Biographical History of the American Irish in Chicago

Title: Biographical History of the American Irish in Chicago by Charles French

Location: Internet Archive     Date 1897

The numerous contributions of the Irish during Chicago’s early history are the focus of this extensive volume. Historians and genealogists will find the searchable text beneficial and the emphasis here is on both individual accomplishments and a detailed accounting of their Irish heritage.

As an entry example, I have chosen John M. Smyth. For many, Smyth’s furniture store advertisement jingle still rings in our memory. But, Smyth’s contribution to early Chicago was also political, serving as an Alderman and Committeeman, and he was known for his honesty in a time when corruption was the norm.

John M. Smyth

Equally a manufacturer, merchant, and one identified with political and public affairs, John M. Smyth is justly regarded as a thoroughly representative man. Personally he unites an old country lineage with the development and energy characteristic of the new world.

The parents of the subject of this sketch, Michael K. Smyth and Bridget (McDonnell) Smyth, left Ireland for America in the summer of 1843, and John M. Smyth was born at sea on the 6th of July of that year. The family came from Balliua, County Mayo, where their people had long been settled, and where Mr. Michael K. Smyth was a surveyor. Their first residence on this side of the Atlantic was in Quebec, but later they removed to Montreal, in which city they lived for five years, settling in Chicago in 1848. In the now historic days when early Chicago was mapped out, Mr. Michael K. Smyth surveyed lands for that notable pioneer real estate owner, William B. Ogden, the first mayor of Chicago. Mr. Smyth, like many others in those early days, had his opportunities of becoming wealthy by the acquisition of laud, subsequently very valuable, but to be had then for comparatively trifling; considerations. For instance, he was offered once for certain services, the Erie square block of land between Kinzie and Michigan, Market and Franklin, afterwards easily worth $1,400,000, but which he declined to accept because it would have taken a year of labor and some slight cost to have leveled a high bank upon it, removed refuse and put generally into marketable shape. Meantime, while the elder Smyth was taking a hand in making the ground plan of the future World’s Fair City, young John M. was attending the renowned “Kinzie” school, known among the youth of that time as “Wilder’s” from the name of the principal, then responsible for shaping and developing the young ideas. Having completed school terms sufficiently well to equip himself with a sound general education, he started out in life on his own account, he chose the typographic art and that section of it represented in the composition rooms of a daily newspaper. Mr. Smyth was employed successively upon the early newspapers of Chicago: the “Morning Herald;” the Chicago “Democrat,” when the historic paper was owned by that representative citizen, Mayor Wentworth, “Long John,” and lastly on the “Press and Tribune,” now the “Tribune.”

Mr. Smyth, when in a leisure hour, likes nothing better than to dwell upon the details of the early newspaper life and business of Chicago; that epoch in Chicago when James W. Sheahan started “The Times” (Sheahan & Price), afterwards purchased by the Hon. Cyrus H. McCormick, and subsequently advanced to a conspicuous place in modern daily journalism by the distinguished editor, Wilbur F. Storey. But the comparatively unremunerative business of the printer and publisher did not satisfy John M. Smyth.

He embarked in business for himself in 1867, opening a furniture store at 92 West Madison Street. This was the beginning of the business that has since grown to such immense proportions and has made the name of its proprietor almost a household word in every part of the city. To accommodate his increasing business, he removed his establishment in 1880 to its present location, where he greatly extended and enlarged the operations of the establishment. The store was destroyed by fire in April, 1891, but Mr. Smyth immediately rebuilt on the same site, completing and occupying, by November 1st of the same year, the largest and handsomest business block on the West Side. It is a business which now embraces literally thousands of individual accounts, and the fair and just management of the great time credit department has deservedly won for John M. Smyth thousands upon thousands of friends and well wishers in Chicago.

Mr. Smyth was sent to the City Council in 1878, re-elected as Alderman until 1882, and has twice served as a Presidential Elector in the successful campaign for Garfield in 1880, and also upon the Blaine ticket. He managed the latter campaign, in Chicago and Cook County in 1884 and also the Republican campaigns of 1894 and 1896. Mayor Hempstead Washburne appointed him a member of  the Library Board in 1892, and from that date until 1895 Mr. Smyth served the Library upon its Finance committee. In politics he has ever been a consistent Republican, and as member and chairman of the County Central Republican Committee, has always been active in that great political party.

With all this, he is much more of a family and domestic man than a political aspirant, and cares most to live simply within the conventional requirements of the responsible citizen. Mr. Smyth married June 14th, 1871, Miss Jane A. Hand, and [has] eight children. Three sons and five daughters, blessed a union which led to an exceptionally happy domestic life. The best exemplification of his energy and success as a Chicago business man, is found in the accomplishment of certainly the greatest business in his special direction ever known in the West.

Cartoons By Bradley, Cartoonist of the Chicago Daily News

Book Title: Cartoons By Bradley, Cartoonist of the Chicago Daily News

Location: Internet Archive     Date published: 1917

In July of 1899, Luther Bradley (1853-1917) joined the staff of the Chicago Daily News and he became one the newspaper’s most famous and beloved political cartoonists. This book was published after his death. It includes a biography and remembrance written by Daily News editor, Henry Justin Smith and a generous selection of his beautifully drawn cartoons reflecting the issues of the period. 

Bradley

 

Luther Daniels Bradley, whose cartoons commanded admiration

everywhere, was never personally conspicuous. He did not make speeches, or sit on platforms, or seek office. His very portrait was almost unknown. In an age when publicity comes easily to less eminent men, when, indeed, popular persons are so much written about that their work is less known than their way of working, Luther Bradley managed to live unobtrusively. Yet he had friends, thousands of friends who never saw him, but who felt that in his cartoons he spoke directly to them. They wrote to him, not as “Dear sir,” but as “Dear Mr. Bradley.” In the scrapbooks wherein he methodically pasted every cartoon he had published for the last seventeen years, he laid away scores of these letters, some from people of note, the majority from that vast body of “plain citizens” he loved to serve. They said in these letters he had “helped”‘ them. They asked his advice. Mothers poured out to him their thoughts. Little boys sent drawings painfully copying his style. He laid all these tenderly away where he could see them again. They were his banquets.

 

THIS picture, drawn by John T. McCutcheon, the noted cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune, was published in that newspaper January 11, 1917, the day of Luther D. Bradley's funeral. The tribute was characteristic of Mr. McCutcheon's sincerity in his friendships. Equally sincere was his spoken corrunent at the time of Mr. Bradley's death: "He was great all the time… not just now and then."

Deadlines by Henry Justin Smith

Full Title: Deadlines: Being the Quaint, the Amusing, the Tragic Memoirs of a Newsroom by Henry Justin Smith

Book Location: Internet Archive; Google Books   Date Published: 1922

Henry Justin Smith (1875-1936) was Managing Editor of the Chicago Daily News.

The Day 

It  is still dark in the streets, still dark among the fiat roofs of our block, when the day begins.

It is a winter morning before seven o’clock. Night clings to the city. Windows in some of the tall buildings burn with a radiance never extinguished; others spring into color ahead of the belated sun. On street cars and elevated trains
that sail through the darkness like lighted ships the seven o’clock workers are arriving “downtown.”  They are shabbier, more morose, than those who come later. It is hard to be buoyant before seven o’clock in the morning.

In the newspaper office desks and long tables stand in a twilight due to glimmerings that penetrate through the windows. Typewriters, grotesquely hooded, lie in ranks. Waste-baskets yawn. The wires, clinging to the desks, are asleep; telephones have not yet found their tongues. The electric contact with the waking world is in suspension. What happened yesterday? What will happen today? The wires do not care.

A sleepy boy, shivering, his shoes trickling melted snow, enters the spectral room, carrying a bundle of morning newspapers which he lets fall upon a table. He sighs. He turns an electric switch, and the desks and tables spring into
outline. The boy stares about him, stumbles over a waste-basket, kicks it away, sits in a battered chair in front of the mouth of a tarnished copper tube that runs through the ceiling, and drowses, He has barely settled down when he hears men coming in, and starts up. The men are two ; young, but with graying hair. They have not much to say to each other. They do not even glance toward the boy. With a manner somewhat repressed, but alert enough, they go to desks, call out for the morning papers, and start slicing them up with scissors. Ten minutes go by, while the clock ticks serenely and the windows become grey with creeping daylight ; daylight that sifts down among the roofs and through veils of smoke and fog, that comes cold and ashamed and reluctant. It envelops in new shadows the bowed shoulders of the two young men, touching their cheeks with its own pallor, casting pale reminders upon the papers
they are cutting. One man glances over his shoulder at the clock. The clock presently strikes a puny but peremptory “Ping!” It is seven o’clock.
The day has begun.