The Romance of Chicago

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 22, 25 November 1908, Page 44

The Romance of Chicago

THE RECORD OF A DOMINANT SPIRIT OF HUSTLE

By

NEWTON DENT

The Growth of the Western Metropolis—lts Tremendous Impetus and its Contribution to the Making of America

from last week.) From the first, Chicago has been a university for leaders and pioneers. When Roosevelt wanted a strong man to drive the Panama ('anal through from ocean to ocean he picked T. P. Shonts out of his office in the Railway Exchange. When the largest of the American insurance companies needed a leader to reconstruct its affairs it chose Paul Morton, who had been for sixteen years a Chicago railway man. When Morgan decided to place the Steel Trust in control of three efficient managers, two out of the three whom he selected were Chicago-1 rained—Elbert H. Gary and George W. Perkins. And above all. the

judges of America, presiding for eighteen years over the United States Supreme Court, sits Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller, of Chicago. Apart from her exceptional men and exceptional ideas, this Brobdingnagian city has developed ordinary activities until they have become colossal. In her various mills and factories, for example, she employs more workmen, pays more wages, and reaps more profit, than the busy State of Massachusetts. She has one piano-factory which is making more pianos than all the factories of France. Her tailors, last year, made as many suits as would clothe every man in Spain, ami her shoemakers as many shoes as would supply one pair to every man, woman, and child in Mexico. Her contractors built a hundred thousand homes,

and her cabinetmakers produced enough furniture to give these homes four hundred dollars’ worth apiece. If all her new buildings of 190 G were put in line, they would stretch fifty miles from end to eml. Every city has a grain exchange, but where is there a ‘‘wheat pit” as terrible in its power to unsettle the price of the world's bread as that which stands at the head of La Salle Street? In her eighty-five elevators, Chicago could store the entire wheat crop of Great Britain. The total movement of gram that circled around her “wheat pit” last year was twice as great, in bushels, as the immense wheat yield of a Canadian harvest.

This pit is more than a place of business. It is a place of adventure —of romance and tragedy. In the shadows of the great dim hall, watching the noisy groups of brokers, there seem to be the spectres of the men who won the great speculative battles of earlier days. There has been a long line of these warriors, from Hutchinson to Leiter and Gates, and the world has often watched in breathless wonder at their daring. They have gained startling victories, but always, while they stood counting their spoil, the mighty wheat rose silently and covered them up. Such is the bulging commerce of Chicago that oven the Big Things are too small. There is the new post office, for instance, which cost Uncle Sam four millions dollars. It is the finest postal building in the United States, but it was outgrown before the builders had laid the last sheet of gold-leaf upon its dome. There is the Marshall Field store. Its floor-space is equal to something like thirty acres; it has forty-five display windows and fifty elevators; but the constant enlargements prove it to be too small. This vast institution has become more than a store. ft is an exposition. a school of courtesy, a museum of modern commerce. And it has no monopoly of public favour, as you may see by visiting any one of half a dozen of its riyals. There is that giant of hotels, the Auditorium. Big as it is, it is obliged to have an Annex. There is the immense Coliseum. When the Chicagoans built it they said: “At last, here is one thing (hat is large enough.” Yet, since last year's automobile show the Coliseum has been outgrown. Even the wide business section of Chicago—a square mile of crowded sky-scrapers—has grown tar too limited for the overwhelming flood of traffic. The railroad loop that encircles this central district has eleven stations; it pushes its trains along as fast as five a minute. But it is too small. It is strangling the Hercules of Illinois, and before many years it will be widened to • larger girUu

This unparalleled expansion is a growth, and not a boom. The prosperity Of Chicago is not based upon stock values, and her sky-scrapers do not totter when the ticker-tape spells bad news.

She handles real products—necessities that must be bought and sold as long as the race exists. The United States might as well try to live without railways as without the bread and meat of Chicago. There is a geographical reason for her expansion. Baek of her is the push of the Middle West. She stands midway between the United States and Canada —between the centre of wheat production and the centre of capital—at the focal point of the railroad systems of North America. She is the great exchange of the continent. She is the hub of ’seventeen steamship lines and twentyfour railways. The long-headed pioneers who chose to build their city on this march knew that in their life-time the prosperity of both East and West would focus here. ADVANTAGES OF LOCATION. In the days of La Salle and the later voyageurs, even then Chicago was the central portage—the spot that linked the Mississippi to the Great Lakes. Later, by the aid of its canal, it became the place where the grain of the South was exchanged for the lumber of the North. And the rapid opening up of the Northwest, with its treasures of copper and grain, has poured a whole horn of plenty upon Chicago's head. Add to this central location the fact that Chicago was settled by the pick of Germany and New England, and you have the secret of her greatness. Out of her thirty-two mayors, *wenty were born in New England. The grandchildren of the Puritans intermingled with the FortyEighters — those noble Germans who fought for liberty at home before they found it in America. It was a blending of the practical and the ideal. This sturdy breed soon made its mark upon American history. It sent out as its

public representatives aueh resolute m«M as “Long John” Wentworth, -who knew every man in Illinois; Stephen A. Douglas, the Little Giant; ami Elihu B. Washburne, A famous watch-dog of the Treasury. It was a£ Chicago that Abraham Lincoln received his first nomination foe President; and when the crash of the Civil War shook the Union apart, Oblige forgot politics and supported Lincoln with men and money. Logair, Burnside, Turchin, and a dozen other Union generals enlisted from here. It was here, too, that Ellsworth organize*! and drilled his famous Zouaves. In all, there have been five Presidents nominated in Chicago—Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Cleveland (twice), aud Harrison. At the outset they were all poor, these First citizens of Chicago. Some arrive*! on ox-carts or on horse-back. Many came on foot. There were no men of fortune! or of high degree. They had no special influence with government officials. The only priviledge they had, the only one they wanted, was the priviledge of being let alone, to show what they could do. In this respect Chicago stands by herself among the great cities. She was no pampered pet of the centuries, like Paris —no headquarters for a world-wide empire, like London—no landing-place for incoming millions, like New York. She had to fight for every victory and to sweat for every gain. This is the reason why she is the most typical of American cities. She was built up, every inch of her, by self-help. To take just one simple group of the men who did the work, there were five

who went from the State of New York in the early days. All were sons of poos farmers, with no advantages except the chance to shift for themselves. One became the first mayor of Chicago, and the chief promoter of her railways. The second founded her greatest store and hotel, and became the creator of her. busiest! street. The third gave her Hyde Park.

He fourth was known as the father of the stockyards. And the fifth was her foremost physician for more than half a century. Such was the record of William •B. Ogden, Potter Palmer, Paul Cornell, John B. Sherman, and Dr. Nathan S. Davis —men who worked as hard to improve their city as they did to advance themselves. Considering how Chicago has had to grapple with physical difficulties—how she has had to push back a lake, tip a river-bed front north to south, and cover * marsh with a ten-foot crust —it would not be surprising if she had as yet paid little attention to the arts and graces of life. “Culture! We haven't got to that yet,” said one of her centre-rush millionaires; “but when we do, we’ll make culture hum! ” The truth is that, unlike certain othw cities of longer pedigree, Chicago lu t more refinement than she claims. >Slie is even now rearing a superstructure—a higher city—which, when it is finished, will be as notable as the business development upon which it stands. Does Chicago appreciate art? Ask Director French, of the Art Institute ou the. Lake Front, and he replies that in 1906 he received twentyrlive hundred pupils into his classes. Chicago artists are no attic-dwellers; far from it. lu fact, they have a whole sky-scraper of their own—the Fine Arts Building. Here Lorado Taft chisels his marble, Ralph Clarkson paints his portraits, and other men of genius pursue their various vocations. In a certain bank there is a fund of a million dollars, bequeathed by B. I l '. Ferguson, which is to be spent upon the one item of statuary for the parks and public squares. And is not Chicago the home of D. 11. Burnham, the most celebrated of American civic architects,. inventor of the sky-scraper, and originator of designs for the reconstruction of whole cities? j CHICAGO’ AND THE FINE ARTS. Does Chicago. appreciate music? Ask Frederick Stock, the able .successor of. Theodore Thomas. In answer, very likely he will show you tire Orchestra Halt, the magnificent home that has been built ifor music, not by two or three millionaires, but by popular subscription. • He might also mention that pipe-organs ■have been installed in twenty Chicago homes and in one of the best hotels; and that the city’s output of musical instruments is thirty-three millions a year. Does Chicago appreciate literature? Ask the directors of her six great libraries, in which fifteen hundred thousand books are at the service of the people. Her Public Library has the unique fame of having been founded by a queen. [When Queen Victoria was told of the Chicago fire of 1871, she at once wrote to Gladstone, Carlyle, Tennyson, Spencer, Tyndall, and Disraeli requesting each to send a full set of his works to the homeless and bookless city. In all, the English queen gave seven thousand Volumes, from which the present fine collection has grown. Two of Chicago’s Six libraries were gifts from John Crerar

and Walter L. Newberry, men who were civic patriots in the highest degree. As McClurg’s can testify, Chicago is a buyer of books; but better still, she writes them. Apart from the writers of local fame, she has a notable group of authors whose place is among the leaders. »n science, for instance, who knows more of the mystery of the origin of life than. Jacques Loeb, who performed his famous experiments in Chicago? Where is there a poet-dramatist of finer quality than William Vaughn Moody, or a wit-dramatist with a larger

constituency than George Ade? What humorist is wiser than Finley Peter Dunne? Or what company of novelists has touched human nature in more points than these: Robert Herrick, Stanley Waterloo, Opic Reed. Margaret Potter, George Barr McCutcheon, H. C. Chat-field-Taylor, Henry Kitehell Webster, I. K. Friedman, and the latest arrival, Rex E. Beach ? Nearly every institution in Chicago is “the lengthened shadow of one man”; and her great schools arc not exceptions. One man established the lewis Institute, which is dedicated to science, literature, and technology. Another man. Philip D. Armour, founded the institute that bears his name. One Sunday morning he heard a minister preach upon the duty of providing a practical training-school for poor young men. Carried away by his theme, the preacher painted an ideal college which would transform young workmen into engineers and architects and electricians. After

the service Armour waited outside the thureb-dooi for the preacher. “Well. Mr. Gunsaulus,” he said, “go ahead with your, college. I'll provide the money.’’ COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES. To-day that college is not an ideal, but a fact, with two thousand students, and with Preacher Gunsaulus himself at. the head of it. Ee had preached a twoniilliondollar sermon on that Sunday morning.

As for the University of Chicago, every one knows it to be the life-work of the late President Harper, a man of terrific will-power and energy. Acre after acre this persistent educator gathered in for his university. Hall after hall he built of solid gray stone, until thirty-five massive buildings stood around the plain brick house in which he lived. Million after million he amassed, by the aid of the great Oil King, until of all the American universities only three excelled his in wealth. Had he lived three years , longer, he would have made it the- rich- : ost in any country. t As it was, his fruitful life carnb to a ■ heroic close. When his doctor told him ’ that be was in the last stage of an in- \ curable disease, lie said: “I cannot die yet, for I have five I books to vfrite." | One by one he wrote his books —in ’ bed, and eyen while in the operatingroom of the hospital. Then, when the. last word had been written, his steel will ‘

relaxed, the peu fell from tiis and the breath passed from bis lipa. There have been women, too, in ttuf work of city building. In fact, the beat and must ;>opulai- citizen of Chicago, many will tell you. is a votelew woman— June Addams, the founder of Hull House. What this <me gentle, soft-voiced 'Oman has done in eighteen years is in itself a romance that will be told in the future by, some Homer of Illinois Ten ot the buildings of the University of Chicago were given by women. The famous Woman’s Temple was built here by iiunce»

Willard. Andon many notable-occasion* Mrs. Potter Palmer. Mrs. Emmons Blame, and the late Lady Curzon have advance* the prestige and the welfare of theij city. i. Chicago is still in the making, of course; hut the struggle has been move* to a higher plane. Iler civic troubles fo«

day are not the marsh; the-lake and the liver. They are an oiitgrown charter, a ehambling street-car service, and the prevalent and crying nuisance of small men in big offices. ■ ; • • Faults? Chicago has plenty of them,

and knows it. So lias the human race—and the universe, too,’for that matter. But die. faults of Chicago are those of youth,'not age : of enterprise, not stagnaiioii; of health and strength and vitality, .not of feebleness and decay. Her dirt is the smudge of toil, and her disorder is. the litter of a workshop. This, then, is the supreme fact about Chicago—that her Titanic Age is in full ewing. In spite of her wealth and her

greatness, there has been uO'softening of the fibre, no shortening of the stride. The 1 fathers worked in their shirt sleeves and the sons keen their eoats on—that is the main difference. There is no sign of ex- 1 haustiun. The word *’ enough ” has not

yet been discovered; and the talk of the streets is of the present and the future. On, on, on —this dogged, indomitable city plunges ahead against the new problems of to-morrow. The tvhole United States moves faster, earns more, and spends more because pi Chicago’s compelling energy. Her exploits have raised the standard of achievement in ail civilized countries. Young as she is, Chicago has become the pace-maker of the world.