Studies in The South and West, With Comments on Canada

Perhaps there never was before such an opportunity to study the growth of an enormous city, physically and socially, as is offered now in Chicago, where the development of half a century is condensed into a decade. In one respect it differs from all other cities of anything like its size. It is not only surrounded by a complete net-work of railways, but it is permeated by them. The converging lines of twenty-one (I think it is) railways paralleling each other or criss-crossing in the suburbs concentrate upon fewer tracks as they enter the dense part of the city, but they literally surround it, and actually pierce its heart. So complete is this environment and interlacing that you cannot enter the city from any direction without encountering a net-work of tracks. None of the water-front, except a strip on the north side, is free from them. The finest residence part of the south side, including the boulevards and parks, is surrounded and cut by them. There are a few viaducts, but for the most part the tracks occupy streets, and the crossings are at grade. Along the Michigan avenue water-front and down the lake shore to Hyde Park, on the Illinois Central and the Michigan Central and their connections, the foreign and local trains pass incessantly (I believe over sixty a day), and the Illinois crosses above Sixteenth Street, cutting all the great southward avenues; and farther down, the tracks run between Jackson Park and Washington Park, crossing at grade the 500-feet-wide boulevard which connects these great parks and makes them one. These tracks and grade crossings, from which so few parts of the city are free, are a serious evil and danger, and the annoyance is increased by the multiplicity of street railway’s, and by the swiftly running cable-cars, which are a constant source of alarm to the timid. The railways present a difficult problem. The town covers such a vast area (always extending in a ratio that cannot be calculated) that to place all the passenger stations outside would be a great inconvenience, to unite the lines in a single station probably impracticable. In time, however, the roads must come in on elevated viaducts, or concentrate in three or four stations which communicate with the central parts of the town by elevated roads.

This state of things arose from the fact that the railways antedated, and we may say made, the town, which has grown up along their lines. To a town of pure business, transportation was the first requisite, and the newer roads have been encouraged to penetrate as far into the city as they could. Now that it is necessary to make it a city to live in safely and agreeably, the railways are regarded from another point of view. I suppose a sociologist would make some reflections on the effect of such a thorough permeation of tracks, trains, engines, and traffic upon the temperament of a town, the action of these exciting and irritating causes upon its nervous centres. Living in a big railway-station must have an effect on the nerves. At present this seems a legitimate part of the excited activity of the city; but if it continues, with the rapid increase of wealth and the growth of a leisure class, the inhabitants who can afford to get away will live here only the few months necessary to do their business and take a short season of social gayety, and then go to quieter places early in the spring and for the summer months.

It is at this point of view that the value of the park system appears, not only as a relief, as easily accessible recreation-grounds for the inhabitants in every part of the city, but as an element in society life. These parks, which I have already named, contain 1742 acres. The two south parks, connected so as to be substantially one, have 957 acres. Their great connecting boulevards are interfered with somewhat by railway-tracks, and none of them, except Lincoln, can be reached without crossing tracks on which locomotives run, yet, as has been said, the most important of them are led to by good driving-roads from the heart of the city. They have excellent roads set apart for equestrians as well as for driving. These facilities induce the keeping of horses, the setting up of fine equipages, and a display for which no other city has better opportunity. This cannot but have an appreciable effect upon the growth of luxury and display in this direction. Indeed, it is already true that the city keeps more private carriages—for the pleasure not only of the rich, but of the well-to-do—in proportion to its population, than any other large city I know. These broad thoroughfares, kept free from traffic, furnish excellent sleighing when it does not exist in the city streets generally, and in the summer unequalled avenues for the show of wealth and beauty and style. In a few years the turnouts on the Grand Boulevard and the Lincoln Park drive will be worth going far to see for those who admire—and who does not? for, the world over, wealth has no spectacle more attractive to all classes—fine horses and the splendor of moving equipages. And here is no cramped mile or two for parade, like most of the fashionable drives of the world, but space inviting healthful exercise as well as display. These broad avenues and park outlooks, with ample ground-room, stimulate architectural rivalry, and this opportunity for driving and riding and being on view cannot but affect very strongly the social tone. The foresight of the busy men who planned this park system is already vindicated. The public appreciate their privileges. On fair days the driving avenues are thronged. One Sunday afternoon in January, when the sleighing was good, some one estimated that there were as many as ten thousand teams flying up and down Michigan avenue and the Grand Boulevard. This was, of course, an over-estimate, but the throng made a ten-thousand impression on the mind. Perhaps it was a note of Western independence that a woman was here and there seen “speeding” a fast horse, in a cutter, alone.

I suppose that most of these people had been to church in the morning, for Chicago, which does everything it puts its hand to with tremendous energy, is a church-going city, and I believe presents some contrast to Cincinnati in this respect. Religious, mission, and Sunday-school work is very active, churches are many, whatever the liberality of the creeds of a majority of them, and there are several congregations of over two thousand people. One vast music-hall and one theatre are thronged Sunday after Sunday with organized, vigorous, worshipful congregations. Besides these are the Sunday meetings for ethical culture and Christian science. It is true that many of the theatres are open as on week-days, and there is a vast foreign population that takes its day of rest in idleness or base-ball and garden amusements, but the prevailing aspect of the city is that of Sunday observance. There is a good deal of wholesome New England in its tone. And it welcomes any form of activity—orthodoxy, liberalism, revivals, ethical culture.

A special interest in Chicago at the moment is because it is forming—full of contrasts and of promise, palaces and shanties side by side. Its forces are gathered and accumulating, but not assimilated. What a mass of crude, undigested material it has! In one region on the west side are twenty thousand Bohemians and Poles; the street signs are all foreign and of unpronounceable names—a physically strong, but mentally and morally brutal, people for the most part; the adults generally do not speak English, and claning as they do, they probably never will. There is no hope that this generation will be intelligent American citizens, or be otherwise than the political prey of demagogues. But their children are in the excellent public schools, and will take in American ideas and take on American ways. Still, the mill has about as much grist as it can grind at present.

Social life is, speaking generally, as unformed, unselected, as the city—that is, more fluid and undetermined than in Eastern large cities. That is merely to say, however, that while it is American, it is young. When you come to individuals, the people in society are largely from the East, or have Eastern connections that determine their conduct. For twenty years the great universities, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Princeton, and the rest, have been pouring in their young men here. There is no better element in the world, and it is felt in every pulse of the town. Young couples marry and come here from every sort of Eastern circle. But the town has grown so fast, and so many new people have come into the ability suddenly to spend money in fine houses and equipages, that the people do not know each other. You may drive past miles of good houses, with a man who has grown up with the town, who cannot tell you who any of the occupants of the houses are. Men know each other on change, in the courts, in business, and are beginning to know each other in clubs, but society has not got itself sorted out and arranged, or discovered its elements. This is a metropolitan trait, it is true, but the condition is socially very different from what it is in New York or Boston; the small village associations survive a little yet, struggling against the territorial distances, but the social mass is still unorganized, although “society” is a prominent feature in the newspapers. Of course it is understood that there are people “in society,” and dinners, and all that, in nowise different from the same people and events the world over.

A striking feature of the town is “youth,” visible in social life as well as in business. An Eastern man is surprised to see so many young men in responsible positions, at the head, or taking the managing oar, in great moneyed institutions, in railway corporations, and in societies of charity and culture. A young man, graduate of the city high-school, is at the same time president of a prominent bank, president of the Board of Trade, and president of the Art Institute. This youthful spirit must be contagious, for apparently the more elderly men do not permit themselves to become old, either in the business or the pleasures of life. Everything goes on with youthful vim and spirit.

Next to the youth, and perhaps more noticeable, the characteristic feature of Chicago is money-making, and the money power is as obtrusive socially as on change. When we come to speak of educational and intellectual tendencies, it will be seen how this spirit is being at once utilized and mitigated; but for the moment money is the recognized power. How could it be otherwise? Youth and energy did not flock here for pleasure or for society, but simply for fortune. And success in money-getting was about the only one considered. And it is still that by which Chicago is chiefly known abroad, by that and by a certain consciousness of it which is noticed. And as women reflect social conditions most vividly, it cannot be denied that there is a type known in Europe and in the East as the Chicago young woman, capable rather than timid, dashing rather than retiring, quite able to take care of herself. But this is not by any means an exhaustive account of the Chicago woman of to-day.

While it must be said that the men, as a rule, are too much absorbed in business to give heed to anything else, yet even this statement will need more qualification than would appear at first, when we come to consider the educational, industrial, and reformatory projects. And indeed a veritable exception is the Literary Club, of nearly two hundred members, a mingling of business and professional men, who have fine rooms in the Art Building, and meet weekly for papers and discussions. It is not in every city that an equal number of busy men will give the time to this sort of intellectual recreation. The energy here is superabundant; in whatever direction it is exerted it is very effective; and it may be said, in the language of the street, that if the men of Chicago seriously take hold of culture, they will make it hum.

Still it remains true here, as elsewhere in the United States, that women are in advance in the intellectual revival. One cannot yet predict what will be the result of this continental furor for literary, scientific, and study clubs—in some places in the East the literary wave has already risen to the height of the scientific study of whist—but for the time being Chicago women are in the full swing of literary life. Mr. Browning says that more of his books are sold in Chicago than in any other American city. Granting some affectation, some passing fashion, in the Browning, Dante, and Shakespeare clubs, I think it is true that the Chicago woman, who is imbued with the energy of the place, is more serious in her work than are women in many other places; at least she is more enthusiastic. Her spirit is open, more that of frank admiration than of criticism of both literature and of authors. This carries her not only further into the heart of literature itself, but into a genuine enjoyment of it—wanting almost to some circles at the East, who are too cultivated to admire with warmth or to surrender themselves to the delights of learning, but find their avocation rather in what may be called literary detraction, the spirit being that of dissection of authors and books, much as social gossips pick to pieces the characters of those of their own set. And one occupation is as good as the other. Chicago has some reputation for beauty, for having pretty, dashing, and attractive women; it is as much entitled to be considered for its intelligent women who are intellectually agreeable. Comparisons are very unsafe, but it is my impression that there is more love for books in Chicago than in New York society, and less of the critical, nil admirari spirit than in Boston.

It might be an indication of no value (only of the taste of individuals) that books should be the principal “favors” at a fashionable german, but there is a book-store in the city whose evidence cannot be set aside by reference to any freak of fashion. McClurg’s book-store is a very extensive establishment in all departments—publishing, manufacturing, retailing, wholesaling, and importing. In some respects it has not its equal in this country. The book-lover, whether he comes from London or New York, will find there a stock, constantly sold and constantly replenished, of books rare, curious, interesting, that will surprise him. The general intelligence that sustains a retail shop of this variety and magnitude must be considerable, and speaks of a taste for books with which the city has not been credited; but the cultivation, the special love of books for themselves, which makes possible this rich corner of rare and imported books at McClurg’s, would be noticeable in any city, and women as well as men in Chicago are buyers and appreciators of first editions, autograph and presentation copies, and books valued because they are scarce and rare.

Chicago has a physical peculiarity that radically affects its social condition, and prevents its becoming homogeneous. It has one business centre and three distinct residence parts, divided by the branching river. Communication between the residence sections has to be made through the business city, and is further hindered by the bridge crossings, which cause irritating delays the greater part of the year. The result is that three villages grew up, now become cities in size, and each with a peculiar character. The north side was originally the more aristocratic, and having fewer railways and a less-occupied-with-business lake front, was the more agreeable as a place of residence, always having the drawback of the bridge crossings to the business part. After the great fire, building lots were cheaper there than on the south side within reasonable distance of the active city. It has grown amazingly, and is beautified by stately bouses and fine architecture, and would probably still be called the more desirable place of residence. But the south side has two great advantages—easy access to the business centre and to the great southern parks and pleasure-grounds. This latter would decide many to live there. The vast west side, with its lumber-yards and factories, its foreign settlements, and its population outnumbering the two other sections combined, is practically an unknown region socially to the north side and south side. The causes which produced three villages surrounding a common business centre will continue to operate. The west side will continue to expand with cheap houses, or even elegant residences on the park avenues—it is the glory of Chicago that such a large proportion of its houses are owned by their occupants, and that there are few tenement rookeries, and even few gigantic apartment houses—over a limitless prairie; the north side will grow in increasing beauty about Lincoln Park; and the south side will more and more gravitate with imposing houses about the attractive south parks. Thus the two fashionable parts of the city, separated by five, eight, and ten miles, will develop a social life of their own, about as distinct as New York and Brooklyn. It remains to be seen which will call the other “Brooklyn.” At present these divisions account for much of the disorganization of social life, and prevent that concentration which seems essential to the highest social development.

In this situation Chicago is original, as she is in many other ways, and it makes one of the interesting phases in the guesses at her future.

X.—CHICAGO [Second Paper.]

The country gets its impression of Chicago largely from the Chicago newspapers. In my observation, the impression is wrong. The press is able, vigorous, voluminous, full of enterprise, alert, spirited; its news columns are marvellous in quantity, if not in quality; nowhere are important events, public meetings, and demonstrations more fully, graphically, and satisfactorily reported; it has keen and competent writers in several departments of criticism—theatrical, musical, and occasionally literary; independence, with less of personal bias than in some other cities; the editorial pages of most of the newspapers are bright, sparkling, witty, not seldom spiced with knowing drollery, and strong, vivid, well-informed and well-written, in the discussion of public questions, with an allowance always to be made for the “personal equation” in dealing with particular men and measures—as little provincial in this respect as any press in the country.

But it lacks tone, elevation of purpose; it represents to the world the inferior elements of a great city rather than the better, under a mistaken notion in the press and the public, not confined to Chicago, as to what is “news.” It cannot escape the charge of being highly sensational; that is, the elevation into notoriety of mean persons and mean events by every rhetorical and pictorial device. Day after day the leading news, the most displayed and most conspicuous, will be of vulgar men and women, and all the more expanded if it have in it a spice of scandal. This sort of reading creates a diseased appetite, which requires a stronger dose daily to satisfy; and people who read it lose their relish for the higher, more decent, if less piquant, news of the world. Of course the Chicago newspapers are not by any means alone in this course; it is a disease of the time. Even New York has recently imitated successfully this feature of what is called “Western journalism.”

But it is largely from the Chicago newspapers that the impression has gone abroad that the city is preeminent in divorces, pre-eminent in scandals, that its society is fast, that it is vulgar and pretentious, that its tone is “shoddy,” and its culture a sham. The laws of Illinois in regard to divorces are not more lax than in some Eastern States, and divorces are not more numerous there of residents (according to population) than in some Eastern towns; but while the press of the latter give merely an official line to the court separations, the Chicago papers parade all the details, and illustrate them with pictures. Many people go there to get divorces, because they avoid scandal at their homes, and because the Chicago courts offer unusual facilities in being open every month in the year. Chicago has a young, mobile population, an immense foreign brutal element. I watched for some weeks the daily reports of divorces and scandals. Almost without exception they related to the lower, not to say the more vulgar, portions of social life. In several years the city has had, I believe, only two causes célèbres in what is called good society—a remarkable record for a city of its size. Of course a city of this magnitude and mobility is not free from vice and immorality and fast living; but I am compelled to record the deliberate opinion, formed on a good deal of observation and inquiry, that the moral tone in Chicago society, in all the well-to-do industrious classes which give the town its distinctive character, is purer and higher than in any other city of its size with which I am acquainted, and purer than in many much smaller. The tone is not so fast, public opinion is more restrictive, and women take, and are disposed to take, less latitude in conduct. This was not my impression from the newspapers. But it is true not only that social life holds itself to great propriety, but that the moral atmosphere is uncommonly pure and wholesome. At the same time, the city does not lack gayety of movement, and it would not be called prudish, nor in some respects conventional.

It is curious, also, that the newspapers, or some of them, take pleasure in mocking at the culture of the town. Outside papers catch this spirit, and the “culture” of Chicago is the butt of the paragraphers. It is a singular attitude for newspapers to take regarding their own city. Not long ago Mr. McClurg published a very neat volume, in vellum, of the fragments of Sappho, with translations. If the volume had appeared in Boston it would have been welcomed and most respectfully received in Chicago. But instead of regarding it as an evidence of the growing literary taste of the new town, the humorists saw occasion in it for exquisite mockery in the juxtaposition of Sappho with the modern ability to kill seven pigs a minute, and in the cleverest and most humorous manner set all the country in a roar over the incongruity. It goes without saying that the business men of Chicago were not sitting up nights to study the Greek poets in the original; but the fact was that there was enough literary taste in the city to make the volume a profitable venture, and that its appearance was an evidence of intellectual activity and scholarly inclination that would be creditable to any city in the land. It was not at all my intention to intrude my impressions of a newspaper press so very able and with such magnificent opportunities as that of Chicago, but it was unavoidable to mention one of the causes of the misapprehension of the social and moral condition of the city.

The business statistics of Chicago, and the story of its growth, and the social movement, which have been touched on in a previous paper, give only a half-picture of the life of the town. The prophecy for its great and more hopeful future is in other exhibitions of its incessant activity. My limits permit only a reference to its churches, extensive charities (which alone would make a remarkable and most creditable chapter), hospitals, medical schools, and conservatories of music. Club life is attaining metropolitan proportions. There is on the south side the Chicago, the Union League, the University, the Calumet, and on the north side the Union—all vigorous, and most of them housed in superb buildings of their own. The Women’s Exchange is a most useful organization, and the Ladies’ Fortnightly ranks with the best intellectual associations in the country. The Commercial Club, composed of sixty representative business men in all departments, is a most vital element in the prosperity of the city. I cannot dwell upon these. But at least a word must be said about the charities, and some space must be given to the schools.

The number of solicitors for far West churches and colleges who pass by Chicago and come to Xew York and New England for money have created the impression that Chicago is not a good place to go for this purpose. Whatever may be the truth of this, the city does give royally for private charities, and liberally for mission work beyond her borders. It is estimated by those familiar with the subject that Chicago contributes for charitable and religious purposes, exclusive of the public charities of the city and county, not less than five millions of dollars annually. I have not room to give even the partial list of the benevolent societies that lies before me, but beginning with the Chicago Relief and Aid, and the Armour Mission, and going down to lesser organizations, the sum annually given by them is considerably over half a million dollars. The amount raised by the churches of various denominations for religious purposes is not less than four millions yearly. These figures prove the liberality, and I am able to add that the charities are most sympathetically and intelligently administered.