Can Anything Good Come Out of Chicago?

The progress of Chicago during the decades immediately following the civil war marked its metamorphosis from a pioneer town into a city of promise.

During 1870 and the years immediately following, it became necessary for Dad Dearborn, (Chicago’s pseudonym) to lift himself by his bootstraps. On October 9, 1870 he had a city; on October 10th a fire, and on October 12th little except smoke and ashes; all being the tragic result of the juxtaposition of a lantern and the heels of Mrs. O’Leary’s fat cow. If Bucephalus was the good king of horses, perhaps Mrs. O’Leary’s bovine was the bad queen of cows; in any event, with one swift kick delivered at the right time and place, she undid the doings of a generation and broke several New England fire insurance companies, as well.

The lawlessness of frontier life in America has been pictured as a remarkable phenomenon. In reality, it was the natural consequence of indiscriminate mixing of volatile substances. Strong, determined men of diverse racial traits and traditions, gathered together with one common impulse, personal gain, could scarcely have been expected to abide in peace.

Chicago retained many of the characteristics of a pioneer town until after the beginning of the twentieth century. Open gambling was the first of the vices ordinarily associated with pioneer towns to receive its coup de grace. Open wine-rooms, with assignation houses conveniently at hand, were next in order. “The Loop” was honeycombed with such institutions.

Business respectability frequently found itself next door neighbor to commercialized vice and accepted the situation as a matter of course; it always had been thus and would no doubt continue so until something happened. So far as business was concerned, dealing with such matters was not in its line.

Interspersed with wine rooms were hundreds of saloons, some of which were breeders of crime and political corruption, while others were not considered offenders in those particulars. Wets and Dries who knew ante prohibition days in Chicago, are in agreement on one phase of the much mooted question: they are in agreement in the belief that saloons, as then conducted, were liabilities rather than assets.

It has been contended that the saloon was the poor man’s club; quite right, but it was his hearthside as well, in many cases. Saloon attendance was the great indoor sport of many, and the regular business of others. The lure of the saloon was in man’s insatiable desire for fellowship. There kindred spirits were to be found, and the stimulating influence of alcohol served as quick and certain means of breaking down the barriers between men. The pity was that it broke down more than barriers; it broke down self’ respect. A strong man might withstand its demoralizing influences for a time — a long time perhaps, but it usually got him sooner or later.

Fellowship is wonderful; it illuminates life’s pathway, spreads good cheer, and is worth high price, but even fellowship comes at too great cost when it paralyzes human Instincts and extinguishes the flame of conjugal and paternal love.

Whether there is significance in the fact that Chicago’s saloon days were its unkempt days, it remains a fact, nevertheless. There was little, even in the downtown district, to give promise of the well groomed city of today was poor; there was a variety of odors, each identified with its particular part of the city. To the neophyte, only packingtown, glueburg, and pickledom distinguishable in the malodorous melee, but he whose olfactory nerve was trained by long usage could have smelled his way about town blindfolded.

The languid Chicago River made a mess of the job of transporting sewage, stock yards’ oils and fats to its mouth where it was supposed to empty its fetid cargo into Lake Michigan, whence the city drew its water supply. The tortuous river yielded its own special blend to the conglomeration of odors and on occasions caught fire from cigarette stubs which had been carelessly thrown on its fatty surface. However, enough sewage and refuse succeeded in reaching their destination, to pollute the drinking water to the extent that epidemics of typhoid fever followed each other in rapid succession.

When affairs became so bad they could not be worse, they accepted the only other alternative and got better. The outraged citizenry arose, turned the turbid river right’ about and sent it and its noisome contents meandering down the Illinois and Mississippi Valley, aerating and Purging itself on its way to the sweet salt waters of the Gulf of Mexico —“good riddance to bad rubbish.”

The fight for the restoration of sanitary conditions cost sixty million dollars, but it was worth it. Moreover, it gave courage for another, even greater undertaking, the beautifying of the entire city from the Indiana line to Evanston. Daniel Burnham’s “City Beautiful” dream became Chicago’s City Beautiful plan. Slowly but surely, it is being worked out. Someone has aptly described Chicago’s waterfront as twenty miles of fairyland. Incongruous, such mixing of the esthetic with the disorderly? Quite right, but that is Chicago.

What was in some respects Chicago’s zero hour, came toward the end of the nineteenth century during the depression following its first World’s Fair. There is no whip like the whip of destitution, and multitudes were destitute. Those who possessed, fought to retain their possessions; those who possessed not, fought to obtain the necessities of life. Tenants defaulted in rent; mortgagors defaulted in interest; retailers defaulted in obligations to wholesalers; wholesalers defaulted to manufacturers. The courts were glutted with forcible entry and detainer suits, distress warrants, mortgage foreclosures, replevins, and attachments. Creditors were trying in every way known to ingenious lawyers to snatch something from the hands of impecunious debtors. Storms which buried streets and sidewalks of the city in snow, were welcomed. They provided the human flotsam and jetsam with temporary employment. Hungry men must be fed in any event and it is better that they have something to do. Idleness breeds mischief.

The days immediately following Chicago’s first World’s Fair will not soon be forgotten; they were anticlimactic with a vengeance. Chicago took the brunt of the shock of the financial panic which swept over the country. The city, as a result of the preparations for the Fair, had been overbuilt in all directions. The consequences were tragic, and the spectacle of closed stores, theaters, hotels, apartment buildings, rooming houses, as well as the prevalence of “To Rent” signs, was sorely depressing.

In the tenement districts, heart sickening evidences of want and distress were to be seen everywhere. Employment was reduced to the minimum; soup kitchens were opened in many parts of the city. The city hall, county buildings, and police stations were thrown open during cold winter nights, that homeless men, women, and children might find shelter. The jail was crowded to the doors, many having committed misdemeanors for the sheer purpose of gaining access. How to get into jail was more of a problem than how to get out. Six month’s penitentiary commitments were welcome.

During this reversion to the primordial, business men who hitherto had maintained what, at that period, were considered reasonably high standards, abandoned them and joined in the general scramble. The slogan “Service above Self” would have been regarded as pure moonshine. “Self preservation first,” would have been more in keeping.

There was no representative Chamber of Commerce nor other organization capable of successfully contending with the corrupting forces in business life. There were associations of credit men, but they were maintained for the purposes of defense only. There was one force, however, which had to be reckoned with and that was the spirit of the people which found expression in Chicago’s time honored motto, “I Will.”

During this period, Chicago’s civic consciousness and pride were considerably shaken by the publication in England by Mr. W. H. Stead, of a book entitled, “If Christ came to Chicago.” It pictured Chicago’s delinquencies in startling light, but gave little account of the back-to-the wall fight which the better element was making against them. As a matter of fact, the title of the book was worse than the text. The implications of, “If Christ came to Chicago” were manifold and shocking, but the Chicago which had managed to lift itself out of the mire and rebuild itself after its devastating fire was game enough to lift itself out of the slough of bad repute. Chicago succeeded because of its various vicissitudes, rather than in spite of them. It developed a power of resistance which has served in good stead on many occasions.

The words, “Can any good thing come out of Chicago?” have been hurled by skeptics at many of the virile forces which have originated in that city, and Rotary has not been an exception. It is conceivable that Rotary might have been born under sunnier skies, in a climate more equable, and in a city of mental composure; but many will contend that there could have been no more favorable birthplace for a movement like Rotary than paradoxical Chicago, where the battle for civic righteousness was being so fiercely waged.

When the present First Vice President, Donato Gaminara of Uruguay, South America was Governor of the sixty-third district of Rotary International, he made his campaign for extension on that theory. Due to the unfavorable publicity Chicago had been given, he found it difficult to interest the best type of men in the movement.

For some time, he tried to overcome the handicap by stating that Chicago was not so bad as represented; but, finding it impossible to convince them he adroitly changed his tactics and when his prospective members condemned Chicago as one of the worst cities in the world, he went them one better by saying that it was the very worst; that, in fact, it was so bad that it was absolutely necessary for the respectable element to resort to heroic methods, and that was how Rotary happened to be born in Chicago. Sales resistance having thus been broken down, he experienced unprecedented success.

The ills with which Chicago was afflicted during the first part of the twentieth century were prevalent else’ where. Generally speaking, business was in a bad way. Practices were not in accord with high ethical principles, with respect to consumers, competitors, or employees. The doctrine of caveat emptor (let the buyer take care of himself) was applied to the consumer. Ill-will and distrust of competitors were intense to the point of being destructive. To cripple a competitor was legitimate, if not commendable. To the doctrine, “Let the buyer take care of himself,” might well have been added, “Damn the competitors.”

Railroads in their efforts to put competitors out of business frequently sold transportation at a fraction of its cost, and on occasions actually gave it free in order to divert traffic from rivals. At one time, during a period of fierce competition between two railroad lines, the freight on carloads of cattle from Chicago to New York was reduced from one hundred and fifty dollars per car, to one dollar. The winner (in volume of business) however, became the loser by virtue of the fact that the loser, unbeknown to its competitor, bought thousands of carloads of cattle in the West, and shipped them over the competitor’s lines at a rate of one hundred dollars per car less than cost.

The railroads put the companies engaged in water transportation out of business through reducing tariffs below cost, but quickly restored the old rates after the purpose had been accomplished. Until the day of state and interstate commerce commissions, the public had no voice in such matters. The prevailing contempt of the railroad management for public rights was aptly expressed by one of the foremost railway magnates of the times, in the few choice words, “The public be damned!”

The passage of state and interstate commerce laws turned the tables in favor of the public, and the persecutors quickly became the persecuted with a liberal allowance for back interest.

In those days of conscienceless scramble, the services of employees were bought at the lowest possible market price. So far as humanitarian considerations were concerned, an employee was an accessory to be used or junked at the will or on the caprice of the supposedly only human factor, the boss.

Community spirit was at low ebb. Millionaires, having no purpose to serve, frequently left their fortunes to children who were poorly prepared to bear the responsibilities of wealth, either to their own advantage or to that of the communities in which they lived. Many of the so-called beneficiaries spent their patrimonies on wine, women, and song without special emphasis on the song. To make proper use of leisure requires more careful preparation than training for business. An idle mind is the devil’s workshop. To the American youth of the nineteenth century there was frequently little choice; it was business, or destruction, and even business had little to brag about. Thirteen suicides was the record of one very small city. Seventy-five divorce suits in one year was the record of another. The youth of affluence led the pace.

Not only was boys-work, as it is at present understood, unknown, but business engrossed fathers had little time to devote to their sons. The popular conception was that the exercise of parental discipline naturally devolved upon the women, except when the application of physical force seemed necessary. The word “mother” had deep and precious meaning; the word “father” too often suggested tyranny and unreasoning abuse.

The means enabling the captains of industry  to give their off-springs flying starts down the toboggan slide to destruction, were wrested from two classes, neither of which was organized nor otherwise prepared to defend its rights—the consumer and the employee. There were, of course, outstanding exceptions to the rule, but taken by and large, great wealth frequently proved to be a curse, seldom a blessing.

However, unscrupulous business men, crooked politicians, operators of gambling joints, dives and saloons, weren't having things entirely their own way. The opposing were rallying from all quarters. The law of action and reaction was still functioning as it had functioned in New England in earlier days.

A young man from the east visited Chicago. To him, the smoke, air and water pollution, noisome odors, political chicanery and other social short-comings were passing phenomena, evidence of virility rather than depravity, Incidents merely in the metamorphosis of a trading post into a great city. The University of Chicago stands on the south side of the city as a memorial to his foresight. On the north side, Northwestern University and two Catholic universities occupy other strategic positions; and on the west side, the professional schools of the University of Illinois are advantageously grouped near the county and other hospitals.

Theodore Thomas conceived and brought into being the Chicago Orchestra. Another Chicagoan of vision and determination, the superb Art Institute, others the Chicago Grand Opera Company, the Field Museum, the Planetarium, the Rosenwald Industrial Museum, the Aquarium, the Historical Society, a boulevard system second to none and fifty hundred acres of parks and recreational centers. The names of the strong men who made these things possible are not so familiar as those of the Capons and Dillingers.

The forces of iniquity met with vigorous opposition from all directions. To many, sufficient answer to the question, “Can anything good come out of Chicago?” is found in the facts that Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Paul Rader all began their evangelistic careers there. The forces of resistance developed by this trio were so vigorous that they extended their campaigns throughout the United States and even into other countries.

A girl, who had been teaching school in a western village, and whose life had been a struggle against ill-health and adversity, felt the irresistible pull of the pulsating, restless city where the battle between right and wrong was being so fiercely waged, with the result that the name of The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and that of Frances Willard will ever be associated together in the minds of American women.

In demonstration of the fact that there were those courageous and self-sacrificing enough to take up permanent abode in the midst of the very worst in Chicago, Jane Addams, another country girl, gave Chicago Hull House, the American counterpart of London’s Toynbee Hall; and her example was followed in other equally unattractive and unwholesome parts of the city.

The story of Chicago is more than a record of crime and corruption; it is the story of the lives of strong men and women inspired by faith. Nauseating things are not expressions of the spirit of Chicago. Unfortunately, they have been conspicuous and dramatic and have therefore been given the widest publicity.

The editor of an Australian publication manifested deeper insight than Mr. Stead, when he wrote: “Why don’t our Australian papers give us the side of Chicago that I have seen? Is it not of news value? Sydney has a very great deal to learn from Chicago. If we must have cities, let us take a leaf from their book and at the same time, remember what has had to be overcome by those who have done the wonderful work there. Starting with a rough shore of a lake, in rough times, a rapid influx of people from all parts of the world, and almost everything that made for the inartistic, they have created a beautiful city, and the end is not yet.”

Against every evil deed in Chicago which has been announced to the world, there are hundreds of good deeds, unheralded and unknown. What surface disturbances are to a river, crime and corruption are to the life of Chicago. The great current goes on undisturbed.

Rotary need never be ashamed of the city of its origin.