Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  Shikoh sets Chicago apart from the other large cities in the United States writing that “during the 1890s, Chicago was more self-conscious about its ‘higher life.’”7 She notes: “Journalists, ministers and others in speaking of Chicago, often mentioned that although in the past the city had been preoccupied with its material growth, it was finally arriving at a ‘higher and maturer stage of civic existence.’”8 The Great Fire of 1871 had only recently destroyed Chicago. By the early 1890s, Chicago’s boosters announced that the city had successfully rebuilt itself from the ashes with the newest technology available. Before a great deal of the reconstruction had been completed, civic engagement meant bringing wealth to the city, through building and promoting the city as the site for the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893. Now that the boosters had rebuilt the city, at least according to the promotional rhetoric, Chicagoans could shift their sights from physical construction to promoting and raising the cultural wealth of the city. Chicago’s elite, who provided the economic wealth of the city, was most interested in promoting the kind of art that would raise Chicago’s higher life. Fuller’s work was seen as exactly the right kind of art to promote.

  On June 12, 1893, he received an invitation from the Author’s Congress of the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition “to read a paper of the time-limit of twenty minutes … upon some appropriate topic of your own selection.”9 The Official Directory of the World’s Fair does not list Fuller as having read a piece or participated in an exhibition. His reply to the committee has been lost and so it is unknown whether he turned down the prestigious invitation completely or backed out when subjected to numerous demands for revisions by the committee. The invitation is curious because the Fair had already begun a month before the invitation and the invitation may be the committee’s final attempt to get Fuller to participate in the Fair. He was busy finishing his third novel The Cliff-Dwellers, which would be a realist critique of those promoting and funding the upward lift of Chicago. Fuller had clearly had enough of the Chicago business world and the years of hearing art used as promotional material for the business of the Columbian Exhibition.

  Fuller’s ideas about the negative aspects of Chicago’s push for the higher life play out in The Cliff-Dwellers (1893). The novel describes the inhabitants of the fictitious Clifton Building who struggle with business and domestic failures as they attempt to raise themselves up against Chicago’s oppressive and hostile atmosphere. Ann Massa points out:

  Fuller acknowledged the connection between his novel and the World’s Fair in an unpublished essay on his early books. He recalled that it had developed from “Between the Millstones,” a novelette that, because of its pessimism, had not found favor with publishers. Set in Chicago, it charted the business and domestic failures and the eventual suicide of its protagonist, events ascribed in substantial part to the hostile urban environment. It was the Fair, Fuller stated, which encouraged him to try once more to secure a hearing for what he disingenuously described as “less … mournful materials.”10

  Massa has shown that “the presence at the Fair of a Cliff Dweller exhibit, and the exposure it gave to that culture’s problematisation of issues of evolution and progress, convinced Fuller of the aptness of the Cliff Dweller analogy to express his reservations about the modern cliff dwellers.”11 She concludes that “Fuller was less interested in the Cliff Dwellers per se than in the critical light they allowed him to shed on what Chicago and America had achieved by 1893.”12

  Fuller’s novel used the cliff dwellers as a metaphor for the elite Chicagoans who occupied skyscrapers and worked high above the city’s immigrant hordes. He may have derived the metaphor from earlier versions of the ideas about the Anasazi Indians contained in the catalog put out by the H. J. Smith Exploring Company to accompany the cliff dweller exhibits at the World’s Fair of 1893. The catalog describes the cliff dwellers as “by far the most highly civilized representatives of the ‘stone age,’ antedating the Aztecs and the Toltecs, and exhibiting almost as high a degree of civilization … They are a mythical race, exhibiting in the relics found, rare powers and refined tastes at variance with the common idea of aborigines.”13 The legend continues, “They were not a warlike people—their fighting was simply done in defense. Arrows of reed, … were their chief implements of war, and the small number of these found is indicative of their naturally quiet and peaceable natures, which only rose up to defend themselves against the attacks of their foes.”14 The catalog concludes with an interpretation of part of the exhibit that repeats the ideas of its first pages: “Several fine specimens of feather-cloth and buckskin garments denote their fondness for ease and comfort, and the rare stone axes, bows, arrows, and slingshots found give additional proof to their peaceful pursuits and may also give a clue to the mysterious disappearance of this once great nation, which was possibly annihilated by more warlike tribes surrounding it.”15

  The catalog draws the Anasazi Indian’s position on the high cliff as a reminder of the cliff dwellers’ cultural superiority to the surrounding, newer tribes bent on attacking the more peaceful, artistic civilization. The catalog transcribes the cliff dweller’s physical location into a cultural position: they took up a defensive position to protect their culture not just physically but culturally. The legend of the cliff dwellers, then, demonstrated to Chicagoans that climbing upward serves as a form of cultural self-protection. Fuller’s cliff dwellers are those Chicagoans who can trace their lineage to the Europeans who had settled America and now inhabit the city’s first skyscrapers. Because the cliff dwellers had become extinct, their memory served as a warning to the citizens of Chicago, who may also become extinct if they are unable to resist the modern changes that threaten them. Guy Szuberia has observed, “Like many of his contemporaries, Henry Blake Fuller frequently paired his ideas and fears of the ‘new immigrant’ with the spectre of a declining or dispossessed ‘native American stock.’”16 He argues that Fuller’s novel expresses his grave concerns that if the cliff dwellers uplifted too many immigrants to join the ranks of the elite members of cultural circles, their numbers would overwhelm and eventually deplete those who raised them in the first place.17 The cliff dwelling conceit in the novel also serves as a warning to the elite citizens of Chicago, who may also become extinct like the Anasazi, if they continue participating in the futile project of using art to uplift others to their position.

  Fuller’s novel attracted attention from Chicago writers and from the literary establishment in the East. Hamlin Garland, a prolific Chicago writer who had just begun publishing in 1891 and quickly received recognition for his stories about Midwestern farmers, wrote to Fuller on January 17, 1894, for the first time. He praises his novel: “I have just read your ‘Cliff-Dwellers.’ It interests me profoundly to see you doing such a book. It has great power. It is a brave thing to grapple with the life of a great city like Chicago.” However, Garland has difficulty with Fuller’s critique of the city and speaks as a booster for the city:

  And while I’m not entirely satisfied with your point of view—which is essentially unsympathetic—I recognize it as a fine … out-put. I hope when I come to Chicago we may meet and find common ground. …. I want to close my letter as I began with praise. It looks as though in you Chicago has found her first indigenous novelist.18

  H. H. Boyeson, whose novels—The Mammon of Unrighteousness (1891) and The Golden Calf (1892)—helped to create the new urban realism that Fuller now fully participates in with The Cliff-Dwellers, writes to Fuller that “in spite of your very critical attitude towards Chicago … you seemed destined to be her completest chronicler.” He writes that the “‘Cliffdwellers’ is the first book which strongly grasps the situation”19 and hopes to meet him for the first time in February of that year.

  William Dean Howells’s review of The Cliff-Dwellers, published in the 1893 Atlantic Monthly, helped solidify Howells’s reputation along with the novel’s and Fuller’s. Howells was also a Midwesterner, born in
Ohio in 1837, twenty years before Fuller. He settled in Boston, where he became a Christian socialist. His own literary work and taste would show this particular religious bent, as he probed the intricate relationship between individual liberty and Christianity, particularly as the two conflicted in American business and in the lives of American businessmen. He was particularly disgusted by the excesses he saw around him in late nineteenth-century America and his work spoke back to this sin which he saw at the heart of American business.20 Howells stops short of developing a full Marxist critique of American capitalism, but his literary voice tries to be fully authentic and truthful in its rendering of America. Henry James would name Howells’s work “in the highest degree documentary.”21 Howells promoted only that work which did the same. He names Fuller’s attention to detail “scrupulous” and the whole thing “bitten in with a corrosive truthfulness.”22

  Fuller followed The Cliff-Dwellers with With the Procession (1895), which Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, the Chicago writer of the farcical novels—With Edge Tools (1891) and An American Peeress (1893)—praised. He writes a glowing portrait of Fuller’s novel and acknowledges that he renders certain circles of Chicago life perfectly. He writes:

  I like the story much better than the “Cliff Dwellers,” which is saying much, as I have long been an ardent admirer and champion of the former book. You certainly understand Chicago life, through and through. You get right at the heart of it and present a perfect picture of the peculiar social construction of the city. Perhaps you are too faithful to win the approbation of the typical Chicagoan … I have never dared to write of Chicago as I see it and sense my experience with “With Edge Tools.” I have contented myself with skirting around it in the suburbs and bringing foreign types into a Chicago atmosphere. After reading “With the Procession” my feeling is of despair. I could never hope to print as true and faithful a picture as you have given us. So I have about made up my mind to abandon Chicago altogether and seek other fields.23

  Fuller’s vision of Chicago’s mixing of art and business and his rendering of the blind climbing of its upper classes would gnaw at the artists of Chicago who would, over the next generation, begin to leave the city for exactly these reasons, citing Fuller’s book as true. Harriet Monroe, the young poet who had written and delivered the “Ode” at the Columbian Exhibition and with whom Fuller had become friends writes to Fuller simply: “We have all been reading the book and think it is great.”24

  Fuller’s novels demonstrate his fascination with Chicago’s focus on the higher life and its treatment of artists and art, and their reception by Chicago artists indicates that his vision is accurate. He writes directly about the treatment of artists and art by Chicagoans in the “The Upward Movement in Chicago” published in the 1897 Atlantic Monthly. His essay begins with an ambivalence that contradicts the optimism of Chicago politicians and boosters: “The civic shortcomings of Chicago are so widely notorious abroad and so deeply deplored at home that there is little need to linger upon them, even for the purpose of throwing into relief the worthier and more attractive features of the local life.”25 He clarifies the plight of the Chicagoan who cares about art a column later: “We are obliged to fight—determinedly, unremittingly—for those desirable, those indispensible things that older, more fortunate, more practiced communities possess and enjoy as a matter of course.”26 For Fuller, Chicago doesn’t know how to create this higher life that seems to come so easily to older, more established cities. The city’s artists must fight for recognition against the naïve and unsophisticated sentiments of the Chicago patrons of the arts, whose conception of culture was overwhelmingly utilitarian. He then offers a bit hope for artists in Chicago, “As a community, we are a school; we are trying to solve for ourselves the problem of living together. All the best and most strenuous endeavors of Chicago, whether practical or aesthetic. Whether directed toward individual improvement or toward an increase in the associated well-being, may be broadly directed as educational. Everything to be said about the higher and more hopeful life of the place must be said with the learner’s bench distinctly in view.”27

  Fuller indirectly warned that Chicago’s temperament and attitudes toward art and culture would result in the cultural destruction of the city. He wrote The Cliff-Dwellers while a member of a loose group of artists who met around the activities of the Columbian Exhibition. The group began in 1893, loosely formed at the suggestion of Lucy Monroe, Harriet’s sister and art critic for the Chicago Tribune.28 The group would become a formal club and a support for artists, especially Fuller, whose association with the club would go on long past those of most other members. After the Michigan Avenue Repository was remodeled into the Fine Arts Building, from 1897 to 1898, most members of the club, including Fuller, took studios in the newly renovated building. The “Studios Club” met officially in Lorado Taft’s protégé Bessie Potter’s top-floor studios in the Fine Arts Building, next to the Chicago Club, the Auditorium Building, and across from where the Art Institute would be when it moved out of the Chicago Club. The club formalized around the name the “Little Room,” which derives from a short story Madeline Wynne published in Harper’s Magazine in 1895 about a magical room in which a room magically disappears and reappears. The story is about the magical creation of new spaces where there seems to be no room for them, especially for women. The adoption of Wynne’s story title by the club members indicates that they saw the club in similar terms. It would be a new space for artists in a city that had no room or proper support for them. The name of the group also repeats the idea of the cliff dwellers, because the club met in a studio perched at the top of a large building, in a “little room” like those belonging to the original Anasazi. But where Fuller’s novel uses the conceit to describe those at the top of the business world of Chicago who feel threatened by immigration and social change, the club of artists who promote social change use the idea of the “Little Room” to describe how they feel threatened by the business world and Chicago’s commercialism. Fuller must have enjoyed the play on his novel because he allowed it and perhaps even suggested it to the group.

  Fuller writes a letter to Allen B. Pond that the club has fully formed by February 25, 1898. He was in Charleston, South Carolina, for part of the winter and so missed the chance to attend the earliest “official” meetings. He writes to Allen B. Pond, the architect who, with his brother Irving, founded Pond and Pond, a Chicago architecture firm that built new modern buildings from an Arts and Crafts perspective:

  Dear A.B., I hear roundaboutly from Mary Jameson Judah and Hamlin Garland that the Little Room is “Rooming,” and this reminds me that I have been slow in acknowledging the graceful handbill that bade me attend its sessions. It is to you that I make my acknowledgements, because I think I perceived some traces of your style in the document. If I remember rightly, the schedule is arranged to run to March 1st; so I send my benediction on the final meeting for this season.29

  The Little Room brought together the artists of Chicago in a membership that included Elia Peattie; reformer Jane Addams; sculptor Lorado Taft; Allen B. and Irving K. Pond, who designed Hull House; Anna Morgan; painter Ralph Clarkson; illustrator and publisher Ralph Fletcher Seymour; and writers George Ade, Harriet Monroe, and Edith Wyatt, in addition to Garland and Fuller.30 Bertha Palmer, the wealthy Impressionist art collector and wife of industrialist Potter Palmer, although never directly mentioned in conjunction with the Little Room, did occasionally attend. She and Fuller were friends and he based, in part, the character of Susan Bates in With the Procession on her.31 They would gather for afternoon teas and after midnight dramas, bringing a much-needed sense of community to the artists and supporting a shared vision of an artistic culture within Chicago.

  The first entry in the Club Record of the Little Room Book is dated Summer of 1902:

  At the meeting of members of the “Little Room” held in Miss Morgan’s studio in the early summer of 1902, it was voted that the board of directors should consist of nine me
mbers, holding office for the term of three years then to be retired annually and their successors to be elected by members of the Board of Directors whose term of office has not expired. It was further voted that no one should be admitted to membership in the “Little Room” until his candidacy has been discussed with representatives of his own profession or craft. It was further voted that the election of a new member by the Board of Directors must be unanimous; that when the candidate has been unanimously chosen by the board of directors his name shall be posted for two weeks in the room in which the meetings of the “Little Room” are held, and that three negative votes addressed in writing to the secretary shall defeat the election.32

  The Little Room should not be seen as a frivolous gathering of artists, but rather an important and mannered club that took as its business supporting art and artists. Members crafted the club’s rules in 1902 to impart seriousness to all of the club’s activities, and they made their rules and regulations similar to those of other important and influential nineteenth-century clubs in Chicago.

  The second entry of the Club Record, dated Fall 1902, records the meeting held in Mr. Clarkson’s Studio. In this meeting, the membership voted that there would be three sets of elected directors who would have varying length terms.33 In 1904, the club elected Miss Anna Morgan, Ralph Clarkson, and Allen B. Pond for one year; Mrs. M. Y. Wynne, George B. McCutcheon, and Allen Spencer for two; Mr. Franklin Head, Mr. Hobart Chatfield Taylor, and Mrs. Elia Peattie for three. Allen B. Pond was the secretary. Franklin H. Head was the treasurer, George B. McCutcheon, chairman of the entertainment committee, and Miss Anna Morgan, chairman of the house committee.34 When there was a reelection, the nine people above reshuffled themselves, suggesting an assumed hierarchy within the club.35 By 1905, members, too, would be elected.36 Active members to the group could propose names and then elections were held.37 Fuller was a member of the committee in 1906–190738 and in 1907–1908 too.39 His name appears frequently in the club’s pages as a member, member of the committee, and organizer of activities. The frequency of his communication with the Little Room and the Little Roomers, even while out of town, as well as his active involvement, demonstrates the importance of the club to him.