Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  During the summer, the Little Room members met at the Eagle’s Nest Camp, a semi-commune with multiple individual and shared dwellings.40 The name of the camp represents the club’s stated belief that “association and conversation had largely to do with inspiration.”41 Lorado Taft, sculptor and professor at the Art Institute, and his friends set up a small camp in Oregon, Illinois, during the summer of 1898. They had been traveling to Bass Lake in Indiana, until the summer before an outbreak of malaria at the camp scared them into finding a new retreat.42 Taft’s love of natural beauty, the central idea of most of the essays he brought to the Little Room group, found its expression at the natural camp. By 1901, the central cabins and many smaller cabins had been erected. Fuller leaves the group formally at exactly this point, writing cryptically to Mr. Oliver Bennett Grover, the secretary of the Eagle’s Nest Association from Chicago on January 11, 1901, that he’s unable to take part in a meeting and also regrets that he no longer can take an active part in the association. He writes: “In view of this fact I am quite clear that my wiser choice is to withdraw from the association … Wishing the Association continued and increased prosperity.”43 The construction of additional cabins allowed more members to bring their families to the camp and the atmosphere became family oriented. Fuller most likely did not like the new atmosphere and preferred the company of men and his friends, away from the demands of wives, children, and domestic responsibilities in which he had no interest or part.

  In 1907, Garland started a formal men-only club that would deliberately drain away the male members of the Little Room. Garland made extensive lists of professional, intellectual, and artistic men whom he wished to join his club. One list is exclusively a list of the male members of the “Little Room” and this list suggests that he did so deliberately and systematically. He then made it new club business to “tender an invitation to join the new club” to all Little Room male members. 44 The “Provisional Committee of the Attic Club” was held at the City Club Rooms on Tuesday July 30, 1907. Present were “Mr. Garland, Mr. Taft, Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. I. K. Pond, Mr. A. B. Pond, Ira Nelson Morris, Arthur Addis, Chatfield-Taylor,” and notes mention that they are in negotiation with a space in the Harvester Building, suggesting connections with the wealthy McCormicks.45 In the letter sent out, but undated, Hamlin Garland writes:

  On behalf of the Committee of which I am Chairman I hereby invite you to become a member of a club which is meant to be a union of the artists, art lovers, and literary men of Chicago, somewhat like the Players Club of New York City. It is in effect widening the scope of the Little Room of which you are a member. We plan to now have a home of our own near the Fine Arts Building, (possibly on the top of some building) with our own kitchen and grill room and with unique and tasteful furnishings.

  He continues:

  The number of resident members will be fixed at about two hundred, and will take in most of the well-known men in painting, sculpture, music, architecture, landscape gardening, arts and crafts, illustration, fiction, poetry, essay, and the drama. In addition, as you will observe from the enclosed list, the Committee is inviting to membership distinguished men of science, law, business, and other professions who are sympathetic with purposes of the organization, so that the club will be a union of the aesthetic elements of Chicago and the West, very much as The Century Club of New York has brought together the most distinguished personalities of New York and the East.46

  Garland’s club would bring together artists and businessmen with artistic tastes in a union that made formal the alliance that characterized Chicago’s art scene to Fuller’s displeasure. Because it was perched at the top floors of the newly constructed Orchestra Hall, the members called the new club the Attic Club. The group would decide on the name the Cliff Dwellers Club two years later.

  As the members of the Attic Club anticipated, Fuller declined to join the Cliff Dwellers Club. The minutes of the June 27, 1907, meeting reveal: “Henry B. Fuller asked to serve as temporary secretary. Mr. A. B. Pond to act in case of the refusal of Mr. Fuller to serve.” Fuller scholarship has made much of Fuller’s refusal to join the club that bore the name of his most popular novel. Most recently, Massa argues that Garland’s arrogance and insensitivity caused Fuller to “boycott” the club.47 Her interpretation is highly plausible, given Garland’s deliberate destruction of Fuller’s club and his later boasting that he, not Fuller, was a founding member. The Attic Club minutes also show that Fuller’s attitude toward the club and presumably its founder was well-known even before the Attic Club changed its name to the Cliff Dwellers Club. However, Fuller does appear on a typed list of dinner acceptances for the club’s First Annual Dinner, January 17, 1908.48 The Cliff Dwellers’ Dinner may have been Garland’s last attempt to recruit Fuller into his club and he never succeeds in doing so. Fuller never became a member and his name never appears in the minutes or notes. In his letters he will only refer to the camp in passing, much as he does with the Eagle’s Nest Camp: “The campers are gradually getting down to camp. Garland has finally got the Cliffdwellers ‘papers’ signed and the new move is going ahead with the help of Robert Granger and Shaw.”49

  Histories of the Chicago literary renaissance tend to use Garland’s creation of the Cliff Dwellers Club as the end date for the Little Room, but the Little Room did continue into the 1920s, with Fuller as an active member. Memberships in these last years were often delinquent among less-successful members and it became harder to collect money for the club.50 Allen B. Pond notes on April 28, 1910, in a letter to the treasurer, F. H. Head, that he “used thirty-three 2 ct. stamps” to send out delinquency notices.51 On October 20, 1924, a letter went out to all “Little Roomers” from H. B. Fuller, A. B. Pond, I. K. Pond, Lorado Taft, and several other original members of the club including Nellie V. Walker. In it, they write: “Those of us who are writing and signing this letter have felt for many years that the Little Room was not only unique but the center of our most charming hours in Chicago.” They say they don’t want to end the club, but dues need to be raised to five dollars. They ask, “Will you kindly use the enclosed return envelope to say whether you desire the Little Room to continue; whether you will make an effort to attend; and whether you are willing to pay the necessary increase in the annual dues?”52 Fewer people were attending regularly and there had to be an increase in dues.53 There are letters from Clara Louise Burnham, dated October 22, 1924, and Arthur M. Burton, dated October 24, 1924, saying how useful the club has been to them and how much they would miss it. Burton writes how he would “decidedly wish it to continue.”54 Notes poured in at the end, including from Harriet Monroe, that everyone would do all that they can to help the Little Room continue.

  The decline of the Little Room certainly occurred because of Garland’s vicious and deliberate reforming of the club into the Attic Club, but the club did little to welcome the newest members of the Chicago art scene, preferring to remain entrenched around its founding during the Fair, twenty years before. On December 12, 1913, several new artists were passed over for membership in the Little Room, including Maurice Browne, who, along with Ellen Van Volkenburg, founded the Little Theater in the Fine Arts Building.55 Perhaps his attitudes about uplift and need for art to be useful chafed against the legacies of too many founding members, especially Jane Addams. He would tell the Chicago Record-Herald the next year: “I am free to say I wouldn’t go anywhere myself where people aimed to uplift me, and I don’t blame anyone for staying away from the Little Theater if he thinks its prime effort is to uplift.” Even the paper sniped back, responding that he was “speaking more frankly and downrightly than might have been expected of one whose godparents were named Art and Scholarship.”56 His language of the new avant-garde, which ironically repeats Fuller’s, will have no place in Chicago, even among its artists.

  Harriet Monroe wrote a response to the Little Room’s plea to members in October of 1924 that criticizes the Little Room for being too closed off. She writes:

  I conf
ess I have somewhat lost interest since the committee turned down a perfectly good and fitting candidate whom I had proposed, the husband of a valued member, who of course thereupon resigned. I have felt that if this was the policy of the committees if they wished to keep the long-standing membership and not admit a liberal supply of new and younger members, this club had ceased to fulfill any reasonable function and might as well cease. As almost no new members have appeared during a number of years, this policy seems to have been followed, with the result that few of the younger crowd know anything about the society or would now care to join.57

  She does enclose her dues to keep the club going, even if she will no longer attend. The Little Room’s autograph book ends on January 31, 1931, suggesting that this is as near an end date for the club as it is possible to delineate. It has all of the old signatures in it and no one new, not even Margaret Anderson or Jane Heap of the Little Review, Sherwood Anderson, or Edgar Lee Masters. The group seems to have closed itself off in its ongoing mission to protect itself and its members from those outside who may threaten the art scene as only they defined it.58

  Fuller was still spending a great deal of time on the North Shore. Anna Morgan reminisces that “at his home ‘Fairlawn’ they frequently sat out by the lake and discussed hours at a time, literature of all lands, cognating relative merits of each. At that period, about 1908, 'The Little Playhouse' founded by Mrs. Arthur Aldis in her grounds at Lake Forest was in vogue. There she produced many clever plays, several of them from her own pen. Dramatics being one of Henry’s many interests he became a frequent visitor and councilor. There he frequently met the Noble Judah’s and the Howard Shahs’s, the John T. McCutcheon’s in whose houses he was a frequent and welcome visitor.”59 He had contact with almost everyone who had country homes north of Chicago, including I. K. Friedman, the novelist, whose success was due in part to Fuller’s helpful advice, and Edwin Fechter, whose aunt was Harriet Monroe. Anna Morgan too had a home in Ravinia, and he was often there along with Jen Jenson, who was a landscape gardener, and Clifford Raymond of literary fame.60

  Fuller did continue trying to publish, but his name would appear in publications more often as a respectful homage by a younger writer or publisher than attached to a new piece of writing from Fuller. Vachel Lindsay, a younger poet who wrote what he called “Singing Poetry,” had been published to great acclaim in Monroe’s new Poetry magazine. He wrote to Fuller a note of admiration and praise later that year:

  You are in my opinion a very good man. I used to read your art student stories with all kinds of thrills when I was an arts student in the Institute. I will count it as a great honor to know you and besides I think a heap of you because you fit my theory of the New Socialism. You have located in Chicago—and sing your song about it—in noble numbers as it were.61

  He clearly regards Fuller as important, but also past and while Lindsay appreciates his work and generosity, Fuller fits his theory, not the other way around. His friend, Carl Van Vechten, sent him the copy of an article he wrote praising Fuller that appeared in the June 1922 issue of John McClure’s small New Orleans journal The Double Dealer.62 The article appears alongside William Faulkner of Oxford Mississippi, “a young Southern Poet of unusual promise,” and a small poem by Ernest Hemingway. Van Vechten’s new book, Peter Whiffle, had just been issued the previous month by Knopf and went into its second printing and Sherwood Anderson’s name is on the cover to promote his new book Many Marriages.63 Fuller’s importance to the American literary canon had never been more assured than it was during this period, but he couldn’t get published anymore because his kind of realism no longer had a place among the newer, younger, and fully modern writers.

  The editors he submits to are polite and encouraging, but rejecting. Horace B. Liveright writes on March 12, 1921, to thank him for his “kindness in pointing out a number of typographical errors in ‘The Great Modern Short Stories.’” He goes on: “I have heard some rumors about a new novel by you. If it hasn’t already been arranged for, I’d like very much to have the privilege of considering it.”64 On April 21, 1924, George Jean Nathan, coeditor of The American Mercury with H. L. Mencken, wrote a rejection note to Fuller without saying for what he was rejected. He does say, “It would give me great pleasure to have you in the Mercury. Have you anything else that you think might be available?”65 He received another note, presumably of the same year on December 30, from Nathan rejecting him again. “I am sorry indeed that I can’t take this, but I think it lies outside the field of the American Mercury. I surely hope you have something else on the stocks in mind. It would be a great pleasure to see you in the magazine.”66 Fuller never recaptures the success of his early years, but his legacy beginning a radical critique of Chicago’s business scene will be imitated, borrowed, and repeated by the young modernists who believe they have moved beyond his older vision begun in the days of the Columbian Exhibition. His literary and personal legacy will inspire Fuller’s good friend Louis Bromfield to write, nearly eighteen months after Fuller’s death in July of 1929:

  When I read in the Paris Herald that Henry Fuller was dead I had the feeling that something definite had gone from my life which I could never replace. He was that rarest and finest of things—a gentleman and I think he understood what few of us in our generation understands—that being a gentleman is the most important thing of all. He had taste, intelligence, cultivation, now what more could one ask in a friend? He was the most civilized American I have known.67

  2

  Harriet Monroe and Chicago

  Harriet Monroe’s autobiography, A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World (1938), was published two years after her death, of a cerebral hemorrhage from the altitude at Machu Picchu. Robert Morse Lovett reviewed the book for Monroe’s beloved Poetry magazine and split Monroe into two women. He claims: “Harriet Monroe has written two lives, one properly entitled A Poet’s Life, one less distinguished but equally interesting, the life of a citizen of Chicago and of the world.”1 Scholarship that even considers Monroe still insists on a split between her professional and personal lives. Recent studies on Monroe place her among the other modernist little magazine editors of her time and, in doing so, separate her from the unique context of Chicago that allowed her to create the only little magazine still in print. Her creation of the magazine was both an embrace of Chicago’s values and a pushback against its cold climate for artists.

  This chapter will read Harriet Monroe’s life as an artist and as an early supporter of the “new” in art against her life as a Chicagoan. The chapter’s first section will trace her involvement with the Columbian Exhibition, from her first commission to write the “Columbian Ode”, through her negotiations with the committee for ownership rights and control, to her copyright lawsuit with the New York World that changed copyright laws and granted ownership of unpublished work to artists. Her adept management of the committee and legal action when her inherent rights were violated show her to be both a savvy businesswoman who could have become an attorney like her father, had the possibility existed for a woman in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and an artist interested in original and new forms, whatever they may be. The chapter’s second section places her victory for artists’ rights within the context of her involvement with the Chicago Workers’ Rights Movement and Arts and Crafts movement, and the Little Room’s pushback against the Chicago business world. Ultimately, the chapter argues that she won respect from the Chicago business world and its artists because of her lawsuit and deep concerns for art. She stayed in Chicago and started Poetry magazine, because she considered herself and the magazine as a kind of beacon for the artists of the city, a Jane Addams for the artists. She feared that if she left, the hope of the Little Room would be completely extinguished.

  The Columbian Exhibition, the “Columbian Ode,” and copyright

  Harriet Monroe’s five-chapter description of her childhood contains long passages about her attorney father’s connections to the u
pper echelons of the Chicago business and social world and how his success allowed her to create her own connections. Henry Stanton Monroe often invited Stephen A. Douglas, the American politician who was a member of the house, the senate, and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in 1860 who lost to Abraham Lincoln, but became best known for his debating prowess against Lincoln in a series of debates in 1858. Bob Ingersoll, who had served as attorney general and was good friends with Walt Whitman, was also around a great deal.2 Her father and mother, Martha Mitchell, believed in the arts and education and supported their daughters in their reading from Monroe’s “book-lined study.” Her father spent money on fine editions of the classics and “enjoyed competition with his rivals.”3 She mentions the names of the classical writers she read, including “Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, with Dickens and Thackeray,” the plays she loved, and the music she played, just as she names her actual friends and acquaintances, which shows that she thought of them as friends and acquaintances too, just as her father did. Monroe’s parents believed in educating women and they sent her to the same boarding school outside of Washington, DC as Mrs. Potter Palmer and Mrs. Frederick Grant, who married the son of Ulysses S. Grant, the American Civil War general and president of the United States.4 While in the capital, she met the famous Civil War generals Ulysses S. Grant, who she said gave her a “thrill,” William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan.5 Her parents sent her sister, Dora, to the prestigious Miss Porter’s School, and Monroe writes that she returned “a full fledged ‘young lady fresh from Farmington’ who would ‘reform the family manners.’”6 No one was surprised when Dora began to date and eventually married the architect John Wellborn Root in 1882.