The international press reported at length on the Haymarket Affair and the subsequent legal proceedings. In the wake of the extended negative publicity about the factories in Chicago, the capitalists of Chicago, especially the Medills and the McCormicks, campaigned hard to bring the Columbian Exhibition to Chicago. It was a chance to recast national and international attention on Chicago away from the labor unrest and the stories being churned out about the working conditions in their factories and plants. Margaret A. Sullivan sent out the alarm that a New York paper planned to publish Monroe’s Ode in September of 1892, five years after the Haymarket Affair and one month before Monroe’s Ode would be revealed at the Fair. Monroe’s subsequent letter-writing campaign to the newspaper editors of Chicago gave the editors, who had supported the industrialists in portraying the striking workers as “thugs” and running editorials against unions, a chance to appear as if they now supported workers’ rights. The editors of the Chicago newspapers, including the Tribune’s Robert W. Patterson, all gave their support to Monroe because by doing so, they were continuing to support the capitalists who commissioned the poem for the Fair.64 Monroe’s protection of her copyright provided an excellent opportunity to uplift the image of Chicago in the international papers and she would find herself well supported by the men who ran the city.
On May 11, 1894, more than 4,000 employees of the Pullman Company went on strike to protest the company’s reduction of their wages and the recent layoffs of many of their workers. Pullman invented the company town, where his workers lived in Pullman, on the Southside of Chicago, and paid their wages back to the company in rents and at the company stores that serviced the area. The strike occurred, in part, when the company would not lower rents or prices on goods in stores despite reducing their workers’ wages. The American Railway Workers Union had been organizing the factory over the last year and Pullman refused to negotiate with or even recognize the union. The strike spread and workers refused to pull any train with an attached Pullman car, shutting down rail lines through the entire Midwestern and Western United States. The US attorney general, still on retainer from his previous position as a railroad attorney, asked the federal courts for an injunction barring federal workers from supporting the strike. The court granted the request quickly and when the union refused to back down, the federal government brought in troops, town by town, to enforce the court order. Riots and violence broke out, prompting bad press from New York and abroad about Chicago. Conservative Chicago leaders supported the federal government, decreeing a breakdown of rules and order, but younger reformist ministers supported the striking workers.65
Harriet Monroe had her first court date for the lawsuit on December 1894, with the newspapers, politicians, and ministers still making pronouncements about the significance of the Pullman strike. Monroe would have understood her fight as a workers’ rights case because she was leading a solitary charge to reinforce the right of artists to own and control the products of their own work and to negotiate for and receive proper payment for their work. The lawsuit frames the case exactly this way and the appellate court cites Wheaton v. Peters 8 Peter 655, which states: “That an author, at common law, has a property in his manuscript, and may obtain redress against any one who deprives him of it, or, by improperly obtaining a copy, endeavors to realize a profit by its publication, cannot be doubted.”66 The Supreme Court repeated its position two years later, arguing that “a literary man is as much entitled to the product of his labor as any other member of society cannot be controverted.”67 The Court used Wheaton v. Peters to reaffirm that a creative work is a product of labor and in doing so affirmed that workers and artists in the 1890s felt stripped of rights, already granted. Monroe’s lawsuit made it safe for artists to produce work for the wealthy without fear of having that work stolen or misappropriated by them. Monroe did not hesitate to call on her friends, the capitalists who could help her when she had difficulty with the Fair’s committee, but the lawsuit and her fight to maintain her ownership and power over the Ode, and to make money from the fruits of her own artistic labor, show her firm understanding that as an artist, she is a worker for the wealthy.
In the years after the Fair, the Arts and Crafts movement took root in Chicago deeply because there it found a group of artists, intellectuals, and architects, like Harriet Monroe, who had become increasingly concerned about mass industrialization and the loss of artists’ rights. The movement was based in large part on John Ruskin’s idea that a healthy and moral society needed workers and artists who designed and controlled the objects they made and the labor with which they made it. William Morris, a British designer, became the main influence on the American movement because of his ideas about aesthetics and social reform. He believed that design and manufacture should be linked together, as they had been in the Middle Ages, and controlled by the artist, who he called a craftsman. Craftsmen had control over their product from conception to finish and worked ideally by hand. Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement would fix the excesses of modern industrialization, particularly the violence done to the worker and to aesthetics by restoring the proper relationship between the artist and his creation.68 Instead of mass-produced trash made by labor treated as slaves, people could buy fewer pieces of well-made products made ethically by a craftsman.
The first American Arts and Crafts show took place in Boston on April 5, 1897. In Chicago, Jane Addams’s Hull House began offering classes and exhibitions of the arts and crafts produced in the classes months later. The Arts and Crafts vision of Ruskin and Morris matched Addams’s, who believed very strongly in reforming society through the process of upward lift and Hull House became the center of the movement in Chicago. On October 22, 1897, the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society was founded at Hull House. Their constitution, adopted on October 31, described seven purposes of the society, including cultivating “in its members, and through them in others, a just sense of beauty,” “influencing the designs of ornamental work,” “recognizing and encouraging handicraft among all the members,” considering “the present state of the factories and the workmen therein,” holding “exhibitions,” and “to found and maintain centers where the various crafts may be carried on and developed on lines suggested by the society.”69 There were 137 founding members, including Jane Addams, Harriet Monroe’s sister Lucy Monroe, Irving K. and Allen Pond, Madeline Yale Wynne, and Frank Wright, the young architect who started his own firm in Oak Park in 1893 after working for Adler and Sullivan for five years.70
Monroe would have been drawn to the Arts and Crafts ideal expressed by her good friend Addams, her sister, and her friends the Ponds. She supported enthusiastically the reform work of Addams and the Settlement Movement of which Hull House was part and had a great interest in women’s and workers’ rights. Her lawsuit allowed the courts to articulate that an artist has the right to control their own work and the new Arts and Crafts community in Chicago would have seen her as the champion of their foundational premises. Monroe was not a member of the Arts and Crafts society, but she was a very early member of the Little Room, along with the Ponds, Henry Blake Fuller, and Madeline Yale Wynne. The club’s name derived from a short story by Wynne that appeared in Harper’s Monthly in 1895.
Wynne moved to Chicago in 1893, right after the Columbian Exhibition because she had been recently widowed. She came from an artistic family and studied painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Students’ League in New York, and trained in Europe. Her brother, Julian Yale, moved to Chicago earlier that year because of business, and Madeline and her mother soon followed.71 Fuller writes: “They established themselves in a pleasant house at No. 9 Ritchie Place, which for many years was a Mecca for true lovers of art and literature. Here it was that Mrs. Yale and Mrs. Wynne collaborated to form a salon of real intellectual interest; here too, Madeline and her brother wrought together in the unique and fascinating workshop.”72 The Wynnes had distinguished themselves as metal workers in the East and Madeline’s silver jewe
lry designs, featuring original and unique designs and hammer marks, and her work had national recognition. She spent her summers in Massachusetts, where she revived Deerfield Crafts and stoked enthusiasm for Chicago Arts and Crafts. It was during this time she wrote “The Little Room,” and her house and workshop provided the meeting place for the group of artists who would form the club.73
Monroe, as a member of Wynne’s salon and founding member of the Little Room, would have been a part of the crafting of the club’s name. Wynne remained a member of the Little Room until she left Chicago permanently and Monroe remained in contact with her until Wynne died on January 4, 1918, at the Langman Hotel in Nashville of cerebral hemorrhage.74 The fact that the group of artists named their club after Wynne’s story indicates that the club wished to name Wynne’s salon as the origin for the club. Because Wynne was such a visible and vocal member of the Arts and Crafts movement, naming the club after her story serves to announce that the Little Room believed in the principles of the Arts and Crafts movements. The Little Room’s name indicates that the club was more than a privileged place to discuss the social and aesthetic issues of the day. Instead, the club saw itself as a craft guild or a union of artists, where they could protect and support each other against the harshness of Chicago’s business world, which sought to separate the artist from his or her labor. Monroe’s lawsuit would be remembered for beginning the fight for the individual craftsman.
When the Little Room moved to the top floor studios in the newly converted Arts Building, it made sense because the club occupied the best floor of the new building which would provide a home to justice and reform movements, artists, craftsmen, theater groups, and their clubs because the groups all involved the same members and friends. Anna Morgan writes about the early days in the building in her memoir My Chicago (1918):
In the beginning years of the Fine Arts Building there was a blending of the social with the artistic life in the studios that was truly delightful. We are all prosperous, with plenty of work to do, yet somehow there was time to exchange visits with our co-workers and to take an active interest in the work which each was doing.75
She names the Fine Arts Building’s purpose as providing a place to bring together those artists who had formed a loose colony in Chicago. Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, a friend of Morgan, Monroe, and Fuller and original member of the Little Room, provides context for Morgan’s book and the enthusiasms of the early days of the Fine Arts Building. He writes: “In the midst of Chicago’s turmoil, there has been for a number of years a colony of painters, writers and lovers of the Fine Arts which has been striving with might and main to create within our material city a spirit of idealism.”76
However, he adds a concern that the artists too easily shut themselves off from the industry that fueled Chicago. He first sounds like Fuller: “The city’s uncouthness, however, has been a thorn in the side of this aesthetic colony; and, living aloof as they have from the material world about them.” But then, he pivots sharply by announcing that the artists have separated too far from the industry of Chicago: “Its members have been tempted, I fear, to brush aside unfeelingly the achievements of her captains of industry, while magnifying unduly their own endeavors.”77 Chatfield-Taylor wants to protect Chicago industry and sees no reason why the arts and business communities should remain so separate from each other. His language echoes that of Hamlin Garland who started a formal men’s only club that would deliberately drain away the male members of the Little Room, including Chatfield-Taylor, who joined immediately. He claimed it was because many of the original Little Room members had deserted Chicago, but he never explained his decision to issue men’s only invitations.78 According to Henry Regnery, a Cliff Dwellers Club member, who published the club’s history in 1990, at the first gathering of:
interested and like-minded men, including most of the male members of the Little Room, he laid out the plan: “This club will bring together men of artistic and literary tastes who are now widely scattered among the various social and business organizations of Chicago and unite them with artists, writers, architects, and musicians of the city in a club whose purposes are distinctly and primarily aesthetic, taking hints from the Players, the National Arts, and the Century Association of NY.”79
Garland’s club would formally bring together artists and businessmen with artistic tastes in order to protect the interests of Chicago. The group would decide on the name the Cliff Dwellers Club two years later.
Garland and Chatfield-Taylor’s concerns need to be understood against the increasing interest in modern, European, and avant-garde art on the part of Chicago’s artists, patrons, curators, and gallery owners. The establishment’s and mainstream Chicago’s reaction and utter disdain for international modernism became strikingly clear when from March 24 to April 16, 1913, the Art Institute of Chicago hosted the International Exposition of Modern Art—the famous “Armory Show.” The show arrived in Chicago following its month-long showing in New York. Prior to the show’s arrival in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune had sent their art critic Harriet Monroe to New York to cover the exhibition. Despite her glowing review of the show and despite a series of exhibitions of works by Arthur Dove, Jerome Blum, and B. J. O. Nordfeldt, in 1912 at the W. Scott Thurber gallery, the Armory Show came as a shock to Chicago’s sensibilities. Business leaders mocked the exhibit through the presses, religious leaders morally postured against the exhibit, and Hamlin Garland even staged a protest outside with members of The Cliff Dwellers club.80
Andrew Martinez has shown that Monroe’s “review of the exhibition, while appearing under the headlines ‘Art Show Open to Freaks’ and ‘American Exhibition in New York Teems with the Bizarre,’ was more favorable than most.”81 She writes: “Even the cubists seem to be playing interesting games with kaleidoscopic polygons of color.” She writes excitedly: “Most American exhibitions are dominated by the conservatives. Not so this one; the radicals are in control, and there are new voices in the chorus.”82 Her positive review often surprises scholars who make the mistake of seeing Monroe as a voice left over from an earlier generation, a view created and perpetuated by Ezra Pound to allow him to appear more powerful and have more control of Poetry than he really had. Monroe’s voice in the review is the same as the one who fought for control of her work and who worked tirelessly alongside Jane Addams for reform. She sees the new modern art and the sponsoring of new art as leading the way to that reform for workers’ and artists’ rights and a more egalitarian society. She is even prompted that year to begin educational work for women because of her Tribune writing. On September 12, 1913, Minna C. Denton writes from the Lewis Institute in Chicago: “I have, from time to time, noticed your comments upon current art and architecture, in the Chicago Tribune. I wonder if you are at all interested in doing educational work. We very much need, in our course called ‘The House,’ just such lectures as I should be glad to get from you. May I ask whether you would consider the matter?”83 She begins lecturing that very year, something she will continue to do nationally for the rest of her life.
Her review of the Armory Show also expresses her own embrace of the possibilities for new modern art. She explains her embrace of the new, the modern, in the inaugural issue of Poetry the year before, by using terms that stem directly from her lawsuit and the Workers’ Rights and Arts and Crafts movements that she took part in years ago. She explains her “Motive of the Magazine”:
In the huge democracy of our age no interest is too slight to have an organ. Every sport, every little industry requires its own corner, its own voice, that it may find its friends, greet them, welcome them. The arts especially have need of each an entrenched place, a voice of power, if they are to do their work and be heard.84
The magazine will pay it writers and provide a place for the workers to speak, no matter how slight. In the second issue, she explains that the magazine will have an “Open Door Policy” as the assurance that all artist’s voices will be heard and published. Poetry promises to be
free of “entangling alliances with any single class or school.” Instead, she will “print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written.”85
When Monroe reviewed the Armory Show exhibit in New York, she had already started Poetry magazine in 1912 with her long list of industrialists and patrons of the arts as backers. Accounts of the founding of Poetry have loosely mentioned the lawsuit as the source of the journal’s funding money, ignoring the facts as written by Monroe as well as the twenty years between Monroe’s receipt of the verdict and the official founding of the magazine. Monroe writes, “When the World’s check arrived, and Mr. McCarthy’s fee and the payment of certain overdue medical bills had absorbed about two-fifth’s of it, I decided to follow the usually American vacation trend towards Europe and spent half of my little fortune on foreign travel.”86 Her receipt of verdict and bill from her attorney, George Yeaman, indicates that Monroe remembers the amounts correctly.87 She still needed a community of backers and friends to publish the magazine and she courted the business world much as she campaigned twenty years ago to write the Ode for the Fair.
In October of 1915, she, along with Chatfield-Taylor’s wife, joined a networking club for women. The Cordon Club met in the Fine Arts Building and the club was presented as “the feminine counterpart to the Cliff Dwellers.” The club papers said the club is to be for purely social purposes and consisted largely of women with some profession or definite calling in life. It was said to be “about evenly divided between women who ‘do something’ and those who lead merely domestic and social lives.” Harriet Monroe and Anna Morgan were members, as were Elia Peattie and the wives of Ogden Armour and Cyrus H. McCormick. The club was prestigious and filled with Monroe’s old friends from the days of the Fair.88
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