Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  The respect she won from the Chicago business world and its artists because of her lawsuit allowed her to create a magazine that supported the new, modern art. Both the business world and artists trusted deeply that her new project would continue to uplift the city and its artists as all of her past projects, including the lawsuit, had done. Edgar Lee Masters will consider her decision to stay permanently in Chicago in a letter in June of 1925. He writes: “In the case of Harriet Monroe who loves Chicago, because she has always known it, and because she has a gifted eye for its charms and possibilities, what has been her fate but the most arduous endeavor to hold up the torch and not starve while doing it?”89 Monroe never left Chicago permanently because she considered herself and the magazine as a kind of beacon for the artists of the city, and herself, a Jane Addams for the artists. She feared that if she left, the hope of the Little Room would be completely extinguished.

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  Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Chicago

  An unknown person cut out a poem from the newspaper and pasted it into what appears to be the inside of the front cover of an old journal. The journal itself is gone and only the cover is left with the yellowed newspaper clipping inside. The poem is titled “The Little Room” and is signed “M. Stranger,” which is most likely a pseudonym. The poem begins with the instruction that it is a song to be sung to, “I Want to Be an Angel.” The poem relates the hopes and wishes of the writer who dreams of being a writer who can join the Little Room. The members are very clannish, she says, and the writer hopes to be asked to join if she can keep up the pretense of indifference and not look too eager. The writer calls the members the “Hoi Polloi” and says she will soon be “Too Aged” to join the Little Room. She ends by asking and wants to know “What can I do that’s worthy/The Goal—‘The Little Room.’”1

  The poem is undated and was kept as part of the Little Room’s papers. It’s tempting to ascribe the poem to Harriet Monroe after she fell away from the group, upset that they seemed to have closed their doors to young writers, one of which she had nominated and had been rejected.2 There’s no evidence that she wrote the poem, but her difficulties with the group had just started and the poem most likely dates sometime after 1910. The poem calls out the club for being clannish and snobbish, which Monroe had difficulties with too. The “angels” of the “Little Room” meet in the best rooms on the top floor of the Fine Arts Building and so the poem suggests that they think of themselves as rather close to God at the top of the artistic hierarchy of Chicago and almost religious in their adherence to a certain kind of aesthetics. The darkest moment happens in the last lines, when the writer expresses that they are aging and would do anything to become a permanent angel in the club: immortal, stagnant, and dead.

  When Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson each arrived in Chicago, neither had the money nor the prestige to join the few groups that took literature and arts seriously. Masters and Anderson, along with Floyd Dell and Carl Sandburg, formed the core of what would be considered the new school of Chicago writing. The new generation of writers formed a new, modern, and collective response to the older regionalism and realism, so championed by Howells and published by the established magazines. The new Chicago writers and artists would be published by the new and modern little magazines, including Monroe’s Poetry and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s The Little Review, and reviewed by the Chicago papers which would boost anything that could raise Chicago’s position in the artistic and literary markets. Anderson and Masters became literary celebrities and had to sell the idea of the new Chicago Renaissance along with their books.

  This chapter draws from Edgar Lee Masters’s and Sherwood Anderson’s collections at the Newberry Library in Chicago in order to show the ways in which each writer wrote about Chicago privately, despite their contradictory public statements. The chapter’s first section shows how Edgar Lee Masters, after leaving Chicago, named the close association between the Chicago business and art scene as detrimental to artists, especially with regard to the way in which art critics manipulated the scene for the newspapers. The second section argues that Sherwood Anderson became a modern craftsman after working for Frank Lloyd Wright in 1915 as a way to combat the commercial art scene in Chicago. The chapter then reveals that although Sherwood Anderson extolled the virtues of Chicago publicly, he writes repeatedly in private letters dated 1915 through the 1920s about the distaste he has for Chicago’s inhabitants and its art scene steeped in utilitarian social realism and patronage. Both writers left Chicago, despite being permanently linked to the city they would come to despise.

  Edgar Lee Masters’s critique of Chicago

  Masters moved to Chicago in 1892 during the Columbian Exhibition and found a job collecting bills for the Edison Company. He was trained by his father as an attorney and eventually built a successful law practice in Chicago. He became partners with labor attorney Clarence Darrow for eight years, who had become well-known for defending the Haymarket Anarchists. Darrow was responsible for petitioning the governor to grant clemency for the three imprisoned labor leaders and his appeal worked. Newly elected Governor Altgeld granted the clemency, stating that their trial had been unfair and was a miscarriage of justice. Darrow and Masters had similar dramatic and bombastic styles in the courtroom stemming from their love of the arts, literature, and theater. They each wrote books and poetry when they had time and enjoyed the company of the fellow attorney and lover of the arts Henry S. Monroe, Harriet’s father. The partnership ended when Darrow left to defend John and James McNamara in California in mid-1911. The relationship had been a contentious one, with each accusing the other at the end of various acts of impropriety. The relationship became so bitter that Darrow became Masters’s wife’s attorney during their divorce.3 Masters’s work as an attorney took up so much time, he lamented that he didn’t have more time for artistic pursuits. By the time he received some attention for his poetry, the old art scene that formed around the World’s Fair had closed itself off from new members and many of the younger members were looking to leave to greener pastures in New York and Europe.

  On November 22, 1914, the Chicago Tribune ran a small column announcing “Edgar Lee Masters, who has practiced law in Chicago for more than twenty years, is the author of the Spoon River Anthology, a group of poems in free verse which has been printed serially in ‘Reedy’s Mirror’ under the pseudonym of Webster Ford.” Masters had been concerned that his poetry, if well-known, could hurt his law practice because of its tone and new way of presenting the small town. The paper then announced: “Macmillan will publish the anthology when it has been completed.”4 On May 15, 1915, the Chicago Tribune announced its review of Spoon River Anthology with a drawn head shot of Masters and the gushing text: “Chicago has unawares been harboring a poet of unusual merit in the person of Edgar Lee Masters, an attorney of this city, whose book, Spoon River Anthology has challenged the acrious consideration of the literary world. In form and content there has been nothing like this published before.”5 Elia W. Peattie’s glowing review of the “odd, new” poet ends with the simple declaration, “Once possessing the book, one is unwilling to part with it. It is too notable a piece of literature to omit from one’s library.”6 Robert B. Peattie in the July 11, 1915, Tribune placed Spoon River Anthology next to Vachel Lindsay’s Congo and Other Poems and asked “Is This the Beginning of an Illinois School of Poetry?” He argues that both books of poetry “have made a new departure in verse and created a definite style and technic which may be the nucleus of a new school of poetry in Illinois destined to have an important bearing upon the development of English poetry.”7

  Journalists and writers in Chicago considered Masters’s book of poetry a remarkable achievement and one that brought attention to a new kind of poetry and writing that had sprung up in the city. Masters’s work separated itself aesthetically and through its narrative from the work of Chicago writers Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, who had published popular and well-reviewed no
vels just the decade before. Both Dreiser and Sinclair wrote “critical realism,” a “type of fiction which reports truthfully warped social relationships so men may study and improve them.”8 Vernon Louis Parrington named William Dean Howells the “prophet” of realism in 1930 for his championing of art that tells the truth about the new modern and industrial urban spaces of America.9 Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Sinclair’s muckraking exposé of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle (1906), do just that. The plots of the novels are simple, in order to give both writers ample space to catalog, in painstaking detail, the realities of gritty urban life and the unfeeling wealthy who inflict countless daily indignities on the lower classes. Masters’s poetry is light, terse, and in free verse, the exact opposite of the excessive language in the realistic novels. His poetry uncovers the failed promises and scandalous secrets of the small town in America so exalted by Howells and the realistic writers of the previous generation.

  Howells’s review of Spoon River Anthology identifies Masters’s work as possibly being like Whitman’s. He declares: “Freak for freak we prefer compressed verse to shredded prose, but because both of these are freak things we will not decide whether Uncle Walt will be more enduring than Mr. Masters.”10 His use of the word “freak” associates Masters’s work with the numerous negative reviews of the Armory Show the previous year, and the idea of “shredded prose” recalls imagistically the cubism of the exhibit. Howells sees in Masters something new and indisputably modern. Howells praises Masters despite his absolute dislike of his form and the new modernism in general. He allows:

  It is when the strong thinking of Mr. Masters makes us forget the formlessness of his shredded prose that we realize the extraordinary worth of his work. It is really something extraordinary, that truth about themselves which his dead folk speak from their village graveyard; for it is the truth about the human nature of us, if not the whole truth about our respective lives.

  Howells praises the verity of Masters’s work, which is the highest praise he offers because he believes verity should be central to a work of art. But, then he declares: “It will not last.”11

  Despite Howells’s review, Chicago continued to praise the new and exciting poetry collection. By November of 1916, Masters and his entire family had achieved celebrity status in Chicago. The Tribune published a picture of Edgar Lee Masters’s wife and daughters on the society pages, directly beneath a large picture of British royalty at a charity sports event and next to a picture announcing the divorce of an heir to the Standard Oil fortune.12 That same year, Sherwood Anderson published Windy McPherson’s Son, the story of how Sam McPherson, the son of a drunkard in small town Ohio, moves to Chicago and climbs through the ranks of the business world to become a wealthy success. The more professional success he has, the more his personal life falls apart and the more immoral he becomes. Anderson spent the year writing the short-story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, and when it finally came out in 1919, the influence Masters had on Anderson was obvious. Burton Roscoe’s June 7, 1919, review of Winesburg, Ohio, begins with the statement that “comparison” with “the Spoon River Anthology is rather inevitable, possibly so inevitable that it may be questioned whether the analogy is totally legitimate.”13

  David Minter sees this period as an especially fertile time for Chicago artists and writers. He reports Ford Maddox Ford announcing from Paris that the “Midwest was seething with impulse.”14 He sees all of the young writers as having “wanted to contribute the creation of a distinctly ‘American’ culture.”15 Masters was one of the poets who, along with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg, everyone read, in part, because Monroe published them in Poetry. Walt Whitman, as even Howells noticed, was experiencing a revival and his message of revolution and freedom spoke to the young, radical poets.16 Everything was up for renovation and doing so followed the charge of the earlier reformers and the Settlement House movement at Hull House. However, Poetry magazine, the Little Room circle, and the young group of Chicago writers did not critique the idea of cultural uplift that was so much a part of the Chicago way of doing the business of art. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz has shown that there was only a “rephrasing of it,” and they remained aligned and loyal to the institutions of Chicago.17

  Lisa Woolley has noticed that “Spoon River Anthology makes little attempt to represent Midwestern speech,” which distinguishes Masters from the other Chicago Renaissance writers and their regionalist predecessors. She sees the lack of dialect in the collection as stemming from his interest in the idea of “literariness,” and his training as an attorney.18 The lack of dialect suggests that he understood that if the book contained dialect, it would be quickly declared a Chicago book and perhaps criticized for its lack of uplifting content. The language also indicates that Masters had a vision that was larger than Chicago and wrote for an audience outside the limits of the Tribune. Woolley points out that his “inclusion of representatives from all parts of the social spectrum links Spoon River to other writing from this period.”19 He was, after all, a defense attorney and his vision for art must be understood, in part, by working with Clarence Darrow whose ideas for social justice served a community larger than Chicago.

  Edgar Lee Masters names the close association between the Chicago business and art scene as detrimental to artists, especially with regard to the way in which art critics manipulated the scene for the newspapers. After leaving Chicago, he wrote a series of letters to Harriet Monroe about his divorce and how badly it was proceeding. He mixes the news about his divorce with an ongoing discussion about Chicago. He complains that Fanny Butcher, the literary critic at the Tribune has misrepresented him. He writes:

  I too wish to return to Chicago. In the flush days of my fame I was importuned to come to New York, and offered things to do so. But I refused; and while I am on this subject I want to say to you that those things that Fanny Butcher printed, and that are still printed in the News about my loving New York and disliking Chicago, and that Chicago is not a literary center, are as grossly untrue as they are deeply malicious. I was unwise enough to be interviewed, first by a woman at the New York Tribune who has a grudge against Chicago because of some newspaper experience there, and she asked me for example, if I liked this or the other feature of Chicago. I said I didn’t as to some of things, but I said in all instances that the very things I disliked about Chicago were good for me and stimulated my writing. What she printed was pure perversion, and Fanny Butcher took it up to make enemies for me. This is a nice world. The same thing is true about the literary center matter.20

  He is deeply concerned he has been misrepresented in the Chicago press, which paradoxically needed his celebrity to sell itself and Chicago. His concern is that the commercial literature business of Chicago will work against him, even more than it already has.

  In a letter to Agnes Lee Freer, dated September 9, 1924, he writes: “Chicago will have a literature in spite of the Tribune and the News but never without their aid. For Chicgoa [sic] is really full of cliques; and it has not risen out of its provincial intimacies and leagues.” He returns to his “theme” as he calls it in a postscript to the same letter, where he identifies the Chicago art world’s cliquishness as emerging out of Chicago boosterism: “So you remember that the boom of Spoon River really carried several books into prominence, even Frost’s? It created the swell upon which several boats came into port, the interst [sic] that projected itself to poetry at large. Since then a lot of local boosters have fancied that the ascension of their favorites could be brought about by my declension, and they have attacked and praised accordingly.”21

  He complains in that same letter about how “it’s funny how people who make apolitical faith out of the equal distribution of wealth, are indifferent to the faith after they are filled themselves; and it is this kind of people who are indifferent to the equal distribution of honors all the time.” The cliquishness of Chicago extended beyond that of the clubs, because it became extremely difficult to obtain any awards or acknowledgme
nt by the papers without the right “Bohemian” connections.

  His disgust at the critics reveals the business of writing and how the newspapers perpetuate it. On September 9, 1924, he points out that the newspapers don’t even back their critics. He writes:

  Do not think that the proprietors of those papers do not stand for their critics. They do, and by that token they stand for against the writers criticized or ignored. You remember when Burton Rascoe was let out of the Tribune for something he said about a Christian Science book. That would not do, you see. It hurt advertising, and when advertising is hurt editors and owners can’t live so high.22

  He’s particularly annoyed with Fanny Butcher’s reviews through the twenties, of himself and others.

  By June 28, 1925, Masters decided he’s never returning to Chicago. He writes to Mrs. Freer:

  You have asked me more than once if I shall ever return to Chicago, and I wonder if the same question is asked the numberless others who have divorced themselves from the city that Wells described a lapse from civilization. Every writing artist or other artist who has been able to leave Chicago has done so; and the city has failed to recruit itself from the ranks of those who originated near it, and for the matter of proximity might have chosen it as an abiding place.

  Masters then lists every writer who had left Chicago, including Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Upton Sinclair, Hamlin Garland who “tried his best,” and Carl Sandburg. He points out the list would go on for pages if he named everyone who left to be free and associate among like-minded people. He reiterates that Chicago is a “clique” with a “village mind.” The village has been completely dominated by “influence as corrupt and arrogant as the Pattersons and McCormicks, who are the Hapsburgs of Illinois. It is these selfish and envious spirits that engender the vermin that run the literary pages of the News and the Tribune, and who have lost to Chicago valuable men like Burton Rascoe, Floyd Dell, Lucian Cary, and Francis Hackett, all of whom left the field to be occupied by the parasites of the McCormicks, the Lawsons and the Schaefers.”23