Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  Moody would not be the first Chicagoan to link business practice and spirituality, but he was the first to use pragmatic business language and methods to reform and boost up his church and vision. Moody’s life story, as he would frequently tell it, rivals Horatio Alger’s novels for its thorough demonstration of the possibilities available to a determined young American boy who wishes to rise up into social, economic, and political prominence. Moody was born in Boston to a non-Christian mother and left school in fifth grade to go to work. At 17, he left home and sold shoes in his uncle’s store. He joined the YMCA and took several Sunday school classes, eventually becoming a Christian at eighteen. He moved to Chicago and continued to work as a salesman with the goal to earn $100,000 as quickly as he could. Eventually, his goals began to shift from trying to merely accumulate money for himself to a more Christian mission of helping others through Sunday school teaching and growing a church for the poor. His work became part of the new evangelical network in Chicago that made the “urban crisis” the focus of their new Christian work. Instead of preaching, one worked for the poor, speaking in plain language to combat the menaces of urban poverty and the crime and alcohol abuses that stemmed from and contributed to the crisis.10 He used his business skills in order to raise money for religious projects and even went so far as selling stock in a building to business leaders who could turn a good profit on his endeavor. His unorthodox methods would fuse together the business world of Chicago with evangelical spiritual projects by providing the actual projects that could support the manufactured idea of being a good, Christian, businessman. His good business practices and projects quickly drew the attention of those interested in the idea of the higher life and elevating the spiritual status of Chicago while earning a great deal of money, like Hemingway’s grandfather who supported the building of the new YMCA headquarters in September of 1867 along with Cyrus and Nettie McCormick, department store owner Robert Scott, and many other members of Chicago’s business elite.11 Moody was enormously successful and would build up a grand network of churches, a college, and large, wealthy congregation before he died in 1899, the same year Hemingway was born.

  Dr. William E. Barton, who had just taken over as rector at the First Congregational Church, where all of the best families in Oak Park, including the Hemingways, belonged, baptized Hemingway. While not an adherent of Moody, he belonged to the next generation of pragmatic theologians who preached a gospel readymade for the businessman of Oak Park. Michael S. Reynolds has called him “a business man’s minister,” on a “crusade for ‘clean money.’” Reynolds explains Barton’s favorite conceit further:

  Filthy money, he said, was not only a menace to health but had its influence on the character of those who used it, while clean money, like clean clothes and cleanliness of person, tended to tone up one’s morals and self-respect, He could get something of an index of the character of the young man he had married not by the size of the fee but by the quality of the money in which it was paid, its newness and cleanliness.12

  Hemingway would spend his childhood listening to Barton preach this gospel of clean money, which would reinforce the idea of good business handed to him by his grandfather, father, and uncle Tyler. Good business was clean business, morally upright, and financially profitable. Bad business could also be quite profitable but filthy and degenerate and too risky to engage in for the sake of one’s eternal soul.

  When Hemingway responds to a recruitment effort by the Red Cross and signs on to be an ambulance driver, he most likely was influenced by the fact that Barton’s sister Clara founded the Red Cross. His work there would appear to his family and especially his grandparents as “good business” in the “bad business” of the war. On May 10, 1918, they echo the title of their son Alfred’s book and translate their grandson’s military service into business and pragmatically spiritual terms:

  It’s the joy of our lives to think of you starting on this big job. You’ve made good and far more, in your last undertaking and we are absolutely certain that you will bring much glory and honor to the name of Hemingway—I’m overjoyed that you’re first to hear the banner.13

  They enclose ten dollars for their grandson, which they enclosed as proof of the profitability of doing good business.14 His grandparents continue to write and keep repeating how proud of him they are, especially after acknowledging receipt of the telegram that he had been shot. Hemingway’s father used the same business language a month earlier to express his pride in his newspaper work in St. Louis and the fact he joined the Red Cross. He writes to his son on April 17, 1918:

  I am proud of you and your success and the fact you have in seven months got a profession that you can take anywhere in the world and earn a living. Mother and I love you devotedly and have always prayed for and believed you would succeed—We both agree your judgement at this time is good.15

  His family even helps boost his career by giving out his letters for publication in the newspapers, which Hemingway seems annoyed at in a letter to his sister on November 23, 1918.16

  Over the next decade, Hemingway’s father continues to offer advice to his son about doing good business, which is identical to that in Alfred’s book on How to Make Good. He sends a letter to Hemingway on February 4, 1920:

  I hope you are still enjoying your work and can get in some real active work on a Toronto paper. It surely is a good arrangement you have with Mr. Connable. I congratulate you both. I am sure the arrangement is a great character builder and will give you a chance to see things with a new responsibility that had never actually occurred to you before. Get acquainted with as many nice people as you can. They are the very real asset in life’s bank as the years go on. Your big sister left Tuesday morning for the big doings at Williamstown, Mass. I certainly trust she will get all she anticipates and will see others who are her equal and are a true inspiration to Character.17

  His father’s words reflect his belief that a man’s and a woman’s character is a direct reflection of who he or she chose to associate with and to which community he or she belonged. He draws the idea directly from Barton’s church services that present the church as a place where businessmen can gather and renew their spirit through interacting with a community. Over the next decade, he will also enclose printed bulletins and copies of Barton’s sermons in letters to Hemingway. His brother Alfred’s book should, therefore, be seen as the sincerely written credo of the entire Hemingway branch of Ernest’s family, who believed that those who played the business game well could control their fates and the final destinies of their fortunes, work, and souls.

  Hemingway will take the advice, although by 1917 it was most likely completely ingrained in him from hearing his father and observing his very social family’s behavior during the entirety of his childhood. He would maintain his family’s deep belief that nice people help build one’s character and work contacts simultaneously while providing a much needed “asset” both psychologically and literally as time goes on. He will make use of this advice by joining clubs in high school, seeking out other Chicago and Oak Park writers, finding Sherwood Anderson and the remaining members of the artistic crowd in Chicago, and joining the small artistic community in Paris. The pragmatism with which Hemingway developed his business, social, and artistic contacts comes directly from his Oak Park and Chicago upbringing, by a family who believed in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century business rhetoric of Chicago. When Hemingway decides to become a writer, he had read quite a bit of Horatio Alger, and Reynolds declares that he was “operating in a familiar Alger mode: pluck and luck.”18 Hemingway will later see writing as simple hard work and later claim that “anyone could become a writer if he worked at it hard enough.”19 He will go at it as the Hemingways go at any kind of business: as a good Chicago businessman.

  The business of making good, honest modernism

  Hemingway was not just placating his family and pretending to be interested in being a good businessman while growing up in Oak Park. He took a per
sonal interest in the literary representations of Chicago business and it shows in his reading as a young man trying to “make good” as a writer. On July 3, 1956, he writes a short list of writers he likes to Harvey Brett: “Outside of Jim Joyce and an old writer in Chicago named Henry B. Fuller (the Cliff Dwellers, etc.) and a man named Edwin Balmer who wrote pot boilers and helped me as a kid.”20 His comment is notable for two reasons. First, Fuller and Balmer are both Chicago writers who used their writing, as an essayist and a journalist and then as fiction writers, to interrogate the corrupt business cultures in Chicago. Fuller found after the Columbian Exhibition that “too much work of a public character has been derived with haste and incompetence and executed with haste and dishonesty.”21 Balmer wrote crime stories that revealed new ways to expose lies. Both writers were particularly interested in reforming dishonest and bad business practices, something that would have struck young Hemingway as correct. Second, he would have read Fuller and Balmer as a young writer and so his remembrance of them both at fifty-five speaks volumes about how well he considered them as writers. The fact that he mentions them together with James Joyce indicates that he considers Fuller and Balmer as important an influence as Joyce to his development as a modern writer. Hemingway’s comment then reveals that his old interests in Chicago business feed into his development as a modern writer. He would employ himself, as young Horatio Alger, in the business of making good modernism.

  Hemingway most likely read The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) as side reading while at Oak Park-River Forest High School, because the school emphasized a classical curriculum, or right after returning from the war to further recuperate at home. Any novel that was about Chicago and written by a Chicagoan would have been enthusiastically promoted as particularly excellent reading by an English teacher or a librarian at the Oak Park public library, although the novel shocked its readers when it came out. It was redeemed, at least among the literary and art worlds, when William Dean Howells reviewed the novel well in Harper’s Bazaar and gave the novel its coveted place of honor as a fine example of the kind of American realism he sponsored and promoted. He names Fuller’s attention to detail “scrupulous” and the whole thing “bitten in with a corrosive truthfulness.”22

  By the time Hemingway read The Cliff-Dwellers around 1918, its bite and corrosiveness would have been softened by the reformist ideas now preached by the powerful evangelical movement begun by Moody and Rev. Barton. Hemingway would have been quite familiar with the kind of corruption revealed by the novel and labeled “bad business” at the church, by his family, and in the newspapers. Fuller’s novel would be seen as uplifting the very idea he critiques heavily, because he uses art to spur reform and, in doing so, practically applies spirituality to art. A new generation of journalists had patterned themselves after the earlier realists and used the reformist novel as a springboard for hard-hitting stories that revealed the dirty underside of the dream promised by the old promoters of the Columbian Exhibition and despised by Fuller. Hemingway, already doubting the sincerity of Rev. Barton, would have been attracted to this kind of unsparing realism that reveals corruption in the business world through pithy action and extended conceits. He would have also appreciated that Fuller was attempting to tell the truth about those who still held the highest places in the Chicago business world.

  Edwin Balmer, the other great early influence Hemingway mentions in his letter to Harvey Brett, worked briefly as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune uncovering corruption in the wake of Fuller’s recent literary expose and critique. He began to publish genre fiction coauthored with his fellow Tribune reporter and brother-in-law William MacHarg, including the short story “Man in the Room” (1909) starring the scientific detective Arthur Trant. Hampton’s Magazine took it because its themes of police corruption matched the interests of the magazine known for publishing realistic portraits of the excesses of capitalism. The next year, Balmer and MacHarg would publish what would become their best-known story collection: The Achievements of Arthur Trant (1910). The story collection continues the work begun by Fuller with The Cliff-Dwellers of exposing the truth about the bad business in Chicago. But where Fuller’s work reveals and critiques the terrible business, the Trant stories explain and promote a scientific method for reforming the terrible corruption: the “lie detector.” The stories demonstrate how the “lie detector” could potentially reform Chicago’s corrupt and morally bankrupt police interrogation methods by stopping the violence of the notorious third degree.23 Through the employment of the lie detector, the bad business of extracting confessions could be transformed into a good business that was clean, organized and principled, and the very essence of Taylorian efficiency.

  Trant’s “lie detector” relies on applied psychology and scientific instruments to observe and measure the physical reactions that occur when a person tells the truth or a lie. The character explains that he has been showing daily at a university, “that which—applied in courts and jails—would conclusively prove a man innocent in five minutes, or condemn him as a criminal on the evidence of his own uncontrollable reactions.”24 The lie detector, human or machine, records the actions of the witness, suspect, or victim while they speak. If a small, unconscious physical reaction occurs while the witness speaks, it indicates that what was said may be a lie. The lie detector shifts the focus of the examination room completely; where police had been violently beating the body of the witness to force a confession, now they look for small bodily clues the victim may be lying. What had been a physical focus on the body of a potential liar to beat the lie out of it becomes an intense intellectual focus on the body of the potential liar to spot the unconscious signs of a lie. The lie detector transforms the vulgar physical beatings of a corrupt police force into an intellectually vigorous exercise in modern detection and like all good reform ideas in Chicago, the focus shifts from condemning the sinner to seeing the traces left by the structures of the sin itself.

  The Achievements of Arthur Trant helped popularize Hugo Münsterberg’s groundbreaking theories of applied psychology that had been published in magazines over the last decade. Münsterberg’s On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime (1908) compiled the articles into one volume. The volume emerges from the studies he did at Harvard, where in 1892, William James invited him to be the chair of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, where he remained for over a decade. At the start of his term, Gertrude Stein came to the lab through William James and Münsterberg called her his ideal student.25 Münsterberg’s work is grounded in the premise that all physical bodily processes had parallel brain processes behind them. The study of automatic writing would eventually be developed into On the Witness Stand, where he will argue that “the hidden feeling betrays itself.”26 Physical reactions indicate that the subject tries to hold back something in his mind but cannot. He will argue that because all memories are formed through association, eyewitness testimony is completely unreliable because the witness’ perceptions become clouded through these associations. The Trant stories use Münsterberg’s theories to develop and promote the idea of lie detection by relying on the idea that lies can be ferreted out by watching for the physical reactions that betray them.

  Balmer had long had an interest in applied psychology. His father developed methods of applying psychology to business and after studying with Walter Dill Scott at Northwestern, Balmer collaborated with his father on a book while writing the Trant series, The Science of Advertising: The Force of Advertising as a Business Influence, Its Place in the National Development, and the Public Result of its Practical Operation (1910). In the introduction, he relates a story about observing the purchases of a young housewife and being astounded because everything she bought had been heavily advertised over the last few months. He writes, “I had just been going at it backwards, letting the things bought direct me to the advertisements. She had gone at it and shown a fine, clear characteristic example of advertising in operation—having the advertisements direct her to the article boug
ht and with a wonderful unconsciousness and naturalness upon her part which was astoundingly significant.”27 For Balmer, Münsterberg’s main principle, that hidden associations direct physical actions, can be used as easily in advertising as in lie detection. The book shows how easily good advertising can manipulate a consumer through unconscious associations and in doing so applies William James’s and Münsterberg’s ideas about parallel processes to the business of advertising.

  Balmer’s book itself demonstrates its own methods to sell and promote itself because it takes its style from the business guides, like Arthur Hemingway’s, and so manipulates the reader through their previous associations, into seeing the book as another book about doing “good business.” Its language, the Arthur Trant stories, and Hemingway’s uncle’s book all employ what would have been named as “hard boiled” language in 1910, the year all three books came out. The phrase comes straight out of advertising and indicates a lack of sentiment or emotion, and in the advertising world of the late nineteenth century, the use of facts highlighted a masculine business-like appeal, over a soft and sentimental feminine advertisement. Printers Ink, the first American national trade magazine of the advertising industry, was the first to use the phrase: “Hard-boiled facts—convincing selling arguments, rid of prosaicness—that’s what we put into our ten ads.”28 When Balmer and Arthur Hemingway write in this style, they do so to associate with doing good business. But, by 1914, the phrase had come to be associated with a kind of businessman who cared nothing about doing “good business.” C. N. Williamson’s Shop Girl in Munsey’s Magazine used the phrase “A hard-boiled man of business who’ll do anything to succeed.”29