ORDER OUT OF CHAOS
If the stockyards and teamsters strikes of 1904 and 1905 seemed to signify the outbreak of race war for many white workers, such events had very different implications for the city’s business community. For the city’s longstanding power elites—Field, Armour, and Pullman, among others—these explosions of labor violence represented another peak moment in a longer pattern of class warfare that had witnessed epic confrontations between disgruntled workers and the forces of order in the middle years of every decade since the 1870s, when, during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Mayor Monroe Heath rounded up some five thousand vigilantes to take on striking railroad workers. While this more recent wave of strikes did not involve the intervention of federal troops, as had been the case in the Great Railroad Strike, the Haymarket affair of 1886, and the Pullman Strike of 1894, the seriousness of the situation was lost on few within Chicago’s rather tight circle of business elites. A range of business interests—meatpackers, retailers, and the press—conspired to ignite the flames of race hatred in 1904 and 1905. The response to the teamsters strike, in particular, revealed the existence of a tight alliance of businessmen—brought together under the auspices of the Employers Association of Chicago—sworn to the task of defeating the unions and making Chicago an “open shop” town. Although the Employers Association had been led by retailing executives John G. Shedd and Robert J. Thorne during the teamsters strike, it had formed three years earlier with financing from a number of prominent bankers to take on strikers seeking to unionize manufacturing workers at Western Electric.22 In managing the battle over public opinion, the Employers Association also clearly had the moral support of some key dailies. But the collusion of the press involved more than this. It is doubtful that the race-baiting tactics of the Employers Association would have met with the same success without the toxic press coverage provided by the supposedly progressive Chicago Tribune and the more avowedly reactionary Chicago Daily News, which painted unionists as hell-bent on destruction and black strikebreakers as moral degenerates.
Indeed, African Americans were not the only ones to suffer from the fallout of these events, and while broader currents were carrying along discourses linking the nation’s decline to the racial others crowding out the “native Anglo-Saxon race,” diatribes against immigrants seemed particularly virulent and somewhat more visible after the strikes. The city’s homicide epidemic merged seamlessly with the vicious labor violence of previous years, shaping perceptions that immigrants were prone to such behavior. By 1907, this premise was guiding the work of the United States Immigration Commission (also known as the Dillingham Commission), which, after analyzing Chicago arrest records between 1905 and 1908, concluded in its 1911 report that southern and eastern Europeans committed more murders than “the peoples of northern and western Europe and the peoples of North America, with the exception of the American negroes.”23 In Chicago, however, this had been a foregone conclusion for years. Discussing the city’s crime problem in the pages of the Chicago Record-Herald in July 1906, for example, police chief John Collins went so far as to refer to the city as a “dumping ground for the different nations of Europe” and a “rallying point for the scum of the earth.”24
And yet, as the work of Jane Addams and Anita McCormick Blaine on Chicago’s tenements revealed, some of the more enlightened middle-class Chicagoans did not put much stock into such ideas. In fact, the city’s business elite was, politically speaking, a somewhat varied crowd, and even within individual families one could find opposing positions on the pressing issues of the day. As historian Maureen Flanagan has argued, middle-class men and women, in particular, tended to have markedly divergent perspectives on the city and its problems during this era.25 But significant differences of opinion existed among men as well. A good many prominent Chicago men would answer the call of Jane Addams during the 1912 presidential election to break with old school Republicans and support the Progressive Party candidate, Theodore Roosevelt. Chicago Tribune vice president Joseph Medill McCormick, for example, signed on as vice chairman for the Progressive Party’s national campaign committee. McCormick’s progressive leanings, however, did not necessarily involve a warm embrace—at least when Chicago was involved—of the kind of lofty pro-labor principles espoused by the Progressive Party platform. Although the Tribune’s coverage of labor affairs had come a long way from the Haymarket era, when, under Joseph Medill’s direction, the paper once referred to strikers as “the scum and filth of the city,” the Tribune’s sensationalist, race-baiting reportage of the stockyards and teamsters strikes under Medill McCormick hardly displayed an unmitigated commitment to the working man.
Medill McCormick, it should not be forgotten, circulated within a milieu in which rabid antiunionism lingered in the air with the thick smoke of fine cigars. He was a loyal member of Chicago’s most elite fraternity of business leaders, the Commercial Club of Chicago, which met each month in the glitzy dining hall of the Auditorium Hotel over an extravagant four-course dinner, concocted with the finest ingredients from overseas, to discuss the business of the city and to hear talks by illustrious guest speakers. The Commercial Club received presidents, senators, congressmen, and cabinet members, as well as the city’s most influential reformers and civic leaders, and meetings were not to be missed. This exclusive club gathered among its members a good many of those leading the charge against the labor movement in the early 1900s: retailing executives like Shedd, Thorne, and John W. Scott of Carson Pirie Scott; wholesalers like John V. Farwell Jr. of Farwell & Company and Frank H. Armstrong of Reid, Murdoch & Company; captains of meatpacking like J. Ogden Armour and his right-hand man, Arthur Meeker; and leading newspapermen like Medill McCormick and Victor Lawson of the Chicago Daily News. To be admitted into the this elite fold, one of its founding members wrote, “a man must have shown conspicuous success in his private business, with a broad and comprehending sympathy with important affairs of city and state, and a generous subordinating of self in the interests of the community.”26 Such sympathy and generosity extended to the helpless and infirm—Farwell, for example, was a big benefactor of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and its orphan asylum—but stopped well short of able-bodied workers fighting for better living and working conditions. In fact, a great many of the philanthropic activities pursued by the Commercial Club’s members figured somehow into the labor question. The YMCA’s project of evangelizing working-class young men and offering them healthy recreational alternatives to keep them out of the saloons made it one of the Commercial Club’s charities of choice. The great antilabor warriors of the late nineteenth century (all Commercial Club members)—Philip Armour, Cyrus McCormick, and George Pullman—were all generous benefactors of this organization.
Commercial Club members were also quite active as patrons and sponsors of the city’s cultural institutions, with twelve serving on the board of the Art Institute of Chicago and eight on the board of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by 1907. Yet the involvement of the captains of industry and finance in such endeavors was about more than obtaining marks of prestige and refinement. Between the 1890s and 1910s, both of these institutions, in line with the spirit of Hull House, were engaged in missions to uplift the laboring classes by bringing them into contact with the fine arts. Beginning in 1909, the Art Institute sponsored exhibitions of its works in public park field houses and other neighborhood settings, and in 1914 it worked with the Chicago Board of Education to bring exhibitions into some of the city’s public schools. For its part, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra partnered with the Civic Music Association, an organization launched by the progressive-minded Chicago Women’s Club, to fill the city’s parks and neighborhoods with the refined sounds of classical music. Although banker, Art Institute president, and Commercial Club member Charles Hutchinson spearheaded these activities, they also reflected the fact that the spirit of progressivism embraced by Jane Addams had taken hold among a significant number of the city’s power elites—more so, a
ccording to historian Paul DiMaggio, than in other major U.S. cities.27 Within the context of the Commercial Club, this spirit translated into a marked open-mindedness in terms of the speakers chosen to enlighten its members. Jane Addams and pioneering black writer Alain Locke, for example, were among those invited to address the club during these years. Although Hutchinson may not have seen eye to eye with the hardcore antiunionists in the Commercial Club on some issues, he was largely after the same thing: a resolution of the class war that appeared to be threatening Chicago’s place on the national and world stages. The Commercial Club discussed the labor question at a number of its banquets in the early 1900s. The very building in which it often met, the Auditorium Hotel, with its grandiose Auditorium Theater, was a monument to the mission of disarming the laboring classes. Conceived amidst the labor upheavals of the 1880s on a scale that would facilitate the sale of low-priced seats, the entrepreneur behind the Auditorium Theater’s construction, Ferdinand Peck, once claimed that “magnificent music, at prices within the reach of all, would have a tendency to diminish crime and Socialism in our city by educating the masses to higher things.”28 Not surprisingly, Marshall Field and George Pullman were among the project’s biggest investors.
However, amidst the troubling violence of the stockyards and teamsters strikes, it is likely that many of Chicago’s civic and business leaders felt that more dramatic measures were necessary to bring order to the chaos—social and infrastructural—that seemed to be dragging the city down. Such feelings gained increasing expression, in particular, among the members of the Commercial Club and the Chicago Merchants Club, another exclusive organization of leading businessmen that distinguished itself from its homologue by restricting its membership to men under the age of forty-five. In 1907, the two organizations merged, taking the name of the older, more prestigious Commercial Club, in order to more effectively support the grand plan that was to save the city from the chaos enveloping it. The Commercial Club quickly raised the funds required to draft the plan, and the expertise behind it was provided by one of its own members: Chicago’s star architect Daniel Burnham. The result of this private initiative, the Plan of Chicago, was released on July 4, 1909, amidst an aggressive public relations campaign that sought to make the ideas behind the plan building blocks of common sense. By January 1910 the Chicago Plan Commission, the body responsible for drafting and promoting the plan, had raised money for an abridged edition to be assigned to eighth graders as a part of their civics curriculum, the idea being that these adolescents would then educate their parents about the plan’s merits. The Plan of Chicago would need to be sold to the public, the commission realized, if it stood any chance of being implemented.29
Using the city of Paris as its main source of inspiration, the plan called for a number of projects that would “bring order out of the chaos incident to rapid growth” and turn the city into “an efficient instrument for providing all its people with the best possible conditions of living”: a green, uncluttered lakefront area that would facilitate views of the lake to inspire “calm thoughts and feelings”; a scheme for a metropolitan highway system; the consolidation of the intercity railroad passenger terminals into new centralized complexes around the Loop; the incorporation of forest areas around the city into a vast park system; the widening of existing thoroughfares into Parisian-style boulevards and the addition of new diagonal streets to improve the circulation of traffic around the city; and the construction of a massive neoclassical civic center downtown that would serve as a source of pride and unity for all.30 Of course an unabashed commercial logic tied together all of these schemes. The goal of the whole project was to ensure the future “prosperity” of the city, a notion linked, in the final analysis, to the accumulation of wealth more than anything else, as the plan explained:
In creating the ideal arrangement, everyone who lives here is better accommodated in his business and his social activities. In bringing about better freight and passenger facilities, every merchant and manufacturer is helped. In establishing a complete park and parkway system, the life of the wage-earner and of his family is made healthier and pleasanter; while the greater attractiveness thus produced keeps at home the people of means and taste, and acts as a magnet to draw those who seek to live amid pleasing surroundings. The very beauty that attracts him who has money makes pleasant the life of those among whom he lives, while anchoring him and his wealth to the city. The prosperity aimed at is for all Chicago.31
Clearly the objective of attracting, retaining, and generating capital lay at the center of the plan’s moral universe. Tellingly, average citizens here were conceptualized only as wage-earners, and there was little doubt that their health and well-being mattered only in so much as they made them better workers. In this the plan reflected the ethos of the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s and 1900s, of which Burnham was a central figure. Beautification, proponents of this movement believed, would lead to a higher quality of life for the populace, which in turn would bring about social harmony, thereby ensuring optimal conditions for labor productivity. While the labor conflicts of previous years were referred to only obliquely as “frequent outbreaks against law and order,” the plan, in the environmentalist spirit of reformers like Jane Addams, attributed such problems to the “narrow and pleasureless lives” led by the city’s laborers.32 The solution then was to create a city that would function on a grand scale in the same way as the fine arts and recreational initiatives behind which many in the Commercial Club were then throwing their support.
Reflecting on the plan today, it is tempting to interpret its vision of the city as “an efficient instrument” for the accumulation of wealth, its displacement of any sense of social justice by values of business efficiency, and its authorship by a group of businessmen representing an organization called the “Commercial Club” as symptoms of the kind of neoliberal mind-set that would increasingly shape Chicago’s political culture during the postwar decades. And yet if the plan represented a seminal moment in a longer process of neoliberalization that would advance incrementally throughout the twentieth century, it also revealed how much resistance that process ran up against during this era. Moreover, as much as Burnham and his peers viewed business as occupying the driver’s seat, they also invested in the idea of a protective and interventionist state using its power to improve the general welfare of city residents (rather than a truly neoliberal one whose only vocation was to unleash free market dynamics). “It is no attack on private property,” the plan asserted, “to argue that society has the inherent right to protect itself against abuses.”33 Furthermore, strikingly expansive notions of “the people” and “the public interest” were seemingly everywhere to be found—a far cry from the privatized, individualized neoliberal mind-set of the late twentieth century. In perhaps its most definitive passage, for example, the plan characterized the very “spirit of Chicago” as “the constant, steady determination to bring about the very best conditions of city life for all the people, with full knowledge that what we as a people decide to do in the public interest we can and surely will bring to pass.”34 Such democratic ideals extended to some of the city’s most valuable resources, such as the lakefront, which the plan affirmed in no uncertain terms “belong[ed] to the people.” “Not a foot of its shores,” it unambiguously specified, “should be appropriated by individuals to the exclusion of the people.”35 Finally, the great amount of energy and resources the Commercial Club brought to promoting the plan also suggested how far away the city was from where it would be by the late 1950s, when the major planning decisions shaping its future were moving further and further out of the public eye. The city’s business interests would perhaps never again speak in such a unified voice about its planning priorities, and nevertheless the plan’s implementation was far from a fait accompli.
Of course the plan faced other challenges beyond public acceptance. For one thing, raising the funds required by these massive infrastructural projects was going to be difficult b
ecause of state-level constitutional limitations on the city’s home rule powers. In other words, Chicago would require authorization from the Illinois state legislature to borrow money or to initiate new tax policies. For another, although the Municipal Voters League had begun to take on the corrupt practices of the Gray Wolves on the city council, it was unable to remove them from office. Preventing the plan’s infrastructural projects from becoming boondoggles was thus not going to be easy. Daniel Burnham and the rest of the Chicago Plan Commission had so little faith in the public authorities that they were ready to raise the necessary funds themselves in order to force the city to carry out the plan’s projects. In fact, considering that the Plan of Chicago devoted an entire chapter to implementation, it is quite reasonable to conclude that practical considerations as well were behind its heartfelt embrace of the people. The people offered valuable leverage in the struggle to force the hand of the public authorities. And the Chicago Plan Commission continued to insist on the active participation of the people into the 1920s, when under the chairmanship of businessman and leading Commercial Club member Charles Wacker, it issued a pamphlet entitled An S-O-S to the Public Spirited Citizens of Chicago.
Chicago on the Make Page 5