Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago

3. Progressives and Muckrakers: 1894–1909

61 3 Progressives and Muckrakers 1894–1909 Unlike other large cities, Chicago in the Progressive era never experienced the reforms that consolidated overlapping and wasteful governmental bodies, encouraged government by experts, and diminished the influence of local party politics. —Maureen A. Flanagan, “The Ethnic Entry into Chicago Politics” One reason that the shortfalls of reformers are puzzling is the formidable assets on their side—wealth, prestige, and moral and spiritual zeal. William T. Stead’s If Christ Came to Chicago! exemplified and excited all of these like a symbol of that industrial age, an electric dynamo. Stead spoke of urban reform in ecclesiastical terms, calling for a “City Church.” He had inherited fervor from the traditions of the Great Awakenings and abolition . At the same time, he expressed a new wave of Protestant thought known as the social gospel. Aside from piety, the outstanding feature of Stead’s book is its empiricism . He named names and cited figures. He published a detailed, colorcoded map of the Levee, identified its owners, and furthermore listed the paltry tax assessments on streetcar king Charles Yerkes and other millionaires .1 These revelations were accomplished with a scrutiny of public records in a foretaste of what is known now as investigative reporting. Stead merged piety with the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment in a slippery combination that we still strain to define. Like other visitors, Stead (–) found the city at once fascinating and repellent. “The building of the city, and still more its [post-Fire] 62 Progressives and Muckrakers rebuilding, are one of the romances which light up the somewhat monotonous materialism of Modern America.”2 He could not understand how its Christian builders tolerated so much crime and poverty. Mayor Carter Harrison I, killed by a deranged job seeker as the fair closed, did not live to see the nation enter a four-year depression late in —paradoxically, the same year that the United States became the world’s biggest industrial power. That winter’s depression was so severe in Chicago that poor children, their parents unable to buy coal, sometimes spent all day in bed as their only defense against freezing to death. A typical Irish immigrant who survived infancy had a life expectancy of thirty-seven years. One person in fifteen went beyond elementary school. Just eleven days after his arrival, Stead convened afternoon and evening mass meetings at his own expense in the Central Music Hall (at the site of the present Marshall Field’s department store). He managed to place on stage at the same time capitalists and labor leaders, including even one of the recently pardoned Haymarket defendants. One wishes that modern technology had been available to record Stead’s remarks. The son of a Congregationalist preacher, he had talked with Levee lowlifes that morning until  A.M. and said he found them preferable in some ways to hypocritical churchgoers. He further dismayed his audiences by stating that respectable women, by doing nothing against social evils, were more culpable than Levee whores. We do not know whether cheers or jeers held sway in the resulting audience uproar. If Stead was not inflammatory enough, a socialist speaker urged the use of dynamite if necessary to wreck the established order. Stead promptly reclaimed the stage to denounce this notion. In the end, Stead impaneled a committee of five, including settlementhouse founder Jane Addams and millionaire “dry” crusader Turlington W. Harvey. This group became the nucleus of the Civic Federation. Stead charged it to be as well organized as New York’s Tammany Hall. Although it did not meet that standard, it was a reform group different from the Citizens’ Association. It was morally charged for social justice. Stead completed his -page indictment in February . The cover lithograph showed an angry Jesus driving money changers from the temple with the faces of the money changers clearly recognizable as Yerkes, Bath- Progressives and Muckrakers 63 house John, and others. The book was an instant sensation. Seventy thousand copies sold out in one day. The New York press applauded; Chicago’s tended to label Stead a foreign demagogue. “He has meddled in a gratuitous , offensive, and . . . insulting manner. . . . [H]is methods and intemperate gabble do not commend him to Chicago,” the Tribune harrumphed.3 An unnoticed facet of the book is its enthusiasm for public works. Stead foretold the St. Lawrence Seaway, which he said would make Chicago the world’s premier...