One has but to ask in Chicago whether some particular philanthropic or welfare work has been undertaken to be borne away at once to observe that very thing in successful operation. It is a fair statement that no one need walk the streets of the city hungry. Many doors stand ajar for the despairing. A common indictment of the churches, that they have neglected the practical application of Christianity to humanity’s needs, hardly holds against Chicago’s churches. The Protestant Episcopal Church has long been zealous in philanthropic and welfare work, and Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists are conspicuously active in these fields. The Catholic Church in Chicago extends a helping hand through forty-five alert and well-managed agencies. The total disbursement of the Associated Jewish Charities for the year ending May, 1916, was $593,466, and the Jewish people of Chicago contribute generously to social-welfare efforts outside their fold. The Young Men’s Christian Association conducts a great number of enterprises, including a nineteen-story hotel, built at a cost of $1,350,000, which affords temporary homes to the thousands of young men who every year seek employment in Chicago. This huge structure contains 1,821 well-ventilated rooms that are rented at from thirty to fifty cents a day. The Chicago Association has twenty-nine widely distributed branches, offering recreation, vocational instruction, and spiritual guidance. The Salvation Army addresses itself tirelessly to Chicago’s human problem. Colonel Carbaugh thus summarizes the army’s work for the year ending in September, 1916: “At the various institutions for poor men and women 151,501 beds and meals were worked for; besides which $38,779.98 in cash was paid to the inmates for work done. To persons who were not in a position to work, or whom it was impossible to supply with work, 111,354 beds and meals, 11,330 garments and pairs of shoes, and 123 tons of coal were given without charge.”
The jaunty inquirer for historical evidences—hoary ruins “out of fashion, like a rusty mail in monumental mockery”—is silenced by the multiplicity of sentry-houses that mark the line of social regeneration and security. Chicago is carving her destiny and in no small degree moulding the future of America by these laborious processes brought to bear upon humanity itself. Perhaps the seeker in quest of the spirit of Chicago better serves himself by sitting for an hour in a community centre, in a field-house, in the juvenile court, in one of the hundreds of places where the human problem is met and dealt with hourly than in perusing tables of statistics.
At every turn one is aware that no need, no abuse is neglected, and an immeasurable patience characterizes all this labor. One looks at Chicago’s worst slum with a sense that after all it is not so bad, or that at any rate it is not hopeless. Nothing is hopeless in a city where the highest reach down so constantly to the lowest, where the will to protect, to save, to lift is everywhere so manifest. This will, this determination is well calculated to communicate a certain awe to the investigator: no other expression of the invincible Chicago spirit is so impressive as this.
V
Anno Urbis Conditæ may not be appended to any year in the chronicles of a city that has so repeatedly rebuilt itself and that goes cheerfully on demolishing yesterday’s structures to make way for the nobler achievements of to-morrow. While the immediate effect of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1892-3 was to quicken the civic impulse and arouse Chicago to a sense of her own powers, a lasting and concrete result is found in the ambition inspired by the architectural glories of the fair to invoke the same arts for the city’s permanent beautification. The genius of Mr. Daniel H. Burnham, who waved the magic wand that summoned “pillared arch and sculptured dome” out of flat prairie and established “the White City” to live as a happy memory for many millions in all lands, was enlisted for the greater task. Without the fair as a background the fine talents of Mr. Burnham and his collaborator, Mr. Edward H. Bennett, might never have been exercised upon the city. Chicago thinks in large terms, and being properly pleased with the demonstration of its ability to carry through an undertaking of heroic magnitude it immediately sought other fields to conquer. The fair had hardly closed its doors before Mr. Burnham and Mr. Bennett were engaged by the Commercial Club to prepare comprehensive plans for the perpetuation of something of the charm and beauty of the fairy city as a permanent and predominating feature of Chicago. Clearly what served so well as a temporary matter might fill the needs of all time. The architects boldly attacked the problem of establishing as the outer line, the façade of the city, something distinctive, a combination of landscape and architecture such as no other American city has ever created out of sheer pride, determination, and sound taste. Like the æsthetic problems, the practical difficulties imposed by topography, commercial pre-emptions, and legal embarrassments were intrusted only to competent and sympathetic hands. The whole plan, elaborated in a handsome volume published in 1909, with the effects contemplated happily anticipated in the colored drawings of Mr. Jules Guérin, fixed definitely an ideal and a goal.
This programme was much described and discussed at the time of its inception, and I had ignorantly assumed that it had been neglected in the pressure of matters better calculated to resound in bank clearings, but I had grossly misjudged the firmness of the Chicago fibre. The death of Mr. Burnham left the architectural responsibilities of the work in the very capable hands of Mr. Bennett. The Commercial Club, an organization of highest intelligence and influence, steadfastly supported the plan until it was reinforced by a strong public demand for its fulfilment. The movement has been greatly assisted by Mr. Charles H. Wacker, president of the plan commission and the author of a primer on the subject that is used in the public schools. Mr. Wacker’s vigorous propaganda, through the press and by means of illustrated lectures in school and neighborhood houses, has tended to the democratizing of what might have passed as a fanciful scheme of no interest to the great body of the people.
With singular perversity nature vouchsafed the fewest possible aids to the architect for the embellishment of a city that had grown to prodigious size before it became conscious of its artistic deficiencies. The lake washes a flat beach, unbroken by any islanded bay to rest the eye, and the back door is level with limitless prairie. There is no hill on which to plant an acropolis, and the Chicago River (transformed into a canal by clever engineering) offered little to the landscape-architect at any stage of its history. However, the distribution of parks is excellent, and they are among the handsomest in the world. These, looped together by more than eighty miles of splendid boulevards, afford four thousand acres of open space. The early pre-emption of the lake front by railroad-tracks added to the embarrassments of the artist, but the plan devised by Messrs. Burnham and Bennett conceals them by a broadening of Grant Park that cannot fail to produce an effect of distinction and charm. Chicago has a playful habit of driving the lake back at will, and it is destined to farther recessions. When the prodigious labors involved in the plan are completed the lake may be contemplated across green esplanades, broken by lagoons; peristyles and statuary will be a feature of the transformed landscape. The new Field Museum is architecturally consonant with the general plan; a new art museum and other buildings are promised that will add to the variety and picturesqueness of the whole. With Michigan Avenue widened and brought into harmony with Grant Park, thus extended and beautified and carried across the river northward to a point defined at present by the old water-tower (one of Chicago’s few antiquities), landscape architecture will have set a new mark in America. The congestion of north and south bound traffic on Michigan Avenue will be relieved by a double-decked bridge, making possible the classification of traffic and the exclusion of heavy vehicles from the main thoroughfare. All this is promised very soon, now that necessary legislation and legal decisions are clearing the way. The establishment of a civic centre, with a grouping of public buildings that would make possible further combinations in keeping with those that are to lure the eye at the lakeside is projected, but may be left for another generation to accomplish.
Chicago’s absorption in social service and well-planned devices for taking away the reproach of its ugliness is not at the expense of the grave problems presented by its politics. Here again the inquirer is confronted by a formidable array of citizens, effectively organized, who are bent upon making Chicago a safe place for democracy. That Chicago shall be the best-governed city in America is the aspiration of great numbers of men and women, and one is struck once more not merely by the energy expended in these matters but by the thoroughness and far-sightedness of the efforts for political betterment. Illinois wields so great an influence in national affairs that strictly municipal questions suffer in Chicago as in every other American city where the necessities of partisan politics constantly obscure local issues. The politics of Chicago is bewilderingly complicated by the complexity of its governmental machinery.
It is staggering to find that the city has not one but, in effect, twenty-two distinct governing agencies, all intrusted with the taxing power! These include the city of Chicago, a board of education, a library board, the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, the county government of Cook County, the sanitary district of Chicago, and sixteen separate boards of park commissioners. The interests represented in these organizations are, of course, identical in so far as the taxpaying citizen is concerned. An exhaustive report of the Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency published in January, 1917, reaches the conclusion that “this community is poorly served by its hodgepodge of irresponsible governing agencies, not only independent of one another but often pulling and hauling at cross-purposes. A single governing agency, in which should be centred all the local administrative and legislative functions of the community, but directly responsible to the voters, would be able to render services which existing agencies could not perform nearly so well, if at all, even if directed by officials of exceptional ability. The present system, however, instead of attracting to public employment men of exceptional ability, tends to keep them out, with the result that the places are left at the disposal of partisan-spoils political leaders.”
The waste entailed by this multiplication of agencies and resulting diffusion of power and responsibility is illustrated by the number of occasions on which the citizen is called upon to register and vote. The election expenses of Chicago and Cook County for 1916 were more than two million dollars, an increase of one hundred per cent in four years. This does not, of course, take account of the great sums expended by candidates and party organizations, or the waste caused by the frequent interruptions to normal business. Chicago’s calendar of election events for 1918 includes opportunities for registration in February, March, August, and October; city primaries in February; general primaries in September; a city election in April; and a general election in November.