The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10

by William Cowper Brann

There is a merchant prince in Chicago whose private life contains a scandal that is absolutely unprintable. He is looked up to by men and admired by women. His name is often upon the lips of the good, although I cannot learn that he gives freely to charity, or to the city's advancement. He is held up as a model for young men struggling in the race of life. He is pointed out to girls as an epitome of brainy American manhood. It cost him $500,000 to hush up this scandal, or rather to keep it out of print. It is known to thousands of course, because a matter of this kind can no more be stilled than the winds and the waves can be stilled. But the dollars did the work they were designed to do. Not a paper of the newspaper trust contained a line in reference to it. The man advertises, you see.

There is another man high in Chicago financial circles. Men tip their hats to him on the streets. His name appears on the prospectuses and in the lists of directors in many powerful institutions. He is a prominent figure at many social functions. His hair is white with age, but he still has a lust for tender maidenhood. This man has served a term in the penitentiary for stealing from his government. As a result of that theft he has many dollars.

When a man hears of Chicago he is pretty apt to hear of Yerkes. Yerkes owns all of the north side street railways and is a dictator in a dozen enormous enterprises. It is the fashion to regard Yerkes as an octopus who has Chicago grasped in his strangling arms. It is the custom to hurl abuse at Yerkes and hold Yerkes responsible for all the many ills of the city. In the popular mind Yerkes is the Chicago exemplar of the grasping, soulless, blood-sucking monopolist. This is because the newspaper trust does not like Yerkes. He began fighting it a long time ago, holding war to be cheaper than tribute. Up to date Yerkes has a long way the best of the contest. He has a thick skin. Abuse glides off him like water off an oiled board. Yerkes, too, is a jail bird. He has served, it is said, a term in a Pennsylvania penitentiary. Yerkes went to the penitentiary, it is further said, because he would not betray his fellow robbers. He took his punishment, but he kept his mouth shut. In other words, he "did not peach on his pals." It will be seen that there is a good deal of a man in Yerkes—much more, in fact than is to be found in any one of his newspaper publishing traducers; but even his fondest intimates have never denied that he is a rascal.

There are women high in the society of Chicago who know more about the services of unscrupulous midwives than they would care to tell. There are girls still wearing their maiden names whose white arms and throats flash with the ransoms of princes who will feel no blush stealing over neck, cheek and chin when they lie waiting in the bridal bed. Three are mothers of children—many of them—who have "graduated" from Dwight and whose breaths still reek with the fumes of whiskey. There are wives whose annual flitting to the summer resorts means six weeks of unrestrained lechery. Meanwhile the old man, who is left in the city to wrestle for some more of the dollars, is not overlooking any bets. It is possible that he knows his wife is unchaste. Certainly he makes no pretensions to chastity himself.

Things have reached this pass in "the representative American city": A youth born, reared and educated there believes that it is his mission and his duty to get dollars and has no other idea. A girl born and reared there thinks it her mission and her duty to marry dollars. If her parents are poor, if she is compelled to "work out" as stenographer, typewriter, shop-lady, or whatnot, and if she keeps her virtue, she is a phenomenon. The vaudeville stage is recruited from her ranks. The bawdy houses are recruited from her ranks. The fetid river's yearly burden of corpses is recruited from her ranks.

What is to become of it? What is the natural fruit of such a tree? What is the legitimate of a million and a half of such humanity cooped into one space and boiling and seething with ten million different aims and passions? What part in the drama of the future is to be played by the 300,000 non-English speaking residents, many of whom are voters? Men say that the signs of the times point to revolution. Men behind the scenes say that this country was dangerously near it in 1896. It needs no prophet to foresee trouble when the rich are becoming richer, through scoundrelism, and the poor are becoming poorer, through drunkenness, idleness, dirt and all viciousness. Of that revolution when it comes Chicago will be the fountain and the center. I dare to say that if there are 5,000 open anarchists in Chicago to-day there are 50,000 anarchists unconfessed. The trouble is that their indictment against the wealthy ruling classes contain true counts. They are not worth the powder and lead necessary to their execution, but are those who sit in the high places any better?

Preachers on fat salaries may preach in rich churches, scrolled and cavern and mullion-windowed, then form laisons with choir-singers; hired writers may write of the goodness of the times, then pose in beer-joints and denounce God and the universe. Christian Endeavorers and all the other bands of inane asses may shout their mawkish hymns, but facts are facts. The city of the dollar is in a bad way, and it is the "representative American city."

More men to tell the truth are needed. More men willing to lead clean lives. One object lesson is worth a hundred told from books. More women are wanted who will hold their virtue as God-given and a priceless gem. Such men and such women would be laughed at for a while as oddities in Chicago, but even the modern Gomorrah would be affected by them in time. Missionary boards are spending thousands every year in endeavors to induce highly moral Chinamen to become immoral Christians; but right before their eyes in the county of Cook, state of Illinois, is a more fruitful field than they have ever plowed, a field that is lying fallow, although there are ministers enough camped on it, God knows. It is the fashion of the snug missionary board, however, to see only those things which are far off. It has been so since missionary boards first tortured savages whose chief offense was that they worshipped God in their own way, and it will continue to be so until the last missionary has taken up his last collection and laid in his winter's coal therewith. The ICONOCLAST has done its level best to snatch the Chicago brand from the burning and now and then some Chicago man walks straight for a little way under the influence of its teaching, but one journal cannot do the work of a hundred, nor is the whole of heathendom to be saved by one preacher. Until the great sweeping time comes around and Chicago is purified in the most cleansing of all liquids, though each quart of it means a human life, the money changers will sit in the temple and the bawds and lovers of bawds drink in the sanctuary.

. . .

Not long ago Chicago had a celebration. It placed a statue to "Black Jack Logan" on the lake front. This statue, which is by St. Gaudens, represents a large-moustached man on a slimly-built horse that has his right hoof elevated to his ear, apparently endeavoring to paw a fly therefrom. Of course, it is understood that any natural horse which stood in that way, would fall down and skin his pasterns and hocks and stifles and barrel and withers and other parts of him known to the veterinarians. I am no horse doctor.