Ear on Chicago; Emergency Ward: Cook County Hospital

The genius of America is in her business. This is a fairly obvious statement. I've been made often times, but I think it's interesting, in starting a discussion of the Chicago novel, to realize that some of the most important of the Chicago novels deal with businessmen. And among the best of the novels, dealing with businessmen, and among the best of the novels, dealing with Chicago is a novel called The Titan by Theodore Dreiser. And I think it'd be good to start out any series on the Chicago novel with Dreiser's Titan. It may not be the greatest novel in the world, but it's certainly one of the masterpieces of American literature, and we're studying for that reason. Now, Dreiser, who wrote this, was born in this area. Now, Chicago is, of course, an area extending as far as you want to make it. Goes as far as Colorado, goes east. It includes Indiana, Wisconsin, and Chicago land. And therefore, Theodore Dreiser was born in Chicago, area in Chicago land. He was born in Terry Hut,

as the natives call it in Indiana, in Terry Hut. Other poor family, the family that had once had some money, but had gone down in an economic circumstances, so that the Dreiser knew poverty all his life. Or at least his young, cut that one out. His young life. They moved from house to house. And finally, Dreiser himself, at age 15, having had the rudiments of grammar school education, struck out for himself, came to Chicago. He had been preceded in coming to Chicago by two sisters. These two sisters had lived with men and not their husbands. And Dreiser remembered their experiences later years and wrote two novels, two Chicago novels, about them. One of them, Sister Carrie, is a novel of tremendous importance and great attraction. Deals with Chicago, a story of Carrie, who comes here from the country, and is seduced by a traveling salesman.

She lives in Chicago and goes in very successful and goes on to a stage career in New York. The novel offended the publisher's wife, Mrs. Double Day, and she refused to allow her husband to publish it. After the novel had been printed, so that it remained in the warehouse, and was not issued until 11 years later, after the success of Jenny Gerhardt, established Dreiser's reputation. Jenny Gerhardt was the second novel about his sisters, and that is a story of a woman who comes to Chicago and lives as a mistress of a fairly well -educed Chicagoan for many years, and the study of her plight, her problems, and the study of how the city grasps the innocent from the country, is the plot of Jenny Gerhardt. But this Dreiser, came to Chicago at 15, got a job with Addison Hibbert, the hardware merchants, working there as a shipping clerk. Then he found he had some talent in newspaper work and writing. He wanted to write, he was interested in people, one of the most important requisites for

writing, of course. He got a job under the eye of John Maxwell, who was a newspaper man of considerable discernment. Maxwell sent Dreiser out on what he called human interest stories, and surely enough. Dreiser showed a talent not only for finding the stories, but for writing them up. After a time, Dreiser grew restless, and went on to St. Louis, then to Toledo, and finally ended up in the New York where he became an editor of the Delineater magazine, working for Butterwick Corporation, and became quite successful in the field of journalism. His first novel, as I said, was Sister Carrie, which came out in 1900. But it's not until 1911 with the appearance of Jenny Carehart, that he really settled down to writing novels and taught himself as a literary man. We have here a picture of the Dreiser of this time, a heavy man,

a brooding man. All this will come out in the discussion of the Titan here. But this is the way he looked at the time of the novel we are talking about. Dreiser in 1911, having been successful with the Jenny Carehart, decided to do some more novels, especially about Chicago, especially about the businessman. In the course of writing for the Delineater, writing articles, he had done a series on American businessman, including articles on armor and field. And he was fascinated by business. The success of these men were radiated. Their competence in administration and in management. And he said, after he had interviewed Marshall Field, no more significant story, non -more fullest stimulus of encouragement. A brain inspiring and pulse thrilling potency has been told in these columns. Or, again, when he visited the Philadelphia Deamers place, the what he called the snowstorm of

white letters, which fell upon the dark desks. A very, really good pictorial image. Impressed him. The tremendous administrative skill that went into an organization like that. So his admiration for business, he decided to go ahead with the novel. But the businessman he selected was a Chicago businessman who had grown up in Philadelphia. The story of Charles Tyson Yerkees. Now, most of you know Charles Tyson Yerkees as the founder or as the main developer of the Chicago attraction system, or before the fancy name Traction got into the picture of the Chicago Streetcar system. It was Charles Tyson Yerkees baby, a very profitable baby to him, but still it was his doing. And it was the career of Charles Yerkees, a fascinated driver especially. Now, we have here a special problem, I think of considerable interest. The relationship between

American business and our own economy. American business novel dates back to the 1870s. American business in its modern sense dates back to 1865, 1867. After the Civil War, when the United States changed from a great agrarian economy to this intense industrial economy with the great monopolies rising, this is part of a tremendous wrench in our country and in a whole world too. That brought about certain crucial problems, which out of which came the so -called business or economic novel. Mark Twain even wrote one. Some of you have read The Gilded Age, which is a very amusing satire of life in the United States in the 1870s and 80s. And the Robert Herrick wrote a number of them. William Dean Howells wrote some business novels and a number of others who were back at Harding Davis and so on, who

we don't need to consider at this moment. But business had intruded itself upon oligrarian United States and the businessman was indeed a figure to cope with to consider. And since literature is after all a mirror of the human condition and business in America became an important part of America's condition, naturally the reflection was inevitable. A driver then took Yerkees. He came out to Chicago in 1913 to study Yerkees. He talked with people to study Yerkees' life. Yerkees had been dead for seven years then. He talked with people who had known Yerkees. He went to the library and went to newspapers and magazines. He studied how business corporations operate. He gathered a tremendous mass of material and out of this mass of material he shaped. He healed. He hacked his work. The work started out

in a book called The Philanzer. This was the first section of Yerkees' career, or Frank Cooperwood. Now, it's hard to distinguish between Cooperwood and Yerkees. Cooperwood is a fictional character, a driver's fictional character. But he is so close to Charles Yerkees in so many ways that one is tempted half the time to say Yerkees and then the other half the time to say Cooperwood. Not that we must mistake fiction for reality or reality for fiction, but you understand the confusion which sometimes arises. He took the career of Yerkees Cooperwood in Philadelphia in the Philanzer. So that does not involve us with Chicago. But the story is interesting that we have the same kind of pattern in the Philanzer that we get in basically the same pattern we get in the title. In the Philanzer we have the young Yerkees going into business, making a large sum of money, coming into difficulty, into a clash with certain authority. The clash he came into in the Philanzer was

with the business recession which took place after the Chicago Fire of 1871. And with this recession, the... With this recession, Cooperwood or Yerkees, you can see how the confusion is mine. Yerkees found himself caught sharp. The banks called in their loans and since Yerkees had been playing around with Philadelphia City funds, he had to go to the penitentiary and served a sentence there of only six months. He did not feel penitentiary at all, he probably had just been unlucky. And he came out to get back onto the track of making money and gathering power into his hands. And he did this very rapidly. In 1873, there was a considerable recession in America. And Yerkees truly capitalized on this recession. He bought

low and sold high, which is a good way to do it, you know, how to do it, and made over a million dollars. And with this money in his pocket, he looked around for new fields to conquer. He split towards Chicago. Chicago is the wide open opportunity. The Chicago fire, which had raised his whole area here that we have on this map, which is a map of 1893, 20 years after the fire. But this whole area, you all remember, was raised by the fire of 1871, a terrible damage. But out of that fire, grew the modern loop and the modern Chicago. And it was to this Chicago with its possibilities and development of expansion that Yerkees came. So over the opening of the second novel, the Titan, we have Frank Cooperwood, or Yerkees, if you wish. But Frank Cooperwood coming to Chicago to make his further fortune and to conquer the city of Chicago.

And the story of the Titan is the story of his conquest and his final failure in this great city. Now, while I am making circles around this map, one circle I'll make is obviously a loop. And this loop around here, which we all know and are written on many times, is the creation, was the creation of Charles Yerkees. And so appears very important way in the Titan. The whole street car system is part of the story of the Titan and will come to that very shortly. In the opening of the Titan, we have an interesting passage. I think those of you who doesn't remember, the remarkable poem about Chicago by Carl Sandberg, Horg butcher in the world, Handler of the Nations, Braith, not better than these lines, better. And the poem by

Sandberg would celebrate Chicago, which came out in 1914, just about the same time that this book came out. Sandberg's poem, everybody knows. And it is a good summing up all the greatness, the power, the energy of Chicago. This poem curiously echoes a passage out of Dreiser's Titan. Now Sandberg, I'm sure it didn't know Dreiser's Titan, they are completely independent. But the city, what I'm saying is the city, pulled from both two great creative minds, poems in prose or in verse. And I must say I think that Dreiser's verse is just about as poetic as Sandberg's poetry. It's just in slightly different rhythms. But this is of these lines, Cooperwood's reflection, as he's entering the city in the train. The city of Chicago, with whose development, the personality of Frank Algin and Cooperwood, is soon to be definitely linked. To

whom, excuse me, but it's deadly, that opening sentence doesn't have a verb. It's a kind of prose rap city, you see. To whom may the laurels as laureate as this foreign to the west get fall? This singing flame of a city, this all -america, this poet in Chaps and Buckskin, this rude, raw Titan, this burns of a city by a shimmering lake at lay. A king of shreds and patches, a Monterey open with a pepkin and a smile, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with a grip of Caesar in its mind, the dramatic force of Euribides in its soul. A very barred of the city this, singing of high deeds and high hopes, its hellebrogans, very deep in the mire of circumstance, take Athens, old Greece. Italy, do you keep Rome? This was a battle on the trough, the Nino of a younger day. Here came the gaping west in the hopeful east to sea. Here hungry man, raw from the shops and fields, idols and romances in their minds, build them an empire, crying glory in the mud. Now, just like Sanberg, he celebrates mud and glory in the

same passage, in the same line. And he uses all the devices that Sanberg uses. He has an alliteration here in this, and rhythms, this singing flame of a city, this all America, this rude, raw Titan of a city. And reading that passage, some of you may have thought that when I talk about the Titan and Frank Cooperwood in Yerkes, that the title referred to the character. It does, but also refers to the city as this passage shows, this poetic passage. And that is Lee Chicago, which excited driver and the businessman Yerkes is the man who incited driver to write his great novel. This is the second volume of a trilogy and the first volume ran to about 750 pages. This runs to about 600 or 550 pages, or 1 ,300 pages about the Carrera Frank Cooperwood. He did not write the third volume of this trilogy, suppose if you have a trilogy you have to have three.

Third volume came up many years later, and it was called a stoic, and it is much less interesting. Partly because the Carrera of Yerkes, which is of course Cooperwood in the novel, is less interesting. It is a story of defeat and a fast defeat, a physical decline, and early death. But the power and the energy and the force, which give Cooperwood insignificance and his charm, are faded when we come to the third volume of the trilogy. So the very few people ever read the story compared to the many people who read the thinnest there, and the Titan. There is a passage in the opening of the thinnest there, which we need to read. It ought to understand not only the Titan with thinnest there, but drives her himself, and as well as the psychology of his hero

Frank Cooperwood. It is a passage about the young boy going to school every day and passing a fish store, and seeing in a tank in this fish store a lobster and a squid. And it became apparent as he passed from day to day that there was a contest between the lobster and the squid. The lobster was the aggressor, the squid, the defender, and the lobster wanted to eat the squid. But every time it made an advance towards the squid, the squid would spurred out this inky fluid and retreat backwards or retreat and evade the lobster. But this was a rather tiring chase for the squid, and bit by bit the lobster was getting a nip here and a nip there until finally the boy came by one day and a man told him, well, the lobster really caught him this time and ate him up. And this impressed the young boy, the brutality or the animal nature of the whole business, and it made him reflect upon the nature of life, the

nature of nature. That's the way it has to be, I guess, he commented to himself. The squid wasn't quick enough. He didn't have anything to feed on. He made a great impression on him. It answered in a rough way, that riddle which had been annoying him so much in the past, how his life organized. Things lived on each other. That was it. Lobsters lived on squid and other things. What lived on mobsters? Man, of course. Sure, that was it. And what lived on man, he asked himself, was it other men? While animals lived on men, and there were Indians and cannibals, and some men were killed by storms and accidents. He wasn't so sure about men living on men yet, but men didn't kill each other. How about wars and street fives and fights and moves? Sure, men lived on men. And the, so deciding that men lived on men, this is the law of life, he had better adapt himself to the law of life, and he would live on other men. He would

not indulge in the passion or pity. He would be ruthless, and he would make his way regardless of other men. The, so we have the struggle now of drager against the city, the two tightens, the great powerful, ruthless man against the powerful, developing and ruthless, uncaring city. Who wins? The starter goes for him, and the first three quarters of the volume, Cooper with wins. He takes over a number of gas companies in Hyde Park and elsewhere around the city, until he finally gets a stranglehold of a monopoly in the gas companies. Then he moves in on the traction system, and slowly builds up a powerful, a powerful empire in the traction system. It's not merely that he builds this up. He does it by ways which are unscriptuous,

absolutely unscriptuous. He bribed all the, enough aldermen in the city, so that he controlled the city council. And if he wanted something done, all he had to do was to call his henchmen in and say, do this, do that, and they would do it. So Cooper would go on getting more and more power. But while he's getting power, he also gets into trouble by his amorosity. A man of tremendous energy, force, he falls in love frequently. He comes to Chicago with a second wife, having divorced his first wife, as Yorky did, too. It was a very attractive woman, but he goes tired of her in time and has a number of affairs during the course of the book. And these affairs, in these affairs, it grows more and more careless. He has affairs with some of his business associates wives and their daughters. And he does this in a very reckless way, not hiding

his acts. And the result is, these businessmen, not liking it, decide finally to gang up against him. But what is more important, he runs up against Harrison. Harrison, of course, is a famous mayor of Chicago who served four terms. And it was Harrison who finally broke Yorkies and who broke, in other words, Cooper would. This is a picture of Harrison in later years, to be sure. But you can see a very handsome man. Perhaps this picture here is a better one. The picture of 1897, one year before the great fight in the council meeting of December 19, 1898, when the Olimen voted against Cooper Wood against Yorkies. And here is the Harrison who then was then opposing Yorkies. The situation, our Cooper Wood, the situation was this. Cooper Wood wanted

a 50 -year extension of the franchise on his railway properties. And Harrison said, no, because the streets belong to the people. And Cooper Wood could not have them for himself. A short term franchise, yes. But one should not commit a street railroad system to a single man or a single company for that length of time. And Yorkies, crew careless and confidence. Cooper Wood, crew careless and confident that he had the Olimen in his hand. And he even put off, delayed this great meeting, thinking that the election, 11 of the men who were against him, would be defeated. But the result of the election was these 11 men were not only re -elected, but some of his own candidates were defeated. And he was in a very delicate situation. But he still thought he had the power. What happened was that Harrison

got hold of Hinky Dinking McKenna and Beth House John, well famous, of course, in Chicago, political history of the first ward. And he got them on his side. And they, and also another man, and just enough to swing the vote. And at the this meeting, on December 19th, 1898, Yorkies' franchise was turned down, and he was defeated. Now a defeat, which leaves a man immensely wealthy, with a powerful house in Chicago, one in New York, with a great art collection. It's not a defeat, which makes us weak many tears. But it was a defeat for a man whose great ambition was power and more and more power. Furthermore, Cooper Wood had been unable to make his way in Chicago society. And this was his greatest defeat. And it had been partly because of his arm -rest nature, his Cuminia fairs, and his business unscrupulously had offended the business, had brought about his business defeat. Now, this, this, uh, Cooper Wood

is described by... Drizer has an extremely handsome man. And this is, uh, shows how closely Drizer was working with Yorkies. This picture of Yorkies. See, he is a handsome man. The, uh, the stash, which, of course, is the style of the time, the long handlebar mustache. If you shave that off, you can still see he's the very handsome figure of a person. But he was ruthless. He charmed people, but he didn't hesitate to sacrifice until his interest. Here's a picture of him, a good sight to our oven, striding the streets. You can see he's putting up the L there. And, uh, this is the, uh, opposition picture. This is done in the Tribune. Uh, opposition picture of the Great Baron, uh, the Robert Baron, uh, controlling things is on way. And here is an amusing one, I think. Uh, the meeting of the Allaman, the Allaman Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self -evident, that all men have a right to graft. And they are going to go their own way, and they're, because of the defection of three of them,

they, they go to, uh, they vote against him, and Yerkes, the real popular of his country, is defeated. What about this book? Uh, you can see it doesn't have much plot. I mean, the sense that plot is a dramatic opposition of forces. You have the opposition of a businessman against his business competitors, and it finally brings about his house crashing about his own head, because he pushes the, the supports of the house too far, too, too hard. The, you go on from triumph to triumph, triumph, but you have to make each triumph greater in order to have any real climax. The, uh, so the, the plot is centered on the single person. It is a study of the individualists, or the powerful individualists, who rags ruthlessly over everybody. It's a kind of A -hab, or a Camberlain, if you wish. A Renaissance grandeur about this man. He was an art collector, a lover of books, and all that, but still, uh, the, uh, complete individualists. A very favorite

American theme. Drizer writes this story in a style which suits the massive adding up of detail by his great care with the business details. We get a sense of the city, we get a sense of the financial operations, and although a lot of people object to what they call the heavy sentences, the lumbering style, I think it is appropriate to the book. It becomes massive. It's something like the figure of Drizer himself. He is, uh, like an elephant moving, but an elephant moving can be impressive. The, um, also, he uses words which annoy. Words like trig, meaning neat, handsome, tidy. And these can be offensive. But, uh, if you forget, uh, a few things like that, the, uh, book, uh, holds up in general. Now, the business man is celebrated here, better than any other novel, and I think in our literature. Why? Because Drizer took great care to study American business. Furthermore, he, um, became fascinated by the implications of the business situation. A

mere reporter, uh, writing about this will do one thing. Drizer concentrated the implications of his, uh, of American business in the figure of Frank Cooperwood. The result is a portrait, which I think will charm you. Um, if you will stay with it, don't expect something light and easy, like, uh, light as romance, or a historical novel, which you, uh, which are so popular these days. Expect something serious, and but profound. And if you will bear with it for an hour, and get, let yourself be trapped, like the squid getting trapped by the lobster, I think that the results will be profitable to you, and, uh, you will be grateful for having this brought to your attention. Amen.