Impressions From Chicago Faces

WERE we an imaginative people, or were this an age free to indulge its fancy in symbolism, we no doubt should possess the beginnings of a mythology of Chicago. Though little more than two generations of its municipal life have passed, this city, from its quick vicissitudes, presents the perspective of antiquity. True, the masses of Chicago care nothing for its history. Yet if they were not such harrowed devotees to the ritual of commercialism they might pause to marvel at the unique record which this city has made in the annihilation of the customary duration between the birth and maturity of ordinary municipalities. Leisure to reflect would lend an astonishing dignity in the eyes of its inhabitants to the fact that its present pride of towering granite and brick is as distant from its humility of mud and marshes in the thirties as is the London of to-day from the city of the Trinobantes in the time of Cæsar. Its annals abound in the germs of fable and allegory. White men toiling over leagues of prairies or breasting the waves of three inland seas, to settle in a swamp by the side of red aborigines; the felling of the fragrant pines of the northern forests to rear the city; the first railroads bringing hosts to aid in the conquering of the wilderness; the exuberant growth of a vast commerce; the radiation from this city of steel highways to every point of a mighty empire; its function of feeding the world with the cattle, sheep, hogs, and grain from the greatest pastures and gardens of the earth; the stately dignity in which the city rose from the quagmire; the fire which wiped it from the earth, and left it a melancholy name; its phœnix-like rebirth and almost instantaneous development to a mightier state than before; its creation of lofty, steel-ribbed temples of trade; its welcome to the hundreds of thousands of liberty lovers from the oppressed lands of the Old World; its transformation of them into American citizens; its marvelous epitome of the progress of humanity in its great exposition, — these are themes as fruitful of personifications by the high priests of poesy as were the vague social movements interpreted to us in such characters as Æneas, Evander, Hercules, Theseus, and Romulus.

But Chicago is so preëminently a type of the commercialism of the age, so feverishly hostile to the fanciful, that none of its chroniclers have successfully departed from that style adopted by statistical historians of its Board of Trade, its First National Bank, its Union Stock Yards. It has always been a city of opportunity. Formerly this was not merely the opportunity of making a steady livelihood, but it was the possibility of a quick fortune characteristic of all the boundless realm of our Western states. Men were spurred on by such chance to a restless search for new fields for development, new avenues for gain, and there was scarcely more repose and content in Chicago in 1870 than there was in San Francisco in 1850. Now, though the opportunities of this city have changed, as they have throughout the whole trans-Mississippi region, from individual to corporate and capitalistic chances, the same eagerness for money-making, as a heritage, extinguishes all sentimental fondness for tales of its origin, and drives the community exclusively in channels of facts and figures.

Indeed, tradition seems to count for less and less with its inhabitants as the years go by. A generation ago its pregnant history inspired a hundredfold more self-glorification among its citizens than the story of achievement does now. This has become an old byword. Probably the change in the character of Chicagoans in that time, from natives to aliens, has counted strongly in this apparent lapse of civic patriotism, but as adequate an explanation is that its people now struggle wearily for a supremacy in money-making which formerly they maintained with ease and pride. Business worry, keenest competition, meagre returns for effort expended, instead of encouraging jubilant retrospection, keep the anxious thoughts of merchants on the future.

Yet, in spite of the nerve tension their surroundings create, Chicagoans possess a distinctive freedom in not being trammeled by a conformity to the imperious domination of the bygone. In talking with inhabitants of historic Massachusetts towns, such as Plymouth, Concord, Salem, and Gloucester, the writer has detected a note of impatience in their replies to words of appreciation of the significance of the past of those interesting spots; they seemed to feel those memories as a burden, and gladly turned conversation from them to the output of cordage factories, the number of new houses built, the prospect of increased shipping, or the present market for fish. The people of the Western metropolis enjoy the present opportunity of notable achievement which has passed away from the historic hamlets of the East. That opportunity has not the distinction of the birth throes of a mighty nation, nor the first call to arms in an epochmaking war, nor the conservation of the choicest in a country’s literature, nor the sending of pioneer fleets to unknown lands, but it is consonant with our present life. Its mission is to be the central forum for the strife between capital and labor, to be a chief arbiter of the issues of the competitive system, to overcome old prejudices against certain broad socialistic doctrines, and, in the solution of industrial problems, to refine, as in a crucible, the drudges and serfs of Europe, the “emptiness of ages” in their visages, into the similitude of intellectual and physical freemen.

Perhaps it is because its life is entirely in the present, and its activity bent toward the clearing from the future of the ugly difficulties of to-day, that Chicago is spoken of as a typical American city. Certain it is that it does not deserve that title because it possesses a predominant American population. Unquestionable American countenances are comparatively rare on the streets in the heart of the city, where are daily assembled a proportionate representation of Chicago’s entire population. But this metropolis is performing the characteristic American labor of assimilating all nationalities, of doing something toward making the world American. It is the great social alembic of this republic, the grand consolidator of diversity into unity. To what may be generously called the refined and semi-refined product of this distillation, the city holds alluring prizes of American citizenship. All municipal and county offices, save possibly the mayoralty and the judgeships, are easily accessible to, one might almost say exclusively reserved for, the quickly stimulated political ambition of the first or second generation of aliens who are eager to turn their suffrage into material gain.

These positions of honor and emolument are not free-will offerings of friendly welcome, but are the fruits of coercion by dictating nationalities in the muddy arena of local statecraft. Germany, Ireland, Bohemia, Sweden, Italy, — these exotic units, learning the power of compromise and combination with outer forces, here in Chicago project themselves with telling effect into our political life. Doubtless this is a more or less transient phenomenon, for immigration laws in the future must exclude like inferior classes, and descendants of these cohesive countrymen will in time be scattered and absorbed in broader social bounds. But at present this process is probably the most concrete example extant of the unimpeded development of the alien under our government. A unique dignity attaches to this distinction of being a centre toward which the great anabasis of nations, the migratory flight of discontented populations, the unparalleled hejira of fortune seekers and liberty worshipers, has flowed.

Probably in no city in the country do the masses show by their countenances fewer traces of Anglo-Saxon blood than they do in Chicago. On the thoroughfares, in the street cars, in the parks, in the public libraries, in the City Hall, in the Court House, in railway stations, on excursion boats, there is the unmistakable, universal foreign cast of physiognomy. These are not so conspicuously the raw countenances of new arrivals, but they are those variously modified by a longer or shorter identification with our social customs. Only the faces tell the general truth, for, of course, here, as everywhere else in this country where these exiles have settled, all national distinction of dress, all individuality and picturesqueness of costume, is obliterated in a dull and cheap conformity to American standards. Yet in this multitude the observer sees the wonder of the evolution of minds and souls in all stages, from the vacuity of animalism to maturity of the higher faculties. Chicago’s great mission of uplifting the lower strata of races is broadly evident in the faces of its masses. Of course, only by viewing the multitude as a whole is the effect recognizable. The observer can know nothing of individuals, but looking into the countenances of hundreds of Teutons, Jews, Celts, Scandinavians, and Slavs, the prevailing types seen daily on the streets, he sees the American quality, in varying degrees, creeping in to supplant some of the more marked native lineaments. A distinguishable homogeneousness is working out of the heterogeneous human compound. Even two or three years as janitor, teamster, gardener, junk dealer, or hod-carrier in a large American city have an effect in moulding away the original inertness and depression from the features of an alien. Though units of the throng may owe their advancement to other influences, the throng itself is a true criterion of the power of Chicago in modifying diverse peoples toward one standard. Not that even the grandchildren of Irish, German, or Bohemian immigrants are rid of the facial stamp of their progenitors; but easier environments, broader companionship, and the public school have placed on them the indelible superscription of America. Time and again one sees here beauty and intelligence in the countenances of the sons and daughters of apparently the dullest pack brutes of humanity.

Yet the influence of Chicago on its people, foreign and native alike, is in a sense perhaps more depressing than that of any other community in the United States. In degrees the same results are seen in all our large cities, but here the effect is well-nigh universal. Materialism, drudgery, and worry are written on the faces of the crowd. Unrelieved toil, weariness in money-seeking, rivalry in display, artificial, soulless flat life, the monotonous surroundings of numberless miles of commonplace, indistinguishable brick and stone dwellings, seem to have their effect in denying lightness, happiness, and peace of soul to the municipality. Back of these, industrialism — rampant, triumphant, unlovely, universally oppressive — is the primal cause. Young men, college graduates, in professions and business, to whom life should present a spiritually inspiring aspect, are surely overcome by the dragon of moneygetting, and fall into its procession of careworn captives. Since the enterprise of trade gave Chicago birth, no power has prevailed against the consuming ambition for gain implanted in the bosoms of its citizens, which is the only reason for their domicile here, — the only reason, indeed, for the existence of the city.

From the general apotheosis of materialism, which is declared to be a characteristic of the republic in general, there are of course select dissenters in this city, who seek to allay the ravages of the organic ailment by such antidotes as libraries, orchestral music, art exhibitions, university influences, and social settlements. Chicago, however, is fundamentally true to the principles of its origin. Its typhoid business temperature, its worship of the dollar, are not perceptibly mitigated by a contemplation of the highest things in life, nor even the beautiful objects of sense. Its buildings reflect the mentality of the people, being purely utilitarian, imitative in design, dull brown, dull gray, and dull red in color, to match the sooty air. Its famous sky-scrapers, quickly growing, vast and box-like, in scarcely a single instance are distinguished for architectural grace or adornment. All these structures epitomize the population, great and strong, but only emerging from the crudity of haste and necessity. Yet the perceptible evolution of the Chicago masses is always suggestive of that piece of statuary by Barnard, inspired by Hugo’s words: “I feel two Natures struggling within me,” in which the uprising, intellectual man is leaving his prostrate, brutish self. But in this community one feels that on the animal side, aiding it against the aspiring spirit, is the thralldom of unceasing toil. Few of its inhabitants are more than one degree removed from lifelong, soul-deadening strain and effort after a livelihood. Overwhelming numbers are fast in these bonds to-day, but happily they are not resigned to their state. Everywhere the observer gets the idea that the local body politic is looking and growing upward. Those animal likenesses which Emerson saw reflected in human features are here preëminent to the imaginative eye, but the totality of faces shows that they are becoming overcast and rendered normally obscure by soul germinations and florifications.

We are not speaking of the lessons to be drawn from the activities of Chicagoans, but of deductions springing from a cursory view of the expression of the crowd. Though coarse lineaments, or a nervous tenseness of eye and mouth, which are the heritage of work and worry, appear on ninety-nine in a hundred faces, there is also there, in a large proportion of them, clear as a written page, the capacity for boundless absorption of ennobling ideals. In studying the physiognomies on the streets the thought recurs again and again that here is a midway poise in social evolution, a multitude of tremendous potentiality for a higher life, which cannot receive the inspiration according to its ability because there is no great force to overthrow the absolutism of the material. In the faces of many laborers are suggestions of the highest traits shown in the features of illustrious jurists, philanthropists, philosophers, and educators. But with these appear the cunning engendered by getting a dollar by hook or crook, the resignation to poverty, the hereditary subservience to wealth, the indulgence in the coarse pleasures which are the only recreation of this class of men.

In this panorama of character growth Chicago differs from other large municipalities of this country in the fact that the developing peoples are here in larger proportion than elsewhere. Unlike the general aspect of the throngs in the largest cities of the East, those of Chicago show small admixture of the educated, refined native element. Nowadays a stranger on the street does not pass the type of man which fits his ideal of the originators of the city’s greatness. Only in a few localities of its business district are American faces so numerous in the streets as to be continuously evident. Four blocks on the east side of State Street adjacent to the great retail emporiums of the higher grade, four blocks in Wabash Avenue where are art, music, and book stores, and three blocks in Michigan Avenue from the Art Institute southward, are the channels where, like those immemorial, stationary hillocks of water in the whirlpool rapids of Niagara, Americans are prominently and perpetually thrown out of the seething currents of aliens which flood the other highways. But in spite of the fact that in the native minority most clearly is moulded the outward token of intellectuality, it, as well as the foreign majority, is conspicuously in a state of flux. Though highest in the mental plane, it bears the characteristic Chicago stamp, — the business countenance, clear, alert, but hardly indicating anything beyond a contemplation of profits, markets, and securities. One thinks how resourceful, how unrivaled such men are in a business setting, with a fitness for their environment like that of a cow puncher for his on the great plains; yet this hypercritical reflection intrudes, — how utterly they in their self-satisfaction would suffer intellectual abasement in the air of Oxford, Baireuth, or Florence.

Men might be expected to display this badge of their servitude, but the women, who, by the way, outnumber the sterner sex on the portions of the thoroughfares mentioned, portray in their faces suggestions of similar qualities. A summary of blurred, routine panoramas of passing femininity, extending through years, would emphasize, as traits of American women of Chicago, calculation, independence, shrewdness, experience of the world, love of the insignia of affluence. Certainly women of wealth, as well as the hosts of salesladies and female clerks and stenographers, are often imprinted with these designating marks, or at least disclose in their features or expressions clues to a paternity of tradesmen whose intellectual range has been limited to trade.

It is hard to write of one’s impression of the mental unfolding of a multitude whose composite expression is of the earth earthy. Alike behind the knit brows, arithmetical eye, material nose, close, thin lips, and practical chin of the higher order of Chicagoans and the animalized features of the lowest class, there is a sure though changeable sign that these folk are living up to the best of their opportunities. The correctness of this facial interpretation is borne out by the eager patronage of all elevating agencies by the varied elements of the fermenting mass: the arts of social settlements by localized aliens; the public libraries by the thousands of poor and moderately well-to-do workers; and the exhibits of paintings at the Art Institute, and the numerous concerts, by every type of men. It is a fancy, of course, but a fancy which leaves a conviction, that in the masses, as noted before, one constantly catches comparisons between the commonplace individual and characters of high renown. Suggestions come from the stream of countenances of resemblances to people of commanding gifts. Ascending degrees of this similarity are apparent to the observer who looks at physiognomies with that curious purpose. Natives lead in the upward drift, but the remade assimilated denizen is growing into the traits and marks of the New England stock.

Add to these the children of immigrants, who, while inclined to certain customs of their parents, as the observance of Old-World festivals and the patronage of band concerts and beer gardens, yet, unconsciously perhaps, affect superior airs, pride themselves on their Americanism, and eagerly imitate the pleasures and habits of the city at large. They learn the latest comic opera tunes, shout themselves hoarse at baseball games, imitate cheaply the prevailing styles of dress, go by boat in summer with the crowds on dollar excursions to Michigan resorts. Hungary, Poland, Italy, Germany, fade from the faces and the hearts of such youth. They are now as characteristically Chicagoan as are the children of Vermonters who came here before the Civil War. Indeed, they are so in a truer sense, for their greater numbers make them a more prominent type.

No doubt abundant exceptions could be taken to these generalizations. Such impressions, it might be said, do not comprehend the vast number of Americans who have left former homes in the heart of the city, and now dwell in a mighty periphery of Chicago’s environs. Here, as in most of the great cities of the United States, the native element, except a small hotel population, is moving steadily outward toward the suburbs, leaving old aristocratic neighborhoods to the successive occupation of progressive settlements of immigrants. But the double attraction of business and bargains brings men and women alike into the downtown district every day, thus mixing the mass of natives and aliens in a just abstract of the whole population of Chicago.

Chicagoans now sigh for the boundless individual opportunities of forty years ago. The present influx of population seems the momentum of human sheep who follow their leaders after the latter have long since devoured the substance of the land. In passing in and out of our marts of trade, a stranger would know from the strained, eager visages that here was a people aiming singly at material opportunity. But were he of an analytical cast of mind, he would not be long in recognizing the stupendous capacity and need of this people for intellectual and æsthetic opportunity, — something to broaden life and make it worth living.

One cannot but feel that the coming of these powers for cosmopolitan culture to Chicago will be in abundance, perhaps in greater proportion than in New York or Boston. Chicago in its diversity is, nevertheless, in a negative sense at least, unified; that is, distinctive social strata do not here so entirely segregate classes as they do in the East. Neither society nor politics in this city is organized for that long-established, oppressive domination which is a distinctive feature of the oldest municipalities. Commercialism alone is the great incubus. Democracy in its free self-assertion is not repressed, and the Demos halts in its measures for selfimprovement only at the limits of its education. Those bettering instrumentalities no doubt will come according to the capacity of the entire population. It is not one portion of the city which needs them, but the whole. An insight into the capabilities of this multitude for improvement is seen in the almost complete reform of the city council within the last ten years, and the recent overwhelming verdict for the municipal operation of the street railways. If internal factors are not so thoroughly consolidated for aggressive and overawing power in Chicago as in communities like New York and Philadelphia, where the inevitable tendency of humanity toward caste and monopoly has for a long period had free play, yet the very absence of a blue blood aristocracy and of a thoroughly intrenched political machine gives this city a freedom to express itself in its entirety with virile power.

Where we find such potentiality the elevating agencies can hardly be remote, nor long delayed. Already they appear in embryo in the public schools, the unrivaled Thomas orchestra, the libraries, the great university, the museums, the academies, the art institute, and in many social settlements. No city of similar age has done so much for the higher life of its citizens. Yet the effect of this leaven is so far seen only in the suggestions in the faces of the people of refining powers at work under the imperious sway of commercialism. It is true, moreover, as has been charged, that certain of these potencies named, themselves compromise with the reigning autocracy of the material, and are thwarted of their highest effect. But influences are mutual, and the æsthetic cannot always be the vanquished side. Let us indicate a few touchstones of the larger, better era to come. When a person may not frequently, nay, commonly, overhear at a restaurant of the better class conversations exemplified by that of one well-dressed salesman explaining to another how he rebuked and humiliated a rival vendor of dress goods who intimated that he was not a gentleman; when the typical, prosperous-appearing youth on the sidewalk does not pause in his hurry to gaze long and steadfastly at a man who has accidentally jostled against him, so as to mark well the unconscious culprit for future vengeance; when two business men can chat socially without getting on the price of stocks or provisions; when such art exhibits as the “Damm Family” cease to hold gaping knots of pedestrians at store windows; when the people of the community eradicate the trait of speaking at all times of everything and everybody in terms of money, then we may know that the intellectual reclamation of Chicago is at hand.