IN this year of the Century of Progress Exposition it was to be expected that a rush of books dealing with the city of Chicago would break out on the sensitive epidermis of the publishing world. The three volumes here reviewed may be only the preliminary symptoms, tor our hook publishers have often shown a surprising ability at simultaneously exploiting the obvious opportunity and thus destroying it. However, this group of books need not disturb potential authors of ‘The Soul of Chicago’ or ‘Stockyard Hymns.’ I here is still a, great deal left to be written about that extraordinary city.
The first, Checagon, by Milo M. Quaife (University of Chicago Press, $1.00), is a chronicle of the historical small beer of the place as an Indian and military trading post. It shows a considerable and meticulous research concerning the traders, squaw men, soldiers, and missionaries who lived in this hit-or-miss outpost of our American Empire. As such it will interest those who find something fascinating in the minutiæ of the pioneer life. The author does not interpret the significance of the events or personalities he describes from an historical standpoint, but the picture he gives of the hardships of the early settlers and their daily toil, their marriages and begettings, is probably as nearly accurate as need be. The best chapters deal with the Fort Dearborn Massacre. It does not seem to astonish the author as much as it does the casual reader that the commander of the garrison on that occasion, in a truly blind obedience to orders from a distant superior, should have marched his handful of troops and volunteers and all the helpless women and children in the place out from a safe frontier fort into the midst of an overpowering body of hostile and bloodthirsty Indians. The result was approximately 100 per cent killed or captured — and one of the stupidest pieces of bravery in American military history. The book has a useful index.
As Others See Chicago, 1673-1933, compiled by Bessie Louise Pierce and J. L. Norris University of Chicago Press, $3.00), is a long and on the whole well selected and interesting series of comments and opinions about the city from all sorts of visitors, American and foreign, extending over its entire history, including a certain amount of history which might be described as prenatal. A good many of these excerpts are obviously the efforts of dull or prejudiced or annoyed travelers. They shed more light on the travelers than on the experiences described or the place visited. As is generally the case with the less philosophic or even less sophisticated journeying journalist, major importance is attributed to his own reactions rather than to the cause of them. The result is a confused and confusing impression, rather like an early and inefficient moving picture, of contradictory contemporary flashes of Chicago in the course of its brilliant and sometimes brutal development. It is a self-conscious book, in the nature of things, but the editors have included as many bitter pills as they have sugar-coated ones. The sketches of the various authors quoted indicate careful scholarship and a calm, critical judgment.
Julia Newberry’s Diary (Norton, $2.50) has really very little Chicago in it. She was born there and spent intermittent portions of her childhood there, and loved the place dearly. The book ends in a poignant record of her distress on learning, while in Europe, the full measure of the destruction of the Chicago Fire and the loss of everything that she treasured in her Chicago home. It is a pathetic, touching little diary of a young American girl of wealth and distinction and a fatal delicacy destined to carry her off four years after this journal ends. Her father had urged her to ‘be somebody,’ and from 1869 to 1872 she never failed — in spite of her health — to be somebody, to be different from the casual, material, or vacuous people she encountered. She writes with an extraordinary frankness about herself, her profoundly Victorian love affairs, her opinions of men and women, of places and the arts. A sense of doom and tragedy oppresses one in reading even the most artless and gay little pages in this book. One feels that Juggernaut is being oiled to run over a flower or a butterfly. That she was a girl of rare and really lovely quality is everywhere manifest. She must have been charming and she might have become a woman of genuine talent and accomplishment. She had the sensitiveness of the true artist and the ambition to achieve. Alas, her spirit burned too brightly for the fragile body which framed it. She was dragged about Europe, from spa to spa — and she really died of the hardships of her search for health. Her book is worth anybody’s reading, not for the light it throws upon Victorian Chicago, but as a record of an American Victorian young lady — in this instance, to use a Victorian phrase, a ‘lovely creature,’ of a kind banished, perhaps permanently, from the stage of society.
RICHARD ELY DANIELSON