The City of the Century

Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
February 6, 2005

Story for all ages:

How many of you have heard of Jane Addams? One hundred years ago, she was said to be the second most famous woman in the world, second to Queen Victoria. She was the daughter of a rich man who was in politics, and a good friend of Abraham Lincoln. She had everything money could buy. She was among the first generation of women to graduate from college. You’d think she would be happy, but she wasn’t. Something terrible happened to her when she was young. She got a disease called spinal tuberculosis that made her become stooped, turned her feet inward, and moved her head to the left. For several years she feared her life couldn’t amount to anything and she felt terrible that she wasn’t doing anything productive. While in London, she was drawn to a project that brought art and culture to people living in poverty. She liked it so much, when she moved to Chicago, she decided she would rent an old mansion right in the middle of the worst neighborhood and create an outreach project. The big house she bought had been built and owned by a Chicago pioneer, Charles Hull, so it was called Hull House.

How many of you have heard of Hull House?  It is located on Halsted Street. A hundred years ago, it was a terrible place to live. It was where people who had just moved to the United States lived. Now, these people didn’t have any money, so living conditions were really terrible. And more and more people without money would move in, so it was crowded. A really bad problem was all the garbage. Piles of garbage seven feet high would accumulate. People got sick all the time because of these unhealthy conditions. This neighborhood was one of the worst places to live in the United States a century ago.  Jane Addams helped the residents through attending to their needs and lobbying for legislation that would benefit them. 

First Reading:
from Hillel Schwartz of the Millennium Project

I am counting myself among the broken shells.

What am I doing at dawn on these waters?

I am recalling my cousins beyond the waves.

What am I doing in morning light on this ice?

I am singing to the future across high winds.

What are we doing here in this village?

We are gathering.

What am I doing in afternoon sun on this marsh?

I am holding still.

What are we doing here in this town?

We are moving through shattered walls.

What am I doing at dusk on this farm?

I am drawing water from a dwindling well.

What are we doing here in this busy city?

We are listening to angry voices in the dark air.

And what am I doing at eventide on this Earth?

I am taking your hand, making a change.

Second Reading:
from City of the Century by Donald Miller

There is in the life of any great city a moment when it reaches its maximum potential as a center of power and culture and becomes fully conscious of its special place in history. For Chicago that moment was 1893. In that year the world’s first skyscraper city had a population of over a million people, and among them was an early settler who remembered it as a desolate trading post of some thirty souls living between a swamp and a sand-choked river. Without ever leaving Chicago, this old man had moved, by 1893, from the country to the city, from an agrarian to an industrial America, and had lived, in the process, through the entire history of his still-growing city. …

No large city, not even Peter the Great’s St. Petersburg, had grown so fast, and nowhere else could there be found in more dramatic display such a combination of wealth and squalor, beauty and ugliness, corruption and reform. The story of rising Chicago is one of big and small folk—of assembly-line meat cutters and millionaire beef barons, or five-dollar-a-week salesclerks and magnificent merchant princes, or stenographer-typists and the architects who built their new offices in the sky, of devil-may-care French Canadians and straight-living Protestant improvers who drove them from their frontier trading post and built there a perfectly gridironed capitalist canal town. … The great theme of Chicago’s nineteenth-century history is the battle between growth and control, restraint and opportunity, privatism and the public good. Chaotic Chicago seemed to have sprung up spontaneously, without planning or social foresight, a pure product of ungoverned capitalism. Yet the city that was a sprawling spectacle of smoke and disorder had a magnificent chain of parks and boulevards, one of the best sewage and water-supply systems in the world, a Sanitary and Ship Canal that was one of the engineering marvels of the century, and a splendid complex of cultural and civic buildings along its downtown lakefront. The city that critics compared to a gigantic real estate lottery, where everything was for sale, even its streets, undertook some of the most ambitious public improvement projects of the age. In 1893 it was a place well known for both its unlicensed cupidity and its strong civic consciousness. Even if Chicago provides no easy answers, the story of its unresolved struggle between order and freedom remains instructive for our time, as we seek ways to build and maintain cities that retain their humanity without losing their energy.

Sermon:

When someone says that Unity Temple wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for a big fire, most people would suppose you were referring to the fire that consumed this congregation’s building nearly a century ago, on June 5, 1905. It is certainly true, but there is another fire, often referred to in Chicago lore, as the Great Fire, without which Chicago likely wouldn’t have brought to this first suburb so quickly the building vision, the resources, the architectural genius, the raw, robust energy, and the need for ethical wisdom that all came together to create Unity Temple.

1871 was a monumental year in the history of Chicago. On October 8 of that year, a terrible fire windswept through the core of Chicago, killing 300 people and leaving 90,000 homeless. The day after, fear turned to disbelief. Everything was gone. All familiar landmarks—churches, street signs, corner groceries, bars—had disappeared into thin air. More amazing than the destruction was the recovery. Within a week, more than five thousand temporary structures had been erected and two hundred permanent buildings were under construction. Architects and builders flocked to the need of raising buildings out of the ashes, the opportunity to build an entire city from the ground up. The history of Chicago from that horrible day is an epic story. The people of Chicago were building a city from the ground up, not only literally but also figuratively. “Chicago was like no other city in the world,” wrote Theodore Dreiser, “a city which had no traditions but which was making them.”

By 1893, Chicago had a million people. It had more than tripled in size in the 22 years following the fire. Three-quarters of its residents had foreign parents. The vast majority were laborers, whether in the slaughterhouses, amid the construction sites, on the railroads, or within the warehouses, often living in tight quarters amid filthy streets. The city was ripe for thieving aldermen and plundering capitalists. Prostitution and gambling thrived. Idealists and dissenters emerged and were drawn here: Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Clarence Darrow, Mary McDowell, Thorstein Veblen, and Ida B. Wells, a young African American who moved to Chicago to mobilize a national crusade against lynching and racial segregation. The Chicago newspapers evoked a religious image to describe the most powerful, “The Chicago Trinity”. They were Marshall Field, Philip Armour, and George Pullman.

Interestingly, George Mortimer Pullman, the railroad titan that made his fortune from the luxury railcar, was a Universalist. I have difficulty finding how his faith informed his life but his story fascinates me. He built a town where he expected his workers to live, a town he named after himself. The town of Pullman, that is today located in a section of Hyde Park, had libraries, good schools, indoor toilets in every home, paved streets, streetlights, excellent recreation and sports facilities, even two grandstands, all as George would say, “kept in perfect repair and cleanliness by the company at its own expense.” It was reputed to have the lowest disease and death rate of any urban neighborhood in the world. It was, its founder boasted, a model city, and workers were expected to live there. There was only one catch. No one could buy property, they could only rent. The town was run as a business, not a philanthropic enterprise, at which George made sure turned a profit. Nothing was free in Pullman, not even the library. Liquor wasn’t sold except in the prohibitively expensive Florence Hotel; the entertainment was censored; and the only newspaper, the Pullman Journal, was edited by the company publicist. Union organizers were kept out of town, and company officials paid eavesdroppers called “spotters” to snitch on anyone who expressed dissent.  

The town of Pullman was an experiment that pitted the human drive for comfort and security with that of creativity and freedom. The city of Chicago had already developed a raw, robust spirit of a tumultuous city, that gave strong impetus to the labor movement in this country. When George Pullman decided to raise rents without raising workers’ salaries, there was no stopping the outrage from boiling over. When Eugene Debs led a nation-wide strike, he was unable to keep rioting from breaking out. It was the Unitarian Clarence Darrow that defended young Eugene Debs and became the most known labor lawyer in the country. This chapter of Chicago history demonstrated that human nature isn’t something that can be simply restrained, ordered, and privatized.

Chicago history has as many stories of plundering capitalists like George Pullman as stories of idealists and dissenters, such as what I shared with the children about Jane Addams. Human nature, as evidenced by the epic of Chicago, includes profound greed and corruption as well as extraordinary compassion and faith in humanity. Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” captures the essence of the city of the masses of laborers. “Chicago: Hog butcher for the world, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler. Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.” Stories abound of slaughterhouses, of the first commercial retailers, Marshall Field, Montgomery Ward, or Richard Sears, or those who made their fortunes, and many who lost them, through the selling of futures on the Board of Trade.

Besides being a huge city, the one thing I knew about Chicago before coming here was that it boasted one of the finest Art Museums in the world—and it had a lot of really tall buildings. However, I had no idea of the richness of the stories behind the many Chicago cultural institutions such as the Art Institute.

Charles Hutchinson’s father was one of those guys who made a fortune—and then lost it—on the Board of Trade. At age 20, Charles ran a bank, and by age 34, he was the head of the Board of Trade. What distinguished him from many of his peers, his motivation was not money but civic duty. He devoted half of his time and half of his income to philanthropic pursuits. He served on the board of Hull House, the University of Chicago, the YMCA as well as orphanages, hospitals, and schools. His passion, though, was art.

For many of Chicago’s capitalists, promotion of the arts was part of an effort to maintain control of their city. They put together civic boards dedicated to civic causes, but they were run by the elite for the elite. For Charles Hutchinson, public service was a private religion. He was an art enthusiast not just an art philanthropist. He once said, “We live in a materialist age…and …in one of the most barren cities” where most men “are in a state of slavery,…mere machine[s] devoted to business.” He made several trips to Europe looking for art, and persuaded several other benefactors to do the same. In 1882, he co-founded the Art Institute. He felt art was a counterbalance to the pursuit of money that was so central to Chicago, and he believed that all people benefit from access to great art. During the 1890s, the Art Institute was free to the public three days each week, including Sunday, when most laborers had off.

Hutchinson and Jane Addams were kindred spirits. Both lived out the conviction that all people, not just the educated elite, benefit from beauty. Jane Addams founded Hull House to give women of all social strata the opportunity to benefit from culture. Miller writes, “There was something naďve—almost unreal—about this cultural outreach, but enough Halsted Street immigrants were hungry for knowledge of the arts to sustain a Plato Club, a Dante Club, and a Shakespeare Club and to get enthusiastic audiences at Sunday afternoon concerts.” In time, Addams became tough-minded and more pragmatic to help people figure out how to address the issues that hurt them. She even turned down a $50,000 donation that held the condition of her withdrawing support of a sweat-shop bill.

Jane Addams never called herself a Unitarian, but she attended the church of Jenkins Lloyd Jones, initially named Fourth Unitarian Church of Chicago and then All Souls Unitarian Church of Chicago when it founded the settlement house known as the Abraham Lincoln Center, which today houses the Center for Inner City Studies of Northeastern Illinois University, located at 700 East Oakwood Boulevard about seven blocks in from the lake.

Jenkins Lloyd Jones is arguably the most influential Unitarian or Universalist minister in the Midwest. In addition to being one of the most respected ministers in the city, he served as the Missionary Secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference, he helped found Unity Churches throughout the Midwest, he edited the liberal religious weekly Unity, he gave several women their start as ministers in the Midwest, and he was largely responsible for encouraging the American Unitarian Association to push open its theology and draw the circle of the church to include non-Christians. If that wasn’t enough, Jones was active in almost every social movement of his day. He was the founder of the Abraham Lincoln Center settlement house, a strong supporter of the Hull House Settlement, a fiery opponent of child labor, an avid supporter of early trade union movements, and a co-founder and leader of the American Anti-Imperialist League. He also was the chief organizer of the World Parliament of Religions that first met in Chicago in 1893 for the sake of interfaith understanding and cooperation.

Jenkins Lloyd Jones frequently gazed upon the world and asked, “What doth the spirit seem to say?” and he then responded by organizing people to make the world in the image of what is most just. At the Abraham Lincoln Center, he hosted events that not only brought together people of different religions, but he also brought people from different races, ethnicities and social classes together for the sake of the betterment of society.

So what does this all have to do with us? Three things: our history, our hopes, and our humanity.

First, our history. Oak Park wouldn’t be here without Chicago. Our suburb and our congregation are, whether we like to admit it or not, historically contingent on Chicago for a mere ten miles to the west of downtown, Oak Park was the first train stop for many trains bound for the west. Even our congregation has a parallel history with Chicago history. The year of the Great Fire of Chicago, 1871, was also the year this congregation was founded. A group of Unitarian Transcendentalists, who called themselves the Unity Men, provided funds and an organizing effort that brought together a large portion of the First Church of Oak Park dissatisfied with its theology, seeking a religious home that spoke to the needs of a newly emerging world that called for the Unity of all people. Thus this congregation, originally named Unity Church, was born. Note, this has no relation to the metaphysically-based Unity church movement founded by Charles Fillmore decades later. The Unity Church movement that Jenkins Lloyd Jones pioneered throughout the Midwest held high the banner, “Freedom, Fellowship, and Character in Religion”. They united people with similar ethical convictions without concern for theology.

Imagine what it must have been like to be a member of this congregation, when its newly constructed building was on Pleasant and Wisconsin. Imagine if you were a young adult, freshly settled in Oak Park and becoming a part of this vibrant, new liberal religious community that called people not to simply respect tradition but more importantly to affirm that we can cultivate an original relationship to the universe, that we are called to forge our own insights and live out our ethical ideals. Imagine how extraordinary it must have been to watch and contribute to the extraordinary city that manifested those ideals in all walks of life! I have no doubt the majority of members of our congregation gladly participated in the making of Chicago. According to Donald Miller, "Chicago’s first suburbanites returned to downtown to work, shop, and be entertained far more frequently and in far greater numbers than suburban commuters do today.”

It does not surprise me that our faith tradition played a significant role in the history of Chicago. It does surprise me that our congregations did not flourish or even keep up with the growth of Chicago. The religious innovation that occurred within our tradition did not adequately engage the people of Chicago. It can be argued that it did engage the spirit of invention and provide an ethical basis for moving forward with new technology and industry, but it never engaged what Sandburg called the "city of broad shoulders". Perhaps that is why both Unitarian and Universalist congregations closed their doors over the last century—and why an extraordinary Unitarian minister was among the civic leaders of late nineteenth century Chicago, and neither he nor his congregation are remembered by many Unitarian Universalists.

The history of Chicago has much to reveal to us about our hopes. Many of us lament the widespread corruption that routinely splashes into the newspapers, but Chicago history suggests that the corruption and plundering of generations past were at levels far worse than now. The history also teaches that creative resistance makes a difference.

Many of us lament the deplorable conditions that many ethnic minorities and African-American people must endure and the sense that there’s nothing we can do about it. But Chicago history attests to many ways either an individual or an organization can respond; indeed, a Unitarian Church ran a settlement house and their minister was one of the primary movers and shakers among the civic leaders of the city.

The stories of the emergence of Chicago as a world-class city, with all its beauty and ugliness, also reveal much about our humanity and human nature. The pioneering Chicago sociologist, Robert Park, writes how the city is not only a product of nature but it is a product of human nature. It can be argued that the city, in turn, shapes human nature. The city operates as a culture-creating system. According to Donald Miller, the city is “not only where the goods of civilization are made and exchanged but also where experience is heightened and transformed into art, ritual, and civic pageantry. The history of Chicago is a two-way process: people making Chicago and Chicago making people.” As individuals and as a congregation, we have the choice to contribute to that process. The history helps us see the city as a culture-creating system, virtually a living organism, not only where the goods of civilization are made and exchanged but also where experience is heightened and transformed into art, ritual, and civic pageantry.

The epic of Chicago tells us a lot about what it means to be a human being. It is a constant battle between growth and control, restraint and opportunity, privatism and the public good. Chicago provides no easy answers but obliges us to live the questions of how to simultaneously maintain both the humanity and the energy of the city, as the zealous pursuit of one so often results in the reduction of the other. For a century, angry voices have filled the night air, and those who responded to the religious impulse of service have stretched out a hand to make a change. May we choose carefully which strands of history we shall extend as we participate in the ongoing history of Chicago.

Blessed be. Amen. 

© Copyright 2005 Rev. Alan Taylor, All Rights Reserved.