Part 36 (1/2)
35. These exercises are said to be less striving and to have more pleasure for all contestants.
36. The attaches of the United States Weather bureau here say that while the precipitation has been unusually heavy, the present storm and that predicted to follow it are but the usual rainy season rainfalls, for which there is no freak or extraordinary explanation.
_CHAPTER XIV_
_A._ Number 1 below is a copy of a speech delivered by George Ade last night at a dinner in honor of Mr. Brand Whitlock, United States minister to Belgium. Number 2 is a New York dispatch about the dinner. Write up the story for an Indianapolis morning paper on which you are working.
George Ade's home is in Indiana.
1. If you will go over the list of young men who wrote for Chicago newspapers twenty-five years ago you will be convinced that the newspaper business is the greatest business in the world for getting out of.
Let us go away back to 1890. Also let us go back to Chicago. I hope I am not asking too much. About twenty-five years ago in the Middle West there was a restless movement toward the newspaper office. Nearly every young man who could no longer board at home decided to enter journalism. Chicago called him.
Chicago is the home of opportunity--and other things.
The young man who wishes to be a book agent must have a prospectus. Any solicitor must own a set of application blanks.
The burglar needs a jimmy. But the journalist requires only a collection of adjectives. So I repeat that about 1890 all the by-roads led to Chicago and all the young men who abhorred farm work were arranging to be editors.
The period to which I refer was to Chicago what the Elizabethan period was to English letters. Joseph Medill and Wilbur F.
Storey were just rounding their interesting careers. George Harvey was flas.h.i.+ng across our local horizon on his way to New York. M. E. Stone was hacking out of one newspaper office in order to a.s.sume general supervision of all the newspapers in the world. Vance Thompson wrote for an evening paper. Opie Read was up and down the street, working as little as possible. William Elroy Curtis had just served a term as society editor of the _Inter Ocean_. Paul Potter was tied to an editorial desk, but already he had heard the call of the stage and was getting ready to write _Trilby_. Will Payne, Kennett Harris, Ray Stannard Baker, Forrest Crissy, Emerson Hough, and other contributors to the five- and ten-cent beacons of the present day were humbly contributing to the daily press. Ben King was writing his quiet verse and peddling it around. Eugene Field had come on from Kansas City and was trying to weave _Culture's Garland_, in spite of the fact that the high wind constantly disarranged his material. Julian Street was still operating as an amateur, while Henry Hutt and the Leyendecker boy and Pennrhyn Stanlaws and other ill.u.s.trators who have brought the show girl into the home life of America were students at the Art Inst.i.tute, over on the lake front. Do you recognize some of the names? Most of them are now typical New Yorkers--born west of Kalamazoo.
It was in 1890 that John T. McCutcheon came up from Indiana and broke into the old _News_ office. Perhaps you know that later on he became the Thomas Nast of the corn belt--one of the few cartoonists with a really definite influence and a loyal following. Tom Powers was just beginning to draw his comics.
Shortly before Melville Stone escaped from bondage he received a call at his office from a talented young woman who acted on the stage. I am not repeating any ancient scandal. I am simply telling you the facts. The young actress showed the great editor some verses which had been dedicated to her by a lad living on the West Side. Mr. Stone sent for the young man and put him to work, and the next morning he knew the young man had written _Robin Hood_, and since then he has written most of the plays with music presented anywhere in America. You must have seen the name of Harry B. Smith on the billboards.
A young person with very red hair did general hustling on the _Inter Ocean_ for a short time and then disappeared. Years later he bobbed up in congress as a member from Kansas and began to shout defiance at Uncle Joe Cannon. The young person's name was Victor Murdock.
It was during this same golden age that an overgrown and diffident young man came from an obscure town in Illinois and was given a tryout on the _Tribune_. He was steady and industrious and ever willing, and they set him to do hotel reporting. He was a failure as a hotel reporter, because the young men employed by the _Herald_ and _Times_ secured interviews every day with interesting visitors whom he was never able to find. He could not find them because those interesting persons did not exist. They were created by the enterprising young men of the _Times_ and _Herald_ who were working in combination against the _Tribune_.
Each morning the _Herald_ and _Times_ would have a throbbing story told by some traveler who had shot big game in India, or penetrated the frozen north, or visited the interior of Tibet, or observed the habits of the kangaroo in Australia.
The visitor who told the wondrous tales of adventure invariably left in the afternoon for New York, but his name was on the hotel register as a corroborative detail intended to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
Perhaps I should explain that the hotel clerk was a party to the conspiracy.
Every day the _Tribune_ young man was rebuked because he had been scooped by the _Times_ and the _Herald_. He ran from hotel to hotel, frantically eager to do his duty, but he never could find the African explorer and the t.i.tled European and the North Sea adventurer who told their breathless tales day after day in the columns of the rival papers. So the _Tribune_ young man was taken off hotels and put on finance. After that he was not scooped. He came to know Lyman J. Gage and moved on to New York via Was.h.i.+ngton. To-day the poor young man who failed as a hotel reporter because he lacked the gift of imaginative fiction is president of the National City Bank of New York. Perhaps you have heard of him. His name is Frank Vanderlip.
Now let us inquire as to the designing scribblers who caused him to lose his job. The _Times_ man is here in New York as first aid to the tired business man. The next time you visit ”Chin Chin” or the Hippodrome you will notice the name of Charles B.
Dillingham on the program. As for the _Herald_ young man, you must know something about him if you have read _Mr. Dooley_.
It was about 1890 that the sprightly organization known as the Whitechapel Club came into existence in Chicago. Moses P. Handy was an adopted son of the same period. He had come on from Philadelphia and was trying to introduce the custom of wearing evening clothes in the evening. Chicago had started to build the Columbian Exposition and was trying hard to prove that a provincial city could be cosmopolitan while company was present.
Thus many influences worked together to make Chicago a rather interesting preparatory school in 1890.
If you will go over the list of young men who wrote for Chicago newspapers twenty-five years ago you will be convinced that the newspaper business is the greatest business in the world for getting out of. Let us here resolve to treat the reporter kindly, because in a few years we may be working for him.
Of all that untried host standing in line to receive a.s.signments, I don't suppose any one man was a greater disappointment to prophets than Brand Whitlock. When he came up from a freshwater college in Ohio and quietly attached himself to the _Herald_ staff he attracted attention almost immediately as a humorist. He specialized on ”Josh stuff.” He wrote bantering, fantastic, mock-serious stories of the kind that were standardized by Mr. Dana's young men. He was a star reporter, pulling down his thirty-five per; but any first-cla.s.s horoscoper would have allowed that Whitlock was destined to contribute to _Puck_ and _Judge_, and probably attempt the libretto of a comic opera. He legged it on the newspaper for a while and then re-deserted, the same as most of the others, and went to Springfield to resume his studies. This was his first erratic move. If he had been a true journalist there wouldn't have been anything more for him to learn. Then he published _The Thirteenth District_. Many of his old friends bought it expecting to get something on the order of refined vaudeville, but found, instead, a true and tragic story of cheap ambitions.
Well, we watched him as mayor of Toledo, and we have been telling everybody for the last year and a half that we did a.s.signments together and are members of the same college fraternity and wouldn't be afraid to go right up and speak to him anywhere.
To that scattered colony of twenty-five years ago I bring the a.s.surance that we are proud of Brand Whitlock and are glad to call him our friend.