‘She should have our respect’
Edith Rockefeller McCormick was one of the city’s most important, if overlooked, figures
There are people who, for reasons confounding and unfair, vanish under history’s dust.
One of these is a woman named Edith Rockefeller McCormick, who lived from 1872 to 1932 and deserves, correctly writes the author of new book about her life, that, “Had Edith been male, her life trajectory would have been entirely different from the get-go.”
Andrea Friederici Ross is out to remedy this “injustice,” writing that “Chicago should know this patron saint, this enigmatic woman who helped elevate the city from stockyards and industry to one rife with cultural and artistic organizations.”
And know her you will if you read Ross’ marvelous new book, “Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McCormick,” recently published by the fine folks at Southern Illinois University Press. In it Ross writes, “Though cut short, there is no question that Edith lived a full life … She forged her own path, a task that could not have been easy, given the forces and personalities around her. For this — if not for her generosity, intelligence, and fierce determination to change the world — she should have our respect.”
She has mine now and so does Ross, who came to writing and to Edith when she worked as the assistant for Brookfield Zoo’s late director George Rabb. “I has worked in administration for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra before coming to Brookfield,” she told me. “I never thought of myself as a writer but when I learned the zoo was thinking about a history, I volunteered. Bless George Rabb’s heart for putting his trust in me.”
That book is the fine and lively 1997 “Let the Lions Roar!: The Evolution of Brookfield Zoo” and in it you will discover what Ross discovered, that the land on which the zoo sits was donated by Edith, land given to her as a wedding gift from her father, so that people could, as she said, could “get nearer animals to reach the human soul.”
Initially, Ross thought that Edith might make a good and lively character in a novel but the more she dug into the woman’s past the more substance she found. But it was not easy quest. Ross writes that it began “as a puzzle, searching for pieces of Edith’s life wherever I could find them.”
She says, “I would go into the Rockefeller and McCormick archives and find boxes and boxes of material on other members of the families, including the women. But when it came to Edith, there was nothing but little file folders. It was as if she was erased.”
Edith was born with a golden spoon in her mouth, the daughter of John D. Rockefeller and raised in the most privileged circumstances and settings. In a match made in moneyed heaven, in 1895 she married Harold McCormick, the son of another wealthy man and prominent Chicagoan, Cyrus McCormick, who invented the mechanical reaper, which helped in the mechanization of agriculture.
This union was shouted in such newspaper headlines as “Greatest Catch of the year! Two Great Fortunes to be Joined.” And for a time, all seemed happy. The couple spent lavishly, buying, among many, many things, the jewels of Catherine the Great and moving into a DuSable Lake Shore Drive mansion and another in Lake Forest and participating in, what Ross calls, “a merry-go-round of social engagements.”
They would have five children, two of whom would die young, and Edith Rockefeller McCormick was increasingly at odds with her “penny pinching” father. In time she was off to Zurich in an attempt to remedy the panic attacks, phobias and depression that beset her and in Europe she was under the care of the yet to be famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who she helped to make famous. She also after intense analysis and study she became a Jungian analyst here.
And soon enough, after returning to Chicago, she also became a divorcee, severing her marriage to Harold in proceedings in 1921 that took only 50 minutes, including these exchanges between the judge and Edith.
Judge: Has he contributed anything at all to your support?
Edith: Not one cent. Judge: How did you conduct yourself toward him during the time you lived together?
Edith: In the manner a wife would.
I will not catalog all of her accomplishments or endeavors, because it’s too much fun to discover them on your own through the book’s pages.
This is a terrific biography, deeply researching and written with care and flair. It is peopled with all sorts of compelling and
real characters. Here’s one: James Joyce who, while he was writing “Ulysses,” was financially supported by Edith. Here’s another: Harold would woo and marry a second-rate opera singer named Ganna Walska, a real-life romantic to-do that, Ross says, “inspired the love triangle in ‘Citizen Kane’.”
As Ross writes, in wonderful understatement, “Ganna greatly overestimated her own gifts.”
Edith Rockefeller McCormick did not come to a happy end. In fact, the woman once thought to be the richest in the country died broke. How she got there makes a fascinating story, parts joyous, part sad.
Ross has undoubtedly been affected by all the time she spent with Edith. As Ross writes, with refreshing candor, “I am
roughly the same age as Edith when she returned from Zurich. With my children off to college and my marriage now dissolving, I find myself alone. I take courage from Edith’s example: starting new ventures, developing new routines, always looking forward with curiosity and anticipation.”
Then at book’s end, she lets Edith have the final, inspirational words: “How does (one) know what the day will bring? It is filled with possibilities, it is filled with magic. It is a brandnew day.”