FROM CANOES TO SKYSCRAPERS
A newspaper is born, and Chicago is catapulted to the world’s stage
Imagine yourself walking the muddy streets of Chicago in June of 1847. If you had 3 cents in your pocket to spare you might have spent it to buy the first edition of a new newspaper, created in the thirdfloor loft of a building at the corner of Lake and LaSalle streets.
It was named the Chicago Daily Tribune and its “parents,” so to speak, were three men named Joseph K.C. Forrest, James Kelly and John E. Wheeler, who were already in the printing business with a Sunday literary paper known as The Gem of the Prairie.
These men would be out of the daily newspaper business within a few years, and there exist no copies of the earliest issues of the paper. But perhaps you kept buying the publication, grabbing a copy of what is now the earliest known survivor, dated April 23, 1849, the same year the Tribune became the first newspaper in the West to receive news via telegraph on a regular basis. Practically every inch of this and early front pages were given over to advertising — advertising of an intensely practical kind, aimed at newcomers to the young city and travelers passing through what was becoming a transportation center.
Railroads were transforming Chicago into a metropolis, the central point through which the raw materials from the Midwest and West and the finished goods from the East had to pass. Its population would swell from 17,000 in 1850 to nearly 2 million by the end of the century, and the Tribune was there to record it all.
For a few years, the newspaper was saddled with debts and shadowed by uncertainty as changes in ownership and editorship took place. Then, in 1855, a 32-year-old Joseph Meharry Medill arrived in town, coming from Cleveland where he had started and run a newspaper, the Cleveland Morning Leader. He purchased an interest in the Tribune with five other men, and over the next decades would become not only a prominent citizen and political power (he was the city’s 26th mayor and would help found the Republican Party), but would transform and grow the Tribune.
Operating from offices over a post office on a stretch of Clark Street known as “Newspaper Row,” the paper’s increasingly large staff had some of the most important stories of the century to cover, and plenty of rivals covering them.
There was a presidency, and Medill tirelessly championed Abraham Lincoln. Though he lost an 1858 U.S. Senate run, with Medill’s considerable aid (and the paper’s anti-slavery editorial support), Lincoln won the Republican nomination at
a convention held in Chicago and the presidency in 1860.
Inevitably, came the Civil War, and early in 1863, the Tribune published the longest telegraphic dispatch ever carried by a paper in the West, a report on the Battle of Stones River in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Circulation boomed. During the war years, 30,000 subscribers were having their news delivered, some by means of a two-wheeled cart pushed, on some days, by Medill. More than 10,000 readers bought the daily paper on the streets.
The paper had more than 25 correspondents in the field and in Washington to report on the war. Lloyd Wendt, in “Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper,” captured the routine of one correspondent: “(He) left his hotel, taking with him a telescope, notepaper, pencils and a box lunch. He previously had checked the telegraph station at Fairfax Court House, as any good war correspondent should, since a news story possessed value only if transmitted promptly to the newspaper.”
There was a fire, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, that roared through the city, with 18,000 buildings destroyed, much of the city leveled, 90,000 people left homeless and 300-some dead. While the city still smoldered, Medill arranged for the paper to be published in a small print shop on Canal Street. The first postfire edition carried a famously upbeat editorial: “CHEER UP! ... CHICAGO SHALL RISE AGAIN.”
In November of that year, Medill would run successfully for mayor on what was called the “fireproof ” ticket and during his two-year term, the paper warned angrily in print of the dangers posed by unscrupulous and careless builders.
Those post-fire years were exuberant for the city and the newspaper, filled with technological innovations. The Union Stockyards was in its bloody business — “so many cattle as no one has ever dreamed existed in the world,” the Tribune wrote — telephone service began, a public library was opened, Holy Name Cathedral dedicated, the town of Pullman was built and the world’s first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building, rose nine stories into the sky at the
corner of LaSalle and Adams streets.
Medill would buy a controlling ownership interest in the paper in 1874 and
continued as publisher until his death. Across the land, newspapers were becoming a potent medium of mass communication, and there was a constant
push to grab readers. The
Tribune ran bolder and bigger headlines and began to feature line drawings, reporting on such events as the first White Sox game, the opening of the Art Institute, construction of the Auditorium Building and of the elevated train, and the Haymarket tragedy.
Visiting the city in 1883, Mark Twain wrote, “She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.”
In editorials, the newspaper reflected Medill’s common man philosophy, such as his opposition to the concentration of wealth in a few hands, which he considered a threat to democracy. His editorial pages also regularly campaigned for such projects as the World’s Columbian Exposition, and when that arrived on the South Side in 1893, the newspaper covered it with exuberance.
There was a special edition published near the fair’s end, 24 pages with the headline, “Canoes to Skyscrapers,” and other editions often sold out, even though newsboys were elevating prices to as much as $3.50. The paper noted the one edition “was as choice as gold in financial panic and as scarce as sunshiny days this spring.”
By that time, the paper had begun to feature elaborately drawn illustrations, and these were used to call special attention to the fair’s 179 days and eye-catching attractions. Nearly 30 million visitors came to Jackson Park, and what they saw in the marvels of the “White City” convinced them that Chicago was America’s future and its coattails a good thing to grab.
Even though the city, in the wake of the fair, was crippled by a deep depression that saw thousands starve to death and thousands more made jobless, city leaders and aesthetic-minded citizens worked to emulate what they considered the fair’s beauty by improving the look of what was then a murky, ugly city to the north. Parks and playgrounds sprouted.
It was during this time that Daniel Hale Williams, one of the first Black surgeons in America, founded Provident Hospital in 1891 as an interracial institution where Black doctors and nurses, denied access to white institutions, could receive medical training, and where members of the Black community could receive care. In 1893, he achieved international fame by performing the world’s first successful heart surgery at Provident.
Reformer Jane Addams arrived here in 1889, and with Ellen Gates Starr rented a bedraggled mansion on Halsted Street near Polk Street and opened Hull House. Her aim was to render humanitarian and civil service to the poor in the surrounding area, through programs ranging from bathing babies to teaching arts and crafts. The Tribune early on proclaimed the effort “could be greater than any charity.”
Medill and his son-in-law Robert Patterson, who had worked his way up from assistant night editor, Washington correspondent, editorial writer, managing editor and editor-inchief, were doing all they could to attract new readers. More would be gained when the paper began featuring photographs. The first appeared on March 21, 1897, four photos under a three-column headline that read: “Four Candidates for Mayor of Chicago.”
Carter Henry Harrison IV would win that race and head a city of 1.7 million people, second only to New York City. More than one-third were foreign-born, and 98% of them were white. Harrison was the first, but hardly the last, Chicago-born mayor.