STATES & CITIES: Chicago’s Party

STATES & CITIES

(See front cover)

In Chicago one afternoon last week some 5,000 schoolchildren, egged on by their teachers, paraded to Grant Park near the city’s lakefront. There they burned in effigy a wicked banker who would not buy city tax warrants so the teachers could be paid long-due salaries. The effigy did not look much like anyone, but it had a corncob pipe in its mouth and it was supposed to be Charles Gates Dawes.

Chicago’s Press ignored the incident, and four days later a lot of the same schoolchildren were in another throng that trooped to the lakefront for a party at which Banker Dawes’s sister-in-law officiated. Mrs. Rufus Cutler Dawes broke a bottle of milk over the Magic Mountain on the Enchanted Island for children, formally opening this section of Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair.

When President Roosevelt opens the whole show May 27, he will use a beam of starlight from Arcturus instead of a bottle of milk, a beam that started towards the earth the year Chicago last held a world’s fair. That was in 1893, only 40 years ago, but the party Rufus Dawes and his brother Charles and their Chicago friends are giving this year to (they hope) 50 million guests, is “A Century of Progress,” referring to Chicago’s founding in 1833.

Fair superlatives, rumbling throughout the nation’s Press for many a month, were nearing crescendo last week. Burton Holmes, famed traveloger, was hired as the national barker to make nightly 15-min. talks over an NBC network. Daytimes Lecturer Holmes, also the Fair’s cinematographer, watched a miniature Hollywood spring up where, through a glass partition, fairgoers will see real cinemas filmed & recorded on a 60-ft. stage. Excerpt from one of the Holmes Fair talks:

“The world has been my oyster—I have opened it and relished it every year for nearly half a century. But this time the world, my oyster, lies right here below me, in its gloriously tinted shell, ready for me to open it and relish it again, without budging very far from where I sit.”

Really a World’s Fair it is to be. France, viewing it as a rival to her summer tourist trade, is not merely ignoring the Chicago doings but last week opened on a grand scale her Paris industrial fair in competition. Germany, having declined to participate, was last week reported thinking of sending over her chief propagandist, li’ttle Paul Joseph Goebbels (see p. 21). Chicago, where 50,000 Jews demonstrated against Adolf Hitler last week, made known that no German envoy would be received officially.

Meantime at Orbetello, Italy, General Italo Balbo was tuning up 24 Fascist seaplanes to fly over in style. Transshipped to Montreal and reassembled, England’s famed London-Edinburgh express, the Royal Scot, complete with new paint, shiny brasses and fresh-scrubbed stewards, exhibited itself to 3,000 an hour in New York before touring leisurely out to Chicago. Mexico City was polishing up a special Presidential train to bear the famed Monte Alban jewels to Chicago’s Fair. From Japan to Chicago had come a national exhibit filling 17 freight cars.

Oldsters who first beheld a Ferris wheel and an electric light bulb at Chicago’s Fair of 1893 will appreciate the “Century of Progress” idea when they see the show’s location. Within view of one of the country’s tallest city skylines, on the lakefront from 12th to 39th Streets, the buildings surround a long lagoon and stand almost entirely on “made” land that did not exist when the Columbian Exposition was held five miles south of the Loop. Approaching this year’s Fair from the heart of town the visitor’s first sight will be two 625-ft. steel towers joined by cables, soaring up between the Soldier Field stadium and Lake Michigan?’ This is the Sky Ride (40¢ a head in 5-m.p.h. “rocket” cars) whence the entire layout can be surveyed.

From the 12th Street entrance a brilliant Avenue of Flags sweeps the visitor down to a great U-shaped Hall of Science, heart of the Fair. Like other Fair buildings it is long, low, ultramodern, brilliantly painted—blocked and banded in orange, red. yellow, white. It is windowless, because sunlight is variable, electricity constant, and because windows are too expensive for buildings which will start coming down when the last sightseer leaves on Oct. 31.

In the Hall of Science the visitor will get his first taste of the Fair’s keynote— Action. Here the sciences will be demonstrated not by dull charts and lectures, but by experiments actually performed. The layman will see how chemistry transmutes coal, wood, oil, rubber, minerals into paints, dyes, soaps, explosives, paper, food. He will see laid bare the basic mysteries not only of his radio, telephone, refrigerator, automobile but even his own body, in models with beating heart, breathing lungs, circulating blood. A huge steel robot, ten feet high, will point to foods on a table and lecture metallically on food chemistry and nutrition, tracing the foods through its own illuminated digestive tract.

Industry too has joined in the Fair’s activitism. It knows the visitor can see its products in the stores of his home town; here it shows him how they are made. In General Motors’ $1,000,000 assembly plant a Fairgoer may order his Chevrolet in the morning, see it put together during the day, drive off in it at evening. He may watch Firestone turn crude rubber and chemicals into finished automobile tires, one every ten minutes. Phoenix Hosiery will show women how silk stockings are woven. Quaker Oats Co. will steam, roll, pack 100 cases of breakfast food per hour. Only inactive spot will be the airy, peaceful TIME-FORTUNE building, carefully designed as “A Place to Sit Down” and containing the world’s biggest rack of current periodicals.

Physically unable to bring actual plants to the Fair, other industries have found three substitutes. Some have full-size, realistic imitations: U. S. Steel will, with trick lighting effects, dazzle spectators by apparently belching molten metal out of a blast furnace in a tower 40 ft. high. Others have erected working models: oil industry, a miniature refinery. Still others have put up huge dioramas (three-dimensional picture-models) : with three such the meat industry will show all that happens to beef on its way from cattle range to kitchen range.

Whole modes as well as accessories of life will be shown. The Social Science division has reproduced inhabited sections of Indian villages, a Colonial homestead, a modern city apartment. In the Home & Industrial Arts Group, prefabricated houses, equipped with air conditioners and many another electrical device, may persuade the 20th Century man to change his entire housing scheme. To compete with exhibits from 14 foreign nations, the U. S. Government is spending, through Federal Commissioner Harry S. New, $1,000,000 to show its citizens how they are governed (except Prohibition enforcement).

Near the Fair’s southern tip lies the Travel & Transport Building. From a grandstand across the street the visitor may see the oxcarts, covered wagons, automobiles, ships, trains, airplanes of a century’s travel—all functioning, with operators in period costumes. All vehicles except the ships, among them Fulton’s steamboat and the Baltimore Clipper, are originals. Baltimore & Ohio R. R.’s ancient Tom Thumb locomotive, a boiler on wheels, leads the way for the Royal Scot. Straight-eight automobiles purr behind the horseless carriages of 1905.

Stretching back beyond the Century of Progress will be a replica of Fort Dearborn (1803), a Lama temple from Jehol imported by Vincent Bendix, a Mayan ruin reproduced after the approximately 700-year-old original in Yucatan by Tulane’s Frans Blom. Climax of the backward time flight is “A Million Years Ago.” On a small rounded mountain a caveman and his woman crouch low while the horrid monsters of King Kong and The Lost World stomp & roar, waggle their heads, lash their tails. New York’s Messmore & Damon, U. S. monopolists on the construction of mechanized monsters, have furnished two dinosaurs, a brontosaurus, a shovel-jawed elephant, a sabre-toothed tiger, a wooly rhinoceros and prehistoric specimens of gorilla, horse, giraffe, giant turtle.

-On the Midway, officially named.for the amusement centre of the 1893 Fair, the visitor will find under new names most of the devices which amused the visitors of 40 years ago. Here are the Lindy Loop, the Hey Dey, Bozo, a roller coaster, Midget Village, captive balloon, shooting galleries, an Oriental village with dancing girls.

Best fun of all is saved for those who will enjoy it most—small boys and girls. For them has been created the five-acre fairyland, guarded by mammoth wooden elephants, which Mrs. Dawes dedicated last week. Children may wander past pleasantly fearsome caves and pirates’ dens, meet a fairy princess, shake hands with a Bagdad giant 7 ft. 7 in. tall. There is a miniature zoo filled with baby animals which, by contract, must be replaced if they show signs of growing up. There is the World’s Largest Marble, seven feet in diameter, in a gleaming house made all of marbles. Forty-seven at a time the Fair’s young visitors may operate a complete miniature railroad system. Or they may thread a hedge maze, speed over 15 miniature amusement rides, see plays, marionettes, animal shows, movies in a Junior League-run theatre.

Admission to the Fair grounds is 50¢ a day (25¢ for children of 12 and under). For persons living within 700 mi. of Chicago it has been estimated they can come, see plenty and get home for $80 each. To see everything would take at least two weeks. Finances. Most amazing fact about the Fair is that it should exist at all. Prodigious indeed is a show on which backers and actors have, in depression years, been willing to spend $27,000,000. Not one cent is a gift from any municipal, state or Federal treasury. When Rufus Dawes and associates took over the Fair idea in 1927 they decided to make it a strictly private enterprise, hold out their hats to no one.

From the South Park Commission, a public body in but not of the City of Chicago, the Fair corporation got free loan of its land. One-fourth was under water, the rest barren lakefront. It will go back to the Commission filled, landscaped, paved. Sale of $10,000,000 worth of bonds, backed by potent signatures and 40% of anticipated gate receipts, paid for some of the Fair’s own buildings. Others were financed by exhibit space sold in advance of building.

Dawes Brothers. Most people know that there are really five Marx Brothers. Few people realize that there are four Dawes Brothers. That is chiefly because Charles Gates, the eldest, swears picturesquely and used to smoke a hubble-bubble pipe.* Only last month he added “To hell with troublemakers” to the list of epitaphs which he has carved for himself upon the public memory. It was for that phrase, a sidelong explosion during an interview with Chicago’s desperate unpaid teachers, that he was burned in effigy last week.†

Obscured by their smoke-screen brother, who approaches 68, the younger Daweses are Rufus Cutler, 65, Beman Gates, 63, and Henry May, 56. Their father, a brevet brigadier general in the Civil War, made a fortune in the iron business, lost it in the panic of 1873, and the four Dawes Brothers were brought up very modestly in the placid Ohio River town of Marietta. They have stuck together in life and business nearly as closely as the four Marx Brothers who stayed out of the clothing business.

They have long had a family corporation, Dawes Brothers Inc., to manage their joint properties. These began to accumulate soon after the Fair of 1893 when Charley Dawes, an up-&-coming young lawyer-politician of Lincoln, Neb., went to Chicago to put the failing Evanston Gas Co. on its feet. In 1927-28 Dawes Brothers Inc. sold control of 15 utilities companies, capitalized at $1,000,000 to $50,000,000 each, supplying 35 cities and towns. Charles Dawes had not acquired and managed all those companies by himself.

In 1897, when William McKinley called him to Washington to become Comptroller of the Currency, Brother Charles called Brother Rufus up from Marietta to run his gas companies. When he came back to found Central Trust Co. of Illinois in 1902, Rufus became cashier. Brother Henry came along a few years later, has been on the job ever since. Brother Beman was the family playboy. The others graduated from Marietta College at 19; Beman did not graduate at all. He organized one of the nation’s great oil companies (Pure Oil), then left most of its management to Henry. Beman preferred to find strange new trees and shrubs for his arboretum near Columbus, Ohio. Both Beman and Henry have had a taste of public life— Beman as a Congressman from Ohio (1905-09), Henry as President Harding’s Comptroller of the Currency.

When Father Dawes’s health began to fail in 1889, it was Rufus who took over his lumber business, saw the family through the next few years, Charley was away in Nebraska, Beman and Henry were too young. Wrote the father in 1890: “Rufus will pull the stroke oar over the coming year in our business. . . . He shows excellent judgment and great capacity.”

Any one of the brothers will testify that “Rufe” has shown those same qualities ever since. Quiet, retiring, the family scholar, he has kept on pulling the stroke oar, a sagely sober counselor and friend to his brothers. He cannot remember off-hand how many utilities companies he has headed. He was economic adviser to the U. S. experts who drafted his brother’s “Dawes Plan,” assistant to Owen D. Young when Mr. Young was Agent General of Reparations. Sir Josiah Stamp has called him one of the U. S.’s greatest economists. Yet until he took the Chicago Fair’s presidency in 1927 his chief fame was as the only man in the world who could handle Charley Dawes.

He never crosses his elder brother, never argues with him; simply lets him explode, then goes ahead to do what should be done. In the early days of the Fair he wanted to allot $10,000 a year for publicity. Cried Charley: “Damn it. just do something. Then the newspapers will publish it. The hell with spending that much money!” Rufus said nothing, allotted the $10,000 when the time came.

Rufus Dawes smokes his pipe right side up. An able public speaker, he dislikes society and ceremony but has had to get used to them in his present job. Tall, long of face and nose, at 65 he is slightly stooped and his grey hair is thinning. His brown eyes twinkle benignly through horn-rimmed pince-nez swung from a black silk ribbon. He picks his suits carefully and well, wears them neatly pressed and with ties more harmonious than Brother Charley’s.

Two of his three daughters and two of his three sons are married. He plays mediocre golf, desultory family bridge, would rather spend an evening reading history or talking international finance with Charles and Henry. He takes his Fair job seriously. Last winter he closed his old remodeled house on suburban Evanston’s lakefront. moved into a town apartment to be nearer the Fair. That is why his Daughter Margaret was married in town instead of Evanston last month.

At the Fair have been two sharply divided cliques—one military, the other civilian. For general manager, Brother Charles picked Lenox R. Lohr, a onetime Major of Engineers who served with him in France. After Major Lohr came many another Army officer, until submerged civilian workers chafed under ‘ Army brusqueness and red tape. Brother Rufus has kept them all in harness and pulling forward so well that the Century of Progress may be one of those rare fairs that is really ready to open on the day advertised.

It was phrasemaking Brother Charles who named the Fair “A Century of Progress” and who, when Samuel Insull bogged down, took over the finance chairmanship. But soon after he got back from Ambassadoring in London he had Reconstruction Finance Corp. to run, and after that a run on his bank to stop, and after that a new bank to build. So Brother Rufus has really done most of the work from all angles. He has not permitted money to be spent until it was in hand, has never let the Fair’s bank balance fall below $1,000,000. As they look over the multicolored Fair buildings and up at the Sky Ride’s soaring towers, Chicagoans know that they really are monuments to Brother Rufus, the quiet member of the Dawes quartet.

*Last week in San Francisco, Calif, died Col. Charles E. Stanton, U. S. A. retired, the soldier who really said, “Lafayette, we are here” and of whom General Dawes says, “He taught me how to swear.”

†Last week Chicago’s 18,000 school teachers and school employes got paid in cash their last September salaries. Some $26,000,000 was still owed them. Mayor Kelly hoped to sell enough tax anticipation warrants this week, and collect enough taxes, to pay school salaries up to Jan. 1.