The centennial anniversary of the publication of the 1909 Plan of Chicago has sparked renewed interest in this landmark of Progressive Era urbanism. This essay examines an often neglected legacy of the Plan: its influence on civic discourse. Best known for its City Beautiful vision of Chicago, the Plan and its implementation campaign also provided a powerful object lesson in the effectiveness of new media and techniques of mass communication for constructing a collective civic identity. Even as the Plan promoted a spatial approach to this problem, its promotion advanced a vision of civic unity enacted not through the building arts but through the new arts of selling.
"About the Centennial" and "Vision, Theme, and Objectives,"Burnham Plan Centennial, http://eucip.lib.uchicago.edu/burnhamplan100.html.
2.
Despite recent growing interest, the history of public space has not emerged as a field or even subfield of study. It is, though, a major theme of urban and cultural history. The most comprehensive examination to date of the postwar "commercialization" of public life is Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003). The essays in Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) provide provocative case studies.
3.
Studies of the Plan have generally paid minimal attention to its publicity campaign. In addition to Carl Smith’s recent publication, major works on the Plan include Robert Averill Walker, The Planning Function in Urban Government (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1941); The Plan of Chicago: 1909-1979 (Chicago: Art Institute, 1979); Carl W. Condit, Chicago: Building, Planning and Urban Technology, 1910-1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1973). Roger P. Akeley, Jr., "Implementing the 1909 Plan of Chicago: An Historical Account of Planning Salesmanship" (M.A. thesis, University of Tennessee, 1973) offers the only detailed analysis of Plan publicity.
4.
Theodora Kimball, "A List of American City-Planning Reports," American City (December 1914): 490-97.
5.
Richard E. Foglesong, Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 20-3; Walter D. Moody, What of the City? America’s Greatest Issue-City Planning. What It Is and How To Go About It (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1919), 263.
6.
James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1991 ), 23-44.
7.
F.W. Fitzpatrick , "Beautifying Washington,"Inland Architect (March 1900): 9-14, quoted in Robert Prestiano, Inland Architect: Chicago’s Major Architectural Journal, 1883-1908 ( Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 168.
8.
Proceedings of the First Meeting of the Chicago Plan Commission, November 4, 1909 (Chicago, 1909), 2; Chicago Tribune, July 4 1919, 4.
9.
Daniel Burnham and Edward H.Bennett, Plan of Chicago (Chicago: Commercial Club of Chicago, 1909), 82, 87.
10.
John Robert Mullin, "American Perceptions of German City Planning at the Turn of the Century," Urbanism Past and Present3 (1976-1977): 5-15.
11.
"Proceedings of January 25, 1908,"typescript, Commercial Club of Chicago, Edward Bennett Papers, quoted in Michael P. McCarthy, "Chicago Businessmen and the Burnham Plan,"Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society63 (1970): 247.
12.
Walker, The Planning Function in Urban Government, 243.
13.
Charles Wacker , "Gaining Public Support for a City Planning Movement," in Proceedings From the Fifth National Conference on City Planning (Boston, 1913), 224.
14.
Wacker, "Gaining Public Support for a City Planning Movement,"238; Walter D. Moody, "City-Planning and the Public Schools,"American City (October 1912): 720.
15.
Frederic Howe, The City: The Hope of Democracy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 43; Michael M. Davis, Jr., "Civic Interest Among the People," Survey (November 1906): 258; Marvin A. Farr, "Peril in Class Antagonism," Real Estate News (June 1912): 112; Charles Wacker, "The Plan of Chicago," American City (October 1909): 53; The Presentation of the Plan of Chicago (Chicago: Commercial Club of Chicago, 1910), 29, quoted in McCarthy, "Chicago Businessmen and the Burnham Plan," 256; Charles Edward Merriam, Chicago: A More Intimate View of Urban Politics (New York: MacMillan Company, 1929), 172. On the centrality of space to nineteenth-century urban reform see Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1829-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
16.
Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago ( New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995).
17.
Keith D. Revell, "Regulating the Landscape: Real Estate Values, City Planning, and the 1916 Zoning Ordinance," in The Landscape of Modernity, New York, 1900-1940, eds. David Ward and Oliver Zunz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 19-45; Industrial Chicago, Vol. 1 (Chicago: Good-speed, 1891), 69, quoted in Jordy, Progressive and Academic Ideals, 72; Montgomery Schuyler, "The Sky-line of New York, 1881-1897," Harper’s Weekly (March 1897): 295, quoted in William R. Taylor, "New York and the Origin of the Skyline: The Visual City as Text," Prospects (1988): 235; The Rand, McNally and Company’s Bird’s Eye Views and Guide to Chicago (Chicago, 1983), 137.
18.
William H. Jordy , Progressive and Academic Ideals at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 78, 70-82; Carl Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 33-5.
19.
"Chicago and the Ferguson Fund," City Club Bulletin (February 1914): 67. Neither the Civic Center nor Grant Park were ever developed as imagined in the Plan. The former presumed a degree of public control over land use well in excess at the time of both the police power and the public purse. The later was blocked by Montgomery Ward’s one-man campaign-remarkably successful, at least during his lifetime-to preserve Grant Park as open space. Lois Wille, Forever Open, Clear and Free: The Historical Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1972), 77-9.
20.
Edward Bennett , diary entry, September 25, 1908, quoted in David Dunster, "The City as Autodidact: The Chicago Plan of 1909,"Annals of the Architectural Association23 (Summer 1992): 32.
21.
Proceedings of the Fifth Meeting of the Chicago Plan Commission, March 19, 1912 (Chicago, 1912), 85-7. "Purple Dream" from Henry W. Lee, "The Lake Front Steal,"Address presented before the United States Engineers, Chicago, 13 January 1913, 9; "coterie of millionaires," from G. E. Newcomb , Chicago Replanned, Written by a Plain Chicago Man Who Knows and Loves His Native City (Chicago, 1911), 6. Both quoted in Akeley, "Implementing the 1909 Plan of Chicago," 74, 72.
22.
McCarthy, "Chicago Businessmen and the Burnham Plan," 148-52; "Direct Pleasure Gateway" from the Chicago Tribune, November 15, 1910, 10, quoted in McCarthy, 120; Wacker, "Gaining Public Support for a City Planning Movement," 241. While machine politicians did oppose specific Plan public works that did not serve the immediate interests of their constituencies, according to Joan Draper they were in general big supporters of the Plan, which, despite the Commission’s efforts, did not successfully circumvent "politics." Politicians still managed to manipulate Plan public works for personal and political gain. In the most outrageous instance, mayor William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson (a.k.a., "Big Bill the Builder") for over a decade after his election in 1915 exploited the Plan as an opportunity to fund massive public works projects through bond issues-and, as public hearings eventually revealed, to skim along with Michael J. Faherty (head of the board of local improvements) and George F. Harding (city controller), over $1.7 million in taxpayer’s money. The hearings, which were prominently reported in the press, contributed to the Plan Commission’s declining influence in the 1920s, although this was as much a product of Moody’s death in 1920 and Wacker’s resignation in 1926 as Plan Commission Chair. Joan E. Draper, "Planning Wacker Drive," in Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space, eds. Zeyney Celik, Diane Favro, and Richard Ingersole (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 259-76, 272.
23.
Moody, What of the City?, 403, 359, 394.
24.
Moody, What of the City?, 68, 33.
25.
On the explicitly aristocratic ethos and politics of stewardship of Chicago reformers of Burnham’s generation see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1890s to 1917 ( Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1976); Kathleen D. McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849-1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). On Burnham see Kristen Schaffer, Daniel H. Burnham: Visionary Architect and Planner ( New York: Rizzoli, 2003); Thomas S. Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
26.
Walter D. Moody, Men Who Sell Things (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1908), 158, 168. "All things to all men" from Orison Swett Marden, Selling Things (New York, 1916), 53, quoted in Timothy B. Spears, "‘All Things to All Men’: The Commercial Traveler and the Rise of Modern Salesmanship," American Quarterly 45 (1993): 539.
27.
Moody, What of the City?, 115, 87; Proceedings of the Fifth Meeting of the Chicago Plan Commission, 327; Walter Moody, "Chicago Destined to be the Center of the Modern World," Bank Man (November 1912): 314. On women’s rights activists use of publicity see Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). For a contemporary account of municipal improvement groups’ use of the press see J. Horace McFarland, "The Nationalization of the Civic Improvement," Survey (November 1906): 229-34. Moody’s calculation of the value of press coverage apparently operated on the principal that all publicity was good publicity, as not all newspaper coverage of the Plan was positive. For example, when Mayor Busse appointed Chicago Federation of Labor President John Fitzpatrick to the Plan Commission, the Chicago Tribune (November 4, 1909) reported that he refused to serve; his views did not accord "with any preconceived plan to boost commercial and industrial interests" while these remained "based on profits alone." He further criticized the Plan for concentrating on "superficialities" while leaving "fundamental problems of life and happiness" unresolved.
28.
Walker, The Planning Function in Urban Government, 236, 237 ; Proceedings of the Ninth Meeting of the Chicago Plan Commission (Chicago, 1913), 41; Moody, "City Planning and the Public Schools,"720.
29.
Moody, What of the City?, 103; "The Plan of Chicago: An Illustrated lecture by Walter D. Moody,"lecture circular, n.d., Chicago Historical Society, Chicago , Illinois.
30.
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Meeting of the Chicago Plan Commission, May 16, 1914 (Chicago, 1916), 829; Herbert Swan, "The Use of Moving Pictures in City Planning," in Proceedings of the Thirteenth National Conference on City Planning (Boston, 1921), 183-86; Proceedings of the Nineteenth Meeting of the Chicago Plan Commission (Chicago, 1920), 1030.
31.
Moody, What of the City?, 82, 74; Walter D.Moody, Teacher’s Handbook: Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Plan Commission, 1911), n.p.
32.
Daniel Burnham to Charles Moore, August 23, 1901, February 1, 1902, and February 10, 1902, Burnham Papers, Art Institute of Chicago, quoted in Thomas S. Hines, "The Imperial Mall: The City Beautiful Movement and the Washington Plan of 1901-1902," in The Mall in Washington, 1791-1991, ed. Richard Longstreth (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1991), 89.
33.
Wacker, "Gaining Public Support for a City Planning Movement," 242; Chicago’s Greatest Issue, 76. Moody’s tactics were consistent with the new psychology of advertising advanced by men such as Chicago’s own Walter Dill Scott, directory of psychology at Northwestern University. What made Moody’s work exceptional was his application of advertising psychology to a political campaign. Not until the WWI Committee on Public Information-which drew heavily on advertising industry talent- would a promotional campaign demonstrate comparable sophistication. Walter Dill Scott, The Psychology of Advertising (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1913; 1908). On the subordination of rational to emotional appeals in advertising techniques of persuasion see Stewart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001; first published 1976), 31-40.
34.
Hooker, "A Plan for Chicago ," 779; C.H. Reilly, "Town Planning Schemes in America,"Town Planning Review1 (1910): 56.
35.
"Address by Managing Director Walter D. Moody," in Annual Report, 1913, 433-67; Moody, What of the City? , 103.
36.
Wacker, "Chicago Beautiful Plan,"525, quoted without reference to publication or date in Akeley, "Implementing the 1909 Plan of Chicago,"120; Bennett, et al., "The Use of Moving Pictures in City Planning,"183, 184.
37.
Indeed, actual cultural institutions began intentionally to leave downtowns in the 1920s because of this problem.Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001 ), 196. For an analysis of the influence of the Plan on the development of North Michigan Avenue see John W. Stamper, Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue: Planning and Development, 1900-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Lewis Mumford, Report of the Committee on Community Planning to the Fifty-Eighth Annual Convention (New York: American Institute of Architects, 1924), reprinted in Roy Lubove, ed., The Urban Community: Housing and Planning the Progressive Era (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967), 124.
38.
Cecil C. Evers, The Commercial Problem in Buildings ( New York: Record and Guide, 1914 ), 37-40; Mumford, Report of the Committee on Community Planning, 130, 116; Walker, The Planning Function in Urban Government, 227. Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 31.
39.
Mumford, Report of the Committee on Community Planning, 125. City park development also contributed to the exclusivity of Grant Park-Chicago’s "front yard"-and other lakefront parks. In 1899 Mayor Carter H. Harrison created a Special Park Commission to purchase land and build recreational parks in the city’s crowded tenement districts, a move that provided residents opportunities for recreation within their own neighborhoods-and kept them out of the large monumental parks. Michael P. McCarthy, "Politics and the Parks: Chicago Businessmen and the Recreation Movement," Journal of the Illinois Sate Historical Society 65 (Summer 1972): 161-64.
