Chicago Renaissance

CHICAGO RENAISSANCE. For the purposes of the Left, the Chicago Renaissance, dated roughly from 1912 to 1925, highlighted leading radical poets and writers of the time. Poets Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay and novelists Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson offered stark views of American reality and hopes for social transformation.

Chicago newspapers had already advanced social criticism in the humor of Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade and Eugene Field early in the century. A decade later, the press helped spawn little magazines such as Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, and the Friday Literary Review. The Jungle (1906) written by outsider Upton Sinclair about the meat-packing industry in Chicago and serialized in the Appeal to Reason drove the industrial, realist point home in ways that no American socialist writer had yet managed to do.

Theodore Dreiser was a giant of gritty socialistic realism who remained a central literary figure for decades, but Sherwood Anderson captured something different and also widely shared. The American small town had been idealized, increasingly at odds with the power of the cities to pull young people away, but also increasingly exposed as run by bankers and others finding ways to legalize their exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. Eugene Debs’s intimate friend James Whitcomb Riley, like Debs from railroad town Terre Haute, Indiana, dealt with this issue by romanticizing past settings and social relations to the great enjoyment of a large, sentimental readership. Edgar Lee Masters, barely more than a generation later, took the opposite tack. The Spoon River Anthology, first published in 1917, in manuscript form reputedly much more radical than in print, savaged the small-mindedness of village life and articulated the widespread sense of alienation. Writing from Chicago, Masters captured Americana so brilliantly that his reputation has continually spread around the world.

Masters’ protege Vachel Lindsay, living in Springfield, Illinois, captured in “BRYAN BRYAN BRYAN BRYAN” about the 1896 campaign for the presidency, the sense of midwestern hope and despair in his evocation of John Peter Altgeld, who had pardoned the surviving Haymarket Martyrs.

Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth
Whose name the few still say with tears?
Gone to join the ironies with old John Brown
Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.

Lindsay’s “Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket” would never be so famous except perhaps among the Eugene Debs faithful. Both Lindsay and Masters had written poetry about Johnny Appleseed, epitomizing the hopes of finding a different outcome to the settlement of the Midwest, a lost highway of American life.

Sandburg, the most famous of all, drifted from youthful socialism to liberalism and the massive saga of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg’s early evocations of Chicago industrial life stirred socialists and made major waves in American poetry circles until discarded by subsequent modernists.

One literary critic and editor stands out above the rest in the Chicago Renaissance, although his role was relatively brief. Floyd Dell, moving from Davenport, Iowa to Chicago in 1908, played a leading role at the nationally-distributed supplement of the Chicago Evening Post, the Friday Literary Review, praising and promoting the writers setting the pace for something new and exciting. In 1913 he moved to New York, finding his destiny at the Masses magazine, barely avoiding a federal indictment and eventually becoming a major figure in the self-celebration of Greenwich Village.

Some critics regard Booth Tarkington as an extended member of the Chicago Renaissance. Best known for The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), Tarkington wrote fiction about the rise of the auto industry, the consumer debt economy, the rise of remote suburbs and the destruction of mass transit as shattering the economy and life of small towns. The final volume in the trilogy, which he titled simply Growth (1923) and championed by Orson Welles as some of the best American social criticism in twentieth-century fiction, remains undeservedly obscure. Another Chicago literary renaissance during the 1930s brought attention and inspiration to such leftwing writers as James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright. Likewise emerging during the 1930s, the “Chicago Black Renaissance,” including Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and a host of musicians, painters and other creative artists, was to play an important rise in the civil rights movement during the 1940s-1950s, with many links to the Chicago Left.

Kramer, Dale. Chicago Renaissance: The Literary Life in the Midwest, 1900-1930. New York: Appleton-Century, 1966.

Smith, Carl S. Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984.