The Huntress Read online

  In the beginning Patterson’s experience of statehouse politics was much to his liking—the noisy, often raucous speechifying of downstate politicos, the slow-motion give-and-take of lengthy sessions, and then afterward the late-hours camaraderie and tavern talk, almost like a Yale fraternity without the Yale men. For much of that spring the legislature was occupied with the heated issue of Chicago street railways; at the time there existed dozens and dozens of small, mostly inefficient trolley car operators, and inevitably there were the usual forces wishing to consolidate them. Patterson instinctively regarded himself as a man of the people, and soon devoted much energy and many words trying to push forward a populist agenda. But which was the populist agenda? The one favoring small operators? Or the one backing municipal consolidators? Legislative sessions grew noisier and then violent. Fistfights often broke out on the floor. Joe himself was named in a newspaper account for throwing an inkwell at the Speaker, an accusation he accepted noncommitally if not cheerfully, which horrified his wife. “Of course I like him to be working hard,” she wrote her mother, “but not so lathered up, and not letting his good name be trampled in the mud.” But in the end the great street-railway debate led to one of those typical legislative compromises, which didn’t do much to change Chicago transportation one way or the other, but which put Joe Patterson on what he thought to be the wrong side of the fight and sent him back to Chicago, for the time being disillusioned with politics and thankful to have a desk he could return to at the Tribune. By then, too, Alice was pregnant with what her husband felt certain would be their first boy: his son and heir. Not all men in those days placed sons at such a premium, but many did, and certainly Joseph Patterson was one of them.

  Joe Patterson, a very young father, with baby Elinor, ornamentally seated on a table.

  By the time Alice was ready to have her baby, she and Patterson were living on Stratford Place in Chicago, another rental on the not entirely acceptable North Side; which was one among several reasons she moved back into her parents’ huge mansion on Prairie Avenue for her accouchement, as proper people called it, a female ritual best managed in the comforts and cleanliness of a well-appointed home (as opposed to the unsanitary conditions prevalent in most hospitals). Here the Higinbothams’ family physician was in attendance, maids were everywhere, and a young German wet nurse waited in a room down the hall to breast-feed the newborn. In due course, and without notable trauma to Alice, who had the benefit of chloroform, a fine baby girl was produced—in fact, more than fine, everyone agreed: a beautiful, quite perfect little creature. Even Joe Patterson, summoned from his office at the Tribune, doubtless surprised himself a little at his gruff satisfaction with the lovely little female, who was instantly named after his mother: Elinor Medill Patterson.

  Indeed, she would remain remarkably beautiful for most of her long life (and in that one respect at least prove a tough act to follow); although as Joe soon wrote his mother, he was now more confident than ever that their next child would be a boy.

  · 2 ·

  GIVEN THAT JOE PATTERSON was now a father, a family man, there were those—with Alice Patterson surely at the head of the pack—who rather hoped, even assumed, that he might take this opportunity (under his nose, so to speak) as a signal to buckle down after that first false start in Springfield and settle in at the Tribune. His job was on the editorial board, surely a nice level for a young man to begin his employment, and one with the potential for providing a public platform that greatly appealed to him, given his growing interest in populist matters. The Tribune, of course, was not merely Chicago’s leading Republican newspaper (with its editor, Robert Patterson, consequently a major force in the Republican Party) but for decades it had been speaking to and for the so-called sound business interests of the city. Nationally it was considered a topflight paper, employing talented reporters and editors; it had been a pioneer in publishing well-regarded cultural coverage on art and architecture, books, and music; it was also excellent on sports. But one thing it wasn’t, and had never been, was a journal for the masses. Accordingly Joe Patterson’s decision as a junior editorial writer to embrace not only the city’s new Democratic mayor, but also the mayor’s push for city ownership of those blessed street railways, meant that from the start he was in constant conflict, first with his immediate boss, James Keeley, who steadfastly declined to print his editorial submissions, and farther up the line, inevitably, with Keeley’s boss, his own father, an increasingly aloof and taciturn figure whom he rarely saw except at a distance, and who in due course turned out to be having plenty of his own problems.

  It’s worth noting that Joe Patterson wasn’t wrong about the city and its evolving demographics; with the middle class expanding more rapidly than the Tribune elders seemed aware of, with the lower classes becoming steadily better educated and more literate, and with neither group deserving of being abandoned to Hearst. He was also mainly right, as he would often turn out to be, in his intuitions about, and empathy for, ordinary people. But while capable of forward and imaginative thinking, he could also be obstinate and stubbornly righteous in that off-putting way of true believers, stirring up a frothy mix of well-meaning impulse and quick-study certitude, which sometimes played out to those around him as visionary charm, though at other times more like restless instability.

  It also probably didn’t help matters much that, more or less offstage, Patterson’s parents’ own marriage was fast sliding downhill, in a mostly buttoned-up Gilded Age version of marital dysfunction. His father, Robert, by nature grave, hardworking, and undemonstrative (himself the son of another lately deceased Chicago great man: the charismatic Presbyterian preacher Rev. Robert Patterson), had been trying hard to steer the Tribune into the new century without provoking the wrath of Joe Medill’s ghost or the incessant, clumsy interferences of his wife, Nellie, who with her sister, Kate McCormick, was a cotrustee of the powerful Tribune Trust: interferences lately transmitted mostly by telegram, because soon after Joseph Medill’s death she had by and large decamped to Washington, D.C., where on fashionable Dupont Circle she had decreed a mighty pleasure dome (in fact, a twenty-eight-room mansion) to be built by Stanford White, furnished in the grand manner, and intended to at least rival the mansion already erected down the street by her sister, where such bellwethers of Eastern society as Mr. Henry James, Jr., and Mr. and Mrs. Henry Adams had reportedly taken tea. This left Robert Patterson not so much free as duty bound to run the Tribune, by his own choice bleakly domiciled in a hotel room near Chicago’s Loop, where he had the bellboys bring him occasional corned-beef sandwiches from a tavern across the street, also more than occasional pints of bourbon whiskey, which he unfortunately preferred to tea.

  · 3 ·

  BY EARLY 1904 Joe Patterson had taken the hint—surely numerous hints—from senior Tribune editors as to his slim chances of slipping even modestly progressive editorials into the paper. But instead of entirely backing off (as Alice begged him to do, once reminding him to “think about which side your bread is buttered on”), he only shifted tactics, now devoting his energy to producing a less overtly political and more or less consumerist supplement for the Sunday edition, which he was allowed to title the “Workingman’s Magazine”—a four-page insert featuring information and advice for white-collar office workers on such topics as “travelling tips” and “business opportunities”—which was generally well received by readers though scarcely noticed by those on high.

  Then in March came a frantic summons from his mother for him to come immediately to Washington—alone, sans Alice; this was specified—to help out with a new family crisis: the wedding of his younger sister, Cissy Medill Patterson, nineteen years old, with flaming red hair, porcelain-white skin, a piquant slightly upturned nose, and the air and manner (which would stay with her all her life, for better or worse) of the proverbial “wild child.” As an older brother Joe was fond of Cissy and she of him, though neither had much in common beside the bond of siblings in a family of disordered
grownups. Most emphatically she was neither populist nor progressive, nor for that matter much of anything just then beyond determined to be married to a Polish-Russian nobleman by the name of Count Josef “Gigy” Gizycki, more than twenty years her senior, handsome in the then-approved international style of brushed-back hair and waxed mustache, certifiably aristocratic with a castle in eastern Poland, many acres, peasants, horses, debts—and alas very little money—and on the whole with a persona, as one might call it, that seemed fairly to shout a warning to willful nineteen-year-old American heiresses. But Cissy was intent on becoming Countess Gizycka, and had already provoked a first crisis by making a press announcement of her own engagement. The second crisis, following rapidly from the first (and thereby causing Joe’s summons to Washington), stemmed from what might be called a contractual disagreement between the principals, which is to say between the dashing, impecunious Gigy, who expected to be paid for his services—and paid rather well—and Cissy’s parents, notably her father, the morose, moralistic Robert Patterson, who took the position that upstanding Americans neither wished to sell their daughters nor for that matter wanted to buy a son-in-law, even one with an impressively unpronounceable title.

  Joe Medill, founder of the Chicago Tribune, one of the original “Lincoln men,” with his grandchildren: (clockwise) Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson; Medill McCormick; Joseph Medill Patterson; Robert R. “Bertie” McCormick.

  By the time Joe arrived in Washington on the morning of March 4, entering the marbled splendor of 15 Dupont Circle with a valise in one hand and a copy of the “Workingman’s Magazine” in the other (in the hope that his father might finally consent to read it), the Patterson-Gizycki nuptials were in ever-more-serious disarray. The bride was locked in her room upstairs, threatening suicide should the wedding not take place. Somewhere downstairs Nellie Patterson was attempting to placate a Roman Catholic bishop and a trio of priests who had been hastily enlisted, first to consecrate the vast secular edifice by sprinkling holy water about the premises, then to perform the ceremony—a liturgical compromise presumably between the Pattersons’ stern Protestantism and the count’s smoky Russian Orthodoxy. The father of the bride, perhaps understandably, was nowhere to be seen. The putative bridegroom himself was reported to be defiantly incommunicado a mile or so distant, behind the walls of the Russian Embassy.

  Much against his will, or at least his commonsense impulses, Joe was persuaded by his mother (who seemed to have evolved a rather more flexible attitude to dowries than her husband) to take a hansom cab over to the czar’s embassy and there try to arrange a compromise with the haughty Gizycki. This too turned out to be more easily said than done. Joe Patterson, a Yale man and prince of Chicago, was accustomed to a certain high level of American sophistication and behavior. But with Count Gigy and the other Russian aristocrats gathered around him at the embassy, he quickly found himself out of his league. When Patterson showed up in the embassy billiard room, Gigy just laughed at him, and not a kindly laugh either; and when Joe, repeating the family line, told the count that in America they did things differently, Gigy snidely replied to the effect that that was why America was so provincial, so uncultivated, and so on. In the end, for better or worse, an understanding was achieved, which is to say the Pattersons gave in: A “distribution” to Count Gizycki of so many dollars was agreed on, payable in such-and-such a way, according to such-and-such a schedule. Whereupon the wedding took place. The Catholic bishop, assisted by the trio of priests, united the unlikely couple in Holy Roman matrimony; flowers, champagne, and even a wedding cake were produced. However this was still not the end of the drama, for the groom was expecting not merely the promise of future dollars but an actual here-and-now check, a down payment, so to speak. This in turn was the last straw for Robert Patterson, citizen of Chicago and the Middle West, plainspoken son of the Great Presbyterian. He wouldn’t write one; not then, not there. And so, while the new countess was upstairs changing into her traveling clothes, the newly married count turned on his heels and left for Union Station by himself, declaring that he would travel back to Europe without her. As it happened, Nellie Patterson (who already enjoyed being the mother of a countess) had a checkbook handy of her own, with an ample balance. She soon wrote out a check for ten thousand dollars, and once more prevailed on Joe to take another hurry-up hansom cab, this time to the train station, bringing with him both the check and his sister. Which he did, handing both over to his infuriating new brother-in-law and even staying around long enough to wave a sentimental American good-bye to the departing couple.

  —

  IT SHOULDN’T COME as much of a surprise that Countess Cissy’s marriage eventually ended no better than it began; rather worse, in fact, seeing that by then there was a child involved. But that, as they say, is another story for another time. Meanwhile, let us hold for a moment on Joe Patterson, now in his second-class carriage on a Baltimore & Ohio train, heading back to Chicago. As one of those young men (and surely he is still young, though fast growing older) who stoutly claimed how he always liked to learn from his experiences—well, a biographer might unprofessionally wonder what might he have lately learned? That his father’s patriarchal posture was something of a mask, that he can’t even protect himself; that his mother, another character better suited to the stage, is too tightly sewn into her own costume to be of much use to anyone else; that his sister is at once spoiled, beloved, and incorrigible; and that fancy-pants Europeans are no better than one would expect, besides being snootily unreliable witnesses to the American life he cherishes? But possibly he has known much of this already. As the train travels westward into the Pennsylvania twilight, does he stare out the grimy window? Does he read? Read what? Keep in mind, moreover, that he is not really the hero of this narrative, not the key player. In any case the key player is a she, has not been born yet, has not even been thought of, in the way such things are thought of. In the meantime he is here in this story, one might say, to provide context, a kind of ballast. And we also know this about him, because years later, so many years later, his wife (now a grandmother) remembered it: that in his suitcase, which his mother herself had packed, beneath some shirts and whatnot, still perfectly folded, clean, and crisp, lay the same copy of the “Workingman’s Journal” he had brought down and presented to his father, who had returned it to him, obivously still unread.

  · 4 ·

  WHAT SEEMS TRUE of many warring couples, even those who don’t know or won’t admit they’re at war, is how firmly convinced each of the parties remains of his or her own reasonableness; and more and more this became the case with Joe and Alice Patterson. She, all too recently Alice Higinbotham, raised in the sober calm of the Higinbotham household, wherein father, mother, children moved in Newtonian predictability across the domestic universe, on the whole assumed that everyone—at least everyone at a proper social level—observed similar laws of motion. Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t her husband, for instance, be altogether pleased to work in a successful family business, and work hard too, responsibly, in an effort to impress his superiors and gain advancement, and then come home at a decent hour to attend to his wife and child? At the same time Patterson, who had been sent off to boarding school at eight, raised neither by wolves nor exactly by himself, as he traveled through Groton, Yale, and the corridors of his grandfather’s large, empty house, could see no reason why a man—a man such as he—shouldn’t chart his own course, try to do some good in the world, make his mark while making things better. What could be more sensible than that?

  As has been noted, Joe Patterson’s choice of a platform from which to improve the imperfect city around him—the city’s leading conservative newspaper—was a choice unlikely to bring satisfactory results. His editorial ideas continued to be disregarded; next his already small “Workingman’s Journal” was cut down to two pages and then discontinued. At which point Patterson’s response, which might be ascribed to either youthful audacity or sheer bullheadedness, was in effect to do
uble down on his mission of converting the family newspaper to progressive politics. He proposed to the editorial board (whose invisible chief was of course his father) that the Tribune promptly and strongly endorse the new “People’s Candidate,” Democrat George Dunne, in the upcoming mayoralty election; and when the editorial board pointedly declined, Patterson stalked out of the building, leaving behind him a curt message of resignation (a copy of which he walked over and left at the offices of Hearst’s American), and then offered his own services to candidate Dunne.

  After Dunne was elected (by a wide majority) he appointed Joe Patterson his commissioner of public works. Unsurprisingly this new political period posed new challenges to the Pattersons’ strained domestic life. Joe’s loud and queenly mother and Alice’s quiet and not-at-all queenly mother both weighed in with admonitions and concern. For her part Alice was trying hard, after her fashion, to be a stand-by-your-man wife. True, she didn’t often understand Joe’s big ideas, but as a woman of her time she harbored no big ideas herself and thought that a man who did would be bound to amount to something. “Like you, I do sometimes worry about Joe,” she wrote Nellie Patterson, “but I know his heart is in the right place.” What neither she nor either mother nor certainly Robert Patterson expected was that Joe’s first official decision as commissioner of public works would be to enforce a hitherto minor and recondite public ordinance against both the Tribune and its chief advertiser, Marshall Field & Co.

  The regulation in question had to do with allowable storage space below sidewalk level, and until then was something few people had known or cared about. But the areas involved also happened to constitute crucial warehousing space for both the Tribune and Field’s department store: taxable square footage, proclaimed the new public works commissioner, on which city taxes had gone unpaid for years. As can be imagined, rival papers (notably Hearst’s) provided enthusiastic and ample coverage of the crusading efforts by the new commissioner, and of course the “People’s Mayor, “ to recover the several hundred dollars in scandalously withheld taxes from the two establishment delinquents. The issue, such as it was, buzzed along in the public consciousness for almost two months until the other papers lost interest, and then the lawyers took over and the matter once again disappeared from view. But among those close to Joe Patterson, there was not one of them, save perhaps for pretty little Elinor, who didn’t begin to worry that Joe Medill’s grandson (and likely inheritor of a substantial piece of the Tribune pie) might be burning bridges that he would later need to cross.