The Huntress Read online

  Nellie Medill Patterson’s all-purpose answer to many of the problems and puzzlements of marital life—to those tiresome “situations,” as people spoke of them in those preanalytic days—was one she had learned from her parents and shared with her contemporaries. It was to “go abroad,” which inevitably meant Europe in a general sense, though more specifically England and France: the mother ships of empire, those lodestones of culture and shopping, with their great imposing, civilizing capitals of London and Paris. Thus, she proposed directly to Alice, and indirectly to her erratically behaving son, a mother-financed holiday across the Atlantic, with the unspoken hope that the proverbial “change of air” might bring a calming and who knows a romantic effect on the alienated young couple.

  Alice was thrilled; at seventeen she had spent six months at a finishing school at Versailles and sometimes remarked wistfully that she wished she had been born French. As a boy Joe had been on several excursions to Europe with his parents and liked the place well enough, though now as a grown man, with things to do and people to see, he declined the offer. Besides, hadn’t anybody noticed that he was Chicago’s commissioner of public works? But almost immediately his new political career began running into gusty headwinds. Apparently the serious men of the city had been having quiet talks with Mayor Dunne, with the result that the “People’s Mayor” was now having second thoughts about some of his more progressive initiatives, perhaps especially those lately trumpeted by his young public works commissioner. In other words, far from it being a poor idea to take some weeks off from reforming Chicago, it now seemed a fortuitous and timely move. Thus, on September 7, Patterson, Alice, and little Elinor embarked on the Caronia, one of the older White Star steamships, for the seven-day crossing to Southampton.

  · 5 ·

  LONDON IN EARLY AUTUMN 1905 was as impressive as its postcards suggested, which Alice Patterson, seated in the writing room of the Hyde Park Hotel, inscribed in quantity and sent back to Prairie Avenue and nearby addresses. Although Queen Victoria had finally died, her stout, jovial, tirelessly lascivious son, the perennially incumbent “Prince Eddie,” now ruled as Edward VII over an empire at its apogee of power, economic prosperity, and geographical reach. As did many of his own countrymen, Patterson accepted more or less as a fact of life the size, the heft, the sheer theatrical mass of the British Empire. But no longer a Groton schoolboy cheerfully bellowing Anglican hymns, and spending more time in the classroom studying British instead of American history, lately he had come to find the well-bred arrogance of the English, with their ruling-class attitudes and general stuck-upness, almost as oppressive as the czarist aristocracy. As a husbandly tourist he dutifully traipsed around the city with Alice, but his thoughts seemed elsewhere (“Spent the afternoon with J at the National Gallery but suddenly he vanished and was back at the hotel,” she wrote to Nellie, who was herself in Vienna at the time). They took little Elinor to feed the ducks on the Serpentine. One night they went to the D’Oyly Carte Theatre and watched The Mikado, where he embarrassed Alice (as she wrote her sister) by complaining, “not as quietly as he might have thought,” about “the habit of British condescension to the Asiatic races.”

  Matters were not much better after they crossed the Channel and made their way to Paris. He left Alice even more on her own, drifting along the rue Saint-Honoré, looking for chemises and lacework, dropping in on the Luxembourg Gardens to check on Elinor with her mam’selle. Joe seemed not only restless but had become interested to the point of preoccupation with ongoing events in Russia: the six-month-old revolution of 1905, which had been back in the news as students and other revolutionaries mounted renewed protests against the czarist regime. He disappeared for hours to the American Reading Room nearby the embassy, also to the Tribune’s little office on the rue du Louvre. Then seemingly on the spur of the moment, as Alice plaintively described it to her mother-in-law, he packed his “old valise with shirts that should have been with the laundress” and took the night train to St. Petersburg.

  Once there he found what apparently he had been looking for: conflict, danger, a battle between elemental opposites. For the better part of a week, he made his way around the unstable city, with its many youthful dead and green-uniformed, saber-wielding czarist cavalry patrolling the streets. He managed interviews with student revolutionaries, as well as with the newly emerging liberal and socialist politicians who were trying vainly to achieve even a modest level of constitutional reform. In all he produced five creditable articles, a mixture of on-the-spot reporting, interviews, and political analysis, which he arranged to have smuggled out in the U.S. Embassy’s diplomatic pouch (safe from Russian censors), and which were published in the Tribune under the pseudonym “David Macbeth.” Temporarily pleased with himself, he returned to Paris, where Nellie had shown up to take Alice and the baby under her distracted protection, and where Alice, bewildered and angry as she had been at his sudden bolting, now claimed she was glad to have him back.

  · 6 ·

  BY FEBRUARY 1906 Alice Patterson suspected—more or less knew—that she was carrying another child, almost certainly a baby brother for Elinor, and it’s hard to tell when she passed the news on to her husband, whether right away or just as likely not so immediately. Two months earlier, when Patterson had returned from Europe to resume his duties as public works commissioner, he’d found his relations with Mayor Dunne even more strained than before. Earlier he’d somehow assumed that Dunne’s retreat from reform was only a tactical maneuver, a temporary change of plan, and that he would soon resume the offensive against Chicago’s establishment malefactors, and with his righteous commissioner once again at his side. But the offensive was never resumed. Worse still, Dunne summoned Patterson to his chambers and told him directly, and even heatedly, that from now on he should stop working and speaking against the “sound business interests” of the city, and by inference that he should none too slowly align himself with those same interests—the business leaders who paid most of the city’s bills, which of course included the Tribune.

  Patterson’s response was twofold. For a while he stayed at his job, signing forms, inspecting sites, “doing nothing,” as he told his wife—although not exactly nothing, as she well knew. For after office hours, and sometimes instead of returning to the office after lunch, he had started dropping in at the new Socialist Club on State Street, where he began reading Marx, Veblen, and various of the proliferating socialist publications, in the process hanging out with the new political class, as well as doing more than his share of drinking. As the journalist Burton Rascoe later wrote of Patterson in those days: “Young Joe Patterson was all brains, brawn and pep, and tried hard to prove that being brought up wealthy hadn’t made him soft. He’d walk into a rough saloon like Hinky Dink’s and pick a fight with one of the tougher mugs—and of course the other tough mugs would all knock him about and pitch him onto the sidewalk. But he felt he’d made his point.” In April he officially quit his job and resigned from Dunne’s administration, but not without first sending off a pugnacious public letter to the mayor: “You of all people know how many of our laws are obsolete and ridiculous. When Capital says it offers equal opportunity, you know that is a lie. And you also know that any efforts that stop short of Socialism are no better than skin-deep measures.”

  Joe Patterson, “the renegade heir.”

  It was troublesome enough that Joe Patterson had taken a potshot at Chicago’s mayor in the city newspapers, especially in competing papers such as Hearst’s American, which took obvious delight in running with the story. But next, when approached by a Hearst reporter looking for a follow-up, young Patterson more than obliged, unleashing a tirade on an even broader front. “By what right does Mr. Rockefeller enjoy a monopoly on the oil that God put in the ground?” he declared in full voice. “By what right does Mr. Vanderbilt own all those railroads, employing so many thousands of workers, when in fact it’s those workers who support and carry Vanderbilt, and all wealthy capitalists, on their s
houlders?” And then, as if tiring of attacking others, he attacked himself: “Consider my own undeserved good fortune. I can go to the theater or opera any time I like, and sit in the best of seats, but only because my grandfather worked hard for sixty years and left us money.” And: “I own two horses, and have a groom to take care of them, and yet he has to touch his cap to me and call me Sir, despite his being a better horseman than I am, all because he was born poor.”

  Twenty-six-year-old Patterson’s seemingly sudden and all-too-public transformation into a class warrior finally got the attention of his father. Prodded into action by his wife, Nellie (who almost certainly had been sharply elbowed on the subject by Kate McCormick, her older sister and Tribune cotrustee), Robert Patterson initially played the part of the bemused-though-tolerant parent. “Don’t worry about Joe,” he amiably told a gathering of reporters. “He’s all right. He just needs to feel his way around for a while. Young fellows like him have to sow their wild oats. Besides, if all sons thought just like their fathers we should still be in the land of Abraham.” Then, on his way out, he added, “I don’t mind telling you boys, I think Socialism is one of the wildest fanaticisms of the age,” which provoked a burst of sympathetic laughter from the crowd. However, such was the nearly scandalous nature of the story, especially in the context of Chicago’s rule-bound, moralistic establishment, that reporters even sought out Alice Patterson at home, to ask her for a statement about her rebellious husband. Pale and visibly pregnant, she met them at the door, with one reporter describing her as “the most daintily incongruous ideal of a Socialist one could imagine,” while another wrote of “her delicate face and violet eyes, the lady looking like a butterfly poised for flight rather than the wife of one of the city’s most talked-about Socialists.” Loyally the lady declared: “I don’t know much about Socialism but I am sure of one thing. Whatever my husband is, then so am I. If he is a Socialist, I suppose I am one too.” After which she added: “He tried so hard as Commissioner but nobody appreciated his sincerity and effort, and then he received not one word of thanks from anyone in the city. Now he is worn out and exhausted and I hope he will rest for a long time.”

  Instead of resting, or for that matter spending any more time at home than he had to, Patterson only accelerated his political activities. In the process he went back to journalism, though not to the Tribune. In May, to the consternation of his wife and parents, he became editor of the Daily Socialist, a Chicago-based, blue-collar workingman’s journal that at the time was one of the leading advocates for the national political ambitions of former labor agitator Eugene V. Debs. Moreover, it was widely reported that not only would Debs be giving the principal speech at a Sons of Labor July 4 picnic outside Milwaukee, but that one of the preliminary speakers would be a new convert, Joseph Medill Patterson. On the day appointed, warm and sunny, with a large crowd already milling about in the open field where a makeshift platform had been constructed by Sons of Labor carpenters, and around which Joe Patterson was happily consorting in the company of such prominent socialists as Carl Sandburg, Emma Goldman, and the notorious Debs himself, all of a sudden he received a tap on the shoulder by a special messenger from the Chicago Tribune. Alice Patterson, it seemed, had unexpectedly and dangerously gone into early labor, for which she was receiving urgent medical attention. Patterson rushed home immediately, distraught and guilty at having pushed things so far, only to find on his arrival a situation by all appearances far from dire. He ran into the family doctor taking his leave, who seemed as blandly affable as always, pronouncing the patient healthy, with everything normal save for the usual discomforts. Upstairs he found his wife in bed but crocheting, also to his surprise his mother, both of them with the look of coconspirators, pretending astonishment at seeing him home so early, and of course regrets at his having to miss his moment at the socialist rally, both of them equally bad dissemblers.

  If Joseph Patterson was already reluctant (or, some might argue, too restless, innately distracted, or self-involved) to let himself become conventionally domesticated, then his being so clumsily tricked into leaving the July 4 socialist picnic, and before delivering the speech he had put much work into, was almost guaranteed to turn an already disaffected husband into an even looser cannon. Since he could no longer deliver his speech at its intended venue, instead he published it at greater length in the Daily Socialist; and such was its singularly provocative nature that the little newspaper, struggling along with a modest blue-collar circulation, soon began receiving requests for thousands of reprints. “I have not done a particle of productive work, or have added one jot of wealth to the larger community,” Patterson’s statement began, with its odd, arresting mingling of autobiographical mea culpa and upside-down grandiosity. “For I am a member of the Capitalist class, the slave-owning class of the Twentieth Century. The rest of you have served me all my life and unless you wake up to the situation you will continue to do so; and when I am dead you will construct a handsome marble headstone over my head to keep me down.”

  One immediate result of Patterson’s new notoriety was an invitation from the Saturday Evening Post, an important, mainstream national magazine, to expand his piece for wider publication. This he did, and now titled “Confessions of a Drone” (“drone” was a contemporary synonym for a do-nothing social parasite), it appeared in subscribers’ mailboxes across the country to even greater effect, earning its author the sobriquet the “Renegade Heir,” and thus infuriating his parents even more, also worrying his wife, who was far along in her pregnancy and not looking for more trouble. After the Saturday Evening Post piece came more magazine offers. In Collier’s Weekly for a second time he challenged Marshall Field & Company, or more precisely the Field family, on the subject of a recently probated will that showed a failure to pay income taxes. What people at the time called muckraking (and what we now call investigative reporting) was fast becoming popular, and other things being equal, Joe Patterson might have continued in this vein, in the tradition of such journalistic battlers of the era as Frank Norris and Ida Tarbell. But other things are rarely equal, or remain equal for long. On October 16 Alice Patterson finally went into labor, once again in her parents’ large, safe, stable household, and once again with a minimum of duress was delivered of a daughter.

  · 7 ·

  AT LONG LAST the subject of our story has made her appearance, in that upstairs bedroom in the grand Higinbotham mansion on Michigan Avenue. Her name was, or soon would be, Alicia Patterson; that is to say her Patterson surname was clear from the start, although it revealed a certain lack of acclamation at her debut—one might even call it an atmosphere of downright letdown—that her birth certificate stayed incomplete for many years: “Female Child Patterson.” As Alicia years afterward characterized the moment: “No bells rang at my arrival.” Few would have disagreed; indeed, some recollections go so far as to describe the disappointed father thudding down the Higinbotham stairs, then slamming the front door on his way out of the house. Or was it only out of his wife’s birthing room? Or possibly out of all the doors and all the rooms? Again in Alicia’s later words: “Father had much wanted a boy.”

  Fortunately Patterson’s bark was usually (which is not the same as always) worse than his bite. Granted, the new baby was not as compellingly adorable as Elinor, not a showcase, demonstration-level beautiful baby. But it was a healthy kid, however unremarkable, with the right number of fingers and toes, despite of course all too evidently not being a boy. And soon enough Patterson was on companionable terms with the new arrival, referring to her affectionately and a bit abstractly as “Baby”; who in any case, in keeping with the practices of the time, was rarely visible, being nursed offstage, though not by Alice but by a wet nurse hired for the occasion, a young German girl with a baby of her own at home.

  Baby Alicia with her mother, Alice Patterson, and older sister, Elinor.

  Besides, Patterson’s thoughts as usual were elsewhere. He was still committed to socialism and continued to edi
t and write for the Daily Socialist. But he had lately shifted, or rather expanded, his perspective on social justice from urban politics to agrarian reform. In this he was a disciple of sorts of Count Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, who had startled many in his country, beginning with his own family, by leading an idealistic back-to-the-land movement, freeing his two hundred serfs, and trying to institute modern farming methods on his large estate. Patterson himself had no serfs to free, and no estate, large or small, but with Alicia barely three months old, and with Alice and Elinor in tow, plus two domestics and the prospect of hiring another wet nurse from a local farm, he moved his family eighty miles north of Chicago to Madison, Wisconsin. There he installed them in a rented cottage, not far from the campus of the Wisconsin State Agricultural School, in which he had enthusiastically enrolled, so as to learn something about progressive agriculture while he looked around for a farm to buy.