THE CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB

 

FEBRUARY 23, 2004

 

“THE INEFFECTIVE HAND OF THE DEAD”

 

OR

 

“THE CRANE SIBLINGS’ SUPPORT OF THE ARTS”

 

PREFACE – THE INFLUENCE OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS

 

            Well into my research for this paper, in a quality used book store in Denver, I stumbled across a copy of a book by Hamlin Garland - My Friendly Contemporaries – A Literary Log – [1932] –his third volume of autobiographical musings based upon a review of his own diaries – this one covering the years of 1913-1923.  Garland had been the first President of The Cliff Dwellers and has been credited with its founding and organization.  Of our own Chicago Literary Club, Garland was, never, a member.

[His two prior autobiographical volumes were Roadside Meetings and Companions on the Trail.]

 

            Within the first few pages of his Literary Log, I found:

 

            “[In 1913,] The Cliff Dwellers, a union of workers in the fine arts that I had originated in 1907, was still active, and, as its chairman, I continued to give it much of my time while in the city.  It was my habit to lunch there and, afterward, give an hour to its affairs.  . . .  To its dining room, every passing artist, author and musician was brought.  . . .  [I]t was a meeting place for men whose lives were concerned with literature, painting, sculpture, architecture and music.  . . .  .”  [at p. 2]

 

In 1915, however, Garland, resigned his Presidency;  he had decided to remove his literary efforts from Chicago to what he perceived to be the greener pastures of Manhattan:

            “It may be counted a weakness, but I was no longer content to live the life of a literary pioneer.  I came to Chicago in 1893, and I had aided, so far as I could, to build up the aesthetic and literary side of the city’s life.  . . .  In preparation for my removal, I resigned the Presidency of The Cliff Dwellers,  . . .” 

______________________

 

Copyright – John K. Notz, Jr. (2004)
            “[The Cliff Dwellers] has proved a pleasant meeting place for the men engaged in some form of art, but it is, now, mainly used as a lunch room for painters and musicians.  Few men of letters are to be seen there.  The truth is, we have been forced to scrape the town, to keep up our membership, voting in beginners in the arts and hard-working newspapermen – all admirable in their way, but not very distinguished – just as similar organizations in other cities have been forced to include reporters and space writers.  Chicago is only a larger town.  Architects and music makers are increasing in power, but our workers in creative literature are diminishing in number.  . . .”  [at pp. 25-31]

 

            “On my return to Chicago [in 1914], I was sufficiently at home to meet with a committee to organize a society for Western writers for which I suggested the name “The Midland Authors”.  There was no association of this kind in the West, and, in the normal course of development, such a society was due.”

 

            “[Among others,] Hobart Chatfield-Taylor and I were present.  . . .  By reaching out into Iowa and Wisconsin and back into Indiana and Michigan, a very respectable list of eligibles was made up;  but I was only half-hearted in the attempt, as I have seen The Cliff Dwellers dwindle to a small group.  . . .  ‘Some time, Chicago will be an important literary center,’ I said to Chatfield-Taylor, ‘but not in your time or mine.  Without a first-class publishing house or magazine, how can it hold its writers and artists?’  ‘It can’t, and it won’t,’ he replied.”  [at p. 29]

 

            Running my eyes through the remarkably detailed Table of Contents of his Literary Log – as there is no Index – I found Garland to have been an inveterate dropper of names;  however, he redeemed himself for me, when he referred to “Crane’s dinner” – meaning that his Literary Log would contain something about a dinner at which he was a guest of a Mr. Crane.  I found:

            “Dining with Charles R. Crane [in 1914]   . . .  Herbert Hoover was one of the guests and presented himself in a highly critical mood.  I could not learn of the cause of his dissatisfaction, and I cannot recall anything he said at the dinner,  . . .”  (at p. 284 – emphasis supplied)

 

While Garland went on to describe his own conversation with Hoover;  my interest in Hoover is pale, compared to my interest in the host, Charles R. Crane.  Crane has been, for several years, a research target for me, to whom I return, again and again.  I read on:

            “Charles R. Crane, who had been so helpful to me in Chicago, had taken an apartment in New York, and, one evening [in 1915, my editor] and I went to call on him.  I made this notation of our interview:

 

            ‘Crane is an amazing character.  He is very close to the source of national power just now.  [President Wilson] is making use of him in an advisory capacity.  As we came away, [my editor] suggested to me that I do a character study of him  . . .    I may do it, for I have had many opportunities of seeing him in action.”  [at p. 66 – emphasis supplied]

 

                        [Garland never wrote that character study.]

 

There was one other reference to Crane:

 

            “Dining with Charles R. Crane [in 1921], I met a man whom Crane introduced as ‘Paul Miliukof, the greatest living Russian’.  He was a sturdy, white-haired man with a gentle and very sad face.  His voice was low and, in all of his talk, I could detect no bitterness, no hate, and, yet, Crane said, ‘He has been through Hell’s tortures for the past five years.’"

 

            “He told us that he got out of Russia just half an hour before Lenin gave orders for his arrest.  . . .  He was to have been the President of the Russian Republic, but, instead, he is in exile, with no hope of ever returning to his home.”

 

            “[Miliukof’s] reluctance to talk forced Crane into action.  . . .  [As Crane talked,] Miliukof listened gravely,  . . .  As I studied him, I recalled my enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution, when it seemed that he or someone like him could be its ruler.  I began to understand his failure.  . . .  I, afterward, said to Crane, ‘He is too gentle to deal with ruthless adversaries.’”  (at pp. 377-378 - emphasis supplied)

I have found that, for Crane to have been on such friendly terms with one of the most important Russians of the first 20 years of the 20th Century, was but a tip of the iceberg of Crane’s international contacts.

            I have read a good deal of Crane’s correspondence and autobiographical material that is in The Butler Library of Columbia University.  A vast amount is there, and more is following.  My sources who speak of Crane have remarked to me, “The man deserves a competent biography.”  While I agree that he does, this paper is designed only to give you a sense of the aesthetic tastes of the man, relative to those of his siblings.

            My own aesthetic taste has, for many years, included the Art Nouveau work product of the great Czech artist Alphonse Mucha.  I have, for years, without knowing that Mucha had made a name for himself here in Chicago during The World’s Columbian Exposition and teaching at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago during the first decade of the 20th Century, enjoyed Mucha’s joyous, sensuous paintings of women of that time, all of which, as posters, have become valued collectibles.

            Several years ago, my wife and I took a canal boat tour on the Elbe River from near Prague to near Berlin.  We flew into Prague a few days early.  I had read of the then brand new Mucha Museum in Prague.  We made a point of going to it, finding, to our delight, that it contains as good a representation of all of Mucha’s life history and work product that I could have wished.  Indeed, its bookstore had an unusually good selection of books on Mucha, in English.  (Needless to say, I read no Czech.)  I bought several;  I read a good portion of them during the course of our ensuing canal boat tour.

            I was startled to read in one that Mucha had had extraordinary financial support during much of his career from a “prominent Chicago industrialist”, especially late in his life, while he was creating the Slav Epic tableaux of which I had not, previously, heard.  It struck me that, if that man were neither Charles Hutchinson nor Martin Ryerson, he had to have been a friend of theirs.  And who had tipped that Chicago industrialist to Mucha?

            After my return to Chicago I found this man to have been Charles Richard Crane - once of Chicago – who was, himself, sufficiently well-connected to have arranged, in 1900, for a personal private call upon the Tsar of Russia at his private estate near St. Petersburg, known as Tsarskoë, for President William Rainey Harper of The University of Chicago, Martin Ryerson and Charles Hutchinson, in their capacities as the principal officers of The University, to promote the development of the teaching of Slav culture and languages at The University of Chicago.

            This paper concentrates on “the support of the arts”, by, on one hand, the eldest Crane brother – Charles – who set an example followed by one sister – Frances – and, on the other, by the youngest Crane brother, Richard, Jr. (through his wife), who set an example for another sister – Emily.  This paper contrasts the support by one brother (and one sister) of cutting edge living artists with the support by the other brother (and one sister) of dead artists – a contrast between support of the modern and support of the traditional - a contrast similar to that made by Leonard Eaton, in his Two Chicago Architects – in which he compared of the clients of Frank Lloyd Wright to those of Howard Van Doren Shaw.

INTRODUCTION

            As many of you know, I find much of the subject matter for my papers ‘round and about Geneva Lake, WI.  For tonight, I focused on a family there – the Cranes – of whom I have not, previously, made mention to you.

            The progenitor Crane, responding to the recommendation of his middle son, “Bert”, acquired Geneva Lake property in the 1870’s, and had, in 1898, persuaded Ryerson to buy “in his neighborhood”.  In 1901, Ryerson persuaded Hutchinson to do the same.

            Geographically, the Crane Family property was between those of two men of whom I have spoken to you in the past:  Edward Uihlein, on the West End, and Charles Hutchinson, on the North Shore, towards the East End.  Of these men, the Crane progenitor – Richard Teller Crane of Chicago – arrived at Geneva Lake, first – in 1879.  Uihlein did not arrive until 1899;   Hutchinson did not arrive until 1901.

            Richard Crane founded Chicago’s Crane Company – not the fine paper maker of New England – but the fine plumbing and valve maker of Chicago, that used to operate from property located on 12th Street (now Roosevelt Road), between the South Branch of the Chicago River and Canal Street, and he procreated a large family – seven sons and daughters that lived to adulthood.

            At Geneva Lake, four Crane houses were constructed on Crane’s Jerseyhurst estate – the first having been built for use by Crane and his brother Charles, who is not to be confused with his son, Charles;  this brother of Mr. Crane died early;  this is the last that you will hear of him.) The other three houses were built as wedding presents for Richard Crane’s children, one for Charles, who married in 1889.

            In contrast to Uihlein (who used and promoted his German-American friends’ use of Jens Jensen) and to Hutchinson (who used and promoted his Yankee friends’ use of John Olmsted - the remarkably competent elder son of Frederick Law Olmsted), the progenitor Crane used no landscape designer and used no known architect for the construction of the four residences and the many outbuildings of Jerseyhurst.  In the late 1800’s, most personal residences were constructed without the assistance of an architect;  as I have found no mention of the involvement at Jerseyhurst of such a professional, I surmise that the four Crane houses were, all, owner-designed and contractor built.

[In recent years, Mr. and Mrs. Dean Griffith of Griffith Laboratories have reassembled much of the Crane property and have arranged for intelligent and thoughtful naturalistic restoration of the wooded areas.  It is not within the scope of this paper, for me to comment on whether the Griffiths are coming closer to emulating Jensen than Olmsted.]

            For years, I had heard the Crane name ‘round and about Geneva Lake.  In June of this past year, in connection with a celebration of the 27 Founders, in 1915, of Lake Geneva’s Horticultural Hall, I was asked to try to find all their descendants living within a reasonable drive of Lake Geneva, in order that they could be invited.  Richard Crane had been one of the 27.  I could find but one such Crane descendant - my immediate next door neighbor.  While there is no other living Crane descendant known to me to be living in the Chicago area, there are many interred in the large Crane family plot in Lake Geneva’s Oak Hill Cemetery, and a few interred in the Richard Crane, Jr., mausoleum in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery.

            Per the 1911 edition of The Book of Chicagoans – the then Who’s Who of Chicago – published shortly prior to his death, the progenitor Crane owned all of the Crane Company.  His eldest son - Charles - was its sole First Vice President;  the middle son, “Bert” was not mentioned;  a son-in-law was its Treasurer;  another son-law had been an executive of the Crane elevator operations, but he had gone on to the Otis Elevator Company in 1898, when the Crane elevator operations were sold to Otis.  The youngest – by sixteen years - son – Richard, Jr. - was the sole Second Vice President.  The Will of Mr. Crane, Sr., filed with the Clerk of the Probate Court of Cook County, after making provisions for his third wife and for his other five children, left Charles and Richard equal shares of the Crane Company.

            The next edition of Marquis’ The Book of Chicagoans (1917) reflected that Charles Crane succeeded Mr. Crane, Sr., as President of the Crane Company, but he had sold his entire inherited share to his youngest brother.  The price was $15,000,000 – which is some $300-$400,000,000, in today’s money - and had left the Crane Company in 1914.  The youngest  brother had succeeded him.  There appears to have been differences between these two brothers;  Charles solved those differences by selling out.

            Charles’ withdrawal to his other interests could have been foretold by a 1909 event.  Then President Taft appointed him as U.S. Minister to China.  On Charles’ way to assume his post, when in Japan, he was outspoken on behalf of Chinese interests, in a manner from which the Japanese Government took offense.  Wall Street interests favoring those of Japan, took their cause to Taft’s Secretary of State, Philander Knox, leading Knox to express a lack of confidence in Charles.  Charles took the issue to Taft.  When Taft declined to support Charles, Charles tendered his resignation, which was, immediately, accepted.

            Taft and his Wall Street Republican supporters of Japan’s interests, soon, had a bitter pill to swallow, as Charles, already a great Progressive, by-passed TR’s Bull Moose campaign, to become Woodrow Wilson’s largest financial supporter (and a confidant).  In time, Wilson reappointed Charles U.S. Minister to China, which role Charles performed, with distinction, until his tenure was ended by the expiration of Wilson’s last term of office.

            While Charles became noted for his frequent refusal to comply with urgings from his own State Department, he was no amateur diplomat.  In the late 1800’s, he had started substantial manufacturing operations for the Crane Company in Russia.  Charles turned his Russian experiences into his sole paper for our Club, titled Russia.  Hutchinson’s version of his call, with Charles, on the Tsar was turned into another paper for our Club that Hutchinson read in various other Chicago venues, as well.

(A copy of Charles’ paper may be among his papers in The Butler Library, as no copy came to light during the preparation of our Club’s recently published history of its first 125 years.); Hutchinson’s paper survives in among those of his papers that are in The Newberry Library.]

            Both Crane brothers left the operation of Jerseyhurst to their step-mother and to their siblings.  Charles took his ensuing Summers in Woods Hole, MA, South of Boston.  Richard, Jr., took his in Ipswich, on Boston’s North Shore.   It seems that they wished to distance themselves from each other.

            In business, Richard, Jr., stayed in Chicago and ran the Crane Company until his 1931 death, at age 58, which occurred as the Crane Company was starting to suffer from The Great Depression. 

            Charles “did his own thing”, leaving Chicago, virtually simultaneously with the departure of Garland - each man reaching for a complete change of life.  In the Geneva Lake area and in Chicago, Charles is forgotten;  in Woods Hole, he remains honored.  As for Garland, he is honored only here at The Cliff Dwellers;  in Manhattan, he is forgotten;  Hollywood, CA, was where he died.

            THE PROGENTITOR - RICHARD TELLER CRANE - AND HIS PROGENY

“THE MAN WITH THE HAND”

            The progenitor Crane had three wives – the first two having been sisters – but all of his children were from his first marriage.  His eldest son was Charles;  the middle son was Herbert, known as “Bert”;  and the youngest son was Richard, Jr.  “Bert” became a sportsman, seemingly uninterested in the arts, and, seemingly, never even employed by the Crane Company.  I have found no biographical record of “Bert”, other than that he was a fine sailor and yachtsman, having a primary home in St. Charles, IL.  In addition to one of the four houses at Jerseyhurst, “Bert” designed the first of his father’s two steam launches (both named Passaic).  “Bert” vanishes from my paper, at this point.  Each of the four sisters was a distinct personality;  two – Frances and Emily - figure in my paper.  As I have not come across useful information relating to the other two sisters – Kate and Mary – I suspect that their interests were in their more numerous children and in their own lives.  Neither Kate nor Mary figure, further, in this paper.

            In 1908, four years before his 1912 death, but not as a part of his Will, Mr. Crane, Sr., signed a long witnessed document containing advice to his children that included:

My children know that I have been doing considerable in the line of charity, and it is my hope that they will continue the work which I have started;  also, that they will confine their charities solely to the lines which I have always supported, and never do anything in directions that I consider to be largely ornamental or artificial – such as higher education, higher music, or higher art.”

 

Such an instruction is known as “An Exercise of the Hand of the Dead”.

            This is not to say that Mr. Crane was not generous;  he was;  however, the targets for his generosity were his employees and their families:

“. . .  [M]y idea of charity is to help the lower strata almost exclusively.  Also, that charity should begin at home, and, therefore, we should look after our own help and workmen, as we are doing, and we should increase the work we are doing in this respect, when it is clear that we can afford to do so, and where it is deserving – especially among those who are unfortunate:  that is, the sick, disabled, or aged.”

            Well ahead of his time, Mr. Crane used a profit-sharing plan covering all of his employees, and he funded the support of families of his employees who were disabled, retired or had died.  Since there was no income tax during the rise of the Crane Company under Mr. Crane, and he owned all of the Crane Company, his generosity to his employees came, 100%, out of his own pocket.  Profit sharing plans for other than top management did not become wide-spread until deferred compensation plans became tax-favored and the belief arose that they could be employee motivators.  Employee fringe benefits that cover medical costs, death, disability and retirement did not become wide-spread until World War II, when they were a means of by-passing Wage Control restrictions on compensation.  Now, but not in the Cranes’ time, corporate governance and tax policies encourage all such forms of compensation.

            Mr. Crane was a self-made man who saw no merit in education acquired other than by personal experience.  Beyond the 1908 written instructions to his children, Mr. Crane, a man without any formal education, was out-spoken, during that entire decade, in public, articulate in his condemnation of formal education, including published papers bearing the following titles:

The Utility of All Kinds of Schooling;

The Utility of All Kinds of Higher Schooling –  . . .  ;

The Demoralization of College Life – Report of an Investigation at                         Harvard  . . .  ;

The Futility of Higher Schooling; and

The Futility of the Technical, Industrial, Vocational and Continuation                    Schools

 

[NOTE:  There is an unsympathetic review of those papers by Abigail Loomis, titled Richard Teller Crane’s War with the Colleges, in The Chicago Historical Society’s CHICAGO HISTORY (1982).]

 

Elsewhere, Mr. Crane is said to have said:  “I would, rather, put my money into a scheme for spreading small pox than support a law school.”  The medical profession fared no better.  Mr. Crane did, however, provide the funding for what became the first Crane Technical High School, on Chicago’s Near West Side, but, as a result, he was accused of doing no more than facilitating public support of training for potential Crane Company employees.

[NOTE: This school’s architecturally sound, extant, building was built in 1928, well after Mr. Crane’s death.]

 

            When I learned of Mucha’s support by a Chicago Crane, I knew only of a Richard Crane – the man recognized, today, by The Crane Altar and The Crane Bells of Chicago’s St. Chrysostom’s (Episcopal) Church, where I have been a Vestryman,  and a large mausoleum on a prime site in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery, where I am a Trustee.  This Richard Crane married Florence Higinbotham - the daughter of Harlow Higinbotham - the partner of Marshall Field that had been volunteered by Field to be in charge of The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and who was, for many years, thereafter, the President of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.

[As a result of his contacts with Daniel Burnham during The World’s Columbian Exposition, Higinbotham was a great promoter of the use of Burnham, the consequences of what Higinbotham did, using Burnham in and around Joliet, IL, is beyond the scope of this paper, nor is the contrast between his taste and that of his son, who, likely at the suggestion of Charles Hutchinson, used a Prairie School architect – Robert Closson Spencer, Jr., for his own Joliet area home – Harlowarden.]

            Richard, Jr., had used “Rick” Olmsted of the Olmsted Brothers firm, to site, and to design landscaping for, the structures on a vast estate in Ipswich, MA, using Charles Coolidge of the Shepley Firm of Boston for the design of the first country house there, and David Adler of Lake Forest, for its replacement.  It is known as “Castle Hill”.  (“Country house” is quite an inadequate phrase for that remarkable residence, its outbuildings and its landscape, which are publicly accessible, as they are controlled, today, by the Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations – that state’s large preservation organization.)

CHARLES CRANE

            In contrast to the use by Richard, Jr., of Olmsted, Coolidge and Adler, Charles Crane used William Purcell and George Elmslie of Purcell & Elmslie - Prairie School architects of Minneapolis – for “The Bradley House”, in Woods Hole, MA – the architecturally-famed “Airplane House”.  Charles was Josephine  Bradley’s father;  this was the second of three houses that Charles caused to be built for his hearing-impaired daughter, who had married an impecunious college professor.  The first had been in Madison, WI, designed by Louis Sullivan. In the course of its construction, however, Sullivan, as he was too prone to do to his clients, had given Charles offense.

[It is, now, a college fraternity house.  That offense had as serious consequences for Sullivan has had the offense given Charles by President Taft, described hereinafter.]

Consequently, the second of the houses for Josephine – that known as “The Airplane House” - was designed by Purcell & Elmslie.  “The Airplane House” is such a distinctive Prairie School structure that it was selected by Allen Brooks for the cover of the 1996 reprint of his seminal book on The Prairie School.  The third house for the Bradleys, again designed by Purcell & Elmslie, is extant, in Madison – much modified, I am told.

            A couple of years ago, I had occasion to be in Boston, with enough time to make a side trip to Woods Hole, to see “The Airplane House” for myself, live, rather than in photographs or drawings.  I had been told that it was no longer in the Bradley Family and that it was at risk - capable of a remodeling, if not demolition.  I arrived in Woods Hole in moonlight-less darkness, turned myself into a motel and was awakened by the rising sun.  I opened the blinds, to see “The Airplane House”, directly in front of me, across a small bay.  With a telephoto lens, I could have taken satisfactory photographs of it from the motel window in which I stood.  I walked out to and onto the peninsula that is its location and along its property line, took some photographs and went off to the local Historical Museum, to see what I could learn of it.  There, I found far more than I could absorb in this first visit, including:

(1)  With an advance appointment, I could visit the interior of the house (which I will do in April, under the auspices of The Society of Architectural Historians);

(2)  The Bradleys’ “Airplane House” is immediately next door to Charles’ extant house, which is, still, occupied by two of his grandsons;

(3)  Mrs. Bradley’s father was the same man who had been financing Mucha, and he was equally prone to finance other nontraditional artists;

(4)  Charles had been the most prominent citizen that Woods Hole had, ever, had, with an artistic sun-dial memorial to him in Woods Hole’s waterfront park;

(5)  Charles had had a sister whose husband was the second most famous citizen that Woods Hole had, ever, had - Frank Lillie, the Director, for many years, of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and a renowned Professor of Zoölogy at The University of Chicago;

(6)  Lillie’s wife - the former Frances Crane – had, herself, been extraordinarily generous in Woods Hole, especially, to its St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church;  and

[Then, her involvement in Roman Catholicism surprised me, but, in time, I learned better; she was an enthusiastic convert, over the objections of all her family other than her brother Charles.]

(7)  The Lillies had lived in Hyde Park and had given their home there to The University of Chicago, for its use as a nursery school.

I left for Chicago, having ordered a great many photocopies of documents that I had, only quickly, skimmed, and having learned that papers of Mrs. Lillie and of the Crane Company are in the archives of The Chicago Historical Society.

            Shortly after my return, I happened to hear Vince Michael of The School of The Art Institute talk on the some-time Prairie School architect Francis - Barry - Byrne.  Vince surprised me, when he related that Frances Lillie had been a most generous patron of Byrne, funding St. Thomas the Apostle Roman Catholic Church in Hyde Park, its reredos - designed by Alfeo F’Aggi - and its Stations of the Cross - designed by Alphonso Ianelli.

(The two “sprites” behind me, as I talk - on loan to The Cliff Dwellers from Seymour Persky – were designed by Ianelli for Chicago’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Midway Gardens.)

            Some months later, I returned to Woods Hole, to take my fill of photographs of the exterior of The Airplane House and of the Charles Crane House, from their water sides.  I, also, paid a call at the Charles Crane house, meeting Tom Crane, one of Charles’ grandsons, who told me of the availability of his grandfather’s and his father’s papers in The Butler Library at Columbia University.

 [Then, knowing nothing of Charles’ support of the Slavs, I did not appreciate the relevance of the nationality of the Russian woman in charge of access to those papers.]

            Looking further around Woods Hole, I found:

(a)  There are miniature versions of Ianelli’s Stations of the Cross in The Bell Tower of the Woods Hole Roman Catholic Church;

(b)  The Bell Tower, itself, had been commissioned by Mrs. Lillie from the same Coolidge used in Ipswich by Mr. and Mrs. Richard Crane, Jr.;  and

(c)  The main older buildings of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratories had been financed by Charles Crane and designed by Coolidge.

            Returning to Chicago, I learned, during a talk by Terry Tatum of The Chicago Commission on Landmarks, at a Meeting of The Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, that the Lillies’ home in Hyde Park had been a 1901 design by Pond & Pond - Prairie School architects, who were the house architects for Hull House, architects for other Chicago settlement houses, members of our Club and members of The Cliff Dwellers.  Reading up on Mrs. Lillie at The Chicago Historical Society, I found that the Mary Crane Nursery at Hull House – designed by Pond & Pond – had been funded by her and named for her mother.

            Going to the Butler Library, in a long autobiographical memoir that Charles prepared late in his life, I learned how Charles had influenced his taskmaster father away from his father’s self-taught business methods, towards those of the then more modern world, persuading his father to make quite significant business moves, one of which Charles described as follows:

“[The Crane Company] secured a large tract of land in Bridgeport [CT] with both water and rail communications and gradually evolved a fine new plant on quite modern lines.  Having had experience with a rapidly growing business, we realized the necessity of working out a plan, not only to care of current business, but to double, triple and quadruple it, and, still, have an orderly flow of material through the plant at all times.  That procedure had not been well worked out, before, but it was so successfully done in the Bridgeport plant that, later, when we designed the new and larger plant in Chicago, this basic principle was still further developed.  The Bridgeport plant was a good-looking lot of engineering buildings, but I felt that it would be worth while, if we would design something that would give the thousands of workmen going in and out of that plant, every day, a little thrill of pleasure, as they looked at the buildings.

 

            “I took the plans to Louis Sullivan, a Chicago architect, who, I thought, would like to work out a problem of this kind, and said to him,

 

“‘These are engineering buildings, and the dimensions have, all, been worked out, but they have the hard features of an engineering design.  I want you to take the drawings, leaving the dimensions just as they are, and give them the architectural note.  This is an industrial concern, and I do not anything but industrial buildings, but I want them to be the best looking industrial buildings possible.’”

           

            “My long-time friend, John R. Freeman, the famous engineer, was interested in this plan and said,

 

‘Is it not a pity that some of our big engineers have not had the inspiration to do this same sort of thing?”

 

            “Afterwards, in building the new plant at Chicago, we followed the same principle.” [at p. 113]

This “new plant at Chicago” was Crane Company’s 1899 and 1900 Chicago foundry and machine shop, which was followed by Sullivan’s 1905 Crane Company Brass Division Offices at 12th Street and Canal Street.

[Today, that entire site is desolately empty of all its former manufacturing capabilities and offices.]

            For health reasons, as well as his father’s belief in education only by practical experience, Charles had, never, obtained any formal education beyond high school.  Instead, he had spent his own “Two Years before the Mast”.  On his return to Chicago in about 1880, he went to work for the Crane Company, designated in 1884 its First Vice President.  I believe, that, from this time on, until his father’s death, he was the Crane Company’s Chief Operating Officer and de facto Chief Executive Officer.           

            In 1904, Charles met Mucha.  Mucha wrote that, after his favorable experiences in Chicago before and during The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, all, for him, had gone downhill, but that his meeting he had been resurrected by his meeting with Charles.  He met Charles at a political dinner in Chicago that was an unofficial demonstration against the Russo-Japanese War.  As a Slav, Mucha would have been supporting the Russian cause;  as a supporter of the Tsar, Charles would have been empathetic and supportive of the same point of view.

            Charles, immediately, commissioned Mucha to paint a portrait of his eldest daughter, Josephine (already, Mrs. Bradley) - the beneficiary of the three residential designs by Sullivan, Elmslie and Purcell.  That portrait was successful.  It portrayed Josephine as the mythic female Slavia.  It was, in 1918, placed on the first currency of the then newly created Czechoslovakia, remaining there until that country was taken over by Hitler’s Germany.

            In 1908, Mucha spent many summer weeks in Charles’ boathouse on his Woods Hole property.  That boathouse was soon to be replaced by one designed by Purcell & Elmslie.  It was from the successor boathouse, that Tom Crane emerged, to greet me, during my second visit to Woods Hole.

            By 1913, Mucha had, also, painted a portrait of Charles’ second daughter, Frances (Leatherbee) of Lake Forest, IL.  (This portrait was, however, not accepted by Frances.)  At that time, Frances, like her Uncle Richard in Ipswich, was a client of “Rick”  - not John – Olmsted and had a house designed for her husband and herself in North Lake Forest by the Dangler & Adler architectural partnership, which house was not built, as the creation in 1914 of the Great Lakes Naval Air Station consumed the Leatherbee property.  The Leatherbees went on to Boston and to Woods Hole.  After divorcing during World War I, Frances aligned herself with her father’s interests, marrying a son of Tomas Masaryk, the Czech patriot and first President of Czechoslovakia.  That marriage was briefer than her first.  However, she remained a client of the Olmsted Bros. firm until she died in the 1930’s.  Of course, what Olmsted Bros. was asked to do by her was far more modest than what Olmsted Bros. was asked to do at Castle Hill by Richard and Florence Higinbotham Crane.

            One can date Charles’ support of Russian artists and his interests in China to the 1890’s, when he obtained the permission of the Tsar to build a Crane Company factory in St. Petersburg, the products of which took Charles, also, into Kuo-min-tang China, in the cause of finding markets for Crane Company products manufactured in Russia.  This China experience had been the basis for Taft’s 1909 designation of Charles as U.S. Minister to China.

            Over time, Charles became a patron of at least three Russian artists whose works are, today, of recognized quality viewable in museums – Vasnetsof, Nesterof, Polenov and Roerich.  The last, Roerich, is worth special comment, because, just as Charles financed Mucha, it appears that he financed Roerich – most famously, by providing the funds necessary

(a) for Roerich to spend the three years of 1925–1928 in Central Asia, painting and developing his philosophy of life;  and

(b) for the creation in New York, near Columbia University, of The Roerich Museum, founded in 1923.

That Roerich became quite controversial in the 1930’s for his pro-Communist leanings, probably did not bother Charles.

            As Wayne Andrews, in Battle for Chicago (1946), said of Charles:

            “One backer [of LaFollette who stood by him to the end] was Charles R. Crane,  . . .  who presumed to criticize D. H. Burnham’s Chicago Plan.  One of the truly generous millionaires of modern times, Crane was as unpretentious as he was unselfish, and far from eager to hold office.  . . .  Crane was a thoughtful citizen of Chicago.  . . .  Though [in 1914] he left the management of the company to his younger brother,  . . .  he insisted on setting up a million dollar trust fund for the widows and children of workers in the factory.  Come election time, he was equally altruistic.  Wistfully, and fully conscious that the odds were hopeless, he put up money for one campaign after another for responsible government in the City Hall.  In the end, his open-handedness became a legend.  ‘You never had to ask Charles Crane how much money he was going to give to a good cause,’ Harold Ickes told the author.  ‘You, always, knew that he would give until it hurt.’”

            Richard Crane, II – eldest son of Charles – is given credit for the antiquarian set of Russian church bells of Lowell House of Harvard University.  I believe that it was at the suggestion of his father that these bells were liberated from a Russian Orthodox church in Communist Russia in the 1930’s, to save them from salvage.  While, upon the first attempt at ringing changes, their atonality was controversial, it was found that, if a competent Russian bell-ringer were at hand, to ring the proper changes, the controversy ceased.  In recent weeks, an effort by Russian monks of the source monastery – reported in The New York Times – to reclaim their set of bells has caused the “powers that be” of Harvard to find more than antiquarian value in them.

FRANCES LILLIE

            Frances Crane was eleven years younger than her older brother, Charles;  their closeness appears to have been the result of his having recognized,  shortly, after their mother’s death, her propensity to disabling depression, taking empathetic measurers she describes in her own papers.  There is a biographical entry on her in the recently published Biographical Dictionary of Women Building Chicago [1790-1990] that, quite wrongly, suggests that her brother Charles was unsympathetic towards her Socialist views.  (I suspect that the writer of the newspaper article cited as authority had mixed Charles with Richard, Jr.)

[Copies of  Frances’ daughter’s privately printed biographical study of her mother are in the Woods Hole Historical Museum, in The Chicago Historical Society and in The Regenstein Library of The University of Chicago.]

            Frances had met her husband while she was taking a class at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, for which he was a Summer instructor, marrying at Jerseyhurst in 1895.  In 1902, when her husband was recruited by University of Chicago President Harper from a faculty position at Vassar College, the Lillies moved into the house designed for them in 1901 by Pond & Pond.

[The brothers Pond designed a good number of homes in Hyde Park and Kenwood.  Both Ponds were, from 1888, members of our Club – both presenting papers, regularly.  As Frances was a significant supporter of Jane Addams’ and Ellen Gates Starr’s Hull House;  the Ponds were the architects for its several expansions beyond Mr. Hull’s home.  If one looks at the exterior detailing of Lillie House, one can see elements of Prairie School design – elements similar to those of Dwight Perkins’ Hitchcock Hall of The University of the same year.]

            While Frances Lillie, contrary to the wishes of her family (but, almost certainly, with at least the tacit support of her brother Charles), converted to Roman Catholicism, it was her open and active support of the 1913 Strike in Chicago of the Garment Workers that brought the attention of the press to her, as well as the open hostility of her younger brother, Richard.  Frances’ support of that Strike and of the Hull House of Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr could be deemed, not merely an emulation, but an extension of her brother Charles’ support of Progressive causes.

            Frances’ support of the arts that followed her conversion to Roman Catholicism brought her into this paper, in a role secondary only to that of Charles, the evidence thereof being her funding of:

1.  St. Thomas the Apostle Roman Catholic Church in Hyde Park – designed by Barry Byrne after he had removed himself from his partnership with Walter Burley Griffin and from the Prairie School, as well as its Stations of the Cross (designed by Ianelli) and its reredos (designed by F’Aggi);  and

 2.  The Bell Tower of St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Woods Hole containing the miniature versions of Ianelli’s Stations of the Cross.

RICHARD AND FLORENCE CRANE

            Expansion of the Crane Company under Richard Crane, Jr., required substantial new buildings, one of which was its new Office Building at 836 South Michigan Avenue.  Per The AIA Guide to Chicago Architecture, it was a 1913 design by Holabird & Roche and a tasteful and sound structure, but a Classical Revival design (substituting its more elaborate office quarters for those on 12th Street designed by Louis Sullivan, only a few years before).  With the selection by the Crane Company of such a design, one could have sensed that Charles Crane would be leaving the Crane Company, as he did, within a year.

            Richard Crane, Jr., before and after becoming Chief Executive Officer of the Crane Company in 1914, was a “clubman” - “in Society”.  Before becoming CEO of the Crane Company, he was a member of these clubs:  Chicago, Chicago Golf, Chicago Athletic, University, Onwentsia, Chicago Yacht, Mid-Day, South Shore Country and Union [League];  after he became CEO, he added: Racquet & Tennis (New York), New York Yacht;  Jekyll Island (Georgia) and Mount Royal (Montreal).  His architecturally unremarked home was at 1550 North Lake Shore Drive, at the corner of North Avenue, at the South edge of Lincoln Park (long since, demolished for an apartment building).

            His wife’s aesthetic interests seem only to have been antiquarian, evidenced by her contribution or funding of the contents of Crane Room at The Art Institute of Chicago (since disassembled and dispersed), the nature of her tangible gifts to The Art Institute (all antiquarian) and her active membership in The Antiquarians of The Art Institute.  Her aesthetic tastes were consistent with those of her Higinbotham father, a devotee to the architecture of Daniel Burnham, with whom he had worked, closely, in the preparations for The World’s Columbian Exposition.

[While both structures were built, Mrs. Higinbotham seems not to have cared for her Burnham-designed residence, for, as soon as her son caused his own, nearby house to be built - Harlowarden - extant – designed by Robert C. Spencer, Jr.] - she moved into it.]

            Using my analysis of Charles Hutchinson’s influence on his contemporaries that I gave you in a prior paper for our Club, I expect that Hutchinson had recommended Olmsted Bros. and Coolidge for the siting and design to Richard Crane for his first Ipswich residence;  however, I am confident that it was Richard’s wife, who selected Adler to design its replacement.  One who selects David Adler, when Prairie School architects had become well-known, would not be interested in Arts & Crafts furnishings.  I saw none in Castle Hill, when Janis and I visited it.

[As, by 1948, “Rick” Olmsted was 80 years old, and the Olmsted Bros. Firm had ceased operations, The Trustees of Public Reservations of Massachusetts used, as a landscape architect, Fletcher Steele (trained by the Olmstedian Warren Manning) for a project in Ipswich, MA, that I presume was “Castle Hill”.  In addition, in 1949, Steele did a project in Woods Hole for the former Mrs. Leatherbee and Mrs. Masaryk.]

            After the early death of Richard in 1931, his wife saw to the design and erection of a large, beautifully sited mausoleum in Graceland Cemetery – not surprisingly, in the Classical Revival style.  Then, she, again, looked to David Adler, to design what became The Crane Altar in Chicago’s St. Chrysostom’s Church, which contains a literal copy of a beautiful mosaic portrait of St. John Chrysostom, the original of which one can see in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

EMILY CHADBOURNE

            After Emily Crane’s divorce from her childless marriage, she – the longest-living of the Crane siblings and the largest of the last Crane family Crane Company stockholders - became a peripatetic traveler (with her regular female companion) and a magpie-like purchaser of antiquarian arts.  As her antiquarian taste was other than in American Decorative Arts, there was no contribution by her, other than of money, to The Antiquarian Society of The Art Institute of Chicago.  She is, however, credited by The Art Institute for having given to it a fireplace screen designed by Louis Sullivan, from the demolished Cyrus McCormick Family residence at 975 North Rush Street.

            On one hand, Emily was extraordinarily generous, in the quantity and variety of the items that she gave to The Art Institute of Chicago, but she appears to have been uninterested in the individual work product of living artists, with these exceptions known to me:

            1.  She and her companion were part of the Parisian circle of Gertrude Stein;

            2.  She commissioned her portrait from the then fashionable 1920’s Parisian artist, Foujita, which is said to be, presently, on exhibit by The Art Institute;  and

            3.  As a memorial to her sister Frances, she commissioned still another set of Stations of the Cross and other sculpture by Ianelli, for the Childerley Chapel of the Lillie Camp for Hyde Park children, in Wheeling, IL.

[While that camp ceased operations in 1941, the Childerley Chapel remains as a part of a Wheeling public park;  the sculpture has been removed to The Art Institute.]

Emily was as independent, in her own way, in the conduct of her life, as was Frances, and she remains so, after her death.  Her headstone in Lake Geneva’s Oak Hill Cemetery stands entirely alone, on the side of the Crane monument opposite the many stones of her Crane, Gartz and Maxwell relatives.

CLOSURE

            I close, by observing that, while I remain intrigued by the contrasting tastes in their support of the arts, I can, readily, understand why each Crane sibling chose to ignore his and her father’s dictate, to avoid design professionals.

            Even at the end, consistent with their differing aesthetic tastes evidenced in their lives, they differed in the style of their post-death arrangements.  While most Cranes other than Charles and his progeny and Richard, Jr., and his progeny, joined their forebear in his large plot in Lake Geneva’s Oak Hill Cemetery, Charles and his progeny are Woods Hole’s municipal cemetery next to its lovely little Episcopal Church, with a charming piece of Chinese statuary as the sole “monument”, amidst stones well set into the ground.  Frances and her family joined him there.  Richard, Jr., and his progeny are in a significant mausoleum in Graceland Cemetery, with a good many Higinbothams, as this Mrs. Crane wished, in the half of what was, originally, solely the Cranes’ plot.

            Until I met Tom Crane in Woods Hole, the only Crane descendant that I knew as such was [Augustus] “Gus” Maxwell – son of Dorothy Crane (Maxwell), who was a child of “Bert” Crane.  Now, I know more, as I have met, face-to-face, a Crane – Tom – and a Bradley.  I have “met” several Crane descendants through what they have written and through what has been written about them.  I expect that, as my inquiries continue, I will meet many more.  Each Crane has struck me as having this trait:  he or she is among the most interesting people whom I have, ever, met.

            The old gentleman – the man who tried to exercise the power of his hand after his death - would be proud of them, notwithstanding the failure of his effort.

_________________

John K. Notz, Jr.

February 23, 2004

 

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