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Henry Blake Fuller and Chicago

Fifteen-year-old Henry Blake Fuller witnessed the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and he lived on the edges of the ashes listening to the pushcart drivers, factory owners, and businessmen call out to dust off, raise money, and rebuild. His father and grandfather were among those considered “the old settlers” and most substantial and important families in Chicago. The Fullers came over on the Mayflower, a fact no one would much care about in Chicago, and had spent generations interwoven with the intellectual and business establishment in New England. His grandfather, Judge Henry Fuller, began to move westward in 1830, eventually becoming a county judge in St. Joseph, Michigan. He moved to Chicago in 1848 and created a fortune developing the Rock Island and West Chicago City Railway systems and the Chicago water system. His son and Henry’s father, George Wood Fuller, worked as secretary at the Southside Railway Company. He had inherited his father’s New England temperament of conservative austerity, and he made use of it for conserving his father’s fortune, rather than expanding it.¹ Henry Blake grew up hearing about the superiority of New England and New Englanders to Chicago from his grandfather, and he imagined it as a place that supported culture and the arts and that had a sense of tradition, particularly an intellectual one emanating from Boston. He viewed Chicago through the lens of his family’s vision of genteel New England and saw a rough, vulgar town that seemed to wallow in its own love of money and increasing commercialism.² After his grandfather died in 1879, Henry Blake Fuller traveled to Italy and found the elegant, beautiful, and art-loving culture he imagined New England to be. Because Italy existed, Fuller understood that it was possible to have towns, cities, and countries that supported the arts rather than suppressed them while degrading their importance. He saw Chicago as choosing the latter route, and he would spend his life writing and living in opposition to the implied and stated values of what he saw as the vulgar commercialism of Chicago. Fuller would always be drawn to those artists who lived in opposition to the stated values of Chicago and they to him. He would never leave Chicago permanently, but lived surrounded by those who saw in him a beacon of hope for the artists of Chicago.

Fuller took over the family estate in 1883 when his father died, but there wasn’t much left from his grandfather’s fortune because George Fuller had a series of financial mishaps over the four intervening years. Fuller would never speak about his early life to his friends and the overall impression among his friends is that he was freed of the oppressive natures of his parents and their expectations for a bachelor son of a good family.3 Fuller far preferred the company of men, which was well-known among those he considered his good friends. In the early 1890s, Henry Blake Fuller lived among a group of bachelors on the North Shore of Chicago in Kenilworth, where they had set up housekeeping together. The circle consisted of “Edgar A. Bancroft—later Minister Plenipotentiary to China, Alexander A. McCormick, Parmalee J. McFadden, Philip Sidney Post, all of whom were literary. Being particularly intimate friends of Henry’s they were fond of relating anecdotes about him.”⁴ Anna Morgan, Fuller’s great friend and teacher of the dramatic arts, remembered that “those possessed of certain mental attitudes and predilections, have been and still are migrating to the North Shore in search of an intellectual nouveau.” She remembered of Fuller’s group that “they dispersed a rare and lively hospitality.”⁵ He would find among these men a physical, emotional, and mental buffer from the harshness of Chicago and its single-minded vision of making money.

It was while living on the North Shore and participating in this loosely formed literary group that Fuller wrote his first two novels. The first book appeared in 1890, The Chevalier de Pensiere-Vani, written under the pseudonym of Stanton Page, but it was his second novel, The Chatelaine of La Trinite (1892), that won him recognition outside of Chicago as not just the “best stylist” in Chicago but among all writers who were currently writing in English. Both novels established Fuller’s penchant for elegant stories about the gracefully wealthy in Europe. His novels dovetailed nicely with the new American tourist culture developed and promoted by train and steamship lines. The novels with their intriguing French titles seemed to be travel narratives for those who dreamed of the continent but would never get to go or guidebooks to the manners and habits of the more sophisticated Europeans for those Americans who may be the first generation to have a European tour, like Henry James’s Daisy Miller. Fuller’s novels imitated James’s with their plots about wealthy women, the landscapes of continental Europe, and courtship among class divisions, but he wrote as a Chicagoan without access to the elegance he writes about and so he never indulges in the ambiguity of perspectives that leads James’s more perceptive readers to critique the more European habits and spaces they had just been admiring.

Fuller’s penchant for elegant subjects caught the eye of many mid-nineteenth-century writers who were surprised that a Chicagoan could be producing such highly refined writing about Europe. Fuller’s recognition by both the East Coast and the European literary world for writing what was seen as civilized novels, in tone and content, made him one of a handful of artists who—according to the Chicago elite who were in the early stages of developing the Fair—would raise Chicago’s literary and cultural importance on the national stage. Chicago’s art and literary scene has been linked to Chicago’s business since the turn of the nineteenth century. In the 1890s, in large cities across America, spiritual, political, and civic leaders began voicing concerns about “the higher life.” What they meant was the need to raise the quality of a city through the presence of social projects; social and art clubs; education and intellectual institutions; and moral clubs, institutions, and instruction. Jane Allen Shikoh explains how the idea of the higher life emerged from the fusion of the Evangelical Church’s spiritual project of raising all souls to a higher plane, with Darwinian-based ideas about social evolution.6 Concern for “the higher life” of the cities was a concern for the spiritual, physical, intellectual, cultural, and artistic evolution of America’s cities as almost sentient beings.

Shikoh sets Chicago apart from the other large cities in the United States writing that “during the 1890s, Chicago was more self-conscious about its ‘higher life.’”⁷ She notes: “Journalists, ministers and others in speaking of Chicago, often mentioned that although in the past the city had been preoccupied with its material growth, it was finally arriving at a ‘higher and maturer stage of civic existence.’”⁸ The Great Fire of 1871 had only recently destroyed Chicago. By the early 1890s, Chicago’s boosters announced that the city had successfully rebuilt itself from the ashes with the newest technology available. Before a great deal of the reconstruction had been completed, civic engagement meant bringing wealth to the city, through building and promoting the city as the site for the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893. Now that the boosters had rebuilt the city, at least according to the promotional rhetoric, Chicagoans could shift their sights from physical construction to promoting and raising the cultural wealth of the city. Chicago’s elite, who provided the economic wealth of the city, was most interested in promoting the kind of art that would raise Chicago’s higher life. Fuller’s work was seen as exactly the right kind of art to promote.

On June 12, 1893, he received an invitation from the Author’s Congress of the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition “to read a paper of the time-limit of twenty minutes … upon some appropriate topic of your own selection.”9 The Official Directory of the World’s Fair does not list Fuller as having read a piece or participated in an exhibition. His reply to the committee has been lost and so it is unknown whether he turned down the prestigious invitation completely or backed out when subjected to numerous demands for revisions by the committee. The invitation is curious because the Fair had already begun a month before the invitation and the invitation may be the committee’s final attempt to get Fuller to participate in the Fair. He was busy finishing his third novel The Cliff-Dwellers, which would be a realist critique of those promoting and funding the upward lift of Chicago. Fuller had clearly had enough of the Chicago business world and the years of hearing art used as promotional material for the business of the Columbian Exhibition.

Fuller’s ideas about the negative aspects of Chicago’s push for the higher life play out in The Cliff-Dwellers (1893). The novel describes the inhabitants of the fictitious Clifton Building who struggle with business and domestic failures as they attempt to raise themselves up against Chicago’s oppressive and hostile atmosphere. Ann Massa points out:

Fuller acknowledged the connection between his novel and the World’s Fair in an unpublished essay on his early books. He recalled that it had developed from “Between the Millstones,” a novelette that, because of its pessimism, had not found favor with publishers. Set in Chicago, it charted the business and domestic failures and the eventual suicide of its protagonist, events ascribed in substantial part to the hostile urban environment. It was the Fair, Fuller stated, which encouraged him to try once more to secure a hearing for what he disingenuously described as “less … mournful materials.”¹⁰

Massa has shown that “the presence at the Fair of a Cliff Dweller exhibit, and the exposure it gave to that culture’s problematisation of issues of evolution and progress, convinced Fuller of the aptness of the Cliff Dweller analogy to express his reservations about the modern cliff dwellers.”11 She concludes that “Fuller was less interested in the Cliff Dwellers per se than in the critical light they allowed him to shed on what Chicago and America had achieved by 1893.”¹²

Fuller’s novel used the cliff dwellers as a metaphor for the elite Chicagoans who occupied skyscrapers and worked high above the city’s immigrant hordes. He may have derived the metaphor from earlier versions of the ideas about the Anasazi Indians contained in the catalog put out by the H. J. Smith Exploring Company to accompany the cliff dweller exhibits at the World’s Fair of 1893. The catalog describes the cliff dwellers as “by far the most highly civilized representatives of the ‘stone age,’ antedating the Aztecs and the Toltecs, and exhibiting almost as high a degree of civilization … They are a mythical race, exhibiting in the relics found, rare powers and refined tastes at variance with the common idea of aborigines.”¹³ The legend continues, “They were not a warlike people—their fighting was simply done in defense. Arrows of reed, … were their chief implements of war, and the small number of these found is indicative of their naturally quiet and peaceable natures, which only rose up to defend themselves against the attacks of their foes.”¹⁴ The catalog concludes with an interpretation of part of the exhibit that repeats the ideas of its first pages: “Several fine specimens of feather-cloth and buckskin garments denote their fondness for ease and comfort, and the rare stone axes, bows, arrows, and slingshots found give additional proof to their peaceful pursuits and may also give a clue to the mysterious disappearance of this once great nation, which was possibly annihilated by more warlike tribes surrounding it.”¹⁵

The catalog draws the Anasazi Indian’s position on the high cliff as a reminder of the cliff dwellers’ cultural superiority to the surrounding, newer tribes bent on attacking the more peaceful, artistic civilization. The catalog transcribes the cliff dweller’s physical location into a cultural position: they took up a defensive position to protect their culture not just physically but culturally. The legend of the cliff dwellers, then, demonstrated to Chicagoans that climbing upward serves as a form of cultural self-protection. Fuller’s cliff dwellers are those Chicagoans who can trace their lineage to the Europeans who had settled America and now inhabit the city’s first skyscrapers. Because the cliff dwellers had become extinct, their memory served as a warning to the citizens of Chicago, who may also become extinct if they are unable to resist the modern changes that threaten them. Guy Szuberia has observed, “Like many of his contemporaries, Henry Blake Fuller frequently paired his ideas and fears of the ‘new immigrant’ with the spectre of a declining or dispossessed ‘native American stock.’”16 He argues that Fuller’s novel expresses his grave concerns that if the cliff dwellers uplifted too many immigrants to join the ranks of the elite members of cultural circles, their numbers would overwhelm and eventually deplete those who raised them in the first place.¹⁷ The cliff dwelling conceit in the novel also serves as a warning to the elite citizens of Chicago, who may also become extinct like the Anasazi, if they continue participating in the futile project of using art to uplift others to their position.

Fuller’s novel attracted attention from Chicago writers and from the literary establishment in the East. Hamlin Garland, a prolific Chicago writer who had just begun publishing in 1891 and quickly received recognition for his stories about Midwestern farmers, wrote to Fuller on January 17, 1894, for the first time. He praises his novel: “I have just read your ‘Cliff-Dwellers.’ It interests me profoundly to see you doing such a book. It has great power. It is a brave thing to grapple with the life of a great city like Chicago.” However, Garland has difficulty with Fuller’s critique of the city and speaks as a booster for the city:

And while I’m not entirely satisfied with your point of view—which is essentially unsympathetic—I recognize it as a fine … out-put. I hope when I come to Chicago we may meet and find common ground. …. I want to close my letter as I began with praise. It looks as though in you Chicago has found her first indigenous novelist.¹⁸

H. H. Boyeson, whose novels—The Mammon of Unrighteousness (1891) and The Golden Calf (1892)—helped to create the new urban realism that Fuller now fully participates in with The Cliff-Dwellers, writes to Fuller that “in spite of your very critical attitude towards Chicago … you seemed destined to be her completest chronicler.” He writes that the “‘Cliffdwellers’ is the first book which strongly grasps the situation”¹⁹ and hopes to meet him for the first time in February of that year.

William Dean Howells’s review of The Cliff-Dwellers, published in the 1893 Atlantic Monthly, helped solidify Howells’s reputation along with the novel’s and Fuller’s. Howells was also a Midwesterner, born in Ohio in 1837, twenty years before Fuller. He settled in Boston, where he became a Christian socialist. His own literary work and taste would show this particular religious bent, as he probed the intricate relationship between individual liberty and Christianity, particularly as the two conflicted in American business and in the lives of American businessmen. He was particularly disgusted by the excesses he saw around him in late nineteenth-century America and his work spoke back to this sin which he saw at the heart of American business.20 Howells stops short of developing a full Marxist critique of American capitalism, but his literary voice tries to be fully authentic and truthful in its rendering of America. Henry James would name Howells’s work “in the highest degree documentary.”²¹ Howells promoted only that work which did the same. He names Fuller’s attention to detail “scrupulous” and the whole thing “bitten in with a corrosive truthfulness.”²²

Fuller followed The Cliff-Dwellers with With the Procession (1895), which Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, the Chicago writer of the farcical novels—With Edge Tools (1891) and An American Peeress (1893)—praised. He writes a glowing portrait of Fuller’s novel and acknowledges that he renders certain circles of Chicago life perfectly. He writes:

I like the story much better than the “Cliff Dwellers,” which is saying much, as I have long been an ardent admirer and champion of the former book. You certainly understand Chicago life, through and through. You get right at the heart of it and present a perfect picture of the peculiar social construction of the city. Perhaps you are too faithful to win the approbation of the typical Chicagoan … I have never dared to write of Chicago as I see it and sense my experience with “With Edge Tools.” I have contented myself with skirting around it in the suburbs and bringing foreign types into a Chicago atmosphere. After reading “With the Procession” my feeling is of despair. I could never hope to print as true and faithful a picture as you have given us. So I have about made up my mind to abandon Chicago altogether and seek other fields.²³

Fuller’s vision of Chicago’s mixing of art and business and his rendering of the blind climbing of its upper classes would gnaw at the artists of Chicago who would, over the next generation, begin to leave the city for exactly these reasons, citing Fuller’s book as true. Harriet Monroe, the young poet who had written and delivered the “Ode” at the Columbian Exhibition and with whom Fuller had become friends writes to Fuller simply: “We have all been reading the book and think it is great.”24

Fuller’s novels demonstrate his fascination with Chicago’s focus on the higher life and its treatment of artists and art, and their reception by Chicago artists indicates that his vision is accurate. He writes directly about the treatment of artists and art by Chicagoans in the “The Upward Movement in Chicago” published in the 1897 Atlantic Monthly. His essay begins with an ambivalence that contradicts the optimism of Chicago politicians and boosters: “The civic shortcomings of Chicago are so widely notorious abroad and so deeply deplored at home that there is little need to linger upon them, even for the purpose of throwing into relief the worthier and more attractive features of the local life.”²⁵ He clarifies the plight of the Chicagoan who cares about art a column later: “We are obliged to fight—determinedly, unremittingly—for those desirable, those indispensible things that older, more fortunate, more practiced communities possess and enjoy as a matter of course.”²⁶ For Fuller, Chicago doesn’t know how to create this higher life that seems to come so easily to older, more established cities. The city’s artists must fight for recognition against the naïve and unsophisticated sentiments of the Chicago patrons of the arts, whose conception of culture was overwhelmingly utilitarian. He then offers a bit hope for artists in Chicago, “As a community, we are a school; we are trying to solve for ourselves the problem of living together. All the best and most strenuous endeavors of Chicago, whether practical or aesthetic. Whether directed toward individual improvement or toward an increase in the associated well-being, may be broadly directed as educational. Everything to be said about the higher and more hopeful life of the place must be said with the learner’s bench distinctly in view.”²⁷

Fuller indirectly warned that Chicago’s temperament and attitudes toward art and culture would result in the cultural destruction of the city. He wrote The Cliff-Dwellers while a member of a loose group of artists who met around the activities of the Columbian Exhibition. The group began in 1893, loosely formed at the suggestion of Lucy Monroe, Harriet’s sister and art critic for the Chicago Tribune.²⁸ The group would become a formal club and a support for artists, especially Fuller, whose association with the club would go on long past those of most other members. After the Michigan Avenue Repository was remodeled into the Fine Arts Building, from 1897 to 1898, most members of the club, including Fuller, took studios in the newly renovated building. The “Studios Club” met officially in Lorado Taft’s protégé Bessie Potter’s top-floor studios in the Fine Arts Building, next to the Chicago Club, the Auditorium Building, and across from where the Art Institute would be when it moved out of the Chicago Club. The club formalized around the name the “Little Room,” which derives from a short story Madeline Wynne published in Harper’s Magazine in 1895 about a magical room in which a room magically disappears and reappears. The story is about the magical creation of new spaces where there seems to be no room for them, especially for women. The adoption of Wynne’s story title by the club members indicates that they saw the club in similar terms. It would be a new space for artists in a city that had no room or proper support for them. The name of the group also repeats the idea of the cliff dwellers, because the club met in a studio perched at the top of a large building, in a “little room” like those belonging to the original Anasazi. But where Fuller’s novel uses the conceit to describe those at the top of the business world of Chicago who feel threatened by immigration and social change, the club of artists who promote social change use the idea of the “Little Room” to describe how they feel threatened by the business world and Chicago’s commercialism. Fuller must have enjoyed the play on his novel because he allowed it and perhaps even suggested it to the group.

Fuller writes a letter to Allen B. Pond that the club has fully formed by February 25, 1898. He was in Charleston, South Carolina, for part of the winter and so missed the chance to attend the earliest “official” meetings. He writes to Allen B. Pond, the architect who, with his brother Irving, founded Pond and Pond, a Chicago architecture firm that built new modern buildings from an Arts and Crafts perspective:

Dear A.B., I hear roundaboutly from Mary Jameson Judah and Hamlin Garland that the Little Room is “Rooming,” and this reminds me that I have been slow in acknowledging the graceful handbill that bade me attend its sessions. It is to you that I make my acknowledgements, because I think I perceived some traces of your style in the document. If I remember rightly, the schedule is arranged to run to March 1st; so I send my benediction on the final meeting for this season.29

The Little Room brought together the artists of Chicago in a membership that included Elia Peattie; reformer Jane Addams; sculptor Lorado Taft; Allen B. and Irving K. Pond, who designed Hull House; Anna Morgan; painter Ralph Clarkson; illustrator and publisher Ralph Fletcher Seymour; and writers George Ade, Harriet Monroe, and Edith Wyatt, in addition to Garland and Fuller.30 Bertha Palmer, the wealthy Impressionist art collector and wife of industrialist Potter Palmer, although never directly mentioned in conjunction with the Little Room, did occasionally attend. She and Fuller were friends and he based, in part, the character of Susan Bates in With the Procession on her.³¹ They would gather for afternoon teas and after midnight dramas, bringing a much-needed sense of community to the artists and supporting a shared vision of an artistic culture within Chicago.

The first entry in the Club Record of the Little Room Book is dated Summer of 1902:

At the meeting of members of the “Little Room” held in Miss Morgan’s studio in the early summer of 1902, it was voted that the board of directors should consist of nine members, holding office for the term of three years then to be retired annually and their successors to be elected by members of the Board of Directors whose term of office has not expired. It was further voted that no one should be admitted to membership in the “Little Room” until his candidacy has been discussed with representatives of his own profession or craft. It was further voted that the election of a new member by the Board of Directors must be unanimous; that when the candidate has been unanimously chosen by the board of directors his name shall be posted for two weeks in the room in which the meetings of the “Little Room” are held, and that three negative votes addressed in writing to the secretary shall defeat the election.³²

The Little Room should not be seen as a frivolous gathering of artists, but rather an important and mannered club that took as its business supporting art and artists. Members crafted the club’s rules in 1902 to impart seriousness to all of the club’s activities, and they made their rules and regulations similar to those of other important and influential nineteenth-century clubs in Chicago.

The second entry of the Club Record, dated Fall 1902, records the meeting held in Mr. Clarkson’s Studio. In this meeting, the membership voted that there would be three sets of elected directors who would have varying length terms.³³ In 1904, the club elected Miss Anna Morgan, Ralph Clarkson, and Allen B. Pond for one year; Mrs. M. Y. Wynne, George B. McCutcheon, and Allen Spencer for two; Mr. Franklin Head, Mr. Hobart Chatfield Taylor, and Mrs. Elia Peattie for three. Allen B. Pond was the secretary. Franklin H. Head was the treasurer, George B. McCutcheon, chairman of the entertainment committee, and Miss Anna Morgan, chairman of the house committee.34 When there was a reelection, the nine people above reshuffled themselves, suggesting an assumed hierarchy within the club.³⁵ By 1905, members, too, would be elected.³⁶ Active members to the group could propose names and then elections were held.³⁷ Fuller was a member of the committee in 1906–1907³⁸ and in 1907–1908 too.³⁹ His name appears frequently in the club’s pages as a member, member of the committee, and organizer of activities. The frequency of his communication with the Little Room and the Little Roomers, even while out of town, as well as his active involvement, demonstrates the importance of the club to him.

During the summer, the Little Room members met at the Eagle’s Nest Camp, a semi-commune with multiple individual and shared dwellings.⁴⁰ The name of the camp represents the club’s stated belief that “association and conversation had largely to do with inspiration.”⁴¹ Lorado Taft, sculptor and professor at the Art Institute, and his friends set up a small camp in Oregon, Illinois, during the summer of 1898. They had been traveling to Bass Lake in Indiana, until the summer before an outbreak of malaria at the camp scared them into finding a new retreat.⁴² Taft’s love of natural beauty, the central idea of most of the essays he brought to the Little Room group, found its expression at the natural camp. By 1901, the central cabins and many smaller cabins had been erected. Fuller leaves the group formally at exactly this point, writing cryptically to Mr. Oliver Bennett Grover, the secretary of the Eagle’s Nest Association from Chicago on January 11, 1901, that he’s unable to take part in a meeting and also regrets that he no longer can take an active part in the association. He writes: “In view of this fact I am quite clear that my wiser choice is to withdraw from the association … Wishing the Association continued and increased prosperity.”⁴³ The construction of additional cabins allowed more members to bring their families to the camp and the atmosphere became family oriented. Fuller most likely did not like the new atmosphere and preferred the company of men and his friends, away from the demands of wives, children, and domestic responsibilities in which he had no interest or part.

In 1907, Garland started a formal men-only club that would deliberately drain away the male members of the Little Room. Garland made extensive lists of professional, intellectual, and artistic men whom he wished to join his club. One list is exclusively a list of the male members of the “Little Room” and this list suggests that he did so deliberately and systematically. He then made it new club business to “tender an invitation to join the new club” to all Little Room male members. 44 The “Provisional Committee of the Attic Club” was held at the City Club Rooms on Tuesday July 30, 1907. Present were “Mr. Garland, Mr. Taft, Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. I. K. Pond, Mr. A. B. Pond, Ira Nelson Morris, Arthur Addis, Chatfield-Taylor,” and notes mention that they are in negotiation with a space in the Harvester Building, suggesting connections with the wealthy McCormicks.⁴⁵ In the letter sent out, but undated, Hamlin Garland writes:

On behalf of the Committee of which I am Chairman I hereby invite you to become a member of a club which is meant to be a union of the artists, art lovers, and literary men of Chicago, somewhat like the Players Club of New York City. It is in effect widening the scope of the Little Room of which you are a member. We plan to now have a home of our own near the Fine Arts Building, (possibly on the top of some building) with our own kitchen and grill room and with unique and tasteful furnishings.

He continues:

The number of resident members will be fixed at about two hundred, and will take in most of the well-known men in painting, sculpture, music, architecture, landscape gardening, arts and crafts, illustration, fiction, poetry, essay, and the drama. In addition, as you will observe from the enclosed list, the Committee is inviting to membership distinguished men of science, law, business, and other professions who are sympathetic with purposes of the organization, so that the club will be a union of the aesthetic elements of Chicago and the West, very much as The Century Club of New York has brought together the most distinguished personalities of New York and the East.⁴⁶

Garland’s club would bring together artists and businessmen with artistic tastes in a union that made formal the alliance that characterized Chicago’s art scene to Fuller’s displeasure. Because it was perched at the top floors of the newly constructed Orchestra Hall, the members called the new club the Attic Club. The group would decide on the name the Cliff Dwellers Club two years later.

As the members of the Attic Club anticipated, Fuller declined to join the Cliff Dwellers Club. The minutes of the June 27, 1907, meeting reveal: “Henry B. Fuller asked to serve as temporary secretary. Mr. A. B. Pond to act in case of the refusal of Mr. Fuller to serve.” Fuller scholarship has made much of Fuller’s refusal to join the club that bore the name of his most popular novel. Most recently, Massa argues that Garland’s arrogance and insensitivity caused Fuller to “boycott” the club.47 Her interpretation is highly plausible, given Garland’s deliberate destruction of Fuller’s club and his later boasting that he, not Fuller, was a founding member. The Attic Club minutes also show that Fuller’s attitude toward the club and presumably its founder was well-known even before the Attic Club changed its name to the Cliff Dwellers Club. However, Fuller does appear on a typed list of dinner acceptances for the club’s First Annual Dinner, January 17, 1908.⁴⁸ The Cliff Dwellers’ Dinner may have been Garland’s last attempt to recruit Fuller into his club and he never succeeds in doing so. Fuller never became a member and his name never appears in the minutes or notes. In his letters he will only refer to the camp in passing, much as he does with the Eagle’s Nest Camp: “The campers are gradually getting down to camp. Garland has finally got the Cliffdwellers ‘papers’ signed and the new move is going ahead with the help of Robert Granger and Shaw.”⁴⁹

Histories of the Chicago literary renaissance tend to use Garland’s creation of the Cliff Dwellers Club as the end date for the Little Room, but the Little Room did continue into the 1920s, with Fuller as an active member. Memberships in these last years were often delinquent among less-successful members and it became harder to collect money for the club.⁵⁰ Allen B. Pond notes on April 28, 1910, in a letter to the treasurer, F. H. Head, that he “used thirty-three 2 ct. stamps” to send out delinquency notices.⁵¹ On October 20, 1924, a letter went out to all “Little Roomers” from H. B. Fuller, A. B. Pond, I. K. Pond, Lorado Taft, and several other original members of the club including Nellie V. Walker. In it, they write: “Those of us who are writing and signing this letter have felt for many years that the Little Room was not only unique but the center of our most charming hours in Chicago.” They say they don’t want to end the club, but dues need to be raised to five dollars. They ask, “Will you kindly use the enclosed return envelope to say whether you desire the Little Room to continue; whether you will make an effort to attend; and whether you are willing to pay the necessary increase in the annual dues?”⁵² Fewer people were attending regularly and there had to be an increase in dues.⁵³ There are letters from Clara Louise Burnham, dated October 22, 1924, and Arthur M. Burton, dated October 24, 1924, saying how useful the club has been to them and how much they would miss it. Burton writes how he would “decidedly wish it to continue.”54 Notes poured in at the end, including from Harriet Monroe, that everyone would do all that they can to help the Little Room continue.

The decline of the Little Room certainly occurred because of Garland’s vicious and deliberate reforming of the club into the Attic Club, but the club did little to welcome the newest members of the Chicago art scene, preferring to remain entrenched around its founding during the Fair, twenty years before. On December 12, 1913, several new artists were passed over for membership in the Little Room, including Maurice Browne, who, along with Ellen Van Volkenburg, founded the Little Theater in the Fine Arts Building.⁵⁵ Perhaps his attitudes about uplift and need for art to be useful chafed against the legacies of too many founding members, especially Jane Addams. He would tell the Chicago Record-Herald the next year: “I am free to say I wouldn’t go anywhere myself where people aimed to uplift me, and I don’t blame anyone for staying away from the Little Theater if he thinks its prime effort is to uplift.” Even the paper sniped back, responding that he was “speaking more frankly and downrightly than might have been expected of one whose godparents were named Art and Scholarship.”⁵⁶ His language of the new avant-garde, which ironically repeats Fuller’s, will have no place in Chicago, even among its artists.

Harriet Monroe wrote a response to the Little Room’s plea to members in October of 1924 that criticizes the Little Room for being too closed off. She writes:

I confess I have somewhat lost interest since the committee turned down a perfectly good and fitting candidate whom I had proposed, the husband of a valued member, who of course thereupon resigned. I have felt that if this was the policy of the committees if they wished to keep the long-standing membership and not admit a liberal supply of new and younger members, this club had ceased to fulfill any reasonable function and might as well cease. As almost no new members have appeared during a number of years, this policy seems to have been followed, with the result that few of the younger crowd know anything about the society or would now care to join.⁵⁷

She does enclose her dues to keep the club going, even if she will no longer attend. The Little Room’s autograph book ends on January 31, 1931, suggesting that this is as near an end date for the club as it is possible to delineate. It has all of the old signatures in it and no one new, not even Margaret Anderson or Jane Heap of the Little Review, Sherwood Anderson, or Edgar Lee Masters. The group seems to have closed itself off in its ongoing mission to protect itself and its members from those outside who may threaten the art scene as only they defined it.58

Fuller was still spending a great deal of time on the North Shore. Anna Morgan reminisces that “at his home ‘Fairlawn’ they frequently sat out by the lake and discussed hours at a time, literature of all lands, cognating relative merits of each. At that period, about 1908, 'The Little Playhouse' founded by Mrs. Arthur Aldis in her grounds at Lake Forest was in vogue. There she produced many clever plays, several of them from her own pen. Dramatics being one of Henry’s many interests he became a frequent visitor and councilor. There he frequently met the Noble Judah’s and the Howard Shahs’s, the John T. McCutcheon’s in whose houses he was a frequent and welcome visitor.”⁵⁹ He had contact with almost everyone who had country homes north of Chicago, including I. K. Friedman, the novelist, whose success was due in part to Fuller’s helpful advice, and Edwin Fechter, whose aunt was Harriet Monroe. Anna Morgan too had a home in Ravinia, and he was often there along with Jen Jenson, who was a landscape gardener, and Clifford Raymond of literary fame.⁶⁰

Fuller did continue trying to publish, but his name would appear in publications more often as a respectful homage by a younger writer or publisher than attached to a new piece of writing from Fuller. Vachel Lindsay, a younger poet who wrote what he called “Singing Poetry,” had been published to great acclaim in Monroe’s new Poetry magazine. He wrote to Fuller a note of admiration and praise later that year:

You are in my opinion a very good man. I used to read your art student stories with all kinds of thrills when I was an arts student in the Institute. I will count it as a great honor to know you and besides I think a heap of you because you fit my theory of the New Socialism. You have located in Chicago—and sing your song about it—in noble numbers as it were.⁶¹

He clearly regards Fuller as important, but also past and while Lindsay appreciates his work and generosity, Fuller fits his theory, not the other way around. His friend, Carl Van Vechten, sent him the copy of an article he wrote praising Fuller that appeared in the June 1922 issue of John McClure’s small New Orleans journal The Double Dealer.62 The article appears alongside William Faulkner of Oxford Mississippi, “a young Southern Poet of unusual promise,” and a small poem by Ernest Hemingway. Van Vechten’s new book, Peter Whiffle, had just been issued the previous month by Knopf and went into its second printing and Sherwood Anderson’s name is on the cover to promote his new book Many Marriages.⁶³ Fuller’s importance to the American literary canon had never been more assured than it was during this period, but he couldn’t get published anymore because his kind of realism no longer had a place among the newer, younger, and fully modern writers.

The editors he submits to are polite and encouraging, but rejecting. Horace B. Liveright writes on March 12, 1921, to thank him for his “kindness in pointing out a number of typographical errors in ‘The Great Modern Short Stories.’” He goes on: “I have heard some rumors about a new novel by you. If it hasn’t already been arranged for, I’d like very much to have the privilege of considering it.”⁶⁴ On April 21, 1924, George Jean Nathan, coeditor of The American Mercury with H. L. Mencken, wrote a rejection note to Fuller without saying for what he was rejected. He does say, “It would give me great pleasure to have you in the Mercury. Have you anything else that you think might be available?”⁶⁵ He received another note, presumably of the same year on December 30, from Nathan rejecting him again. “I am sorry indeed that I can’t take this, but I think it lies outside the field of the American Mercury. I surely hope you have something else on the stocks in mind. It would be a great pleasure to see you in the magazine.”⁶⁶ Fuller never recaptures the success of his early years, but his legacy beginning a radical critique of Chicago’s business scene will be imitated, borrowed, and repeated by the young modernists who believe they have moved beyond his older vision begun in the days of the Columbian Exhibition. His literary and personal legacy will inspire Fuller’s good friend Louis Bromfield to write, nearly eighteen months after Fuller’s death in July of 1929:

When I read in the Paris Herald that Henry Fuller was dead I had the feeling that something definite had gone from my life which I could never replace. He was that rarest and finest of things—a gentleman and I think he understood what few of us in our generation understands—that being a gentleman is the most important thing of all. He had taste, intelligence, cultivation, now what more could one ask in a friend? He was the most civilized American I have known.⁶⁷