4: Connecting City, Suburb, and Region
In 1909, writer James Edward Rogers pointed out an unusual pattern in American news. “Traveling across the continent from New York one passes through different ‘zones,’” Rogers explained. In each zone, a traveler would encounter a different city’s newspapers. “On the train out of New York he is offered the New York papers—the Times, the Sun, the Herald, and the like. On the next day he is flooded with the newspapers of Chicago, then of Salt Lake, then of Ogden, and later of San Francisco. Returning via San Francisco on the Santa Fe, he passes through the ‘zones’ of the Los Angeles, the Denver, and the New Orleans newspapers.”1 These cross-country trains passed through farm country, desert outposts, mountain towns, and dense forests. Yet no matter how far he might venture from a major American city, the passenger would still get his news from a city paper.
A dozen years later, sociologists Robert Park and Charles Newcomb described the same phenomenon. Park and Newcomb mapped the reach of cities’ major morning dailies and found that information from each city traveled hundreds of miles (fig. 4.1). Their map showed dailies’ territories spreading outward, often edging over state borders until they bumped up against the next big-city paper’s domain. Los Angeles papers, for instance, reached to the eastern border of Arizona. Minneapolis papers traveled to eastern Montana. New Orleans papers circulated in the Florida panhandle, and Chicago papers covered portions of ten different states. A handful of America’s cities dominated the national news market.
4.1 Map showing the reach of cities’ major morning dailies. Robert E. Park and Charles Newcomb, “Newspaper Circulation and Metropolitan Regions,” in The Metropolitan Community, ed. Roderick D. McKenzie (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1933), 107.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, city newspaper publishers energetically pursued readers who lived outside of city limits. The middle-class and wealthy families who moved from cities out to planned suburbs seemed like natural audiences for city papers, since they often worked in the city or visited it frequently. Residents of towns beyond the metropolitan region were more difficult to reach, yet as newspapers’ advertisers expressed a desire to speak to these people, publishers did their best to draw them in. Express trains, steamships, and even airplanes sped city papers to readers living many miles away. Sunday papers, especially, traveled far and wide, with many metropolitan papers selling more copies outside of city boundaries than inside them.2 Newspapers never completely saturated their broader regions, though—and this was on purpose. Papers’ distribution networks simply passed over working-class suburban residents or poor farm families with little money to spend on the products that appeared in newspaper pages.
Newspapers did not just adapt to a suburbanizing trend but in fact actively created suburbs. Real estate sections grew middle- and upper-class suburbs through their advertisements for subdivisions and their mail-order house plans; they promoted the suburban way of life in features on home decor and gardening. By the 1910s and 1920s, newspapers had so integrated suburban news, images, and values that they had become truly metropolitan—not just city—media. In turn, they helped readers acclimate to the suburbs. The railroad timetables, department store ads, and help-wanted notices in papers made it possible for people to live lives that straddled city and suburb. Metropolitan papers further eased the transition to suburban life by depositing vicarious experiences of cities on suburbanites’ doorsteps.
Beyond the suburbs, city papers coordinated regional economies and drew far-flung readers into the city’s cultural and economic orbit. Papers’ commodity price listings and freight schedules gave farmers the logistical tools to sell their produce to city markets. Newspaper ads and features altered small-town and rural people’s tastes and standards, turning them into consumers of urban products. Papers coordinated flows of not only products but people, too; they helped young men and women in small towns to imagine, and then establish, urban lives.
As their territories spread, urban papers kept readers looking to the city itself. Newspapers depicted the city as the indisputable heart of metropolitan and regional life, and the daily flow of information from downtown outward reinforced cities’ centrality. Simultaneously, though, newspapers forged broader metropolitan and regional identities for their readers. Articles introduced city people, suburbanites, and country people to each other. They often outlined priorities and interests that all of these readers could share, building up regional identities. By stitching together city, suburb, and region, newspapers built an American economy, culture, and identity more tied to cities than ever before.
This chapter travels to Chicago, a city whose urban center, suburban periphery, and outlying regions all grew spectacularly through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The city’s founders had envisioned it as a hub for the Midwest and even the whole western United States. They chose a site on the shore of Lake Michigan for its easy access to trade routes and to both wild and rural hinterlands. Developers hoped that products from the surrounding region—lumber from the forests to the north, livestock from the prairie, milk from nearby farms, grain from the entire Midwest—would help feed, build, and enrich the city. Chicago railroads could carry midwestern goods farther west, while boats could speed them east along the Erie Canal or south down the Mississippi. Chicago’s relationship with its hinterland resembled that of many other U.S. cities. Upstate New York farmers sent their produce down the Hudson to be sold in New York City markets or shipped out through its ports. Ohio farmers sent their hogs to Cincinnati to be slaughtered, processed, and sent by rail to customers nationwide. Chicago’s regional territory, though, stretched across a vast space, and its entrepreneurs dreamed on a grander scale than nearly anyplace else.3
Chicagoans strove for urban sophistication, and in many ways they achieved it. By the turn of the century, the city boasted the most modern architecture in the United States, an extensive transportation system, luxurious shopping districts, and landscaped parks. It had hosted the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the largest and most lauded fair the United States had ever seen. The city was incubating a new school of realist urban fiction and a new genre of human-interest reporting that reveled in the incongruities of urban life.4 Yet because Chicago was so much younger than its eastern counterparts and because its economy relied so heavily on agricultural products and raw materials, Chicago’s urban center bore many traces of its rural surroundings. At the downtown board of trade, brokers exchanged purchasing rights for hogs and corn. In central Loop department stores, visiting farmers gawked at the expensive goods. Some Chicagoans found their city’s countrified ways embarrassing.5 Many other Chicagoans knew, though, that their city’s prosperity depended in large part on the farms and wilderness that surrounded it and embraced elements of midwestern rural culture as their own.
Almost as soon as settlers arrived in Chicago, real estate speculators began developing a suburban fringe, and the suburbs grew ever more popular as the city expanded. Chicago’s population more than quintupled between 1870 and 1900, and hundreds of thousands of migrants and immigrants taking factory and service jobs crowded into the city.6 Downtown, towering skyscrapers blocked out sunlight and high land values turned front yards and porches into unaffordable luxuries. The noise, dust, and massive scale of the city’s industrial districts drove many families to seek out space and quiet in a suburban subdivision or an unincorporated, outlying district. Because Chicago’s suburbs grew continuously in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city offers examples of nearly every kind of suburb developed in those years.7 The size and diversity of the suburban periphery also means that a large proportion of Chicagoans cycled through the suburbs at some point in their lives and experienced life not only in Chicago but also in “Chicagoland.”
Building the Suburbs, Selling the Dream
Most Chicagoans’ journeys to the suburbs started with a newspaper. Older methods of finding a place to live—from scouting the “for sale” or “for rent” signs in windows, to touring apartments with a local realtor, to moving into the same building as a relative—simply did not work for the suburban search. Instead, Chicagoans turned to newspapers’ centralized listings, which provided space for suburban developers to speak to potential customers but also played more active roles in the process of suburbanization. Chicago dailies ran feature stories on new developments. They urged readers to browse the real estate listings, and they eventually created separate real estate sections. They commissioned countless articles on home life and countless more on the metropolitan real estate market, all of which spread suburban ideals and suburban norms.
Newspaper editors accommodated realtors in part to attract ad revenue. Editors also worked hand in hand with suburban developers because they stood to benefit from suburban growth. Every new neighborhood that sprouted up meant a broader base of potential reading customers. Finally, editors boosted suburbs and their real estate because many of them believed that suburbs offered a genuinely higher quality of life. The editors and publishers of many metropolitan newspapers lived in suburban estates themselves.8 They were glad to partner with developers who made suburban greenery, quiet, and fresh air available to much of the city’s middle class.
“Suburb,” however, was a slippery concept in turn-of-the-century Chicago. The city annexed huge swaths of territory all through the period, eventually encompassing suburban, industrial, and rural areas.9 Many middle- and upper-class districts that started as suburbs laid out by private developers, such as Hyde Park, Lake View, and Rogers Park, eventually became urban districts. These areas often retained much of their suburban character after annexation: they boasted landscaped parks and winding streets, the houses had large yards and front porches, and residents commuted to downtown for work.10 These areas can be seen as suburban, even though Chicago came to count them as part of its municipal territory.
The suburbs also included less planned neighborhoods, where working-class residents built their own houses bit by bit, over years or even decades. These neighborhoods did not conform to the archetypal suburban image of uniform houses, neat lawns, and commuter train stations. Residents often used outhouses rather than bathrooms, raised chickens or goats, and saw the smokestacks of Chicago’s outlying factories out their windows. Yet these areas—places like Melrose Park, Robbins, and Garfield Heights—were as close as many working-class families would come to the suburban dream.11 Chicago newspapers played minimal roles in building these scrappier suburbs. Because profit margins were smaller in the business of selling cheap lots, realtors were less likely to mount major newspaper ad campaigns for such suburbs, and papers themselves probably did not clamor for that business. Circulation managers may have seen working-class suburbs as lost causes—their unpaved roads made newspaper delivery difficult, and residents were unlikely to purchase many of the goods advertised in newspaper pages. Newspapers therefore had little to do with the growth of working-class suburbs.
Newspapers had everything to do, in contrast, with the growth of home ownership as a goal and a reality for middle- and upper-class Chicagoans. Buying a home had been just one option, and not a particularly popular one, for nineteenth-century city dwellers. But in the late nineteenth century, newspaper material began making a compelling case for home ownership in the suburbs. Developers placed illustrated ads showing neat suburban tracts just waiting for customers to construct gracious homes. Classified real estate listings caught readers’ attention with patterned text, bold type, and images. “Shall I buy a home?” asked an 1889 ad for a development. “Does this question haunt your waking hours? Is it disturbing your nightly rest? IT CERTAINLY SHOULD.”12 Newspapers kindled readers’ interest in buying in part by pointing out the downsides of renting. “BURN YOUR RENT RECEIPTS for the last ten years; they never will buy you anything,” shouted a 1913 ad in the Record-Herald. “Make your rent receipts represent payments on YOUR OWN HOME.”13 Advertisements also depicted rental apartments as inherently unstable places to live and commiserated with readers about the frequent moves required of renters. An 1897 Chicago Tribune cartoon depicted moving as akin to a game of musical chairs, in which Chicagoans went through hassles and minor traumas only to realize that their new flat was no better than their old one.14 A full-page ad in the Sunday Record-Herald promised to solve renters’ problems—housing instability and moving expense—in one fell swoop. “Your memory is full of the discomforts of moving day,” it said. “Move just once more and then settle down to years of enjoyment in your own home.”15 Many readers, tired of neglectful landlords, noisy neighbors, and rent increases, took the bait.
Newspaper material further lobbied for suburbs by calling readers’ attention to all of the amenities and conveniences that they lacked in the city. Advertisements for suburban developments depicted domestic conveniences such as wide lots, front yards, tree-lined streets, sewers, and gas heat.16 The suburbs were shown as nature-filled alternatives to the industrial city—even though they required as much construction and maintenance as urban neighborhoods. A testimonial in an 1888 ad portrayed the Edgewater development as an idyllic haven: “There is no dust, dirt, noise, or anything unpleasant at Edgewater so far discovered. Our little children play outdoors without watching and without danger. We would think the place spoiled if the railroad ran between us and the lake, as it does on the South Side. No doctor has yet gone to any family in Edgewater for a single visit called by sickness. The lake bathing in summer is enjoyed by all. . . . It is cooler in summer and warmer in winter close to the lake.”17 Readers desperate to escape cramped and polluted industrial neighborhoods were primed for suburban developers’ inflated promises. Live the way man was meant to live, urged the Chicago Record-Herald: “You Get Most out of Life in a Suburban Home” (fig. 4.2).18
4.2 The Chicago Record-Herald—not its advertisers—constructed this suburban fantasy, as it announced an upcoming real estate special issue. Beside the image of a commuter greeted by his family and dog, the text explains that, in springtime, “your mind is naturally turned toward green lawns, garden plats and the big outdoors.” Sunday Record-Herald, 4 May 1913, sec. 2, 8.
Newspapers continued to sell the suburban idea by combating readers’ fears of isolated suburban life. Every spring and summer weekend, papers ran announcements for free excursions, in which Chicagoans could hop on special trains or streetcars, tour the available properties at subdivisions, view model homes, and enjoy picnic lunches. These excursions used the promise of a pleasant Sunday afternoon to introduce city people to the pleasures of suburban life and to familiarize them with the commute. Advertisers took pains to describe the mechanics of commuting and to stress how easy and convenient travel would be. They explained that the train to the Loop took only eighteen minutes, that trains ran fifty times a day, and that the fare was a mere seven cents. Many ads printed maps that depicted their area, sometimes through sleight of hand, as close and connected to the city (fig. 4.3). In an 1888 ad for Auburn Park, rings radiated from downtown, and the text assured readers that they would have to travel through only two of these rings or “zones” to get to the Loop.19 These ads attempted to bridge physical distances and smooth over logistical difficulties to convince readers that they could have the best of both worlds, that they could live in peace and quiet within an easy distance of cities’ bustle.
4.3 An advertisement for Grossdale pictures it at the center of the entire Midwest, and lists the distances to all of the region’s major cities. The picture disguises the fact that residents could not actually travel in a straight line to any of these places, and if traveling by train, they would still have to pass through downtown Chicago. Chicago Herald, 16 July 1893, 23.
In case Chicago newspapers had not convinced readers of the pleasures of suburban life, they also aggressively pushed suburban houses as wise financial investments. Speculators had hedged fortunes on Chicago’s land through much of the nineteenth century, and it was largely speculators who built central Chicago. But newspapers invited average citizens to get in on the game. “This property will have a natural increase in value within the next year of from 25 to 50%,” forecast an 1889 ad. “Can you afford to let so excellent a chance of making money pass you by?”20 Ad copy sometimes played down several factors families might want to consider when choosing their homes—convenience, aesthetics, proximity to family or friends—and played up the potential for fast profit. “There’s just one thing about this real estate business, young man,” advised a classified ad. “That if you don’t buy a lot pretty quick you’ll get left.”21 By constantly talking about homes as good investments, newspapers gradually transformed suburban home buying from a means to acquire a permanent place to live into a means to get rich quick.
Newspaper material taught readers the value of one final suburban offering: neighborhood exclusivity. Advertisements promised “good homes and good neighbors” or “the best associations”—veiled references to suburbs’ carefully selected, homogenous populations.22 Ads pointed out nearby churches, letting readers know that there was a convenient congregation for them to join and indicating that the people settling there were good church-going folks. Newspapers described suburban schools in status-conscious terms. “The schools are excellent,” noted one 1890 Chicago Record article on Hinsdale, “embracing all of the advantages of the public school system without that objectionable feature to be noticed in cities—a mixed attendance from every social grade.”23 The caliber of suburbs’ residents could even raise property values, insisted newspaper ads. “A choice class of people are settling here,” assured an 1889 classified ad, “and the property is increasing rapidly.”24
By the 1890s, many German families had lived in Chicago for a generation and had established themselves in a business or profession; many could pass muster in “exclusive” communities. So developers commonly placed ads in the city’s German-language newspapers; readers of the 1891 Illinois Staats-Zeitung, for example, encountered ads for Rogers Park, Ravenswood, Irving Park, Northfield, Summerdale, and Avondale.25 Fewer developers marketed to recently arrived, less-assimilated immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who had less money to spend and may have been the very groups that wealthier Chicagoans were trying to leave behind.26
Newspaper text pointed out the benefits of homogenous, exclusive suburban communities for two reasons. On the one hand, developers and reporters believed that many urban residents would genuinely prefer to live among people much like themselves. In Chicago, as in New York, newspapers encouraged middle-class readers to visit immigrant neighborhoods as tourists, but few articles talked to readers about learning to live with immigrant neighbors. On the other hand, developers pushed a single-class model because they found it easier to lay out physically uniform neighborhoods. Most suburban developers divided their land into grids of equal-sized lots and connected each lot to the same utilities. Realtors charged all buyers the same markup for shared amenities such as schools, nearby train stations, and community parks. If developers constructed houses on suburban properties, rather than selling empty lots, they often built many variations on the same design to keep costs down.27 Newspaper text then helped to convince Chicagoans that developers’ decisions—made out of social preference and economic necessity—had actually produced the ideal living situation. Of course, advertisements sold an image and not reality. Middle- and upper-class suburbs actually housed members of multiple social classes, if only because families hired live-in domestics. Even so, suburbs dominated by one class of residents became the most common pattern in Chicago and in the United States, with help from newspapers.
Correspondingly, white realtors, developers, and homeowners drew increasingly firm boundaries around the neighborhoods where black Chicagoans could rent or buy.28 African American readers likely knew that most suburban developments in mainstream dailies’ pages—just like most of the shops and services taking out ads—would not welcome their business. Chicago’s black weekly papers, though, marked out safe neighborhoods.
The Chicago Defender, the city’s biggest African American weekly newspaper, pitched the exclusive middle- and upper-class suburban dream to its readers even though that dream might be hard to achieve. “All Are Happy and Prosperous—Most of Them Being Business Men—Place Is Like a Summer Resort,” declared a 1913 feature on a South Side development, Lilydale. “Everyone Goes to Church.”29 The Defender emphasized suburbs’ powers to uplift their residents. A 1925 serial story followed a city woman as she visited a young married couple in the fictional suburb of Ploverdale. The visitor marveled over the couple’s tiled kitchen, their laundry chute, and the hot water that ran right from the tap. The story became a treatise on the transformative power of fine real estate:
Clustered around a drive encircling an oval parkway were many beautiful homes of stucco and brick, enhanced by spacious lawns. In the center was a fountain which made a pretty picture against the smooth green oval surrounding it.
Aunt Lottie Purkins was incredulous. “You ain’t foolin’ me, chile, so you mought as wall turn ‘round an’ drive down there by them railroad tracks. I know my kinda folks don’t live here.”
“Well, auntie,” laughed Isabel, whom she had come up to visit, “you forget that we are living in the 20th century. Some of our folks still live in the kind of shacks we passed there at the railroad, but there are others that are doing much better.”30
The paper pointed out that Ploverdale selected its residents from among the well-to-do; “building restrictions prevented the erection of any but high-grade homes.”31
An exclusive and prosperous suburban ideal appeared in Defender articles and fiction in spite of the few opportunities open to African American prospective buyers.32 Those who insisted on suburban homes found just a handful of developments advertised in the Defender, mostly in industrial districts in South Chicago or Gary, Indiana.33 More buyers purchased urban property—multifamily homes and apartment buildings in Chicago’s black belt. These buildings offered buyers the stability of ownership and even the possibility of steady income; Defender ads played this up. “The road to independence is through ownership,” declared an ad for a South Side real estate company. “It gives you credit and standing in the community. REAL ESTATE IS THE BASIS OF ALL WEALTH.”34 These buildings did not, however, provide any version of the leafy, leisurely suburban dream.
Newspapers played only a minor role in orchestrating both black and white working-class Chicagoans’ moves to the suburbs. When developers did choose to advertise to working-class buyers, though, they made slightly different pitches. “1 block to river,” stated a 1921 ad for a South Side development. “Good fishing: improved, ready for building. I.C.R.R. and electric car service; rich soil and enough to produce fruit and vegetables to cut down cost of living.”35 These developers sold homes not with images of manicured lawns but with a do-it-yourself ethos instead.
When they crafted separate real estate sections, Chicago’s newspapers further accommodated suburban realtors. The size and frequency of these sections varied with the state of the market, but by the 1920s every Chicago daily ran a regular one.36 Real estate sections played vital roles in developing Chicago’s downtown, its urban neighborhoods, and its suburbs. Their listings helped many Chicagoans find rental apartments and buy businesses. Though they stimulated investment all over the city, and did not simply drain capital and residents from the center to the edges of the city, they put an enormous emphasis on the importance of homeownership. They provided the rationales as well as the logistical means for suburban growth.
Real estate sections fueled the market by conveying a relentless optimism about Chicago’s potential for growth. A 1916 ad described Chicago’s apparent destiny: “Yesterday, a prairie. Today—three million dollars’ worth of homes, bungalows, cottages, apartments . . . Incidentally, lots have increased in value 20% to 150%.”37 The sections’ articles spoke of huge demand for Chicago properties and of an inevitable rise in values. “Chicago Building Pace Called Dizzy,” reported the Daily News in 1925. “City Growing Too Fast to Overbuild.”38 One development illustrated its ad not with images of homes but with bags of money and dollar signs.39 Next to these euphoric statements ran more detailed listings that helped readers decide exactly where to invest. Lists of the previous day’s transactions, with descriptions of the properties sold and the prices paid, could be useful to major investors deciding where to buy. But they also encouraged the average reader to think like an investor. Readers could try to predict which areas of the city were about to see the biggest growth or which styles and sizes of building would soon be in highest demand. Real estate sections’ advertisements then acquainted readers with the people who could help finance their purchases: mortgage brokers who clamored for readers’ attention and promised “easy terms.”40 “Lack of ready money need not stop you when you see your chance,” explained one.41 Eventually, ads appeared that invited readers to invest in bundles of other people’s mortgages, predicting that the collective value of Chicago properties would increase and investors would receive hefty returns.
Even once Chicagoans had bought homes, real estate sections’ material encouraged them to keep thinking about those homes as investments first and dwelling places second. The Chicago Tribune’s Book of Homes, a catalog of house plans, warned prospective builders that following personal whims might hurt the resale value of their property. “In case the owner wishes to dispose of this house in a few years,” explained the catalog, “he will find that he has strayed too far from the average taste and the resale value of his house has greatly lessened.”42 The Tribune’s features on remodeling similarly stressed resale value over the owners’ actual needs. Before diving into the details of stuccoing an old facade, the writer asked readers to “take, for instance, a house which the owner could not possibly sell for $7,000 because of its decaying, dilapidated appearance. Spend $1,500 or $2,000 on it and it becomes salable for $10,000 or more.”43 Such features taught readers to think of their homes as temporary dwellings and investments rather than permanent places to live where their own comfort and taste was all that mattered. This attitude would take deep root among homeowners in the twentieth century.
Real estate sections wrought complex transformations on the city. When they printed information about property investments, they helped to demystify and democratize the process. The mortgage brokers who found clients in the newspaper often increased the real wealth of families, for mortgages allowed many Chicagoans to purchase and then pay off properties whose values rose over time. At the same time, real estate sections’ constant boosting and their promises of easy money helped create a high-turnover and dangerously volatile industry. By encouraging rampant speculation and by assuming endless growth, newspaper material inflated the real estate bubble that would burst, spectacularly, in the autumn of 1929.
When newspaper editors actively recruited advertisers who could sell products to homeowners, they boosted not only the business of home buying but of home owning as well. In nineteenth-century cities, only landlords and the home-owning upper class had needed to purchase things like roof tiles, boilers, or coal chutes. In twentieth-century neighborhoods around the city’s periphery, nearly all families became potential customers for such things. And for all of the extra square feet that families gained in the suburbs, they needed more furniture, more fixtures, and more window drapes. “Those communities in which home ownership is deep-seated encourage the sales effort of the advertiser,” explained the Chicago Tribune in its annual Book of Facts, which it sent to current and prospective advertisers each year. “Take a glimpse, for instance, of a few separate rooms in these Tribune homes.”44 The Book of Facts then pointed out sample products that readers might need for their kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, basement, and laundry. Real estate sections of the 1910s and 1920s earned the advertising dollars of garage builders, porch screeners, roofers, interior decorators, landscapers, painters, plumbers, and utility companies, all hoping to sell products and services to homeowners.
Real estate editors supported the selling mission of their sections, and also catered to their readers’ interests, by offering lessons in how to decorate, landscape, and maintain a home. In the 1910s and 1920s, editors commissioned home-decor features written by real or fictional experts, such as the Herald’s “Madame Maison.” The Tribune’s “The Home Harmonious” stressed that every object in a room and every room in an entire home should coordinate. Its aesthetic encouraged readers to replace their current noncoordinating possessions with the era’s marketed “ensembles” of appliances or linens.45 Newspaper articles and advertisements both insisted, over and over, on the importance of beautiful interiors. “The labor of furnishing should be one of love, and an individual expression of self,” declared one column of domestic hints.46 A downtown department store advertised a “home beautiful service” that would create “plans in home furnishing and decoration as the requirements of individual problems demand.”47 All of these home features and advertisements fed a real interest in interior decoration. Readers used the Home Beautiful Service, bought many of the advertised products, and wrote letters to “home” editors asking for advice.48 But by positioning home decor as a “problem,” and by speaking about design as self-expression, real estate sections advanced their advertisers’ agendas and primed readers to buy.
Features in real estate sections focused readers’ attention on the pleasures and demands of the suburban, rather than the urban, home. They referred to spaces such as sun porches and foyers as if every reader would have one—even though most urban apartments would not. A few home decor columns, such as those appearing in the Chicago Daily News, made a point of discussing small spaces and ways to save money while decorating. Even so, these columns took suburban properties as the aesthetic ideal and showed readers how to make their urban apartments at least seem suburban. “In to-day’s drawing I have shown a country outlook,” explained Dorothy Ethel Walsh, the Daily News’s home columnist, “but even in a city apartment there is generally something worth seeing out of the windows. Maybe a branch of a tree crosses the window. Make a great deal of it if it does. . . . If only brick walls greet your gaze then plant a window box and have a vision of green.”49 Columnists assumed that readers either lived in a single-family, detached home with ample outdoor space and a yard or that they wanted to.
Gardening columns, too, established suburban norms in city papers. In 1923, the Sunday Tribune instituted a daily column called “Farm and Garden,” which gave readers tips on keeping hydrangeas alive in winter and decorating with hyacinths. In 1926 the paper compiled the column’s tips on flower and vegetable gardening and sold it as a booklet, Suburban Gardening by Frank Ridgway.50 Other papers started similar features during World War I, when many civic groups urged families to start gardens, and kept publishing them through the 1920s.51 Advertisements further set the expectation that Chicago newspaper readers had, or ought to have, gardens. Carson Pirie Scott & Company pictured spades, pruning shears, turf edgers, lawn rollers, garden hoses, and birdhouses alongside other housewares like dishes and furniture.52 An ad in the Sunday Record-Herald pictured a landscaper and a homeowner surveying a huge suburban property: “Wittbold Gardeners . . . will see with trained eyes the unseen possibilities of your lawn and garden.”53 These ads planted desires and aspirations in urban readers’ minds for a green, suburban—and expensive—life.
Suburban imagery and expectations surfaced in many other portions of newspapers—especially advertisements. Ads for vacuums, pianos, curtains, and living room sets showed spacious homes with breezy porches, meandering driveways, and windows framed by creeping vines. Urban housewives in compact kitchens or at washbasins gave way to suburban housewives in airy kitchens with garden views (fig. 4.4). Automobile advertisements pictured glamorous motorists pulling up to suburban homes.54 These images cropped up in the Chicago Daily News, even though most of its readers lived in dense urban neighborhoods, and in the Defender, even though most Defender readers did not have access to any piece of suburbia. The images lent a surprisingly suburban look to urban newspaper pages and deepened the assumption that most readers aspired to suburban-style living.
Real estate features presumed that every man planned to build his own home, and they helped him along that path. The Chicago Daily News titled a portion of its real estate section “The Home Builder’s Clinic” and printed a regular column called “Help for the Man Who Wants to Build.”55 The columns answered home-owning readers’ questions about topics such as weather stripping, attractive shrubbery, and foundation materials.56 Both the Tribune and the Daily News printed plans for single-family homes each week, which readers could order by mail (fig. 4.5).57 The Tribune even sponsored an architects’ contest for five- and six-room house plans. The entries appeared in the paper’s real estate section and also in a book that proved popular among Chicagoans; in 1926 alone, the Tribune offices sold 3,399 copies.58 Tribune editors described the book of plans as a vehicle for readers to achieve their home-owning dreams: “If the homes amid its pages reach out and make their appeal,” mused the booklet’s editor, “bringing men and women a step beyond their dream home and a step closer to their real one, then surely its mission will have been accomplished.”59
4.5 Almost all of the mail-order homes offered through Chicago newspapers appeared surrounded by trees and gardens, with no neighbors in sight. Chicago Daily News, 12 September 1925, 15.
Newspapers’ house plans, like much real estate material, did help many readers realize dreams of more spacious, healthy, serene surroundings. But like many news features, real estate sections entwined news and commerce. These sections pushed readers toward a single-family, suburban model of life, in part because that model benefited advertisers. The sections worked steadily and effectively. Chicago’s suburbs could not have established such a grip on the public’s imagination, nor could they have enlisted nearly so many buyers, without the constant aid of the city’s metropolitan papers.
There was one much more subtle way that newspapers stimulated suburban growth: they delivered a vicarious experience of the city to readers’ doorsteps each morning. The ready availability of Chicago newspapers, and the urban experience within, meant that subscribers did not have to entirely disconnect from the life of the city when they moved outside of its borders. The daily bundle of urban information eased the transition from city to suburb.
Many of the features that allowed suburban readers to imagine city life were not written explicitly for those suburbanites. Journalists tried to capture facets of urban experience that would interest people living in Chicago as well as to those living outside of it. While these features helped urbanites flesh out and interpret their own city experience, they let suburbanites imagine a Chicago life without going there at all. When the 1896 Tribune published columns called “Events of a City Day” or “What Some of the Chicago Preachers Said,” the paper brought suburban readers into the daily life of the city proper.60 More evocative pieces heightened the experience. George Ade wrote short “Stories of the Streets and of the Town” for the Chicago Daily News between 1893 and 1900, in which he sampled urban experiences. He told readers about discussions unfolding over boarding-house dining tables or in front of paintings at the Art Institute. He described some of the city’s oddest vehicles (a waffle wagon, a cobbler shop), or the city’s tiniest storefronts.61 The Sunday Herald’s “Humor and City Life” section printed a half page of “Tales They Tell in the Loop,” and a series of illustrations, called “Our Neighbors across the Way,” that reproduced the mini-dramas urbanites glimpsed through their neighbors’ windows.62 The 1920s Tribune ran a series of short stories on its front page, each centering on the coincidences and possibilities of life in the big city.63
The vicarious urban experience available in newspapers, as we have seen, rendered a print community that readers could imagine themselves a part of. It meant something a little bit different, though, to commuters and to stay-at-home suburbanites. Commuters often had very little opportunity to explore and enjoy the city, as their direct experience of Chicago might be limited to the view from the train, the walk from station to office, and a meal at a downtown lunch counter. Newspaper material could help these commuters feel connected to the cultural and social life of the city. It could make up, in part, for the urban experience they were missing when they shuttled home after work. For suburban residents who stayed home—especially women—newspapers could ease some of their isolation. The chatty society columns and the intimate women’s page material provided a bit of companionship for women raising children in single-family suburban homes. Tales of urban life let these readers taste the energy and dynamism of city streets, and perhaps imagine alternate existences as city people. In these small ways, newspaper material made suburban life a bit more palatable to Chicagoans; it allowed them to move out of the city without leaving it entirely behind.
Writing for Suburban Subscribers
In the beginning, all that Chicago newspapers did to cater to suburban readers was to follow them to the city’s fringes. Only in the early twentieth century did Chicago papers alter their circulation strategies and adapt their reporting to appeal specifically to suburban readers. These efforts produced newspapers that felt simultaneously urban and suburban. As publishers circulated these papers across a wide swath of territory, they knit disparate communities into a metropolitan network.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Chicago publishers did not have to try too hard to get suburbanites to subscribe to their papers. After all it was newspapers, along with rail lines and streetcars, that actually made early suburban life possible. Only with access to city information could anyone live so physically separate from the city but still earn and spend money there, still work and visit downtown. Businessmen read morning sheets during their commute; papers caught them up on national events, commodity prices, and city happenings before they started their day at the office. Suburban women would use daily department store ads to plan their shopping trips downtown. They could also scout out the stores that offered delivery to their area, since suburban stores stocked a limited range of clothing and home goods—if they stocked any at all.64 Suburban residents browsed the city papers’ entertainment ads to see if a vaudeville show or musical concert merited a weekend trip in. Some suburbs published their own papers, but their slim weekly issues could not substitute for fat metropolitan dailies. Many suburban households found city newspapers so essential to everyday life that they had two copies delivered to them every morning—one for the husband to read on the morning train, the other for the wife to read at home.65
To cover these new domains, Chicago publishers sent reporters along the routes that suburbanites themselves traveled. This meant that newspapers incorporated news from prosperous bedroom communities: Lake View and Evanston to the north, Grossdale and Morton Park to the west, Hyde Park to the south. Under the Tribune’s regular column of local news, “The City,” it printed a “suburban” column, which discussed suburbs’ Sunday sermons, club meetings, or new schools. The 1880s Tribune printed notes from the board meetings of new developments and reported on changes to suburban train service. The city’s dailies covered debates over suburban annexation in detail, sometimes from the perspective of suburbanites rather than city dwellers.66 Chicago papers integrated suburban news and announcements into their regular columns, too, mirroring the ways that urban and suburban Chicagoans themselves mixed in daily life. The residents of prosperous suburbs belonged to downtown social clubs and served on the boards of its charities, so the Times-Herald titled its club column “Clubs of the Town and Suburb” and listed the suburban Lake View Woman’s Club alongside the urban Chicago Teacher’s Club.67 The wealthiest suburban parents debuted their daughters in downtown balls and sometimes even rented apartments downtown during the winter social season, so society columns described teas and weddings in Wilmette and Winnetka as well as in Chicago proper.68
Chicago suburbs depended on urban labor—and hence depended on city newspapers to connect them to labor markets. Metropolitan papers offered clearinghouses where suburban households could place ads for nannies or gardeners and where laundresses or carriage drivers could advertise both their skills and their willingness to work in the suburbs. Chicago dailies recognized that suburban readers relied on their classified listings and made efforts to hold onto that business as the metropolitan area grew. The Tribune opened dozens of branch offices throughout the metropolitan area; the Daily News enlisted hundreds of drugstore owners to take people’s classified requests and phone them into the paper every day.69 These branch arrangements kept the commerce of a huge territory flowing through city papers. Suburban residents even started to use city papers to communicate with each other. When plumbers in Evanston sought jobs nearby, when South Side dentists needed to attract local patients, or when Austin storekeepers wanted to sell their businesses, they all turned to Chicago papers’ classified ads.
By the first decades of the twentieth century, Chicago’s suburbs were developing somewhat more independent identities and economies. Chicago had annexed broad stretches of territory in the 1880s, but after that, the city was unable to convince many other suburbs to join. Townships—especially wealthy ones—came to value their independence and exclusivity over Chicago’s city services. Suburbs established separate school systems, governments, and municipal utilities. Their economies strengthened as small stores were joined by suburban offices, banks, and branch department stores.70 In this changed context, Chicago’s newspapers had to work harder to keep themselves relevant to suburban lives.
The city’s papers varied in their approaches. The Chicago Daily News decided to focus on urban reporting and to run advertisements aimed at an urban audience.71 The Chicago American also dedicated most of its coverage to events within city limits. The Herald, which became the Times-Herald, the Record-Herald, and finally the Herald and Examiner, extended its coverage a bit wider and spoke more frequently to suburbanites’ specific interests. The Chicago Tribune aimed to be the consummate metropolitan paper, serving urban and suburban readers alike. In 1925, the paper’s suburban subscriptions totaled 104,661, about one-quarter the size of its city circulation.72
Newspapers actively pursued readers in distant neighborhoods and in suburbs by offering them the same prices and delivery options as city residents, meaning that Chicagoans did not have to sacrifice the quality or the speed of their news when they decided to move to the suburbs. Circulation managers enlisted horsecars, trains, trucks, and deliverymen “at an expense of several million dollars,” in the case of the Chicago Tribune, to bring papers to suburban newsstands and doorsteps.73 The paper paid carriers extra to deliver to far-flung subscribers, sometimes taking a steep loss on subscriptions simply to uphold the paper’s reputation as a reliable news source for residents anywhere in the metropolitan area.74 The Daily News concentrated its delivery routes on the city’s center, but the paper employed its own suburban circulation manager, and it used four airplanes to shuttle the paper to far-off readers. It supplemented its downtown operation with plants on the West Side and the North Side, so that it could speed copies to residents in each district.75 None of these newspapers passed on the extra transportation costs to suburban customers.
Both the Tribune and the Herald and Examiner’s politics enlisted the sympathies, and potentially the subscriptions, of Chicago’s suburbanites. Each pushed an expansive and fundamentally metropolitan vision of the city. The Tribune printed its political platform above each day’s editorials beginning around 1920:
1—Lessen the Smoke Horror.
2—Create a Modern Traction System.
3—Modernize the Water Department.
4—Build Wide Roads into the Country.
5—Develop All Railroad Terminals.
6—Push the Chicago Plan.76
Aside from “the smoke horror,” each one of these issues dealt with connecting all the pieces and outlying areas of Chicago. (Item number six referenced Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, which proposed grand public buildings, parks, and wide boulevards that would make it far easier to navigate the city by streetcar or automobile.) The Herald and Examiner imitated the Tribune’s format, and by 1929 it, too, printed an editorial platform “For Chicago, the Nation’s Central Great City.” It stressed many of the same issues, simply updated for 1929 technology: wide roads, fast freeways, and organized public transit.77 Each paper’s urban vision included, and even prioritized, the suburbs.
In an effective ploy to hold onto readers and advertisers all through the metropolitan area, Chicago newspapers began to act as neighborhood weeklies as well as city dailies. Beginning in 1927, the Tribune printed three separate editions of its Sunday metropolitan section, for Chicago’s south, west, and north. Each edition covered the everyday events of its zone: charity fundraisers, high school sports matches, and Boy Scout troop meetings. The sections also sold separate advertising space.78 In 1929, the Herald and Examiner created a similar service, issuing four separate editions of the daily classifieds. “The new classified shopping service,” explained the paper, “is making it so convenient for readers on all four sides of the city to turn to the classified pages to find articles and services that they want and need, right in their own neighborhood, just around the corner from their homes.”79 Chicago papers established directories for local—not just downtown—services. The Tribune and the Herald and Examiner each drew up a “motion picture directory” using regional headings: Downtown, North Side, South Side, West Side, Oak Park, and Austin.80 Because Chicago papers had secured this suburban and neighborhood audience, regional chains used them to advertise—even when most of their locations lay outside of Chicago.81 By explicitly courting readers with neighborhood news, and by creating outlets for small and regional merchants’ advertising, both the Herald and Examiner and the Tribune positioned themselves as local, neighborhood papers. This not only kept subscriptions high and kept advertising dollars flowing in to these papers, it also prevented competition from springing up in the form of neighborhood newsletters or regional newspapers.82
By the late 1920s, Chicago newspapers had cultivated such metropolitan—rather than strictly urban—audiences that the very feel of these papers had changed. Readers encountered stories on suburban high school sports, columns full of suburban weddings, and listings for suburban theaters. They saw images of cozy single-family homes and read about players’ golf scores at suburban country clubs. Several portions of the paper no longer assumed that readers would be familiar with downtown Chicago. A 1925 Sears ad in the Chicago Daily News spelled out “El” and streetcar routes and driving instructions from four different directions, and department store ads mentioned their free and plentiful parking.83 In the 1929 Daily News, the Pittsfield Building Shops advertised themselves to readers either unused to or exhausted by the usual hubbub of downtown shopping. “You’ll be delighted with this sensation of shopping at your leisure right in the heart of the loop, yet far removed from the hurrying crowds and noise,” assured the ad.84 In their pursuit of suburban readers, editors and advertisers were incorporating suburban expectations, tastes, and values into city papers.
Yet metropolitan papers did not simply boost the profile and power of suburbs; they also kept suburbs tied to downtown. Like trains, which shuttled suburbanites downtown and back but did not carry them to the next town over, newspapers circulated information from city to suburb but not among suburbs that lay close to one another. This pattern constantly reinforced the idea that suburbs’ primary relationship was with downtown Chicago—not with their neighbors. “Englewood has little in common with the Stock-Yards . . . Kenwood has little that is in common with Pullman,” explained one suburban minister in a letter to the editor of the Tribune. “What is common to all these places? Chicago, Chicago, Chicago alone.”85 By facilitating suburbs’ interactions with Chicago but not with each other, newspapers helped to create a metropolitan area utterly dependent on the city at the center, in which that city prospered from its growing suburbs.
Reading Suburban Newspapers
Even though several of Chicago’s metropolitan dailies tried to be all things to all people, they could not provide thorough coverage of every suburb, town, and city in the metropolitan region. Other papers jumped into the news market wherever informational gaps remained. In middle- and upper-class suburbs, weeklies fostered local social and civic life and cemented the image of suburbs as enclaves of wealthy, white, nuclear families. In the largest peripheral cities, daily papers anchored small regional economies of their own, within Chicago’s greater reach and influence. Each community’s ratio of Chicago news to local news indicated the strength of its cultural and economic ties to the metropolis.
Commuter Suburbs
At first glance, Chicago’s newspapers did not seem to leave a lot of room for competition in the suburbs. Chicago dailies saturated the prosperous communities to the north and west of the city and often staked out territory before any suburban paper had the chance to take root.86 By the 1920s, between 70 and 90 percent of the families in these municipalities subscribed to the Sunday Tribune alone, not to mention the city’s other Sunday and daily papers.87 But publishers in these suburbs did spot an opportunity to gather and sell local news. They crafted weekly papers that spoke to women and mothers, older residents, and local business owners—all of whom spent their days right there in the suburbs, not in downtown Chicago. Suburban papers such as Wilmette Life, the Evanston Index, and the Lake Shore News provided the local and logistical information that these residents needed. At the same time, these weeklies artfully depicted the prosperous and homogenous communities that readers wanted to live in, rather than the multiracial, mixed-class suburbs that readers actually inhabited.
Suburban papers did not try to cover metropolitan papers’ beats. They generally ran no international or national news, printed no business page, and covered only the most local sports. Suburban weeklies never published the fashion spreads, advice columns, feature stories, or fiction found in Chicago papers. Local editors even printed advertisements for Chicago dailies, seeing dailies as supplements rather than competitors.88 These editors recognized that they would never develop their papers into large or highly lucrative operations. They employed just a few reporters and relied on local residents to write or phone in with their news.89 Many suburban papers stayed afloat by operating small printing businesses on the side, using presses to run off locals’ wedding invitations and birth announcements between editions of the paper.90
Suburban editors found their niche by focusing on local stories and local advertising but also by painting idyllic pictures of suburban life. Suburban papers played essential roles in the workings of local governments and communities. The papers covered local elections, school board motions, and club meetings, and they listed new books acquired by the library. Columns introduced readers to families moving in and alerted readers to their neighbors’ illnesses or vacations. All the while, suburban editors crafted papers that reflected the communities these residents wanted to have—not necessarily the communities they did have. Suburban weeklies included almost none of the salacious or disturbing material common to metropolitan papers. Very little crime appeared in their pages, and what did appear was quite subdued, such as a 1929 Hyde Park Herald list of bicycle thefts and clothes stolen off of clotheslines.91 The provocative movie ads of the metropolitan papers did not run in suburban weeklies. Instead, the Hyde Park Theater touted itself as a “house of quality” that showed only “family” films. Other ads invited readers to genteel entertainments such as teas, dinners, and dances at local clubs.92 Suburban weeklies took pride in the wholesome content of their papers much as they took pride in the wholesome nature of their suburbs. Under its masthead, Wilmette Life printed the slogan: “A Clean Newspaper for a Clean Community.”93
As publishers edited their weeklies to portray the kinds of communities they wanted their suburbs to be, they also addressed the kind of suburban audience they wanted to have. This meant that they wrote for homeowners and business owners in the fashionable parts of town. They did not write for working-class or black suburban residents, even though commuter suburbs housed gardeners, construction workers, drivers, mechanics, and live-in domestics.94 Working-class and nonwhite suburbanites generally looked elsewhere for their news, either to Chicago dailies or to the Chicago Defender. The Defender printed an Evanston column, for example, for the African Americans who made up roughly 5 percent of that suburb’s population.95 Even the want ads in suburban weeklies barely acknowledged working-class or African American populations. Suburbanites seeking maids or gardeners placed ads in Chicago papers. Workers willing to take jobs in the suburbs posted their “situation wanted” ads there too. This arrangement made logistical sense, since domestic workers often only moved to a particular suburb once they got the job. Yet outsourcing labor markets to urban papers had the convenient effect of keeping working-class and nonwhite residents out of suburban papers’ pages.
Unlike urban newspapers, which offered male- and female-oriented spaces within the larger newspaper, suburban newspapers created an overwhelmingly female space. Weeklies devoted a large proportion of their pages to schools, society, and shopping—all issues central to suburban women’s lives. The 1929 Hyde Park Herald went so far as to report every absence at the local elementary school; Wilmette Life published a mini-newspaper written by the town’s schoolchildren.96 Advertisements for milliners, hair salons, and china-painting lessons targeted women readers. This news strategy made sense in an environment where more women than men spent their days. It was mostly women who supervised children’s schooling, and mostly women who used suburban libraries and shopping districts. Occasionally editors revealed that they did not expect men to take as much of an interest in suburban news. “This copy of the ‘home paper’ on your library table identifies you and your interests in the community,” stated a full-page ad in Wilmette Life. “Be sure that it is there every week!”97 The ad persuaded Wilmette residents to subscribe not because they needed the information in the paper but because a subscription declared their allegiance to Wilmette.
Weeklies’ advertisements assumed that their core audience did not travel downtown very often and guided suburban readers through the process in order to attract their shopping dollars. “Shoppers will find the Elevated particularly convenient,” explained a 1913 ad placed by the train companies. “The Elevated will take you within a few steps of any of the large stores in the Loop district, with sheltered connections into several of them direct from station platforms.”98 The ad explained in detail which lines to take and assured suburban operagoers that there would be special late-night trains waiting to take them home from performances.99 A 1921 ad for the Field Museum of Natural History promised “a day you will never forget!” and then walked readers through the train transfers that would take them from Wilmette to the museum entrance.100 These ads rehearsed readers for a particularly suburban relationship to downtown, in which people took scheduled, safe, and orderly day trips for shopping and entertainment, then returned to their quieter lives by evening.
Suburban papers evolved into peculiar hybrids: one part civic institution, one part separate female sphere, and one part exclusive vision. The limited range of their articles in some ways reflected the limited range of activities that took place in commuter suburbs. But the content also rendered the kinds of lifestyles that many suburban readers wished for themselves. The articles in weeklies depicted homogenous, prosperous, domestic, wholesome places. Editors’ choices of content sent messages about who and what belonged in the suburbs and shaped readers’ impressions of their hometowns.
Satellite Cities
Chicago daily newspapers circulated in smaller “satellite” cities surrounding the metropolis.101 These cities lay between thirty and fifty miles from downtown Chicago, and each grew up dependent on the larger city. Their steel plants, watch factories, and machine-building shops often imported raw materials through Chicago and then exported their finished products back through the big city. Yet cities such as Elgin, Aurora, Waukegan, Joliet, and South Chicago in Illinois, and Hammond and Gary in Indiana, functioned as urban hubs, too, with populations large enough to support real downtowns.102 The news offerings in these satellite cities reflected, and indeed fostered, their simultaneously self-contained and dependent relationships with Chicago.
Each satellite city published one or two daily stand-alone papers, which bought national and international news from wire services, ran syndicated women’s columns, covered national sports, and printed occasional feature articles. Their editorials weighed in on national politics as well as local issues. These papers also provided the logistical details necessary for daily life. The advertisements from nearby stores and firms offered a full spectrum of goods, from groceries to insurance. Chain stores did not assume that readers in Hammond or Elgin would see their ads in Chicago dailies; they placed separate ads in these newspapers.103 Because these papers functioned as complete sources of information for local readers and served local advertisers’ purposes, they usually circulated more widely in their cities than did Chicago dailies.104
These cities’ newspapers also catered to small-town and rural people. News articles kept readers abreast of county politics, and columns like the Joliet Daily News’s “From the Coal Fields and Surrounding Towns” served as central sources of information on regional social life.105 The Joliet Daily News fashioned its Friday edition into a weekly, targeted at country subscribers. The paper ran its own farm column, and editors compiled an index of Joliet dairy and poultry prices for readers who sold their farm produce in town. Sunday department store ads listed the sale items for every day of the coming week, so readers could plan their shopping trips into the city.106 The Joliet Daily News also offered “news bundling,” a practice common in more remote areas. The paper’s carriers would deliver, along with the Daily News, any publications that subscribers chose from a long list of options, including women’s weeklies, farmers’ weeklies, literary and science reviews, labor papers, and trade magazines, all with a package discount.107
Chicago daily newspapers never printed special columns for Elgin or Hammond the way that they did for Evanston or Hyde Park. Their society pages did not report on teas and weddings in satellite cities, and their sports pages did not say much about games there. The relatively large populations and self-contained nature of these communities discouraged Chicago editors from pushing hard for their readership, since they knew each satellite city could sustain a paper of its own. Also, if Chicago papers correlated their desired audience with people who would buy Chicago’s goods, satellite city residents were not great catches. Working-class factory hands and their families tended to shop in their city’s downtown, attend local theaters, and socialize in local circles. Only occasionally did they travel to Chicago, and even then, most did not spend very much money there. At first glance, it seems that residents of satellite cities would have little reason to read a Chicago newspaper.
Yet even though Chicago papers did not aggressively pursue readers in satellite cities, a majority of residents subscribed to both a local and a Chicago paper, either a daily or a Sunday edition.108 These readers chose to learn about, and perhaps to participate in, the far-reaching economy and the sophisticated culture of the larger city. Merchants might browse Chicago stores’ advertisements so that they could offer comparable products in Aurora or Waukegan. Merchants could also track Chicago prices for staple goods and plan their bulk-buying trips into the city. Satellite city residents might look to Chicago papers for style tips and world news. Many in Gary or Elgin or South Chicago thus chose to keep Chicago within their field of vision, to live within the city’s cultural and economic orbit. Their Chicago newspaper subscriptions reminded them that their small-city lives unfolded on the fringes of a vast metropolis, and the papers reoriented readers’ lives toward “the city” even if they spent little or no time there.
Perhaps surprisingly, small-city residents were more “metropolitan” in their news reading habits than some other residents of greater Chicago. Robert Park mapped the circulations of both Chicago and satellite city newspapers in 1928 (fig. 4.6) and found spots within the region where people read only the satellite city papers. However, these spots lay not in the satellite cities themselves but beyond them. If residents of these towns wanted to travel to Chicago, they would have to go through the smaller city first. This meant that Joliet or Waukegan served as their big city, their center of gravity, the way that Chicago served as the big city for the small-city residents. “The man in the small city reads the metropolitan in preference to the local paper,” Park observed. “But the farmer, it seems, still gets his news from the same market in which he buys his groceries. The more mobile city man travels farther and has a wider horizon, a different focus of attention, and, characteristically, reads a metropolitan paper.”109 Readers in satellite cities sustained their connection to Chicago, while others living nearly as close but in small villages chose not to participate in Chicago culture. So although Chicago papers dominated the information ecosystem of the metropolitan region, their reign was not uniform or complete. Residents sampled information written for a variety of audiences and on a variety of scales, and pockets of more local systems and cultures endured.
4.6 Map showing the circulations of both Chicago and satellite city newspapers in 1928. Robert E. Park, “Urbanization as Measured by Newspaper Circulation,” American Journal of Sociology 35 (July 1929): 68.
Newspapers Define the Region
On a midwestern country road in 1907, a farmer plowing his fields struck up a conversation with a country editor passing by. They stood two hundred miles west of the Missouri River and twelve miles from a railroad as the farmer spoke: “I see by today’s Kansas City papers,” he began as a visitor came alongside, “that there is trouble in Russia again.” “What do you know about what is in today’s Kansas City papers?” “Oh, we got them from the carrier an hour ago.”110 This up-to-date farmer surprised the wandering editor because, for most of the nineteenth century, no one living in such an isolated spot could hope to read fresh news. Yet by the early twentieth century, farmers often read city papers on the same day they were printed. As these newspapers sped from Chicago into households across the Midwest, they transformed the regional economy and regional culture and cultivated a regional identity for urban and rural readers alike.
Reaching Rural Readers
People living on isolated farmsteads thirsted for news from the outside world in a way that few urban readers would understand. Women who lived far away from other wives and mothers could find companionship and advice in newspapers’ women’s pages. Farm children could temporarily escape from their home routines as they read the adventure stories in “junior” sections. Everyone in the family could take pleasure in the spectacle of the Sunday paper, with its color comics, photo sections, fashion spreads, and lively sports pages, all of which plunged them into a more frenetic urban world. “The newspaper was bringing me notions of the excitement and colorful variety of life in the city,” explained a native of small-town Kansas, Carroll D. Clark. “I wondered how people had courage to live where bank robberies and holdups occurred almost daily and almost anything was more than likely to happen.”111 Meanwhile, city papers offered plenty of concrete, useful information for rural households. Weather maps could help farmers choose when to plant and harvest crops. Lists of prices helped them decide whether to sell their corn right away or store it for later sale, whether to send their eggs to Chicago or Indianapolis. Rail schedules told them when to arrive in town to load their produce onto freight trains.
Residents of towns and cities would seem to have fewer reasons to take big-city papers than rural readers, for their towns already printed daily papers full of local and global news. Readers in early twentieth-century Paducah, Kentucky, for example, could choose between the Paducah morning News-Democrat and the Paducah Evening Sun.112 Yet the papers in nearby bigger cities such as Saint Louis, Nashville, Memphis, and Cincinnati offered flashier headlines, bulkier feature sections, and more current national and international news. Big-city papers especially called out to readers who found their home too provincial. With a subscription, readers could sample information from a worldlier place and declare their allegiance to a more urbane metropolis. “Paducah people want to read these metropolitan papers,” noted circulation manager William Scott, “and on Sunday do read them to an amazing extent.”113
In earlier decades, several obstacles lay between regional readers and big cities’ daily papers. City dailies arrived too slowly to be very useful and cost more than most people were willing to pay. Postage added a few cents to every copy of the paper, perhaps doubling the price.114 Papers traveled several days by train and then by horse to a town post office. There, daily issues would pile up until the subscriber—who might live several hours’ journey away—made the trip to retrieve them. By the time a subscriber read news from the city, it could be weeks old. The national reporting would be stale, and the weather reports useless. If some of newspapers’ appeal lay in reading information at the very same time as thousands of other people, and imagining oneself connected to that reading community, that appeal was entirely lost for small-town and rural readers. Hence in the 1870s and 1880s, recalled a former newspaper writer, “not one farmer in three hundred got a daily paper.”115
So farm people contented themselves with other kinds of news. Most subscribed to newsweeklies, specially edited to appeal to rural people. These papers’ editors assembled the highlights of the week’s happenings, concentrated on state and regional politics, and paid special attention to agriculture. Editors did not bother to include anything too time sensitive, since they knew that readers might not receive their copy for days or weeks. They padded the paper with fiction and jokes that would be entertaining no matter how late the paper arrived.116
This scenario began to shift in the 1880s and 1890s, as newspaper publishers collaborated with post office officials to speed city dailies to faraway readers. In 1884, the post office contracted with regional railroads to run the first express mail train out of Chicago. The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy line left the city at three in the morning, loaded with mail and Chicago morning papers. Crowds greeted the train at many stations along the way and bought loads of papers. “The Tribune sold like hot cakes,” a writer reported from Council Bluffs, Iowa, “and the supply was exhausted in ten minutes after its arrival here. Our newsdealers have quadrupled their orders for tomorrow’s Tribune.”117 Residents in Burlington, Iowa, read Chicago papers at their breakfast tables for the first time, and those in Chariton, Iowa, rejoiced in getting “the Tribune for dinner every day.”118 Chicago rail lines to the east and the north of the city scrambled to set up express trains of their own, and steamboats started to speed Chicago papers up and down the Mississippi as well.119
Newspaper publishers wagered that if they could deliver their papers to smaller cities at the start of the working day, readers would buy copies for the still-current information inside. “When our carrier routes are established in this and other cities all readers of THE TRIBUNE within 200 miles of Chicago on either of these lines will have their papers served to them before business hours,” explained the editors of the Tribune. “THE TRIBUNE will then be as much of a necessity to the public of Galesburg, or Burlington, or Milwaukee as to that of Chicago.”120 The strategy seemed to work even on that first day that the express trains ran, when a reporter in Creston, Iowa, declared it necessary and natural to have these Chicago papers. “The fast mail is the topic of conversation,” noted the reporter, “and it seems as though something was wrong in not having it before.”121
The post office took an active role in distributing newspapers as a part of its federal mandate to circulate information as democratically as possible. The post office’s rates for newspapers had been comparatively cheap all through the nineteenth century, and in 1885, they dropped again, to one cent per pound. At this new rate, residents of Dubuque or Peoria could subscribe to Chicago papers for just slightly more than Chicago residents paid.122 Low postal rates alone, though, could not hook rural subscribers, for they still had to retrieve all of their mail from distant post offices. Postmaster General John Wanamaker proposed Rural Free Delivery, or RFD, to change this situation. Wanamaker argued that rural people ought not to be deprived of the ideas and goods of modern life. He proposed hiring mail carriers to travel to mailboxes at rural crossroads and recommended making drastic improvements to rural roads so that mail carriers could deliver in all seasons. The idea gathered support from representatives of rural districts, from farmers’ organizations such as the Grange, and from all kinds of merchants, like Wanamaker himself, who wanted to send catalogs and advertisements to potential rural customers. Congress approved the bill in 1896.
Once rural people were able to get city newspapers right at their doorstep, or in the mailbox down the road, they subscribed in droves. “The daily newspapers have never had such a boom in circulation as they have since the free rural delivery was established,” commented an Editor & Publisher article in 1902. Many farmers, it said, subscribed to two or three dailies apiece.123 By 1911, the post office was delivering more than one billion newspapers and magazines along rural routes each year, and periodicals outnumbered all other types of rural mail combined.124 “Everybody can read and everybody does read,” announced Editor & Publisher, “because periodicals are so plentiful and cheap.”125
Even though rural people desired city newspapers, city papers did not always welcome rural subscribers. “If train schedules, distance, and other factors make it impossible for country readers to take advantage of the daily offerings of the local advertisers,” explained one circulation manager, “such circulations are 90 per cent useless.”126 Instead of haphazardly sending their papers out into the countryside, circulation managers mapped out their city’s “trade radius”—the area in which readers might plausibly buy advertised goods. As changes in transportation and mail delivery gradually expanded cities’ reach, these managers redrew the radius. Over time, Chicago publishers managed to turn newspapers into vehicles for selling products to people living hundreds of miles away and profitably expanded into a regional market.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Chicago stores had done brisk business with shoppers from out of town, but newspapers played little part in that trade. Migrants from the east coast often outfitted themselves in Chicago before heading to their final destination, be it a homestead in eastern Iowa or a relative’s house in Racine, Wisconsin.127 Those same migrants made regular shopping trips back to the big city. Newspaper ads occasionally tried to capture these travelers’ attention. “Men of the West,” announced a 1901 ad in the Chicago Daily News. “During your visit to Chicago you are cordially invited to visit The Hub, the world’s largest and best clothing house.”128 The ad appealed to country people with a picture of a ranch hand and a display of Stetson hats.
By the late nineteenth century, newspaper publishers had realized that they could advertise Chicago goods to these same shoppers before they traveled to the city. Publishers took an especially keen interest in readers living fifty miles or less from Chicago, for such people often made weekly or monthly trips in. Publishers then persuaded advertisers to take out space to speak to these potential customers.129 Department stores hosted regular sales and advertised them ahead of time so that country readers could plan to attend.130 Some department store ads even proposed to refund customers’ railroad fares if they bought a certain amount of merchandise.131 Advertisements aimed at country readers did not include the suggestive descriptions or stylized images that so effectively lured city residents into stores to browse. Instead, they printed realistic, detailed illustrations of their clothing and housewares (fig. 4.7). The pictures helped distant readers plan efficient shopping schedules, in which they would be sure to go home with the items they needed.
4.7 This ad for Smyth’s Town Market offers free catalogs by mail but only to those who live outside of Chicago. The pictures are accompanied by detailed descriptions including the type of upholstery fabric, the variety of wood, and the color. The word “trade” rather than “shop” also seems to target country customers. Chicago Tribune, 21 November 1897, 31, American Newspaper Repository, Rubenstein Library, Duke University.
Rural Free Delivery, as it sped newspapers to country people’s doorsteps, also made it far easier for those people to order Chicago goods through the mail. So Chicago retailers began to use daily and especially Sunday papers to build their mail-order business. They offered readers free catalogs and printed mail-away coupons in their ads.132 They used guarantees to try to get readers comfortable with the idea of ordering products sight unseen. “If our goods are not as represented,” stated an ad for Smyth’s Town Market, “return them and get your money.”133 The passage of parcel post, in 1913, drastically lowered the shipping fees for small packages. Advertisers then began to treat newspapers as if they were themselves mail-order catalogs, printing detailed drawings of their merchandise. If a store advertised a dinner-service set, the drawings showed every single piece, down to the coffee spoons. The Sunday Herald-Examiner printed a special mail-order section in the 1920s, and advertisements there pictured sturdy shoes, practical housedresses, and canvas work pants intended for a rural customer base. Newspapers facilitated—and profited from—the expansion of the mail-order business, which became a staple of rural life.134
Cars again expanded Chicago papers’ trade radius. In the 1910s and 1920s, over two million rural families bought their first cars.135 When a 1916 federal appropriation put money toward improving rural post roads, it smoothed the drive from farms to cities, and when the 1921 Federal Highway Act invested in interstate roads, it paved clear paths from all over the Midwest to Chicago. By the mid-1920s, thanks to their automobiles, millions of residents of Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana traveled to Chicago between one and twelve times per year, and bought a huge array of products there.136 The regional traffic through the city meant that nearly any kind of Chicago retailer could improve sales by advertising to midwestern readers.
Chicago publishers thus revamped their circulation strategies, turning their Sunday papers into substitutes for old-fashioned newsweeklies and building Sunday into more of a stand-alone edition. If editors ran serial fiction on Sunday, they printed the next installment a week later, so that Sunday subscribers could pick right up where they left off. Editors also specially timed their Sunday paper production so that they could ship editions out quickly to faraway readers. They assembled much of the Sunday material ahead of time, so on Saturday night they could wrap the front-page news sections around a stack of prepared features and ship the bundles out on the midnight train.137 As metropolitan papers developed their Sunday editions into periodicals that combined the entertainment and the summaries of old-fashioned weeklies with the timeliness of city dailies, their Sunday circulations often swelled to more than double that of their daily editions.138
In Chicago, the Tribune and the Herald-Examiner both harbored grand regional ambitions. In 1925, each paper sent 25 percent of their daily sheets to country readers. On Sundays, the Tribune sent 39 percent of its papers into the country, and the Herald-Examiner sent 59 percent of its Sunday papers (over 610,000 copies) there.139 Chicago papers even gave newspapers in other states a run for their money. The Indianapolis News, for example, was Indiana’s biggest paper in the early twentieth century, yet it only sold about one-third more Sunday papers in its own state than did the Chicago Tribune.140
Chicago’s afternoon papers, at a serious disadvantage in the country circulation game, still energetically pursued readers outside of the city. Afternoon papers printed at midday, which left them little time to stock small-town newsstands before customers walked home from work in the evening. Afternoon papers also did not publish on Sundays, the most popular day of the week among regional readers. Yet in 1925 the Chicago American sent 12 percent of its dailies to the country, and the Daily News sent 6 percent of its dailies there.141 The Daily News operated delivery routes that extended not only into southern and western Illinois but also to Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan.142 The paper sent salesmen to canvass towns, such as White Pigeon, Michigan, and Pine Village, Indiana, with fewer than one hundred people.143 The paper enlisted country store owners as sales agents, paying them a 15 percent commission for any new subscribers they brought in.144
Because of Chicago newspapers’ combined efforts to reach country people, the city’s news territory expanded farther and farther outward, until it stretched hundreds of miles around the city. Robert Park made a map of all the towns taking more than half of their newspapers from Chicago in 1930. “The boundary so determined circumscribes a region with an average radius of about 200 miles,” he explained.145 Compared to the same boundary in 1920, Chicago’s territory had expanded in all directions.
Becoming Regional Papers
When city newspapers pursued readers so far outside of city limits, and when regional readers started to make up significant percentages of news audiences, the papers themselves were bound to change. Because of their small proportion of country readers, the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago American did not cater much to country tastes. Their content told rural people all about the city, but told city people little about the countryside. The Tribune and the Herald-Examiner, in contrast, adjusted their content to speak to small-town and rural people. When this content mixed with all the information for city readers, it turned each paper into a truly regional medium and also encouraged a regional consciousness and identity.
Much the way that city papers had created zoned metropolitan sections and classifieds to appeal to suburban readers, papers also printed special regional editions and made tailored pitches to regional readers. In the 1920s, the Tribune printed a special Springfield edition, which focused on Illinois rather than Chicago politics. Printers shipped that edition off extra early so that readers in central and southern Illinois would have papers waiting on their doorsteps in the morning.146 The Tribune and the Herald-Examiner each created and embellished features that might appeal to readers outside of the metropolitan area. They expanded their Sunday agriculture sections in the 1910s and 1920s. The Herald-Examiner ran a poultry page every week. The Tribune sold a separate Farm and Garden book that compiled the section’s most useful tips and aired a farming broadcast on its radio station in the 1920s.147 The Tribune explicitly included regional readers in the essay competitions and beauty contests it orchestrated in the 1920s by choosing regional winners for Iowa and Wisconsin as well as an overall champion.148 Twenty departments at the Chicago Tribune accepted and reprinted readers’ letters or questions; when midwesterners read each other’s love quandaries, favorite jokes, civic opinions, and embarrassing moments, it could highlight the commonalities running through readers’ lives all through the region.149
By gathering information from far afield and sending it right back to where it came from, Chicago newspapers kept the city at the center of the Midwest’s information network, its economy, and its identity. Wisconsin people read about Wisconsin trade in a Chicago paper. Iowa farmers read about Iowa weather in a Chicago paper. At the same time, though, the inclusion of all of this regional news thrust the region into city people’s consciousness. City readers now browsed, or at least flipped past, agriculture columns and mail-order ads for aprons and work boots. This material reminded readers of the others, relatively close by, who lived very different lives and whose labor provided the eggs, the wheat, and the milk they depended on. While the addition of regional news and rural advice might seem a minor accommodation to regional readers with little broader impact, it could help to cultivate a regional consciousness among all readers, every Sunday.
The Chicago Tribune made more overt statements, too, about regional interests. Alongside its daily political platform “For Chicago,” the Tribune printed a platform “For the Middle West” on Sundays. Its objectives included regional highway systems, an expanded Illinois waterway, flood prevention for the Mississippi, and regional reforestation.150 Here, the Tribune highlighted causes that would benefit the whole region, rather than enrich one city or state at the expense of another. The Tribune thus offered a sense of the Midwest as a political and economic unit, a place where all residents could get behind the same ideas. It portrayed Chicago not as the big city that drained people, attention, and resources from the rest of the region but as the true capital of the Middle West. And the paper positioned itself as the ultimate regional advocate and institution.
Newspapers strengthened regional ties as they helped—even encouraged—country people to take city jobs. Many workers and dreamers from smaller midwestern towns and rural hamlets had set out for Chicago in earlier eras, but early twentieth-century metropolitan newspapers smoothed the process. Articles about Chicago’s department store girls or its factory hands gave readers a sense of how city people earned a living, and theater sections, sports news, and restaurant ads displayed the city’s tempting options for evenings and weekends. Newspapers also gave country people access to city information, so that when they moved they did not have to dive entirely into the unknown. Prospective Chicagoans could reserve a room at a boarding house they spotted in the “rooms for rent” listings and scan the Chicago want ads to see what kind of positions would be open to them. The Tribune specifically marketed its classified columns to country parents hoping to get their children started in Chicago (fig. 4.8). As they eased the transition from country to city, newspapers likely increased the number of rural people willing to take the leap into Chicago life and, correspondingly, increased the number of families whose lives spread over the midwestern region. A 1928 Chicago Tribune ad spoke eloquently about the relationship that Chicago’s newspapers had built with the region. The paper drew the couple into a relationship with the city (fig. 4.9), but it also cast its shadow over them. The interaction was mutually beneficial but not exactly equal.
4.8 This ad for the Chicago Tribune classifieds pictures a mother in a country home and a boy in an industrial city, writing to each other. It frames the classified ads as a means to set up a son with a safe, successful Chicago life, and frames the newspaper itself as a way for families to imagine each other’s lives and to stay connected. Chicago Tribune, 8 February 1908, 10, American Newspaper Repository, Rubenstein Library, Duke University.
4.9 The city reaches out and touches a newspaper-reading couple. The newspaper here turns the region into a network, connecting city people with those outside of it. Chicago Tribune, 11 November 1928, sec. 3, 8, American Newspaper Repository, Rubenstein Library, Duke University.
In catering to the region around Chicago, the Tribune in some ways conjured it into existence—especially when it dubbed this territory “Chicagoland.” Reporter James O’Donnell Bennett set out on a motoring tour of the Midwest in 1926, with this mandate from the Tribune:
Travel a 200-mile radius from Chicago, north, south, east, and west, and learn that area historically, industrially, and culturally. It is Chicagoland. Make it entertaining to read about. Give the autoist some destination besides a roadhouse and some aim other than a chicken dinner.
. . . Get the tourists interested in their Mississippi valley and their lake coast. Make ’em sit up and look out instead of loll. Tell about interesting places and outstanding people.151
The term “Chicagoland,” unknown before this series, appeared in every installment on Bennett’s trip. The word quickly spread through the paper and entered midwesterners’ vocabularies. By 1927 the Tribune was selling a roadmap of Chicagoland and mounted a massive Chicagoland map in its Touring Department for employees and visitors to consult as they planned out regional trips.152 The paper narrated Chicagoland tours on its radio station, WGN. Other writers adopted the term, as when Harley Bradford Mitchell titled his 1928 book Historical Fragments of Early Chicagoland.153 Though Bennett’s series was mostly meant to spark Chicagoans’ interest in traveling the region (and was thus similar to many articles and maps that appeared in city newspapers’ motoring sections), it also initiated a dialogue about regional identity in the places he visited. The Peoria Transcript received a letter from a reader who objected to Bennett’s claiming the town of Nauvoo as a part of Chicagoland. The Peoria editor wrote this in reply:
Every city and village of Illinois should be proud to be included in “Chicagoland.” In addition to being the second city of the United States and the fourth city of the world, Chicago is the most democratic city in America and its great industries and enterprises enrich as well as are enriched by the small communities of Illinois.
. . . Chicago, however, is now more than a city—it is a symbolism. It stands for the midwestern idea in politics, religion, education, and economics. Cook county practically dominates state politics. In many respects all Illinois is “Chicagoland,” as well as many parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan.154
The editorial writer had completely adopted Chicago as his capital and had put it at the heart of his midwestern identity. Only through the regular circulation of Chicago information were people such as this Peoria editor able to feel that affinity and to proudly imagine themselves as part of Chicago’s domain.
Hubs and Hinterlands
Chicago newspapers’ regional ambitions continued to expand in the 1910s and 1920s with a large influx of brand advertising. Papers had carried ads for a handful of brand-name products in the nineteenth century: patent medicines, baking sodas, breakfast cocoas. But the flowering of mass-produced goods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prompted Chicago newspapers—and above all, the Chicago Tribune—to aggressively solicit advertisements from brand manufacturers. When newspapers carried more brand ads, they worried less about their literal “trade radius.” Neither shopper nor product needed to travel through Chicago anymore; readers would likely purchase brand-name products right in their hometowns. Publishers instead started to think about targeting communities where readers would have money to buy. The seemingly small addition of brand advertisements to newspaper pages wound up reshaping newspapers’ business strategies, their circulations, and eventually the whole midwestern economy.
Chicago Tribune staff studied the regional economy in an attempt to find the most prosperous, connected, and promising locations to sell the paper. They found that regional trade was leaving small towns and concentrating in larger regional hubs. Railroads had created a new hierarchy among towns and cities. Towns with a rail depot were often instantly transformed into market centers, where farmers would travel to load their milk or grain onto freight trains and pick up the week’s provisions.155 Automobiles were also concentrating business into the region’s larger towns and cities. In the 1910s and 1920s, farm families piled into their cars on Saturdays, drove to the nearest large town, and spent time and money there—buying clothes, eating ice cream, going to the movies.156 The Tribune realized that with trade booming, residents of these towns had plenty to spend, both on daily paper subscriptions and on advertised goods. The paper also recognized that these towns’ denser populations made for easier distribution. Sending bundles of newspapers to a few hundred towns was a far more manageable task than sending individual papers via train, mail, and carrier to thousands of different rural mailboxes across the Midwest.157 The Tribune pushed hard in order to sell subscriptions in regional hubs and largely succeeded. Just under half of all the residents in these towns read the Sunday Tribune—impressive considering how far away many of them lay from Chicago itself.158
The Chicago Tribune taught its advertisers to think about the regional market in the same terms that the paper itself used and helped them distribute goods to high-volume markets. The Tribune sent its advertisers a detailed booklet titled Book of Facts every year from 1917 onward. As the book shared statistics about midwesterners’ needs, buying habits, and incomes, it advocated a specific sales strategy. It told merchandisers to scout the region for:
(1) large bodies of people with high spending power;
(2) concentration of retailers readily accessible to salesmen and for merchandise delivery; and
(3) dominance over nearby competitive cities and towns.159
The Tribune helped merchants advertise their products and then helped persuade local stores to stock these merchants’ goods. The paper sent its own salesmen to accompany advertisers’ sales agents, since regional retailers would be more likely to stock a product if they knew it was being advertised in the paper.160
By winning over readers and retailers alike to mass-manufactured brand-name goods, the Tribune gradually homogenized the economies of the towns in which it circulated and built economies in which both buyer and seller—each often living hundreds of miles from Chicago—depended on Chicago information. Because they had perused newspaper advertisements, customers were more likely to arrive at their local store with opinions and preferences and were less likely to ask shopkeepers for recommendations. When the Tribune conducted a survey of regional retailers, many respondents said that their customers asked for products they had seen in the paper, and some customers even clipped out ads and brought them to the store. A shopkeeper in Buchanan, Michigan, reported that ads could noticeably change his customers’ ways. “I have sold lots of goods by the help of Tribune advertising,” he reported, “goods that people in my community were not in the habit of using before.”161 As a result, storekeepers, too, began to consult those ads when deciding what to stock and display. “We follow The Sunday Tribune ads,” explained a merchant at E. D. Miller & Co. of Stockton, Illinois, “and on Mondays make a special display of the goods that are advertised.”162
The Co-Operator, a monthly newsletter that the Tribune distributed to fifteen thousand retailers and merchandisers, actively pushed specific sales methods.163 The newsletter claimed “two main objectives: one, that of helping the merchant develop better merchandising methods, and the other, that of emphasizing the wisdom and importance of handling advertised goods.”164 The newsletter profiled successful retailers and told readers how to emulate them. An article on a successful drugstore owner included photographs that showed how this owner positioned his window displays, how he arranged goods on the shelves, and how he organized the ingredients behind the soda fountain counter.165 Due to these articles, residents of five states might each encounter identical products in identical displays on their local grocery shelves. Chicago newspapers were increasingly orchestrating the economies of small towns throughout Illinois and the Midwest.
The Tribune purposely ignored the Midwest’s poorer and more isolated regions, and it encouraged its advertisers to do the same. The Book of Facts printed maps of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan (plate 7) that ranked their counties “best,” “good,” “fair,” and “poor,” based on factors such as the number of automobiles owned by residents and their income tax returns.166 It provided these maps to help merchants strategize about where to concentrate their own sales efforts and, also, to showcase the wealth of its subscribers. The Tribune boasted “mass circulation starting at the top and going down.”167 Meanwhile, the Book of Facts urged retailers to quit pushing their goods in struggling rural stores. “It is, at times, a tactical and costly error for a manufacturer to spend much time in intensive cultivation of the small town,” it explained.168 “Specializing on the successful dealers, the pace makers in these flourishing communities, permits discarding the old cumbersome plan of trying to sell every retailer regardless of the volume and general sales expense.”169
The Tribune, and other papers, went beyond simply reinforcing existing disparities in wealth and access to information and actually reshaped the region. Through content as varied as movie reviews and Pepsodent ads, papers put a new mass culture at many readers’ fingertips. But because they aggressively solicited subscriptions only in the most prosperous districts, papers also limited country people’s ability to stay in touch with that culture. Papers turned certain towns into commercial centers and left other towns out of trade circuits. These strategies slowly cut out many rural readers from a growing regional economic network and carved out new hinterlands where neither urban goods nor urban information reached.
The Rural and the Regional Persist
A handful of observers began to notice, around the turn of the century, that the spread of metropolitan dailies into surrounding regions was hurting other newspapers’ business. The old-time newsweeklies, written especially for country people, were fast losing their audiences.170 Critics worried that the spread of big-city papers would kill off local dailies, too. “The proximity of large cities and fast trains is fatal to provincial dailies,” declared one country editor in 1892. He saw metropolitan papers ruining the business prospects of every other daily for hundreds of miles around. For this reason, he said, “except in the case of Milwaukee, there are no really creditable dailies within two hundred miles of Chicago.”171
Some believed that the spread of urban information might kill off distinctive local cultures entirely. In 1909 James Edward Rogers described a pattern in all towns within one hundred miles of a metropolis, in which “their inhabitants, mingling more and more with the metropolitan life, will finally become merged in the great mass.”172 The writer Sherwood Anderson depicted a world where urban information had reached into, and profoundly altered, the remotest corners of rural America:
In our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men. The newspaper and the magazines have pumped him full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever. The farmer by the stove is brother to men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.173
The 1920 census, which for the first time found more Americans living inside cities than outside of them, helped to cement the public’s idea that rural life and rural culture were slowly, inexorably disappearing. In 1929 Robert Park observed that, “in some parts of the country, as, for example, in New England and on the Pacific Coast, what we once called rural community and rural people has ceased to exist.”174 The city newspaper—like the mail-order catalog, like the automobile—seemed to have remade a rural republic into a nation of cities and city-centered regions.
Yet urban newspapers did not simply replace rural ways of life with urban routines. They reshaped, rather than obliterated, the local. In small cities and towns, urban newspapers dominated the morning market and covered national and international news more thoroughly than any local paper could manage. But most readers still wanted to hear something about their hometowns. So small daily papers strengthened their local news coverage and published in the afternoon, so as not to compete with metropolitan morning papers.175 Local papers also continued to issue weeklies, often long after city papers had abandoned the practice.176 These weeklies offered the kind of information that metropolitan papers would never print: descriptions of theatricals and revival meetings coming through town, notes of thanks from families who had received support in a time of need, and announcements of new babies born to farm families. “Although the rural carriers take each morning great packages of daily papers, brought to the village by the fast mail,” explained Charles Moreau Harger, an editor from Kansas, “the people along the routes are as eager as ever for the weekly visit of the home paper.”177 These local weeklies also exerted a special nostalgic pull among people who had grown up in the region and moved away. “The city business man throws away his financial journal and his yellow ‘extra,’” said Harger, “and tears open the pencil-addressed home paper that brings to him memories of new-mown hay and fallow fields and boyhood. Regardless of its style, its grammar, or its politics, it holds its reader with a grip that the city editor may well envy.”178 So as urban newspapers transformed into regional papers, they did not kill local journalism or local culture. They instead created a new division of labor, in which small papers left large-scale reporting to metropolitan newspapers and concentrated on the hometown news.
In the 1920s, city dailies’ advertising departments drew up images that depicted their papers at the vital center of American metropolitan areas and broader regions (figs. 4.10 and 4.11). Newspapers’ circulations appeared to ripple outward in even circles around downtown.179 The images effectively communicated just how far city newspapers traveled and how thoroughly regional they had become. In a 1929 article, Robert Park seemed to describe this phenomenon, arguing that metropolitan newspapers’ spread, alongside increasing mobility and travel, had urbanized huge swaths of the population even far outside city limits. “Urbanization may be due,” he commented, “quite as much to the fact that the city is going out into the country, as to the fact that the country people are coming into the city.”180
4.10 Advertisement for the Milwaukee Journal in Editor & Publisher, International Yearbook Number for 1926, 30 January 1926, 147.
4.11 Advertisement for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in Editor & Publisher, International Yearbook Number for 1926, 30 January 1926, 183.
But metropolitan newspapers did not, in fact, urbanize their entire regions. When newspapers crossed city limits, they did not radiate in smooth circles, nor did they pull every reader within a hundred miles into the city’s economic and cultural orbit. Such images concealed the messy, uneven, and constantly shifting patterns of regional news. Within each of these circles, a combination of economics, culture, physical distance, and transportation routes determined the balance of local and regional information that residents wanted and that publishers supplied. And while city information did travel outward, smaller papers covered the events and filled the needs that metropolitan papers overlooked. The era of the entirely homogenous region, in which cities stretched on forever and everyone read the same news, never arrived.
* * *
Not just in Chicago but all over the nation, newspapers were the medium through which millions of Americans learned about, and were won over to, their future suburban homes. An 1899 ad for Philadelphia’s Roslyn Terrace showed a cross section of the streets there, in order to fully explain all of the improvements that would make residents’ lives easier—gas mains, brick gutters, macadamized streets, bright street lights.181 Newspaper material provided rationales for suburban moves and transformed the suburban option into a common and commonsense decision for city families. “Rear your children away from the dangers of the city,” suggested an ad in the 1927 Milwaukee Journal. “Rear them in an environment where they can develop their minds and bodies in the way in which nature intended.”182 Ads in African American papers beyond Chicago attest to the appeal of the suburban dream even among populations that many suburbs tried to exclude. A Baltimore Afro-American ad for Morgan Park promised an exclusive neighborhood full of illustrious neighbors: “An ideal residential community, protected by all the restrictions and with all the improvements of the best white developments.”183 With most developers uninterested in selling to African Americans, though, black suburban options remained limited. A Pittsburgh Courier ad touted a suburban “classy four-room bungalow”: hardly the spacious retreat readers might have hoped for.184
The material in many cities’ real estate sections kept readers focused on houses (and not apartments) with articles on gardening, decoration, construction, and renovation. “The Home Garden for Pleasure and Profit” in the Philadelphia Public Ledger targeted suburban gardeners; the columnist explained that he worked ten or twelve hours in the city and then came home and gardened.185 An article in the Baltimore Afro-American’s home department, titled “Let Your House Show What Season It Is,” taught readers that their home decor ought to change throughout the year, while newspaper ads for Hitchner wallpaper explained the art of home decor: “Wallpaper has a most important duty—to tie together the furniture, pictures and other objects in the room. Proper contrast, relation of designs and colors, size of room and lighting must all be taken into account.”186 When the New York Sun conducted a contest for small house plans, the headline announced that the paper “Expected to Help Solve Problem of Those Who Desire Comfortable, Artistic, Efficient Homes at Moderate Cost.”187 The Sun’s contest may have done that; it also handily boosted the real estate, construction, and home improvement industries.
When readers actually bought suburban homes, papers risked losing those readers’ subscriptions. So metropolitan dailies tried to make themselves indispensable to suburbanites. The 1895 Milwaukee Daily Journal’s “news of the suburbs” section reported the visits, vacations, dinners, church services, and club meetings in prosperous communities just beyond city borders.188 The Philadelphia Inquirer operated dozens of branch offices in peripheral neighborhoods such as Wissahickon, Norristown, and Riverton to keep those populations placing classified ads with them and not in neighborhood newsletters.189 By 1927, the New York Herald-Tribune was printing eight pages of society news that included the boroughs, Westchester, Connecticut, and New Jersey, all to keep the city’s millions of suburbanites reading.190
Chicago papers covered an exceptionally wide swath of territory, as the Chicago Tribune was keen to point out. “Chicago Rubs Elbows with No Other Metropolis!” it declared to prospective advertisers in 1927. “In every direction this titan of trade can enlarge its influence to the fullness of its destiny as master market of America.”191 Some other midwestern, southern, and western papers could market to broad hinterlands as well. The late nineteenth-century Cincinnati Enquirer circulated in what newspapermen called “the Enquirer’s Confederacy”: Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia.192 The Pittsburgh Gazette established a newspaper train in 1885, which departed at 2:50 A.M. to deliver morning papers to Harrisburg.193 By the 1920s, the Des Moines Register and Tribune were reprinting their front pages up to twenty times to appeal to the interests of readers in different Iowa regions.194
Papers along the eastern seaboard, where cities lay so close together, could not reach as far but attempted to serve as regional media nonetheless. The late nineteenth-century Philadelphia Record hoped to hook regional readers with an agricultural section assembled from clippings of journals like National Farmer and Agricultural Review.195 The New York World offered a three-times-a-week edition specifically for New York and New Jersey rural readers in the 1890s. While posters for the daily World featured scandalous headlines and pictures of showgirls, posters for the country edition promised a farm department and showed a lovely girl threshing wheat.196 In the 1920s, the Philadelphia Public Ledger ran pages of society notes from coal country towns like Mount Carmel, Shamokin, and Shenandoah, more than a hundred miles away.197
As in Chicago, city newspapers around the country only pursued regional readers when they became viable customers for advertised goods. After parcel post had created a strong incentive to reach rural readers and offer them goods by mail, a New York World advertisement asked: “Why Waste Money on Horses? The Do-It-All tractor will do a greater variety of work on your farm than horses because it plows, it cultivates, it hauls your loads, operates hay mowers, lawn mowers and gives you 6 H.P. for belt work.”198 The ad gave readers an address where they could write to request a catalog. When automobiles expanded papers’ trade radius yet again in the 1920s, papers involved themselves even more actively in rural and regional life. The Philadelphia Inquirer printed lists of prizewinners at the Pennsylvania Farm Food Show, and the Philadelphia North American sponsored egg-laying competitions.199 The strategies worked. “Why do I read it?” wrote a Florida farmer who subscribed to the Jacksonville Times Union. “Because it is the only State paper covering the whole State in its local news service. It has a fine exchange column; its farm page reports on what the Florida farmers are doing, its market reports and editorial advice to farmers interest me as a ‘back-to-the-soiler.’”200
When trying to please their urban, suburban, and regional readers all at once, many metropolitan papers learned to highlight points of regional interest and regional pride. The Boston Post, which claimed the biggest Sunday circulation in New England at the turn of the century, rallied the whole region around the Harvard football team and advocated for “the advance of New England”—not just Boston—on its editorial page.201 The Columbia State explored South Carolina’s history in its Sunday editions. “This year it has published,” explained an appreciative reader in 1911, “a secession semicentennial number, several charming character sketches of ante-bellum life in the low country, a series of excellent articles on the birds of the State, and another series on investigations into the history of the University of South Carolina.”202 In the late 1920s, when the Milwaukee Journal’s rural readership was on the rise, the paper ran an exposé of companies that sold barren land to hopeful Wisconsin farmers.203 These articles turned newspapers into guardians of regional identity and regional interests.
As city dailies spread beyond city limits, they surely had the largest impact on suburban and regional readers. Dailies drew these readers into a national system of city-centered regions, in which suburban and country people necessarily defined themselves in relation to “the city.” But the expansion of metropolitan papers also influenced city readers. The addition of suburban images and viewpoints introduced many city dwellers to suburban ideals. The inclusion of rural material heightened urban readers’ awareness of their farming neighbors. Metropolitan papers gave city, suburban, and country readers common vocabularies and common reading experiences. To some extent, they homogenized the different cultures present within regions such as the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic, and New England. But more than anything, these newspapers made all three types of readers aware of each other and built regional identity around the exchanges and interactions between them.