If it is possible to rehabilitate the reputation of Charles T. Yerkes, a successful musical play might just do the trick. Nothing else has worked in the 90 years since Chicago’s pre-eminent robber baron and scoundrel passed from the scene.
Imagine aldermen “Bathhouse” John Coughlin and “Hinky Dink” Kenna, the City Council’s two most infamous Gray Wolves, standing on the stage of the Merle Reskin Theater singing:
To clinch a deal,
Just grease the wheel
With quid pro quo.
And what about portraying Joseph Medill, the man who tried to reform Chicago from the editor’s desk of this newspaper and for whom Northwestern University named its journalism school, and Marshall Field, the store icon whose fortune helped Chicago build its natural history museum, as (gasp) scheming villains.
For some comic relief, let’s throw in a character called William Rainey Harper, who is constantly showing up in the strangest places to grovel for money to build a telescope for his University of Chicago.
The improbable hero, of course, is Yerkes, the financier from Philadelphia who went to prison for fraud after he lost a wad of his investors’ money in 1871 when the uninsured losses in the Chicago fire caused some markets in the East to collapse. Yerkes, who was pardoned after serving less than a year, later came to Chicago and wound up controlling most of its mass transit system–streetcars and elevated lines. The city rode him out of town on a rail in 1901.
But during the nearly two decades he spent in Chicago in the late 1800s, he was the city’s Titan of Traction, which is what they called mass transit in those days. What a great moniker, Titan of Traction, which is what author Theodore Dreiser must have thought back in 1914 when he picked “Titan” as the title for one volume of his fictionalized trilogy on the life of Yerkes.
Chicago lawyer Michael C. Dorf is using the same title for his musical he hopes to stage by 1997, which happens to be the 100th anniversary of the Loop elevated that Yerkes built. Composer Claudia Howard Queen wrote the score.
Dorf is trying to raise the $500,000 necessary to stage the production. On Aug. 28 he put on a bare-bones performance of the play in the Reskin before a group of city officials and potential investors. The only prop was an oil portrait of the Titan himself, propped up against a stepladder behind the piano.
Actor Patrick Finn, who sang the part of the Titan in the preliminary production of the play, said the role was an education to him. “I’m a Chicago native and had never heard of Yerkes, although I’d heard of some of the other characters,” Finn said.
Dorf, 43, doesn’t recall ever having heard of Yerkes while growing up in Albany Park, during his four years at Roosevelt High School, as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, or at Columbia University’s Law School. His avocation as a playwright dates from his college days. “I wrote some musicals while in college, and I have also written some radio plays,” he recalled. “Titan” is his first serious attempt at a big-money musical.
His interest in Yerkes began years later when he read Dreiser’s trilogy, which also includes “The Financier” about Yerkes’ career in Philadelphia and “Stoic” about what he did after he left Chicago and went to London, where his reputation is far more solid than it was in Chicago.
“I discovered the character was based on a real person,” Dorf said, “but when I tried to find out more about him, I discovered he was a villain that Chicago had erased from its memory.” Dorf wound up at the University of Pennsylvania sorting through the Dreiser papers.
The novelist had been fairly accurate about the financial details in Yerkes’ life, but had embellished the social side with a mistress that, Dorf concludes, was Dreiser fantasizing about his own spartan sex life. Dorf’s Yerkes is an even more sympathetic character, an enlightened populist who wants to build the Loop to help the working man get to work.
Reassessing Yerkes’ life
Curiously, Dorf is the latest in a succession of scholars and amateur historians who have re-examined Yerkes’ life and have concluded that he wasn’t nearly the scoundrel history has painted him. If anything, he was an excellent businessman who modernized the transit system, a visionary who built the Loop, and a victim of the political corruption that was rampant in Chicago in the late 19th Century.
According to such revisionism, the reformers like Medill, Gov. John Peter Altgeld and Mayor Carter Harrison Jr., who made Yerkes the symbol of corruption, unwittingly contributed to the graft by passing a succession of laws that unintentionally forced traction developers to bribe everyone in sight–the legislature, the City Council, homeowners and downtown merchants.
The revision of history and rehabilitation of Yerkes’ reputation began in 1971 with an unpublished doctoral thesis by Robert David Weber at the University of Wisconsin. Weber, while conceding that Yerkes late in his career in Chicago commonly used bribes, especially to get his Loop built, painted him as a victim of shakedowns, not necessarily the corruptor from the East who led Chicago astray.
“I had not heard of Yerkes, but I was impressed by the revisionist attention given some of the robber barons,” said Weber, who now teaches at East Los Angeles College but who described himself as the “campus conservative” more than 20 years earlier when he began working on his doctoral dissertation in Wisconsin. Madison in those days was a hotbed of anti-war sentiment.
Chicago in the late 1800s also was a hotbed of activism. There were the unionists, the anarchists, the Haymarket Riot and a gaggle of reformers intent on ridding society of robber barons. “These guys were not above putting money in their own pockets, but Yerkes was convinced that the only way to make money was to make the system more efficient,” Weber said.
Making sure the fix was in
The favorite targets of the Gray Wolves, that legendary gaggle of corrupt politicians that dominated Chicago’s City Council a century ago, were the city’s utilities–traction, gas, telephone and electric companies that required franchises from the city to build their systems. The Gray Wolves’ ploy was to create paper competitors and grant them franchises, then shake down the real utilities by forcing them to buy out the newcomers to prevent competition.
Eventually the reformers got laws passed requiring the approval of abutting property owners before streetcar or elevated lines could be built. As a practical matter, that forced the traction developers to bribe merchants and homeowners as well as politicians, and associations of property owners sprang up to keep track of the going rate for bribes.
That raised the price of building transit systems and contributed to the practice by traction developers like Yerkes of oversubscribing the stock and bonds necessary to build a new system. Historians now estimate that Yerkes raised $10 million from investors to cover the $600,000 necessary to build the Loop elevated. The financial mess was complicated by the practice of giving away stock to investors willing to buy bonds, so no one today really knows how much money, if any, the traction developers were able to skim.
In the last few years, Weber’s thesis has gained influence as more historians have re-examined the record. Bruce G. Moffat in “The `L’ ” (Central Electric Railfans Association), his just-published history of the elevated system, thinks Yerkes “wasn’t any different than any of the other big industrialists of the time.”
“My feeling is that if he’d had his druthers he wouldn’t have bribed anyone, because it was more expensive,” Moffat added. “Other promoters of street railways and public utilities tried loftier routes and failed.”
Whatever historians think of him today, as the 19th Century drew to a close Yerkes had become the lightning rod for a brewing storm. He was shunned by Chicago society because of his prison stint, attacked daily in the newspapers for everything wrong with the traction system and spurned even by the political allies he enriched. Even his altruistic moves, such as an attempt to get the legislature to pass a model law creating a public utility commission to regulate mass transit, was tainted by scandal by his foes.
So in 1901 he gave up, sold out and left town for London. So why, if Yerkes was not such a bad character, has he been savaged by historians for so many years?
“The winners wrote the history,” said Dorf.
