The brass electric light fixture atop the ancient wooden lectern supplies barely enough light. The sound system, featuring a conspicuously modern microphone, often does not work.
Noise from nearby diners and waiters not involved in the Monday night proceedings distracts listeners. The grandfather clock chimes loudly, announcing the wrong time. Evening meals settle into sleep-inducing digestion, the speaker’s greatest challenge.
A chipped portrait of the group’s first president, Rev. Robert Collyer, with swept-back hair and an earnest face, looms from an easel placed each week near the lectern he contributed in 1874.
Despite the familiar setting, the week’s scheduled member-speaker, selected by the Committee on Arrangements and Exercises, invariably suffers the dryness of mouth and twitch of fingers that signal that words carefully researched and constructed are about to be spoken aloud to an audience.
The Chicago Literary Club, a unique Chicago institution, has inspired this anxiety for 125 years.
As they confront the fearful task of public speaking, an art that remains elusive despite the explosion of communication technology, members of the club continue a rich tradition that once helped young Midwest communities define themselves.
Known variously as debating societies, polemic societies and literary clubs, the gatherings were small and rustic but generally topical and often entertaining. In “Honor’s Voice” (Knopf), Lincoln scholar Douglas Wilson writes that Abraham Lincoln’s first speech took place in the early 1830s before one of the literary societies in and around the tiny frontier village of New Salem, Ill.: “The clubs put him in touch with the cultural issues of the day, some of which had little or no currency among the poor farmers that constituted the majority of the populace.
“The literary clubs were, for Lincoln, a much needed supplement to the kinds of religious and political discourse that dominated the world he grew up in.”
In early Chicago, where commerce, not farming, dominated the lives of most residents, men and women–separately, it seems–felt the need for organized discussion of matters beyond immediate business, political and domestic concerns.
Ambitious merchants, traders, manufacturers and financiers desired outlets to initiate or rekindle their intellectual growth and to give their rough-and-tumble city something like culture as it hurried to rebuild from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
In March 1874, a group of men meeting in the Sherman House hotel organized themselves around the objective, as stated in the bylaws, of “literary culture.” Not much has changed since then at the Monday night meetings of The Chicago Literary Club.
The organization that survives today solely on the ability of members to attract new members began with seven men, including a lithographer who showed up just once, hoping vainly to solicit customers for his business–the kind of networking the group has shunned ever since.
During the Reconstruction Era, many rich and powerful men created private clubs in America’s major cities as refuges in which they could conspire to take advantage of the business opportunities of the post-Civil War era. The Chicago Literary Club nearly followed that path.
Founding member Edward Mason, a son of the city’s mayor during the Chicago Fire and a great-great-uncle of current member Manly Mumford of Chicago, wrote that an unnamed individual at the first meeting “read a list of proposed members which seemed to have been copied from one of our newspaper articles upon millionaires. . . . One of those present, however, rallied sufficiently to recollect that it had been stated to be a reason for forming the proposed club that there should be one place in Chicago where money did not count, and he mildly suggested that such a membership was not exactly the best way to accomplish this object.”
Rejecting the trappings of wealth, the club only briefly maintained its own facilities. For most of its history, the group has arranged with other organizations to host its weekly meetings. Since the 1960s, the group has convened in The Cliff Dwellers, a dining club now atop the Borg-Warner Building at 200 S. Michigan Ave.
Thanks to William Poole, a founding member from Ohio, the club modeled its constitution and bylaws on the Cincinnati Literary Club, founded in 1849.
But Poole, who was the first librarian of the Chicago Public Library, made another important contribution by quashing the instinct toward pomp and ceremony. The “fustian” language, as a later member described it, of the original constitution was repealed, as were such pretentious titles as “orator,” “poet” and “marshal.”
Although it was common at the time for men and women to form separate literary societies, an absolute ban on women attending Literary Club dinners as guests was averted in 1878. Peter Edge of Winnetka, in a 100th anniversary retrospective on the organization, wrote, “A motion that no ladies be invited was passed only after an amendment to strike the word `no.’ ” The group began admitting women in 1995.
Chicago lawyer John Notz Jr., club president in the 1996-97 season, believes the group endures with fewer than 150 men and women because its weekly meetings present a non-competitive, unhurried forum for exploring and expressing intellectual interests that otherwise would be lost in the routine of making a living.
Many people undertake research and write reports in their daily work, he notes, but not for themselves. There are no billable hours in preparing papers, no clients, customers or professional colleagues to provide a natural audience, he said.
Club bylaws refer to the reading of papers as “exercises,” an apt word. The discipline of preparing and reading a paper aloud in an essentially social gathering requires presenters to make their own personal interests interesting to someone else–no easy task. Dull academic papers are no more welcome than self-indulgent travelogues.
By tradition, titles of scheduled papers, published in advance in the club’s yearbook, frequently do not reveal the topic. Last fall, for example, retired Chicago lawyer Ray Greenblatt delivered “Havoc or Chaos,” in which he enlivened the narrow semantic distinction between the two words by telling his experiences as a volunteer economics teacher at Providence-St. Mel High School on Chicago’s West Side.
The power to intrigue and entertain an audience rests entirely with the speaker, who in daily life may rarely enjoy such a singular opportunity, Notz said. Commanding that power, he added, is the chief benefit and principal risk of public speaking.
Dr. Robert Carton of Winnetka, president in 1995-96, said, “The literary club gives you an opportunity to indulge in literature as a participant.” Physicians are especially drawn to the meetings, he said, because “in medicine, the writing is secondary. It’s only a tool, whereas in the literary the writing is primary. The subject is secondary.”
Members–doctors, lawyers, clergymen, academics, architects and others–are encouraged to research and present papers on topics unrelated to their careers. There have been notable exceptions to the unwritten rule. In 1896, architect Daniel Burnham violated both the tradition about titles and the admonition about work-related subjects when he presented a paper called “The Lake Front,” the first exposition of his plan for Chicago formally unveiled in 1909.
Nonetheless, speakers ideally seek to stretch intellectually beyond their businesses or professions, said Carton. Since 1984, retired physician Carton has delivered papers on two Civil War battles; Rene Descartes; Juan Peron’s Argentina; the discovery of Brazil; the Illinois and Michigan Canal; German poets Goethe and Schiller; the life of British historian Edward Gibbon; Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”–and others.
“If you have things you’ve always puzzled about, it gives you an opportunity to solve the puzzle,” said Carton, whose grandfather Laurence Carton belonged to the Literary Club from 1909 to 1923.
In turn, 25 to 30 stalwarts who regularly attend meetings October to May bring the expectation–by no means fulfilled each week–that a presentation of 45 minutes to an hour will communicate a novel and perhaps lasting piece of a person’s individual creativity and knowledge.
“The chance of a good paper” brings a core audience back week after week, architect Herman Lackner said in an interview shortly before his death last year.
Occasionally, poetry or a short story provides a diversion from expository writing. In recent years, speakers have embellished their papers with music, slides and handouts–a show-and-tell trend not always appreciated by older members.
One of the best uses of stagecraft occurred earlier this year when retired accountant Ralph Fujimoto of Chicago concluded his biographical sketch of 19th Century journalist Lafcadio Hearn by introducing a descendant of Hearn’s brother, who shared his fascination with Hearn’s colorful life.
Audio-visual aids and surprise guest appearances may invigorate a presentation, but researching, writing and a public reading remain the essential challenges. The lectern, weakened by use, has been renovated, but the format is untouched.
At their best, the readings project “a human tapestry being rolled out in front of you,” said Carton. “You find yourself surrendering to someone else’s ideas.”
Roger Ball of Chicago, a retired management consultant and president in the 1997-98 season, believes the habit of relaxed discussion of ideas drawn from literature and the other arts must be nurtured. The habit persists in Europe’s older cultures, but it needs encouragement in America against the onslaught of TV and movies, where professional producers “do the work” of the viewer’s creativity, he said.
“Our imaginations are under attack,” Ball told a meeting in January marking the club’s 125th anniversary.
The group encourages the expression of ideas by making participation wholly voluntary, although members often are asked to offer a paper. Some individuals have attended meetings for decades and never delivered a paper. Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, belonged from 1876 to his death in 1926 without even attending a meeting, according to club histories.
There are no limits on opinions or topics. The group nearly disbanded in 1875, when a jurist named Henry Booth read a paper titled “Evidences of the Resurrection Examined.” The remarks outraged clergymen in attendance by concluding the evidence was inadequate.
“In these days when agnosticism is common and conventional religious views are so often lightly held, it is difficult to realize the intensity with which they were believed a half-century ago,” wrote longtime secretary Frederick Gookin in 1926.
Soon after the Booth incident, a rule was adopted that “no paper, at the time it is read, shall be open to adverse criticism in the club.”
