Chronicle of a Media Death Foretold
A new book about a long-forgotten Chicago magazine shows why the publication—like many before and after it—was doomed from the start.By Daniel Strauss
January 8, 2009
The short-lived Chicago competitor to The New Yorker.Chicago has been the birthplace and burial ground of many publications. It’s currently home to two daily newspapers, two alt-weeklies, and a number of online news and magazine startups. Arianna Huffington recently started a city-focused reporting project with Huffington Post Chicago. The town is also home to a number of major magazines including Chicago Magazine, The Chicago Reporter, Time Out Chicago, Michigan Avenue, and In These Times, to name a few. Esquire and Hugh Hefner’s Playboy started out in the Windy City, too. Some of these publications are good, some are bad, and only the strong survive.
If there’s one thing the Chicago-based Tribune Company‘s recent bankruptcy shows it’s that Chicago is a tough town for even the strongest media beast. The Windy City has been the home of many newspapers, magazines, and literary publications that have lived far too short a life despite good conceptions or quality reporting. One of these relics is The Chicagoan, a magazine recently recalled from historic oblivion by University of Chicago History Professor Neil Harris. Harris stumbled upon old copies of the magazine while browsing the stacks of Regenstein Library and subsequently published a book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, about his find.
Harris’ coffee table book is divided into chapters, each a collection of essays from and about The Chicagoan‘s pages. The magazine, started by Ann Marie Armstrong Hecht, debuted as a biweekly as Chicago’s population exploded. Among Chicago’s new dwellers were poets, painters, writers, journalists, musicians, and photographers—many of them young and willing to be part of an ambitious and creative enterprise like The Chicagoan. At the same time, the city was gaining a reputation as the country’s crime capital. The magazine attempted to elevate Chicago to more than a dreary industrial town overflowing with crime.
Hecht’s idea was a stylish humor magazine that highlighted Chicago high society in the mold of The New Yorker, a publication started by Harold Ross a year earlier. In the first essay of his book, Harris writes of a spiteful pride many Chicagoans felt of their city and the sense of being overshadowed by New York City. According to Harris, "the worldwide attention lavished on the city’s crime and colorful politics seemed indifferent to the architectural, engineering, literary, and artistic accomplishments that could legitimately be cited in rebuttal."
The problem, though, was that The Chicagoan‘s founding editors had the recipe backwards. When founding The New Yorker miles away in New York, Ross envisioned a "journal of urbane, sophisticated humor that would celebrate and satirize the city’s cultural life." Hecht and Publisher Martin J. Quigley, on the other hand, first and foremost tried to create a copy of The New Yorker for their own city. The result was nothing substantively unique.
What’s worse, The Chicagoan both blatantly copied The New Yorker‘s featuresbut could never keep those features constant—even the sections that helped make its New York counterpart successful. Signature sections like The New Yorker‘s “Talk of the Town” appeared in The Chicagoan, first under the same title and then as "The Chicagoan Surveys" and "Town Topics." Unfortunately, The Chicagoan didn’t copy The New Yorker‘s obsessive dedication to good copy editing and intensive reporting.
Yet The Chicagoan’s appeal showed through its covers, drawn with the same concept that made The New Yorker famous. "Vibrant colors, elegant geometry, and sly humor made the Chicagoan’s covers one of its major accomplishments and announced its presence forcefully. The covers’ affectionate and sometimes satirical tone captured the city’s energy and ambitions, foregrounding new landscapes of leisure and pleasure and juxtaposing Chicago’s emerging skyline to its dramatically changing seasons. Many of these artists further showed off their wit and versatility by producing the cartoons, caricatures, and illustrations that enlivened interior pages," Harris wrote.
Indeed, the magazine’s best qualities lay in its arts coverage. The magazine was able to attract some of Chicago’s best journalists and columnists of the time, but it seems the majority of the talent that stayed was its reviewers, like Robert Pollack and Angela Boone, who critiqued the city’s cinema, theatre, book, and painting scenes.
As evidence that The Chicagoan was at its best when it touched on the city’s artistic scene, here’s a short editorial by Boone on they aesthetics (or lack thereof) of the cityscape:
Cityscape
Containing a Suggestion
Chicago’s public Avenues of Art are in decline. At the present rate of contraction, motorists soon will be forced to endure the ride from Chicago Avenue to Devon without one heroic plate of pancakes or flowing bowl of Biscuitina Cereal to sustain interested in the aesthetic. Exhibits are disappearing in alarming succession.
With the mushrooming of apartment hotels crowding out the billboards, advertisers are inspecting with reflective eye the space possibilities of boulevard concrete. If each turn of the wheels could be made to apprise passengers of what’s new in the factories of Oshkosh and Youngstown—but the plan has its drawbacks. Therefore—while we still know that When It Rains It Pours, that Four Out of Five Have It and that Buick Is Going to Build a Better One—it is gratuitously suggested that a storehouse not unlike the Art Institute, save, possibly, in possession of bigger and more colorful lions, be erected for the display of these canvasses. And perhaps such a display would even warrant a full six-day admission schedule.
Unfortunately, even The Chicagoan couldn’t help but be drawn into the stereotypes about the city. Harris mentions throughout the book that The Chicagoan regularly took subtle and not-so-subtle racist and ethnically offensive jabs. It seems that it would have been counterproductive to do so in such a diverse city, even then. Much of the city was made up of middle- and lower-income Americans, many of whom were recent immigrants. No wonder it was hard to get the city’s residents to enjoy reading something if it reflected such distasteful reflections of their city.
Both The New Yorker and The Chicagoan experienced its share of financial difficulties early on. But while The New Yorker overcame its money woes, The Chicagoan did not. The magazine completely disappeared for a time and then reappeared months later with a new staff and monthly frequency. As The Chicagoan struggled, its content shifted even further away from The New Yorker‘s mixture of serious reporting and insightful witty humor and instead publishing fluffier prose. Harris writes, "While excursions into Chicago history and profiles of Chicago columns and pieces on beauty care and shopping, along with photographs of weddings, club women, pet shows, and polo matches, became regular parts of almost every issue. In this respect it was less Vanity Fair and more Town and Country.” Such content is reminiscent of Chicago’s city magazines today.
The change resulted in a modest circulation increase and a hardier existence during the Depression than one would expect. But still, seemingly inevitably, The Chicagoan faded away. Few records remain of what was going on in its twilight days. If one lesson can be learned from The Chicagoan‘s life and death it’s that cities shape magazines, not the other way around. Chicago is not New York and it never has been. A successful Chicago magazine might have been edgier, harder, and perhaps more reflective of Rolling Stone’s gritty voice. There are intrepid journalists working to start a media empire today and they would do well to remember a template that worked in Boston or New York may not work in Chicago.
Chicago isn’t New York, and a magazine that accurately depicts the best of Chicago probably wouldn’t look anything like The New Yorker or The Chicagoan. The message of The Chicagoan is that a mindless adaptation of another magazine for another city isn’t enough. What really succeeds is a unique product that provides something you can’t get elsewhere.
Daniel Strauss is a blogger for Pushback and a student at the University of Michigan.
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