The Writer and the City: John Bartlow Martin and Chicago

As a boy growing up in Indianapolis, John Bartlow Martin remembered a memorable trip his parents took him on to visit a distant male cousin who lived not far from Wrigley Field in Chicago. A bookish, small child, Martin had been immediately impressed by the city, including the “unbelievable Lake Michigan,” as well as his relative’s audaciousness. One night, as Martin’s cousin and his wife were driving to a movie, his car broke down, “so he traded it on the spot for a new one,” a “magnificent gesture” that Martin later thought of as “having something to do with the Chicago spirit.”

Chicago had a siren call for Martin, as it was the home of novelist Sherwood Anderson, the place where labor leader Eugene V. Debs had led the Pullman strikers, attorney Clarence Darrow had battled for justice in the courtroom, and “a country boy” named John Dillinger had been gunned down by lawmen. It also seemed to be a place “hospitable to new and sometimes hostile ideas,” he noted, pointing to Chicago having as its poets Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, and Theodore Dreiser ad James T. Farrell its novelists. “The horizons in Indiana seemed suffocatingly close,” said Martin, “the ceiling in Chicago unlimited. And as fast as I could I went.”

With the failure of his first marriage, Martin, a former reporter with the Indianapolis Times, packed his bags and decided to move to Chicago to make his mark as a freelance writer. In the fall of 1938 he found a room at the Milner Hotel, located at the northwest corner of Rush Street and Grand Avenue. Part of the coast-to-coast empire of 130 units in twenty-six states owned by company founder Earle Milner, the hotel offered the tired traveling businessmen and tourist basic lodging at a reasonable price—“A Room and a Bath for a Dollar-and-a-Half,” boasted the chain’s motto. In addition to the Milner’s inexpensive rates (five dollars a week monthly), its management paid the cab fare from the railroad station for guests and also provided them free laundry service. “It suited me fine,” said Martin. “I had nothing but one suitcase and a portable typewriter. I had a room with a bed and through the dirty window a view of the fire escape.”

Having escaped from his depressing Indianapolis childhood (two of his brothers had died at a young age), Martin was thrilled to be in a vibrant and colorful city and delighted in its “free-wheeling, go-getting” spirit. While a high school student, he had wandered with a friend though Indianapolis’s scanty slums, disappointed they were so small, while in Chicago “there were acres and acres of them, all mine.”

Martin even enjoyed the noisy traffic on the Outer Drive and Western Avenue, the sound of the elevated trains as they “roared by overhead on the wondrous El, reared against the sky,” and the bright lights of Randolph Street’s theatrical district. “There was nothing like this in Indiana,” he said. As he had while he was a freshman at DePauw University, Martin, suddenly single, behaved foolishly for a time, sleeping most of the day, writing at night, and drinking beer while he worked. He soon discovered, however, that he could not keep up such a lifestyle and make a living and fell into a regular routine he followed for years to come—writing from nine in the morning to five in the evening and avoiding drinking alcohol between those working hours.

The near north side neighborhood in which the Milner stood, and its sometimes shifty clientele, offered their own distractions for the budding freelancer. A scattering of garrets, apartment houses, French restaurants, and nightclubs filled with artists, writers, performers, and hoodlums dotted the neighborhood. “In the expensive nightclubs,” Martin remembered, “you could see not only well-to-do suburbanites, but big shot Syndicate men with their show girls. Ever since [Al] Capone’s time, Chicagoans have enjoyed gangster watching.” A disappointed Martin soon discovered that many who inhabited the area were, like himself, “kids out of college drinking beer by a fireplace at the Pub [a bar across the street from the Milner], and most went into the advertising business and moved to the suburbs or to New York.”

Gambling—roulette, craps, blackjack—was widespread, with dice games running twenty-four hours a day in saloons along Rush Street. Upon entering a tavern, patrons could flirt with the “26” girls who ran a dice game whose prize often included coupons for free drinks. Jazz singer Anita O’Day, who got her start as a “26” girl at Kitty Davis’s University Bar and Cocktail Lounge, noted that a “bunch of pretty girls in low-cut, slit-skirt gowns were a big attraction for any guy who wandered in.”

Everyone Martin met in Chicago seemed to have paid a bribe to a policeman or expected to do so. Bar patrons nervously eyed one another, “each wondering,” Martin observed, “if all the others were gangsters, and it seemed to be part of the code not to talk to strangers, but to stand at a bar hour after hour almost shoulder to shoulder, never speaking, never quite touching one another, lest a false move, as in a Grade-B Western, trigger bloodshed.” Martin took to carrying his money loose in his pocket instead of in a wallet. “It was all rather innocent foolishness,” Martin said of those days.

While living at the Milner, Martin befriended a man who claimed he worked as a newspaper police reporter, but he never seemed to be at his job, carried a large roll of cash, and drove a flashy Cadillac. The man delighted in driving close to traffic policemen on rainy nights, splashing them, and shouting curses at them as he drove away at top speed. “When I discovered he carried a gun,” said Martin, “I stopped seeing him.”

Martin made a steady living by writing articles for editor Harry Keller’s true-crime magazines Official Detective Stories and Actual Detective Stories of Women in Crime, known in the trade, respectively, as OD and AD. During its heyday from 1935 to 1945, the true-crime genre attracted millions of readers across the country, with consumers having their pick of as many as seventy-five different periodicals on the average corner newsstand. A host of notable names in American literature wrote for these magazines, including Dashiell Hammett, Earle Stanley Gardner, Jim Thompson, Harlan Ellison, Ellery Queen, and Nunnally Johnson.

Unlike some fact-detective writers, Martin visited the scenes of the crimes to make his descriptive passages even more convincing. “I tried to get some of the flavor of Chicago itself into the stories,” he said, “sometimes using Chicago dialect in the dialogue and the grim Chicago humor.” The stories he wrote served as perfect training for his later career writing serious fact pieces for national magazines, teaching him how to conduct research and how to interview people. It also introduced him to the real Chicago—not the luxurious shops and restaurants his former wife had taken him to, but its vast political wards, where millions of workingmen, the people who built the city, lived in two-family dwellings, and the numerous slums that bred the thousands of criminals who gave Chicago its unsavory national reputation.

Years later, he still remembered taking the streetcar to the Criminal Courts Building and Cook County Jail on the city’s southwest side. While the streetcar clattered its way to its destination, passing along the way the city’s Jewish and Italian neighborhoods, Greek coffee shops, and gypsy encampments, Martin sat inside, absorbed in reading Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

During the 1940s and 1950s one name, Martin had gravitated from writing for true-crime magazines to influential national magazines, including Harper’s and, especially, the mass-circulation Saturday Evening Post, where he produced multipart articles on such provocative topics as mental illness, divorce, abortion, and desegregation in the South. In the Post he also introduced national readers to the ins and outs of Chicago politics, especially its Democratic organization that had its start during the Great Depression under the control of Mayor Anton Cermak, who was killed on February 15, 1933, during an assassination attempt against president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami, Florida. The organization continued to prosper under Mayor Ed Kelly and became, as Martin noted, “the most powerful of the old-fashioned big-city machines in America.” He described it as embracing all sorts—“black men and white, Irish and Jews, Poles and Lithuanians, good citizens and crooks.”

The organization exerted its control over the city’s fifty wards and 4,157 precincts through ward committeemen, who appointed a captain for each precinct. These were highly sought-after positions, as they offered one of the few ways out of the slums for many. Martin described a typical precinct captain as uneducated but intelligent, hard-working, and a longtime resident of a ward. “The captain is the man a citizen telephones if the garbage isn’t collected or a dead tree needs cutting down,” he related in the first of a two-part series he did on the 1955 Chicago mayoral election for the Post. “The City Hall government is remote; the precinct captain lives down the street. He is the government.” They were particularly useful in slum wards, where residents were often in trouble with police and needed legal help and favors. 

Each election, captains were responsible for bringing in about 350 voters. Those who had yet to vote before a polling place closed received reminders of past favors from the captain of their precinct, and the grateful recipients of the machine’s largesse dutifully followed the instructions. “That’s the effectiveness of an organization,” a ward politician told Martin. “And a man who hasn’t got an organization is just in a hell of a fix.”

During his time in Chicago, Martin had been lucky enough to be on hand for the rise to the mayor’s office and control of the city’s Democratic organization by a man he considered one of city’s best, and later most controversial, chief executives—Richard J. Daley. In Daley the machine had picked a man it knew and could trust to look after its interests, and the interests of the city he loved. “My opponent says, ‘I took politics out of the schools; I took politics out of this and I took politics out of that.’ There’s nothing wrong with politics,” Daley proclaimed in a speech to his fellow Democrats during his first campaign for the mayor’s office. “There’s nothing wrong with good politics. Good politics is good government.”

Daley also regarded the Cook County machine “with the fierce protectiveness of a mother bear,” said Martin, who found the professional politician to be liberal-minded, friendly, and fast-thinking. Later, he realized that Daley possessed two flaws—he had “an ineradicable blind spot” when it came to race relations, especially when it came to African Americans, and before he died he had failed to groom a successor.”

Martin, who had remarried and started a family, eventually moved out of the city to the suburbs, finding and renovating a Victorian home with his wife, Fran, a Chicago native, in Highland Park. The city, however, continued to captivate Martin, and in October 1960, while working for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, he wrote an article about the city for the Post, titled, “To Chicago, With Love.” In the piece he recalled how he glamorized the city when he first came there as a young writer. Now, older and wiser, he realized that the El no longer seemed romantic, but was an “obsolete nuisance. The slums are not picturesque, just appalling; Randolph Street and Rush Street not glamorous, just tinsel cheap; gangsterism not exciting, just dreary and dangerous.” 

For the few how could afford to live on Lake Shore Drive, life in Chicago was “lovely,” Martin noted, but for the millions existence in the city meant “toil and ugliness, if it is not squalor and privation.” Still, Martin had no doubt that while he wrote his article, some young man had gotten off a train from Indiana in Chicago “longing for excitement and opportunity, and found it here.”

Martin’s article attracted quite a bit of attention from Chicago readers, with the Post reporting to him that it had sold 40,000 copies in the city, whereas usual sales figures for an issue reached only 25,000. Flying into Chicago near the end of his presidential campaign, a bemused Kennedy, who had read the piece and enjoyed it, called Martin into his cabin, showed him a copy of the Post that contained his Chicago article, and, kidding, asked him, “What are you trying to do—lose Illinois?” Martin also recalled that Mayor Daley had held a press conference and when asked about the article had said, “I think John must have come through Chicago with blinders on.” Martin responded by writing Daley to tell him that he hoped that people read his article “in the spirit in which it was written—an attempt to express an affectionate light-hearted view of our city’s reputation and its problems, both serious and trivial.”