A MAN OF SALT AND TREES

The Story of Joy Morton

A paper presented by James Ballowe to The Chicago Literary Club as the Arthur Baer Fellowship Address at the Union League Club of Chicago on January 12, 2009

In Writing Lives: Principia Biographica, Leon Edel, the Pulitzer-prize-winning biographer of Henry James, begins,

Some write biographies because they have fallen in love with their subjects (as Boswell fell in love with Johnson.) Some make biography into their trade: they seek lively and lucrative subjects. All biographers understandably seek a measure of fame for themselves. A few—a very few—write biographies because they like the energy and economy, the order and form of a work of art.

Edel spent 21 years writing his five-volume life of James. I think he was motivated by all of the principles set forth above. Biographers of great writers have two subjects: one the writer and the other the writer’s works.

Most of us who have made our living teaching literature and writing at the university level have had our small successes in relating to others what we know and think of the literary greats. Few who have careers in literature would ever believe they would spend, as I have, a considerable amount of time (six years, in my case) with a figure who is known for trees and salt. Before coming to Joy Morton, my literary interests were the philosopher George Santayana, American culture, and poetry. Then, when I became an administrator at Bradley University, I began writing long essays for the Chicago Reader on subjects like Italo Balbo, the fascist aviator who became the celebrated hero of Chicago when his armada flew across the Atlantic to visit the 1933 World’s Fair, Charlie Birger (a Prohibition Era Jewish gangster), the last man to be hanged in public in Illinois, and the Herrin Massacre, perhaps the most brutal labor uprising in the history of this country.

Just before retiring from my university, I began teaching part time in The Morton Arboretum’s Naturalist Certificate Program at both the Arboretum and the Field Museum. [It was in a classroom at the Field that I had the pleasure of having Steve Thomas and Barry Kritzberg as students, although I thought of them more as colleagues in the endeavor.] At some point after retirement, I was asked to write a history of the Arboretum. It was published in 2003 as A Great Outdoor Museum: The Story of The Morton Arboretum. A few months before that publication, Gerry Donnelly, the president of the Arboretum, mentioned to me in passing that someone should write a biography of Joy Morton, the founder of both the Arboretum and Morton Salt.

Not long after that, in a meeting with Gerry and Walter Becky, then the president of Morton Salt, I found myself agreeing to take up the task. The motivation was certainly not tenure or money. For one thing, through the tutelage of my wife, Ruth, and through teaching there, I had come to love the Arboretum, that 1,700-acre world-renowned outdoor museum-park, an expansive wooded oasis bordered by Lisle, Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, and Downers Grove. But in writing the history of the Arboretum, I realized that I had learned little of Joy Morton, its founder. Even students at the Arboretum would sometimes ask, “Who is she?” Thereupon I began my search for the character and lifetime achievements of Joy Morton.

I soon discovered while reading through the voluminous Morton papers in the Chicago History Museum, the Sterling Morton Library at the Arboretum, and the Nebraska State Historical Society, that Joy Morton’s life was not just the sum of salt and trees. Those two notable but seemingly incongruous interests were bookends to a lifetime of achievement. Joy lived among Chicagoans who are recognized today by name and achievement—entrepreneurs, politicians, social thinkers, and architects credited with the city’s remarkable emergence from the Great Fire of 1871. Among them are Potter Palmer and Marshall Field, merchants and real estate moguls; Carter Harrison, Sr., elected mayor five times and a catalyst for the 1893 Columbian Exposition; Philip and Herman Armour and Gustavus Franklin Swift, builders of the meatpacking industry; William LeBaron Jenney, the architect of the nation’s first steel skeleton skyscraper in 1885; Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House and the social awareness and policies it spawned; and Daniel H. Burnham, the chief architect of the 1893 Exposition and the principal author of the Plan of Chicago, first published on July 4, 1909 and destined to become a touchstone for urban planners yet today. Ironically, the historical spotlight that illuminates these iconic citizens casts a shadow over the identities of many who also were instrumental in making Chicago the international city it is today. Joy Morton is one of these.

Even Joy’s father, Julius Sterling, the founder of Arbor Day in 1872 and Grover Cleveland’s Secretary of Agriculture from 1892–1896 and Joy’s younger brother Paul, Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy in 1904 and, later, president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, are cited by historians. Joy, the oldest son in a remarkable family, is rarely mentioned. He held no high office; he built a large fortune but not as great as that of many of his contemporaries; he made no effort to become politically or socially prominent.

What I came to know, however, was a person of steady purpose and a businessman of exacting principles. Moreover, he was a man whose vision of the future proceeded from a careful examination and understanding of the past. This methodology worked. Evidence of almost everything he did can be found today: the Arboretum, now 87 years old; Morton Salt, the industry Joy joined in 1880 and the brand name he gave his salt in 1915; the pervasive influences of the teletype whose development he single-handedly sponsored in 1905; landmark buildings in Chicago and Nebraska City; University of Chicago anthropological investigations in Central Illinois on his 7,000-acre farm, now known as Emiquon; Chicago’s Highways Old and New, a book-length history of Chicago roadways; and his advocacy for the Calumet River and the I&M and Hennepin Canals. Many other business and civic organizations no longer existent benefited from Joy’s counsel and philanthropy: the creation of the Continental Bank and the prosperity of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, to name but two. In 1931, he gave the Chicago Historical Society, of which he had been a trustee for twenty-two years, $35,000 toward its building fund. His family wealth continued to be important to Chicago and the region long after his death. In 1948, following the death of his wife, Margaret Gray, Northwestern University Hospital received $1,500,000 for the construction of the Morton Research Center on Superior. Edward Sanatorium in Naperville (later Edward Hospital), which Margaret had served as board president, was the beneficiary of a major gift from the Morton estate. And the Morton Wing of the Art Institute was donated by his son Sterling Morton and his wife Preston Owsley Harrison, the granddaughter of Mayor Carter Henry Harrison, Sr.

But what I what I want to discuss tonight does not focus on the Arboretum or Morton Salt, per se – two prominent subjects in the biography – but Joy’s participation in carrying out that vision of Chicago which the city is celebrating in 2009 and that is embodied in Daniel Burnham’s and Edward Bennett’s Plan of Chicago, the document published 100 years ago that has impacted the way we continue to think of the city and the region.

First it is useful for us to know something of Joy Morton’s origins. Like most successful Chicagoans of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Joy was not a native. But unlike them, he spent almost the first third of his life in the pioneer west, not the more settled east. When he was only six weeks old, his mother carried him from Detroit, a difficult 1,400 miles by train and riverboat to Nebraska City in the Nebraska Territory. In later life, Joy lauded her “fortitude,” a trait he himself hoped to emulate. Only a year earlier, his mother had come to the Territory on her wedding day with her husband, J. Sterling, a young, aggressive politician and newspaper editor whose principal political offices would be appointed rather than elected. While she was lying in Detroit, J. Sterling had built a four-room house on the outskirts of Nebraska City, said to be the first shingled house between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. By increments, it became known over the next fifty years as Arbor Lodge, the Arbor Day originated. Joy hired the Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt, to complete the mansion, now fifty-two rooms. A year after he started his Arboretum, in 1923, he donated Arbor Lodge and its surrounding 65 acres to Nebraska, making it the first park in that state.

Joy grew to manhood on the western bank of the Missouri River as the unruly territory, formed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, championed by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, was maturing into statehood and the Civil War, partially a consequence of the territories’ formation with the right to expand slavery, was about to begin. Joy’s formal schooling, like that of his three younger brothers, lasted only until he was fifteen. But his parents, both having had a formal education until they were 21, kept a frontier household dedicated to literacy in all subjects. By the time Joy left school, he had gained practical experience managing the family farm, hauling goods by wagon train between Nebraska City and Lincoln, and working on a railway survey crew. At fifteen he became a bank clerk and later worked his own farm. Forced to remain at home because of a near-death bout with spinal meningitis, he finally took low-paying railroad jobs first in Omaha and later in Aurora, Illinois. But by age twenty-four, in 1880, he had saved enough money to become engaged to be married and to invest in a junior partnership in a sales and distribution salt firm located in Chicago. Five years later, he owned the firm, named it Joy Morton & Co., and set about extending the scope of its operations. Financial success soon allowed him to invest in related businesses in Chicago and Nebraska City.

From the outset, Joy and his wife, Carrie Lake, the daughter of a Nebraska supreme court justice, sought residences in Chicago where they and their family could breathe fresh air and be far from the maddening sounds of the city. Consequently from 1880-1905 they occupied residences in land once owned by Stephen Douglas in what is now known as Bronzeville, on the south side. They finally built a permanent residence in Groveland Park. In the ensuing years, Joy marveled at the landscape work of Frederick Law Olmsted that would eventually create the ambience for the 1893 Exposition architecture, overseen by Daniel Burnham.

In 1905, when Joy turned 50 and had already amassed a comfortable fortune, he moved the offices of Joy Morton & Co. from the bustling Illinois Central Pier I at Lake Michigan to the newly constructed Railway Exchange Building at Michigan Avenue. His move from cramped quarters in a wooden replica of the first Boston public building (designed by his ancestor Thomas Joy in 1657) into the Railway Exchange Building (designed by Daniel Burnham and financed by the Standard Office Company over which Joy presided) marked a pivotal point in his relationship with his adopted city. He joined with Burnham, the president of D. H. Burnham and Company, Architects; E. P. Ripley, president of the Santa Fe Railroad; and E. J. Earling, president of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, to build what would become The Railway Exchange Building, a seventeen-story, 380,000 square-foot structure.

Locating the Railway Exchange Building at the corner of Michigan and Jackson was thought by many to be a poor business decision, because the area was considered to be squalid. Moreover, a building facing out to the vast emptiness to the east seemed to be turning its back on the Loop commercial and La Salle Street financial centers. But Burnham convinced Joy and other investors that this site overlooking railroad tracks lapped by Lake Michigan beyond would be an advantageous investment, if not a symbolic statement, for anyone who was committed to the city’s future. The Plan of Chicago would be completed in the penthouse from which Chicago’s shoreline could be scanned for miles.

Joy would be one of the principal contributors to the conception and realization of the Plan. From the start, he became involved when the Commercial Club of Chicago, an organization of powerful leaders to which he had long been a member, merged with the Merchant’s Club and began in 1906 to provide funds for the design of a plan that would encourage an orderly urban development while enhancing the natural features of the lakefront. A member of the Commercial Club’s executive committee on the plan, Joy served as chairman of the Plan Commission’s important committee on railway terminals. In 1909, when the city accepted the basic idea of the Plan, Charles H. Wacker was appointed chair of the Chicago Plan Commission and Joy became a member of the executive committee.

A year following the release of the Plan of Chicago Joy set out with a friend to explore the suburbs. They motored to what was then Wheaton and discovered a large piece of property that Joy immediately envisioned as compatible with the estate he had wanted to purchase. At the age of 55, he bought 1,000 acres for $100 an acre and began building his estate on a hill to the west of the east fork of the DuPage River, which bisected the property. The rest was farmland and native woods. He called his home, designed by Holabird and Root, Thornhill ,and the farm surrounding was known as Lisle Farms. The acreage was much larger than that at Arbor Lodge which he had inherited from his father and where, before he became committed to Chicago, he had hoped to retire. Ten years later, at the age of 65, he began to create an arboretum of 173 acres nearby the estate. Helped along by the advice of Charles Sprague Sargent, the director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum and O. C. Simonds, the noted Chicago landscape designer, Joy directed the operations of his arboretum and chaired the board, almost immediately bringing the incipient institution into national prominence. From the first, Joy intended that the arboretum would be added to incrementally. Today, of course, it covers 1,700 acres.

Joy’s next major building venture in downtown Chicago started as the Arboretum was being developed, and it is not entirely unrelated to that institution. Two weeks before his seventieth birthday, he received authorization from the State of Illinois to build an office building at Washington and Wells in Chicago. It was financed by The Morton Building Corporation (with capital stock of $1,500,000). Joy wrote to Charles Sprague Sargent, “It may interest you know that I am now building a new office building, which is going to cost me as much as several Arboretums. I am enclosing for you a picture of it herewith. I expect that my own Company and other companies in which I am interested, will occupy the upper floors of the building, which is to be completed the latter part of 1926.” And later he put the building in perspective for Sargent, linking it to the Morton Arboretum: “I quite agree with you that I am expecting to get more fun out of the Arboretum than out of the building, but arboretums require income and the Morton Building will assist the Morton Arboretum permanently and very materially in that regard.”

The Morton Building, designed by the Chicago firm of Ernest R. Graham, successor to Daniel Burnham who died in 1912, was planned so that the sixth to the seventeenth floors would be on an exact level with those of the Illinois Bell Telephone Company office building just to the west. Joy knew that the Morkrum (later Morkrum-Kleinschmidt) Teletype Company, which he had backed in its initial stage (hence the name Mor-Krum) would complement the services of the communication giant. Joy thought of the Morton Building as a capstone to his entrepreneurial contributions to Chicago, but the address at 208 West Washington also held sentimental and historical value for him. The site was where Wilbur F. Storey had published the Chicago Times, the paper whose accounts of Civil War battles he began to read to his younger brothers when he was seven. Storey’s paper, located in a building that had been erected after the Chicago fire in 1871, had also been a consistent outlet for his father’s conservative Northern Democrat positions, and he had been offered the job of publisher when Storey died. On May 14, 1926, Joy’s deceased first wife’s birthday, he placed a succinct, handwritten, biographical note, summing up the family’s history:

This building was built by Joy Morton who was born in Detroit, Mich., Sep 27, 1855, and taken to Nebraska in infancy and lived there until 1879 when he came to Chicago and on May 1^st, 1880, entered the salt business as a member of E. I. Wheeler & Co, Agents, Michigan Salt Association. They were succeeded in Dec. 1885 by Joy Morton & Co, and in 1910 the business was incorporated as Morton Salt Co.

This corner stone was laid May 14^th, 1926, the birthday of Carrie Lake, mother of my daughter Jean Morton Cudahy and Sterling Morton – my only children –she died in 1915 and would have been 69 years old had she lived until this day….

On Jan 16, 1917, I married my second wife, Margaret Gray.

Joy assured Sterling that the Morton Building was not going to put him in a weakened economic condition. On the contrary, in renting up to eight floors to American Telephone and Telegraph’s Illinois Bell Telephone, he estimated that the Morton Building Corporation would realize a million and a half dollars in ten years. Sterling suggested that the Morton Building might gain other tenants who supplied electrical services and equipment and that the building would become “identified” with the booming electrical communication industry. In fact, Sterling, who was combining his family’s vacation in Europe with marketing the teletype company of which he was president, would negotiate a $30,000,000 sale of Morkrum-Kleinschmidt to AT&T in 1930, as the Great Depression descended. The Western Cold Storage Company, in which Joy and his brother Mark continued to hold the major interest, would also move into the building. As the building neared completion, Joy said, they would “work harder on prospective tenants.” One tenant, however, was housed at little cost. Joy invited the Chicago Plan Commission to move its operations there.

Joy was “surprised and delighted at the view.” He could see Lake Michigan, he said, better than he had from his seventh floor office in the Railway Exchange Building. To the north, before taller buildings like the Merchandise Mart intervened, Joy had a view of Lincoln Park and the North Branch of the Chicago River where he was building a new salt warehouse on Elston, between Division Street and North Avenue on the North Branch of the Chicago River. The new warehouse was needed because Illinois Central Pier I was being torn down to make way for the extension of Lake Shore Drive and the bridge over the Chicago River, as suggested by the Plan of Chicago. It also meant that the replica of the Boston Town House, which had been used for Morton Salt printing machines since Joy moved his offices in 1905 to the Railway Exchange Building, had to be razed.

As the Morton Building was being prepared for occupancy, Joy spoke out as a member of the Chicago Plan Commission and the Wells Street District Owners’ Association, which he served as vice president. In January 1927, the Chicago Daily Tribune published his opinions on two highly debated topics: the straightening of the Chicago River as it flowed southward from its north branch and its link with Lake Michigan; and the replacement of the elevated trains that had given the central city its “Loop” appellation. Joy called the river project, which would allow traffic to flow freely south of Wacker Drive on Wells, Franklin, and Market Streets, “one of the most important improvements in the entire history of Chicago.” He advocated an extension of Wacker Drive south along what would be the straightened east side of the Chicago River. It would connect, he argued, all of the city’s passenger railway terminals and provide access to the western suburbs via Congress Street, which had recently been enlarged. Bringing his interest in European inner-city design to bear, he said, “Such an arrangement of streets would give Chicago an avenue comparable to the Ringstrasse in Vienna and at the same time serve to relieve the congestion in the present Loop.” His argument effectively described what has become the street layout in the western portion of the business district of the city. On the issue of the Loop, Joy wrote from within the context of the Plan of Chicago. As chairman of the plan’s railway terminal committee that provided direction for the crucial chapter on transportation, Joy endorsed its call for an efficient system that was conducive to the health and well-being of its citizens. This passage from the plan expressed his views perfectly:

Again, the noises of surface and elevated road cars is often excruciating. It is not denied that this evil can be largely mitigated. These conditions actually cause misery to a large majority of people who are subjected to the constant strain, and in addition they undoubtedly cause a heavy aggregate loss of money to the business community. For the sake of the state, the citizen should be at his best, and it is the business of the state to maintain conditions conducive to his bodily welfare. Noises, ugly sights, ill smells, as well as dirty streets and workshops or offices, tend to lower average efficiency. It does not pay the state to allow them to continue. Moreover, citizens have pride in and loyalty to a city that is quiet, clean, and generally beautiful. It is not believed that ‘business’ demands that our present annoying conditions be continued. In a state of good order all business must be done better and more profitably. With things as they should be, every business man in Chicago would make more money than he does now.

Joy was painfully familiar with the clatter of the elevated on the Wells Street side of his new Morton Building, and he expressed his frustration in no uncertain terms:

Any plan for subways must take into consideration the removal of the elevated loop. It should be entirely removed without delay. In fact, it never should have been built in the first place. I do not favor elevated extensions in the downtown district under any pretense. Complete demolition of the elevated loop is the only thing which will satisfy the public.

Remove the elevated loop and Chicago will make its own business district. It will spread west beyond the river and south beyond Polk Street. The idea that Chicago should be penned up by any artificial boundary such as the elevated loop is intolerable. It has the psychological effect of a stone wall.

Joy’s argument did not prevail, of course, but he articulated a sentiment that has lingered throughout the existence of elevated transit in downtown Chicago.

Several months later, Joy was quoted at length in the Chicago Daily Tribune as one of only two members of the executive committee of the Chicago Plan Commission to urge no further delay by the Illinois Commerce Commission in granting air rights to two major projects. He argued that the granting of air rights to the Chicago Daily News to begin building its offices over Union Station property and to the Marshall Field family to construct the Merchandise Mart (destined to become the world’s largest commercial building) over North Western railway property should begin immediately. Joy argued, “The use of air rights should be of immense interest to the city itself. It would be a public benefit. Every one abhors waste, and the failure to utilize air rights is in effect promoting waste.” Joy pointed to New York City’s development from 42^nd Street to 59^th Street as a model of what granting air rights over rail lines could do for Chicago’s commercial center. When air rights were finally granted and the buildings were finished in 1929 and 1930 respectively, they became the first major buildings to front onto the Chicago River, giving the river a distinct position within the commercial life of the city it had not previously enjoyed.

I conclude with the scriptorium issued in 1934 by the Chicago Plan Commission, chaired by James Simpson, the president of Marshall Field’s. Its words reveal the essence of his dedication to the region he came to embrace as both his place of business and his home. “He was one of the first citizens to appreciate the importance of a definite scheme for the development of Chicago,” the citation read, emphasizing the Arboretum as one of the key components of that plan.

Joy Morton believed that the care and fostering of our forests were fundamentally important. This belief he inherited from his father. He was fortunate in being able to give expression to it in the establishment and endowment of the Morton Arboretum, which combines a beautiful park and botanical garden and fits in perfectly with the recommendation in the Plan of Chicago for preserving the forests of this region.

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James Ballowe is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus, Bradley University, Peoria, IL. He is the author of A Man of Salt and Trees: The Life of Joy Morton, Northern Illinois University Press, 2009.