Mr. Selfridge in Chicago: Marshall Fields in the Windy City & the Making of a Merchant Price

INTRODUCTION

Nothing in the world is done as well as it can be done.

–Harry Gordon Selfridge

History is always a bit of a puzzle. Faded dates inscribed in yellowed ledgers, names spelled incorrectly in elaborate and hard-to-decipher script, carefully recorded but distorted memories of survivors…no amount of research can ever claim to portray events of the distant past with 100 percent accuracy. The best that an author can do is to review multiple sources of information and attempt to glean that tiny common thread that most likely hints at the real truth. You might find that some small bits of information in this book conflict with other sources, but rest assured that each conclusion drawn was the result of lengthy investigation and careful study.

Harry Gordon Selfridge presents an extraordinary enigma—the poor Wisconsin lad who honed his trade among Chicago’s (indeed, the world’s) most celebrated merchants before he headed off to take London by storm. Much of his early and rather unremarkable life went unrecorded, only to be reinvented and colorized at Harry’s whims. He would brazenly shave years off his age to the extent that even his wife and children were uncertain of his true birth date. Some tales he told were true, others were embellished and some were blatant pants-on-fire fabrications. In fact, it sometimes seems that there were two Harrys: the talented and hardworking merchant whose story was reported in Chicago and the regal British Harry, whose exaggerated recollections of his earlier years often differ sharply from past chronicles.

Perhaps he felt the need to dramatize his circumstances because to Harry, good was never good enough. Everything in his world needed to be spectacular, larger than life. In many ways, this trait served him well. Because he aimed so high, he achieved more than most of his peers. However, this pursuit of excesses also proved to be his downfall. One thing can be said for certain: Harry Gordon Selfridge was a man who lived to his fullest capacity and changed the lives of those who surrounded him in the process. He was a showman, a magician and, perhaps, in the end, just a hungry boy who wanted to make his mother proud.

THE HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

It is not the making of money that is the chief motive with me. It is the great game that is the thing.

–Harry Gordon Selfridge

Ripon, Wisconsin, is a small midwestern town that has birthed some very big ideas. Situated on the gentle rolling hills and meadows of the upper Fox River basin in Wisconsin—about eighty-five miles northwest of Milwaukee—the land once belonged to the American Indian tribes that fished its streams and hunted its woodlands. The Winnebagos, the Illinois, the Kickapoos, the Foxes, the Miamis and the gentle Mascoutins all lived in relative harmony. In fact, long before the white man arrived, there existed a massive Mascoutin village located just northwest of Ripon that housed more than twenty thousand individuals from five different tribes. They had come together to live in peace and in common defense against attacks by the warlike Iroquois, but as it turned out, the Iroquois were the least of their problems. French explorers convinced the Mascoutin people to resettle near the French fort at Detroit, where the peaceful tribe was systematically exterminated by the white conquerors and their Indian allies. By the mid-1800s, the remaining Fox Valley tribes were being forced from their lands under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 in order to make way for the European pioneers who were fast arriving to start a new life in the American frontier.

The first white men to settle permanently in the area arrived in May 1844. Nineteen men and one boy traveled from the town of Southport—now Kenosha—to break ground for a grand social experiment. Known as the Wisconsin Phalanx, this group dreamed of creating an agricultural commune based on the teachings of French philosopher and socialist Charles Fourier. They named the community Ceresco in honor of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, and at its peak, about two hundred residents lived and worked cooperatively to farm its two thousand acres. Unlike some other utopian communitarian societies of the day, Ceresco carried little debt, and its assets exceeded its liabilities. Unfortunately, its financial success did little to quell the discontent of members who were growing tired of the cramped shared quarters and loss of autonomy. Slowly, the membership began to decline, and by 1849, it had become clear that the experiment was reaching an inevitable end. Over the next few years, the association sold off all of its land and other assets, and the money was divided equally among its shareholding members.

As the Ceresco commune began to liquidate, David Mapes, a steamboat captain from New York, arrived in search of land. Mapes had recently suffered the loss of his ship—and his livelihood as well—when the uninsured vessel sank after a collision. He took the meager salvage money and headed west without a firm plan in mind. Mapes recorded his adventures and explained why he came to Wisconsin: I took another start in life and tried to acquire property which would not sink when having a hole stove in it. When he reached the Fox Valley, he was immediately dazzled by the beauty of the area. Here for the first time in my life I saw a prairie…that prairie was the loveliest sight I had ever seen in nature, and through the summer with its monthly change of flowers, there was nothing more enchanting. Without hesitation, he returned to New York, packed up his family and belongings and headed back to the Wisconsin frontier to build a new home.

After a brief stint at farming, Mapes dreamed of building a city on the land, which he referred to as a spot which was, in its state of nature, the fitting center of that Garden of Eden. At the time, most of the land adjacent to Ceresco was owned by Governor John Scott Horner. Horner agreed to sell the property, but with a few conditions. Among them, Mapes would have to build a gristmill and a public house, live in the town for at least one year and allow Horner to name the new city. Mapes agreed, and Ripon was born. It took its name from the picturesque ancient British cathedral city located on the River Ure in North Yorkshire, which was Horner’s ancestral home. The town grew quickly and soon boasted a gristmill, a post office, a hotel, a blacksmith shop, a school and several stores. Finally, in 1853, Ceresco and Ripon were formally merged by the Wisconsin legislature. Although the lawmakers named the new town Morena, the name never stuck, and it was eventually incorporated as the city of Ripon.

By 1854, rumblings of discontent had begun to spread across the land as the issue of slavery was hotly debated between states. A group of alarmed citizens in Ripon convened at the local schoolhouse to discuss the implications of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had effectively overturned the 1820 Missouri Compromise and opened the door for the spread of slavery in the states. Fed up by what they considered a betrayal on the part of the current lawmakers, the Ripon folks decided that the time had come to create a new political party. They would call themselves Republicans in a nod to Thomas Jefferson’s republican ideology.

The main focus of the group was to fight slavery, which they considered both a moral and an economic evil. Under the southern plantation system, a slave owner could buy up all the good land and inexpensively farm vast acreages by simply acquiring the needed number of slaves. An independent farmer who found the idea of human bondage abhorrent was limited to smaller, usually less desirable parcels that could realistically be worked by his own labor, perhaps with the help of family. As such, the plantation owners controlled the majority of the wealth and resources in the South. The northern abolitionists vowed to fight for free labor, free land, and free men, which meant a return to individual effort and industry and an end to the slave trade. By 1860, the Republican Party that had formed just six years earlier in Ripon controlled Congress and most of the northern states and had elected its first president, Abraham Lincoln. But by 1861, President Lincoln found himself at the helm of a gravely divided country spiraling into a bloody civil war. Many men left to fight, never to return home alive. Small-town cemeteries across the land marked the grim tally with their chiseled headstones.

Robert Oliver Selfridge, Harry’s father, never returned to the family after his discharge from Civil War service. Courtesy of Ripon Historical Society.

One of Ripon’s leading citizens—a dry goods merchant by the name of Robert Oliver Selfridge—was among those who left to go fight the Union’s cause. Robert Oliver had settled in Ripon about a decade earlier in the 1850s along with his grandmother, father John and sister Martha. It appears that John later moved to Michigan, but young Robert and Martha stayed behind. Martha married a Ripon man named Edward Smith, and in 1853, Robert married a feisty young woman from Tecumseh, Michigan, named Lois Frances Baxter. He was thirty-one, and she was just eighteen. The newlyweds settled into a white frame cottage at the corner of Watson and Seward Streets in Ripon. Life seemed to be good for the Selfridges; Robert opened a small store right on the town square, and Lois stayed home to raise the couple’s three boys. Birth records don’t exist for the children and anecdotal family history is sketchy, but it appears likely that the oldest was Robert Oliver Jr., born