George Ade was the child of John and Adaline
Ade. His pioneer parents settled near Kentland,
Indiana, only twenty years after the first white child was
born in the settlement. Growing up as a young frontiersman,
Ade was exposed to the beauty of the untouched prairie,
and watched as the area was settled and converted for agricultural
purposes. From a young age, Ade was an avid reader and this
led him away from becoming a farmer like the rest of his family.
After graduating from the newly built Purdue University, Ade
wrote for some newspapers in Lafayette
before moving to Chicago where he found work at The Morning
News, which later became Chicago Record. He
began publishing his own work in 1896, and kept writing for
the rest of his life. He was well known as a humorist and
for his tongue-in-cheek style of writing.
As a
Hoosier, Ade shows in his writing an appreciation for the
landscape and love of what the natural environment
used to be like. Since he witnessed the alteration of the
environment, it is a common theme in many of his works. Some
of these works include the essay “Looking Back from
Fifty” and excerpts from the book Doc’
Horne.
In Single Blessedness,
and other Observations, “Looking Back
from Fifty” describes the environment of his youth:
So far as I can testify, and as I do verily
believe, nothing much happened in Indiana previous to 1870.
The world at that time was all prairie and cornfields, except
for the white houses of the county seat and a dark line
of timber against the horizon…. It was only a short
cut across fields to unbroken prairie that had never been
touched by a plow. Every township in the Middle West should
have reserved and parked one square mile of the prairie,
leaving it just as the settlers found it. It was a grassy
jungle matted with flower gardens. Tall perennials shot
their gummy stalks and waved broad, fibrous leaves. A traveler
leaving the beaten road found himself chin high in a rank
growth [of] blue and yellow blooms....
When I was a boy, the explorer could start
from anywhere out on the prairie and move in any direction
and find a slough. In the center, an open pond of dead water.
Then a border of swaying cat-tails, tall rushes, reedy blades,
sharp as razors, out to the upland, spangles with the gorgeous
blue and yellow flowers of the virgin plain....
A million frogs sang together each evening,
and a billion mosquitoes came out to forage when the breeze
died away…. The sloughs have gone, after years of
drainage and the leveling processes of cultivation, the
five-acre pond on which we skated is just a gentle swale
in a dry and tidy cornfield (47-49).
This passage shows the dense beauty of the prairies
that used to cover much of the plains around Kentland, Indiana.
Ade’s comments about the needs of the early settlers
to preserve a section of this wild beauty for future generations
show his admiration for nature. They also demonstrate what
little of this beauty was left in his time for people to see
and that he wished that the generations after him could have
seen it.
The same desire is expressed in Doc’
Horne, a book about Chicago. The main character describes
what it used to be like in Indiana in the time of the prairies:
Down in Indiana, where I used to live, we
had black prairie mud. At this time of year it would take
four horses to pull a two wheeled cart with a man and a
sack of flour in it…. The roads had been practically
impassable for weeks, but they were drying rapidly, especially
on top. You have doubtless seen, gentlemen, a muddy road
with this dry crust. At intervals along the road there
were
deep rucks, or “mud holes,” as they were called….
In those days a mud hole was called a “loblolly”
(5-6).
Another theme that existed
in Ade’s writings was the yearning to escape the city
and get away to nature. Four of Ade’s works present
this theme. In Babel, Stories of Chicago
mentions the joy of moving out of the city and near to the
prairies:
The breezes came freely from across the prairies.
Over toward the trolley track the white and blue flowers
of spring peeped timidly from the new grass. Mrs. Buell
gave every symptom of delight. She knew that she would
fall
in love with the place. The children would have a play-ground
at last. Mr. Buell predicted that they whole family would
become brown and heavy from living in the suburbs (185).
In
“A Breathing-Place and Play-Ground,” from Chicago
Stories, Ade mentions a park in between the
city streets that is a “patch of nature almost undisturbed”
(84-85). The trees there are ancient and gnarled, and provided
a soothing atmosphere for Ade’s characters.
A gentle
environment was exactly what the two main characters were
seeking in “What They Had Lain Out for Their Vacation,”
from the book People You Know. In
this fable, a couple spends weeks planning for a trip into
the country. In the beginning, they plan to go to many places
in nature, but cannot decide where to go. They wanted to go
to a resort where “Boats and Minnows were free and Nature
was ever smiling” (13). The husband wanted to go where
“he could penetrate the Deep Woods, where the Foot of
Man had never Trod and the Black Bass came to the surface
and begged to be taken out” (13). These two places show
that the couple in the story were looking for the shelter
of the peace of nature and to escape city life.
In
“The Unhappy Financier and the Discontented Rube,”
from Breaking into Society, the
same sentiment is found. Here, a rich man from the city escapes
into the country for some well deserved rest and explores
the wilderness:
He wandered away from the Hotel and took to
a quiet Country Lane, and soon he was in the Deep Woods.
The Silence was broken only by the Rustles of Leaves, the
tapping of the Woodpeckers, and the occasional stunt of
some feathered Warbler....
“This is where Man really belongs,”
sighed the track-sore financier. “What an artificial
and profitless Life we lead among the Sky-Scrapers…”
(123-24).
In the Hoosier
Handbook and Guide for the Returning Exile,
Ade writes about the counties of Indiana, as seen through
a train trip across the state. Since this book was written
while the author was returning to Indiana, it provides a good
view of what Indiana looked like during the time of publication,
as well as what was happening ecologically to the various
regions during that time. Ade states of Indiana,
“Note the smiling faces, the added tinge
of green to the luxuriant vegetation, the simple majesty
of the buildings that decorate the broad sweeps of the Hoosier
company and the peculiar turquoise blue of the sky--like
Italy, only more so” (6).
Soon, in the book, the dredging of the Grand
Calumet River
is noted: “Even now the Government is estimating the
cost of dredging the river to a width of 200 feet and a depth
sufficient to carry the great lakes boats” (10). This
type of dredging would destroy the river
ecosystem and alter the landscape.
Other alterations to the landscape are also mentioned in the
Hoosier Handbook, such as the use of tiles. Tiles
are used to drain
swamps and other wetlands for agricultural purposes. In
the book, Ade mentions a region near Terhune known for its
tile production:
“Nearly every town in this favored region
has a tile factory. The ovens for baking the tile look like
cook ovens. The drainage tile made at these yards is used
by farmers for carrying water away from the low spots on
their land. With the tile drainage and good roads the farmer
no longer fears wet weather” (37).
This passage shows the attitude of victory over
nature that many agriculturists felt at the beginning of the
twentieth century.
Ade, in another part of the Hoosier Handbook,
again shows this attitude. On converting a natural area to
farmland,
he writes, “this region of sand hills and reclaimed
marshes is being cut up into truck farms and promises to be
very productive” (19).
The final
theme that accompanied Ade’s writings about Indiana
covered the topic of pollution.
With the onset of the industrial era, pollution was something
that was becoming more apparent to the public as the filth,
oil, and soot began to assault city life. A classic description
of the pollution exists in “The Feud,” from the
book More Aces, set in downtown
Chicago. “In front of the police station was a dismal
slime. A fine rain beat into the black puddles and helped
to soften the islands of mud. Dripping trolley-cars went by,
hissing in disgust, the dirty water lifted by the wheels”
(1).
Other
descriptions of the pollution of the city are found in Chicago
Stories fables. “A Plantation Dinner at Aunt Mary’s”
tells of “wet and drifting snowflakes [that] lost themselves
as soon as they reached the black paste spread underfoot”
(119). In "Life on a River Tug," a person could
not get away from the Chicago soot that “vomited from
the stack and the dust from the bridges settles down and peppers
the potatoes and frosts the butter” (16).
The city streets were not
the only parts of Chicago affected by the rampant pollution
in Chicago Stories. The Chicago River was also affected,
as Ade writes in “Life on a River Tug” about “the
black,
oily river [that] streams gently beneath the warm sun
and does not charm any of the senses” (16). In “Olaf
Lindstrom Goes Fishing,” the pollution is so terrible
that “[t]he city was a wall of black from north to south,
with a few towers, spires and the huge bulk of a great building
or two extending into a murky blue sky…” (142).
While George Ade was a prolific humorist writer
of the early 1900s, he addressed some very serious issues
pertaining to the environment, including the pollution of
the city and a craving to escape to a more natural setting.
He devoted an entire work to creating a picture of Indiana’s
landscape, as captured in a single day during a train trip.
Ade's writing has provided later generations with a clear
view of Indiana’s ecology before, during, and after
the settlers came and its ecology after the industrial revolution
altered the land.
--SRD
Sources:
Ade, George. Doc’ Horne: A Story
of the Streets and Town. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone and Co.,
1899.
---. Breaking into Society. New York:
Harper Brothers Publishers, 1904.
---. Chicago Stories. Ed. Meine,
Franklin J. Chicago: The Henry Regnery Co., 1963.
---. Forty Modern Fables. New York:
R.H. Russell, 1901.
---, ed. Hoosier Handbook and
Guide for the Returning Exile. Chicago: Indiana Society of Chicago,
1911.
---. In Babel, Stories of Chicago.
New York: McClure, Phillips, and Co., 1903.
---. More Aces. New York: G.P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1925.
---. People You Know. New York: R.H.
Russell, 1903.
---. Single Blessedness and Other
Observations. New York: Double Day, Page and Co., 1922.
Kelly, Fred C. George Ade, Warmhearted
Satirist. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1947.
Links:
George
Ade
George
Ade Quotations
Ade,
George
Inventory
of the George Ade Papers, 1871-1970
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