Tsar

The west side of the Loop facing the oily, murky Chicago River is not the most glamorous site in the world for the home of grand opera. Yet, Chicagoans had reason to be proud last week when it was announced that Samuel Insull had acquired a half block amid bleak, uncouth warehouses facing the grimy waters, where he intends to make rise the $7,500,000 monumental abode of the Chicago Civic Opera Company and create a midWest music Mecca. Perhaps Mr. Insull's plan is a lusty answer to the Babylo-American style skyscraper which Otto Hermann Kahn is now erecting for the Metropolitan Opera among the tenements and speakeasies which creep up to 56th and 57th Streets at 8th and 9th Avenues, in Manhattan.

But Chicago opera connoisseurs have more immediate glories at which to point with pride. Fortnight ago (TIME, Nov. 22) the Civic Opera embarked upon a season of splendor--probably its greatest. Marie, Queen of Rumania, came the opening night to see Aida. If Samuel Insull, sitting beside Her Majesty in the first box, had been a man of many words, he might have told her of the rising fame of Chicago opera, of such artists as Edith Mason, Mary Garden, Rosa Raisa, Cyrena Van Gordon, Charles Marshall, Tito Schipa. It is true that Chicago has no Rosa Ponselle, no Maria Jeritza, no Gigli, no Martinelli, and that it dispensed with the high-priced Amelita Galli-Curci; but often the Chicago operas more than equal the Metropolitan in vitality and freshness. Mr. Insull, being both quiet and reticent, undoubtedly neglected to tell Her Majesty that he is the Tsar of Chicago opera, that he dashes off to Europe in search of these artists, that he recently collected the second five-year guarantee of $500,000 a year from wealthy Chicagoans months before it was due, that he hopes some day to see a self-paying opera in his dream palace on the Chicago River.

A ruddy-faced young Englishman on a tramcar was reading a copy of a U. S. magazine. A smell of perspiration and wet woolens arose from the people around him. They were people like himself, of obscure destiny and unimportant identity, working people, going home to supper. The young man was 20 years old, a clerk by profession, secretary to one Thomas Gibson Bowles, proprietor and editor of Vanity Fair. The article he read told about Thomas Edison.

Sought out by reporters, Samuel Insull will speak of that evening, of the magazine. He adds, in matter-of-fact tone, that it was pure chance that made him answer an advertisement in which one Col. George E. Gourard announced his desire for a secretary. Colonel Gourard represented the Edison interests in London. Samuel Insull was a good secretary. When Mr. Edison needed a secretary, Colonel Gourard recommended him. So began one of the most important combinations in U. S. business.

Samuel Insull came of a poor family. His father ran a temperance hotel near Reading, Eng. Temperance was not popular. Samuel Insull had worked hard all his life, but he had never in his life worked so hard as he now began to work for Thomas Edison. When he landed in Manhattan, he hurried to the home of his new employer. It was five o'clock in the afternoon. "Report for duty after dinner," Mr. .Edison said. Samuel Insull worked until five next morning.

He stayed with Mr. Edison for eleven years. He bought his clothes for him, wrote his letters, made him take his meals, woke him up, reminded him that he had forgotten to put on a necktie; he even had power of attorney and could sign Mr. Edison's checks. Electricity, and the New York Edison Co., backed up by Henry Villard and J. P. Morgan, began to light, warm,, run New York. Chicago was, logically, the next city for development. It was also the logical city for a monopoly, for 35 separate electrical companies were strangling each other in timid efforts to imitate what had been done in New York. The Chicago Edison Co. was the largest. Mr. Insull proposed himself for president.

He took it. His salary to begin with was $25,000 a year. He found that the big downtown buildings were trying to operate their own electrical plants. He talked kilowatts, convinced one department store owner that he would lose $946,287.69 a year by continuing to make his own light. Other stores fell in line. Mr. Insull went about buying up electrical companies. The capital of the Chicago Edison Co. in 1892 was $883,000. It is now $187,500,000. What he had done with electricity, Mr. Insull repeated with gas. In 1913 he became Chairman of the Board of the People's Gas, Light and Coke Co., an established utility whose affairs had been in a muddle for years. Now, in a city of 200 square miles, no one can switch on an electric light without switching on Samuel Insull. Every time a tired clerk gets on a streetcar to take him out of the roar of the loop, he is getting on Samuel Insull. Every time the mother of eight children turns on the gas to cook the morning Pettijohn she is turning on Samuel Insull. Besides which he owns an electric railway to Milwaukee whose traffic exceeds that of two regular steam railways. Besides all this, he owns the enormous Middle West Utilities Co., which operates public utilities in 19 states. "He provides us," said the Chicago Evening Post, "with light, heat, power, transportation, grand opera and United States Senators."

He is still ruddy, thickset, softspoken; he still reads magazines; he still retains a profound admiration for Thomas Edison. "Insull is tireless as the tides," Mr. Edison has said, but neither Thomas Edison nor anyone else has ever said that Samuel Insull was popular. Tsar, he does not waste words. He has time for diplomacy only when diplomacy is absolutely necessary. For the rest, always half-smiling, he gives peremptory orders in a low, a very low voice. He does not get on with Chicago bankers. When they fail to come to heel, he does his financing in London where he gets the terms he wants. He has crossed the Atlantic more than 100 times. It is said that the captain of every good liner knows him by sight at 100 yards. When the car and chauffeur he keeps in England meet his boat at Plymouth or Southampton, he permits himself a piece of sentimentality. "Home," he says to the driver. He goes to a little five-room house near Reading, boyhood home, which he still maintains. Then he moves on to London.

In the U. S. he takes diversion breeding Suffolk Punch horses and Brown Swiss cattle on his stock farm in Libertyville, 111. When the Chicago Opera Company, which long had rested on the weary shoulders of Mr. Harold F. McCormick and his wife, the now Mrs. Rockefeller-McCormick, came to Mr. Insull for salvation, the yearly deficit was a million dollars. Now it is $350,000. Directors predict that Samuel Insull will make it pay. Rarely, when he is in Chicago, does he miss a performance. In the entr'acte he goes behind to encourage the singers and they in turn speak of him as "Papa Insull" and give him their money to invest. They repeat with awe the statement that he has never lost a penny for himself or anyone else, and that he still has the first shilling he made when he worked for Editor Bowles. That he likes music there can be no doubt, but some say that the tune he likes best is the mysterious and wintry drumbeat to which his life, never missing a step, has marched upstairs.