The Daily Socialist’s lead labor reporter on a worker’s need for the space and freedom found in nature, with a cheap alternative suggested to Chicago proletarians of taking the Aurora and Elgin interurban out of the city to Fox River Valley. Every inch of that trip today would pass through a built environment, with most of it an inhumanly ugly, seemingly endless, suburban strip mall.

‘The Call of the Wild’ by Robert Dvorak from The Chicago Daily Socialist. 3 No. 243. August 12, 1909.

Good Way to Answer It Is to Take a Trip on the Interurban

Have you ever stopped in the midst of your daily grind at the office or shop and looked long and silently out of the window, not knowing why? You surely have and so has every other mortal with live, red blood in his veins. Every person occupied at any kind of work on the inside, from the office kid up, has given that longing look out of the window, the only difference in the look being that the man at the top, the boss, gave the look only once and then disappeared for a few weeks. while the office kid and the lower downs kept on looking and longing.

It’s a mysterious prompting that causes people to give that longing look out of the window. The employe can never diagnose the cause, for it comes silently, like the shadows of the night, and takes possession of the human mind and body.

Purling Brooks, Leafy Trees

First of all the man at the machine, bench or office desk is unconsciously prompted to cease work. His ears are called by many pleasant but disquieting sounds. There is the gentle purring of cool, sparkling waters. The sighing of the leafy green trees and shrubs, the hum of the insects, the fussy activity of the bird families up in the top-most parts of the trees. All these sounds cause the worker to stare out of the window in a sort of dream.

Then the dreamer begins to see things. He sees the brink of a river, stream or creek, a grassy knoll and hundreds of stately trees. The quiet spot is very inviting. Unconsciously the dreamer picks out the grassiest spot and sits down. While sitting there, things begin to happen. The robin descends in a swooping way, from a nearby oak and begins fussing with a straggling worm. A bulky bull frog suddenly makes his appearance on a protruding log in the water and sits there sizing up the scene like a fat, wide-mouthed policeman on the railing near a saloon; then kerplumps back into the water. The scene changes, and the brilliance of the sun is replaced by the pleasant red glow of evening. The quiet of the day is replaced by increased activity. The feathery inmates or the trees whirr more numerously and the air is full of music. The stream is alive with the croaking of the frogs and the grass with the music of the crickets.

Then–the Awakening

Then there is a harsh cry and the dreamer comes to with a shiver. The boss has caught him dreaming.

But the call of the wild has sounded in the ears of the toiler as well as the call of bread and butter. A struggle takes place between the two calls, and as a rule the boss who stands behind the call of bread and butter win out when the recipient of the call happens to have a family. The call of the wild comes to both the poor and rich each summer. The rich answer the call immediately while the poor wait until Sunday or the time that the boss allows as a vacation. The boss goes a long distance to answer the call while the poor who bring him wealth by the sweat of their brows satisfy themselves with a little jaunt to the nearby woods and river.

Vacation Via Interurban

Every year, however, the poor are afforded a better opportunity to answer the call of the wild. A trip on the interurban line offers a satisfactory and cheap way of enjoying the beauties of nature. A trip on the Aurora and Elgin, beginning at Fifth avenue, is full of pleasure. The heeder of the call of the wild in whirred through nature for an hour and twenty-five minutes before arriving in beautiful Aurora where the Fox river valley and the woods offer a realization of the shop and office dream.

The Chicago Socialist, sometimes daily sometimes weekly, was published from 1902 until 1912 as the paper of the Chicago Socialist Party. The roots of the paper lie with Workers Call, published from 1899 as a Socialist Labor Party publication, becoming a voice of the Springfield Social Democratic Party after splitting with De Leon in July, 1901. It became the Chicago Socialist Party paper with the SDP’s adherence and changed its name to the Chicago Socialist in March, 1902. In 1906 it became a daily and published until 1912 by Local Cook County of the Socialist Party and was edited by A.M. Simons if the International Socialist Review. A cornucopia of historical information on the Chicago workers movements lies within its pages.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/chicago-daily-socialist/1909/090812-chicagodailysocialist-v03n243.pdf