Hyde Park Stories: Linné Statue

Statue of Carl van Linne on the Midway.

Standing on the Midway near Harper Library, a bronze statue of Carl von Linné (1707-1778) towers atop a granite base. Linné holds the flower he identified, Linnaea borealis, which became the Swedish national flower. One of his books is tucked under his arm.

Linné came by his love of plants naturally. His father chose the last name Linnaeus to honor his favorite tree. Carl Linnaeus became Carl von Linné when the Swedish king made him a baron. Among his many accomplishments, Linné turned the chaos of nature into taxonomic order, allowing scientific study to grow.

This statue, a symbol of Swedish pride erected in 1891, spent its first 80 years where Fullerton Avenue enters Lincoln Park. Swedish immigration to Chicago began in earnest in the 1860s, when crop failures left people destitute. They gathered in Swede Town, just north of the Chicago river. When the 1871 fire wiped it out, the community, by then the third largest immigrant group in Chicago, spread out. Half moved north to Andersonville and the other half dispersed throughout the West and South sides, keeping in touch through Swedish newspapers and organizations. By 1900, Chicago was the second largest Swedish city in the world.

But as the numbers swelled, so did the rifts within the community. One of the biggest newspapers was the Hemlandet(“Homeland”), which supported the Swedish monarchy and the Lutheran church. Other newspapers, such as Svenska Amerikanaren, circulation 80,000, embraced life in America. Still, other papers promoted socialism and workers’ rights.

Leaders were troubled that the divided community wasn’t making their numbers felt in the city as strongly as the Germans were. They wanted a show of force. In 1885, Hemlandet proposed a statue of King Gustavus Adolphus in Lincoln Park, but there were loud objections. The next year, the Germans erected a statue of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, the famed playwright and poet, and the Swedes decided a cultural figure might be unifying. Like the Germans, they decided to bring a touch of home to Chicago by copying an existing statue. The monument commission chose a monument to Linné by Frithiof Kjellberg that had just been erected in Stockholm.

Fundraising was slow, but by 1890, they ordered a copy from Carl Dyfverman, who had worked with Kjellberg in creating the original. The massive main statue was cast in bronze and shipped to Chicago, while the granite base was carved in sections in Maine. The monument was assembled in time for a dedication on May 23, 1891, Linné’s 184th birthday. Thirty Swedish organizations marched up Clark Street to join the tens of thousands gathered at the shrouded statue. At the end of festivities, the head of the statue commission, Robert Lindblom, a wealthy grain trader, intoned an old Norse inscription: “This sign shall stand by the wayside and exhort our memory as long as men exist.” Then his 11-year-old daughter Vesta pulled on the rope to unveil the statue. After a moment of suspense, the flags parted and fell.

Carl von Linne statue, circa 1930. The muse on the far left is Mineralogy with the map on her knee and a quartz crystal in her right hand, in the center is Botany examining the national flower of Sweden with a magnifying glass, and on the right is Medicine holding a mortar with the Rod of Asclepias on her right.

Large urns sat on the four wings of the pedestal where the muses representing Linné’s areas of study belonged. Dyfverman had sent the commission hollow iron and zinc molds of the originals so that, when they raised enough money, they could cast them in bronze. In March 1893, the commission realized that the whole world, especially Swedes familiar with the original, were about to come to the World’s Columbian Exposition, so they hastily mounted the hollow molds on the pedestal.

The muses showed visitors the wonders of nature. Zoology had a butterfly on the back of her hand, which she reached out to touch. Mineralogy had a map on one knee as she held up a quartz crystal. Botany studied a flower through a magnifying glass. Medicine held out a mortar with the Rod of Asclepius by her side.

Every year on Linné’s birthday, thousands gathered around it for Swedish festivities. However, as immigration slowed and the American-born assimilated, crowds shrank. In the 1930s, the roads surrounding the statue expanded, leaving little room for people. In the 1940s, vandals began breaking off the muses’ arms. As soon as Swedish-American groups raised money for repair, they were broken again.

Two thousand gather in Lincoln Park to honor Carl von Linne with Swedish Singing Festival, May 22, 1933.

By the 1960s, a home economics teacher, Selma Jacobson, realized the memory of Swedish Chicago was slipping away. She collected what she could and organized the Swedish-American Museum and the archives at North Park College. When the king of Sweden announced a visit for the American Bicentennial, she threw herself into the project.

At a planning group gathered at the Swedish consulate in 1975, Jacobson complained bitterly that they couldn’t celebrate the king at their traditional gathering space, the damaged monument encircled by roads. George Beadle, Nobel-Prize-winning botanist and former president of the University of Chicago, pointed out that there was plenty of room on the Midway where, he joked, Linné could be with his Nobel-Prize-winning peers. The commission and the U. of C. administration quickly agreed that having the king rededicate the statue would be a perfect Bicentennial event. As the Swedish-American commission raised the funds, U. of C. Vice President D.J.R. Bruckner coached them through the political labyrinth to get approval to move the 150-ton statue in time.

With a month to spare, a heavy-duty crane pulled up on Fullerton Avenue to take the monument apart. The four muses were carefully loaded on a flat-bed truck. Then, as workmen scrambled up the pedestal to attach a sling to the central bronze, a crowd gathered. They hadn’t known that they were losing their statue. One woman burst into tears. Another called the newly organized Friends of the Parks and the local alderman, who were as outraged at the move as they were at the lack of notice.

The four muses were still intact, except for their hands and arms, in 1976. On the left is Medicine, who is missing her arm holding the mortar. Mineralogy is in the middle, missing her hand holding the quartz crystal. Zoology is on the right. A butterfly was on the back of her left hand.

A storm hit the news. The university said it was all the doing of the Swedish-American commission, the commission said it was Beadle’s idea. The Park District groused that they announced the move at a board meeting in 1975, and it wasn’t their fault no one went to board meetings. Friends of the Parks demanded a replacement. The offended North Siders suggested that, since Hyde Park “stole” Linné, they should grab the Lessing statue from Washington Park. Hyde Park Alderman Leon Despres (5th) protested that Hyde Park needed its reminder of religious and racial tolerance.

Few, other than Selma Jacobson, remembered that Hyde Park was once a Swedish enclave. In 1920, Swedes were the largest ethnic group in a number of Hyde Park census tracts as well as others throughout Englewood, Woodlawn, Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore.

Throughout much of the early 20th century, Swedish workers on the area’s cable cars lived along Cottage Grove Avenue, while those in the building trades lived with their families in the wooden workmen’s houses of central Hyde Park between Kimbark and Dorchester. Most famous of all, single Swedish women lived in the large houses and sprawling apartments throughout the area as cooks, maids and nannies. They even showed up in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. The cook, 34-year-old Hilda Pearson who’d immigrated in 1891, and the maid, 19-year-old Olga Johnson who’d arrived in 1907, lived in the servants’ quarters over the garage. Though urban life had its dangers, domestic work wasn’t seen as the moral threat portrayed in American novels like Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie.” Domestic work was socially respectable in Sweden for single women, and the chain migration of family and neighbors meant they had a support network in Chicago.

The Swedish community also built up parts of Hyde Park. By 1902, the carpenters, gardeners, cooks and maids of Hyde Park formed a congregation in a rented hall on 55th Street between Kimbark and Kenwood avenues. They were prosperous enough to raise $22,000 to build the Swedish Lutheran church at Kimbark Avenue and 54th Street in 1908, near where so many of them lived. Soon after, there was a Swedish Methodist church at 5487 S. Dorchester Avenue. These Swedish-language churches also acted as social centers.

The Hyde Park enclave was famous enough in Sweden that the Swedish Methodist church played a major role in “Jerusalem,” a 1901 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Selma Lagerlöf.

By 1930, Swedish smorgasbords were a popular feature in Hyde Park’s residential hotels. The most popular for decades was Miss Lindquist’s smorgasbord in the Broadview Hotel, 5540 S. Hyde Park Boulevard, where waitresses in crisp blue uniforms and orange aprons, which matched the décor, served herring, lingonberries and her famous butterscotch pie.

The university, too, had roots in the Swedish community. The Swedish Baptist seminary was part of the U. of C.’s Divinity School when the university opened in 1890. The seminary stayed in Morgan Park, but its professors taught Swedish on campus. In the 1910s, when the student population was drawn from Chicago itself, there were Swedish Glee Clubs, Swedish Bell Ringers and Swedish social groups. In 1926, the American Daughters of Sweden created a scholarship at the University of Chicago for young women of Swedish descent who were studying Swedish language and culture.

But decades before Selma Jacobson’s concern, the Daughters knew that Swedish awareness was fading. In the 1930s, the Swedish Methodist Church merged its shrinking congregation with the Methodist Episcopal Church on Blackstone Avenue and 56th Street, which later merged with the United Church at 53rd Street and Blackstone. The Swedish Lutheran Church renamed itself as Augustana Lutheran in 1940. After a fire in 1963 gutted the church and the lot was claimed to build Nichols Park, the congregation moved in 1969 to the current building on 55th Street.

Selma Jacobson was a past president of the American Daughters of Sweden. During the Linné controversy, she told the Herald, “This move means everything to us.” The American Daughters of Sweden sold 51,006 cookbooks to help finance it. The statue, facing south to the Midway, would once more have the space for thousands of Swedish Americans to gather.

(Left to right) Selma Jacobson shakes hands with an unidentified man as King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden looks on at the lunch in Reynolds Club North Lounge.

The bicentennial commission managed to reassemble the monument just in time for the king’s visit on April 27, 1976. The 29-year-old King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden lunched with the university’s Nobel Prize winners, some of whom he’d met in Sweden. Afterward, he, along with Mayor Richard J. Daley, strolled out to the Midway where Linné was shrouded in white and where a few hundred spectators gathered. The king stepped forward to replay the role of Vesta Lindblom in 1891, but unlike Vesta, he wasn’t lucky. He pulled on the rope, but the veil stuck. After workmen got the veil to fall, a refurbished Linné gazed out at the Midway in lonely splendor. The four muses were gone. When asked where they were, Bruckner said the Swedish-American commission had them. In 1983, plans were afoot to recast them in bronze. The molds may have become too brittle. Only a few broken fragments now survive at the Swedish-American Museum.

The crowds celebrating Linné’s birthday never came. The statue stood alone until 2003 when the university and the Park District invested $1.6 million dollars in the Reading Garden that surrounds him now. He seems more like a relic of Lorado Taft’s plan to line the Midway with the towering figures of great men than a symbol of Swedish national pride.

As with other great men, Linné transformed his times but didn’t rise above them. His memory now includes the awareness that his work was used to develop “scientific” racism after his death. Monuments by the wayside may exhort memories, as Lindblom hoped in 1891, but there’s no controlling what those memories might become.

If you see something around Hyde Park that makes you ask, "What’s that about?", let me know at [email protected]. I might be able to find the story.

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A few passing clouds. Low 61F. Winds NNE at 15 to 25 mph..

A few passing clouds. Low 61F. Winds NNE at 15 to 25 mph.

Updated: August 29, 2023 @ 6:12 pm

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