Hutchins Hapgood In The Modern World

Hutchins Hapgood was born in Chicago in 1869, but grew up in Alton, Illinois where his father based his prosperous farm implement company. Hapgood shared the small-town, puritanical background of many of young, educated, middle class people at the turn-of-thecentury who traded the town for the city, and in the process, shed the Victorian values of their families. Hapgood found that the move from the small town to the city brought him freedom to experience reality as it really was, mainly by putting him in contact with the European immigrants and working class people who were to fascinate him throughout his life. Like his two brothers, Norman, who became prominent in publishing, and William, who experimented with worker-run industry, Hutchins
"I seemed for a long time to need contact with human beings who had no security," he wrote in his memoirs. "They were so near the line that, in association with them, I came up against what is called the real thing." [A Victorian in the Modern World, p. 112]
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Hapgood attended Harvard University before setting off for Berlin to continue his education. It was in Berlin that he first became aware of a different side of life. Hapgood took to drinking and roving with fellow American student-adventurers and forming casual relationships with prostitutes and other lower class women. The break from Victorian standards of morality continued upon his return to the United States, where he began working as a journalist, alternating between Chicago and New York, participating in the literary and reform circles that had developed in those cities. From his friendship with Josiah Flynt Willard, Frances
Willard's nephew whose fascination with the transient lifestyle led him to dress as a hobo and write about his first hand experience with the tramping life; to his brutal beating at the hands