American writer, newspaper columnist, and playwright George Ade was
first and foremost a self described Hoosier. Ade was born in Kentland,
Indiana, one of seven children raised by John and Adaline Ade. While
attending Purdue University, he met and started a lifelong friendship
with cartoonist and Sigma Chi brother John T. McCutcheon and worked as
a reporter for the Lafayette Call. In 1890, Ade was hired on by the
Chicago Morning News (later known as the Chicago Record), where
McCutcheon was working. He wrote the column, Stories of the Streets and
of the Town. In the column, which McCutcheon illustrated, Ade
illustrated Chicago-life. It featured characters like Artie, an office
boy, Doc Horne, a gentlemanly liar, and Pink Marsh, a black shoeshine
boy. Ade's well-known "Fables in Slang" was introduced in the popular
column.
Ade's literary reputation rests upon his achievements as a great
humorist of American character during an important era in American
history. The 1890's marked the first large migration from the
countryside to burgeoning cities like Chicago, where, in fact, Ade
produced his best fiction. He was a practicing realist during the Age
of (William Dean) Howells and a local colorist of Chicago and the
Midwest. His work constitutes a vast comedy of Midwestern manners and,
indeed, a comedy of late 19th century American manners.
Ade's fiction dealt consistently with the "little man," the common,
undistinguished, average American, usually a farmer or lower middle
class citizen (he sometimes skewered women too, especially women with
laughable social pretensions).
Ade's followed in the footsteps of his idol
Mark Twain by making expert use of the
American language. In his unique "Fables in Slang," (1899) which
purveyed not so much slang as the American colloquial vernacular, Ade
pursued an effectively genial satire notable for its scrupulous
objectivity. Ade's regular practice in the best fables is to present a
little drama incorporating concrete, specific evidence with which he
implicitly indicts the object of his satire-- always a type (e.g., the
social climber). The fable's actual moral is nearly always implicit,
though he liked to tack on a mock, often ironic moral (e.g., "Industry
and perseverance bring a sure reward").
As a moralist who does not overtly moralize, who is all too aware of
the ironies of what in his day was the modern world, George Ade was
perhaps our first modern American humorist, paving the way for people
such as Will Rogers to follow. The
United States, in Ade's lifetime, underwent a great population shift
and transfer from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Many felt
the nation suffered the even more agonizing process of shifting values
toward philistinism, greed, and dishonesty. Ade's prevalent practice is
to record the pragmatic efforts of the little man to get along in such
a world.
Ade was a playwright (see "Other Works") as well as an author, penning
such stage works as Artie, The Sultan of Sulu (a musical comedy), The
College Widow, The Fair Co-ed, and "The County Chairman." He wrote the
first American play about football.
After twelve years in Chicago, he built a home near the town of Brook,
Indiana (Newton County). It soon became known for hosting a campaign
stop in 1908 by William Howard Taft,
a rally for Theodore Roosevelt's Bull
Moose Party in 1912, and a homecoming for returning soldiers and
sailors in 1919.
George Ade is one of the American writers whose publications made him
rich. When land values were inflated about the time of World War I, Ade
was a millionaire. The Ross-Ade football stadium at Purdue University
was built with his (and David E. Ross's) financial support. He also
generously supported his college fraternity, Sigma Chi, leading a
fund-raising campaign to endow the Sigma Chi mother house at the site
of the fraternity's original establishment at Miami University. Ade is
also famous among Sigma Chis as the author of The Sigma Chi Creed,
written in 1929, one of the central documents of the fraternity's
philosophies.
While Ade's writings fell out of public favor as America struggled
through the Great Depression and the onslaught of World War II, his
legacy lives on. Ade populated his writings with comedic characters
lifted from the streets and front porches of small Midwestern towns and
peppered the language with witty slang; characters and situations that
can still be found in movies and television sitcoms. Ade's comedic
style is just as popular today as it was when he introduced it over a
hundred years ago. While Ade was never considered a high-brow literary
writer or a fashionably caustic social critic, he succeeded in what he
had set out to do, he made America laugh.
