In Henry Blake Fuller's 1895 novel, With the Procession, the artistic young Truesdale Marshall, just returned home from a prolonged grand tour, looked upon his native Chicago as a “hideous monster, a piteous, floundering monster too. It almost called for tears. Nowhere a more tireless activity, yet nowhere a result so pitifully grotesque, gruesome, appalling.” Marshall was not alone: many observers of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America—residents, visitors, and expatriates alike—believed that its cities were ugly. The shapelessness of American cities was due in large measure to the extraordinary speed with which they had developed: between 1860 and 1910, the number of American cities with more than 100,000 residents rose from 8 to 50. By 1910, several cities had passed the one million mark. Such statistics are crucial to understanding the City Beautiful impulse. Despite its preoccupation with aesthetic effect, the movement concerned far more than facade: the quest for beauty paralleled the search for the functional and humane city. Urban planning as the twentieth century would know it developed out of the City Beautiful—both as a phase of it and a reaction to it—and its coalition of planners, of paid experts and unpaid volunteers, of architects, artists, civic officials, journalists, business people, and interested ordinary citizens.