Donald L. Miller - City of the century: the epic of Chicago and the making of America

City of the Century
The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America

Donald L. Miller

Copyright

City of the Century
Copyright 1996, 2014 by Donald L. Miller
Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover design by Misha Beletsky
ISBN ePub edition: 9780795339851

In loving memory of my father, Donald L. Miller, and of my nephew Andrew Miller

Rough-and-tumble-business Chicago after the Great Fire was a regional capital, and in many ways, because of its innovations in industrial method and in architecture, because of its mixture of brutal wickedness and revolutionary newness, the blood of the Yards, the showpiece gems of the Lakefront, the seething of its immigrant slums, because of its violence, corruption, and creative energy, it was also a world city.

SAUL BELLOW

Contents

Chicago around the time of the fair.

On the evening of October 7, 1871, George Francis Train, a popular lecturer on moral themes, gave a talk in Chicago to a packed house at Farwell Hall. There is no record of the topic of his address, but his concluding remarks were noted. This is the last public address that will be delivered within these walls! he thundered. A terrible calamity is impending over the city of Chicago! More I cannot say; more I dare not utter.

The following night, around nine oclock, a fire broke out on the West Side of the city in the cow barn of Mrs. Patrick OLeary. Aided by strong winds off the prairie, it turned into a one-and-a-half-day holocaust that consumed the entire core of the city of some 300,000 people, leaving 90,000 homeless and nearly 300 dead. It was the greatest natural disaster up to that time in American history. Frederick Law Olmsted, sent by The Nation to the stricken city, reported that many of those caught in the inferno thought they were witnessing the burning of the world.

The morning after the fire, fear gave way to disbelief. Everything was gone. All familiar landmarkschurches, street signs, corner groceries, barshad disappeared into thin air, and people wandered around like shock victims, lost in their own city. For three days after the fire we walked through the streets, covered everywhere with heaps of debris and parts of walls, and could not help comparing ourselves to ghosts, one man observed. All those magnificent streets, all those grand palaces, which but yesterday were the pride and glory of the chief Western metropolis, are today indeed a mass of scattered, shapeless ruins.

But more amazing than the destruction was the recovery. The rebuilding began while the ground was still warm in the burned district, and within a week after the fire more than five thousand temporary structures had been erected and two hundred permanent buildings were under construction. Derrick hoists crowded the main streets, and the air came alive with the sound of hammers and the shouts and whistles of draymen and carpenters. In the midst of a calamity without parallel in the worlds history, Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill wrote immediately after the fire, the people of this once beautiful city have resolved that CHICAGO SHALL RISE AGAIN . Chicagoans were convinced they had survived a biblical test, a terrible but purifying act that had cleared the way for a vast regeneration that would transform their ruined city into the master metropolis of America.

Such inflated boosterism was standard fare in the city before the Great Fire, but the fire gave it greater urgency; and with astonishing rapidity, fact almost aligned with myth. By 1893, when the city held the Worlds Columbian Exposition to celebrateone year latethe four hundredth anniversary of Columbuss discovery of the New World, Chicago had the busiest and most modern downtown in the country, with a dozen and more of the highest buildings ever constructed. Chicago would never become as big or as consequential as New York, its greatest rival, but it had made good its boast as the city that could accomplish almost anything.

* * *

There is in the life of any great city a moment when it reaches its maximum potential as a center of power and culture and becomes fully conscious of its special place in history. For Chicago that moment was 1893. In that year the worlds first skyscraper city had a population of over a million people, and among them was an early settler who remembered it as a desolate trading post of some thirty souls living between a swamp and a sand-choked river. Without ever leaving Chicago, this old man had moved, by 1893, from the country to the city, from an agrarian to an industrial America, and had lived, in the process, through the entire history of his still-growing city.

This book is a history of Chicago in the years of its ascendency, from the first recorded discovery of the site by a missionary and an explorer in the service of France to the Columbian Exposition, the culmination of a postfire burst of physical growth and technological and artistic achievement, a civic awakening unparalleled in the history of American cities. It is about the nineteenth centurys newest and most explosively alive metropolis, the city of the century, the first of the great cities of the world, in the words of Henry B. Fuller, its first important novelist, to rise under purely modern conditions.

The epic of Chicago is the story of the emergence of modern America. Child of the age of steam, electricity, and international exchange, Chicago [is] the very embodiment of the world-conquering spirit of the age, an English writer observed in 1893, a city people visited to witness the forces that would shape the next century. Chicago was also, many people thought, the most typically American of the nations big cities, a scene of boiling economic activity and technological ingenuity, American industrialisms supreme urban creation. In an unreservedly commercial country, it was, a visiting French writer noted, the purest kind of commercial city. The novelist Frank Norris described a cable-car ride through late-nineeenth-century Chicago: All around, on every side in every direction, the vast machinery of Commonwealth clashed and thundered from dawn to dark and from dark till dawn. Here, of all her cities, throbbed the true lifethe true power and spirit of America. Chicago was the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the one common, avowed object of making money, Fuller captured part of its character. There you have its genesis, its growth, its end and object. Yet Chicagos wealth and vitalityalong with its overwhelming problemsdrew to it some of the most creative young architects, writers, and reformers of the time, who came there to record, interpret, humanize, or simply experience the new phenomenon of metropolitan life.

No large city, not even Peter the Greats St. Petersburg, had grown so fast, and nowhere else could there be found in more dramatic display such a combination of wealth and squalor, beauty and ugliness, corruption and reform. City of idealists and dissenters, of Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Clarence Darrow, Mary McDowell, Thorstein Veblen, Albert Parsons, and Ida B. Wells, a young African-American insurgent who moved to Chicago in 1893 to mobilize a national crusade against lynching and racial segregation, it was also the city of thieving aldermen and plundering capitalists, of the sharp-dealing transportation king Charles Tyson Yerkes and his political procurator, Johnny Powers, and of those legendary boodlers Michael Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin, aldermen who gave one dollar to the needy for every two they stole. Chicago in 1893 was the city of Marshall Field, Philip Danforth Armour, and George Mortimer Pullman, the Chicago Trinity, the newspapers called them, and of those who wrote about them and a hundred other urban figures, in what became the first realistic American reportage and fiction about the big cityTheodore Dreiser, Eugene Field, Hamlin Garland, Robert Herrick, George Ade, Henry B. Fuller, Ray Stannard Baker, and Finley Peter Dunne, creator of the affable saloon-house philosopher Mr. Dooley. And to Chicago, after the Great Fire, came the young founders of modern American architecture, John Wellborn Root, Louis H. Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, to join such visionary builders as Daniel Hudson Burnham and William Le Baron Jenney in creating urban works of audacity and beauty. In the time of these makers and dreamers, Chicago was the site of some of the greatest achievements and failures of American urban life.