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Chapter One
1. America's City
"There is in history no parallel to this [meteoric growth]," Charles Dudley Warner wrote of Chicago in the 1880s, "not St. Petersburg rising out of the marshes at an imperial edict, nor Berlin, the magic creation of a consolidated empire and a Caesar's power." Warner had been to the city a number of times since the Civil War, but each time he returned, it looked like a different place, an experience his friend Mark Twain related in Life on the Mississippi. "We struck the home trail now, and in a few hours were in that astonishing Chicago--a city where they are always rubbing a lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago--she outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time."
People began calling it America's city, "the concentrated essence of Americanism." Foreign writers, especially, saw this raw, unfinished colossus, with its surging commercial energy, technological wonders, and absence of settled traditions as the most characteristically American of America's largest cities. Older eastern cities like Boston, New York. and Philadelphia reminded the French architecture critic Jacques Hermant. of "the great English cities," while San Francisco had "a Spanish or Chinese flavor." But "Chicago," he declared, "is America."
His countryman, Paul de Rousiers, a prominent economist, found Chicagoans enterprising and confident "in a manner at once foolish and admirable." Most cities and nations were conscious of their physical limitations, but not Chicago, the stupendous product of American expansionism. In Chicago, the American "go-ahead" spirit--the impulse to press forward without hesitation, regret, or even foresight-- "attains its maximum intensity," he wrote in his observant 1892 book American Life. This was the confident spirit of America, but it was also the spirit of youth, for Chicago remained, as ever, a "city of young men." The generation of the 1850s had grown gray, but it was far easier for young men--or women--to rise to positions of influence in Chicago in the 1880s and 1890s than in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston.
This magnet metropolis continued to attract fresh-faced hustlers eager to make a fast million, but it had recently begun to attract, as well, artists and architects, reporters and reformers, with destruction a catalyst of this new migration. Postfire Chicago was the only place in the world at the time where a young person could go and take part in an effort to reinvent the city. Architects and writers, especially, rose to the opportunity, one group to remake the city, the other to document a new kind of city in the making.
Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana town and dreamed of romance and big things off somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran. She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun and when the newspapers came in on the morning mail she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all the trains ran.
That's Sandburg, and that was Chicago to the Mamies and the Carrie Meebers, the Frank Lloyd Wrights and Theodore Dreisers, of the midland towns. For them, Chicago was a place of desire and dream. They came from towns and villages--Rockport, Madison, Moscow, and Cedarville--hungry for the city's excitements and opportunities, and they found Chicago "august as well as terrible," intimidating but inexhaustibly vital. "The business section so sordid to others was grandly terrifying to us." Hamlin Garland recalled his and his brothers initial walk through Chicago as they counted the stories of the tall buildings and absorbed "the drama of the pavement. . . . Nothing was commonplace, nothing was ugly to us."
We find this sense of the industrial city as a place of amplitude and opportunity most brilliantly in the work of Theodore Dreiser, who had lived in Chicago with his family briefly in the early 1880s but returned on his own in 1887 to "a world of hope and opportunity."
Dreiser is the only American writer at the turn of the century who can be compared with Charles Dickens as a renderer of urban life, a wide-awake traveler in new regions of humanity. He took in the big city in its full sweep and complexity, describing people, places, and scenes as though no one else had ever written about them. Being poor and wanting to be rich, he could write with equal insight about the "great" streets and the "bleak" streets. As a young Chicago reporter, he was also drawn to the red-light and gaming districts, where, in early evening, "the hetaerae of the city" could be seen "preparing for those gaudy make-believes of their midnight day." And he also liked the areas "crowded with great, black factories" where men hammered out the products that Chicago shipped by rail and lake steamer to every corner of the country.
Later, Dreiser went to New York and wrote the great Chicago novel, and in describing Sister Carrie, he unconsciously described Chicago itself, so close was his identification of the city with its people. Like Chicago, Carrie Meeber is desperate to rise materially, but she also feels "the drag of desire to be something better." An aspiring actress, she is a romantic seeker after deeper meaning in life. Looking back on his youth in Chicago, Dreiser writes of a city seething with energy and excitement, an unequaled place to watch "a new world . . . in the making."
But in Dreiser's Chicago novels, the big city is more than a romantic place of excitement and opportunity. It is an ungiving force of nature that ruins as many lives as it elevates, an image evoked by Carrie Meeber and her fated lover, Hurstwood, one made by the city, the other undone by it. That is the way Chicago was. Many an opportunity seeker just off the train must have paused at one or another of State Street's crowded corners and asked himself what chance he had to make it in this huge, indifferent place. Few of these ordinary men and women set down their experiences, but Rudyard Kipling spoke for many of the disillusioned in his bitter assessment of the dark side of Dreiser's Chicago Dream.
"I have struck . . . a real city," he wrote on his arrival from a tour of the far western states. "The other places do not count. . . . This place is the first American city I have encountered. . . . Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again."
For ten hours, Kipling wandered through the "huge wilderness" of Chicago, a hired guide filling his head with fact and fable of the city's progress since the Great Fire. "He conceived," Kipling wrote of his guide, "that all this turmoil and squash was a thing to be reverently admired; that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, one atop of the other." To him, this was "proof of progress"; Kipling considered it "a great horror." And the city was ugly and filthy, he thought, beyond belief. Not even the Palmer House impressed him: "A gilded and mirrored rabbit-warren," he called it.
Kipling and Dreiser, speaking for voiceless others, described two Chicagos that were really one, a city of extreme, even violent, contrasts. City of millionaires, Chicago had some of the worst slums in the civilized world. In this the "most American of cities," over three-quarters of its residents were of foreign parentage in 1893. Garden city of parks and tree-bordered boulevards, it had most of its streets filled with uncollected horse manure and putrid animal corpses. Temperance capital of the country--headquarters of the globe-touring evangelist Dwight L. Moody and of Frances E. Willard's Woman's Christian Temperance Union--it had one saloon for every two hundred persons, its second-largest industry was liquor distilling, and its world-famous vice district operated around the clock with police protection. The most corrupt city in the country and a stronghold of antilabor sentiment, it was the center of the nation's trade-union and socialist movements and a rallying ground for urban reformers. Magnet city of the mid-continent, it was portrayed by prairie newspapermen as a place their young people should shun, where thieves, gunmen, and white slavers lay in wait. "All America," wrote a horrified German visitor, "looks with fear at this city that hurls her threat over the country."
Chicago "embraces in its unimaginable amplitude every extreme of splendor and squalor," wrote William Archer. "More than any other city of my acquaintance, [it] suggests that antique conception of the underworld which placed Elysium and Tartarus not only on the same plane, but, so to speak, round the corner from each other." Dreiser thought it "spoke of a tremendous future"; Kipling questioned whether "the snarling together of telegraph wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress." But no matter how observers differed in their reaction to its messy vitality, few would have disputed Henry Adams's conviction that end-of-the-century Chicago was the best place to observe "the new energies" of the age.
This is what brought Paul Bourget to Chicago. An eminent French novelist and cultural critic, he sailed for America in 1893 to see the future of his own country and went directly to Chicago because he had heard it best "symbolized" America, "with its contrasts of extreme refinement and primitive crudity." A city ahead of its age, Chicago foretold the major conflicts and challenges of the "new universe" of science and democracy that Bourget, a deep-dyed conservative, anticipated with fascination and fear.
Bourget left New York with a trainful of tourists bound for the White City, but he was more interested in Chicago than in the instant city Daniel H. Burnham had built on the shores of Lake Michigan for the Columbian Exposition. On the autumn morning of his first day in Chicago, he went to the top of the 270-foot-high tower of the Auditorium Building on Michigan Avenue, a favorite tourist attraction. "One's first visit on arriving should be here," he wrote in Outre-mer his sharp-eyed assessment of American civilization, "in order to get the strongest impression of the enormous city, lying black on the shore of its blue lake."
A city of spectacular distances, Chicago stretched for twenty-four. miles along its lakefront and for ten miles and more into the vastness of its industrial suburbs, while its solid rows of skyscrapers, with their belching chimneys, reached up into a black-and-gray canopy of their own creation. It was an urban physiognomy different, Bourget thought, "from every other since the foundation of the world," an unvarying flatland of industrial neighborhoods that rolled on--backward from the horizon--for miles and miles until it climaxed in a silhouette of towers tightly wedged between river, rail lines, and lake. Entering this tall, closely packed city by rail gave some visitors the sensation of entering a walled medieval stronghold that commanded the countryside, with the river and its pivot bridges serving as the prairie bastion's moat and drawbridges.
The gray imposing sameness of its mills and neighborhoods made Chicago look to Bourget as if it had been built by "some impersonal power, irresistible, unconscious, like a force of nature." This power, he wrote, was the "business fever which here throbs at will, with an unbridled violence," and it manifested itself most magnificently in the city's austere office towers. These "cliffs of brick and iron" were the signature of capitalist Chicago, just as the high dome of St. Peter's was the signature of Catholic Rome. Standing atop a tower that was one of the supreme achievements of modern engineering, a floor above the offices of its builders, Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, Bourget looked out at the first urban skyline of the post--Classical Age not dominated by church steeples and domes.
Bourget found poetry in these buildings--and power; like ancient deities, they could hide the sun, direct the wind, and "shut out the light of day." For him, however, the most striking physical feature of Chicago that clear September morning was not its profit-inspired towers but its far-reaching, factory-like environment, the greatest industrial landscape in the world. Chicago was a spectacle of raw economic energy. There was no attempt to disguise what the city was, no fancy architectural masquerading, no effort, even, to control the noise, the stench, or the smoke. It was, as James Parton called Pittsburgh, "hell with the lid taken off."
The "whole powerful city, more extensive than London--resembles, except for the better residential areas, a human being with his skin removed," wrote Max Weber on his first and only visit there, "and in which all the physiological process can be seen going on." Bourget, a novelist with the eye and interests of a sociologist, had a similar thought, only he preferred an inorganic metaphor. Chicago presented itself to him as a gigantic machine with all its moving parts exposed, an engine that powered an economic empire of continental reach. In the Chicago River, the feed line of the machine, Bourget could see, through twisting columns of smoke, the complex commerce of empire--iron barges from Lake Superior, lumber schooners from Green Bay, grain boats from Duluth, coal scows from Erie. Rail tracks--thick webs of them--spread out from harbor terminals and piers. And through trade corridors lined with signal towers and semaphores, long steam trains bore through the plains and forests of mid-America carrying what Chicago built and bringing back what it bought.
A number of Chicago's giant industries had begun to move to the suburbs, but the river harbor was still the center of economic activity, as it had been when Gurdon Hubbard began trading furs and trinkets there. Entering the river in the summer of 1886, the year of Hubbard's death, a French traveler, fresh from a visit to Marquette's grave on Point St. Ignace, gave a picture of what Hubbard's Chicago had become in the span of a person's lifetime.
"We reached Chicago in the morning through the beautiful blue lakeways," L. de Cotton wrote in an account of his travels published in Paris three years later. "Suddenly, on a low coast, a cloud of smoke appeared. I was told it was the city." As his ship made its way slowly upriver, "stirring up the infectious and muddy waters," he saw "endless piers piled with merchandise, [and] . . . through a black cloud, huge constructions, similar to what must have been the granaries of the Egyptians." Standing at the ship's rail. de Cotton could actually feel the smell of the city grabbing him "at the throat." One breath of Chicago's air "reeks of coal smoke," wrote another foreign traveler, "the other of boiling glue."
On the banks of the river, close to the spot where Isaac Arnold's rescue boat had been imperiled, de Cotton looked out at "huge red brick buildings with large factory-like windows, adorned with inscriptions several meters high." Even the coal-scarred office buildings in the business center had large, wide windows, "giving the whole city the appearance of a huge factory." Surrounded by assaultive Chicago, de Cotton felt a sensation of almost physical pain. "I felt an instinctive need to glance behind [at the disappearing lake], and something cold pressed my heart. Oh! What an awful city."
But where he saw Coketown incarnate, his countryman saw the design of a new economic order of "immense originality," whose "makers," Paul Bourget argued, "are examples of a more vigorous humanity." Chicago was a "summary of [America's] energy and inexhaustible impulse." But Bourget wondered where this cyclonic energy was taking Chicago and the country. "Toward what goal marches . . . America?"
Chaotic Chicago seemed to have sprung up spontaneously, without planning or social foresight, a pure product of ungoverned capitalism. "It is the most perfect presentation of nineteenth century individualist industrialism I have ever seen," H. G. Wells remarked after passing through the city on a tour of the United States. "Chicago is one hoarse cry for discipline!"
Wells got his best view of Chicago as he was leaving it, relaxing in a backward-facing seat in the open observation car at the tail end of the Pennsylvania Limited Express. He had not made the obligatory trip to the stockyards, claiming "an immense repugnance to the killing of fixed and helpless animals," but as his train passed the slaughterhouses, he smelled their "unuholesome reek" and saw "for the first time the enormous expanse and intricacy of railroads that net this industrial desolation." To the right and left of the tracks he saw nothing but industrial power and devastation. Huge freight trains thundered by his train--"long trains of doomed cattle" heading northward, and along the tracks were the slatternly cottages of workmen. "So it goes on mile after mile--Chicago."
Then. suddenly, tearing through one last field of smoke and grime, the Pennsylvania Limited was in "the large emptiness of America," and Chicago. in the retreating distance, became a "dark smear in the sky."
This was the same scene--in reverse--Dreiser had passed through on his journey of initiation from rural Indiana, but what different meanings the two writers put on what they saw: one leaving Chicago anxious about its future, the other entering the city of his desires; one a famous socialist who preached of reconceiving the industrial city, the other a town boy who dreamed of becoming famous by writing about city life as it was, not as reformers wanted it to be.
Dreiser speaks for those who insist that for a city to be great it must be big, busy, and packed with people--and allowed to grow freely and naturally, even if the result sometimes resembles mayhem. Wells, by contrast, is the voice of those who believe that urban growth must be shaped by intelligent public intervention. It was the absence of orderly planning, he argued in his book The Future in America (1906), that explained all that was ugly in New York, Liverpool, South London--and, most riotously, in Chicago, which had not evolved socially, he said, beyond the stage of "the prospector's camp."
Wells saw Chicago as a monstrous creation of the nineteenth century's preeminent features, runaway industrial growth and a Darwinian faith--he called it "optimistic fatalism"--that assumed that the city's problems would somehow right themselves automatically. Passing by the stink and filth of Packingtown on the Pennsylvania Limited he had a wish, he later recalled, that he could "catch the soul of Herbert Spencer and tether it in Chicago for a while to gather fresh evidence upon the superiority of unfettered individualistic enterprises to things managed by the state."
Unlike a number of present-day historians, Wells did not see this urban tradition of privativism--the hard pursuit of profit without the constraint of conscience or law--as a uniquely American phenomenon. He had, after all, been to Manchester, a city built and run, as both Alexis de Tocqueville and young Friedrich Engels described it, without "the directing powers" of government. Wells, however, did leave America convinced that urban laissez-faire had reached its purest, most capricious form in Chicago. "The dark disorder of growth" struck him as the city's supreme characteristic.
In Daniel Burnham's White City, a masterwork of neoclassical architecture and orderly urban design, Paul Bourget saw the beginnings of an effort to discipline Chicago's ill-regulated civic life. But the White City was, Bourget thought, a denial of Chicago itself, everything the actual city was not. So while Henry Adams, William Dean Howells, and hundreds of other out-of-town writers spent days touring Burnham's model city, Bourget went instead to the Union Stock Yard. What went on there, he believed, had more to say about the future of Chicago--and of America--than Burnham's make-believe city of plaster and staff.
The big ideas of America, Bourget argued, were business ideas, and Chicago was America's capital city of big ideas. No other city had created so many revolutionary industries and commercial institutions. The Pullman car, the nationwide mail-order house, the refrigerator car, and the modern packing plant were Chicago ideas; and the originators of these ideas--George Pullman, Gustavus Franklin Swift, Philip Armour, Richard Warren Sears, and Aaron Montgomery Ward--had turned them into vast business organizations, the sum total of which comprised the main parts of the Chicago production and exchange engine that had powered the city's spectacular recovery from the fire. built the new downtown business area. and given the city the 1893 Columbian Exposition.
Chicago was much more. certainly. than a production engine, but to know how the Chicago Machine was reconstituted after the fire and how it operated both for and against the general good--its heedless growth generating civic contests that would be fought for decades--is to understand Chicago in the year of the Columbian Exposition. And an understanding of 1893 Chicago and the Chicago Machine is impossible without insight into the character and lives of the men who projected themselves so strongly in these, their proudest creations.
When Paul Bourget went to the Union Stock Yard to see its synchronized killing machine, he went with the idea of learning more about the ideas and ingenuity that would make the next century, he was convinced, the American century, with Chicago its vanguard city. As he passed by the stockyards on his way out of Chicago on the Pennsylvania Limited, H. G. Wells's thoughts ran in a similar direction. The future was in America. And in centers of energy and change like Chicago. he mused as his train passed into the prairie, the ongoing battles between order and freedom, capitalism and community, that would shape the coming epoch would be won and lost.