City of the Century

Simon & Schuster

Chapter One

1. America's City

"There is in history no parallel to this [meteoric growth]," CharlesDudley Warner wrote of Chicago in the 1880s, "not St. Petersburg risingout of the marshes at an imperial edict, nor Berlin, the magic creationof a consolidated empire and a Caesar's power." Warner hadbeen to the city a number of times since the Civil War, but each timehe returned, it looked like a different place, an experience his friendMark Twain related in Life on the Mississippi. "We struck the hometrail now, and in a few hours were in that astonishing Chicago--a citywhere they are always rubbing a lamp, and fetching up the genii, andcontriving and achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for the occasionalvisitor to try to keep up with Chicago--she outgrows herprophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty; forshe is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the lasttime."

People began calling it America's city, "the concentrated essence ofAmericanism." Foreign writers, especially, saw this raw, unfinishedcolossus, with its surging commercial energy, technological wonders,and absence of settled traditions as the most characteristically Americanof America's largest cities. Older eastern cities like Boston, NewYork. and Philadelphia reminded the French architecture critic JacquesHermant. of "the great English cities," while San Francisco had "aSpanish or Chinese flavor." But "Chicago," he declared, "is America."

His countryman, Paul de Rousiers, a prominent economist, foundChicagoans enterprising and confident "in a manner at once foolishand admirable." Most cities and nations were conscious of their physicallimitations, but not Chicago, the stupendous product of Americanexpansionism. In Chicago, the American "go-ahead" spirit--the impulseto press forward without hesitation, regret, or even foresight--"attains its maximum intensity," he wrote in his observant 1892 bookAmerican Life. This was the confident spirit of America, but it was alsothe 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 foryoung men--or women--to rise to positions of influence in Chicago inthe 1880s and 1890s than in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston.

This magnet metropolis continued to attract fresh-faced hustlerseager to make a fast million, but it had recently begun to attract, aswell, artists and architects, reporters and reformers, with destruction acatalyst of this new migration. Postfire Chicago was the only place inthe world at the time where a young person could go and take part inan effort to reinvent the city. Architects and writers, especially, rose tothe opportunity, one group to remake the city, the other to document anew 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 CarrieMeebers, the Frank Lloyd Wrights and Theodore Dreisers, of themidland 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 butinexhaustibly vital. "The business section so sordid to others wasgrandly terrifying to us." Hamlin Garland recalled his and hisbrothers initial walk through Chicago as they counted the stories ofthe tall buildings and absorbed "the drama of the pavement. . . . Nothingwas commonplace, nothing was ugly to us."

We find this sense of the industrial city as a place of amplitude andopportunity most brilliantly in the work of Theodore Dreiser, who hadlived in Chicago with his family briefly in the early 1880s but returnedon his own in 1887 to "a world of hope and opportunity."

Dreiser is the only American writer at the turn of the century whocan be compared with Charles Dickens as a renderer of urban life, awide-awake traveler in new regions of humanity. He took in the bigcity in its full sweep and complexity, describing people, places, andscenes as though no one else had ever written about them. Being poorand 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 earlyevening, "the hetaerae of the city" could be seen "preparing for thosegaudy make-believes of their midnight day." And he also liked theareas "crowded with great, black factories" where men hammered outthe products that Chicago shipped by rail and lake steamer to everycorner of the country.

Later, Dreiser went to New York and wrote the great Chicago novel,and in describing Sister Carrie, he unconsciously described Chicagoitself, so close was his identification of the city with its people. LikeChicago, Carrie Meeber is desperate to rise materially, but she alsofeels "the drag of desire to be something better." An aspiring actress,she is a romantic seeker after deeper meaning in life. Looking back onhis youth in Chicago, Dreiser writes of a city seething with energyand excitement, an unequaled place to watch "a new world . . . in themaking."

But in Dreiser's Chicago novels, the big city is more than a romanticplace of excitement and opportunity. It is an ungiving force of naturethat ruins as many lives as it elevates, an image evoked by CarrieMeeber and her fated lover, Hurstwood, one made by the city, the otherundone by it. That is the way Chicago was. Many an opportunityseeker just off the train must have paused at one or another of StateStreet's crowded corners and asked himself what chance he had tomake it in this huge, indifferent place. Few of these ordinary men andwomen set down their experiences, but Rudyard Kipling spokefor many of the disillusioned in his bitter assessment of the dark side ofDreiser's Chicago Dream.

"I have struck . . . a real city," he wrote on his arrival from a tour ofthe far western states. "The other places do not count. . . . This placeis the first American city I have encountered. . . . Having seen it, I urgentlydesire never to see it again."

For ten hours, Kipling wandered through the "huge wilderness" ofChicago, a hired guide filling his head with fact and fable of the city'sprogress since the Great Fire. "He conceived," Kipling wrote of hisguide, "that all this turmoil and squash was a thing to be reverentlyadmired; that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, oneatop of the other." To him, this was "proof of progress"; Kipling consideredit "a great horror." And the city was ugly and filthy, he thought,beyond belief. Not even the Palmer House impressed him: "A gildedand mirrored rabbit-warren," he called it.

Kipling and Dreiser, speaking for voiceless others, described twoChicagos that were really one, a city of extreme, even violent, contrasts.City of millionaires, Chicago had some of the worst slums inthe civilized world. In this the "most American of cities," over three-quartersof its residents were of foreign parentage in 1893. Garden cityof parks and tree-bordered boulevards, it had most of its streets filledwith uncollected horse manure and putrid animal corpses. Temperancecapital of the country--headquarters of the globe-touring evangelistDwight L. Moody and of Frances E. Willard's Woman's ChristianTemperance Union--it had one saloon for every two hundred persons,its second-largest industry was liquor distilling, and its world-famousvice district operated around the clock with police protection. Themost corrupt city in the country and a stronghold of antilabor sentiment,it was the center of the nation's trade-union and socialist movementsand a rallying ground for urban reformers. Magnet city of themid-continent, it was portrayed by prairie newspapermen as a placetheir young people should shun, where thieves, gunmen, and whiteslavers 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 ofsplendor and squalor," wrote William Archer. "More than any othercity of my acquaintance, [it] suggests that antique conception of theunderworld which placed Elysium and Tartarus not only on the sameplane, but, so to speak, round the corner from each other." Dreiserthought 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 observersdiffered in their reaction to its messy vitality, few would have disputedHenry Adams's conviction that end-of-the-century Chicago was thebest place to observe "the new energies" of the age.

This is what brought Paul Bourget to Chicago. An eminent Frenchnovelist and cultural critic, he sailed for America in 1893 to see thefuture of his own country and went directly to Chicago because he hadheard it best "symbolized" America, "with its contrasts of extreme refinementand primitive crudity." A city ahead of its age, Chicago foretoldthe major conflicts and challenges of the "new universe" ofscience and democracy that Bourget, a deep-dyed conservative, anticipatedwith fascination and fear.

Bourget left New York with a trainful of tourists bound for the WhiteCity, but he was more interested in Chicago than in the instant cityDaniel H. Burnham had built on the shores of Lake Michigan for theColumbian Exposition. On the autumn morning of his first day inChicago, he went to the top of the 270-foot-high tower of the AuditoriumBuilding on Michigan Avenue, a favorite tourist attraction."One's first visit on arriving should be here," he wrote in Outre-merhis sharp-eyed assessment of American civilization, "in order to getthe strongest impression of the enormous city, lying black on the shoreof 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 vastnessof its industrial suburbs, while its solid rows of skyscrapers, with theirbelching chimneys, reached up into a black-and-gray canopy of theirown creation. It was an urban physiognomy different, Bourget thought,"from every other since the foundation of the world," an unvaryingflatland of industrial neighborhoods that rolled on--backward fromthe horizon--for miles and miles until it climaxed in a silhouette oftowers tightly wedged between river, rail lines, and lake. Entering thistall, closely packed city by rail gave some visitors the sensation of enteringa walled medieval stronghold that commanded the countryside,with the river and its pivot bridges serving as the prairie bastion's moatand drawbridges.

The gray imposing sameness of its mills and neighborhoods madeChicago look to Bourget as if it had been built by "some impersonalpower, irresistible, unconscious, like a force of nature." This power, hewrote, was the "business fever which here throbs at will, with an unbridledviolence," and it manifested itself most magnificently in thecity's austere office towers. These "cliffs of brick and iron" were thesignature of capitalist Chicago, just as the high dome of St. Peter's wasthe signature of Catholic Rome. Standing atop a tower that was one ofthe supreme achievements of modern engineering, a floor above the officesof its builders, Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, Bourgetlooked out at the first urban skyline of the post--Classical Age notdominated by church steeples and domes.

Bourget found poetry in these buildings--and power; like ancientdeities, they could hide the sun, direct the wind, and "shut out thelight of day." For him, however, the most striking physical feature ofChicago that clear September morning was not its profit-inspired towersbut its far-reaching, factory-like environment, the greatest industriallandscape in the world. Chicago was a spectacle of raw economicenergy. There was no attempt to disguise what the city was, no fancyarchitectural masquerading, no effort, even, to control the noise, thestench, or the smoke. It was, as James Parton called Pittsburgh, "hellwith 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 inwhich all the physiological process can be seen going on." Bourget, anovelist with the eye and interests of a sociologist, had a similarthought, only he preferred an inorganic metaphor. Chicago presenteditself to him as a gigantic machine with all its moving parts exposed,an engine that powered an economic empire of continental reach. Inthe Chicago River, the feed line of the machine, Bourget could see,through twisting columns of smoke, the complex commerce of empire--ironbarges from Lake Superior, lumber schooners from GreenBay, grain boats from Duluth, coal scows from Erie. Rail tracks--thickwebs of them--spread out from harbor terminals and piers. Andthrough trade corridors lined with signal towers and semaphores, longsteam trains bore through the plains and forests of mid-America carryingwhat Chicago built and bringing back what it bought.

A number of Chicago's giant industries had begun to move to thesuburbs, but the river harbor was still the center of economic activity,as it had been when Gurdon Hubbard began trading furs and trinketsthere. Entering the river in the summer of 1886, the year of Hubbard'sdeath, a French traveler, fresh from a visit to Marquette's grave onPoint St. Ignace, gave a picture of what Hubbard's Chicago had becomein the span of a person's lifetime.

"We reached Chicago in the morning through the beautiful bluelakeways," L. de Cotton wrote in an account of his travels published inParis 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 "endlesspiers piled with merchandise, [and] . . . through a black cloud, hugeconstructions, similar to what must have been the granaries of theEgyptians." Standing at the ship's rail. de Cotton could actually feelthe smell of the city grabbing him "at the throat." One breath ofChicago'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 rescueboat had been imperiled, de Cotton looked out at "huge red brickbuildings with large factory-like windows, adorned with inscriptionsseveral meters high." Even the coal-scarred office buildings in thebusiness center had large, wide windows, "giving the whole city theappearance of a huge factory." Surrounded by assaultive Chicago, deCotton felt a sensation of almost physical pain. "I felt an instinctiveneed to glance behind [at the disappearing lake], and something coldpressed my heart. Oh! What an awful city."

But where he saw Coketown incarnate, his countryman saw the designof 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 takingChicago and the country. "Toward what goal marches . . . America?"

Chaotic Chicago seemed to have sprung up spontaneously, withoutplanning or social foresight, a pure product of ungoverned capitalism."It is the most perfect presentation of nineteenth century individualistindustrialism I have ever seen," H. G. Wells remarked after passingthrough the city on a tour of the United States. "Chicago is one hoarsecry for discipline!"

Wells got his best view of Chicago as he was leaving it, relaxing in abackward-facing seat in the open observation car at the tail end of thePennsylvania Limited Express. He had not made the obligatory trip tothe stockyards, claiming "an immense repugnance to the killing offixed and helpless animals," but as his train passed the slaughterhouses,he smelled their "unuholesome reek" and saw "for the firsttime the enormous expanse and intricacy of railroads that net this industrialdesolation." To the right and left of the tracks he saw nothingbut industrial power and devastation. Huge freight trains thunderedby his train--"long trains of doomed cattle" heading northward, andalong the tracks were the slatternly cottages of workmen. "So it goeson 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," andChicago. in the retreating distance, became a "dark smear in the sky."

This was the same scene--in reverse--Dreiser had passed throughon his journey of initiation from rural Indiana, but what differentmeanings the two writers put on what they saw: one leaving Chicagoanxious about its future, the other entering the city of his desires; onea famous socialist who preached of reconceiving the industrial city,the other a town boy who dreamed of becoming famous by writingabout 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 mustbe big, busy, and packed with people--and allowed to grow freely andnaturally, even if the result sometimes resembles mayhem. Wells, bycontrast, is the voice of those who believe that urban growth must beshaped by intelligent public intervention. It was the absence of orderlyplanning, he argued in his book The Future in America (1906), that explainedall that was ugly in New York, Liverpool, South London--and,most riotously, in Chicago, which had not evolved socially, he said, beyondthe stage of "the prospector's camp."

Wells saw Chicago as a monstrous creation of the nineteenth century'spreeminent features, runaway industrial growth and a Darwinianfaith--he called it "optimistic fatalism"--that assumed that the city'sproblems would somehow right themselves automatically. Passing bythe stink and filth of Packingtown on the Pennsylvania Limited he hada wish, he later recalled, that he could "catch the soul of HerbertSpencer and tether it in Chicago for a while to gather fresh evidenceupon the superiority of unfettered individualistic enterprises to thingsmanaged by the state."

Unlike a number of present-day historians, Wells did not see thisurban tradition of privativism--the hard pursuit of profit without theconstraint of conscience or law--as a uniquely American phenomenon.He had, after all, been to Manchester, a city built and run, as bothAlexis de Tocqueville and young Friedrich Engels described it, without"the directing powers" of government. Wells, however, did leaveAmerica convinced that urban laissez-faire had reached its purest,most capricious form in Chicago. "The dark disorder of growth" struckhim as the city's supreme characteristic.

In Daniel Burnham's White City, a masterwork of neoclassical architectureand orderly urban design, Paul Bourget saw the beginningsof an effort to discipline Chicago's ill-regulated civic life. But theWhite City was, Bourget thought, a denial of Chicago itself, everythingthe actual city was not. So while Henry Adams, William Dean Howells,and hundreds of other out-of-town writers spent days touringBurnham's model city, Bourget went instead to the Union Stock Yard.What went on there, he believed, had more to say about the future ofChicago--and of America--than Burnham's make-believe city ofplaster and staff.

The big ideas of America, Bourget argued, were business ideas, andChicago was America's capital city of big ideas. No other city had createdso many revolutionary industries and commercial institutions.The Pullman car, the nationwide mail-order house, the refrigeratorcar, and the modern packing plant were Chicago ideas; and the originatorsof these ideas--George Pullman, Gustavus Franklin Swift,Philip Armour, Richard Warren Sears, and Aaron MontgomeryWard--had turned them into vast business organizations, the sumtotal of which comprised the main parts of the Chicago production andexchange engine that had powered the city's spectacular recovery fromthe fire. built the new downtown business area. and given the city the1893 Columbian Exposition.

Chicago was much more. certainly. than a production engine, but toknow how the Chicago Machine was reconstituted after the fire andhow it operated both for and against the general good--its heedlessgrowth generating civic contests that would be fought for decades--isto understand Chicago in the year of the Columbian Exposition. Andan understanding of 1893 Chicago and the Chicago Machine is impossiblewithout insight into the character and lives of the men whoprojected themselves so strongly in these, their proudest creations.

When Paul Bourget went to the Union Stock Yard to see its synchronizedkilling machine, he went with the idea of learning moreabout the ideas and ingenuity that would make the next century, hewas convinced, the American century, with Chicago its vanguard city.As he passed by the stockyards on his way out of Chicago on the PennsylvaniaLimited, H. G. Wells's thoughts ran in a similar direction. Thefuture was in America. And in centers of energy and change likeChicago. he mused as his train passed into the prairie, the ongoingbattles between order and freedom, capitalism and community, thatwould shape the coming epoch would be won and lost.

Continues...
Excerpted from City of the Centuryby Donald L. Miller Copyright © 1997 by Donald L. Miller. Excerpted by permission.
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