Chicago, 1900

Chicago at the turn of the last century was the magical city of Oz. Chicagoan L. Frank Baum’s 1900 tale — and subsequent American film classic — about innocent Midwestern farm folk being drawn to a “wonder city” of danger and delight was inspired by his hometown, a city overflowing with wonderful wizards, scared men of straw and wicked neighbors.

Chicago’s remarkable growth over less than a century from a wild onion field to North America’s “second city” was extraordinary by any standard. The period framed by the signing away under duress of the last aboriginal claims of Native Americans in 1833 to the city’s emergence as the continent’s great transportation linchpin required but a human lifetime. Chicago’s dynamism and diversity overwhelmed the city’s infrastructure and governance structures alike. Successful politicians in this hurly-burly world were forced to serve as brokers among highly fractured and decentralized social, business and political institutions. The city’s most successful bosses of the era did not rule by fiat so much as they

and physical imprint of the conflagration. It made possible many of the city’s greatest achievements, especially in architecture and urban design, while underscoring the impermanence of human endeavor for more than a generation of Chicagoans. Migrants from upper New York State and New England joined immigrants from Europe to reinvent Chicago with such rapidity that there was seldom an opportunity for any single elite to gain total dominance. The city’s volatile mobility unleashed an intense search for the distinctly American in commerce, industry and the arts. It drew on the wealth of the American Midwest to revolutionize the grain, meat and lumber industries. Chicago invented the twentieth-century capitalist metropolis, serving as political capital of nothing larger than its own county. Foreign-born immigrants constituted perhaps the most visible component of the local scene during the post-fire decades. Chicago remained a fundamentally German and Irish town throughout the late nineteenth century. The city at that time became home to more Poles, Swedes, Czechs, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Croats, Slovaks, Lithuanians and Greeks than any other American city. The city’s various ethnic groups lived in tightly knit, highly congested clusters around neighborhood centers spread along major transportation routes. headed to cigar-smoke-filled backrooms to cut deals among contending groups. Their considerable successes rested on Oz-like illusion as much as on hard, empirical realities. A sense of predestination surrounds Chicago. Located astride the lowest of North America’s continental divides — a mere ten-foot-high ridge separating two principal water systems (one extending through the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic, the other running down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico) — Chicago has several incomparable natural advantages. Its success has been rooted in the exploitation of these natural benefits. Chicago traces its origins to the arrival of the region’s first non-native resident, Baptiste Point Du Sable. Du Sable had been born in Haiti in 1745, the son of a Frenchman and a free black woman. Highly successful, Du Sable and his Potawatomi wife, Kitthawa, built a trading compound on the lakefront that eventually would encompass nine buildings, including the city’s first elegant lakefront mansion. Du Sable retired to St. Charles, Missouri, following his wife’s death in 1809, where he lived until his own passing in 1818. Discussions of Chicago’s evolution must begin on October 8, 1871, as that date’s “Great Fire” became Chicago’s defining moment. The city would long bear the indelible psychological, political, social

Individuals were far from immobile, even as their neighborhoods tended to remain home to largely one ethnic community over time. At the center of neighborhood life stood the appropriate church, a school and several saloons and beer halls.

Local entrepreneurs moved toward manufacturing the machines that hastened natural resource exploitation and transportation. By 1890, the city had the nation’s second largest manufacturing center, surpassed only by New York in terms of the gross value of its products. Chicago’s business leaders were inventing entirely new ways of life.

The rise of Chicago more or less paralleled the ascendancy of the American corporation. Outsized business organizations emerged during the late nineteenth century as regional commercial networks stitched together into a national market. This new form of corporate organization lent itself to large-scale operations. The massive consolidated stockyards on the city’s south side offer one prominent example of such gargantuan development. By 1870, just five years after the yards opened, its assembly line of death and dismemberment processed three million animals. Over its first half-century, the Union Stockyard would earn nearly $10 billion in income.

Chicago simultaneously earned a reputation for brutal labor relations. The city was the site of heated strikes during the 1870s, the well-publicized anarchist bombing of the 1886 Haymarket affair, the infamous Pullman strike of 1894 and a dramatic peaceful work stoppage in the stockyards throughout the summer of 1905.

As elsewhere in America, the politics of urban space and community consumed middle and upper classes, with the quest for social segregation simultaneously deconcentrating and suburbanizing the city. In Chicago, as elsewhere, segregation increasingly involved questions of race as well as class.

Chicago’s vigorous African America community began to take shape during these same years. Race relations had remained relatively tranquil throughout the late nineteenth century. This relative calm would change with the onset of the Great Migration of black Southerners to the industrial North during the 1910s and 1920s.

Chicago combined America’s roughhewn exterior with boisterous economic — and even social — inventiveness. The city became a focal point for aggressive reform in virtually every area of social and public policy. Unlike continental Europe, Chicago’s reform impulse found expression largely through non-state entities. The city’s reform community was a diverse and only partially overlapping meld of distinct crusades that mobilized a variety of citizens from academic leaders (such as Edith Abbott, Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, John Dewey, Ernst Freund, William Rainey Harper and Charles E. Merriam) and writers (Dreiser, Lewis and Robert Herrick) through community organizers (Addams, Florence Kelley and Ellen Gates Starr) and religious

activists (such as William Thomas Stead and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd). Chicago’s dynamic reformism symbolized the era’s “progressivism.” Decades later, waves of Chicago academics would join Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in Washington.

Chicago — America’s “Porkopolis,” its bovine city — simultaneously became a major cultural center. Its writers, including L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Will Payne and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, were leaders of American popular letters. Its philosophers defined an American pragmatism. From Dorothy along the yellow brick road to Sister Carrie’s discovery of urban realities, from the jungles of Tarzan to those of the South Side’s stockyards, Chicagoans redefined the American written word.

More than a few Gilded Age Chicago wizards stood behind emerald screens, pushing, pulling, turning and twirling various levers, knobs and wheels to give the appearance of action. Unlike L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy caught in Oz, however, Chicagoans could not merely click their heels and return to a more peaceful time. The politics of pragmatic pluralism required more than spinning wheels; it took hard work. Those civic and cultural leaders who made the effort bequeathed through their labors a number of achievements that continue to serve the city well a century later.