The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Medill’s plans threatened the interests of the stablest elements of Chicago’s working class. Twenty percent of skilled workers and 17 percent of the unskilled owned homes. These were the small and inexpensive wooden cottages, clustered two or three on a lot, that had fueled the fire. The small house inhabited by the O’Learys, which miraculously survived the blaze, was typical. It was a double cottage, with the O’Learys and their five children crowded into the rear half and the front rented to another family. The house and its neighbors were firetraps, but they were also all a working-class family could afford. To eliminate new wooden houses would be to eliminate the possibility of homeownership for the vast majority of workers within the city’s limits. These workers organized and protested, and bummers led the protests. Like the workers, they were mostly German American and Irish American. In the 1870s Chicago was, in the phrase of the time, a “foreign” city with about a third of the city being German in origin, 20 percent Irish, large numbers of Scandinavians, and a scattering of other immigrants.