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

by Donald L. Miller

ecological history must merge with cultural history if it is to encompass the full life of the city. This type of urban history sees the city itself as a culture-creating system of biotic relationships and as a place not only where the goods of civilization are made and exchanged but also where experience is heightened and transformed into art, ritual, and civic pageantry. “A product of nature,” the city is also a product of “human nature,” the pioneering Chicago sociologist Robert Park reminds us. But the city, in turn, reshapes human nature.

whiskey, song, and dance were the great democratizers.

At times, the society seemed as interested in maintaining public order as in alleviating suffering, seeing relief as an antidote to an uprising by a “starving, fierce, and lawless mob.”

Hamlin Garland recalled his and his brother’s 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.”

Swift’s “Wild West Scheme” had made him a millionaire several times over. Yet he remained as frugal as ever, insisting to his sons that “no young man is rich enough to smoke twenty-five cent cigars.”

The size and complexity of these corporations forced their personalistic founders, however reluctantly, to delegate authority to salaried managers, accountants, and engineers, paving the way for the impersonal, managerial corporations of the twentieth century. “Swift and Company,” Gustavus Swift said, foretelling the future, “can get along without any man, myself included.” It would be wrong, however, to view the big Chicago packing companies of the 1890s as impersonal organizations. They were, as Paul Bourget saw them, images of the innovators who built them.

“Give me plenty of work, and it is about all the tonic I want,” he would say, but his secret was that he knew how to relax. In his later years he would leave the office at around three or four o’clock and go for a ride along Lake Shore Drive in his custom-built buggy, taking the reins himself and driving his two blooded trotters as fast as they could run. Then, his head cleared of business concerns, he would stop by the Armour Institute, the technical school that was his favorite charity, to see “my boys” and on his way home pay a visit to his grandchildren. He was back at 2115 Prairie Avenue by six and in bed by nine, unfailingly. “I never think of the office until I return to it,” he told Dreiser. “Your sleep is never disturbed?” “Not at all.” “You have your pile… why not retire?” a Chicago journalist once asked him. He couldn’t, he shot back. “I do not love the money; what I do love is the getting of it, the making it.”

citing ordinances forbidding dumping, they were ignored, for city government, as everyone knew, was a branch office of the packers.

Armour also established a high-school-level academy that offered trade courses for young women and a circulating library for residents of Chicago’s poorer neighborhoods. Young men and women of the best families were admitted to the institute, with the aim, as the Chicago Tribune noted, of “rubb[ing] out the line between the laboring classes and the wealthy classes…. The millionaire’s daughter and my lady’s dressmaker or laundrywoman are already standing here, shoulder to shoulder, learning to see things from the same point of view.”

At the institute he seemed forever in a hurry; at home he was the very picture of composure. He loved to sit with his wife and read, and he always had time for his brood of nephews and nieces.

The average student was industrious, resourceful, driven, and students “felt a responsibility to construct a great university as much in their own way as the faculty and the trustees in theirs.”

he set an example for faculty by continuing to teach and do research and by attending classroom lectures by his faculty, a practice he tried to encourage, for he wanted every professor to become a student in at least one discipline other than his own.

And in the summers he gave wonderful garden concerts in Chicago at the big, airy Exposition Building by the lake. It was “the only cool place in town,” a Chicagoan recalls the atmosphere of these light concerts, “[with] palms and… little tables, [and] dim sequestered reaches at the sides and back of the floor, where quietly glowed the cigar and foamed the beer,” while from the stage came the strains of “The Beautiful Blue Danube.” In this way, Thomas educated countless thousands of people, in delicious small portions, to the masterworks of symphonic music. He did this without cheap tricks or theatrics, his back always to the audience, in a gesture that seemed to say, “Shut your eyes and hear the great music of the world.”

Francis Fisher Brown, editor of The Dial, the literary journal he had launched in 1880 to promote culture in the barbarous West. “If you do not like it now,” his magazine chillingly admonished critics of Thomas’s music, “pray that you may learn to like it, for the defect is yours.”

Potter Palmer left a generous sum of money to his successor in the event his wife remarried. When asked why, Palmer dryly replied: “He’ll need the money.”

Through lectures, university extension classes, and art exhibits, they brought a touch of Oxford and Cambridge into the spiritually cramped lives of their new neighbors, attempting, all the while, to break down the barriers between the classes.

Catholics and German Lutherans, the targets of the Protestant purifiers, believed that the state should steer clear of moral legislation, leaving personal behavior to the strictures of church and conscience, and allow immigrants to freely practice the customs of their country of origin, especially the drinking of alcohol on Sunday social occasions. It was a struggle, as novelist Nelson Algren would later say, between “The Live and Let-Livers” and “The Do as I Sayers,” or as Irish alderman “Bathhouse” John Coughlin put it: “A Republican is a man who wants you to go t’church every Sunday. A Democrat says if a man wants to have a glass of beer he can have it.”

In neighborhoods where up to three-quarters of the residents were illiterate, the saloon was the local newspaper, the chief source of information about the world and, more important, about employment and lodging-house openings.

In 1892, when Edward F. (“Foxey Ed”) Cullerton ran for reelection to council, he told the Ninth Ward voters that it was “better [to] send back the man who has stolen enough already than to send in… a new man.”

The late-night talk around the club’s coffin-shaped bar became a testing field for some of the best reporting in the city as club members began writing more for the approval of each other than for their city editors.

The purpose of a newspaper, Mr. Dooley declares, “should be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”