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'Chicago's Great Fire' Review: Rising From the Ashes

  
Via:  Vic Eldred  •  4 years ago  •  1 comments

By:   Richard Babcock (WSJ)

'Chicago's Great Fire' Review: Rising From the Ashes
Chicago's long summer of 1871 was plagued by fires, but few were prepared for one October night's inferno.

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Along with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 stands as one of America’s foundational urban legends, a story of death and rebirth, a monument to the resiliency of the nation’s character. Most schoolchildren even know who to blame for the Chicago disaster: Mrs. O’Leary and her frisky cow.


Carl Smith, an English professor at Northwestern University, dives into this familiar material, and though “Chicago’s Great Fire” doesn’t exactly break new ground, it serves as a wonderfully thoughtful and concise retelling of the tragedy and its aftermath. More important, the book reminds the reader that many of the issues battled over today—the place of immigrants, the nature of poverty, the efficiency and reliability of a democratic government—have cycled through American affairs for more than a century and a half. Of course, some issues aren’t so much cyclical as constant—for example, the Chicago city council’s reputation as a haven for boodlers.

Even before the fire, Chicago had captured the world’s attention, in part for its startling growth. The swampy patch on the edge of Lake Michigan had developed into a town of around 30,000 people by 1850. In the next 20 years, it grew more than tenfold. As Mr. Smith points out, Chicago’s boom reflected fundamental social changes—industrialization, urbanization, the advance of railroads and a surging influx of the foreign-born, who numbered almost half the city’s population at the time of the fire. In short, Mr. Smith writes, Chicago became “the central stage for the enactment of modernity.”

But the conditions that had made such a transformation possible invited calamity. The city’s rapid expansion meant that most buildings were constructed all or in part of wood. The region had suffered a long, hot dry summer and early fall in 1871, and on the night of Oct. 7, crowds had gathered to watch firefighters struggle with an epic blaze at a wood-planing mill: just one, as Mr. Smith writes, of “more than two dozen conflagrations in Chicago during that past week alone.”
When the O’Learys’ barn went up around 9 o’clock on the night of Sunday, Oct. 8, a neighbor’s sprint to a signal box proved fruitless when the telegraph system malfunctioned. By the time firefighters arrived, 30 minutes later, the situation was dire: Chicago’s chief fire marshal called it “a regular nest of fire.” Whirling winds generated by the heat carried burning chunks for blocks, spreading the flames. The firefighters were understaffed and worn out from taming the recent wave of fires. Crowds gathered to watch in fascination, but as the flames spread, thousands found themselves fleeing with whatever possessions they could gather. Some buried their valuables in the earth. The terrifying conflagration consumed three square miles, including much of the downtown, and left 90,000 homeless, rich and poor alike. Remarkably, only an estimated 300 people died, while on the same evening 250 miles north, a huge forest fire engulfed the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wis., costing at least 1,500 lives.

Even as the flames roared out of control that night, telegraph reports clicked around the country and to Europe through the new transatlantic cable. “As a result,” notes Mr. Smith, “the Great Chicago Fire was the first instantaneously reported international news event, details of which reached an audience in the tens of millions while it was happening.”

Photographs taken immediately after the fire show the utter devastation facing residents: a flattened, rubble-strewn landscape, with only the jagged husks of buildings jutting into the smoky air. But “Chicago’s Great Fire” goes beyond the disaster and its cause to recount the remarkable way the city sprang back. An energizing sense of optimism and opportunity, along with a heavy dose of boosterism, had fueled the city’s explosive growth, and those elements quickly went to work. “Almost immediately,” Mr. Smith writes, “many Chicagoans paradoxically came to see the heroic destruction of their city as an unexpectedly positive event, a stage in its irresistible upward development rather than a dispiriting setback.”

“CHEER UP,” exhorted the headline on an editorial in the Chicago Tribune’s first postfire edition, three days after the inferno started. Even while tens of thousands of residents remained homeless, an emissary assured Eastern financiers that the city warranted a new round of investment. Local entrepreneurs built crude shacks in the rubble to sell necessities. Debris not used for rebuilding was dumped on the edge of Lake Michigan, thus enlarging the size of the downtown.

Because of the city’s notoriety and the global news coverage of the terrible event, donations poured in from around the world. The generosity exposed some of the social and ethnic fissures the city’s expansion had largely covered up. Mayor Roswell B. Mason turned the job of administering the contributions over to the Relief and Aid Society, an established private organization that included of many of Chicago’s leading businessmen. A competing ad hoc committee contained a number of council members, and the mayor and his advisers apparently worried that some of the money passing through that committee wouldn’t come out the other side.

As Mr. Smith points out, though, the Relief and Aid Society suffered from an unfortunate belief system typical of its ruling-class members. There were the “deserving” poor, good workers who had fallen on hard times because of tough circumstances, and the “undeserving,” shiftless lowlifes whose poverty was their own fault. The Relief and Aid Society stayed constantly vigilant against scammers and frauds and made clear they were to be found largely among the displaced poor, not the “better class” of burned-out Chicagoans.

Mayor Mason made another unusual move that showed a lack of confidence in the wheels of municipal government: As fears and rumors of looting circulated, the mayor sidestepped the police department and gave authority to patrol the city to Lt. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan and federal troops he requisitioned. Later, Sheridan denied that he had been needed to put down rampant criminality, but, again, the city’s elites no doubt slept better with the Civil War hero in charge. (Skip ahead in time, and it’s hard to imagine either of the Mayors Daley ever handing over such efforts to units outside of their control.)




As for Mrs. O’Leary, even at the time accounts debunked the story that she was milking her cow when it kicked over a lantern. In fact, she was in bed with her husband when flames erupted in her barn. Still, for a century and a half now, she and her cow have remained the Big Bang of the Chicago Fire, celebrated in myth, song, parade floats, even a dreadful Norman Rockwell painting that prominently features the hindquarters of the beast.




Given the hard times urban centers are suffering today, Chicago should hope that the belief in its resiliency proves as enduring as the calumny directed at poor Mrs. O’Leary.

—Mr. Babcock is the former editor of Chicago magazine.



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