I would rather be a lamppost in Chicago than a millionaire in any other city.”
Now that’s the kind of quote Don Miller likes. Pure, unadulterated Chicago. Full of bluster, braggadocio and blarney, it was stated 100 years ago by a coal dealer who, like many, made his fortune in this town.
Miller likes the spirit that exudes from the great characters who have emerged from Chicago and, in turn, the insouciant character they gave to the metropolis that nourished them. He liked it so much that he decided to write about it.
Strange, perhaps, because he has never even lived here. He’s from Pennsylvania. Teaches American history at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., and writes books there.
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” But,” he says, “I wanted to take one place and tell its story. I wanted to do a biography of a city. What one city made America the wonder of the world? Chicago in the 19th Century. Chicago grew so fast you could almost see it happen. You could almost see it rising up out of the mud. What America became is what Chicago was in the 19th Century. Chicago defined the America to be. And so I wrote this book, …City of the Century.’ The story of the most American of all cities.”
Miller did not come to that conclusion alone. He listened to long-lost voices who wrote of this throbbing, pulsing, crude, tough city that sprang up along the soggy river banks where the prairie bangs into a great inland sea, a city fueled by the energy of pioneers and immigrants and shaped by the conflicting desires of simple greed or simply the chance to make it.
The voices he listened to reveal a lot:
– “All around, on every side, in every direction, the vast machinery of commonwealth clashed and thundered from dawn to dark and from dark to dawn. Here of all her cities throbbed the true life–the true power and spirit of America.” –novelist Frank Norris
– “I have struck a real city. The other places do not count. This place is the first American city I have encountered. . . . Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again.” –Rudyard Kipling
– “It is the most perfect presentation of 19th Century individualistic industrialism I have ever seen. Chicago is one hoarse cry for discipline.” –H.G. Wells
– “Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana town and dreamed of romance and the 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.” –Carl Sandburg
The story of America
So here you had it. A city regarded as both “queen and guttersnipe,” an upstart urban rascal of a city that sweated and swore and drank beer and got in fights and talked with an accent but had big ideas, grew fast and “made things,” says Miller.
“The epic of Chicago is the story of the emergence of modern America,” he writes. And that epic was made possible by those who came to live here: “big and small folk–assembly-line meat cutters and millionaire beef barons, five-dollar-a-week salesclerks and magnificent merchant princes, stenographer typists and the architects who built their new offices in the sky, the devil-may-care French Canadians and straight-living Protestant improvers who drove them from their frontier trading post and built there a perfectly gridironed capitalist canal town.”
In the 19th Century, wrote Theodore Dreiser, “Chicago was like no other city in the world. A city which had no traditions but was making them. . . . It is given to some cities, as to some lands, to suggest romance and to me, Chicago did that to me daily and hourly. It sang, or seemed to . . . and I was singing with it.”
“City of the Century” is about Chicago’s song. Her first one–the music of a city growing up.
Miller first came to Chicago back in the 1970s and while on this first spring visit, took a walk, cut through Grant Park to the lake, turned and stared back at the skyline in awe.
“It really blew me away. In New York there is no one place to see the skyline, but in Chicago, with all its space, you can. I loved that view. It was layered, with the old buildings like the Auditorium Theatre and the Blackstone Hotel first and then, right behind them, the newer, taller modern skyscrapers. If you were an archeologist, you could stand there and read the city.”
People with spirit
Once he decided to delve into the story of the city, Miller got his information and did his research from letters, diaries, city records and books written about Chicago from its first settlers nestled in on Wolf Point up to the turn of the century.
His focus, he says, was partly directed by a quote he found from the mouth of the legendary Mr. Dooley, a popular saloon-house character created by Chicago newspaper columnist Finley Peter Dunne a century ago.
“Mr. Dooley was at the bar talking to one of his patrons,” says Miller, “and he is saying that the problem with historians is they write history like it is a post-mortem–they tell you what a city died of. I’d like to know what it lived of.
“I liked that quote, and that’s what I wanted to tell in the book.
“You can get 20 books on immigration, 15 books on urbanization, 13 books on the industrialization of America, 10 books on social reform, but I wanted to tell the story in a lineal way . . . to connect all the forces that fed into this city–like a biography,” says Miller. “Chicago was a lusty city, a conniving, capitalistic city. It drew interesting people, and those interesting people helped paint Chicago. A city is merely human beings in motion. People change the city and the city changes people.”
During his three-year plunge into the history of 19th Century Chicago, Miller taught an American history course in which he asked the students to read Upton Sinclair’s book “The Jungle,” a graphically raw story of the plight of workers in Chicago’s meatpacking houses.
“After they finished the book, I asked the students how they thought those workers finally escaped the conditions they suffered in. The students shrugged–since the answer was not in the book–and said, maybe politics, maybe social workers, maybe government intervention. I said no, no and no. Those people did it themselves. They survived, they endured, they improved their lives and they did it themselves. That’s what is so great. That’s what I like about the spirit of Chicago.”
In the 19th Century, Chicago and its dichotomy presaged the America of today.
Writes Miller:
“Chicago was a city of extreme, even violent contrasts. City of millionaires, (it) had some of the worst slums in the civilized world. The most `American of cities,’ over three-quarters of its residents were of foreign parentage in 1893. Garden city of parks and tree-bordered boulevards, most of its streets were filled with uncollected horse manure and putrid animal corpses.
“Temperance capital of the country (headquarters for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union), it had one saloon for every 200 persons–its second largest industry was liquor distilling. And its world famous vice district operated around the clock with police protection. The most corrupt city in the country and a stronghold of anti-labor sentiment, it was the center of the nation’s trade union and socialist movements and a rallying ground for urban reformers.”
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It was this tough, gaudy chaos of urban energy, however, that produced a sense of beauty, order and awe the rest of the world had never really quite seen before. It was the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Called the “White City,” because of its majestic alabaster buildings, and built on the south end of the existing city along the lakefront, it was the magical land of Oz, and all 27 million who visited it, be they urban dignitaries, country hicks or foreign visitors, were mere Dorothys gazing upon wonders they had never seen before.
It was Chicago, proving she’d not only grown up in less than 60 years, but was world class and in only one year could build anything it wanted to. Miller provides a wonderful description of the May opening attended by just about everyone including the president of the United States, Grover Cleveland:
“The president gave a blessedly short address and then pressed a gilded electric button setting in motion the machinery that powered the exhibition. In one instant the shroud fell from the . . . statue of the Republic in the Great Basin, fountains sprayed water a hundred feet into the air, flags unfurled from a thousand standards, warships in the harbor fired thunderous salutes and hundreds of lake craft sounded their steam whistles. Buffalo Bill Cody, in town for the summer with his Wild West show, waved his immense white hat from his prominent position in front of the crowd, while Jane Addams, caught somewhere in the crush, felt someone snatch her purse.”
Ah, Chicago! Perhaps not that much has changed in 100 years.
It’s always home
The tale of Chicago’s energy as a city, its evolution from trading post to the city that produced the Pullman sleeping car, the nationwide mail order house, the refrigerator car, the packing plant, and the skyscraper, is a tale put to music by a thousand voices from around the world.
Miller says he listened to their song and loved the tune. The rhythm and, most of all, the words. So he wrote about it.
He had asked his editor at Simon & Schuster who, besides people in Chicago, would even want to buy such a book?
His editor said, “Haven’t you heard of the Chicago diaspora? There are Chicagoans everywhere who’ve left the city. But more than any other group, no matter where they live now, Chicagoans like to buy books about Chicago. People from Houston don’t. People from New York don’t. Or people from L.A. But people from Chicago do.”
Maybe, says Miller, “it’s because a book about Chicago is not just the biography of a city, it’s the story of America.”