The Meanings of the Modern City: Chicago After the Linguistic Turn

In early 1867 the writer James Parton visited Chicago in order to gather materials for an Atlantic Monthly article on the city, part of a series he planned on the urban West. Writing exuberantly to his editor, Parton advised him: “when next you are tired, go to those western cities, and get below the surface of them. As man of business, as literary man, as American citizen, and as human being, you will be instructed and pleased. The United States is there.” ¹ In Parton’s view, the dynamism and energy of Chicago were producing a new urban spirit far different from that of the East: “the too respectable Bostonian, the staid Philadelphian, acquire, after living awhile in Chicago, a vivacity of mind, an interest in things around them, a public spirit, which they did not possess at home.” ²

Parton was only one of numerous post-Civil War commentators and writers who participated in an extensive public discussion of the meaning of Chicago within American life. Like Parton, some celebrated Chicago as a new and invigorating form of urban order: it was the “Queen of the West,” the embodiment of frontier energy and expansive growth, a concrete realization of Manifest Destiny. Others, however, tended to stress that the growth of Chicago brought disorder in its wake; their writings relied upon longstanding urban vocabularies associating cities with darkness, corruption, and decadence, yet also refigured the city within an emerging discussion of the perils of modernity and modernization.

Carl Smith’s richly textured and deeply researched urban and cultural history argues that public discussions of late-nineteenth-century Chicago tell us much about the changing anxieties associated with modernity in American culture. To some extent his Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman continues the project of Smith’s 1984 Chicago and the American Literary Imagination 1880–1920: both books are concerned with aesthetic and intellectual responses to the rise of the industrial city, and both discuss the meanings of modern urban life as expressed and contested in a variety of literary sources. Yet in his new work Smith has broadened and deepened his earlier project by employing a relatively simple expedient: rather than focusing on individual writers, Smith focuses on three major disruptive events in the life of Chicago—the Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, and the Pullman Strike of 1894. This change in subject matter allows Smith to focus on a wide-ranging body of published responses to these events, historicize them in a richly nuanced way, and incorporate an array of voices into his text. While these voices are primarily middle class (in this, as in his previous work, Smith is concerned with what he sees as a middle-class project of interpretation and persuasion), they nevertheless express a variety of interests often at odds with one another.

At first glance the reader may question the logic behind Smith’s linkage of the three events of his subtitle. After all, while the 1871 fire was a natural disaster (however much the myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow made it seem otherwise), both the Haymarket bombing and the Pullman Strike were part of a broad national context of labor unrest and strife in late-nineteenth-century America. Aside from the fact that all three events occurred in Chicago, how deeply connected were they really, and on what grounds?

Smith’s answer to this question revolves around the “imaginative dimensions” of these events, as expressed in a variety of texts such as newspapers and books. He persuasively argues that in all three cases writers and commentators sought to make sense of apparent urban disorder “in relation to the development of an understanding of the meaning of modernity that has carried into our own time” (p. 1). This is...