Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers by Adam Mack (review)

During a recent trip to the Windy City, my family paid a visit to the Chicago History Museum, which features a permanent exhibit that shares its title with Adam Mack’s book. With appeals to the nose, tongue, eyes, ears, and fingers, the museum’s version of “Sensing Chicago” is pitched to kids (“Be a hot dog!”), though my six-year old son was not the only one of us intrigued to smell the Great Chicago Fire, virtually ride the “L,” and flop around in a giant frankfurter bun with all the fixings. As history museums and historic sites know, adults too want to not only see but also smell, taste, hear, and touch the past as much as the present. For some time now, sensory historians have been substantially informing this effort, as they work to resensitize us to the embodied experience of earlier eras. Mack’s effort joins an expanding shelf of such scholarship, and his book fills an important gap in urban social history, applying to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chicago the sensory attention that others have brought to bear on similar periods in cities such as New York, London, and Paris.

In five case studies, Mack seeks to demonstrate “how members of the urban middle classes used their five senses as barometers of civic health and social distinction” (2). This kind of argument, as he recognizes, is not especially original; reading sensory evidence for its revelations about metropolitan class-consciousness is a well-established framework. But harnessing it to the particulars of Chicago’s past is innovative, and it is here where Mack makes his mark. Sensing Chicago’s case studies range roughly chronologically, from the overwhelming olfactory revulsion of the nineteenth-century Chicago River to the refined moral and aesthetic experience of Joseph Beifield’s White City amusement park. In terms of physical impact, the strongest chapters come first: those on the River and the Great Chicago Fire are, in their level of detail and powers of evocation, certainly the strongest smelling, tasting, burning, and itching. This description makes reading these chapters sound like a close encounter with a hot pepper, but I mean to convey Mack’s success in engaging his readers (this one, at least) in the turning points of an industrial metropolis’s formation. I came away with a much better understanding of the embodied challenges this city faced when it was almost but not yet under the sway of modern sewage treatments, sanitation, and fire safety. Beyond documenting historical sensoria, however, Mack demonstrates convincingly how perceptions of and responses to the stench of the river and the destruction of the fire emerged as forms of moral judgment.

This connection between sensory intake and morality reaches a terrifyingly utopic peak in the formation of George Pullman’s 1880s model corporate town, which Mack calls “a spectacle of enlightened capitalism” (61). Pullman’s eponymous suburban arcadia grew out of his own horrified reaction to the 1877 Great Railway Strike and his ensuing desire to create compliant workers for urban industries such as his own luxury rail car company. The level of planning, surveillance, and regulation detailed by Mack, including the stipulation that the houses could only be leased, not bought, from the company, which could evict residents with just ten days notice, is surprising even set against the rigidity of contemporary “planned community” bylaws. Mack argues that Pullman’s sensory agenda to eliminate, refine, or otherwise cover up the sources of unappealing urban sights and smells was at one with his capitalist purposes. As far as Pullman was concerned, clean-living (in every sense of the term) residents made better workers. It is hard to argue against the merits of clean living, yet Pullman slighted the “living” part of the phrase in his pursuit of the “clean.” As told by Mack, the story of Pullman’s town, the collapse of which was precipitated by the boss’s refusal to negotiate in the 1894...