Terrible Destiny

“They tell me you are wicked and I believe them,” Carl Sandburg mused in his free-verse homage to “Chicago.” The City of the Big Shoulders was “crooked” and “brutal” as well: murderers went free while poor women and children remained imprisoned in “wanton hunger.” Yet he also described an exuberant and tenacious bravado that laughed in the face of drudgery, injustice, and despair. Figured as a sweaty and muscular worker, Chicago was “alive and coarse and strong and cunning”; it was “laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth,”

Under the terrible destiny laughing as a young man laughs,Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle.¹

If Charles Baudelaire detected the scent of flowers of evil in the streets of Baron Haussmann’s reconstructed Paris, Sandburg inhaled a democratic promise from the stench of the factories and stockyards of Chicago, implying that the “battle” might yet be won. Yet who emerged triumphant in industrializing Chicago? Sandburg’s answer seemed ambivalent: hearty and strapping as he was, the brawny youth who never lost a battle also labored under a “terrible destiny.”

The three books under review reflect a similar ambivalence. Taken together, they illustrate how Chicago’s bourgeoisie sought to construct a sensory, spatial, and religious regime, a cosmology of capital governed by the gravitational principles of pecuniary reason. At the same time, they narrate how the city’s workers and minorities struggled to counter or modify this hegemony, fashioning their own theology, ecological imagination, and sensorial universe. They suggest that Chicago’s subaltern won a fragile but fateful compromise with their industrial and commercial overlords. The laughing fighter won a battle but lost the war.

A small entrepot of just over a hundred people in 1830, Chicago morphed from a regional depot into a multiethnic industrial metropolis over the next seventy years. Its population rose over nine-fold from 1860 to 1890; by 1900 it boasted two million inhabitants, ranking as the second largest city in the United States and the fifth largest city in the world. Home to burgeoning and unregulated industries—from railroads, construction, and machinery to meat-packing, flour, beer, and textiles—Chicago was a hub of working-class political consciousness and conflict, epitomized by the Haymarket Affair of 1886 and the Pullman Strike of 1894.

Chicago’s expansion was most pungently evident in the noxious labyrinth of its rivers and streets. Adam Mack opens his book with an account of a “smelling committee” that included some of the city’s top civic and medical officials, charged in August 1869 with the task of inspecting the Chicago River—the “Chicago Styx,” as he dubs it (pp. 11–15). Aromated by a raunchy bouquet of what a Tribune reporter termed “admirable stenches,” the Chicago reeked of the copious effluvium of industrial production: chemical waste from factories, swill from distilleries, rotted hams and dead pigs from slaughterhouses, urine and turds from humans and other animals, all mixed in a meringue of offal overlaid with a perpetual haze of smoke. Inundated with garbage and trash, the streets of poor and working-class neighborhoods displayed a similar topography of fetor. Offended by this olfactory inferno, the city’s elite worried that the filth would hamper economic growth and provoke social unrest, disturbing the civic as well as the physical health of the booming municipality.

The struggle to define Chicago’s body politic is the thread that connects these three fine volumes, each of which illuminates a pivotal feature of the middle-class ontological imagination. Drawing on and enlarging the new...