Astonishing Chicago

Immediately after the Great Fire of 1871, the Chicago Tribune declared on its editorial page: “‘CHICAGO SHALL RISE AGAIN’” (p. 16). The newspaper’s confident spin on the crisis was typical of a city whose reputation for windiness had, and still has, less to do with meteorological conditions than with its endless proclamations of future success.

How Chicago made good on its promises is Donald L. Miller’s subject in City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. In the tradition of older narrative histories like Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith’s Chicago: The History of Its Reputation (1929), City of the Century extends from Marquette and Joliet’s exploration of the region to the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Miller tells the story of Chicago’s dramatic growth with verve and style; City of the Century is also well-grounded in primary sources and current scholarship (the bibliography is excellent), making it an extremely useful guide to nineteenth-century Chicago as well as an engrossing read. ¹

Like many scholars of this period in Chicago history, Miller is interested in how the rapid deployment of innovative technologies and modern ways of thinking in business and the arts made Chicago both the “most typically American” (p. 17) of the nation’s burgeoning cities and its most extraordinary. But growth was only one component of Chicago’s extraordinary typicality; class stratification, ethnic diversity, and political conflict mark another. As Miller notes, Chicago’s “character” stemmed from its “extreme contrasts,” from the violent sense of difference visitors were liable to feel when moving from one part of the city to another. In venturing a “‘natural history of urbanization’” (p. 18) (inspired by Lewis Mumford) that acknowledges the impact of personalities on urban culture (with the ancient Greeks as his model), Miller raises the possibility that City of the Century will extend the thesis advanced by William Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) and apply ecological categories of analysis to Chicago’s dramatic social differences. “This type of urban history,” he explains, would treat the city “as a culture-creating system of biotic relationships and as a place not only where the goods of civilization are made and exchanged, but also where experience is heightened and transformed into art, ritual, and pageantry.” This approach is especially suited to Chicago history since the “story” of the city’s rise is “one of big and small folk,” of meat cutters and beef barons, sales clerks and merchant princes—their social roles and relations all established by the convergence of economic, cultural, and environmental forces that made Chicago possible (p. 19). However, the conceptual synthesis promised at the outset remains undeveloped as Miller generally forgoes detailed analyses of biotic social relations and subordinates Chicago’s darker contrasts—its poverty, brutality, and corruption—to the “epic” history of Chicago’s “ascendancy” (p. 16). Nor, despite his recognition of their importance, does Miller have much to say about the “small folk” who helped build the city; labor history receives scant attention in this book. As history written in a big way, focused on the powerful personalities responsible for Chicago’s dramatic rise, City of the Century remains limited by its narrative conventions.

But there is no denying the drama of this account. Although the history of Chicago’s spectacular rise has been told enough times that City of the Century may evoke an already-been-there feeling in some readers, Miller’s detailed tour of the cultural landscape—even with the familiar sights—never fails to interest. Part 1, comprising roughly one-third of the book, covers the pre-Fire history of Chicago. Part 2, the heart of Miller’s account, resumes the narrative with a richly documented discussion of rebuilt Chicago as seen by visitors and newcomers to the city in the 1880s. The book concludes with an obligatory examination of the World’s Fair and a discussion...