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

The Windy City of Chicago has long inspired poets and prophets, scholars and pundits. It has been home to both saintly social reformers and ruthless gangsters, as well as legendary political campaigns and their and tawdry shenanigans. Within its brawling, sprawling limits Sandburg saw the Hog Butcher for the World—crooked, brutal and wicked, yes, but also proud and alive, standing strong and vivid against the backdrop of the softer little cities. For Norman Mailer Chicago was the last great American city, and columnist Mike Royko’s description of the hapless hometown team—“A pessimist sees the glass as half empty; a Cub fan wonders when it’s gonna spill”—could just as easily extend to the citizenry of this fulminating and pugnacious city. In Nature’s Metropolis, a sweeping study by historian William Cronon, the onetime “Second City” becomes the focal point of an authoritative account of the ecological, economic and cultural development of Chicago—and how it profoundly influenced the growth of the Far and Middle West. Within this tangled and fascinating kaleidoscope of urban legend, bibliography and historiography, Adam Mack’s book Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers and Muckrakers fits quite comfortably, and proves both a welcome and original addition to this ever-growing body of work.

It is not hyperbole to place Sensing Chicago with such notable and esteemed literary company; Mack quite effectively places his study within the burgeoning field of “sensory history.” For these scholars, the past is understood through an examination of all of the senses—not just how things looked, but how they actually sounded, tasted, felt, and even smelled. Professor Mack’s monograph covers roughly a half-century of Chicago’s past and offers five intriguing case studies to explore the city “as a multilayered sensory landscape.” Indeed, the study focuses on how this landscape “quite literally shocked the senses to raise questions about the future in terms of civic health and social distinction” (9).

It is not necessary to have lived in Chicago to appreciate Mack’s book, but it certainly helps in conjuring the smells and sounds described therein. In the first chapter, “Smelling Civic Peril,” the readers’ olfactory imagination is assaulted by the description of the Chicago River in the mid-nineteenth century: The water came up thick and black, the “surface covered with a filthy froth and bubbles of gas” as one of Mack’s historical witnesses describes, “while a terrible stench rose over the inky water” (12). Women masked their nostrils, men felt faint, as decaying carcasses of pigs, cows, blood, human excrement and other unpleasantries floated past. An officially assigned “smelling committee” strove to improve the situation in 1869, to little effect. “The stench would discourage healthy and productive people from moving to the city,” concludes Mack, “thus reducing the population to those of the lowest social status and threatening future growth” (27). The flight of the middle classes from the city only exacerbated a situation where the citizenry became stigmatized by their proximity to the river—the “lower orders” residing closest to the stench of the fetid waterway.

Sensing Chicago progresses more-or-less chronologically, and when finished the reader gains immeasurably a new understanding of the growth, conflicts, stagnation and triumphs of this compelling city. The second chapter/case study takes us through the “blazing hell” of the Chicago fire of 1871, and the fourth describes how Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle represents “an indictment of the sensory alienation wrought by industrial capitalism.” Other case studies involve the “quite roar of the mob” of the Pullman railroad strike which began in Chicago in May of 1894 when four thousand factory employees began a wildcat strike which spread across the country. The final chapter, if not the most interesting, will prove the most palatable for most readers; White City amusement park, which opened its gates and rides in May 1905, “defined itself as a resort that appealed to all five senses” (97). The park’s name derived from the million electric...