THE CHICAGO HISTORY JOURNAL: On Chicago

"It is the most perfect presentation of nineteenth-century individualistic industrialism I have ever seen. Chicago is one hoarse cry for discipline."
--H. G. Wells(1866-1946)

(From: The Future in America: A Search after Realities, 1906) Chapter IV, "Growth Invincible: The Tail [spelling is correct] of Chicago"

Friday is Chicago quote day at "Chicago History," and I think the Wells quote about the city is a good one. But, I think his observations of the city at the turn of the century are even better. I have decided to lengthen the quote...a lot.

The following selection is a good example of a primary source on Chicago history. As indicated, the statement is from Future in America. An excerpt of the article is also found in "AN ENGLISH SOCIALIST'S REFLECTIONS, 1906" From: The Development of Chicago, 1674-1914 By Milo Milton Quaife, 1916. I encourage you to explore both books.

In smoky, vast, undisciplined Chicago Growth forced itself upon me again as the dominant American fact, but this time a dark disorder of growth. I went about Chicago seeing many things of which I may say something later. I visited the top of the Masonic Building and viewed a wilderness of skyscrapers. I acquired a felt of memories of swing bridges and viaducts and interlacing railways and jostling crowds and extraordinarily dirty streets. I learnt something of the mystery of "floating foundations" upon which so much of Chicago rests. But I got my best vision of Chicago as I left it.

I sat in the open observation car at the end of the Pennsylvania Limited Express, and watched the long defile of industrialism from the Union Station in the heart of things to out beyond South Chicago a dozen miles away. I had not gone to the bloody spectacle of the stockyards that "feed the world," because, to be frank, I have an immense repugnance to the killing of fixed and helpless animals; I saw nothing of those ill-managed, ill-inspected establishments, though I smelt the unwholesome reek from them ever and again, and so it was here I saw for the first time the enormous expanse and intricacy of railroads that net this great industrial desolation, and something of the going and coming of the myriads of polyglot workers. Chicago burns bituminous coal, it has a reek that outdoes London, and right and left of the line rise vast chimneys, huge blackened grain elevators, flame-crowned furnaces and gauntly ugly and filthy factory buildings, monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots littered with rusty cans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these are groups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses.

We swept along the many-railed track, and the straws and scraps of paper danced in our eddy as we passed. We overtook local trains and they receded slowly in the great perspective, huge freight trains met us or were overtaken; long trains of doomed cattle passed northward; solitary engines went by—every engine tolling a melancholy bell; open trucks crowded with workmen went cityward. By the side of the track, and over the level crossings, walked great numbers of people. So it goes on mile after mile—Chicago. The sun was now bright, now pallid through some streaming curtain of smoke; the spring afternoon was lit here and again by the gallant struggle of some stunted tree with a rare and startling note of new green.

It was like a prolonged, enlarged mingling of the south side of London with all that is bleak and ugly in the Black Country. It is the most perfect presentation of nineteenth century individualistic industrialism I have ever seen—in its vast, its magnificent squalor; it is pure nineteenth century; it had no past at all before that; in 1800 it was empty prairie, and one marvels for its future. It is indeed a nineteenth century nightmare that culminates beyond South Chicago in the monstrous fungoid shapes, the endless smoking chimneys, the squat retorts, the black smoke pall of the Standard Oil Company. For a time the sun is veiled altogether by that.

And then suddenly Chicago is a dark smear under the sky, and we are in the large emptiness of America, the other America—America in between.

"Undisciplined"—that is the word for Chicago. It is the word for all the progress of the Victorian time, a scrambling, ill-mannered, undignified, unintelligent development of material resources. Packing- town, for example, is a place that feeds the world with meat, that concentrates the produce of a splendid countryside at a position of imperial advantage, and its owners have no more sense, no better moral quality, than to make it stink in the nostrils of any one who comes within two miles of it; to make it a center of distribution for disease and decay, an arena of shabby evasions and extra profits; a scene of brutal economic conflict and squalid filthiness, offensive to every sense. (I wish I could catch the soul of Herbert Spencer and tether it in Chicago for awhile to gather fresh evidence upon the superiority of unfettered individualistic enterprises to things managed by the state.)

Want of discipline! Chicago is one hoarse cry for discipline! The reek and scandal of the stockyards is really only a gigantic form of that same quality in American life that, in a minor aspect, makes the sidewalk filthy. The key to the peculiar nasty ugliness of those Schoellkopf works that defile the Niagara gorge is the sarqe quality. The detestableness of the Elevated railroads of Chicago and Boston and New York have this in common. All that is ugly in America, in Lancashire, in South and East London, in the Pas de Calais, is due to this, to the shoving unintelligent proceedings of underbred and morally obtuse men. Each man is for himself, each enterprise; there is no order, no prevision, no common and universal plan. Modern economic organization is still as yet only thinking of emerging from its first chaotic stage, the stage of lawless enterprise and insanitary aggregation, the stage of the prospector's camp.

But it does emerge.

Men are makers—American men, I think, more than most men— and amidst even the catastrophic jumble of Chicago one finds the same creative forces at work that are struggling to replan a greater Boston, and that turned a waste of dumps and swamps and cabbage gardens into Central Park, New York. Chicago also has its Parks Commission and its green avenues, its bright flower-gardens, its lakes and playing- fields. Its Midway Plaisance is in amazing contrast with the dirt, the congestion, the moral disorder of its State Street; its field houses do visible battle with slum and the frantic meanness of commercial folly. Field houses are peculiar to Chicago, and Chicago has every reason to be proud of them. I visited one that is positively within smell of the stockyards and wedged into a district of gaunt and dirty slums. It stands in the midst of a little park, and close by it are three playing- grounds with swings and parallel bars and all manner of athletic appliances, one for little children, one for girls and women, and one for boys and youths. In the children's place is a paddling-pond of clear, clean, running water and a shaded area of frequently changed sand, and in the park was a broad asphalted arena that can be flooded for skating in winter. All this is free to all comers, and free too is the field house itself. This is a large, cool Italianate place with two or three reading rooms—one specially arranged for children—a big discussion hall, a big and well-equipped gymnasium, and big, free baths for men and for women. There is also a clean, bright refreshment place where wholesome food is sold just above cost price. It was early on Friday afternoon when I saw it all, but the place was busy with children, reading, bathing, playing in a hundred different ways.

And this field house is not an isolated philanthropic enterprise. It is just one of a number that are dotted about Chicago, mitigating and civilizing its squalor. It was not distilled by begging and charity from the stench of the stockyards or the reek of Standard Oil. It is part of the normal work of a special taxing body created by the legislature of the State of Illinois. It is just one of the fruits upon one of the growths that spring from such persistent creative efforts as that of the Chicago City Club. It is socialism—even as its enemies declare.

Even amidst the somber uncleanliness of Chicago one sees the light of a new epoch, the coming of new conceptions, of foresight, of large collective plans and discipline to achieve them, the fresh green leaves, among all the festering manure, of the giant growths of a more orderly and more beautiful age.