Becoming the Second City: Chicago’s Mass News Media, 1833-1898

Abstract

Becoming the Second City: Chicago's Mass News Media, 1833-1898. By Richard Junger (University of Illinois Press, 2010. Pp. 235; notes, index. Cloth $69.97. Paper $15.00). In Becoming the Second City: Chicago's Mass News Media, 1833-1898, Richard Junger seeks to answer the question that Chicagoans themselves asked from the time of incorporation 1833 until today: why can Chicago not be the biggest, most populace and prosperous city in the United States. Why does Chicago have to be the second city in all things of importance to New York? Junger's answer to the question of why Chicago became second class to New York lies in the way mass media - mainly newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Times - influenced Chicago's growth. For Junger, the media acted as a accelerant (x) to Chicago's rapid urbanization and population boom. As discussed in chapter one, titled From Zero to 29,963 in Just Fifty Years, the rate at which Chicago grew demographically indeed resembled that of a rapid, chemical chain reaction. unbridled boosterism of Chicago's mass media and the sensational reporting of not only Chicagoans on their own city but other city's newspapers did much for the city. This kind of journalism acted congruently with the thousands of people migrating to Chicago throughout the nineteenth century to nearly make the city into the powerhouse media visionaries wanted it to be. At the same time, those same newspapers both in Chicago and elsewhere helped regulate the flow of people into Chicago by their sensational reporting of events like the 1871 fire (chapter three) and violent instances of labor unrest as in 1886 with the Haymarket Riot and in 1894 with the Pullman Strike (chapter four). Thus the media helped to both give Chicago its prominence while also ensuring that it could never rise above its main competitor in New York. Junger warns his readers, however, of the dangers of using the sensational journalism en vogue in the nineteenth century as documents to demonstrate Chicago place as the nation's second city to New York. Too often historians take historical newspapers at their word and extrapolate broad conclusions without reading them with a critical eye. As a trained journalist and professor of communications and English, Junger possesses the training to use the Chicago Tribune, for instance, as a source more in the way nineteenth century journalists did: to prove a point rather than any strict fidelity to strict, objective reporting. Comparing Junger's use of historical newspapers to nineteenth century journalism is not to accuse Junger of yellow journalism since Junger knows of the kind of journalistic practices common in the nineteenth century where newspapers were often a promotional tool rather than solely a record of daily events. Newspapers thus help to prove his point for him. For Junger, the penultimate promotional event for Chicago media came with the 1893 Chicago's World Fair covered in chapter five, titled The Beauty. By the 1880s, as related in preceding chapters, newspapers around the country and in Chicago contributed to the city's hyperbolic urban growth. Yet for all of Chicago's enthusiasm for demographic and geographic enlargement, it still could not match the size and population of New York City. And when it came time for the United States to host the World's Fair (originally scheduled for 1892), New York thought itself the natural host for such a global event. Meanwhile, Chicagoans saw the fair as an opportunity to put aside the city's rampant corruption, pollution, social disorder, disease, and poverty (126) and show the world that Chicago could outdo not only pretender hosts like New York, but also Paris which held the 1888 World's Fair that featured the Eiffel Tower. …