Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 by Karen Sawislak

Abstract

514 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE that “time and distance are annihilated,” making the postal system one of the “most powerful agents of civilization” (pp. 10, 13). Pamela Walker Laird Dr. Laird is completing a book on the transformation of American advertising, 1870-1917. She teaches part-time at the University of Colorado, Denver, and at the University of Denver. Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874. By Karen Sawislak. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. xi+396; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $15.95 (paper). This excellent and engrossing book offers a new view of an event paradoxically obscured by its own fame: the destruction of proud young Chicago by fire in 1871. As the legend goes, the city was lev­ eled by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, only to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes, to fulfill its destiny as the great inland metropolis. While acknowledg­ ing the substantial truth (minus the cow) behind the legend, Sawis­ lak illuminates the little-known social history of the catastrophe and rebuilding. The fire, she contends, revealed the city as “a culturally diverse population arranged into social and economic hierarchies” (p. 15). The destruction and “The Great Rebuilding” were not, as much popular rhetoric would have it, a moment when all ofChicago suffered and revived together as one, but a time when people “drew upon their own more specific social roles and identities to map out their understandings of their larger community” (p. 16). This necessarily gets Sawislak into the complex dynamics of eth­ nicity and class, which she lays out with admirable clarity. Almost half of Chicagoans were born abroad, mainly in Germany and Ire­ land, and a substantial majority were skilled or unskilled workers, but almost all personal and public accounts of the fire we have were written by the native-born Yankee elite and journalists sympathetic to this culturally powerful minority. Their experience and point of view dominate the fire histories, which mainly tell a straightforward story of trial and triumph. Sawislak addresses this imbalance by re­ sourcefully exploring a range of ethnic and prolabor newspapers (along with those that expressed the opinions of middle- and upperclass Chicago), as well as a wide selection of narratives and letters, speeches and proclamations, fire relief documents, demonstrations, and strike actions. What she finds first of all is that “precisely because of their social differences, the many peoples of Chicago did not share an equal destiny before the flames” (p. 37). The North Division German com­ munity in particular and the less well-to-do in general, because of where and how they lived (including their trust in local insurance companies that failed, if they had insurance at all), suffered the most TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 515 by the fire. Sawislak then details how the policies of the Relief and Aid Society, the private organization to which Mayor Roswell Mason entrusted the millions of dollars in charitable contributions sent to Chicago from around the nation and the world, expressed its leader­ ship’s distrust ofthe working poor and eagerness to reassert the class structure that was briefly suspended in the chaos of Chicago’s sud­ den destruction. Post-fire arguments for fire zoning, however much legitimately safety-minded, ignored the fact that many people couldn’t afford to build in stone and brick. Likewise, when the task of reconstruction appeared to promise— falsely, as it turned out—a rise in wages, the reigning ideology of free market liberalism equated the interests of capital with the com­ mon good and those oflabor solidarity with antisocial activity. Mean­ while, members of the Yankee elite obsessed with order and control on their terms turned a free-floating concern with criminal behavior into an organized campaign for Sabbatarian regulation and temper­ ance that profoundly insulted a cross section of immigrants and workers for their cultural practices. This attempt at social regulation backfired when it prompted the creation ofan unprecedented coali­ tion that won the 1873 municipal election. Sawislak carefully sets up each of her chapters by defining the es­ sential questions up for contention, the most important ones being whether there could be anything called a universal public good and whether it...