The Great Chicago Fire as a National Event

Abstract

FOR CHICAGO'S HISTORIANS, WRITERS, AND CITIZENS, THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE OF October 8-10, 1871, has always had a clear meaning. Chicagoans have long seen the fire as a watershed, the end of the city's pioneer adolescence and the beginning of its metropolitan adulthood.' Yet the Chicago Fire also once had a wider meaning that has since been lost to us. Chicagoans of 1871 were quick to note that their fire had been a national calamity, not just a local one. For weeks following the fire, daily newspapers, religious weeklies, genteel magazines, and trade publications of all sorts attempted to assess the fire's significance. When two Chicago journalists wrote shortly after the fire that [t]he terrible conflagration in Chicago will long be remembered as one of the most prominent events of the nineteenth century, most Americans agreed.' Booster enthusiasm might often inflate Chicagoans' claims, but even the city's detractors admitted that the fire had been an important national event. The very circumstances of the fire lent themselves to such myth making. The destruction of the most successful and representative city of the West, the biblical overtones of a city being ravaged by fire, the apparent unity of the entire country in aiding Chicago, the role of the railroad and telegraph in speeding relief-all these features recommended the fire as a topic of discussion. Particularly suggestive was the historical moment at which the fire occurred-in the midst of Reconstruction and at the beginning of the industrial age. For several weeks, in publication and pulpit alike, Americans would use the fire to debate the direction and character of their society-to comment on the dangers of overly rapid urban growth, the relative merits of religious versus scientific modes of interpreting experience, the moral turpitude of cities, and the place of Christian values in a business culture. In the end Americans would seek in the fire an omen of the future,