The Meanings of the Modern City: Chicago After the Linguistic Turn

Abstract

In early 1867 writer James Parton visited Chicago in order to gather materials for an Atlantic Monthly article on city, part of a series he planned on urban West. Writing exuberantly to his editor, Parton advised him: when next you are tired, go to those western cities, and get below surface of them. As man of business, as literary man, as American citizen, and as human being, you will be instructed and pleased. The United States is there.1 In Parton's view, dynamism and energy of Chicago were producing a new urban spirit far different from that of East: the too respectable Bostonian, staid Philadelphian, acquire, after living awhile in Chicago, a vivacity of mind, an interest in things around them, a public spirit, which they did not possess at home.2 Parton was only one of numerous post-Civil War commentators and writers who participated in an extensive public discussion of meaning of Chicago within American life. Like Parton, some celebrated Chicago as a new and invigorating form of urban order: it was Queen of West, embodiment of frontier energy and expansive growth, a concrete realization of Manifest Destiny. Others, however, tended to stress that growth of Chicago brought disorder in its wake; their writings relied upon longstanding urban vocabularies associating cities with darkness, corruption, and decadence, yet also refigured city within an emerging discussion of perils of modernity and modernization. Carl Smith's richly textured and deeply researched urban and cultural history argues that public discussions of late-nineteenth-century Chicago tell us much about changing anxieties associated with modernity in American culture. To some extent his Urban Disorder and Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, Haymarket Bomb, and Model Town of Pullman continues project of Smith's 1984 Chicago and American Literary Imagination 18801920: both books are concerned with aesthetic and intellectual responses to