CHICAGO'S GREAT FIRE

In which Mrs. O’Leary’s cow is cleared of all charges.

Chicago was not prepared for the conflagration that erupted on Oct. 8, 1871. Writes Smith, an emeritus professor of history at Northwestern, the city was barely 40 years old and had been constructed haphazardly, with wooden structures barely held together by a few nails and—as with the home of the Irish immigrant O’Leary family—set atop pilings rather than a foundation. The fire that began in their barn—no bovine agency involved—spread quickly, and it didn’t help that the city’s pumping station was one of the victims. The fire spoke not just to overcrowding, class divides, poverty, and poor building standards, but also to political corruption. Yet Chicago was also a city of economic promise. “The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 caused American wheat exports to double in volume and triple in value,” writes the author, and the more or less contemporaneous development of the transcontinental railroad, the grain elevator, and mass stockyards placed the port city in an enviable position. Chicago was able to rebuild, and fairly quickly, though it would be years before it had the solidity of stone and steel that characterizes it today. Smith unearths several interesting aspects of the great fire. One was the organization, around the country and world, of tremendous relief efforts—“even Richmond, Virginia, and other southern cities joined in, as did remote Santa Fe and even remoter Honolulu” along with magnates like J.P. Morgan and potentates like the emperor of Prussia. Another was the role of the fire in reshaping city politics, with reformers ousting the entrenched bosses and labor gaining a sense of its power through work stoppages and strikes for better pay and working conditions. The result, writes Smith in this fast-moving narrative, was a rapid expansion of an almost new city—though poor Catherine O’Leary still carries the blame and has been the fire’s “most enduring victim.”

A vivid history revealing hidden aspects of supposedly well-known events.