THE BURNING OF THE WORLD

A complex, capably narrated history of the 1871 fire that remade Chicago.

As architecture scholar Berg, author of Grand Avenues and 38 Nooses, observes, the fire of Oct. 8, 1871, did not occur in isolation. The weather had been unusually hot and dry, and “between October 2 and October 7, the city’s 193 firemen had been summoned to twenty-eight fires” whose causes were various, from carelessly discarded cigarettes to grease spills and oil-soaked rags that spontaneously burst into flames, and the fires burned mostly in places newly crowded in the immigration boom. A cow was almost certainly not the cause of the infamous blaze, though the fire that sprang forth that night sparked somewhere in the neighborhood of Irish immigrant Kate Leary’s home. As Berg notes, “almost all the houses in the West Division were made of pine-wood…a cheap and speedy way to build” but one that created tinderboxes. The fire had numerous knock-on effects, as the author shows. Some concerned Leary herself, smeared in a calumniating press; one cause of the blame, it seems, was that her home was spared while so many were not, but another was the fact that she was an Irish immigrant in a time of growing anti-immigrant sentiment and Know-Nothing political activism. One of its chief exponents was Joseph Medill, a newspaper magnate who was devoted to Republican politics and anti-Catholic vituperation. Other players in the drama that Berg lays out, in which powerful economic forces contested to rebuild Chicago in their own image, include merchant Marshall Field and Wilbur Storey, another newspaper publisher whose “reporters were instructed never, ever to let the absence of facts get in their way.” In the end, their remaking of Chicago helped shape the form of the modern city—architecturally stunning but also sharply segregated by class and race.

A strong contribution to the history of not just the fire, but urban America generally.