[Thanks much to Doug Greenberg, President & Director of the Chicago
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                                Chicago Hope?

                    Review of Carl Smith,
              URBAN DISORDER AND THE SHAPE OF BELIEF:
            THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE, THE HAYMARKET BOMB,
                AND THE MODEL TOWN OF PULLMAN
              (University of Chicago Press, 1995)
                               by
                        Douglas Greenberg


         In 1969, Norman Mailer remarked that Chicago was  perhaps the
last of the great American cities.   Carl Smith s new book, URBAN
DISORDER AND THE SHAPE OF BELIEF, suggests that it may also have been
the first.  This deeply researched, subtle, and complex book seeks to
comprehend the significance of three events of signal importance in the
development of the American urban landscape: the Great Chicago Fire of
1871, the Haymarket Bomb of 1886, and the Pullman Strike of 1894.
These three events punctuated the coming of age not merely of Chicago
but of all urban America as well, and Smith attempts to show why.
         The three decades following the Civil War were the great age of
urbanization in American history.  As Frederick Jackson Turner pointed
out at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the census of
1890 indicated that more Americans lived in the city than in the
country.  And although we now tend to think of urban life and its
attendant problems as peculiar to our own century's end, American men
and women of the nineteenth century regarded the city as their own
special blessing and curse.  And no city better symbolized and
articulated the meaning of urbanism in the United States than Chicago.
                In a way that Boston, New York, and Philadelphia could
not claim, Chicago was uniquely American, sitting as it did at the
economic crossroads of the continent, facing West as much as East,
distinctively itself, and largely devoid of the excessive concern with
Europe so dominant on the eastern seaboard.  As the Civil War came to a
close, Chicago was poised for a period of unprecedented growth and
prosperity.  By 1900, its population of about 1.7 million was sixty
times what it had been in 1850.   But nothing is more characteristic of
urban life than ambiguity, and Smith shows us that Chicagoans quickly
discovered why.
                In a series of interconnected chapters on the Fire, the
Haymarket bombing, and the Pullman Strike,  Smith demonstrates that
growth and prosperity had their price.  Although he details the human
suffering that each of these events embodied, Smith is actually more
concerned with how each challenged Chicago's conception of itself.  This
book is, in other words, an exercise in urban cultural psychology as
much as it is an exercise in urban history.
   For example, although Mrs. O'Leary's much maligned cow was
innocent of any lantern-kicking arson,  the Fire not only aroused ugly
anti-Irish sentiment and other species of social paranoia, it also
prompted a comparison with the recently ended War, an ordeal by fire
from which many Americans believed their nation had emerged somehow
purified.  For some Chicagoans, the Great Fire of 1871 promised
precisely the same thing for their city.
    The Fire literally seared the consciousness of the city.  It
simultaneously bespoke punishment for iniquity and the promise of hope
for the future.  No urban fire before or since (with the exception of
the fires following the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906) has so
utterly informed American ideas about urban life.  Stretching four
miles north and south and three-quarters of a mile east and west,  the
Great Chicago Fire made news everywhere in America and inspired
powerful reactions of support and aid throughout the country.  And
while the Fire was a disaster of unprecedented proportions, it also
offered a promise to remake the city and rebuild it on a more secure
metaphorical as well as literal foundation.
   The Haymarket Bombing, Smith shows, was also both more and
less than it appeared to be.  The accused anarchists were almost
certainly not guilty of the crimes of which they were accused, and the
entire affair made a travesty of legal process.  On the other hand, the
presence of anarchists and the anarchist press in Chicago was a
concrete challenge to the established order and unashamedly threatened
to destroy it.  In coming to terms with the Haymarket events and their
aftermath, Chicago tried literally to define itself and its social
institutions.  Smith observes, moreover, that much of this
self-definition took the form of attempting to decide who was a
 foreigner  and who was not.  This was no easy task in Chicago in 1886
since about 80 percent of the inhabitants of the city were either born
outside the United States or were the children of people born in other
countries.  And the participants in the Haymarket tragedy, on every
side, were almost all from somewhere else.  Indeed, not only the
defendants but all twelve jurors, the judge, and  seven of the eight
lawyers were born outside Chicago.

Thus, the Haymarket Bombing inspired that most American of pastimes:
deciding what (and who) is American by determining what (and who) is
not.  As the citizens of California have noticed in the aftermath of
Proposition 187, this attempt to define ourselves negatively frequently
has the perverse effect of confusing more than it clarifies by
revealing a mean-spirited side to the American character.  In no period
of our history was this more the case than in the late nineteenth
century when immigration from abroad (and opposition to it) were
arguably the most broadly influential trends in American society and
culture.  As in other things, Chicago's experience was the experience
of the country, writ small.
  The third of Smith's catastrophic triad, the Pullman
Strike of 1894, also contained within it strains of thought and
experience that reached beyond the immediate events and spoke eloquently
to the deepest themes in American life.  George Pullman s model town was
an exercise in ego and power, but it was also an attempt to realize a
utopian dream.  As innumerable historians have pointed out, one might
say the very same thing about the United States in this era.
  Pullman's model town sought somehow to join collective life with
individualism, and it failed.  Throughout the Western world, not only
in the United States, similar projects, some actual, some theoretical,
and some on the verge of transformig the world, were attempting to come
to terms with the complex relationship between capitalism and
democracy.  The failure of Pullman's experiment was not unique; and yet
it did open to view some of the deepest contradictions life in the
United States, where the ethic of individualism and a commitment to
political democracy ran most sharply against the corporatist utopianism
that Pullman had tried to achieve.  Following so closely upon the
Columbian Exposition, the Pullman Strike challenged the triumphalism of
the Fair and suggested that the gorgeously ordered fairgrounds,
themselves now in ashes, had been more dream than reality in any case.
         This otherwise excellent book lapses too frequently into
literary and historiographic references that will be of no interest to
the general reader, and Smith's prose is denser than one would like in
a book on so naturally dramatic a theme.  In addition, despite passing
references to Jane Addams, the book could do with a more nuanced
approach to the role of gender in shaping belief.  Similarly, race,
along with immigration the great social obsession of the era, receives
virtually no mention in Smith's account of urban disorder.  By 1890,
the African American population of Illinois had reached about 60,000,
most of it in Chicago.  Yet these people seem mostly to have absent
from the urban imagination that Smith otherwise portrays so
effectively.  It is difficult not to wonder why.
   But these may be complaints that will bother no one but a
reviewer.  The fact is that this fine book delineates many of the
ambiguities of urban life in the late nineteenth century by immersion
in rich textual and pictorial sources of civic memory many of which, I
cannot forebear adding, are to be found in the research collections of
the Chicago Historical Society.  This volume revels in contradiction,
and it gently reminds us that perceptions of disorder, which abound in
our city today, are the nothing new in Chicago.  We reveal as much
about ourselves as about our fellow citizens when we focus too
obsessively on how others have overthrown the social order.  Smith's
portrait of this city's sense of itself in its greatest period of
growth and change is fascinatingly complex.  This book will reward the
patient reader with absorbing stories and beautifully textured
vignettes of great meaning, even today, 100 years after George
Pullman's dream came crashing down upon him and the remnants of the
Columbian Exposition burnt to the ground.

Douglas Greenberg is President and Director of Chicago Historical
Society


--
Douglas Greenberg                  Phone:312 642 5035
President and Director             Fax:312 266 2077 or 312 642 1199
Chicago Historical Society         e-mail: U27777@uicvm.uic.edu
1601 North Clark St.                       sdgchs@aol.com
Chicago Il 60614                           doug48@ix.netcom.com

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