American History Tellers - Great Chicago Fire | Out of the Ashes | 4

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

After the 1871 fire destroyed a third of their city, Chicagoans wanted to do more than rebuild. They wanted to envision a new kind of American city. That included everything from changes to fire codes and labor laws to an entirely new style of architecture -- the skyscraper.Professor Ann Keating is an urban historian and expert on Chicago history both before and after the Great Fire. She and Lindsay discuss the rapid growth and social changes that made Chicago so vulnerable, what lessons city leaders learned -- or failed to learn -- in the fire’s aftermath, and the parallels between the Great Chicago Fire and other, more recent urban disasters.Listen to new episodes 1 week early and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/historytellers.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's November 1903 in Chicago. You're a captain in the Chicago Fire Department, and today you're performing a routine inspection of the brand-new Iroquois Theater, which is set to open its doors to the public in just a few days. Their in-house fire warden, an old colleague of yours, is giving you the tour. He leads you up a flight of stairs from a backstage entrance.

Well, Bill, looks like you've got yourself a fine gig here. Remind me how long it's been since you retired from the force. Ten years, if you can believe it. And honestly, the call couldn't have come at a better time. You know, Alice is sick, has been for months. We need the money more than ever. Hey, they're lucky to have you, a veteran fireman such as yourself. I've seen the billboards.

They're saying this place is absolutely fireproof. Guessing that's all down to you. Bill scratches his ear and looks away. Oh, you saw those, did you? Well, here's the main auditorium. You dodge a pair of stagehands carrying a large painted backdrop and step out onto the stage. You gaze sweeps up and across the cavernous gold ceiling theater,

taking in the ornate chandeliers, the filigreed wrought iron balustrades, and the plush red velvet drapery covering the walls. Wow, looks like they spared no expense. But I don't see any exit signs. Oh, there are exits just behind the curtains. Yeah, but they're concealed. Come on, you can do better than that. You shake your head and make a note. All right, tell me about the fire alarm system.

Right, the fire alarm system. Well, there isn't one. Not yet, anyway. No fire alarm system. You're kidding me, Bill. Next, you're going to tell me that there aren't any sprinklers. Ah, well, no, there's not. We're working on it. Bill, no alarms, no sprinklers, all the exits behind curtains? I'm sorry, but what possible reason could you have for this obvious lack of safety? The warden fiddles with the wedding ring on his finger.

Well, to tell you the truth, I worried that if I said anything, I'd lose my job. My family needs this paycheck. And besides, management has known about it for some time now. Bill shrugs helplessly. But your disbelief at the negligence before you is fast turning into anger. God damn it, Bill. This is outrageous. I'm reporting this. I'm reporting it to my battalion chief. And if a fire ever starts in this theater, God help the people inside.

You look around at the flurry of activity as stagehands make last-minute preparations for opening night. But if you had anything to say about it, there wouldn't be an opening night. You plan to make a recommendation to the city that this fire trap is shut down. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly. Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with.

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Our history, your story. Chicago Fire Captain Patrick Jennings was appalled by what he found during his inspection of the Iroquois Theater just days before its official opening. He took the issue up with his supervisor, who responded that there was nothing the fire department could do about it. On December 30, 1903, three decades after the Great Fire decimated much of the city, A fire did break out in the Iroquois Theater when sparks from a broken spotlight ignited a curtain during a matinee performance. There were still no alarms or sprinklers, and the exits were poorly marked and designed. As flames tore through the theater, terrified audience members found themselves trapped. Within 15 minutes, some 600 people had perished, mostly mothers and their children.

It was the deadliest single building fire in American history. After the 1871 fire that devastated the city, Chicago had introduced stricter regulations on building materials, expanded water access, and improved fire alarm systems. But even when fire codes were followed, they simply did not go far enough. In the wake of the Iroquois fire, new safety measures were once again introduced, including fire exit doors that opened outward, marked by red lights. But the deadly blaze had exposed the ongoing challenge of preventing

disasters in America's biggest cities. Our guest today is an expert on the Great Chicago Fire and all the ways it transformed the city, as well as the ways it didn't. Anne Keating is an urban historian and professor of history at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, where she's taught for over 25 years. She's also the author of The World of Juliet Kinsey, Chicago Before the Fire, and editor of the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Here's our conversation. Professor Anne Keating, welcome to American History Tellers. Oh, thanks for having me. So Chicago was incorporated as a town in 1833, and then the fire happened almost 40 years later, 1871. In between that time, the city transitioned from prairie land to an industrial center,

and its population grew accordingly. What did that growth look like? I would actually describe it as a transition from Indian country to a city that's going to be tied into the U.S. economy and society. In that 40-year period, it's going to grow. It's going to become an urban place. Up until 1833, it was an outpost, really, in Indian country. There was a fort there. After 1833, it's going to grow dramatically on the basis of, to start out with real estate, and real estate's going to be an

important part of the fire story as well. What else fueled its growth? Certainly, people aren't buying land just to buy land. Land speculation is a big piece of the story. New Yorkers and some English investors kind of ID Chicago as a place that they're going to boom. So there is absolutely, at the core of here, a speculative venture that rested on then hope for growth in the future. And one of the pieces of that future growth that was envisioned was that there was going to be a canal, the Illinois and Michigan Canal, that would connect the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. And so the speculation then was that Chicago would grow, that the canal would be completed. It's going to be 15 years before the canal is completed, and it's not done until 1848. But on the basis of that, you're going to see Chicago start to grow.

It's going to have been about, oh, 300-odd people in 1833, and it'll grow to about 3,000 people in 1840. It's got 30,000 people in 1850 and 100,000 in 1860 and 300,000 by the time of the 1871 fire. So you're really looking at a really dramatic growth, even though it's not an enormous place. It's still going to become fairly quickly one of the largest cities in the United States. I mean, what's interesting about the canal, right, is that it opens in 1848. 1848 is just this really interesting year in Chicago because you've got not only the opening of the canal, but the first railroad. So the Galena and Chicago Railroad is going to, well, it's a precursor to just a dramatic railroad growth.

And that's growth that then in the 1850s and 1860s really is going to spur the development of Chicago into a railroad hub. And that's going to spur, begin Chicago's development as an industrial place. And you really see that, you know, by the 1850s and certainly during the Civil War, Chicago is really going to continue to grow as an industrial center. Chicago's growth during these years is also tied very much to the fact that it's in the center of this really rich agricultural hinterland. And the farmers that come into the region, they're finding land that isn't just good enough land. It's some of the best farmland that any of them have ever encountered.

And they're going to be able to raise a surplus. They're going to be market producers. They're going to be raising corn and wheat and they're going to be sending livestock to market because they'll have a surplus. So it seems like Chicago is a confluence of several important ingredients that produce this explosive growth.

And in fact, in the 10 years before the fire, it seems its population triples. But as the city grew, also Chicago became, by necessity, an immigrant city. And that really changed the demographics. Talk about what those patterns looked like. One of the things that's going on in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, in these decades before the Chicago fire is that you're seeing the creation of a civic culture in Chicago. Up until 1833, there were no churches, there were no schools, there were no clubs. And after 1833, then you're going to start to see this development of institutions. And there's a Protestant elite that's coming from the East Coast, many from New York and

New England, who are going to be many of the people who have the money to invest in real estate in these new businesses and enterprises in Chicago. And they are going to become fabulously wealthy. Alongside of that, of course, is the success of McCormick's Reaper plant or the railroads rests on having enough labor that can build those things and work in the factories. And what happens in Chicago, beginning really, you see it in large numbers, late 1830s through the rest of the century, is large-scale immigration from Europe. And in the 1840s and 1850s, that emigration is coming from Germany. And Germans coming into Chicago are going to be wealthy and poor, middle class. A lot of Germans are going to come in with

money to buy land and going to be farmers in the region. Certainly some are Protestant. You're also going to find Catholics and you're going to find Jews amongst the Germans coming in. So they're bringing in a multiplicity of religious groups into the city. They're going to be joined by much poorer immigrants coming from Ireland who are escaping amongst other things, the potato famine, the potato blight by the late 1840s. And they're joined by some Scandinavian groups, in particular Norwegians, who are also coming again because of the potato blight in their home country. And they're not coming with much. There are going to be some Irish that come in and buy farms, but most of the Irish are coming with very little in the way of money to invest and that their skills are in hardscrabble farming. But they come to Chicago

and they're going to take up the hard work of building canals, railroads, working in this Reaper factory and in other companies that are going to emerge here. So we have an increasingly diverse city. How did the rise in immigration lead to tensions in the town? What kind of divides existed on the eve of the fire? And how did the fire expose some of the social and economic divides that you just described? Right. And I think exposed is exactly the right word, Lindsay. It is a world in which rich and poor are living in close quarters, whether it's on the near north side or south of the downtown area or even in the downtown area itself. So people are close at hand, but they are separated in their daily lives. It's increasingly going to be a separate experience. So McCormick, when he first comes to Chicago in the 1850s, when he's starting up his company, he will know his employees. But over the course of the decade, he's going to be employing hundreds and then thousands of people, and he will

no longer know his employees. So those employees, many of whom are Catholic and immigrant, are going to support a whole infrastructure in Chicago that's separate and apart from the Protestant elite civic culture that's been created. And their infrastructure is very much related to their ethnicity and their religion. And so on Sundays, you can see the segregation across the city in terms of attending religious services, again, between Catholic and Protestant congregations and with a few Jewish congregations by the 1860s. And what you see then is both groups are building up. I mean, we're seeing Holy Name Cathedral, which is built about a decade before the fire on the near north side by the Catholic immigrants

living in town. And shortly thereafter, the Episcopals decide that they need to build a much bigger, bigger church, just a block away from Holy Name Cathedral. So you see these large churches being constructed really in a competition in many ways. But there was, again, this underlying tension. And there is already, by the 1860s, you're seeing very clear labor action on the part of laborers who, by the 1860s, are pressing for an eight-hour day. They are already embracing the idea that they need better wages and some kind of protections from the steam engine explosions that take place with such regularity. And so those are going on, and you're seeing protests. Certainly during the Civil War, there's a lot of unrest that speaks to

the economic divisions within the city as well as the ethnic divisions. I mean, when men went off to fight in the Civil War, they joined companies almost exclusively along religious and ethnic lines. So the Protestant elite in Chicago went off and the young men joined companies early on in the early days after Fort Sumter that were tied to their congregations. So that St. James Episcopal Church fielded their own company of a hundred men that were really just drawn from that congregation. And alongside of that, you see companies of Germans, German Lutherans, German Catholics, German Jews that are being organized, and then Irish companies. They will become brigades over time, but the companies being

organized around churches, around neighborhoods. And so it's really, you get a sense there in the Civil War of the divisions, while they're working together in the Union effort, they're also, through the way that they're joining the union army, they're also showing the divisions within the city in that way. We can also see it in politics. So many of these immigrant men will have the right to vote. And local politics is one of the places where there's great contention. And there's actually representation by immigrants within the city council, although the mayor's position through up until the Chicago fire is one- and two-year terms. And it's been almost exclusively successful businessmen who've taken up that post

so that there's political machinations, certainly, but with an eye towards the elite keeping control of city government. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions,

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is that in the span of 24 hours, almost everyone is now suddenly on the same level. Can you explain that? Yeah. I think it's not unlike other natural disaster or man-made disaster. The fire did not recognize whether you were rich or poor. And so when the fire breaks out on that Sunday night, October 9th, in Catherine O'Leary's barn, and again, Catherine O'Leary is an Irish woman, and she's Catholic and poor. I mean, in many ways, she kind of embodies the divide here between the very poorest people in the city, and she would be certainly working poor. She and her husband own property, and they own animals, right? And they have this barn, and they're renting another house

on the front of their lot. They are strivers and working very hard, but they are, from the standpoint of the elite in the city, amongst the people to be afraid of, and at the same time, absolutely necessary for the success of the city. So the fire starts in the O'Leary's barn and because of the prevailing winds, it's going to take off and it's going to work its way north and east. So it's going to amazingly skip the south branch of the Chicago River, that is go from the west across the riverbank into the portion of the city between the river and the lake. And then it's going to go northward and it will burn down the downtown business district. And then it's going to jump the main stem of the Chicago River and

it's going to burn the near north side. And it burns again, rich and poor alike. Catherine and Patrick O'Leary's house does not burn down. Their barn does, but the fire is going from their backyard, north and east. But in its wake then, a third of Chicagoans will lose their homes. And it's not just rich, it's not just poor, it's everyone is affected by the fire, equally in the sense that they are subject to losing their homes. They have to flee quickly, but there are real differences as well, right? And you could see it almost from the get-go in terms of what people were loading up and taking out. If you were really poor, people just fled on foot with mattresses, clothing, food, some kitchen utensils, and got out as quickly as they could. Wealthier people tried to take as much as they could. I mean, people with

more things tried to load up. If they could get a wagon or had a servant and could load up a wagon and send it out of town with their things, they did. And so there is almost from the get-go going to be a difference between what people had at the end of the fire. There will be some families who were able to save some of the things from their home where most of the poorest people wouldn't have had an opportunity to do that,

but then they didn't have as much to start out with. So you do see those differences almost immediately. But in terms of physical danger and having to flee the fire, everybody had that same experience. So we have a tragic equality right at the moment of the fire. But very quickly, as you mentioned, the divides of class appear again, not only in just how people can escape or what they take with them, but in the manner in which they can rebuild. The rebuilding really showed a very big difference in how that could be accomplished, and it changed the face of the city, changed the design and layout of the city.

What was the pattern that arose out of the rebuilding? There's a couple of things. One of the things that's happening is that the downtown burns completely. The downtown area had been a place where people lived and worked. And one of the things that happens after the fire is over is that very few people live downtown. Downtown will quickly become really just a site of business. And that's going to hold right from the 1870s really into the 1990s in terms of Chicago's downtown not being a place that people lived, but only a place where people worked. Many of the people who were downtown, their businesses burned out, had insurance. And while insurance varied in terms of whether or not people were

able to get money from an insurance company to help rebuild. Those who work with Eastern companies or even in London received insurance monies far more quickly and far more likely than people who are insured locally, and that tied in with how wealthy you were. So people with money then were able to rebuild fairly quickly, and rebuilding in Chicago does take place quickly. The railroads don't burn down, so much of the value of the real estate in downtown Chicago is tied to the access to the railroads, and that's still there. What you see then is contractors, architects are coming into Chicago because there's so much opportunity in the city. There's just great opportunity for building. It's not surprising that the opportunity

stays with the wealthy, the persons who can recover and have wealth to begin with. But one interesting aspect of this rebuilding is that those with the means, through insurance or others, build in a different manner than downtown was prior to the fire. They build with different materials. How did this switch continue, perhaps, the residential flight from downtown? So one of the things that's taking place is that the city council will jump in fairly quickly and they're going to prohibit frame construction downtown. Now, there'd already been a move away from frame construction for the large buildings downtown. They were built in, there's a local limestone and in brick over the course of the 1860s.

But this really is going to be pushed forward very much. And you will see in the downtown district, there's really going to be no frame construction. And that's because a fire limits is imposed that goes beyond the immediate downtown area. And it's going to be an area in which you can't build a permanent structure and frame. There's going to be a bunch of temporary structures, but no permanent structures in frame. There's going to be a big fight in the years after the fire to try and extend the fire limits out beyond the downtown area to a broader area that then begins to include many immigrant neighborhoods. And those immigrant neighborhoods, the immigrants are rebuilding in frame. They had built in frame before.

And so they are opposed to having the extension of this fire limits that would mean that they would have to build much more expensive buildings with much more expensive building materials. And it's a big political battle between people who really want to protect their investments, who are spending a lot of money on buildings in the downtown area. They don't want fire. They don't want fire near

downtown against the workers who are building those downtown structures and the workers who are employed by those growing corporations and factories that can't afford to build in brick or stone and live close enough to get to their places of employment. And it's in politics, right? It's in the city council that this gets worked out. And it's a big fight. I mean, there's one city council meeting where the workers who are protesting the extension of the fire limits are throwing rocks and bricks, the materials that the city council is thinking about using as their material for in the fire limits, and they don't get the extension. In the end, the fire limits are going to be limited, and they're limited because the vast majority of workers can't afford that.

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You can listen to Criminal Attorney early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is the Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders. This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger.

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density. And again, you're going to see fewer and fewer residences. And as commercial structures are growing, you've got a number of architects that are going to begin to experiment. And amongst them is a man by the name of William LeBaron Jenny, who employs a number of young architects, including John Root and Daniel Burnham, in his architectural studios. And it's certainly not just in Chicago and not just because it's after the fire, but the idea that they're seeing ways of applying iron and then steel construction to a building. And again, many of the buildings downtown in Chicago had been brick and stone sheathing, but the interior of the buildings and the framing of the building was still lumber, and that burned. I mean, that was a big part of this. So the idea of using iron framing as a way

of avoiding fire was something that was being experimented with. And what you find then, and it takes a good decade, but you're seeing the development here of taller and taller buildings, first masonry construction buildings. But then a decade later, really, you're seeing William LeBaron Jenny beginning to experiment with iron framing in something like the Home Insurance Building. And you're going to see then out of his architectural studios, Burnham and Root will be amongst a group of architects who define what we know of as the first school of Chicago architecture with that modern skyscraper style. And again, part of it is that there are enough architects and there's all of these commissions that they're kind of feeding off of each other. The development of the skyscraper

in these new styles is made possible by the fire in the sense that it brings people to Chicago, it keeps them employed, and they're really thinking about new ways of doing this. I'm going to bring you out of the historical and have you contemplate the present moment. We've seen ourselves in just recent history, plenty of natural disasters, man-made disasters, large-scale catastrophes that we didn't seem to be prepared for, though we obviously knew we should have been. What could we have learned from the Chicago fire that we could apply to almost anything we deal with today, whether it's the pandemic, Hurricane Katrina, the fires in California? I think it's a really interesting question, and I think there are parallels, and then there are ways in which there's no comparison. You know, one of the parallels is that Chicago thought that they could solve, because they knew they had a fire problem. All cities had fire problems in the 19th century.

It was absolutely an ongoing issue. But Chicagoans thought that they had beat this problem by creating a really good water supply. At least that's what they thought with a really top of the line pumping station. They had built a tunnel under the lake a mile out to, again, to draw water in. And it was all new, 1869, 1870. So they had the water. They had gone from a volunteer fire force in 1857. They had developed this really amazing professional force. So they had fire protection. They had a telegraph system that was top of the line.

They had new fire engines and pumpers. They thought that they were able to solve this problem by creating the response that was needed to it. They chose not to think about how do we avoid the risk of fire to start out with. So instead, Chicago, in looking at ways to face a disaster when it happens, rather than working on the back end to think about ways of avoiding that in the first place. I mean, in some ways, that fire limits after the fire was very much that kind of thinking about what could be done to prevent fires in the future. Another thing that I think was really interesting about the Chicago fire is that the response to the fire and the response of getting aid to people after the fire was done. It wasn't organized by the city. And instead, the city

turned over all of the monies that were pouring in from around the world, which is similar to, again, we try and aid each other around the world when there are natural disasters. And this was certainly the case in Chicago. Money poured in from around the world. The money was funneled. Again, it didn't go to city government. City decided that they didn't want the city council that had a lot of immigrants and worker reps on it. They didn't want them to be a part of this. And instead, they turned it over to an elite group, the Chicago Relief and Aid Society, who doled out aid only to a worthy poor, only to people who showed that they were looking for work, that they were upstanding, that they were temperate, they weren't drinking, that they were taking care of their families. And instead of just handing out

the things that were needed, food and shelter and clothing, without regard to your standing and to your worthiness. And I think that's another point that I think about a lot is in the wake of a disaster is whether or not we have these needs tests for the kind of relief that you get rather than just turning eight out. I think one of the most important things you can learn from the Chicago fire is that hubris and a reliance on technological fixes to head off natural or man-made disasters is not going to work out well. And I also think something that you learn from looking at the Chicago fire is that while it can affect everyone in a very similar way on a basic level, that fairly quickly people with more means, people with more power are going to figure out ways to make their situation improve that much more quickly and get back to some sense of normalcy so that these kinds of disasters really do open up and uncover real basic fissures in a society, whether it was back in 1871 or in 2021. Professor Anne Keating, thank you so much for talking to me today. It's been a pleasure. Very interesting. Thanks for having me.

That was my conversation with Professor Anne Keating. She's the Taunagas Professor of History at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. Her books include Chicagoland, City and Suburbs of the Railroad Age, and her most recent work, The World of Juliet Kinsey, Chicago Before the Fire. Next week on American History Tellers, Mount Rushmore, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Panama Canal. They're all marvels of design and engineering and symbols of America's can-do spirit. But what do they tell us about how we see ourselves as a nation? And how has their significance changed over time? In our new six-part series, American Monuments, we'll tell the stories behind these and other iconic structures,

how they were conceived and constructed, the obstacles their creators overcame, and the controversies hidden under their foundations. We begin with the most quintessential American monument of all, the Statue of Liberty. From Wondery, this is Episode 4 of The Great Chicago Fire from American History Tellers. In our next season, a new six-part series, America's Monuments. We'll tell the stories behind the nation's most iconic structures, how they were conceived and constructed, the obstacles their creators overcame, and the controversies hidden under their structures.

We begin with the most quintessential American monument of all, the Statue of Liberty. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Audio editing by Molly Bach. Sound design by Derek Behrens. This episode was produced by Morgan Jaffe. Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marsha Louis, created by Hernán López for Wondery. Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neuro-linguistic programming.

Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict and murder victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. We recently dove into the story of the godfather of modern mental manipulation, Richard Bandler, whose methods inspired some of the most toxic and criminal self-help movements of the last two decades. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid and Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening.