BOOKS Illinois regional history CITY AND COUNTRY: TWO BOOKS WITH AN UNSENTIMENTAL VIEW OF THE PAST Reviewed by Harold Henderson City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, by Donald Miller, Simon & Schuster, 1996. All Anybody Ever Wanted of Me Was to Work: The Memoirs of Edith Bradley Rendleman, edited by Jane Adams, Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. In Jack Finney's science-fiction novel Time and Again, the main character must learn to feel what the 1880s were like in order to travel back in time. His instructor shows him an exhibit from the Smithsonian — a shapeless, faded, high-necked dress about as attractive as a mummy wrap — and then he brings out the original, as its owner would have first seen it: "a gown of bright wine-red velvet, the nap fresh and unworn, the material magnificently draped in thick multiple folds, front and back. The bead trim caught the light, glittering a clear deep red, shimmering as though the garment were moving." Historian Donald Miller has transformed 19th-century Chicago for us in the same way. City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America is a zesty treat for anyone with even a passing interest in the queen city of the Midwest. I picked it up thinking, "Surely we've had enough replays of Chicago's raucous past." I could hardly put it down. Miller has not forgotten that the historian's first duty is to tell a story. And what a story it is. In 1893, the year of the World's Columbian Exposition and the book's climax, "the world's first skyscraper city had a population of over a million people, and among them was an early settler who remembered it as a desolate trading post of some thirty souls living between a swamp and a sand-choked river. Without ever leaving Chicago, this old man had moved, by 1893, from the country to the city, from an agrarian to an industrial America, and had lived, in the process, through the entire history of his still-growing city." In the course of that history, Miller brings a huge cast of characters alive: • Gurdon Hubbard, who in 1818 sailed down Lake Michigan in a 50-foot-long freight canoe to a place he described as "four and a half houses, a fort, and a Potawatomi town"; who in the early 1830s convinced state lawmakers to improve the Chicago River because, he said, using the more amenable Calumet River would cause the resulting city to spread into Indiana; and who lived long enough to hear that his city would host a World's Fair. • Mark Beaubien, tavernkeeper and bon vivant from the 1820s and 1830s, who gave away downtown land that became fantastically valuable only a few years later, and explained with a shrug: "Didn't expect no town." • Louis Sullivan, who walked 20 miles a day on city streets and prairie paths during the depression of 1875 when there was no architectural work to be had. • Owen Aldis, the property manager who convinced 19th-century speculators to build, and firms to occupy, buildings that rose to the unheard-of height of 10 stories. • Carter Harrison, the Kentucky-born mayor assassinated on the next-to-last day of the World's Fair, who ran his unkempt city with a style that (anachronistically speaking) combined the best of Richard J. Daley and Harold Washington. • Ida B. Wells, whose crusade against lynching forced her to leave Memphis with a pistol in her pocket and a price on her head, and who arrived in Chicago in time to help Frederick Douglass fight the racism of the 1893 fair. • unregenerate capitalist George Pullman, who tried to shield his employees from the corruptions of Chicago by building a separate town on Lake Calumet — ironically enough, "the 28 ¦ July 1996 Illinois Issues only industrial city in America that was not the unplanned result of the workings of the private real estate market."
The author is equally adept at evoking Chicago places: • the insane asylum, in which "the inmates were drugged by whiskey and sedatives, forced to eat pigs' heads with the bristles still on, and slept three to a steel bed." • the city's first public library, founded after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 when prominent Englishmen donated volumes to replace those they assumed the city had lost. "Embarrassed by the British gift into establishing [a library for the first time], the city housed its splendid new collection in an abandoned water tank behind the old Rookery building. A skylight replaced the iron top of the tank, gaslights were hung from it, and bookshelves were built to the tank's contours." • the Levee, the vice district between South State Street and the river, in which prostitutes of all prices were segregated from polite society: "The heart of the district was crowded, gaslit, and well patrolled by police, both the vice monarchs and the city having a stake in making it safe for free-spending out-of-towners." • Philip Armour's production-line slaughterhouse, where "a mixture of animal grease and blood — red and shiny — stained [the workers'] faces, and blood hardened in their hair and beards and on their overalls, forcing them 'to walk with long stiff strides.'" Many of Miller's tales serve to inoculate the reader against nostalgia. Was 19th-century Chicago less polluted than today's city? No description of the city in the 1880s and 1890s is complete without mention of an omnipresent pall of coal and wood smoke that we can scarcely imagine now. Was it a more just community than today's polarized metropolis? In 1849, the richest 25 percent of Chicagoans owned all the wealth in town. Did people at least value true urbanity when they had it? Miller catches the great radical Eugene V. Debs saying (what would horrify his ideological descendants today) that Chicago could only be regenerated by "depopulation — when Socialism has relieved the congestion and released the people and they spread out over the country and live close to the grass." The author's judgment is not always beyond question. Was the 1887 opening of the Auditorium Theatre really "the biggest event in Chicago between the Great Fire and the fair"? (No doubt those present thought so, but what about the Hay market labor unrest of 1886?) Is it perhaps an exercise in hindsight to criticize Jane Addams for missing "the energy and institutional vitality of the city's newest ethnic colonies, and the uncrushable spirit of their people" in the horrifically crowded turn-of-the-century slums? But these are small paint daubs on a vast canvas. The epic of Chicago is, as Miller says, "the emergence of modern America." It Illinois Issues July 1996 ¦ 29 is also a poignant reminder of a time when big-city mayors did not have to go to Washington, D.C., to beg the rest of the country not to forget them. During the 19th century, the thematic American struggle between "growth and control, restraint and opportunity, privatism and the public good" took place in the city. (Miller personifies it as a contest between Carter Harrison's and Daniel Burnham's visions of Chicago.) The city is no longer the sole theater for resolving larger social questions. The struggle over growth and control has dispersed to smaller burgs and even, in a broader sense, the Internet. Chicago is no longer special, not always the center. The 20th century has not been kind to Chicago and its ilk, and it's hard to foresee better times for the 21st. Chicago often seems more adept at preserving the physical relics of its past than at matching the inventiveness of their creators. One of the most brilliant of those creators, Burnham's architectural partner John Root, argued that great styles are not made by copying the past. Instead, they emerge from "the careful study of all the conditions which lie about each architectural problem." The same holds true for the city as a whole today. Miller's book calls us to appreciate the past he evokes so vividly — but not to wallow in it. We have to try to understand our present with equal care.
From the opposite end of Illinois comes a very different book with a similarly unsentimental view of the past. The grinding poverty and heavy labor of subsistence farming in Union County underlies every paragraph of All Anybody Ever Wanted of Me Was to Work: The Memoirs of Edith Bradley Rendleman, edited by Southern Illinois University anthropology professor Jane Adams. Originally composed for the author's grandchildren, its a straightforward chronicle of daily life in the deep country from just before the turn of the century to the 1940s. Rendleman was born August 2, 1898, to Elijah and Sarah Bradley. It was the second marriage for both parents. "I don't think she ever loved my dad," Rendleman writes of her mother Sarah. "She just needed a home." Elijah and his first wife Ritta had lost both of their children in infancy to tuberculosis; Ritta herself succumbed to the disease in 1894, before her 20th birthday. "They are all buried at Beech Grove, but my father could not afford a marker for their graves." Her first memories are of the blended family's living in a three-room log house with "one large living room and bedroom combined and a kitchen downstairs and one room upstairs over the living room. There were only two small windows, one on each side of the house. We had two beds in the living room and three upstairs, one in each corner. The stairs were in the fourth corner. The six boys slept upstairs and Mom and Dad and me downstairs. ... People I knew didn't have toilets or privies. The women went to the chicken house and behind it and the men used the barn. "We were very poor, according to our living standard today, but we were better off than most of our neighbors, as we had two teams," a pair of mares and a pair of mules. Rendleman has a wonderful memory of the now-vanished society in which she grew up. Every house and rural neighborhood was peopled and defined by the people. Every transaction was personal: Her mother sold eggs and butter at "Charles Chase's store in Jonesboro" (which town Elijah and Sarah visited every six months). Sarah "never turned anyone away from her door hungry" and the family often boarded hired men or elderly people. An itinerant gentleman known only as "Old Dutch Doc" rode from house to house. When anyone got sick, "you would walk or ride a horse, if you had a horse to ride (many people didn't have a horse), and start out inquiring if anyone had seen or heard of Dutch Doc. Sometimes it took two or three days to find him. ... When he came to your house to see the sick, he would stay until you were much better or dead." 30 ¦ July 1996 Illinois Issues Death was never far away. In the 1920s, Rendleman lost an 8-month-old son to what she later gathered must have been cystic fibrosis. "It's a miracle as many people lived as they did. The only medicine they had was calomel and castor oil, cough syrup and quinine." Life was no picnic either. "None of the men, even my dad, ever gave their wives any money. But Mom always raised chickens and sold some and also sold butter and eggs to buy our clothes and groceries. Dad used to pocket all the money from the farm. A woman never knew what it was to have any. When you would tell him to buy some comfortable chairs, he would say, 'Hell, I can sit on a nail keg.' I know my mother would have liked to have had some nice furniture, but she never got a piece. And he had the finest farm machinery and the finest mules that money could buy, but he never bought one stick of anything for the house." Not until 1926 did Rendleman get a chance to wash clothes other than by rubbing them up and down on a washboard. Her first washing machine, she writes, "was a godsend. Bill [her husband] had a pump house with a gasoline engine hooked up to the pump to pump water for the horses, cows, and hogs. He fixed the washer up to run by that gasoline engine and I didn't have to even pump the water. That was the most wonderful thing, when I didn't have to wash on the board. I began washing for Mom and Dad and washed for them up till they passed away." This life story offers few obvious parallels to Chicago; Union County could almost be on another continent. But as Rendleman grew up, the rural world of her childhood opened to the outside. Humble recreations changed: In Rendleman's childhood "we made our own balls by taking an old heavy sock, we called a sawmill sock, that was worn out. You'd cut off the heel, then ravel out the yarn and wind it around and around to make a round ball. If we had a small rubber ball we'd put it in the middle." A generation later, her sons played high school basketball, and the family enjoyed regular trips with other families, following the team by car around the area. Life chances changed too: Rendleman's father never attended school at all and in the early 1890s "walked six miles and made railroad ties for fifty cents a day" (a distant connection to the metropolis). His daughter rode on the railroad and attended college for a year in Carbondale. Rendleman's story can be read in many ways, and by many more people than her grandchildren. These days it could be read with profit by romantic environmentalists who imagine some special excellence in small communities close to the land and far from the products and byproducts of industrial civilization. Toward the end of the book the author writes simply, "Boy, I would hate to live my life over, I worked so hard." Harold Henderson is a staff writer at the Chicago Reader. His last article for Illinois Issues was about the debate over endangered species.
EDITOR'S CHOICE
Illinois Issues July 1996 ¦ 31 |
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Sam S. Manivong, Illinois Periodicals Online Coordinator |