The Romance of Chicago

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 21, 18 November 1908, Page 44

The Romance of Chicago

THE RECORD OF A DOMINANT SPIRIT OF HUSTLE

By

NEWTON DENT

The Growth of the Western Metropolis—lts Tremendous Impetus and its Contribution to the Making of America

CHICAGO is seventy-one years old this year. She will not celebrate her birthday; she is too busy. But the amazing truth remains that this immense city—more populous than any one of half the States of the Union — is of no more years than threescore and ten, the fleeting life time of a man. Of all the hoary cities in Europe, Africa, and Asia, none but London, Paris, am! possibly Berlin, are equal in size to Chicago; and they were two thousand years old before our giant of the Middle West was born. Incredible as it may seem to foreigners, it is one of our startling American facts that when Chicago was twenty seven years old she was as large as Athens or Damascus was in the height <>f its glory; at forty-three she had caught up to Rome, the Eternal City; and at fifty-six she had surpassed Tokyo, Vienna, Constantinople, and St. Petersburg—four of the greatest empire-centres ol the world. I'he growth of Chicago is past the power of fancy. How can the mind imagine a city as populous as the kingdom of Greece, with twice the public revenue of Denmark, with more newspapers than Africa, a greater railway mileage than Norway, and more schools than Portugal, yet whose entire history can be told from the memory of men and women still alive? Only one century ago the first seed of Chicago was planted when John Kinzie built his log cabin in a wilderness, I'he ‘•fruitage of that log-c&bin is now half a . million homes. Fifty-nine years ago there was neither railway noY telegraph in i what is now Chicago; to-day the city’s' trains average one a minute, day and night, and its telephone wires would engirdle th<» earth ton times. Men who are now sitting at their desks in a twenty storey sky scraper talk of the time when they could have bought ground beneath them for an old gun or a pair of shoes. They tell of paddling canoes vhi’H 1 the Art Institute now stands, and of hunting quail and wild ducks on the site of the ( it y Hall. t here are more millionaires in Chicago, so these <»l»l mon say, than there were vi.tors in the town when Van Buren was in the White House. The whole city of is 40, in fact, could be housed in the Monadnock Building, without the necessity of an extra chair. Ami the more floating population at the present time is greater Ih:m the Chicago that the Prince of "Wales, now King Edward VII., saw in LSiiO. A NAME WITH SOMETHING IN IT. Chicago is big. That is what the name nic.mt, in the Indian language—Che-eau-gou, a thing that is great and powerful. It was a word that the Miaiuis used to describe the thunder and the falls of Niagara. Even if Chicago had been founded by a Pharaoh or a Caesar, its bigness xxould still be surprising; but >hen we are taken up to the hurricane >i ( k of the .Ma<onic Temple, and told that this overpowering city beneath us is no older than many of the people in its streets, we have m> answer. The truth is 100 wonderful to believe. And this is not yet the whole truth. In seventy years these Spartans at the foot of Michigan have built their city not once, but twice. First, they built it on a swamp —a vast waste of slush and sink-holes. Nature had forgotten to put a « nist on the earth at thi- spot, so the Chicagoans made one ten feet thick. For a generation the city grew. Thea came the Great Fire, and eighteen thousand buildings went down. There was no Chicago—nothing but an ash heap. The Spartans were dismayed, but only for a moment. They dashed the tears and cinders out of their eyes, and began to build a second city before the ruins had ceased to burn.

No failure is final—that is the Chicago idea. When their river was crooked, they made it straight. When it fouled their drinking water by flowing north into Lake Michigan, they dug their famous drainage canal and compelled it to run south into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. When the lake trespassed on Lincoln Park, they drove it back with a marvellous sea-wall of masonry and marble. Nothing that either man or nature can do. apparently, can check the growth of this city that has spread back from the lake like a prairie fire, until now its great bulk covers nearly two hundred square miles of 1 llinois. Chicago stands as probably the fourth city in the world in population. She has' doubled her people in fifteen years. But she is the first city of the world in many things—in enterprise, in growth, in energy, and in her indomitable optimism and self-confidence. Nowhere else is there such human voltage. No other city strains more in the harness of commerce, or pulls as much pel' unit. Every State in the unit hurries at the call of Chicago. ‘ Bring me your lumber,” she demands. “I want two billion feet of it a year. Bring me every week-day fifty thousand of your farm animals and a million bushels of your grain. Bring me your ore and oil and Cloth and paper and tobacco, and be

quick, for I am Chicago—the City of Speed!” As a region of rapidity, Chicago has always stood in a class by herself. She is ruled by the Big Minute. Her people are more than quick. They are electric. Whether the game is business or baseball, they carry off the pennants. They spend fast, but they earn faster than they spend, and think faster than they earn. The living torrents of her streets clash and plunge like a battle of cavalry. The power of the hurrying feet would drive all the machinery in Illinois, if some Edison or Marconi could only devise a way of storing up their energy. The twenty-hours trains to New York ■were too slow for the hustlers, of Chicago. At their demand, the time has been reduced to eighteen. Nearly ten hundred miles in eleven hundred minutes! Such luxurious trains have never been put

upon any other line. A passenger in one of these mile a minute fliers may read in its library, bathe in its bath-room, or be shampooed in its barber-shop. At the stations he may receive stock-market bulletins or telephone to his friends. There is a valet to press his clothes and a stenographer to write his letters. HEADQUARTERS OF THE BIG IDEA. Chicago is the headquarters of the Big Ideal, too, as well as the Big Minute. No other city has created so many new industries and commercial institutions. Here, for example, are a few of the big things that were born and bred in Chicago. THE SKY-SCRAPER. When the Rookery was built, in 1887, it was the first of its kind in Worldhistory. To-day there are miles of such

buildings, standing in double rows, like monstrous stalagmites-. Many are as costly as a Bourban palace. At least live millions were spent upon the last one —the First National Bank Building, y.hicli is ribbed with ten thousand tons

Oi steel and lit by right thousand electric lights. Sky-scrapers art* common enough now in all large American cities. They are, in fact, the one physical feature which is said to best represent our highly organised civilisation: and the old Chicago Rookery is the mother of them all. THE HARVESTER. "For thousands- of years the human race could think of no better way to reap its grain than by the sickle and the

scythe. The bread that fed the world was provided by myriads of serfs, who gathered in the wheat with bent backs and bleeding lingers. Then Chicago sprang into existence, with a million farmers at her back door.

Chicago sprang into existence, with a n 11lion farmers at her back door. "Why,” she inquired, “is there no la-bour-saving machinery for the field as well as the factory’” It seems a simple question to us, who have eaten the bread of harvesters all our lives; but no one had thought, of it before. The McCormicks ami the Deerings answered it by manufacturing machines that were almost clever enough to be alive — machines with strong arms that never tired and quick fingers that never bled. These wizards of wood and steel have changed the agricultural methods of all civilised lands. They have pushed civilisation within reach of the outdwellers. They have transformed the man with the hoe into the man with the harvester. . And they have made possible the unparalleled prosperity of American farmers. THE REFRIGERATOR CAR. Ihe vegetarian ean have no justified grievance against Chicago, for it gives us our fruit as well as our meat. To-day the ice-cooled ear, first used by the packers, makes it possible for the most perishable of fruits and vegetables to be carried three thousand miles to market. It was a t Chicago idea that linked the hot-house States with the cities of the North—a union which has added so much to the prosperity of the one and to the health of the other. • THE PULLMAN. To make travel not only swift, but luxurious—that, too, was a Chicago idea. “Why not put a parlour on wheels’” This was the question that smote the brain of George M. Pullman; and as a result of his thinking there is now a whole city, the Thirty-third Ward of Chicago, in which 8000 workmen arc rolling out 20 new Pullmans and 308 freight cars everv week.

THE MAIL-ORDER STORE. No other -Chicago institution embodies the -pirit of .the twentieth century more than this,. While there has been, in all civilised countries, more or less shopping by mail, it has been left to Montgomery Ward and IL W. Sears to bring this idea, to its highest development. In the betters that were sent to these two Chicagoans last year there was the stupendous amount of 75 million dollars—more than the total yearly receipts of all the railroads on the continent! af Africa.

THE WORLD'S FAIR OF 1893. • This was the most brilliant idea that ever Hashed* into'the Chicago brain, and it did* more than any other one thing to establish*the present commercial prestige of the United States. Never before had there been an industrial fete upon so vast a scale, nor under auspices so extraordinary. Here was the youngest great city of the world—nothing but a heap of ashes only 22 years before—calling upon all the nations of the earth to celebrate the four-hundredth birthday of America. It was the acme of audacity and self-reli-ance, and it succeeded. The nations came with their handiwork and their curiosities, even with their religions; and for half a year Chicago became a central clearing-house for the whole human race. THE FREIGHT SUBWAY. This is the latest Chicago idea. It is so new that few of the hurrying throngs in the down-town district have seen the wonderful railway system that is operating 40ft below the sidewalk. Yet it has already displaced 70 postal wagons and hundreds of drays. When it is in full swing it may go far toward clearing the streets of 40,000 turbulent teamsters, and toward making Chicago the handiest city in the world.

THE PACKING HOUSE. — Of all the ideas, this has been the moat, profitable. Now that Chicago has. become the butcher-shop of the earth, her meat and cattle business has risen to a total of six hundred millions a, year—as much as the value of the cotton crop, of, the combined exports of Canada, Switzerland, and Spain. In fact. Packingtown is now a great city in itself. Anywhere, in Chicago, the current of life runs swiftly enough, but the veijj centre of the maelstrom is the square

mile of the stock-yards. Here, encircling tWenty-one thousand cattle-pens, an army of titty thousand men and women are engaged in transforming life int<j food. As though in revenge for the incendiary act of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow in 1871, there is here an annual massacre

of three and a quarter million cattle—twice as many as there are in all the Valleys of Switzerland. Bang! Bang! Bang! As fast as these fvords can be written the steers from the ilVestern plains are struck down by the Seath-hattimers. Sheep—four and a half

million of them—huddle along to the executioners; and hogs—forty-three a minute, eight million a year—are caught by the moving hooks and then swung from knife to knife. i-Not all the swine of France could keep these swift knives liusy from January to September. All toldj since JSylyester Marsh began to kill cattle under ain elm-tree on Monroestreet, four hundred million animals

have been slaughtered by Chicago, for which she has paid seven billion dollars to American farmer-—enough money to buy Japan, or to give twenty-five dollars to every family in the world. The Chicago packers are now in daily communication with the four corners of

the globe. A map of their business is a map of civilisation. They ship fresh beef to the cities of Africa and Asia. The empty tins that were filled in Packingtown are scattered along the Congo; they mark the trail of the North Pole seeker, and litter the bed of every ocean. If this unparalleled business had been the work of ten generations, it would still be remarkable: but the fact is that

half of the men who made it arc still alive. Vast as Packingtown is, it is for the most part the creation of half a dozen men who began life at the foot of the ladder. In the biographies of Armour, Swift, Morris, Libby, and the Cudahys, almost the whole history ot the packing industry would be told. But this'is a Chicago characteristic that is noticeable in all trades —the extraordinary output of a single life. (To lie concluded next week.)