Chicago has always been a town of immigrants and mostly not of the WASP variety: when the 18th-century trader Jean Baptiste Point duSable, his Potawatomi wife Catherine, and their family became the first regular residents, you might say it was a BFIC (Black French Indian Catholic) town. Chicago’s first businessmen were fur traders who answered to the American Fur Company’s headquarters at Mackinaw on the far north end of Lake Michigan.
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Cincinnati and Saint Louis are in the middle of the country too. How did Chicago outgrow them? In 1856, the Board of Trade found a way to gain trade—it turned handmade farm products into commodities by setting up quality standards for grain. Wheat and corn from individual midwestern farms no longer had to be sold and loaded one sack at a time. Now all grain of the same quality could be stored and shipped in bulk and traded by simply using receipts and futures contracts.
After the Great Fire in 1871, the city’s commercial elite compounded the disaster by running the Chicago Relief and Aid Society Katrina-style, dispensing too little help too late to too few. The fire had devastated nearnorth immigrant neighborhoods and burned all the bridges connecting them to the rest of town—yet at first the society set up no relief depot north of the river and published information only in English. When a fire victim did get work, the society immediately cut off all help. These lucky souls then endured a week or two of employment but no cash while they waited for their first payday. (The society finished up with a generous surplus, thank you for asking.)
Labor shortages in World Wars I and II drew African-Americans up to Chicago from the old Confederacy, with big assists from the Illinois Central Railroad and the Chicago Defender. Their labor was welcome but they weren’t: in July 1919, a four-day race riot began when a black swimmer was stoned and drowned at the 29th Street beach. The racial prejudice of whites up to and including Mayor Richard J. Daley, the father of the current mayor, kept blacks restricted to crowded south- and west-side neighborhoods for decades, a residential pattern that has continued even as crowding has eased and African-Americans have moved into adjacent southern and western suburbs.
Millennium Park used to be a sandbar. Soldier Field used to look like a stadium. The Bulls used to be contenders. Sears used to be headquartered on the west side. Sears used to be headquartered in the Sears Tower. Sears used to be . . . oh, never mind. If you want more, here are three places where history reads better than fiction:
