CHICAGO
DAYS AL CAPONE MARSHALL FIELD DILLINGER CUBS WW2 DALEY SANDBURG LINCOLN-DOUGLAS
BEARS RICHARD SPECK 1967 BLIZZARD 1968 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION BLACK PANTHERS
SEARS TOWER CHICAGO DAILY NEWS CRASH OF FLIGHT 191 HAROLD WASHINGTON WRIGLEY
FIELD WHITE SOX COMINSKY PARK DANTRELL DAVIS NORTHWESTERN WILDCATS CHICAGO
BULLS NBA CHICAGO TRIBUNE CYRUS McCORMICK CHICAGO BOARD OF TRADE ILLINOIS AND
MICHIGAN CANAL GALENA & CHICAGO UNION JOSEPH MEDILL CIVIL WAR STOCKYARDS
RIVERSIDE THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE MONTGOMERY WARD ART INSTITUTE PALMER CASTLE
HOME INSURANCE BUILDING GEORGE STREETER ADLER & SULLIVAN FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
HULL HOUSE CHICAGO ORCHESTRA ELEVATED RAILWAY UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO COLUMBIAN
EXPOSITION PULLMAN STRIKE CHANUTES GLIDERS EVERLEIGH CLUB SISTER CARRIE
IROQUOIS FIRE CHICAGO DEFENDER GARY, INDIANA 1906 WORLD SERIES ESSANAY STUDIOS
LAKEFRONT MARKET SQUARE IN LAKE FOREST ROBERT R. McCORMICK EASTLAND DISASTER
1919 RACE RIOTS THE BLACK SOX SCANDAL PROHIBITION MICHIGAN AVENUE BRIDGE FIELD
MUSEUM CHICAGO THEATRE LEOPOLD AND LOEB CASE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO MUNICIPAL
AIRPORT OHARE ST. VALENTINES DAY MASSACRE 1929 STOCK MARKET CRASH SHOOTING OF
JAKE LINGLE GOSPEL MUSIC ANTON CERMAK FIRST ALL-STAR GAME REPUBLIC STEEL STRIKE
WW2 PARK FOREST PLANNED SUBURB BI-LEVEL COMMUTER TRAIN THE BLUES PLAYBOY
MAGAZINE LYRIC OPERA RICHARD J. DALEY CONGRESS EXPRESSWAY OUR LADY OF THE
ANGELS FIRE SECOND CITY IMPROV KENNEDY-NIXON DEBATE McCORMICK PLACE 1961
STANLEY CUP ROBERT TAYLOR HOMES 193 NFL CHAMPIONSHIP THE BEATLES MARTING LUTHER
KING, Jr THE CHICAGO SEVEN THE 1969 CUBS SEARS TOWER AMERICAN BUFFALO JOHN
WAYNE GACEY MURDERS JANE BYRNE POPE JOHN PAUL II WISCONSIN STEEL OPERATION GREYLORD
DEEP TUNNEL HEALY ROAD PRAIRIE THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART THE MUSEUM OF
SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY
150 DEFINING MOMENTS IN THE
HISTORY OF A GREAT CITY
SOFTBOUND BOOK in ENGLISH by the
STAFF OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
------------------------------------
Additional Information from
Internet Encyclopedia
Chicago has played a central
role in American economic, cultural and political history. Since the 1850s
Chicago has been one of the dominant metropolises in the Midwestern United
States, and has been the largest city in the Midwest since the 1880 census. The
area's recorded history begins with the arrival of French explorers,
missionaries and fur traders in the late 17th century and their interaction
with the local Pottawatomie Native Americans. Jean Baptiste Point du Sable was
the first permanent non-indigenous settler in the area, having a house at the
mouth of the Chicago River in the late 18th century. There were small
settlements and a U.S. Army fort, but the soldiers and settlers were all driven
off in 1812. The modern city was incorporated in 1837 by Northern businessmen
and grew rapidly from real estate speculation and the realization that it had a
commanding position in the emerging inland transportation network, based on
lake traffic and railroads, controlling access from the Great Lakes into the Mississippi
River basin.
Despite a fire in 1871 that
destroyed the Central Business District, the city grew exponentially, becoming
the nation's rail center and the dominant Midwestern center for manufacturing,
commerce, finance, higher education, religion, broadcasting, sports, jazz, and
high culture. The city was a magnet for European immigrantsat first Germans,
Irish and Scandinavians, then from the 1890s to 1914, Jews, Czechs, Poles and
Italians. They were all absorbed in the city's powerful ward-based political
machines. Many joined militant labor unions, and Chicago became notorious for
its violent strikes, but respected for its high wages.
Large numbers of African
Americans migrated from the South starting in the World War I era as part of
the Great Migration. Mexicans started arriving after 1910, and Puerto Ricans
after 1945. The Cook County suburbs grew rapidly after 1945, but the Democratic
party machine kept both the city and suburbs under control, especially under
mayor Richard J. Daley, who was chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party.
Deindustrialization after 1970 closed the stockyards and most of the steel
mills and factories, but the city retained its role as a financial and
transportation hub. Increasingly it emphasized its service roles in medicine,
higher education, and tourism. The city formed the political base for leaders
such as Stephen A. Douglas in the 1850s, Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and
Barack Obama in recent years.
In 1829, the Illinois
legislature appointed commissioners to locate a canal and lay out the
surrounding town. The commissioners employed James Thompson to survey and plat
the town of Chicago, which at the time had a population of less than 100.
Historians regard the August 4, 1830, filing of the plat as the official
recognition of a location known as Chicago.
Yankee entrepreneurs saw the
potential of Chicago as a transportation hub in the 1830s and engaged in land
speculation to obtain the choicest lots. On August 12, 1833, the Town of
Chicago was incorporated with a population of 350. The Chippewa, Odawa and
Potawatomi ceded land in Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan in the 1833 Treaty of
Chicago and were forced to move west of the Mississippi River by 1838. On July
12, 1834, the Illinois from Sackets Harbor, New York, was the first commercial
schooner to enter the harbor, a sign of the Great Lakes trade that would
benefit both Chicago and New York state. Chicago was granted a city
charter by the State of Illinois on March 4, 1837; it was part of the larger
Cook County. By 1840 the boom town had a population of over 4,000.
After 1830, the rich farmlands
of northern Illinois attracted Yankee settlers. Yankee real estate operators
created a city overnight in the 1830s. To open the surrounding farmlands to
trade, the Cook County commissioners built roads south and west. The latter
crossed the "dismal Nine-mile Swamp," the Des Plaines River, and went
southwest to Walker's Grove, now the Village of Plainfield. The roads enabled
hundreds of wagons per day of farm produce to arrive and so the entrepreneurs
built grain elevators and docks to load ships bound for points east through the
Great Lakes. Produce was shipped through the Erie Canal and down the Hudson River
to New York City; the growth of the Midwest farms expanded New York City as a
port.
In 1848, the opening of the
Illinois and Michigan Canal allowed shipping from the Great Lakes through
Chicago to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. The first rail line to
Chicago, the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, was completed the same year.
Chicago would go on to become the transportation hub of the United States, with
its road, rail, water, and later air connections. Chicago also became home to
national retailers offering catalog shopping such as Montgomery Ward and Sears,
Roebuck and Company, which used the transportation lines to ship all over the
nation.
By the 1850s, the construction
of railroads made Chicago a major hub and over 30 lines entered the city. The
main lines from the East ended in Chicago, and those oriented to the West began
in Chicago and so by 1860, the city had become the nation's trans-shipment and
warehousing center. Factories were created, most famously the harvester factory
that was opened in 1847 by Cyrus Hall McCormick. It was a processing center for
natural resource commodities extracted in the West. The Wisconsin forests
supported the millwork and lumber business; the Illinois hinterland provided
the wheat. Hundreds of thousands of hogs and cattle were shipped to Chicago for
slaughter, preserved in salt, and transported to eastern markets. By 1870,
refrigerated cars allowed the shipping of fresh meat to cities in the East.
The prairie bog nature of the
area provided a fertile ground for disease-carrying insects. In springtime,
Chicago was so muddy from the high water that horses could scarcely move.
Comical signs proclaiming "Fastest route to China" or "No Bottom
Here" were placed to warn people of the mud.
Travelers reported Chicago was
the filthiest city in America. The city created a massive sewer system. In the
first phase, sewage pipes were laid across the city above ground and used
gravity to move the waste. The city was built in a low-lying area subject to
flooding. In 1856, the city council decided that the entire city should be
elevated four to five feet by using a newly available jacking-up process. In
one instance, the five-story Brigg's Hotel, weighing 22,000 tons, was lifted
while it continued to operate. Observing that such a thing could never have
happened in Europe, the British historian Paul Johnson cites the astounding
feat as a dramatic example of American determination and ingenuity based on the
conviction that anything material is possible.
Although originally settled by
Yankees in the 1830s, the city in the 1840s had many Irish Catholics come as a
result of the Great Famine. Later in the century, the railroads, stockyards,
and other heavy industry of the late 19th century attracted a variety of
skilled workers from Europe, especially Germans, English, Swedes, Norwegians,
and Dutch. A small African-American community formed, led by activist leaders
like John Jones and Mary Richardson Jones, who established Chicago as a stop on
the Underground Railroad.
In 1840, Chicago was the 92nd
city in the United States by population. Its population grew so rapidly that 20
years later, it was the ninth city. In the pivotal year of 1848, Chicago saw
the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, its first steam locomotives,
the introduction of steam-powered grain elevators, the arrival of the
telegraph, and the founding of the Chicago Board of Trade. By 1857, Chicago was
the largest city in what was then called the Northwest. In 20 years, Chicago
grew from 4,000 people to over 90,000. Chicago surpassed St. Louis and
Cincinnati as the major city in the West and gained political notice as the
home of Stephen Douglas, the 1860 presidential nominee of the Northern
Democrats. The 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago nominated the
home-state candidate Abraham Lincoln. The city's government and voluntary
societies gave generous support to soldiers during the American Civil War.
Many of the newcomers were Irish
Catholic and German immigrants. Their neighborhood saloons, a center of male
social life, were attacked in the mid-1850s by the local Know-Nothing Party,
which drew its strength from evangelical Protestants. The new party was
anti-immigration and anti-liquor and called for the purification of politics by
reducing the power of the saloonkeepers. In 1855, the Know-Nothings elected
Levi Boone mayor, who banned Sunday sales of liquor and beer. His aggressive
law enforcement sparked the Lager Beer Riot of April 1855, which erupted
outside a courthouse in which eight Germans were being tried for liquor
ordinance violations. After 1865, saloons became community centers only for
local ethnic men, as reformers saw them as places that incited riotous behavior
and moral decay. Salons were also sources of musical entertainment. Francis
O'Neill, an Irish immigrant who later became police chief, published
compendiums of Irish music that were largely collected from other newcomers
playing in saloons.
By 1870, Chicago had grown to
become the nation's second-largest city and one of the largest cities in the
world. Between 1870 and 1900, Chicago grew from a city of 299,000 to nearly 1.7
million and was the fastest-growing city in world history. Chicago's
flourishing economy attracted huge numbers of new immigrants from Eastern and
Central Europe, especially Jews, Poles, and Italians, along with many smaller
groups. Many businesspeople and professionals arrived from the eastern states.
Relatively few new arrivals came from Chicago's rural hinterland. The
exponential growth put increasing pollution on the environment, as hazards to
public health impacted everyone.
Gilded Age
The Chicago Water Tower, one of
the few surviving buildings after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
A residential building in
Chicago's Lincoln Park in 1885, when the city had dirt roads and wooden
sidewalks.
Most of the city burned in the
1871 Great Chicago Fire. The damage from the fire was immense since 300 people
died, 18,000 buildings were destroyed, and nearly 100,000 of the city's 300,000
residents were left homeless. Several key factors exacerbated the spread of the
fire. Most of Chicago's buildings and sidewalks were then constructed of wood.
Also, the lack of attention to proper waste disposal practices, which was
sometimes deliberate to favor certain industries, left an abundance of
flammable pollutants in the Chicago River along which the fire spread from the
south to the north. The fire led to the incorporation of stringent fire-safety
codes, which included a strong preference for masonry construction.
The Danish immigrant Jens Jensen
arrived in 1886 and soon became a successful and celebrated landscape designer.
Jensen's work was characterized by a democratic approach to landscaping, which
was informed by his interest in social justice and conservation, and a
rejection of antidemocratic formalism. Among Jensen's creations were four
Chicago city parks, most famously Columbus Park. His work also included garden
design for some of the region's most influential millionaires.
The World's Columbian Exposition
of 1893 was constructed on former wetlands at the present location of Jackson
Park along Lake Michigan in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The land was
reclaimed according to a design by the landscape architect Frederick Law
Olmsted. The temporary pavilions, which followed a classical theme, were
designed by a committee of the city's architects under the direction of Daniel
Burnham. It was called the "White City" for the appearance of its
buildings.
The Exposition drew 27.5 million
visitors; is considered among the most influential world's fairs in history;
and affected art, architecture, and design throughout the nation. The classical
architectural style contributed to a revival of Beaux Arts architecture that
borrowed from historical styles, but Chicago was also developing the original
skyscraper and organic forms based in new technologies. The fair featured the
first and until recently the largest Ferris wheel ever built.
The soft, swampy ground near the
lake proved unstable ground for tall masonry buildings. That was an early
constraint, but builders developed the innovative use of steel framing for
support and invented the skyscraper in Chicago, which became a leader in modern
architecture and set the model nationwide for achieving vertical city
densities.
Developers and citizens began
immediate reconstruction on the existing Jeffersonian grid. The building boom
that followed saved the city's status as the transportation and trade hub of
the Midwest. Massive reconstruction using the newest materials and methods
catapulted Chicago into its status as a city on par with New York and became
the birthplace of modern architecture in the United States.
Rise of industry and commerce
Chicago became the center of the
nation's advertising industry after New York City. Albert Lasker, known as the
"father of modern advertising," made Chicago his base from 1898 to
1942. As head of the Lord and Thomas agency, Lasker devised a copywriting
technique that appealed directly to the psychology of the consumer. Women, who
seldom smoked cigarettes, were told that if they smoked Lucky Strikes, they
could stay slender. Lasker's use of radio, particularly with his campaigns for
Palmolive soap, Pepsodent toothpaste, Kotex products, and Lucky Strike
cigarettes, not only revolutionized the advertising industry but also
significantly changed popular culture.
Gambling
In Chicago, like other rapidly
growing industrial centers with large immigrant working-class neighborhoods,
gambling was a major issue. The city's elite upper-class had private clubs and
closely-supervised horse racing tracks. The middle-class reformers like Jane
Addams focused on the workers, who discovered freedom and independence in
gambling that were a world apart from their closely-supervised factory jobs and
gambled to validate risk-taking aspect of masculinity, betting heavily on dice,
card games, policy, and cock fights. By the 1850s, hundreds of saloons had
offered gambling opportunities, including off-track betting on the horses. The
historian Mark Holler argues that organized crime provided upward mobility to
ambitious ethnics. The high-income, high-visibility vice lords, and racketeers
built their careers and profits in ghetto neighborhoods and often branched into
local politics to protect their domains. For example, in 1868 to 1888, Michael
C. McDonald, "The Gambler King of Clark Street," kept numerous
Democratic machine politicians in his city on expense account to protect his
gambling empire and to keep the goo-goo reformers at bay.
In large cities, illegal
businesses like gambling and prostitution were typically contained in the
geographically-segregated red light districts. The business owners made
regularly-scheduled payments to police and politicians, which they treated as
licensing expenses. The informal rates became standardized. For example, in
Chicago, they ranged from $20 a month for a cheap brothel to $1000 a month for
luxurious operations in Chicago. Reform elements never accepted the segregated
vice districts and wanted them all destroyed, but in large cities, the
political machine was powerful enough to keep the reformers at bay. Finally,
around 1900 to 1910, the reformers grew politically strong enough to shut down
the system of vice segregation, and the survivors went underground.
20th century
Chicago's manufacturing and
retail sectors, fostered by the expansion of railroads throughout the upper
Midwest and East, grew rapidly and came to dominate the Midwest and greatly
influence the nation's economy.[39] The Chicago Union Stock Yards dominated the
packing trade. Chicago became the world's largest rail hub, and one of its
busiest ports by shipping traffic on the Great Lakes. Commodity resources, such
as lumber, iron and coal, were brought to Chicago and Ohio for processing, with
products shipped both East and West to support new growth.
Lake Michiganthe primary source
of fresh water for the citybecame polluted from the rapidly growing industries
in and around Chicago; a new way of procuring clean water was needed. In 1885
the civil engineer Lyman Edgar Cooley proposed the Chicago Sanitary and Ship
Canal. He envisioned a deep waterway that would dilute and divert the city's
sewage by funneling water from Lake Michigan into a canal, which would drain
into the Mississippi River via the Illinois River. Beyond presenting a solution
for Chicago's sewage problem, Cooley's proposal appealed to the economic need
to link the Midwest with America's central waterways to compete with East Coast
shipping and railroad industries.
Strong regional support for the
project led the Illinois legislature to circumvent the federal government and
complete the canal with state funding. The opening in January 1900 met with
controversy and a lawsuit against Chicago's appropriation of water from Lake
Michigan. By the 1920s the lawsuit was divided between the states of the
Mississippi River Valley, who supported the development of deep waterways
linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes states, which
feared sinking water levels might harm shipping in the lakes. In 1929 the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in support of Chicago's use of the canal to promote
commerce, but ordered the city to discontinue its use for sewage disposal.
New construction boomed in the
1920s, with notable landmarks such as the Merchandise Mart and art deco Chicago
Board of Trade Building completed in 1930. The Wall Street Crash of 1929, the
Great Depression and diversion of resources into World War II led to the
suspension for years of new construction.
The Century of Progress
International Exposition was the name of the World's Fair held on the Near
South Side lakefront from 1933 to 1934 to celebrate the city's centennial. The
theme of the fair was technological innovation over the century since Chicago's
founding. More than 40 million people visited the fair, which symbolized for
many hope for Chicago and the nation, then in the midst of the Great
Depression.
The demographics of the city
were changing in the early 20th century as black southern families migrated out
of the south, but while cities like Chicago empathized with the condition of
impoverished white children, black children were mostly excluded from the
private and religious institutions that provided homes for such children. Those
that did take in black dependent children were overcrowded and underfunded
because of institutional racism. Between 1899 and 1945 many of the city's black
children found themselves in the juvenile court system. The 1899 Juvenile Court
Act, supported by Progressive reformers, created a class of dependants for
orphans and other children lacking "proper parental care or
guardianship" but the court's designations of "delinquency" and
"dependency" were racialized so black children were far more likely
to be labeled as delinquents.
During the election of April 23,
1875, the voters of Chicago chose to operate under the Illinois Cities and
Villages Act of 1872. Chicago still operates under this act, in lieu of a
charter. The Cities and Villages Act has been revised several times since, and
may be found in Chapter 65 of the Illinois Compiled Statutes.
Late-19th-century big city
newspapers such as the Chicago Daily News - founded in 1875 by Melville Stone -
ushered in an era of news reporting that was, unlike earlier periods, in tune
with the particulars of community life in specific cities. Vigorous competition
between older and newer-style city papers soon broke out, centered on civic
activism and sensationalist reporting of urban political issues and the
numerous problems associated with rapid urban growth. Competition was
especially fierce between the Chicago Times (Democratic), the Chicago Tribune
(Republican), and the Daily News (independent), with the latter becoming the
city's most popular paper by the 1880s.[46] The city's boasting lobbyists and
politicians earned Chicago the nickname "Windy City" in the New York
press. The city adopted the nickname as its own.
Violence and crime
Polarized attitudes of labor and
business in Chicago prompted a strike by workers' lobbying for an eight-hour
work day, later named the Haymarket affair. A peaceful demonstration on May 4,
1886, at Haymarket near the west side was interrupted by a bomb thrown at
police; seven police officers were killed. Widespread violence broke out. A
group of anarchists were tried for inciting the riot and convicted. Several
were hanged and others were pardoned. The episode was a watershed moment in the
labor movement, and its history was commemorated in the annual May Day
celebrations.
By 1900, Progressive Era
political and legal reformers initiated far-ranging changes in the American
criminal justice system, with Chicago taking the lead.
The city became notorious
worldwide for its rate of murders in the early 20th century, yet the courts
failed to convict the killers. More than three-fourths of cases were not
closed. Even when the police made arrests in cases where killers' identities were
known, jurors typically exonerated or acquitted them. A blend of gender-,
race-, and class-based notions of justice trumped the rule of law, producing
low homicide conviction rates during a period of soaring violence.
During the late 19th and early
20th centuries, rates of domestic murder tripled in Chicago. Domestic homicide
was often a manifestation of strains in gender relations induced by urban and
industrial change. At the core of such family murders were male attempts to
preserve masculine authority. Yet, there were nuances in the motives for the
murder of family members, and study of the patterns of domestic homicide among
different ethnic groups reveals basic cultural differences. German male
immigrants tended to murder over declining status and the failure to achieve
economic prosperity. Italian men killed family members to save a gender-based
ideal of respectability that entailed patriarchal control over women and family
reputation. African American men, like the Germans, often murdered in response
to economic conditions but not over desperation about the future. Like the
Italians, the killers tended to be young, but family honor was not usually at
stake. Instead, black men murdered to regain control of wives and lovers who
resisted their patriarchal "rights".
Progressive reformers in the
business community created the Chicago Crime Commission (CCC) in 1919 after an
investigation into a robbery at a factory showed the city's criminal justice
system was deficient. The CCC initially served as a watchdog of the justice
system. After its suggestion that the city's justice system begin collecting
criminal records was rejected, the CCC assumed a more active role in fighting
crime. The commission's role expanded further after Frank J. Loesch became
president in 1928. Loesch recognized the need to eliminate the glamor that
Chicago's media typically attributed to criminals. Determined to expose the
violence of the crime world, Loesch drafted a list of "public
enemies"; among them was Al Capone, whom he made a scapegoat for
widespread social problems.
After the passage of
Prohibition, the 1920s brought international notoriety to Chicago. Bootleggers
and smugglers bringing in liquor from Canada formed powerful gangs. They
competed with each other for lucrative profits, and to evade the police, to
bring liquor to speakeasies and private clients. The most notorious was Al
Capone.
Immigration and migration in the
20th century
From 1890 to 1914, migrations
swelled, attracting to the city of mostly unskilled Catholic and Jewish
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Italians, Greeks,
Czechs, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Slovaks. World War I cut
off immigration from Europe, which brought hundreds of thousands of southern
blacks and whites into Northern cities to fill in the labor shortages. The
Immigration Act of 1924 restricted populations from southern and eastern
Europe, apart from refugees after World War II. The heavy annual turnover of
ethnic populations ended, and the groups stabilized, each favoring specific
neighborhoods.
While whites from rural areas
arrived and generally settled in the suburban parts of the city, large numbers
of blacks from the South arrived as well. The near South Side of the city
became the first Black residential area, as it had the oldest, less expensive
housing. Although restricted by segregation and competing ethnic groups such as
the Irish, gradually continued black migration caused this community to expand,
as well as the black neighborhoods on the near West Side. These were de facto
segregated areas (few blacks were tolerated in ethnic white neighborhoods); the
Irish and ethnic groups who had been longer in the city began to move to outer
areas and the suburbs. After World War II, the city built public housing for
working-class families to upgrade residential quality. The high-rise design of
such public housing proved a problem when industrial jobs left the city and
poor families became concentrated in the facilities. After 1950, public housing
high rises anchored poor black neighborhoods south and west of the Loop.
"Old stock" Americans
who relocated to Chicago after 1900 preferred the outlying areas and suburbs,
with their commutes eased by train lines, making Oak Park and Evanston enclaves
of the upper middle class. In the 1910s, high-rise luxury apartments were
constructed along the lakefront north of the Loop, continuing into the 21st
century. They attracted wealthy residents but few families with children, as
wealthier families moved to suburbs for the schools. There were problems in the
public school system; mostly Catholic students attended schools in the large
parochial system, which was of middling quality. There were a few private
schools. The Latin School, Francis Parker and later The Bateman School, all
centrally located served those who could afford to pay.
The northern and western suburbs
developed some of the best public schools in the nation, which were strongly
supported by their wealthier residents. The suburban trend accelerated after
1945, with the construction of highways and train lines that made commuting
easier. Middle-class Chicagoans headed to the outlying areas of the city, and
then into the Cook County and Dupage County suburbs. As ethnic Jews and Irish
rose in economic class, they left the city and headed north. Well-educated
migrants from around the country moved to the far suburbs.
Chicago's Polonia sustained
diverse political cultures in the early twentieth century, each with its own
newspaper. In 1920 the community had a choice of five daily papers from the
Socialist Dziennik Ludowy (People's Daily; 19071925) to the Polish Roman
Catholic Union's Dziennik Zjednoczenia (Union Daily; 19211939). The decision
to subscribe to a particular paper reaffirmed a particular ideology or
institutional network based on ethnicity and class, which lent itself to
different alliances and different strategies.
In 1926, the city hosted the
28th International Eucharistic Congress, a major event for the Catholic
community of Chicago.
As the First World War cut off
immigration, tens of thousands of African Americans came north in the Great
Migration out of the rural South. With new populations competing for limited
housing and jobs, especially on the South Side, social tensions rose in the
city. Postwar years were more difficult. Black veterans looked for more respect
for having served their nation, and some whites resented it.
In 1919, the Chicago race riot
erupted, in what became known as "Red Summer", when other major
cities also suffered mass racial violence based in competition for jobs and
housing as the country tried to absorb veterans in the postwar years. During
the riot, thirty-eight people died (23 black and 15 white) and over five
hundred were injured. Much of the violence against blacks in Chicago was led by
members of ethnic Irish athletic clubs, who had much political power in the
city and defended their "territory" against African Americans. As was
typical in these occurrences, more blacks than whites died in the violence.
Concentrating the family
resources to achieve home ownership was a common strategy in the ethnic
European neighborhoods. It meant sacrificing current consumption, and pulling
children out of school as soon as they could earn a wage. By 1900, working-class
ethnic immigrants owned homes at higher rates than native-born people. After
borrowing from friends and building associations, immigrants kept boarders,
grew market gardens, and opened home-based commercial laundries, eroding
home-work distinctions, while sending out women and children to work to repay
loans. They sought not middle-class upward mobility but the security of home
ownership. Many social workers wanted them to pursue upward job mobility (which
required more education), but realtors asserted that houses were better than a
bank for a poor man. With hindsight, and considering uninsured banks'
precariousness, this appears to have been true. Chicago's workers made immense
sacrifices for home ownership, contributing to Chicago's sprawling suburban geography
and to modern myths about the American dream. The Jewish community, by
contrast, rented apartments and maximized education and upward mobility for the
next generation.
Beginning in the 1940s, waves of
Hispanic immigrants began to arrive. The largest numbers were from Mexico and
Puerto Rico, as well as Cuba during Fidel Castro's rise. During the 1980s,
Hispanic immigrants were more likely to be from Central and South America.
1930s
After 1900 Chicago was a heavily
unionized city, apart from the factories (which were non-union until the
1930s). The Industrial Workers of the World was founded in Chicago in June 1905
at a convention of 200 socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists from
all over the United States. The Railroad brotherhoods were strong, as were the
crafts unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The AFL unions
operated through the Chicago Federation of Labor to minimize jurisdictional
conflicts, which caused many strikes as two unions battled to control a work
site.
The unionized teamsters in
Chicago enjoyed an unusually strong bargaining position when they contended
with employers around the city, or supported another union in a specific
strike. Their wagons could easily be positioned to disrupt streetcars and block
traffic. In addition, their families and neighborhood supporters often
surrounded and attacked the wagons of nonunion teamsters who were
strikebreaking. When the teamsters used their clout to engage in sympathy
strikes, employers decided to coordinate their antiunion efforts, claiming that
the teamsters held too much power over commerce in their control of the
streets. The teamsters' strike in 1905 represented a clash both over labor
issues and the public nature of the streets. To the employers, the streets were
arteries for commerce, while to the teamsters, they remained public spaces
integral to their neighborhoods.
World War II
On December 2, 1942, the world's
first controlled nuclear reaction was conducted at the University of Chicago as
part of the top secret Manhattan Project.
During World War II, the steel
mills in the city of Chicago alone accounted for 20% of all steel production in
the United States and 10% of global production. The city produced more steel
than the United Kingdom during the war, and surpassed Nazi Germany's output in
1943 (after barely missing in 1942).
The city's diversified
industrial base made it second only to Detroit in the value$24 billionof war
goods produced. Over 1,400 companies produced everything from field rations to
parachutes to torpedoes, while new aircraft plants employed 100,000 in the
construction of engines, aluminum sheeting, bombsights, and other components.
The Great Migration, which had been on pause due to the Depression, resumed at
an even faster pace as the 1910 - 1930 period, as hundreds of thousands of
black Americans arrived in the city to work in the steel mills, railroads, and
shipping yards.
Postwar
Returning World War II veterans
and immigrants from Europe (in particular displaced persons from Eastern
Europe) created a postwar economic boom and led to the development of huge
housing tracts on Chicago's Northwest and Southwest sides. The city was extensively
photographed during the postwar years by street photographers such as Richard
Nickel and Vivian Maier.
In the 1950s, the postwar desire
for new and improved housing, aided by new highways and commuter train lines,
caused many middle and higher income Americans to begin to move from the
inner-city of Chicago to the suburbs. Changes in industry after 1950, with
restructuring of the stockyards and steel industries, led to massive job losses
in the city for working-class people. The city population shrank by nearly
700,000. The City Council devised "Plan 21" to improve neighborhoods
and focused on creating "Suburbs within the city" near downtown and
the lakefront. It built public housing to try to improve housing standards in
the city. As a result, many poor were uprooted from newly created enclaves of
Black, Latino, and poor people in neighborhoods such as Near North, Wicker
Park, Lakeview, Uptown, CabriniGreen, West Town and Lincoln Park. The passage
of civil rights laws in the 1960s also affected Chicago and other northern
cities. In the 1960s and the 1970s, many middle- and upper-class Americans continued
to move from the city for better housing and schools in the suburbs.
Office building resumed in the
1960s. When completed in 1974, the Sears Tower, now known as the Willis Tower,
was at 1451 feet the world's tallest building. It was designed by the famous
Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which designed many of the
city's other famous buildings.