American Experience (1988–…): Season 15, Episode 5 - Chicago: City of the Century: Part 3 - full transcript

Narrator:
Europeans who had flocked

to 19th Century Chicago for jobs

crouched together for survival.

They created ethnic enclaves

little Germanys, Italys,

Warsaws, and Pragues,

glowering at each other with suspicion.

Douglas Bukowski, Writer:
I think the best way to look at

late 19th century Chicago

is to think of it as

a great boxing ring by the lake.



People just didn't get along here.

Nobody who was Polish wanted to have an Irish priest.

Nobody who was Irish wanted to go to a German church.

This whole notion of tolerance

for other groups

was foreign to people who didn't know

any other groups in the old country.

Narrator:
They made Chicago the most American city

as they clawed their way toward the American dream.

When they saw the dream vanish,

they turned to anarchy.

And met a fate

that seemed

less like justice



than revenge.

Chicago had grown so fast in the 19th Century

that it became unmanageable

- the most corrupt,

crime-ridden city in America.

After the bombing at Haymarket Square,

the union movement was crushed,

workers exploited.

Government was limited

- no safety nets,

no standards for housing,

public health or job safety.

People had to cope on their own.

Donald L. Miller, Author:
When you talk about what I call

buccaneering capitalism,

you're talking about Chicago.

It's just explosive,

reckless growth.

And it turned Chicago into a tremendous opportunity center

and a place of just boiling creativity.

But it also, later on,

turns it into an almost unlivable city,

because there were no restraints

or regulations on anything.

Narrator:
The world looked at Chicago with fear

and wonder,

and saw the future.

Narrator:
It was a utopian vision.

A city with broad streets

shaded by trees

and lined with fine buildings.

Statues glistened

and fountains flashed in the late afternoon sun.

Public buildings were of unparalleled grandeur.

Everyone had work.

There were no strikes.

No anarchy.

And...

no freedom.

Workers were regimented like an army.

Boston novelist Edward Bellamy

published Looking Backward

in 1887,

a year after Haymarket.

His utopian city was an uncanny foreshadowing

of the fantasy city

Chicago would create

for its World's Fair

six years later.

Donald L. Miller, Author:
The book was enormously popular.

Next to Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Bible,

it's the third most popular book in the 19th century.

Why?

It hit a nerve.

And this is the nerve.

How can we end this labor discord?

How can we turn cities around?

This is an age that still believes in cities.

Isn't it interesting

that the utopia is a city?

In England,

Robert Morris is writing at the same time

and utopia is in the countryside.

But this is a city.

And Americans still have this faith in cities.

Narrator:
Despite the difficulties they would face,

immigrants saw in Chicago

not problems

but opportunity.

When they arrived from New York,

many walked from Dearborn Station

to the Near West Side.

It became the city's most famous neighborhood.

America's most famous

after New York's Lower East Side.

Paul Green, Political Scientist:
Famous because they had the worst housing,

the worst schools,

the worst crime,

but it was a place where

poor people could

find a place to live.

Probably on Halsted and Maxwell Street,

uh... that area there

would be a place in which

most newcomers

at the bottom would start.

Most of the people couldn't wait to get out,

and most of them did.

Peggy Glowacki, Historian:
This was a neighborhood that was

tremendously active,

in which people were very transitory.

They uh... moved in and out of the neighborhood

as they had money,

uh... they moved around within the neighborhood

as they lost jobs and gained jobs.

Narrator:
Landlords turned two story houses

into four story tenements,

and packed the newcomers

into squalid backyard outbuildings

with little or no plumbing.

This is where Hilda Satt

settled at age 10 in 1892

when her parents emigrated

from a town on the Vistula River, in Poland.

Dena Epstein, Hilda Satt's Daughter:
They settled on the Near West Side

near Halstead Street

in a largely Russian-Jewish neighborhood.

There were blocks and blocks of stores

with signs in Hebrew or Yiddish,

and, uh, you could walk for miles

and not hear a word of English spoken.

Narrator:
Hilda's father easily found work

engraving tombstones.

He could write Polish,

Russian,

and German

as well as Hebrew and Yiddish.

After a year,

he died of a heart attack.

His wife went to work

peddling food door-to-door.

Along with her sister,

Hilda found work,

at age 13,

running one of 400 sewing machines

in a sweat-shop

on a sordid block on South State Street,

a mile from Marshall Field's elegant store.

She never had the money or the time

to shop there.

Epstein:
She operated a sewing machine.

And the thing that

impressed me,

because, I had never heard of such things,

they were charged rent

for the machines they operated,

they were charged for needles that broke,

for oil to oil the machine.

That was all taken out of their paychecks,

which were pretty small to begin with.

Narrator:
Hilda Satt's four dollars a week

helped feed her mother and four young siblings.

For others less fortunate,

Chicago provided no safety net

or welfare programs.

Help, if any,

came from the local ward politician.

Johnny Powers,

the most powerful alderman in the City Council,

represented the Near West Side.

As the neighborhood become more Italian than Irish,

he became known as Johnny de Pow.

Or "the Great Mourner"

for all the wakes he attended.

Green:
Funeral's a good place to go to meet people.

You could show your compassion.

I believe the phrase today would be

You could feel their pain,

and share it with them.

Occasional tear,

you say a little prayer, you move on.

Sometimes you'd do six, seven funerals a night.

You know, wakes were very important.

But he had food to give out,

he had favors to give out.

People get in trouble with the law,

he could get them out of jail.

Narrator:
One Christmas,

Powers gave away six tons of turkeys

and more than four tons of ducks and geese.

All he wanted from his constituents

was their vote.

He got it.

Perry Duis, Historian:
Politics, you have to understand at this time,

for a lot of people was

purely an economic uh... phenomenon.

You sold your vote because

that was one of the few things that you had to sell.

And the matter of morality,

the idea of political participation or citizenship

as an abstract phenomenon

was simply not a part of their world.

Narrator:
Powers paid for the turkeys

as well as a large house,

two saloons

and flashy diamonds

with kickbacks called "boodle".

Street car tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes

and others

who needed licenses for utilities

paid "boodle" to each alderman

for the use of streets in his ward.

As head of the City Council,

Johnny Powers was "Prince of the Boodlers."

Yerkes played the game.

Miller:
Yerkes put it like this:

This is a deal maker's town.

This is a hustler's city and

they're selling the city streets here,

to the highest bidder.

And guess what?

I'll be the highest bidder.

Powers would say to Yerkes,

"I not only," you know, "want a payoff.

What I want is, when the line's up,

if it's through an Irish neighborhood,

I want all Irish conductors on those lines."

So, Powers could stand there on the sidewalk and say,

"Look at that streetcar line.

It's all our boys on there that are running the thing."

Yerkes, yeah, he's corrupt as hell.

But he feels that he's come into a city that is

the most corrupt he's ever seen.

Duis:
Mayor Carter Harrison lecturing at Harvard

once said that

someone came in to take a picture of the city council

and all the aldermen ducked under the desks

because they thought it was a

police identification photograph.

Narrator:
Though outnumbered by Germans two to on,

the Irish controlled ward politics

and benefited from its patronage.

Walking a police beat

was a step up from building railroads.

The system was sustained

through corrupt elections.

In the 1883 municipal elections

George Washington

cast his ballot in the Ninth Ward,

as did Thomas Jefferson

and Abraham Lincoln.

The police once locked up

25 Polish Republicans

until the polls closed.

To thwart Germans voting on their way to work,

the Irish changed voting places at night.

Germans supporting anti-machine candidates

were driven from the polls

by Irish police.

Green:
It was a rough business.

You didn't hire too many college graduates.

The term right-hand man

I really believe started in Chicago,

because you wanted someone

who had a good right.

Edward M. Burke, Alderman:
There was kidnappings,

there were murders,

there were bombings,

there were ballot irregularities.

I'm reminded of that old story about the lady that

lived her whole life in Vincenz,

Indiana, and she was a loyal, committed Democrat.

And she provided in her will

that when she died,

she wanted to be buried in Chicago,

because she wanted to remain active in the party.

(laughs)

Narrator:
Not far from the Near West Side,

close to the train stations and hotels,

was the red light and gambling district

known as the Levee.

It was a paradise for pleasure seekers

and for hustlers.

Thomas J. O'Gorman, Writer:
Rubes from Iowa would come in

with their pockets filled with money

and they'd go into some bordello,

and the next thing you'd know

they'd be standing out in the street

in their long underwear and they

they wouldn't even have the hat they came in with.

Duis:
Mickey Finn was a bartender

who operated a place

in the Levee district and allegedly

placed knockout drops in the drinks

of unfortunate strangers who were,

came into his place,

and they would be relieved of

their valuables,

sometimes their clothing,

and cast out into an alley.

Miller:
There were a number of types of

houses of prostitution.

There were cribs.

They were awful places.

You could get sex for a nickel in a crib.

They were usually women

who were opium addicts.

And then you moved up

the scale as it were.

Narrator:
The Sporting and Club House Directory

pointed men to the upscale bordellos.

Carrie Watson's in the 1880s

and the Everleigh Club at the end of the century

were run like regal men's clubs

with luxurious parlors where guests were served

chilled wine in silver goblets

by silk-gowned women.

The walls of bedrooms

were covered with expensive paintings

and tapestries.

O'Gorman:
Well the Everleigh Club was probably

the most prestigious bordello in Chicago.

The story goes that one of Marshall Field's sons,

who supposedly died at home,

actually died at the Everleigh Club,

and they dressed him

and got him back

to the big mansion on the South Side

so he could be found dead there.

But the Everleigh sisters

ran this kind of gilded bordello.

They wouldn't slip you a Mickey Finn,

and you'd come out with your clothes on.

They were really the grand madams of Chicago.

Narrator:
The madams contributed generously

to the campaigns of the First Ward's aldermen.

One was "Bathhouse" John Coughlin,

a cheerful outgoing Irishman

who perfected his massaging skills

as chief rubber in the Turkish bath at the Palmer House.

There was no better place for a bath

after a riotous evening in the Levee.

When he won re-election in 1893,

Mayor Carter Harrison closed down

some gambling dens in the First Ward,

including the dice game

over the saloon of Michael Kenna.

A quiet, unsmiling political wizard,

Kenna, only five feet one inch,

was known as "Hinky Dink".

Hinky Dink called "Bathhouse" Coughlin.

"John," he growled to The Bath,

who had not supported Harrison,

we ain't getting the dough,

We got a good thing, and we want to hold on."

"Now, behave and soft-soap Carter."

Bath House Coughlin made peace with the Mayor.

"'I promise loyalty to you, Mr. Maar.

We're getting an organization that's the best.

The organization is all yours, Mr. Maar.'"

The Bath and Hinky Dink

muscled out King Mike McDonald

and became for forty years

"the Lords of the Levee."

They protected the gambling dens

after taking their cut.

"Never take anything big,"

Congressman William Mason advised "the Bath"

at Billy Boyle's chophouse.

"Stick to the little stuff.

It's safer."

Miller:
Carter Harrison was lenient about this.

There's a great story about him.

A group of ministers came to his house, a true story,

and complained about

that there were 6 or 7 "gambling hells"

as they called them,

operating the last night,

full blast, all night,

on Clark Street.

He goes, "I know. I was down there and it was great."

[laughs]

Green:
He had the ability to deal with the gamblers

and the people running the First Ward.

And he would also have the ability

to deal with the people who were building the symphony.

Potter Palmer,

one of the wealthiest men in Chicago,

and his wife

were big Carter Harrison supporters.

They would open up the Palmer House for

election night for Carter Harrison

so the unwashed could drink at the famous

Potter Palmer House bar.

Narrator:
Harrison was a distant relative of two presidents

and a Yale graduate.

He had come to Chicago from Kentucky in 1855

"for a few years," he said,

"until I can make enough

to grease my own and my children's wheels

for all time to come."

He never left .

He made money in real estate,

then entered politics

and tried to bridge the gap

between labor and capital,

between Protestant industrialists

and the largely Catholic immigrants.

"Ours is a cosmopolitan city

aggregated from many nationalities,"

he told the City Council

when he first became Mayor in 1879.

" The failure to recognize that

"each has its own civilization," he said,

"would be both ungenerous

and unwise."

On September 18, 1889

an aristocratic young women

moved into a house in the Near West Side,

the neighborhood of Johnny Powers,

Prince of the Boodlers,

to see if she could help.

The work she did

would make Jane Addams

the most famous woman in America,

the most famous woman in the world

after Queen Victoria.

The press would call her

"Saint Jane."

Addams was born in Cedarville,

an Illinois prairie town,

the pampered daughter of its wealthiest merchant.

She was among the first generation of women

to graduate from college.

Peggy Glowacki, Historian:
She graduated with energy and enthusiasm,

and nowhere to expend it.

As a young single woman

at the time,

she was expected to

either marry

or stay home and become everyone's

favorite aunt

and take care of the family.

And she wanted more from her life.

Narrator:
She took two grand tours of Europe,

and when she tired of the galleries,

she wandered into White Chapel,

a slum in London's East End.

There she found her calling.

Dominic Pacyga, Historian:
She goes through an epiphanal of experience.

It's kind of a slap in the face.

She writes something like,

"You know, there were these prostitutes in White Chapel."

This is Jack the Ripper time, right?

And she sees 12-year-old, 13-year-old prostitutes

and she says,

"There but for the grace of God go I.

Those people look like little Janey.

Uh... uh, so, why is,

you know, back home we're saying,

Well, that's those people who do that,

those people from eastern Europe, or southern Europe,

or Black people."

But here's a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant prostitute

that could be Jane Addams.

So what's the difference between me and that girl?"

Narrator:
Jane Addams visited Toynbee Hall

in the East End,

the world's first settlement house,

established by Oxford graduates.

To break down class barriers,

they taught art and literature to the poor.

In Chicago

she bought the run-down mansion of Charles Hull,

now surrounded by a sea of immigrants

in the city's worst neighborhood.

At age 29 Jane Addams established Hull-House,

her own settlement house, in the Near West Side.

She recruited about 20 upper class white women

and moved in.

She decided to move into the community,

because she'd learned from the boys at Toynbee Hall

that the only way to understand poverty was to live

the life of poverty, was to move into it.

Victoria Brown, Historian:
What Jane Addams originally hoped to accomplish

sounds quite humble.

It was a desire to create

mutual social relations

between working class

and

the steward class, or the

more blessed members of society.

Her belief was

that democracy is enhanced

if every member of the democracy

understands the point of view

of other members of the democracy.

Narrator:
She began by offering her poor neighbors,

as Toynbee Hall had,

upper class culture,

including classes in Shakespeare.

Now, imagine this,

you know, Shakespeare on the West Side,

in the middle of the West Side.

These people are poor.

They don't necessarily know

where their next meal's coming from.

But the crazy lady who...

opened what looked to be a whore house

but it's really something called a settlement house,

wants them to sit around and have tea

and discuss somebody named Shakespeare.

I would have loved to have been there

for that first

meeting of the Shakespeare club at Hull-House.

She was attracting

a working class population

of what I might call strivers,

who aspired to middle-class status.

And they did attend these classes because

that was an avenue of survival and

very popular English classes were taught

at Hull-House.

People were not conscripted to take those classes,

people were grateful for an opportunity

to have somebody teach them English for free,

and in a setting in which

they were going to be treated with dignity.

Narrator:
Addams believed in the refining power of art.

Near West Side visitors were treated

to reproductions of the European masters.

She soon learned

her neighbors had more basic needs.

"We were ready to perform the humblest neighborhood services,"

she later wrote.

"We were asked to wash the newborn babies,

and to prepare the dead for burial,

to nurse the sick

and to 'mind the children.'"

Supported by wealthy patrons,

Hull-House ran a nursery,

kindergarten classes,

clubs for older children,

and night classes for adults.

It offered people who could not bathe all winter

public baths,

a gymnasium,

a swimming pool

and the city's first public playground.

When a local synagogue could no longer support its orchestra,

Russian immigrants brought their eleven year-old son

- and his clarinet -

to Hull-House.

Benny Goodman

joined the Hull-House band.

When Hilda Satt dropped out of the Jewish Training School

to sew cuffs in a sweat-shop,

she took evening classes

at Hull-House.

Epstein:
And one of the courses she took

was in creative writing,

and the man who taught that course

was the secretary to the President of the University of Chicago.

Apparently, he was so impressed

by what she produced

that he arranged for her to get a scholarship

to the University of Chicago

for one quarter, that's all.

But she went from 4th grade

to the University of Chicago,

which in itself is kind of remarkable,

and she placed out of freshman English.

I was just astonished at that.

Narrator:
Hull-House helped Hilda Satt

escape the poverty of the Near West Side.

She met a young man who liked the theater,

married him and moved to Wisconsin.

Her daughter Dena

grew up in a working class area in Wisconsin

and went to the University of Chicago

on a scholarship.

Her granddaughter Suzanne Epstein

got her doctorate at MIT,

runs a lab for the Food and Drug Administration

and lives in upscale Bethesda, Maryland.

Many of the 9,000 visitors a week

that Hull-House would come to attract

came to hear lectures on the pressing issues of the day.

Glowacki:
Jane Addams was a great believer

in free speech.

Hull-House had socialists come and talk here,

they had anarchists come and talk here,

they even had vegetarians come and talk here.

So they were open to ideas,

they wanted them to be out in the public.

Narrator:
Some Hull-House projects

were more successful than others.

Tearing down a tenement to build a playground

was not a success.

Bukowski:
People were really hostile

for a reason that no one in the settlement house

ever thought about.

And it was that

by having this tenement torn down,

they had in effect reduced

the number of apartments available.

And what they learned is that

a ratty apartment is better than no apartment at all.

Narrator:
Another project was to provide ready-made meals

for women to take home to their families.

Sounds like a great idea.

People stayed away in droves.

There was a lot of creamed codfish on the menu,

and mutton stew,

no spaghetti,

no kielbasa,

people in this neighborhood were not interested

in Hull-House's sort of sanitized version of good food.

They also

may have offended

the sensibilities of the women in this neighborhood.

The role of cooking for your family

was considered a very primary

role for most women.

And who were these young women?

How dare they

try to cook for people's families?

So the public kitchen was never

much of a success.

Narrator:
Jane Addams had more success

when she tackled the garbage problem.

The alleyways of the Near West Side

were piled high with garbage

infested with maggots.

Brown:
Children were playing with maggots

as if they were little pets.

And she recognized that this was

tremendously dangerous for the health of the community.

There was diphtheria in this community,

there was typhoid in this community,

there was a high death rate of

children below the age of five.

Leon Despres, Former Alderman:
The ward bosses just didn't care about such things.

They didn't care about health measures.

The positions were

a political patronage positions,

the people in charge of

getting rid of the garbage

were not interested in their task,

and the ward bosses were interested in the patronage,

not in the cleaning of garbage.

Narrator:
Jane Addams tried to unseat

Johnny Powers as alderman

and lost.

He could get voters jobs.

She could not.

She did get herself appointed

the ward's garbage inspector,

at $1000 a year,

the only paying job she ever had.

Peggy Glowacki, Hull House Museum:
Jane Addams got up every morning

at the crack of dawn,

and followed the garbage wagons

through this neighborhood.

Garbage was put into

wooden boxes that were basically

nailed to the wooden sidewalks,

and so it wasn't simply a matter of sort of

picking up the box

and throwing it into the back of a wagon.

You had to shovel this garbage out.

Now, if you were a

political patronage appointee,

chances are you didn't feel

much incentive to dig too deep

into the garbage boxes,

and she made sure they hit bottom.

Narrator:
Most immigrants survived

without the benefit of settlement houses.

Reporter Theodore Dreiser

wrote of a "hard, constructive animality"

as he walked the streets of Chicago.

In the can-cluttered yards of broken-down cottages,

"you could find men who were tanning dog

or cat hides, or making soap,

or sorting rags, or picking chickens.

In some neighborhoods the rancidity of dirt

or the bony stark bleakness of poverty fairly shouted,

but if such neighborhoods were here,"

he wrote,

"they were never still, decaying pools of misery.

Dan Rostenkowski, Former Congressman:
There was opportunity here

and if you worked hard

you could make it.

They didn't view it as poverty.

It was struggling to make a living,

to give your kids an education,

to enjoy the benefits of freedom.

Narrator:
To survive,

immigrants banded together

in a defensive communalism.

They created neighborhoods.

A little Ireland,

a little Germany,

a little Poland.

Rostenkowski:
My grandfather on my mother's side was a...

driving a team of horses for the streetcar.

My mother used to tell me that

if you were going that way

you'd put your shoe on the window sill,

point the shoe that way,

and the conductor would stop

and ring the bell until you came down

and got on the street car, to go that way.

If you were going the other way

you pointed the shoe that way

and the conductor stopped,

looked up at the window.

Everybody felt that they lived in a community.

Narrator:
Communities were anchored by churches.

St. Stanislaus Kostka

in "Polish Downtown"

became by the end of the 19th Century

one of the largest Catholic parishes in the world.

In 1871

the Irish bishop appointed a Lithuanian

as its first priest.

After six Poles beat him senseless,

he scurried back to Pennsylvania.

The bishop replaced him with a Polish priest.

Green:
This was not a politically correct city.

We had people in the same religion

refusing to go to some other nationality's church.

You had all this ethnic diversity

within the boundaries of a city,

but certainly not working on diversity issues.

People write about Chicago

being this most racially segregated city.

Before there was a race issue,

Chicago was the most ethnically segregated city.

Narrator:
Communities developed their own institutions.

Building and loan associations

provided mortgages.

Peter Rostenkowski,

Dan's grandfather,

established one in his house

after he arrived in Chicago in 1868.

I remember it being called the Home Loan Bank,

and... uh...

[laughs]

people came in,

put the 75 cents in and took the receipt out,

and there was nobody in the office,

the office was left unattended.

And at the end of the day

my grandfather would come back

from whatever he was doing

and take out the change,

and noticed that the receipts were gone,

knowing that the home loan was... uh...

was reinstated.

It was a kind of club.

You pay into the club and eventually,

if you're there long enough

and you've put in enough money,

you qualify for a mortgage

and you can buy your house.

So what you get here is

a very strong example

of community self-reliance.

Now, imagine a bank,

you're a peasant five years removed from Galicia.

You come downtown,

you go on LaSalle Street,

you walk into a bank,

and you see this...

beautiful marble room

where people do business.

You're scared out of your wits.

So what they do instead

is they rely on this cultural tradition,

the building and loan.

Narrator:
Ethnic saloons were more than places to drink.

They were places to gather,

read a newspaper,

deposit valuables in a safe.

For people who moved or were evicted,

they became a permanent address.

Duis:
There are many stories where

someone arriving from the Old Country

would be clutching an address of a saloon,

and someone would have to be sent

from the saloon to the relative's house

in order to greet them.

And then often their trunks

would end up in the basement of the saloon,

being stored there.

Narrator:
Church schools gave immigrant children

a sense of community

while they eased the transition

into American life.

O'Gorman:
You went to the Catholic school and they'd tell you,

"Wash your hands and face.

Put on a clean shirt.

Stand up when a woman walks in the room."

I mean, they reinforced social behavior,

you know, in many ways it's the stuff Jesse Jackson and

the leaders within the African-American community know.

How do you connect people to opportunity?

How do you connect people to power?

Well, I believe this is really

a strong component of Catholic education.

You might have had a Polish order of nuns teaching you,

but you had to learn English and you had to speak it.

You might not speak it at home,

but you had to speak it at school.

There was no romantic reverence for language.

And so within a generation

you, you could

you could leave behind the baggage

that kept you

for the most part a peasant,

and... um... and, and...

and move on.

Pacyga:
It's an ironic kind of way,

those churches and those institutions and those schools

were most successful

when they allowed people the mobility

to leave those neighborhoods.

You do see a very slow

but obvious generational mobility.

If you didn't, people wouldn't come.

And that's important.

Narrator:
Charles Larson,

a blacksmith,

left Sweden in 1890 at age 21.

He settled in Chicago

and forged parts for police and fire wagons.

He bought a steam hammer.

His sons bought one of the largest in Chicago.

In World War II,

they forged parts

for the 16 inch guns of battleships.

His grandsons fashion titanium components

for the space shuttle.

A minister in the early 1880s

noted that Chicago

was the only city of its size in the world

with not "a single structure built

by local benevolence."

It was so dirty

and barren of culture

that no one vacationed there.

In the decade after Haymarket,

the sons of Chicago's business elite

showed the world

their city was about

more than bomb throwers

and pig stickers.

They built cultural institutions

that would uplift the city

as churches uplifted the neighborhoods.

In 1887

Charles Hutchinson, son of a pork packer,

opened the Art Institute.

He rushed to Tuscany

to snap up a Rembrandt and other treasures

from a widowed princess.

He "probably paid $1,000 a foot

for his Rubens, Rembrandts and Van Dykes, "

New York reporters scoffed,

and will be led on a float through the streets

"by a team of milk white Berkshire hogs."

"We have made our money in pigs,"

Hutchinson retorted,

"is that any reason we should not spend it on paintings?"

Hutchinson wanted to raise the cultural level

of hard driving business men

like his father,

who he said were in "a state of slavery,

mere machines devoted to business."

His father was dismayed.

Helen L. Horowitz, Historian:
Charles Hutchinson bought

a French painting of a sheep meadow,

a pastoral scene,

and his father looked at it, and he said,

Think of it,

my son paid $500 a piece

for five sheep,

when I could have bought

each one of them, live, for $2 a head.

Narrator:
Charles Hutchinson was another

who believed in the refining power of beauty.

Horowitz:
No modernist carries around this notion of art,

but in this period,

art was meant to

elevate,

to refine.

The word refine was a very clear metaphor

for what they wanted in the human self.

The body was filled with all sorts of

urges and desires and

material wishes,

and you take that dross

and you take it through

the prism of art and you refine

that into a more elevated self.

Narrator:
By the early 20th Century

the Art Institute was drawing more visitors

than Boston's Museum of Fine Arts

or New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It charged no admission on Sundays,

the workingman's day off.

One regular visitor

was a Polish immigrant from Packingtown.

"We have built this institution for the public

not for a few,"

Hutchinson said.

"We want the people of Chicago

to feel it is their property."

Neil Harris, Historian:
Did people give to the art museum

or support the public library movement

to provide distraction,

to avoid concentration on the economic differences,

which separated the haves or have-nots?

Were these instruments of social control?

Or are they instruments actually of

inspirational uplift?

Historians have spilled a lot of ink

on these questions.

Uplift has, at, at its center, I think,

the notion that institutions could improve

the spiritual welfare of the population as a whole.

Narrator:
Another who tried to improve the welfare of the people

was Montgomery Ward.

He looked down

from his towering mail order headquarters

on Michigan Avenue

and saw Grant Park

and a waterfront despoiled

by the Illinois Central tracks.

Battling developers who valued the land,

Ward led a 13 year campaign

to enforce the decision made in 1836

that the lakefront remain

"forever open, free of any buildings or obstruction."

He even opposed Marshall Field

for wanting to build a museum in the park.

"I fought for the poor people,"

he said,

"not the millionaires."

Despres:
He had to fight everyone.

The Tribune a powerful newspaper

in the nineteenth century was against him.

The other owners on Michigan Avenue

were against him.

He had very little support.

The Field family

threatened

not to give money for the Field Museum

if he prevailed.

But he kept on to save the lakefront for Chicago,

and finally

the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld him.

Narrator:
The Field family

agreed to build a Museum of Natural History,

one of the landmarks on Chicago's lakefront,

south of Grant Park.

The park remains "forever open,

free of any obstruction."

In November 1889,

Chicago unveiled a new music hall,

the Auditorium Theater.

Bankrolled by businessmen rallied by Ferdinand Peck,

it was the first major commission

for Louie Sullivan,

the young partner

of an established acoustical engineer.

Tim Samuelson, Chicago Historical Society:
Dankmar Adler and Louie Sullivan

were given the job to do it.

Why?

Not because of Sullivan,

but because they knew that Dankmar Adler

could give them the best possible theatre.

Sullivan just kind of came along

as part of the package.

Narrator:
Like the poet Walt Whitman

whom he admired,

Sullivan was obsessed

with the idea of democracy.

Harris:
One of Sullivan's notions about the Auditorium was

that it was democratic

because it didn't have the boxes

that the European opera houses did.

The purchase of a box

and the presence in a certain box

of the wealthy

was part of the opera ritual.

The old concert halls were hierarchical.

You know,

one box on top, on top on the other.

Kings and queens sat at one, and all, you know,

boxes were separated by class.

The Auditorium was democratic.

You could see from every seat.

You could hear from every seat.

Caruso sang there and said

you could hear a pin that drop.

That was the Auditorium.

Samuelson:
When the theater first opened up,

there was going to be a special concert

for the working people of Chicago.

And someone on the Auditorium board

had suggested that they should put some kind of

covering over the seats,

so that the workmen's dirty clothing

would not soil the seats.

And there are stories of Ferdinand Peck

stomping his foot

and saying no,

that if he could cover them with anything,

he would cover them

even finer velvets than were on there.

And I think this kind of gives you an idea

of the democratic ideals

that were very much a part of the Auditorium project.

Narrator:
At the opening banquet,

the mayor praised the businessmen who had backed it

- not for money

but for "public spirit",

for "the honor and glory of their city."

In a city of talented, music loving Germans,

the Chicago Symphony,

which performed in the Auditorium Theater,

never advertised in German language newspapers.

The democratic ideals had their limits.

The theater was part of the Auditorium Building,

at the time the largest building in the world,

the tallest structure in North America.

To help pay for the theater,

it included a hotel

and an office building.

Duis:
The idea that the tallest building

should be in Chicago rather than in New York

is something that for them is...

It's physical, you can't argue with it.

So that if you have a great orchestra

or a great artist

and Eastern critics are dismissive,

then, well,

how are you going to argue back and forth?

Maybe they know more, or whatever.

But the building is there,

and by golly you can't argue with something physical.

And I think that obsession with architecture

really has to do with

the city's desire to be

a world class city.

Narrator:
The men who built the Auditorium Building

featured it in an ad in Harper's

in 1889

as they made their case for Chicago

as the site for the 1892 World's Fair.

They also trumpeted their stock yards.

Harris:
This was the

four hundredth anniversary of the Colombian voyage.

Uh, Columbus didn't get to Chicago,

although you wouldn't have known that

from, um, the way Chicagoans talked.

Narrator:
"The men who have helped build Chicago

want this fair,"

their resolution read,

" and they intend to get it."

Miller:
And their argument was:

The center of gravity

in the country.

Power and population is shifting gradually to the Midwest.

And a train ride from New York to Chicago

is a train ride to the heart of the country.

You can see America.

You just come into New York, you won't see America.

It's also, they said, a train ride into the future,

because you'll see the city of the future,

a city built completely from scratch,

from the ground up.

Narrator:
In two and one half years,

Frederick Law Olmsted,

America's most famous landscape architect,

working with architects Daniel Burnham

and John Wellborn Root,

converted a swamp on the shore of Lake Michigan

into an American Venice

with inter-linked canals, basins and lagoons

It was the most gigantic landscape scheme

ever attempted in the country.

"It is safe to say,"

the Hartford Courant reported

"that no other community in all history

except the Chicago community could have done it.

In no other city is there the requisite public spirit,

generosity,

and headlong energy."

The opening ball was held on time

in the Auditorium Theater in October 1892.

Harriet Pullman organized the dancing lessons.

George went through the motions.

He once wrote his daughter Florence:

"You provide the sort of family happiness

I don't get from your mother."

Marshall Field

could give the lady what she wants at work,

not at night.

He was on the verge of a divorce.

Phillip Armour was up way past his bed time.

Hostess Bertha Palmer

featured a gown of yellow satin with puffs of velvet

from Worth's in Paris.

Potter tagged along.

There were no sightings of Gustavus Swift.

He may have been inspecting the sewer

at Bubbly Creek.

The Prairie Avenue crowd took its dancing lessons

at Bournique's on 23rd Street.

General Phil Sheridan

advanced with military single mindedness

and "stepped on my toes,"

one partner sighed,

"and did not reverse until I was dizzy."

This elite group

controlled Chicago's commerce,

its culture.

Now the Fair.

The world would descend on their city in May.

They had time to regain control of its politics.

Tribune editor Joseph Medill

would see to that.

It meant defeating Carter Harrison

in his bid for a fifth term as mayor.

Harrison

who put on Polish costumes for Polish festivals.

Who accepted the neighborhoods in all their unruliness.

Harrison

who tolerated gambling and prostitution.

Who supported labor unions.

Who had even allowed the anarchists to rally.

Miller:
And Medill is just hammering away

at him in the press.

He's on his editors all the time,

"Get this guy."

Even though he respected him in private,

but "Get him."

And... it's easily

the most vituperative campaign in Chicago history.

They went at him hammer and tong,

and mostly on the anarchist issue.

"He's the guy who let them march in the streets.

He's the guy who encouraged the 8-hour day.

He's the guy

who encouraged the violence,

and testified at the Haymarket case

that there was no violence

when he left the Haymarket Square."

Narrator:
The businessmen ran one of their own,

Samuel Allerton,

a millionaire pork packer.

Miller:
He says,

"I am a businessman, not a politician."

Medill says,

"Fine. We'll push him as a businessman.

This is a business city.

It's the second largest corporation

in the country," he said.

New York's the first.

And this guy will run it like a business corporation,

with efficiency and elan and leadership.

Narrator:
The Tribune and the businessmen could not match

Harrison's support in the ethnic neighborhoods.

Carter Henry Harrison won the battle for the soul of Chicago

by the largest margin of his five campaigns.

The celebration in neighborhood saloons

lasted all night.

It was then that Bathhouse Coughlin

soft soaped the mayor,

pledging his support,

for a price.

"You take the Fair now, Mr. Maar.

I ain't on a single Fair committee.

I'm used to meeting people down here in the First,

and I ought to be on some of them reception committees.'''

"'I'll see that you get on some committees,'

Harrison replied.

'I welcome your support.'"

As the New York press

trumpeted the view that Chicago would

"put on a cattle show on the shores of Lake Michigan,"

The Honorable John "Bathhouse" Coughlin

took his turn at Central Station,

greeting visitors from around the world.

The business elite was dealt a further blow

when a monument to the anarchists was unveiled.

The next day

Governor John Peter Altgeld

pardoned the three who were in prison

and denounced the trial.

No matter how fanatical their beliefs,

Altgeld said,

"no greater damage could possible threaten our institutions

than to have the courts of justice run wild

or to give way to popular clamor."

The pardon made Altgeld the most hated man in America.

The press charged him with encouraging anarchy.

The Tribune attacked his German birth:

"He does not reason like an American,

nor feel like one,

and consequently does not behave like one."

On May 1, 1893,

Chicago's elite offered the world

what they wanted the world to see.

Two hundred thousand people were on hand

when President Grover Cleveland opened the Fair.

The fair's buildings were temporary structures

coated with plaster.

Called The White City,

it was the businessmen's idea of civic order

-white, clean and safe-

everything Chicago was not.

Miller:
It's an imaging thing.

The Fair is an imaging thing.

Chicago hated this image of the black city,

the city of smoke,

and soot, and dirt, and pollution, and

gambling houses, and whatever.

So the idea is you bring them in

to the first class hotels.

And Olmsted set this up beautifully.

They would take excursion boats

from downtown

and sweep across

the magnificent skyline

and land at the Fair,

and take a moveable sidewalk

and go into the Court of Honor,

and here's the new Chicago.

It provided just the things to settle,

I think, the nerve a little bit after Haymarket.

Narrator:
This utopian world

was reflected by the Fair's official photography.

All is orderly.

The weather, perfect.

People, lifeless.

Harris:
They presented pictures of these European-like boulevards,

canals with gondolas and gondoliers,

escorting elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen.

It was presented as an upper middle class festival.

Safe, clean, lots of music, lots of art.

Despres:
My parents spoke about the World's Fair

with the greatest enthusiasm and interest.

It made a tremendous impression on them.

My mother was 17.

And my father was 31.

They spoke about the Palace of Fine Arts.

They had the idea that this was

the greatest art in the world

that was brought to Chicago for the World's Fair.

They talked about a painting,

"Breaking Home Ties",

of a young boy leaving home to go to work,

and that was the experience of my father.

Narrator:
The Fair's architecture

reflected not the innovation
that inspired the new downtown,

but classical Greece and Rome.

Harris:
The Fair certainly

was orthodoxy in action.

That is, it said,

"We admire what you have done,

and we can reproduce it

only on an even better and grander scale."

For Americans like Sullivan

this represented a defeat

rather than a victory for native traditions.

And in that sense,

you could argue the Fair was a defeat.

Narrator:
Louie Sullivan was in despair.

The Fair, he wrote,

set American architecture back 50 years.

George Pullman was ecstatic.

He ran special trains

so Fairgoers could visit his utopian town.

The town uh... became almost

a part of the World's Fair of 1893.

It was Epcot,

the Epcot of that time.

EPCOT meaning

Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow.

with hot and cold water in the homes,

and bathrooms,

and paved streets,

and trees and flowers and things like that.

And

people stayed overnight

to more fully enjoy it.

But, they never really talked to the people.

Narrator:
Those who looked beneath the surface at Pullman

found that all was not well.

Pacyga:
Pullman owns everything.

You can't own your own home in Pullman.

Pullman managers can enter your house,

and tell your wife

that the kitchen is painted the wrong color.

That the curtains clash

with the décor that is expected of a Pullman house.

The Pullman manager can come in and say,

"Mrs. Jones, you have a very dirty kitchen.

We will force you to move unless you do...

You know, do this, that, and that."

And you can be evicted.

So the man has lost control over even his private life.

Narrator:
A writer for Harper's

came to the "unavoidable conclusion"

that the "idea of Pullman is un-American.

It is benevolent, well-wishing feudalism."

Duis:
The Fair is America's window into the future.

Fairs generally function as this.

It is a place where people put out

outlandish ideas which can in a sense

be trial balloons as to whether or not

they're going to work in society as a whole.

One of the most important

for the Colombian Exposition was

the many uses of electricity.

You have an all-electric kitchen,

you have electric lighting,

electric elevators,

electricity doing almost every kind of job

in the factory or in the home.

That's a very advanced idea for a lot of people.

Narrator:
The lights illuminating the Court of Honor at night

impressed Hilda Satt,

the young immigrant from Poland.

She called them

"a sudden vision of Heaven."

Epstein:
She was about ten at the time.

That was the first time she'd ever seen electric lights.

It was like magic to her.

Just thrilling.

She never forgot it.

Narrator:
At the mile-long Midway,

Fairgoers delighted in Pittsburgh bridge designer

George Ferris's 250 foot high wheel.

It was his response to the Fair's challenge

to outdo the Eiffel Tower,

the chief exhibit of the Paris World's Fair.

Hawkers pushed the wonders of a young escape artist.

And international beauties.

Immigrants who could not afford to return to Europe

found a piece of home.

There were exhibits from cultures all over the world.

Duis:
People said that basically this was wonderful.

You created kind of a human museum.

Maybe the natives of those countries

learned more about Americans

and people in Western Europe

learned more about those natives.

My mother spoke about the month of September.

She said the...

the Africans from Dahomey

were suffering terribly from the chill in September,

and the Eskimos who were there

were suffering from the heat.

To civil rights leader Frederick Douglass

it was racist.

The Fair presented no accomplishments

of more than eight million black Americans,

Douglass charged,

only "African savages brought here to act the monkey."

As a marketing device

the Fair held special days

for various ethnic groups:

Germans,

Poles,

Irish,

Bohemians.

There was also a Colored Peoples Day.

Douglas helped organize it.

Ida B. Wells, his young militant friend,

boycotted the day as racist.

Douglass used it as a pulpit.

"We Negroes love our country,"

he thundered.

"We fought for it.

We ask only that we be treated as well

as those who fought against it."

She was very critical of Frederick Douglass,

but she relented after the event to say,

I think I was wrong.

A more mature,

a seasoned civil rights veteran knew

how to take advantage of an opportunity.

Narrator:
Tens of thousands of African Americans

from across the country attended the Fair.

Reed:
They not only enjoyed

listening to great speakers of their group

and other groups,

for example at the World Parliament of Religion

or the Congress of Representative Women,

but they toured the Fairgrounds,

looking at the different exhibits from around the world.

And they thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

Narrator:
Bertha Palmer,

as head of the Board of Lady Managers,

insisted on a separate building

celebrating the accomplishments of women.

A woman designed it.

Bertha Palmer was not only

the most powerful woman at the Fair,

but Chicago's hostess to the world.

O'Gorman:
There's a great story. You know, the Infanta of Spain

came to represent her brother, the King,

at the Columbian Exposition.

The Infanta was staying at the Palmer House,

in one of the nicest suites of rooms,

in what was an extraordinarily elegant hotel.

Miller:
She received an invitation

from the queen bee of Chicago,

Bertha Palmer,

who's the hostess to the World's Fair,

to join her for dinner

at this sumptuous mansion

up on Lake Shore Drive.

O'Gorman:
And when the Infanta found out

that Mrs. Palmer, who lived in the castle,

was the wife of the man

that owned the hotel she was staying in,

she decided not to go to the thing.

She asked with a scowl, "Am I to have dinner

with the wife of my innkeeper?"

O'Gorman:
The Spanish ambassador told her

she had to make an appearance,

so she showed up for a very short time

and she snubbed Mrs. Palmer.

Came late, left early.

Narrator:
Bertha Palmer got her revenge in 1899

when America had gone to war with Spain.

She refused an invitation

to a reception in Paris for the Infanta.

"I can not have dinner,"

she replied curtly,

"with the bibulous representative

of a degenerate monarch."

Koehn:
And so Bertha had her revenge.

Narrator:
The Fair was a smashing success.

New York's Harper's Weekly called it

"the greatest event in the history of the country

since the Civil War."

It drew 27 million people,

14 million from abroad,

the greatest tourist attraction

in American history.

On October 28,

two days before the Fair closed,

Carter Harrison welcomed America's mayors

to The White City.

"When the fire swept over our city

and laid it in ashes," he boasted,

"the world said:

'Chicago and its boasting is now gone forever,'

but Chicago said,

'We will rebuild the city better than ever,'

and Chicago has done it."

"Two years ago this thousand acres

covered by these palaces

was the home of the muskrat.

Look at it now!"

He invited the mayors to "come out of this White City

into our black city."

Then he went home.

To be summoned to his door a few hours later.

Summoned by a half-mad illiterate

rejected for work at City Hall.

Harrison's funeral was the most impressive

in the young city's history.

Two hundred thousand mourners

paid their respects in City Hall.

The procession to Graceland Cemetery

was led by Chicago's titans of industry.

Next came the aldermen

and then Harrison's supporters,

Irish, German, Polish, Bohemian, Italian, Greek,
policemen, union leaders and socialists.

Miller:
There's this tremendous outpouring for Harrison

as this unifying type of figure,

just what the city need,

because everyone was saying at the time

these industrial cities are the scourge of the land,

and they're flying apart

as fast as they're being built up.

And they're filled with anarchists

and socialists

and unacceptable aliens.

And is this the American future?

And...

Harrison was the guy in Chicago

that could cool that kind of stuff down.

Narrator:
The next July

a reporter looked up the tracks

and witnessed another dark moment for the Black City.

A strike at Pullman

had led to a national railway strike.

When this sidelined trains carrying the US mail,

President Cleveland dispatched federal troops.

Thirty-four people

died in Chicago's bloodiest labor uprising.

A Presidential commission was critical of George Pullman.

In the terrible depression of 1893

he had slashed wages but not rents.

Some paychecks were as little as 12 cents.

He guaranteed his stockholders

an 8% return.

Brown:
Even the U.S. commissioners suggested

that he wasn't really playing by the rules

of open capitalism,

which claimed that the reason

that investors were supposed to get a profit

is because they took a risk.

And the commissions came

to the point of view of the workers,

which was,

where's the risk?

They're not taking any risk.

They've got a guaranteed 8% dividend,

you know, rain or shine.

Whereas the workers are having to take a big hit

during this very tough times,

and, in fact,

suffering from starvation

as a result of this.

Narrator:
Renowned the world over

as a symbol of social responsibility,

the town of Pullman

was considered by the Illinois Supreme Court

an agent of social control.

The court forced the company to divest it,

and Pullman was absorbed by Chicago.

An elusive utopia

became an ordinary industrial town.

Within a generation, The Florence Hotel,

named after Pullman's beloved daughter,

was a whore house.

George Pullman's Corinthian column

in Graceland Cemetery

is remarkable for its beauty

and its weight.

When he died brokenhearted in 1897,

his casket was enshrouded

in tons of reinforced cement

to prevent desecration

by labor activists.

George Pullman had tried to speak

to Chicago's labor problem,

the big issue of the age,

through social engineering

and failed.

Others in the 1890s

planted seeds of labor and social reform.

In the hard soil of 19th Century capitalism,

they bore no fruit.

Writer Henry Demarest Lloyd

championed labor unions and the 8 hour day

to no avail.

He railed against the unfairness of Haymarket Judge

Joseph Gary

and tried, without success,

to prevent his re-election in 1893.

Married to the daughter of William Bross,

publisher of the Tribune,

Lloyd was dropped from clubs,

snubbed by patrician friends

and disinherited.

Florence Kelly,

a socialist firebrand,

changed the agenda of Hull-House.

She convinced Jane Addams

the poor would be better served

by social change,

not tea parties.

Miller:
Kelley is urging her to get out of Hull-House.

Instead of having people come to Hull- House,

you've got to go into the neighborhoods,

and you've got to expose first.

Because people have to know

how horrid conditions are

and how extensive these horrific conditions are in the city.

And the only way we can do that is publicity.

And we have to do it with hard statistics.

This is the age of science and statistics

and the beginnings of social science.

So she urged these social science techniques

of surveying

and map-making

and in this way

alert a nation

and try to prick the conscience of a nation.

Narrator:
When Hull-House finished

its elaborate survey of the Near West Side,

it had a hard time finding a publisher

who could handle the 14 color codes

that identified each ethnic group

crammed in its tenements.

A vast number of families,

it found,

had incomes of $5 or less a week.

The first systematic study

of a working class neighborhood in America,

the survey brought fame to Hull-House.

It called attention to the Near West Side,

but little changed.

Kelly wrote a searing report on sweat shops

which led to an Illinois law

for an eight-hour day for women and children

and banned child labor under 14.

She was appointed Illinois's first factory inspector.

Some parents bribed employers

to hire their children

who provided one-third of their income.

Although the Illinois Supreme Court

overruled the Factory Labor Law

as an infringement on property rights,

it would become in future decades

a model of a new liberalism.

Richard Schneirov, Historian:
Before this period of time reform was associated

with getting corrupt politicians from the

lower classes out of office and putting

the, quote-unquote, the best men in their place.

Now you began to get a new kind of reform,

which is much more closely associated

with modern liberalism

of the 20th century variety.

In fact, this period of time

is really the birth of that whole approach.

Narrator:
The winter after the Fair closed,

arsonists burned the remains

of a decaying White City.

It seemed to symbolize the illusion of the urban ideal.

To Ida B. Wells,

Chicago's problems were overshadowed by possibilities.

She found a haven

she could not have found in the South

for her campaign for civil rights.

She remained after the Fair.

In coming decades

Black Americans would follow her,

migrating from the South

by the tens of thousands in search of work.

They came because they saw in Chicago

not problems.

They saw opportunity.

Like the Irish,

Germans,

Scandinavians,

Bohemians,

Poles,

Russians,

Jews,

and Lithuanians before them.

And the Yankee speculators

before them.

And the French explorers

who first saw the potential

of the stinking river

by the portage.