Books in Brief: City of the Century

City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, by Donald L. Miller (Simon & Schuster, 704 pp., $35)

DONALD Miller, history professor at Lafayette College and biographer of Lewis Mumford, takes on his subject with great narrative gusto, sweeping us from the Chicago of 1833—“a desolate trading post of some thirty souls”—through the Great Fire of 1871, to 1893 Chicago, “America’s first skyscraper city” with over a million people, the city that beat out New York as the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition. What fueled this extraordinary growth? Money, says Miller. According to Henry Fuller, Chicago’s first great novelist, Chicago was “the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the one common, avowed objective of making money.” The building of nineteenth-century Chicago, adds a contemporary historian, represents “one of the most purely capitalistic endeavors the world has ever seen.” Miller’s intention is to personify this drive, and he does so with great effect. All the big names are here, the industrialists and the artists, as well as the pols: “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse John” Coughlin, for instance, prototypical Chicago aldermen “who gave one dollar to the needy for every two they stole.” A book that is strong and vital, like its subject, by an engaged historian with a fine eye for significant detail and a novelist’s touch.

JR

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John R. Coyne Jr.

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City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, by Donald L. Miller (Simon & Schuster, 704 pp., $35)

DONALD Miller, history professor at Lafayette College and biographer of Lewis Mumford, takes on his subject with great narrative gusto, sweeping us from the Chicago of 1833—“a desolate trading post of some thirty souls”—through the Great Fire of 1871, to 1893 Chicago, “America’s first skyscraper city” with over a million people, the city that beat out New York as the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition. What fueled this extraordinary growth? Money, says Miller. According to Henry Fuller, Chicago’s first great novelist, Chicago was “the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the one common, avowed objective of making money.” The building of nineteenth-century Chicago, adds a contemporary historian, represents “one of the most purely capitalistic endeavors the world has ever seen.” Miller’s intention is to personify this drive, and he does so with great effect. All the big names are here, the industrialists and the artists, as well as the pols: “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse John” Coughlin, for instance, prototypical Chicago aldermen “who gave one dollar to the needy for every two they stole.” A book that is strong and vital, like its subject, by an engaged historian with a fine eye for significant detail and a novelist’s touch.