AN EARLY ENCOUNTER WITH TOMORROW: Europeans, Chicago’s Loop, and the World’s Columbian Exposition
By Arnold Lewis
University of Illinois Press, 353 pages, $34.95
The 19th Century was the Age of Cities. “The most remarkable social phenomenon of the present century is the concentration of population in cities,” wrote American statistician Adna Ferrin Weber in 1899. New industrial centers like Manchester and Pittsburgh grew at astonishing rates, as did ancient capitals like Paris and London, but the urban phenomenon of the age was Chicago. A desolate fur-trading post of 30 people in 1830, it was, a mere 60 years later, the second-largest city in America and the sixth-largest in the world. At the close of the century it was the only metropolis on Earth that had not existed at the opening of the century.
Chicago was the subject of international attention because of its lightning growth, and because of the growing realization in Europe that it was America’s “most American city,’ the representative city of the most closely watched national experiment of modern times. Like America itself, Chicago was young and aggressively confident, a product of the advancing frontier, a place of hustlers and visionaries disdainful of tradition. In an unreservedly commercial country, it was also, as one French traveler observed, the “purest kind of commercial city,” the stupendous product of America’s buccaneering business spirit.
Chicago, in the 1890s, was also a city ahead of its age, a place people visited to glimpse the next century. Its slaughtering mills and mail-order houses were the incarnation of machine-age speed and efficiency, and its downtown was a technological marvel–its streets lit by electricity, serviced by rapid-running street cars and lined by solid rows of office skyscrapers, tradition-shattering buildings that altered the course of architecture.
Urban progress, however, was purchased at an appalling cost. “If he comes from some well-regulated, cultivated” city like Paris, the first-time visitor “feels shaken out of poise and peace by a tremendous discord,” wrote Chicago novelist Elia W. Peattie. “He sees a city ankle-deep in dirt, swathed in smoke, wild with noise, and frantic with the stress of life.”
Chicago struck foreign visitors as spectacular and awful, and that’s what made it so interesting to them. “This American city, with all its problems and promise, is the future,” observed one European writer. And he was not alone in seeing Chicago’s reckless growth–its hard pursuit of profit without constraint of conscience or law–as a chilling presentiment of the urban future, in America and abroad.
There is a vast body of literature on 19th Century Chicago, yet historians have given insufficient attention to European interest in the new wonder of America. This is the value of Arnold Lewis’ book “An Early Encounter With Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago’s Loop, and the World’s Columbian Exposition.” It is the first comprehensive account of reaction in Germany, France and Great Britain to the city the German writer Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg called “perhaps the most powerful human creation of all time.”
Lewis, an emeritus professor of art history at the College of Wooster in Ohio, limits his focus largely to European encounters with the World’s Columbian Exposition and the Loop, the downtown commercial zone formed by the city’s first cable-car lines. His section on the World’s Fair is flat and familiar, but he does give a fresh account (with the aid of his own translations) of European assessments of what was then the world’s most congested and highly integrated commercial core.
European visitors were overwhelmed by the velocity of Chicago, Lewis argues, because so much of the city’s commercial energy was confined to its 1-square-kilometer Loop, intensifying its impact, whereas Manhattan’s commercial growth extended for miles along its radiating avenues. The terrific crowding and tumult of the Loop were shocking, even frightening, for first-time visitors to the City of Speed. Cable cars pushing through heavy traffic slammed into slow-moving drays, lifting them into the air and overturning wagons and teams, while high above the chaos of the streets, the iron frames of new temples of trade went up at the rate of a story every three days. Signs hanging over office doors in the Loop read “Away for Lunch: Back in Five Minutes,” and the movement of crowds on the streets reminded Hesse-Wartegg of “an infantry attack.”
Europeans were horrified at the number of pedestrians killed or maimed at unguarded railroad intersections just outside the Loop, two persons a day on average. (Steam trains were banned from the center of Paris, and even New York, for that matter.) “(I)t is cheaper to kill people than to elevate the railways, and human life in Chicago is nothing compared with money,” remarked Australia’s A.G. Stephens.
Everything in the Loop seemed to be organized for the efficient conduct of capitalist work. Within a single Chicago skyscraper, with its vertical array of business, legal, advertising and communication services, million-dollar deals were sealed, European businessmen marveled, in a matter of minutes.
Places outside the Loop, such as the Union Stock Yards, were even more efficiently organized as production machines, Lewis points out, but then he fails, inexplicably, to deal with them. This is unfortunate, for when astute foreign observers came to Chicago to witness the ideas behind the American economic “miracle,” they usually went first to the synchronized killing mills of Armour and Swift or to the wondrous merchandising machines of Richard Sears and Aaron Montgomery Ward. Lewis does not even describe European reaction to the best place inside the Loop to feel the beating pulse of busy Chicago: the trading pits of the Board of Trade.
It seems a waste to have spent 20 years unearthing such a vast and vivid collection of material and not use it to give a more fully rounded account of foreign reaction to Chicago. There is also a lot of repetition in the book, and a dozen and more sentences that a sharp editor would not have permitted to pass into print. Even so, “An Early Encounter With Tomorrow” is an important book. Through the eyes of a rich range of outsiders–architects and journalists, businessmen and writers, economists and engineers–we see Chicago of the 1890s for what it truly was, not just a regional capital, but also a world city, one whose international significance is only beginning to be appreciated.
