In “Chicago: City of the Century,” the fittingly bloody and brawny new PBS documentary celebrating a great city’s rise from a prairie swamp, immigrants are oppressed, pigs are partitioned and, of course, buildings are burned.
Words such as “hellhole” and “greed” are invoked. The stench of daily life in the neighborhood near the Union Stockyards is summoned up, most memorably by a resident who recalls retching at
a country picnic, his first extended whiff of fresh air. Cholera dances through the city like delivery boys. The Irish, even as they do the new town’s dirty work, are publicly scorned in such establishment forums as Joseph Medill’s Tribune. Studs Terkel is quoted.
The documentary adopted from Donald Miller’s book of almost the same title is, in other words, a kind of gritty love poem to the manic and often brutal vision that made the place where the stinky river met the big lake into something more than, say, Gary.
Over three nights and 4 1/2 hours, in a special edition of “The American Experience” airing Monday through Wednesday (8 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11), filmmaker Austin Hoyt’s “Chicago” throbs with life and death, celebrating with clear but widened eyes the staggering 19th Century achievement that was this instant metropolis.
“People get crushed,” Hoyt said in an interview. “There are a lot of hard edges, and I don’t try to smooth them over.”
At the same time, “The most important word in the program is ‘opportunity.’ It applied to all the people, not just to the Yankee speculators” — such as William Butler Ogden and Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, who essentially founded the city — “but to the Irish and the Germans and at the end, the black Americans coming from the South.”
And it is much more than a regional story, as Hoyt and his first-rate collection of historians make the case for Chicago as the essential 19th Century American city. In its first rush of existence, they contend, the place opened up what was to be the American West, redefined industries as varied as grain and architecture, and served as the “crucible” for the larger transformation in American life: “from agriculture to industry, rural isolation to the crowding of urban life, from the seasons and the movements of the sun dictating our rhythms to the movements of the punch clock.”
Would these things have happened without Chicago? Of course, and if the film has a fault, it is the same one it accuses the city of when locals, quickly recovering from the shock of their fire, boasted that it had caused the biggest urban disaster the world had seen. “Chicago,” perhaps overly conscious of selling the story to a national audience, is similarly superlative-happy.
But it is both undeniable and propitious to any chronicler that a bevy of firsts and biggests did happen here, largely by virtue of the city being a railroad hub on the edge of vast farmlands, and that they did have national significance.
“Chicago was the shock city of America,” University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon says in the film. “And some reacted to that vision of the future with horror: `This is not the place we want to go. This is not what we want to be.’ And others with great excitement: `This is what the world was becoming.’ It was a world of endless opportunity.”
“When you say `Chicago,’ I think people think, `gangster,'” said “American Experience” executive producer Margaret Drain, explaining her continued concern about national interest in the subject chosen to kick off the “American Experience” season. “That’s their knee-jerk reaction.”
What about “fire”?
“And maybe `fire.’ If they thought `fire,’ that would be good, because that would at least put them in the right century. What we’ve been trying to do is tell people that this is the city . . . that really epitomized what the 19th Century was all about.”
It is an ambitious tale to try to tell, but Hoyt, a 65-year-old Easterner who is best known for the cogent biographies he has done for “The American Experience” (MacArthur, Reagan, Carnegie), more than meets the challenge. His “Chicago: City of the Century” is literate without being florid, political without being didactic, comprehensive without being exhausting.
It is no small achievement that he is able to provide tidy explanations of such lore as the river being reversed, what exactly the Board of Trade does, and why Mrs. O’Leary and her cow have been exonerated.
The greater achievement, though, comes in, for instance, a vivid re-creation of the 1871 fire sweeping across the city and the film’s ability to place the fire in a broader context, as the inevitable result in a city that grew fast and unfettered.
For local viewers, the documentary’s cast of scoundrels, tycoons and anarchists will become more than just street names, their deeds more than just dim bulbs in the scoreboard of history. For national ones, it will remind them that you dismiss middle America as “flyover country” in peril of your own ignorance.
How “Chicago” came to be made is an example of the television process when it works well. WGBH, the ambitious and well-respected Boston public television station, bought the option to turn Miller’s acclaimed “City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America” (1996) into TV because people there were “smitten with it,” in the words of an executive.
Somewhere around the beginning of 2000, Hoyt recalled, his boss at “The American Experience” asked the filmmaker to read the book. He did, and although his Chicago experience had been limited to a drive through here and an airport stopover there, he instantly warmed to the topic and the book.
How could you not like a story that would allow countless details such as the one about the books that were sent to Chicago after the great fire, in well-meaning ignorance of the fact that the city hadn’t got around to building a library yet?
“I was impressed with the magnitude of the story and Don made it come alive,” he said. “It just seemed like such a big story. Everything in Chicago seemed big in the 19th Century.” Indeed, the film would grow from a planned two nights to three.
To help offset the costs of making it, WGBH lined up sponsors including the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, which in better budgetary times ponied up $700,000, or close to one-fifth of the film’s cost.
The department, which oversees the tourism office, had been happy with its experience underwriting a previous “American Experience,” on Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, said a spokesman. Its officials reasoned that the Chicago film, too, would help fuel the significant category of “heritage tourism,” people who use their travels to explore history.
Chicago’s leading PBS outlet, WTTW-Ch. 11, came onboard early on, too, as a co-producer, in association with the Chicago Historical Society. The WTTW role, people at both stations said, was less about financing or making the film, more about serving as a local liaison and marketing the finished product.
From there it was a matter of Hoyt, who is credited as director, writer and producer, extracting a story line from Miller’s muscular book (he is a similarly vivid presence in the film, as Hoyt’s primary interview subject) and committing it to film.
Instead of using actors to read period letters and such, a la the Burns brothers, he has his narrator (David Ogden Stiers, sounding less patrician than usual) play the parts through subtle inflection.
He did, however, use actors for various impressionistic re-enactments, drawing a powerful Haymarket riots scene with just 15 actors, for instance.
Although four interview trips and three or four filmmaking trips brought Hoyt and crew to Chicago, the cobblestone streets are actually in the old fishing city of New Bedford, Mass., a jail is in Springfield, Mass., and the bounteous grain is in Duluth.
“There are a lot of things about 19th Century Chicago that you need to go elsewhere to evoke,” Hoyt explains.
But the story never feels anything other than firmly rooted in Chicago, perhaps at no moment more so than in the poetic ending.
After beginning the film with a reporter riding in one of George Pullman’s train cars to see the “White City” of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago’s coming-out party after the 1871 fire, Hoyt ends it on arsonists setting the White City itself afire.
“It seemed to symbolize the illusion of the urban ideal,” his narrator says.
But a powerful one, he adds in a coda, for even as the city’s social reformers fight an uphill battle for better working conditions and other social change, new migrants will stream in, drawn by the urban promise of opportunity that Chicago came to symbolize.
Making the film, Hoyt said, “At times I was hungering for FDR and all his reforms. At other times, I was thinking, `Ain’t it wonderful what people can do without all these government programs?'”
“This is unfettered capitalism, and it’s wondrous, but it takes a toll.”
