The burning of the world The Great Chicago Fire and the war for a city's soul

Review by Booklist Review

After the hot, dry summer of 1871, Chicagoans knew that their largely wooden city was on borrowed time. The big conflagration hit when the underfunded fire department was already exhausted from fighting a monster blaze the night before and stood no chance against what became known as the Great Fire. Berg does an excellent job narrating the events of those terrible days before introducing his main character, Joseph Medill, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. Medill's desperate attempt to save the newspaper and get the news out is highly detailed. Berg then turns to the political machinations that installed Medill in the mayor's office on the Union-Fireproof ticket. What follows is a so-called "nonpartisan" campaign by capitalist elites to take away home ownership, upward mobility, beer, and democracy from the majority of Chicagoans, actions that invited a backlash from working people still evident in the city today. Berg's history is a comprehensive, empathetic look at a great catastrophe and the uniquely American response to tragedy. For another perspective, pair it with Chicago's Great Fire (2020) by Carl Smith.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this vivid and immersive history, Berg (38 Nooses) describes the Great Fire that devastated Chicago in October 1871. Over the course of three days, the conflagration burned more than three square miles of the then 34-year-old city, killed at least 300, and left more than 100,000--a third of its population--homeless. Even before the fire had run its course, the municipal government, led by city council president Charles Holden, set up makeshift headquarters in a church and made arrangements for public safety, food kitchens, and emergency public shelters. Their efforts, as Berg shows, were soon undercut by a coterie of powerful "stakeholders" bent on protecting their property and businesses who, over the objections of the police, enlisted the aid of Chicago resident and Civil War legend Gen. Philip Sheridan to declare martial law. In addition to Holden and Sheridan, Berg provides many other lively character portraits, including of influential Tribune publisher Joseph Medill; dry goods retailer Marshall Field; and real estate tycoon Potter Palmer. As Berg traces the battles between public and private interests that played out in the years after the fire, he astutely observes how the city was transformed into "a hothouse of populist democracy," with the ever-growing working-class immigrant population, enraged by elite overreach, joining together as a unified voting bloc. This impressively researched account fascinates. (Sept.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Narrator Sean Patrick Hopkins offers a riveting performance of journalist Berg's (English, George Mason Univ.; 38 Nooses) account of the Great Chicago Fire. Berg sets the scene by describing the dangerously dry summer of 1871, when understaffed firefighting companies struggled to keep up with numerous fires that threatened the city. On October 8, a barn in a neighborhood close to the city center caught fire; owing to miscommunication and high winds, the fire spread rapidly. With superb pacing, Hopkins describes how, as the wind shifted, people abandoned their homes and ran for their lives. By the time the fire was extinguished, more than three square miles of Chicago had been destroyed, and up to a third of the city's residents were left without homes. The aftermath of the fire was an opportunity for change. Donations poured in from across the country and worldwide as change makers vied for power, while the immigrant community fought for worker's rights and affordable housing, and rebuilding efforts set Chicago on a new path to the future. VERDICT Hopkins's skillful performance of Berg's meticulously researched narrative of the fire and its aftermath is a must-listen for anyone interested in American history and urban development.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A complex, capably narrated history of the 1871 fire that remade Chicago. As architecture scholar Berg, author of Grand Avenues and 38 Nooses, observes, the fire of Oct. 8, 1871, did not occur in isolation. The weather had been unusually hot and dry, and "between October 2 and October 7, the city's 193 firemen had been summoned to twenty-eight fires" whose causes were various, from carelessly discarded cigarettes to grease spills and oil-soaked rags that spontaneously burst into flames, and the fires burned mostly in places newly crowded in the immigration boom. A cow was almost certainly not the cause of the infamous blaze, though the fire that sprang forth that night sparked somewhere in the neighborhood of Irish immigrant Kate Leary's home. As Berg notes, "almost all the houses in the West Division were made of pine-wood…a cheap and speedy way to build" but one that created tinderboxes. The fire had numerous knock-on effects, as the author shows. Some concerned Leary herself, smeared in a calumniating press; one cause of the blame, it seems, was that her home was spared while so many were not, but another was the fact that she was an Irish immigrant in a time of growing anti-immigrant sentiment and Know-Nothing political activism. One of its chief exponents was Joseph Medill, a newspaper magnate who was devoted to Republican politics and anti-Catholic vituperation. Other players in the drama that Berg lays out, in which powerful economic forces contested to rebuild Chicago in their own image, include merchant Marshall Field and Wilbur Storey, another newspaper publisher whose "reporters were instructed never, ever to let the absence of facts get in their way." In the end, their remaking of Chicago helped shape the form of the modern city--architecturally stunning but also sharply segregated by class and race. A strong contribution to the history of not just the fire, but urban America generally. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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PART 1 FIRE Far below the walkway that circled the top of the Cook County courthouse, Chicago spread itself out beneath Mathias Schae­fer, an ordinary fireman in the most fire-prone city in the world. Overhead, the sky was clear, the moon three-quarters full. The sun had set more than an hour earlier. A hundred and twenty feet below his perch, Schaefer could see pinpricks of gaslight illumination, hear the occasional voices of men and women going home from the taverns, theaters, and churches that ringed the courthouse square, or watch the occasional shopkeeper lock up for the night. Sunday night was a quiet time downtown, a lull before the noisy, surging storm of workers who would overwhelm the central business district at the start of the new workweek. A warm October wind rushed across the city from the southwest, a wind that carried a tinge of the odor of the Union Stock Yards and of hundreds of small West Side factories before it piled the waves along the Illinois Central breakwater at the edge of Lake Michigan. Schaefer was not a watchman by occupation, and this post was a temporary assignment. His usual place was not up here but out there, "on the nozzle," as they said. Pipemen were their own breed. First in, first to feel the heat and breathe the smoke, too often the first to die. Like so much of the paid labor in Chicago--jobs defined by pulling, lifting, pushing, shoving, sawing, stacking, hauling, throw­ing, breaking, and battering--fighting fires wore you down. Still, to be a fireman was a big step up from most menial work. It was a job a man could brag about, one he used familial or ethnic or political connections to arrange. It paid him $75 a month or more and earned him the respect of the men at the station, the gratitude of the public, and the admiration of the girls and their mothers. Walking the tight circle with Schaefer were two young women, sisters of other firemen. They'd brought him supper from the Blenis House hotel down the street and across the river, a small fee to pay for the magnificent view they now enjoyed. Schaefer lived in a boardinghouse on the South Side, beyond the business district, where he roomed with a policeman, a laborer, and a sign painter. But his true home was his station, where he often slept and more often ate--unless he was posted here. In this era of breakneck technological progress just before the invention of the skyscraper--an invention that would make its first appearance four blocks south of where Schaefer now stood--the courthouse was an anachronism: an archaic, quasi-medieval lump of dirty gray stone that served as a bureaucratic battlement, a vast information warehouse, and, above all, a testament to Chicago's rising commercial supremacy over the middle and western portions of the United States. The courthouse was an ugly building, but a broad-shouldered kind of ugly that Chicagoans could appreciate. In the five stories beneath Mathias Schaefer's feet, one and a half of which lay underground, the political and administrative engines of Chicago churned. Here were located the central offices of the police and fire departments, the mayor's office, the chambers of the Common Council and the Board of Public Works, the city's courts, its law library, its jail, and, not least, every scrap of paper bearing every real estate and tax record for the city of Chicago. The only piece of the building that might be described as elegant was its cupola, a cylindrical two-story tower ringed with rounded windows and a balustraded balcony, above which was housed the courthouse's giant bell. Beneath the bell, down a broad stairway and occupying the lower half of the cupola, sat the circular telegraph room, where signals were collected from 172 numbered fire alarm boxes scattered around the city. Attached to drugstores, saloons, and other establishments, or placed inside fire stations, each of these boxes operated with the turn of a key and a single pull of an iron lever. The newfangled electrical model--the old ones used an unreliable hand crank--had been installed that summer, the keys entrusted to well-known men in their neighborhoods. The telegraph room of the courthouse held twenty-five relays that could send a signal out from the building and sound a series of tones in any or all of the city's twenty-five fire stations. All these lines, incoming and outgoing, a system of wires snaking through the city on white-pine posts, converged just below Mathias Schaefer. There, in the middle of the telegraph room, sat William Brown, the spider waiting at the center of this quivering electronic web. Brown entertained his own guest, and from below Schaefer came the soft strum of a guitar. The two men operated in tandem. William Brown's job was to send and receive the alarm signals and to set the bell to tolling. Schaefer's task was to circle the cupola and watch over the city, to decide what was a fire and what wasn't and then to decide where the fire was. Discernment was everything. Care was needed not to mistake the orange glow of a gasworks or the smoke from a small factory for a genuine event. To call down a false alarm was embar­rassing and unprofessional. But more to the point, it was dangerous. The job was difficult enough in the day, but at night the city seen from up high, especially on a Sunday, was a sea of darkness littered with an intermittent confusion of gaslights, lanterns, and candlelit windowpanes. To round out the fire department's night watch, additional observers stood in enclosures atop each of the city's sixteen steam-engine stations during the hours after dark. But all these other sentries were as thrushes to Schaefer's hawk. His was the only viewpoint that encompassed the entire city. Many others had walked this cupola balcony before Schaefer, but none would afterward. If this Sunday evening in October 1871 was the last moment in the life of old Chicago--its last breath, as it were--then Mathias Schaefer might be considered the last person to see old Chicago alive. Excerpted from The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City's Soul by Scott W. Berg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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