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Liquid Capital: Making the Chicago Waterfront (American Business, Politics, and Society) - Hardcover

Buch 15 von 25: American Business, Politics, and Society

Salzmann, Joshua A. T.

 
9780812249736: Liquid Capital: Making the Chicago Waterfront (American Business, Politics, and Society)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812249739 ISBN 13: 9780812249736
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In the nineteenth century, politicians transformed a disease-infested bog on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan into an intensively managed waterscape supporting the life and economy of Chicago, now America's third-most populous city. In Liquid Capital, Joshua A. T. Salzmann shows how, through a combination of entrepreneurship, civic spirit, and bareknuckle politics, the Chicago waterfront became a hub of economic and cultural activity while also the site of many of the nation's precendent-setting decisions about public land use and environmental protection. Through the political saga of waterfront development, Salzmann illuminates Chicago's seemingly paradoxical position as both a paragon of buccaneering capitalism and assertive state power.

The list of actions undertaken by local politicians and boosters to facilitate the waterfront's success is long: officials reversed a river, built a canal to fuse the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds, decorated the lakeshore with parks and monuments, and enacted regulations governing the use of air, land, and water. With these feats of engineering and statecraft, they created a waterscape conducive to commodity exchange, leisure tourism, and class harmony—in sum, an invaluable resource for profit making. Their actions made the city's growth and the development of its western hinterlands possible. Liquid Capital sheds light on these precedent-making policies, their effect on Chicago's development as a major economic and cultural force, and the ways in which they continue to shape legislation regarding the use of air and water.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joshua A. T. Salzmann teaches American history at Northeastern Illinois University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction
State Power and the Rise of Chicago

In 1818, an employee of the American Fur Company, Gurdon S. Hubbard, described a journey that traders had been making for centuries via a land route, or portage, between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds. It spanned a patch of marshland that remains a crucial crossroads today—the site of Chicago's Midway Airport. The men in Hubbard's party paddled their barks from the open waters of Lake Michigan into the shallow, sand-clogged mouth of the Chicago River. From there, they ascended the main stem and south branch of the Chicago until reaching the river's source in a bog at the base of a very low ridge about half a dozen miles from Lake Michigan.

That unassuming ridge was a continental divide, formed more than thirteen thousand years ago when melting glaciers deposited heaps of debris onto the landscape. East of the ridge, water flowed into the Chicago River, Lake Michigan, and, eventually, the Atlantic Ocean. West of the ridge, water flowed into Mud Lake, a murky appendage of the Des Plaines River whose waters ran southwest toward the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. When Hubbard's party got to the divide, the river ran dry, and their boats had to be "placed on short rollers . . . until the [Mud] lake was reached." For three days, the men slogged through Mud Lake. Hubbard recalled the grueling trek: "Four men only remained in a boat and pushed with . . . poles, while six or eight others waded in the mud alongside . . . [and still] others busied themselves in transporting our goods on their backs to the [Des Plaines] [R]iver." All the while, the men were beset by leeches that "stuck so tight to the skin that they broke in pieces if force was used to remove them."

The area surrounding that vital and miserable passageway between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds soon became the site of phenomenal urban growth. That growth was the product of collaboration between public policymakers and private businessmen. Over the course of a century, they constructed crucial water and railroad infrastructure, transforming Chicago into a massive metropolis.

Established as a town in 1833, Chicago was, at the time, a wilderness outpost of just 350 residents clumped around a small military fort on soggy land where the Chicago River trickled into Lake Michigan. The site was known to local natives as Chigagou, or the "wild garlic place." It flooded frequently and stank. Mud abounded. Summers brought blistering heat. The bitterly cold winters were made worse by bracing winds, from which the flat, monotonous landscape offered little protection.

Yet, in the course of a century, Chicagoans radically transformed the site from a desolate swamp into a vast canvas for urban experimentation, construction, and commerce. By 1933, it was a sprawling industrial metropolis of more than three million souls. The city's denizens had built canals, bridges, and docks; laid railroads connecting the coasts; siphoned the nation's grain harvest into towering storage elevators; cut the tall pine forests of Michigan and Wisconsin from the earth, stacking and selling them in magnificent lumber yards; and erected cruelly efficient slaughterhouses where, as the writer Norman Mailer later observed, "they cut the animals right out of their hearts." Chicagoans had built massive factories with giant blast furnaces to transform the iron ore of Minnesota's Mesabi Range into iron and steel, and they had constructed spectacular office towers filled with white collar workers who kept tabs on the rapid flow of money in and out of the city.

The point of Chicago's existence has always been to wring profit from nature. But how did the bog that Hubbard traversed in 1818 become a global metropolis? Did the natural advantages of the place call Chicago into being, or did humans build the city in spite of its sandbars, swamps, and pestilence?

Chicago's geography has always been fundamental to its story. The immense obstacles and advantages it presents have often existed in a productive tension—the natural advantages inspiring ever-greater human efforts to tame the environment and tap it for economic gain. Consequently, Chicago's chroniclers have long been ambivalent about whether nature or human agency played a greater role in the city's growth.

Many of the people who witnessed firsthand Chicago's astounding rise concluded that God must have predestined it. In 1880, the former lieutenant governor of Illinois, William Bross, delivered an address to the Chicago Historical Society in which he claimed: "He who is the Author of Nature selected the site of this great city." In 1923, in an address to the Geographical Society of Chicago, a University of Chicago geographer, J. Paul Goode, argued that the city's location made its rise inevitable. It was titled "Chicago: A City of Destiny." Likewise, in a landmark 1991 book, the environmental historian William Cronon acknowledged the role of human decision-making in Chicago's rise, but he ultimately attributed its rapid growth to a combination of easy access to natural resources—tall timber stands, rich farm lands—and its pivotal position on the shipping lanes of the Great Lakes and the Chicago and Mississippi river systems. Cronon concluded that Chicago was, in the words of his book's title, Nature's Metropolis.

Undoubtedly, Chicago's waterways and proximity to natural resources made the city's growth possible, but it did not make it natural, much less inevitable. In 1955, University of Chicago geographer Harold Mayer underscored this point—and pointedly took issue with Goode—in his address to the city's geographical society. It was titled "Chicago: A City of Decisions." Scholars such as Harold Platt and Robert Lewis have likewise emphasized that, at every stage, Chicago's development was contingent on human actions. People devised remarkable technologies, crafted new laws, and created innovative political and economic institutions to harvest the timber, cattle, hogs, coal, iron ore, and grain produced in the city's hinterland. At the same time, Chicago's development demanded that humans transform the urban landscape, or the metropolis's nature. Above all, they had to radically alter the waterfront and waterways—especially Lake Michigan, the Chicago River, and the Calumet River—to make the wretched landscape habitable and to make the continent's resources exploitable by the city's enterprising businessmen.

The power to command water often resides with the elite. In this regard, Chicago was not exceptional. The people and institutions that changed the flow of Chicago's watercourses and constructed its waterfront included the arch-conservative Supreme Court Justices Melville Fuller and Stephen Field, the idealistic urban planner Daniel Burnham and his colleagues in the Chicago Commercial Club, the pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the expansive Illinois Central Railroad, the resourceful Army Corps of Engineers, the enterprising Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago's crafty Common Council, and the creative, cash-strapped state of Illinois.

Their achievements were monumental. They fused the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds with a canal; piped in drinking water from the depths of Lake Michigan; constructed sewers, docks, piers, and bridges; blasted through sandbars at the mouths of the two rivers; dredged, straightened, and widened the rivers; reversed the flow of the Chicago River; built railroad tracks, depots, and grain elevators along the city's watercourses; and decorated the lakefront with verdant parks and splendid civic spaces.

Even more remarkably, Chicagoans used the same resources for seemingly incompatible purposes, thereby serving stakeholders with divergent agendas. The city's inhabitants drank from the very watershed...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812249739
ISBN 13 
9780812249736
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
234
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Verantwortliche Person
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