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Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
So began Carl Sandburg’s famous ode to the city the Capone family now called home. After the congestion of Brooklyn and the quiet, middle-class respectability of Baltimore, Chicago came as an enormous release for Al, his mother, and his brothers, a receptive environment for their growing ambition, for it was a city obsessed with innovation, progress, and wealth. It had always been this way in Chicago; as early as the 1680s La Salle, the French explorer of the Great Lakes region, came upon the site of the future city and prophesied, “This will be the gate of Empire, this the seat of Commerce. The typical man who will grow up here must be an enterprising man. Each day as he rises he will exclaim, ‘I act, I move, I push,’ and there will be spread before him a boundless horizon, an illimitable field of activity. A limitless expanse of plain is here—to the east water and all other points of land. If I were to give this place a name I would derive from the nature of the man who will occupy this place—ago, I act; circum, all around; Circago.”
Empire. Commerce. Illimitable. Chicago. A vital city, devouring itself by the tail as if it were a mythological snake. Corrupt, hypocritical, and stratified, but bursting with vitality. A competitive, fierce, and unsubtle place, where people thought in headlines and talked in bulletins. Staccato. Blunt.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
In a city obsessed with quantity, statistics related a tale of wild, almost wanton expansion. In 1850, only a few years after Chicago became an official port of entry (and about the same time a public ordinance outlawed hogs from running loose in its streets), the number of inhabitants stood at barely 28,000 enterprising souls. In the entire city there was but a single “paved” block: a stretch of dirt or mud (depending on the weather) covered with wooden planks. Just a year later, the population, swollen with the ranks of immigrant laborers and entrepreneurs who had migrated west in search of fortune, jumped to 40,000; four years later, the number had doubled. By 1870, the city, cleared of hogs and getting more of its streets paved every day, claimed a population of 300,000—a tenfold increase in two decades. Physically, Chicago still resembled a village that went on forever, an endless succession of low, wooden shanties arrayed along the coast of Lake Michigan. Then the city of Chicago reached the first great crisis in its development, a trauma that its collective psyche still wrestles with and rehearses to this day. It was in one of these wooden structures—according to legend, belonging to a Mrs. O’Leary, whose cow toppled a lamp—that a fire started on the night of October 8, 1871. It burned for days, turning the night sky into day, the smoke visible up and down Lake Michigan. By the time it finally burned out, the city had been gutted. The flames consumed eighty blocks, including 1,600 homes, along with bridges, streets, and public buildings of every description. As many as 100,000 people were suddenly homeless, and the amount of the damage approached the inconceivable sum of $200,000.
The immolation of the old city of Chicago set the stage for the new—buildings made of granite, iron, and steel this time, the advent of city planning, and the skyscrapers. Within three years, the city rose Phoenix-like from its ashes, and the statistics shot up again: half a million inhabitants by 1880, over a million in 1890, 1.7 million at the turn of the century, and by 1920, the year of Capone’s arrival, a population of 2.7 million and still climbing; within a few years the population would reach the 3 million mark. As recently as the War of 1812, the site had been a rough-hewn military outpost known as Fort Dearborn, and now, scarcely more than a hundred years later, the city of Chicago was the second largest city in the nation—one of the largest in the world. The unquestioned capital of mid-America. And all its roads were paved now; indeed, they seemed to be paved with gold.
In a city twenty-six miles long and fourteen miles wide, with twenty-two miles of lake frontage, covering an area of two hundred square miles, there seemed to be room for everyone—rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. They were a heterogeneous group, these Chicagoans; the prototypical American city was actually made up of ethnic blocs maintaining close ties to their native lands. The blocs remained separate, occupying distinct districts of the city; there was no such thing as a melting pot in Chicago, not even as a myth. That wasn’t the Chicago way. The Chicago way was to make room for monolithic blocs of inhabitants who preferred not to overlap with one another. Your Poles, nearly half a million of them, in their South Side neighborhoods, your Irish in their precincts, your Russians, Germans, Swedes, Czechs, Bohemians, Jews, and blacks in their respective neighborhoods. Where they belonged. The same applied for the Southern Italian immigrants. Campanilismo proved as compelling in Chicago as in Brooklyn, and Capone found Southern Italian immigrants concentrated in two areas: the city’s crowded Little Italy, over 100,000 strong, and just as important, the city of Chicago Heights. Despite its hopeful-sounding name, Chicago Heights was no leafy suburb, nor did it occupy high ground; it was a separate city an hour or more south of Chicago proper, as supine as the day is long. Chicago Flats would have been a more accurate name for the area, which Al Capone would come to know quite well in the years to come, and on which he would leave his indelible mark.
Geographically, Chicago fell neatly into three major sections divided by the meandering course of the Chicago River. The relatively compact North Side (where the wealthy congregated in imposing brownstones or in luxurious high-rise apartment buildings), the sprawling, ethnic, residential South Side, and the West Side, a largely industrial area that gradually blended into the rural Midwest. They all intersected at the Loop, the city’s central business district. Here elevated and underground railroad lines entered, described large arcs, and exited, giving the area its name. To pass through the Loop on foot, by rail, or by car was like entering a machine; life coexisted simultaneously on several different levels: the street, the underground, and the overhead railways. Everything crisscrossed—the traffic, pedestrians, trains, and the Chicago River—to form a dense environment rivaling the most crowded neighborhoods of New York. Within its compact area, the Loop presented the archetypal American urban landscape, all sharp corners, piercing shafts of sunlight, and menacing shadows concealing pickpockets or even gunmen. While trains roared overhead, shots could be fired, a woman could scream, and no one would hear. But then you walked a few blocks east, and you were suddenly on the shore of Lake Michigan, an endless blue expanse carrying ships to and from Canada, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other points north.
Port city, prairie metropolis—Chicago presented many aspects, none more startling than the Union Stock Yards. Prior to Capone’s arrival, the yards, which covered nearly 500 acres of South Side real estate, had more than any other feature served to characterize Chicago for the rest of the country. There was a simple explanation: you could smell them long before you saw them, a pungent animal odor that made you feel soiled at first and then made you feel alive. The yards were basically a huge outdoor livestock hotel whose vast pens held cattle awaiting the slaughterhouse and the meat market. More numbers to give some idea of the sheer quantity of meatpacking business transacted in Chicago: 17 million cattle, sheep, and hogs passed through the yards each year, their carcasses issuing from fifty meatpacking plants employing 75,000 individuals. How bruta
l the slaughter, with men wading through blood on the killing floor, but how many mouths it fed. The plants produced both meat and animal by-products: soaps of every description, oils, fertilizer, hides, cattle food, feathers, glycerine, buttons, and wool. This industry was but one of the many engines driving Chicago’s economy. There were also railroads and immense lumber yards, and the world’s largest mailorder houses, Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, to count among the commercial glories of Chicago. Twenty-four hours a day, the city’s inhabitants transported, sold, slaughtered, auctioned, and bartered the nation’s essentials. “All the legal battles—smoke, noise, light, heat, sewerage, pavements, water, side-walks, taxes—have all been fought and conquered,” boasted the 1924 Rand McNally Guide to Chicago. “Those who seek locations here know exactly what they are to get, what they can do, and what they have to pay. Here may be obtained practically any quality, or grade, or type of labor required.”
No matter how big it grew, Chicago remained an unpretentious city with a vernacular culture, open and accessible to all and mighty glad to take your money, but abrasive and constantly in flux. It was “two-fisted and rowdy, hard-drinking and pugnacious,” in the words of Robert St. John, among the most enterprising correspondents of the era. “She was vibrant and violent, stimulating and ruthless, intolerant of smugness, impatient with those either physically or intellectually timid. She had her slums, then, too, and her squalor, her smells, and her dirt, but they did wash the streets at three or four o’clock every morning in those days and the breeze from Lake Michigan was like a drink of champagne.” Another famous graduate of Chicago’s rambunctious school of journalism, John Gunther, said simply that Chicago had “the most intense vitality of any [city] I have ever lived in.”
What better place for an ambitious racketeer to touch down, to grow rich. This was no Paris. Didn’t pretend to be. This was Hogtown. Porkopolis. Chicagoans rejoiced in their city’s pride of place in the commercial world, but they were acutely aware that in the cultural and social realms it had rather a dismal reputation; they knew all about it, and they were proud of it. Pleased to be considered square and naïve. A story making the rounds in the 1920s illustrated the point. One day the wife of one of Chicago’s overnight tycoons found herself at a proper tea on Boston’s Beacon Hill, home of that city’s gentry. Cabots and Lodges abounded. Amid the clinking of china, the hostess confided to her guest, “Here in Boston, we lay a great deal of stress on breeding.” To which the woman from Chicago responded, “Well, where I come from, we think it’s a lot of fun, too, but I guess we just don’t talk about it so much.” As the Beacon Hill hostess should have known, Chicago’s interest in bloodlines was reserved for horses and hogs, not families. Despite its enormous new opera house, designed primarily to be bigger than the Metropolitan Opera in New York and secondarily to accommodate music, it remained a cultural outpost. You want art, try New York. Try Boston. Cross the Atlantic. You want jazz, stop by the South Side, where an immense and vital black community was in the making. But jazz wasn’t indigenous to Chicago; like most things there, it was imported, from the South, New Orleans, in particular. Even its beer and breweries, arguably the city’s greatest gastronomic attraction, were imported from Eastern Europe. The city’s coarse, improvised quality could make visitors reel in disgust, especially English writers. H. G. Wells described the place as a “dark smear under the sky,” and Arnold Bennett dismissed it as a “suburb of Warsaw.” “Having seen it [Chicago], I urgently desire never to see it again,” wrote Rudyard Kipling. “It is inhabited by savages. Its air is dirt.”
In the absence of high culture, architecture reigned as the city’s natural art form, and its preeminence was understandable, for architecture was solid, practical, and sufficiently commercial to matter in Chicago. It was, after all, merely a pretentious name for real estate. To the rest of the world, the skyscraper symbolized Chicago architecture—and Chicago itself. The world’s first skyscrapers transformed a provincial settlement into a modern metropolis of somber greens, grays, and blues: a backdrop of immense buildings etched with light. In other cities, architects designed skyscrapers of necessity, and they tried to disguise the resulting structures as traditional buildings, but in Chicago, Louis Sullivan and John Root, to name two of an extraordinary rich field of artist-entrepreneurs, eagerly embraced the requirement to pile one story atop another.
Their skyscrapers gave the city its distinctively modern ambience. In downtown Chicago, the sunshine, leaping from sky to window to street, refracted by the greenish water of Lake Michigan and tinged with smoke and steam, was almost palpable. On the clearest mornings, light sliced through the air, creating a mirage of skyscrapers that vanished as the angle of the sun’s incidence changed. In the afternoon, buildings receded into a bluish haze and seemed gargantuan, unreal. By the day’s exhausted end, the stench of burning coal and the reek of the slaughterhouses hung in the air, and the city’s remorseless, ubiquitous trolleys squealed above the streets throughout the rowdy night. To take up residence in Chicago was to install oneself in a vast, throbbing machine, buying, selling, manufacturing, shipping, hustling. A furnace of commerce.
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
The price Chicago paid for all its wealth and exuberance was human exploitation. “Civic-minded” was not a term often used in connection with Chicago’s leading citizens. An established family was one that had been around for more than twenty years and owned a factory, a business, or real estate. In Chicago, “old money” was an oxymoron, inherited wealth a novelty. The city was built on legends of strong-willed, charismatic men who had arrived penniless, acquired fortunes through hard work, and become pillars of respectability. Everyone in Chicago knew the story of Philip (“I do not love the money, what I love is the getting of it”) Armour, who cornered the market in pork. He bought low, sold high, and built a meatpacking empire, which in turn funded a good deal of the city’s art and educational institutions. They were also in the thrall of the legend of Potter Palmer, who founded the precursor of the city’s best-known department store, Marshall Field, and whose Palmer House hotel was destroyed by the Chicago fire only thirteen days after it had been completed, and was instantly rebuilt, bigger than ever. And there was Marshall Field himself, the department store tycoon, who died a mysterious death during a sex orgy in a posh Chicago brothel. Above all, there was the hydra-headed McCormick dynasty, which appeared to have sprung from the pages of a Booth Tarkington novel, dark, majestic, and cobwebby. One branch—the “rich branch”—held the patent on the McCormick reaper, which, in addition to altering the course of American agriculture, gave rise to the Chicago-based International Harvester. Later on, the “poor branch” (the characterization was strictly relative) came to control the Chicago Tribune and its radio station, WGN. (As everyone knew, its nationally recognized call letters stood for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”: an instance of typical Chicago self-promotion.) During the 1920s, when Al Capone was making his bid to take his place alongside the other Chicago dynasties, the McCormick Tribune was not merely an influential newspaper, it was a major power broker in the city’s public life, almost a shadow government, whose imperial, eccentric publisher, Robert R. McCormick, had designs on changing the course of national and even international affairs. There were other dynasties, as well: the Florsheims, the McNallys, the Sterns, Smiths, and Ryersons. Each traced its wealth to a single-minded founder who, inevitably, came to Chicago penniless, or nearly so, and rose to great wealth and position through pluck and luck.
In his idle moments Al Capone liked to compare himself to these other self-made Chicago millionaires. He was fond of casting himself in their time-honored rags-to-riches mode, another American success story. “When I came to Chicago,” he once boasted, “I had only $40 in my pocket. I went into a business that was open and didn’t do anybody any harm. . . . At least
300 young men, thanks to me, are getting from $150 to $200 a week. . . . I have given work that has taken many a man out of the hold-up and bank robbery business.” Al Capone, self-made man, benefactor. A man persevering against all odds. If fame is an index, Capone was right to do so, for his reputation eclipsed all others. In fact, the city was ripe for the taking.
The absence of traditions and widely acknowledged standards of personal conduct and business behavior generated impressive statistics, but it also made for a state of near anarchy. Chicago, said its boosters, was an “open city.” Translation: its political establishment was for sale to the highest bidder. Political influence in Chicago was one more commodity to be bought and sold like so many head of cattle or a choice location. The city accomplished its business the easy way, through fixing and corruption. The judges were fixed, the juries were fixed, the reporters (half of them, anyway) were on the take from their sources. It was expected that police were on the take; citizens bribed them just to be on the safe side. To be a cop was to be assured of never going hungry. The lawyers bribed juries, and everyone bribed the politicians, who in turn bribed the good citizens of Chicago to vote for them. All over town, the fix was in, and year after year it seeped into the city’s core, until doing business in Chicago, any business at all, meant paying protection money, but that was only the start, because the further anyone went in Chicago public life, the more corrupt he became. Only nobodies and a few zealous, wrongheaded reformers were foolish enough to be honest, for to be an honest man in Chicago was to be alone, without allies, vulnerable, impotent.
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