By 1900, Chicago, which already had more Scandinavians and Dutch than any other city in the United States, became the Nation’s largest Polish, Lithuanian, Bohemian, Croatian, and Greek settlement.
After a long battle the first Juvenile Court in the country was established, and it was soon adopted as a model by other cities. New parks and playgrounds were laid out to bring breathing space into crowded tenement areas. A comprehensive plan for the physical and cultural development of the city was drawn up by Daniel H. Burnham and presented to the city by the Commercial Club.
Although much of it was characterized by what Lewis Mumford later called “municipal cosmetic,” it was accepted by the city, and the Chicago Plan Commission, an advisory body formed in 1909, has used it with important modifications, to guide civic improvements since that time. Streets were widened and bridges were built to facilitate movement in the city, which had been growing at a rate of more than 500,000 each decade since 1880.
The World War found Chicago somewhat divided in counsel, for Mayor William Hale Thompson was vigorously opposed to American intervention. When the die was finally cast, however, Chicago contributed more than her quota to the armies in the field. The war greatly stimulated production in almost all local plants, particularly in the food-processing and metal industries, and incidentally created a grave new problem.
Thousands of workers were drawn from the factories to the military training camps, and with immigration from Europe cut off, 65,000 Negroes poured in from the South to fill the demand for labor. Sporadic clashes occurred as the newcomers rapidly filled up the constricted Negro areas and spilled over into neighborhoods in which they “did not belong.”
In July 1919, an incident on a South Side beach precipitated five days of rioting which took a death toll of 22 Negroes and 16 whites; more than 500 persons were more or less seriously injured. A voluminous study of the psychological, social, and economic causes of the outbreak was made, but no effective steps were taken to improve conditions, which grew more acute as Negroes continued to move into the already overcrowded Black Belt.
During the fantastic 1920’s Chicago boomed as never before. By 1930 it had passed the 3,000,000 mark in population, and it was manufacturing or processing $4,000,000,000 of goods a year–meat and meat products, books and printed matter of all kinds, machinery, clothing, and steel leading among thousands of products. Within three years it expended $1,000,000,000 on new buildings, erecting more than go miles of them in one year. Field Museum, a massive marble pile, and the great oval of Soldier Field took form in Grant Park, extended and improved as “Chicago’s front yard.”
On the fringes of the city the chain of forest preserves expanded to approximately 30,000 acres of recreational areas. Downtown streets became deep canyons with sheer limestone walls as skyscrapers, one more aspiring than the other, shot up toward the heavens. The financial structures of the buildings and other enterprises soared to even dizzier heights, reaching an apogee in the huge inverted pyramid of public utility holdings assembled by Samuel Insull.
But with the lavish abandon of a booming frontier touched with a kind of Continental laissez faire, Chicagoans on the whole cared not about the financial soundness of these structures, nor about how the city was run. The traction muddle, the wasteful multiplicity of governmental units, the archaic taxing system–for each of these and other pressing problems solutions were offered, but were turned down by the electorate.
The chauvinistic clowning of Mayor William Hale Thompson (1915-23 and 1927-31) was climaxed by the emergence of the “wide open town.” The enormous trade in alcohol and beer, gambling and prostitution, and the various “rackets” preying on legitimate businesses moved smoothly; the conviction of a gangster was extremely rare. The blazing sub-machine guns and sawed-off shotguns that were heard around the world were employed by rival gangs in the battle for control of the business whose sales ran into scores of millions annually. Of the several combines resulting from this warfare, Alphonse Capone’s was the largest.
Although its effects were not immediately apparent, the knell of this gawdy period sounded with the stock market crash of 1929. Prices of commodities in which Chicago had a vital interest tumbled disastrously; the Insull utilities empire and other elaborate financial edifices collapsed with a roar, while the “underground” empire shriveled to a remnant after the removal of Capone for income tax evasion and later, the repeal of the eighteenth amendment. Unemployment spread in ever widening circles; teachers and other city employees endured long periods of payless pay days.
In the midst of the world-wide depression, Chicago courageously proceeded with plans for A Century of Progress Exposition, which opened in 1933 in a striking group of modern, plainly geometrical structures erected in newly-made Burnham Park and Northerly Island. Its central theme was applied science, and its exposition at the fair was guided by data furnished by the National Research Council. Hard times accounted in large part for the fact that the exposition was a financial disappointment in its first year, but Sally Rand and her fan dancers accomplished what applied science had failed to do, and the exposition closed in 1934 with a net profit, which was donated to participating cultural institutions, excluding Sally Rand.
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