You can watch this interview in its entirety along with other oral histories, cspan. Org history. Welcome to the 30 sixth annual planning board, please help me give a special thank you to all the sponsors. Before we begin. And the camera flashes. I will introduce today, in conversation proud smith with rick cogan. And with chicago great fire. And and please join me, please welcome rick hogan. You are good to come out on a hot day like this. A big part of this book, the paperback edition was just out and in the current of that addition, simply put, the best book ever written about my father who i admired tremendously wrote a book about the fire and i still say this. My brother is here. Where we have run out of things, you knew my dad. I came to chicago, just finished graduate school in yale in newhaven connecticut. What i was most interested in was history and culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. And weve got this job on northwestern. I was teaching a heavy load but in the spring, i went to teach a course on chicago literature and i dont remember the exact way it happened and somehow before the internet and emails, there he is. Your book is better. Sitting upstairs at the Chicago Press club, ordered a Chicken Salad and pineapple, the only thing that is edible and just enthused and gave me the most important thing which is validated and taught the course including the wonderful book, with the levy. The title the publishers fought and 20 years after the book was published, would increase sales. I always loved the title. The first or, the infamous first or the john coghlan. Next thing i knew i was teaching a course, there is stuff here and did stuff that was in some ways conventionally career suicide except it worked out, a few articles in my dissertation on henry james but didnt try to turn that into a book, write a book about chicago and that ended up being the first of five books that are in one way or another. Writing a book, as smart as you are, is not easy, especially when as you were, digging into the history of chicago, in the near case, whatever the topic was. That was the most literary of the books. Dozens of chicago novel and in the context to learn much more about the city and the one through line, i was interested in how People Living in america in the great age of urbanization were thinking and how they expressed it and how ideas matter, they basically live by. In another book, the development of what i call intellectual infrastructure, the ideas People Living which are insufferable. That the louis sullivan, sermons in stone. If you look at any building expresses certain ideas and assumptions. What does it mean . Armories in a city, they are making a statement, what the assumptions are about society. What is especially true about this city, as you started to research you must have been ravenous about it. It is pretty ravenous, and it kept being interesting. Carl condit, john, walter at the university of chicago, they got me going, robert streeter who wrote a book, Robert Herrick who wrote a bunch of novels about chicago. One of the things, a person who is researching at all sorts of levels, academic research, scholarly research, fiction writing research, how do you determine, is there a point you say to yourself this book is junk, because chicago more so than most places will get to this. There are myths that arise that are so durable and one after another through the decades, takes a bright, smart guy, and are we stunned that historians in chicago. I might add to a culture role historian, the myths are as much fodder as the truth how certain versions of things, the oleary thing. And and and and the difficulty is chasing down the sources, where do they get that. Most of these books we are talking about have no footnotes or anything like that. Most of my books are more scholarly. 50 pages of small print is not numbers on the page. This is written to be a good read. That is what i to say about this book. I have read a great deal about the chicago fires, this reads like a great novel. The narrative drive is so powerful, that can be on the front of the next paperback edition. I would like to talk about how you grew as a writer. Did you see a pattern of growth through your books . You must have. They are all different in their own way and the great difference between this book and other books, it is about ideas but i wanted to be about people and events. It is very much focused on how People Living in chicago experienced the fire. It will arise heavily on contemporary sources they wrote or as i try to come back and see the fire in their eyes and talk in terms of how people are thinking. For these nice people here, draw a portrait of chicago, chicago has been to many periods that has been so unbelievably chaotic it is hard to believe people lived like this. What was chicago like before the fire . Certainly a city of would. Heavily a city of would. But chicago was at a crucial moment in history. It explains why the city rebuilt so quickly. Chicago was built out of nowhere and out of everywhere and the modern chicago that we know in 40 years before the fire, 100 white settlers in 1830, they kick the indians, native americans out three years later and growth takes off so there may be for thousands people at the center of 1840, there are 330,000 at the time of the fire. Between 1850, and 1871, 30,000 to 330,000 people, no place grew so fast. It is the expression as i was saying earlier of the nineteenth century. Industrialization, immigration, westward movement, transportation, and communications revolution. The stock yards had been built as big as they became but you had this wonderful river flowing through into Lake Michigan and it had become a real rail hub by then, had it not . Chicago came into its own as chicago in the 1850s and 60s. You talk about 1848 where the board of trade is, the first train and the first telegraph message and so on. 1850s, grain center and all that, civil war really gives a bump. Triples in size by the 1860s, this is the period it is switching or not switching and becoming more complicated from a mercantile center, a center of trade where things are exchanged to a manufacturing center. It is in process for things like this. And steel bills and much larger things and a lot of these things made the 1860s to equip the union army. People who were drawn to chicago. Many of us who read chicago history, these incredibly cool steve jobs of their day, marshall field, who were the other people. Who were the olearys . Chicago in 1870, 40 of the population was foreignborn and something close to 80 had one foreignborn parents. By early on, the irish were the dominant group but by the time of the fire the germans, tricky term to use in either case because so many of these people, you cant talk about them as a unified group, they are protestant germans and catholic germans in germany didnt exist until 1871. Most of the city is immigrant ethnic, relatively small percentage, yankee, nativeborn, protestant, white people and they earn all of the wealth and the number of them came earlier. Were they to my Job Opportunities . This is where the future was happening. Chicago is a creation of the nineteenth century. Many of you read natures metropolis. It is the crucial nexus between the manufacturing and agricultural and mining west. A place of exchange. It is basically built by Eastern European investment. The International Economy needs this place, wants this place and it becomes a selffulfilling prophecy. It is a boomtown. It is only going to grow. That kept up all the way to the 1930s. It took the depression to stop the growth of chicago which peaked in 1950. What did the olearys do . One of the things i tried to do in this book is bring the lives of immigrants, women, children. Which he does magnificently. The olearys are demonized, the mainstream papers talking about the spectacle of papers, it is impossible to overstate the vilification of workingclass immigrants, especially Irish Catholic immigrants. Joseph markdill was Irish Catholic but patrick reed was like many chicagoans, unskilled labor. He did what jobs he could earning 5 a week, 6, when he found work, they had five children and she to supplement the Family Income had not one cow the four cows, a calf, a horse, a wagon in the barn, north of where they live, but again these five children, these are deeply human people, members of holy family, build back congregation, had their children baptized their, living a life. One thing when the house caught fire, neighbors helped throw water on it. And the Community Later and it is impossible to overstate the condescension, the nastiness of respectable people. I would have to say in large part the nasty reputation after the fire was fostered and set fire by what past for the media in those days, the tribune was very boosters and they, the irish invective and racism, i suppose, that is what fostered that set fire to the oleary myth. That she was a perfect scapegoat. Perfect but a place that was ready to burn any one of them and as the person as olmsted in the nation said that the commonplace, what should the city burn down a blamed goal place for the city was built. This was the city built it was a perfect storm, it was a city built of wood in place experiencing incredible drought. And understaffed Fire Department and beaten down in the night before, something called saturday night fire that they fought for like 16 hours and one third of them already too small Fire Department was basically out of commission and so was a lot of their equipment. Then less than six or hours later comes the one for the chicagos great fire and that alarmed basically for various reasons we dont understand, came a halfhour late so the fires going the time we get to the scene. Basically they had a guard wandering the top like looking out like someplace like the city hall, it seems prehistoric but look there may be a fire over there, what is that over there. It had too few people into little equipment and there were one or 95 fighters of the city of 3,130,000 people but they had a stateoftheart as it were, equipment and steam equipment and they also had a telegraph alarm system, it just did not work at night. Someone threw an alarm but it did not register downtown. And as as the first fire engines that went out in the information to the guy on top of the city hall he went to the wrong place. It was about a mile away. He missed by a mile, a sentence i try to put in there but it just did not sit right. It always amazes me that the olearys, will he did call in a house but it did not burn. The reason that it burned was it started on the near west side, if you know academy is, that is a block where they were. But the wind was blowing north and east. And the wind was ferocious wasnt not. It was burning chicago into the air and then the winds blew it towards the downtown and so it left the south branch of the river and in the main branch of the river and burned a child of the west side and it stopped with the city had been were the night before and jumped over and berg the entire downtown and virtually the whole north side, 13300 of 13003. Some people would position themselves in various places to watch the fires when they start and was like a torch. There was no photographs and it was sunday night and they were watching a fire, sending i will could be more fun and he watch it and even earlier on during for saturday night fire, the crowd gathered around the firemen sprayed them and they thought that was the greatest thing and then they went over they look over the fire started on sunday not thought it would stay there but it did not in the next thing i know, they are running for their lives. And basically to the prairie up to the west into the lake through linkin park that used to be a cemetery. He was changing from the City Cemetery to what we know as lincoln park the bottom halfhour of linkin park now, above north avenue with was the City Cemetery lincoln park was or had just become the linkin park just after the president was assassinated in there moving the bodies out and another health that you could not bury the bodies within the city limits and that is when places like graceland and rose hill and so on. When the panic really took hold, people gathered whatever they could and they would bury their worldly possessions in the park or at the beach. People work very pianos i cant believe it but there are so many different accounts unlike others of people would say that i did it as opposed to some of the other rumors that i heard that kind of seven and another thing when youre dealing with the sources of what you trust we dont and someone. But getting back to missus oleary, what he did it was horrible minnesota brought out this fear of the urban under pressure we gotta control these people are they will burn us down literally and figuratively pretty. So the olearys were forced to over the lives as the kids grew up in one grew up to be a first, big jim and colin james of course for formality and one of the first gambling bazaars certainly of this city if not the whole country but they were forced to move around the south side. As far as i can tell, they largely lived basically near the East Entrance of the stockyard on the near piece changed by 15th street and south homestead and that is where they were living when he died, 1894 and she in 1895. They were hounded, they were hounded by the present media and you couldnt even imagine what it is like today the reporters would show up and i cant will you do a great job of doing it. I so sympathize with her. She learned quickly that there was nothing to be gained. These were people who cannot read or write so they have no way to strike back. And they dont have access to print even if they could. So she stopped talking to them and they made fun of her. And the one thing that happened though is that with the recovery, chicagos triumphant rise, phoenix like, from the ashes and became the part of the positive mythology so she became like a chicago folk hero. Condescending and patronized. You can make the case in which you would that the whole thing inspired was irish family, you have this count, this nameless cow, easy to blame and it is like a little kind of a nasty fairytale. It had the elements to become a story. Whats wonderful about it is it reaffirms existing prejudices and in some ways makes it not dangerous, just some clumsy irish woman if we dont have to have some wholesale overhaul here. There is nothing wrong with the system, the way things are. And not this terrible threat and at the same time, there were other rumors that rejected that people from the Paris Commune were burning chicago down and thats a much scarier and then people like homestead, also to their credit to the tribune say it is not her fault. We built this place to burn down and we have to rebuild it better pretty. With the tribune know the papers of the time the work of the papers at the time world editorials were generally warning of this wooden city, very strong editorials. And they said it would happen again and it did. We are now in the second chicagos great fire, in 1974, july 15th, 1874, an enormous chunk just south for the fire ended about a block away from here, this end of it in went all of the way up to fullerton down here around harrison street. And then this firebird from this area already here burned historic black churches and jewish synagogues here in the neighborhood in the number of brothels. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, there were fears about arsonists wandering around and any tragedies, people trying to take advantage of the situation. Papers were full of the stories that all of the criminals around the country were coming to chicago to pray on them and they were tales of people setting new fires like and then being hanged on the spot on the righteous citizens there is no verification of any of these stories, probably some looting and probably some other the city was under martial law at the time sort of at least martial law. At least completely illegal martial law in one of the residence at the time of the fire, theres so many wonderful stories here. Philip sheridan a hero of the civil war in india fire even had a role in dealing with maximilian in mexico but he is the headquarters of the army of the fourth army here, the basically commands basically fighting indians west of the Mississippi River but he is living here and he is sort of completely regularly pressed into service to kind of lead a ad hoc group of policeman militia and volunteers, two police city. He sought to be vulnerable and to some degree it is an particulars arent concerned about the downtown all of the space and valuables in the businesses that we saw in downtown. The resurrection part of this, the construction part is like a movie, the resurrection part is also kind of cinematic is meant. One of the attempts after the fire that is to enforce what are called fire limits, kind of a zoning, bring forth a law that said that every single building in the city must have a brick or stone exterior, no wall wooden and the problem with that is working people cant afford stone or brick. And they see it as a direct attack on them which to some degree it was and they see it as a way to get them remarkably High Percentage of Home Ownership by working people in the city in a way that they cannot afford to build on their lot, is worthless and they see it as an attempt to grab the land. So there is a meeting in the Chicago City Council and a temporary city hall where the rookery building is over there. In his march on it and it turns into complete with rocks and stones being thrown in the quick adjournment and it kind of a compromise on the fire limits but chicago, those arent even enforced. Chicago remained very fire prone for a long time. The fires in the notion of fire in the chicago fire scared people, the next roswell mayor, and the fire the man who became the next mayor ran on the fireproof ticket. But it also was a ticket of the best men and do mean meant, as a kind of a fusion ticket of the most respectable republicans and democrats to basically reclaim the city. And what is going on in the city is a real find of the city because 60 percent of the electorate is on the ethnic working people and similar representation and what was called the Common Council by 1835, is now the city council as we know it. And there is despite th