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.8
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.”9 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.”10 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.11
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.”12 Scholars such as Harold Platt and Robert Lewis have likewise emphasized that, at every stage, Chicago’s development was contingent on human actions.13 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.14 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 fouled by their sewers and by the animal blood and guts from their meatpackers. Even as the city and industry clogged the river channel with waste, large boats dragged their hulls through the slop, shuttling cargoes to and from businesses. Chicagoans, moreover, demanded that the river banks and lakeshore serve as sites for factories, grain elevators, and railroad depots—as well as civic monuments and “natural” beauty. Thus, the city’s waterways and waterfront simultaneously facilitated mass production, commodity circulation, public health, tourism, and social harmony. Chicagoans engineered a waterscape to reconcile the environmental contradictions of the urban economy. They created a new ecology for a new urban industrial capitalism. The waterscape, in turn, became a resource for moneymaking, a form of liquid capital.15
The story of Chicago’s growth, then, is largely about the contentious politics of creating and managing the urban environment. And, it presents something of a paradox. Chicago’s waterfront, the hub of economic activity in a city renowned as an archetype of crass industrial capitalism, was also the site of several of the nation’s precedent-making decisions about public land use, economic regulation, and environmental protection. A dispute over storage rates at the grain elevators along the banks of the Chicago River, for instance, led to the Supreme Court’s 1877 ruling in Munn v. Illinois, which dramatically expanded state legislatures’ ability to regulate any businesses deemed “affected with a public interest.”16 Another dispute over the ownership of the lakeshore resulted in a Supreme Court ruling in Illinois Central v. Illinois (1892), which mandated that states hold vital natural resources “in trust” for the public. Contemporary environmentalists have, in turn, used this ruling to argue for protection of air, water, and forests.17 Meantime, Chicago’s waterfront—developed in accord with the recommendations of Burnham’s monumental 1909 Plan of Chicago—has become a model civic landscape for urban planners throughout the world.18
Chicago’s waterfront, in sum, was both a critical moneymaking enterprise and the site of several precedents for economic regulation and environmental stewardship. That fact is difficult to square with master narratives about American history and economic policy, which draw sharp—and ultimately misleading—distinctions between the public realm of government and the private sphere of the market.
Historians often tell the story of the growth of the state as a reaction to private market excess. During the nineteenth century, the narrative goes, America had a “weak” state, and public officials seldom intervened in the private marketplace. Unbridled industrial capitalism, in turn, produced class conflict, pollution, workplace accidents, and consumer exploitation. In the early twentieth century, though, well-educated middle-class political reformers came to the rescue, leveraging the power of state and federal governments to enact regulations that mitigated the effects of the industrial revolution. Progressive reforms were a public, state-centered response to the vagaries of the private marketplace.19
This narrative is inscribed in the very terms historians use to describe the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1920s, liberal, “progressive” historians disparaged the late nineteenth century as “the Gilded Age,” after the title of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 satire of the era’s greed and corruption. Meanwhile, they celebrated the early twentieth century as “the Progressive Era.” These terms continue to shape how many Americans think about the rise of the state: as a reaction to industrial capitalism, with the state-centered reforms of the early twentieth century correcting the excesses of the late-nineteenth-century free market.20 It would indeed be ironic, within the framework of this narrative, that Chicago’s waterfront was simultaneously a site of economic dynamism and muscular assertions of state power.
The irony, though, is not in what transpired on the shores of Lake Michigan and along the Chicago and Calumet Rivers. It lies in the space between what that master narrative of history and economic policy reveals—and hides. The “Gilded Age and Progressive Era” framing is powerful because it is partly true. The state did grow larger after the industrial revolution, and