“What is it, angel?” Robert asked. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
Mary Harlan nodded. “Mamie nearly took her first steps today,” she said. “She pulled herself up to a bench, but she couldn’t bring herself to go further.”
“Is that true?” Robert asked his daughter. “Are you finally ready to walk?”
Mamie smiled at her father but didn’t say anything.
Mary Harlan passed the bread. “Do you have children, Mister Caldwell?”
“Oh no,” he replied. “I have a nephew but no children of my own. That is quite enough for me.”
“I see,” she said. “Are you married?”
“No,” he said, “and I don’t plan to be— certainly not in the foreseeable future.”
Robert chuckled. “You don’t know what you’re missing, my friend.”
“Darling, that’s a bit forward, don’t you think?” Mary Harlan said. “Some men aren’t ready until they reach a certain age, and that’s certainly nothing of which to be ashamed—”
Simon put up his hand. “Oh, it’s all right,” he said.
“You see?” Robert asked. “Men shan’t take offense to such things.”
Mary Harlan shrugged and handed him the butter. “Very well then,” she said.
As Simon looked around the parlor, he couldn’t help noticing a few knickknacks in the corner. Abraham Lincoln’s spectacles sat quietly in a cabinet, along with a watch and a fancy gold pen. Simon was tempted to mention them; for all he knew, the pen could have written the Gettysburg Address. But he decided to keep quiet. He was still a bit awed by the fact that he had befriended President Lincoln’s son, and he didn’t want to step on Robert’s toes in any way. All the same, those keepsakes made him think of how a person could do anything, even become President, as long as he was willing to work hard enough.
Simon started his Tribune job the next day, and as he expected, he found himself in a turbulent fast-paced world. Simon had grown up measuring time by the sun, but now he had to measure it by the punch clock. He worked at the Tribune from sunrise to sundown, meeting one tight deadline after another. At first he found the stresses and pressures relentless, but then he became accustomed to his new way of life.
Simon learned that for practical purposes, Joseph Medill’s word had the force of law. Medill’s ambition seemed to know no discernable bounds; he had been born in Canada to Irish immigrant parents, and he had always wanted to prove himself as a patriotic, flag-waving American. He had helped create a political movement, which he dubbed the Republican Party. Within a few years he had reached national prominence, and the party had taken Washington by storm.
Medill’s Tribune was also an extraordinary success. The paper had been born innocuously enough, in a third-floor room on Lake Street. But it had long ago outgrown its humble beginnings, and now it occupied a fancy new building at the corner of Dearborn and Madison. At a height of sixty feet, with a façade of red brick and white stone, the Tribune building dominated the block. Large signs hung on each side of the structure. An archway spanned the main entrance, which was decorated with a Greek-style fresco. Its construction was said to be fireproof, and its safety features were state-of-the-art. The building was pride of the Tribune, as not even the larger Chicago Times could boast anything like it.
Inside was almost perpetual chaos. Clerks ran from one room to another, carrying the latest dispatches from New York and Philadelphia and who-knows-where-else. The editors met in thrice-daily budget meetings and kept a close watch on coverage. Reporters rushed to their interviews, returning just in time to hammer out their stories before their deadlines arrived. Ad people ran in and out of the door and asked advertisers to turn in their copy. Secretaries raced after the ad people, trying to get the tear sheets to them before they left the office. Copy editors pored over the articles and wrote the corresponding headlines. Compositors sat at a table with thousands of tiny letters, trying to set the letters into the forms so that all the stories fit.
The news itself never seemed to rest, as the wires kept coming in at all hours. For the past seven months, Germany and France had engaged in a perennial pastime— namely waging war on each other— and refugees were now fleeing for America. Mary and Tad Lincoln were among the thousands sailing across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, in the South, the Ku Klux Klan was running rampant, and the President and Congress were trying to figure out what to do. In the North, the first professional baseball league had just formed, and its first game was about to be played in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The Chicago Board of Trade was investigating fraud among its inspectors, while the city council debated a measure to provide new clothes to its firemen.
Simon followed those events as best he could, but there was too much going on for him to always keep track. Even his home life was too hectic to give him any rest. He closely oversaw his home’s construction, and he hounded the builders to make sure they did their jobs correctly. On his days off, Simon equipped himself with tools and built large parts of the house himself. Within a few weeks, his home was growing and expanding; first the living room took shape, then the kitchen appeared, and then the bedrooms were constructed on top.
J.J., meanwhile, showed no such initiative. He didn’t give a hoot about Simon’s house, except for the fact that it had many taverns nearby. J.J. was now avoiding Conley’s Patch, but he still wanted to keep going out every night. So while Simon worked on his house, J.J. frequented the North Side saloons, and he stumbled to Fletcher’s house often smelling of booze.
“J.J., what’s the matter with you?” Simon asked him one night. “Have you forgotten that you have a boy of your own?”
“Come off it,” J.J. said. “Just because you know nothing but work—”
“Well, far be it from me to earn what I get.”
“Then tell me,” J.J. said, “if your house is completed, and your work is successful, and everything you hoped for comes true, then what comes next? What, pray tell me, is the ultimate point?”
Simon looked around Fletcher’s living room but didn’t say anything back.
“Well,” J.J. finally said, “what a sad empty life you lead.”
Simon scoffed. “The Yankee work ethic is what made this country great,” he replied. “If you insist on making a fool of yourself, then I’ll have no part of it. Take care you don’t damage that poor child of yours.” He grabbed a handful of things and headed off toward his half-constructed house.
J.J. sat quietly for a moment, then stumbled to his feet and watched his brother through a window. He couldn’t help feeling a pang of regret. J.J. had heard enough lectures from his father, so he didn’t want to hear any additional ones from his brother. J.J. watched as Simon disappeared down the street.
J.J. needed another drink, so he opened Fletcher’s liquor cabinet and helped himself to a bottle. He didn’t care exactly what he was drinking. He only wanted to clear his mind of his worries— from family worries to financial worries to all the rest— and he told himself that nothing was his fault. By two o’clock in the morning, he had drowned his sorrows completely. He sat in the darkened drawing room and savored his drunken complacency.
One block to the north, a telegraph sparked as a message came over the wires. Machinery clicked, clattered, and buzzed, and the giant Courthouse bell began to toll. The sounds of the commotion filtered into Fletcher’s home, but J.J. didn’t notice. He kept right on drinking, and his surroundings seemed to vanish into a fog. He fell out of his chair and sprawled onto the floor; at first he pawed at Fletcher’s carpet and tried to get up, but then he abandoned his efforts and fell into a blissful oblivious sleep.
At that moment, men across the city were springing into action. Horses pawed at the ground while their drivers hitched them up, and bells rang up and down the streets of the North Side.
Simon was trying to sleep in a finished part of his home. When he heard the commotion, he got up, dressed quickly, and went out to the street. In the distance, he saw the distillery of Graft
, Rolley and Company on fire.
Simon instinctively ran toward the scene. Halsted Street was lined with gawkers who pointed, gossiped, and stared at the sight. By the time Simon reached the fire, the whole building was ablaze. The surrounding streets were so shoddy that the fire engines had gotten stuck, although Chief Fire Marshal Robert Williams kept yelling at his men to move faster.
Simon took in the scene with his piercing blue eyes. The distillery was one of Chicago’s largest, producing five thousand gallons of alcohol per day. Most of those drinks went to the North Side saloons, where the city’s German immigrants assembled every Sunday. Being a Saturday night, most of its deliveries had already been made, so the brewery contained a bit less flammable alcohol than usual. But that was little consolation for the men on the scene: the flames were so intense that some bystanders retreated across the nearby river.
The fire engines had just reached the building when a boiler exploded, and the distillery tore itself apart in spectacular fashion. Firemen were thrown around like rag dolls; heavy equipment flew hundreds of feet through the air; and an ear-splitting roar reverberated through the streets. In a matter of minutes, the whole complex was reduced to a ruin.
Simon whipped his ever-present pen from his pocket, and he found a blank scrap of paper. He approached the firemen and obtained the name and rank of one of the injured. He didn’t have time to do full-fledged interviews, but he did manage to get all the key information. With that, he rushed to the Tribune to write up the story, and he finished just in time to make that morning’s edition. The article made the front page, and more importantly, it beat the other papers to press.
It was Simon’s first scoop, and he quickly found himself basking in glory. A front-page story was always difficult to get, and Simon had gotten one in less than a month on the job. The fire was a conversation topic all over the newsroom— and in fact all over town— and suddenly everyone on staff seemed to know Simon’s name. All the senior reporters patted him on the back, and several offered to take him to lunch.
To Simon, the most meaningful compliment came from Joseph Medill himself. “Good work, son,” Medill said. “That was not badly done for an abecedarian.”
“Thank you,” Simon replied.
“Now don’t start with the niceties,” Medill shot back. “This was not the first time we’ve had a large fire, and I daresay it won’t be the last. So don’t think for one moment that you can rest on any laurels. Just do your job, write your stories well, and finish them on time. That’s the only way people earn their keep around here.”
Chapter Four: The Energies of All
“The Creator when he formed the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, intended that... Chicago is to be the great central commercial city of the North American continent.”
— William “Deacon” Bross
THE TRIBUNE, LIKE MOST EMPLOYERS, REWARDED GOOD WORK WITH EVEN MORE WORK. Simon’s reward, as it were, was to cover a special meeting of the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners. It met in the West Wing of the Courthouse, and all the city bureaucrats showed up. Simon was not looking forward to it, and he expected to spend his time doodling on his notepad. But then, just before the meeting started, Tribune co-owner William “Deacon” Bross appeared.
Simon immediately straightened his posture. He knew that Bross was one of the city’s biggest boosters, and Simon wanted to make a good impression. He watched as Bross sat down beside J. Young Scammon. Suddenly the meeting didn’t seem so mundane.
Fire Marshal Williams started his presentation with a dramatic flourish. He was a strong and muscular man, six feet tall, with brown eyes and a beard, and his voice seemed to echo through the building. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I come to you with a matter of the utmost importance. Saturday’s blaze was spectacular— shocking even, perhaps— but it was but a taste of the hells this city may face. If our citizens do not believe it now, they will after the next great fire sweeps us out of existence.”
Simon rolled his eyes. He hated political bluster, and Chicago politicians were more blustery than most. All the same, he kept his comments to himself; he just scribbled his notes while Williams gave his speech.
The truth was that the Chicago Fire Department was nearly ahead of its time. Professional firefighting was still a newfangled idea. The job had originally been handled by amateur groups, since insurance companies would pay whomever put out a fire first. That system, however, had been fraught with problems: it sent untrained men into dangerous situations, and it often created conflicts of interest. If two groups responded to the same blaze, it was not unusual for them to fight over who should be paid for putting it out; and by the time the fight had ended, the building had already burned down.
Chicago had suffered major fires in 1839 and 1857. The latter had killed twenty-two people, which forced the city into action. The old firefighting system was abolished, and the city invested in a trained, taxpayer-funded fire department, one of the first of its kind in the nation. By 1871, the department employed more than two hundred men, and its equipment was state-of-the-art. It boasted seventeen steam engines, four hook-and-ladder trucks, and two hose elevators, as well as a hundred seventy-two alarm boxes all over the city. The downtown Courthouse was the nerve center of it all: lookouts were posted on the balcony while telegraph operators stood by, and the giant Courthouse bell served as a citywide alarm.
It was an impressive system, but it had one Achilles heel, namely money. The Board of Police and Fire Commissioners, which oversaw the department, had no power to levy taxes or fund its own budget. The money had to come from the city council, which was a completely separate body. Since the council was not responsible for the department, it didn’t see it as a priority; the council was more interested in keeping taxes low, which kept voters and businesses happy. The result was that the department was chronically underfunded and understaffed.
Chicago’s explosive growth didn’t help matters, because it happened too quickly for the department to keep pace. In 1870, the city had had 669 fires, which was more than a ten percent increase from the previous year. Worse yet, the fires were getting more and more destructive. In 1869, the average fire had burned $1,454 worth of property; but in 1870, that figure had more than doubled to $3,659; and it was anyone’s guess as to what the 1871 figures would be. Marshal Williams implored the commissioners to take action, for if something wasn’t done, then he felt the city was headed for disaster.
“Consider this,” Williams said. “The city wished to avoid false alarms, so it locked the alarm boxes and gave the keys to ‘responsible’ neighborhood men. Even if we assume that these men can be found— which is not always the case— the chance of malfunction is great. The old boxes must be cranked nearly twenty-five times before a signal goes out. The new automatic ones will not be fully installed for another year at least.” Williams shuffled his papers. “In the meantime, safety precautions have been disregarded more than ever before... so I truly dread what the future might bring.”
Most of the listeners scoffed at those words. James Hildreth, a former Seventh Ward alderman and a notorious gadfly, opposed virtually everything Williams proposed. Even the mayor, Roswell Mason, was not terribly impressed. Mason was an engineer by training, so he wanted to rely on technology instead. He was pushing for construction of a second Water Tower, which would strengthen the water supply and would make firefighting much easier. When Hildreth begged to differ, it touched off another round of political bickering.
In the end, the meeting resolved very little. The Board had just adjourned, and Simon was organizing his notes, when he saw Scammon pointing in his direction. Simon wanted to know what was going on; then, a moment later, Bross walked up to his chair.
“Mister Caldwell?” he asked.
“Yes,” Simon replied.
“I read your piece about the distillery,” Bross said. “You and I must have a word.”
Simon nodded. “Of course,” he said. “What do you wish to discuss?”
&
nbsp; “You shall see,” Bross replied. “Come this way.”
Simon frowned while Bross led him out of the room. Bross was not a large man, but he was powerfully built, with curly brown hair, bushy eyebrows, and a beard. His clout extended across Illinois, since he had served as lieutenant governor until two years before. As Bross strode through the Courthouse, men everywhere seemed to step out of his path.
Bross took Simon to the center of the building, then led him up a spiral staircase. Simon felt a pang of claustrophobia; the stairs were steep and narrow, and the walls were only inches from his face. The men climbed for what seemed like many floors, but when they reached the top, they found themselves rewarded with a spectacular view.
They were at the highest overlook in Chicago. The balcony wrapped around the cupola, giving spectators a panoramic view of the city. It was a beautiful day, with the sun high in the sky and only a few clouds in the distance. The Courthouse roof was thirty feet below, and another sixty feet below that was the ground. Courthouse Square seemed huge from above: hundreds of people were walking down its sidewalks, sitting on its benches, and strolling across the grass.
“Look outward,” Bross said, “and see what ingenuity has wrought.”
Simon walked along the railing and took in the view. The Chamber of Commerce stood just across the street, with the shacks of Conley’s Patch behind it. On Simon’s right, Randolph Street stretched off toward the horizon. To the northwest lay several industrial districts near the river.
“Everything you see here is new,” Bross was saying. “As I first saw Chicago in 1846, I have seen a sea change unequaled by any city in history. Chicago was then a mere group of shanties built upon the soil: there were scattered houses as far as Van Buren in the south, and four or five blocks past the river on the north. When I commenced my permanent residence, the Illinois and Michigan Canal had but opened the month before. Having seen Chicago with no railways, no pavements, no sewers, barely an apology for waterworks— and now having witnessed the transformation since— the temptation to imagine her future is almost irresistible.”
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