![]() Kipling visited Chicago just as new industrial modes of production revolutionized the United States. In 1900, nearly 80 percent of Chicago’s population was either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born immigrants. Chicago, like many other American industrial cities, was also an immigrant city. Mirroring national immigration patterns, Chicago’s newcomers had at first come mostly from Germany, the British Isles, and Scandinavia, but, by 1890, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and others from southern and eastern Europe made up a majority of new immigrants. But if many who flocked to Chicago and other American cities came from rural America, many others emigrated from overseas. In 1870, a quarter of the nation’s population lived in towns or cities with populations greater than 2,500. ![]() By the turn of the twentieth century, the city was home to 1.7 million people.Ĭhicago’s explosive growth reflected national trends. The Great Chicago Fire leveled 3.5 square miles and left a third of its residents homeless in 1871, but the city quickly recovered and resumed its spectacular growth. Twenty years later, it had three hundred thousand. In 1850, Chicago had a population of about thirty thousand. “Once having seen them,” he concluded, “you will never forget the sight.” Like other notable Chicago industries, such as agricultural machinery and steel production, the meatpacking industry was closely tied to urbanization and immigration. Kipling described in intimate detail the Union Stock Yards, the nation’s largest meat processing zone, a square mile just southwest of the city whose pens and slaughterhouses linked the city’s vast agricultural hinterland to the nation’s dinner tables. The Chicago meat processing industry, a cartel of five firms, produced four fifths of the meat bought by American consumers. Chicago, for instance, became America’s butcher. The last decades of the nineteenth century, a new era for big business, saw the formation of large corporations, run by trained bureaucrats and salaried managers, doing national and international business. Its meatpacking industry typified the sweeping changes occurring in American life. ![]() ![]() Library of Congress, LC-D4-70163.Ĭhicago embodied the triumph of American industrialization. They repeated their statements again and again.” Kipling said American newspapers report “that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress.” 1 “I listened to people who said that the mere fact of spiking down strips of iron to wood, and getting a steam and iron thing to run along them was progress, that the telephone was progress, and the network of wires overhead was progress. “There was no color in the street and no beauty-only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot.” He took a cab “and the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress.” Kipling visited a “gilded and mirrored” hotel “crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere.” He visited extravagant churches and spoke with their congregants. He described a rushed and crowded city, a “huge wilderness” with “scores of miles of these terrible streets” and their “hundred thousand of these terrible people.” “The show impressed me with a great horror,” he wrote. When British author Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in 1889, he described a city captivated by technology and blinded by greed. Industrialization & Technological Innovation ![]()
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