The legend — and myths — of the Great Chicago Fire continue to smolder. Watch an upcoming ‘Chicago Stories’ to learn more.
On an October afternoon in 1971 a cow was standing on the sidewalk on Oak Street near Michigan Avenue and the cow was hungry, so it was munching on a bale of bale of hay.
This curious scene was intended as a celebration of 100th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire and the publication of a new book, “The Great Fire, Chicago 1871” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), written by longtime newspapermen and friends Herman Kogan (my father) and Bob Cromie.
The event was the idea of Carol Stoll, the woman who operated the bygone Oak Street Book Shop, and it marked the calamity that killed 300, leveled much of the city, left tens of thousands homeless, and made characters of Catherine O’Leary and one of her cows. People enjoyed the party. They bought books.
Like most members of the generations that came after the fire, I learned at an early age that on the hot Sunday night of Oct. 8, 1871, O’Leary went out to the barn behind her house on DeKoven Street to get some milk from her cow, the cow kicked over a lantern and fire came.
The lady and her cow, initially villainized, eventually became to be viewed affectionately and captured in art (a 1935 Norman Rockwell painting), film (1937 1/4 u2032s “In Old Chicago” was nominated for an Academy Award and Alice Brady as Mrs. O’Leary won the supporting actress Oscar), parades (for the 1960 Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif., Chicago had a float with a “Mrs. O’Leary” and a smoke-spewing cow fashioned out of carnations and chrysanthemums which won the grand prize) and myriad other wacky ways.
Mrs. O’Leary was an early victim of what is now referred to as “fake news,” for it was members of the press who, fueled by the anti-Irish, anti-working class, anti-woman invective so common at the time, pinned the fire on the lady and her cow. (Fifty years after the fire, a reporter named Michael Ahern admitted that he and a couple of reporter pals had made up the story).
Though the truth was well known for ages, the legend persisted. In 1997, thanks in part to the work of Richard F. Bales, a lawyer by trade and historian by passion, the cow and Mrs. O’Leary beat their bad rap. Bales' digging was what compelled Ald. Ed Burke (14th) to state at a meeting of the City Council’s Committee of Fire and Police, “Mrs. Kate O’Leary and her cow are innocent.”
And the city shrugged.
Now, welcome two new members of the great fire crowd.
One is a book, “Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City” (Atlantic Monthly Press). It is, simply put, the best book ever written about the fire, a work of deep scholarship by Carl Smith that reads with the forceful narrative of a fine novel. It puts the fire and its aftermath in historical, political and social context. It’s a revelatory pleasure to read.
The other is an original television program, “Chicago Stories: The Great Chicago Fire,” produced and written by Peter Marks with executive producer Dan Protess of WTTW-Ch. 11 and airing 8 p.m. Oct. 9.
(Wonder what might pop up next year, on the momentous 150th anniversary?).
The television show does an entertaining job of storytelling, embellished by wonderful photographs (though none exists of the fire while it raged) and artful dramatic recreations, and is very smart in its choice of talking heads. Among them are the ever engaging Tim Samuelson, the city’s historian; Donald Miller, the author of the marvelous “City of the Century”; historians Ellen Skerrett, Dominic Pacyga and Liesl Olson; teacher/writer Bill Savage; and Nancy Connolly, a Chicago-area descendant of Mrs. O’Leary’s.
They and others pepper the show with intelligence and wit.
The program also provides some fresh material, most prominently in the form of Joseph Hudlin, a former slave who worked as a custodian at the Board of Trade. He rushed to the BOT during the fire and saved valuable records. He and his family also opened their home to fire victims, Black and white.
Great and interesting fun for an hour, the film ends with that has become the cliched common narrative: “Yet while the city’s physical character would change dramatically in the years following the fire, its spirit remained intact. Even as it grew into a modern metropolis, it retained the soul of a frontier town.”
For a rewardingly deeper dive, there is Smith’s book, in which he writes, “Chicago’s unyielding spirit in the face of the most daunting adversity is an altogether engrossing and inspiring story. The recovery was nonetheless anything but smooth and simple.”
As Smith told the Tribune in a recent story, “The city quickly appropriated the fire to fit an already existing mythology that Chicago was unconquerable. So, the scale of the fire immediately serves a very flattering self-mythology — for a city only about 40 years old then! The fire provides this instant epic of creation, and Chicago becomes the rare place that celebrates, even now, its destruction as a reminder of its civic spirit and, supposedly, how much stronger it is than fire itself.”
A professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University, Smith has written of the city before in polished books featuring Daniel Burnham, the Haymarket bombing, the town of Pullman, the city’s literary influence and, indeed, the fire. He gets it, artfully detailing why the city burned and how it was haphazardly rebuilt, and examining what was and already tense relationship between the city’s haves and its have nots — a situation that sadly remains today.
The WTTW will have a companion website and the the Chicago History Museum its own lively collection website devoted to this particular fire.
There have been, of course, other fires. They punctuate our history with frightening regularity and have since 1812 and the Battle of Fort Dearborn.
While you watch and read the latest entries in the Chicago Fire collection, realize that, since it took place nearly 150 years in the past, this fire can be viewed dispassionately, without alarm or pain.
Fires are not funny, a realization that comes sweeping at us daily on television as western portions of our country burn and burn and burn.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
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