THE WAY WE WERE: CHICAGO

Adverstisement for the Illinois State Guide

Chicago was the second largest city in the United States in 1940, one of “great black mills, factories, and furnaces, filled with the roar and rumble of machinery, their gaunt stacks belching black clouds by day, red flames by night.” It was an industrial powerhouse, valiantly lifting itself from the depths of the Great Depression.

The history of Chicago, as related in the Guide, is a cycle of growth and recession. Starting in 1833 the city begins a period of phenomenal growth. Shortly thereafter, the Guide first records a “financial panic and deflation” in 1837, the year it was incorporated as a city. Growth continues, due to Chicago’s position as a market for the products of the plains; grains, hogs, and cattle. In turn Chicago supplied the needed machinery for expanding agriculture and industries such as mills and packing plants sprung up.

Images from the cover: Illinois: A Descriptive and Historical Guide

Again a “panic” struck in 1857. The Civil War provided relief as supply shipments to the armies established a pattern of war halting the city’s economic troubles. The great fire of 1871, while devastating, spurred a period of growth as the older wooden structures were replaced with granite and brownstone structures. A period of labor and social unrest preceded the First World War. Of course, the Great Depression devastated the city. However, these passages show that the city would undoubtedly rebound from its troubles, a comfort to the thousands of unemployed workers. What the authors of the Guide could not know is that another war was brewing which would lift their city, buoyed by the success of the “Century of Progress Exposition”, out of its misery.

Illinois: A Descriptive and Historical Guide
Compiled and Written by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Project Administration for the State of Illinois – F.546.F45 – First published 1939