Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Study of the Higher Life of Chicago: A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Department or Sociology)
Chicago is young. The history of the city lies within the memory of its Oldest citizens. One of these was born in 1822 and has just been retired from active service on the police force. In his lifetime an Indian village has been transformed into a great metropolis. He was eleven years old when Chicago was organized as a town, and fifteen when the town became an incorporated city. He has seen the City rise new and renewed since the great fire that swept away one - half of its property only three decades ago. He has seen Chicago's population grow from two white families to two million souls; its area, from a fort and two houses to two hundred square miles; its thoroughfares, from a footpath to miles of streets; its drain age, from a gutter to fifteen hundred miles of sewers; its transportation, from a portage between the Chicago and Desplaines Rivers to the greatest railroad center of the continent.
He has seen Chicago grow from an Indian trading-post shipping twenty eight bushels of wheat in 1838, to the greatest grain and provision center in the world, Shipping two hundred and fifty millions of bushels in 1902. He has seen the establishment of twenty thousand manufacturing plants, with an invested capital of six hundred millions of dollars, which pay two hundred million annually in wages and turn out a yearly product of one thousand million dollars in value. He has watched over the vaults of fifteen national banks and thirty-six state banks and trust companies, the aggregate clear ings of which for the last year were more than eight billions. He has witnessed the growth of the biggest stock-yards in the world, now shipping more than one thousand million pounds of dressed beef alone each year.
All this and much more it takes to make Chicago. It is the storm-center of labor disputes. Here have been the Pullman strike, the machinists' and building trades' strikes, and the anarchist Hay Market riot; here the incessant war between organized employers and organized employees. Chicago has tunneled the lake half a dozen miles for water. It cut the Chicago Drainage Canal in ten years at a cost of thirty-five million dollars, turning the waters of the Chicago River from the Gulf of Newfoundland to the Gulf of Mexico. Such is commercial and industrial Chicago.
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