Chapter XXVII: The Development of the City

The last sixty years of the nineteenth century witnessed on the shores of the Great Lakes the development of the city. The towns which we have traced through their early stages as forts, trading posts, and villages began in 1840 to make their appearance on the census lists with populations that could be counted in thousands instead of hundreds. If we reckon a population of eight thousand or over as the requisite number to raise a town to the rank of city, Buffalo with eighteen thousand and Detroit with nine thousand inhabitants were in 1840 the only cities on the lakes. Cleveland had six thousand, and Chicago and Milwaukee timidly entered the lists with records of less than five thousand and two thousand respectively. In the proportionate size of cities in the whole United States these five ranged from being sixteenth, as was Buffalo, to being fifty-fourth, as was Chicago, and down to Milwaukee, which was the seventy-ninth on the list. In 1906 these five cities are among the first twelve on the list, and their joint population is three million six hundred thousand, nearly one hundred times the total population of sixty-five years ago. Figures express this change as well as anything can, but even figures can hardly suggest the wonder of this unparalleled development. It makes this last era of the life of the Great Lakes one of great and unique interest.

Immediately after 1840 this swift growth of the city began. Within twenty years Detroit was five times as large as in 1840, Buffalo and Cleveland were seven times as large, while Chicago and Milwaukee had multiplied their numbers by twenty and twenty-five. Smaller cities, too, like Toledo had had a rapid increase in their population. This sudden tide of immigration and of urban concentration was the natural result of the widespread westward movement of the twenty-five preceding years which had developed the country and created demands for central markets, and of the rise of the great industries described in the preceding chapters with their attendants, the railroad and the steamboat. No communities have ever come into being for more immediate commercial reasons than the cities of the Great Lakes, and the immense wealth derived from their great industries has been directly responsible for their rapid growth and succeeding prosperity. With this story of the industrial side of the life of the lakes we are all familiar. Each city has necessarily passed through a stage when it spent its time and energy trying with breathless haste to keep pace with the outside demands made upon it by commerce. Now that stage has passed, at least in so far as this industrial side takes precedence over everything else and stands out preëminent and alone as the characteristic spirit of the lake city. Great fortunes have been and are being made, and reasonable prosperity has come to thousands of citizens. The last twenty years have seen these cities broaden their interests, and stand out as centres of education, art, sociology, politics, and religion, till now they are leaders as types of all-round development, including all these and many other lines.

Each city claims and has a right to claim an individual spirit and an achievement of its own. But to the student of the past and present of these lake dwellers there comes the evidence of a broader unity under whose general aims and purposes, fostered by similar conditions, the local successes have been accomplished.

In education these cities are preëminent. They have been willing to expend large sums on the public school systems, and have adapted high educational principles to local needs with an independence that has made for a departure from many old and conventional methods, but has resulted almost always in greater efficiency. The large proportion of foreign-born children in the public schools has created many problems and brought the opportunity for great success in dealing with them. Nor does state and city interest stop with the usual public school system. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois have strong state universities, for whose support they give lavishly; and beside them have grown up three other great universities, Chicago and Northwestern in Chicago, and the Western Reserve in Cleveland. There is a widespread enthusiasm for higher education, and these educational centres exert a great influence both as scientific experiment stations, whose discoveries are hailed with delight by the farmer and the mechanic, and as dominant centres of thought. The universities and schools do not wait for the people to come within their walls. They go out with exhibitions and instruction of all kinds. The state legislatures have instituted systems of travelling and branch libraries, and education is being diffused among the people.

As a natural result of high average intelligence and of industrial conditions there has originated in the region bordering on the lakes a political unrest which is being worked out, under the leadership of the cities, into an encouraging independence of party spirit and a striving for the improvement of municipal and state conditions. With the coming of the city there have arisen problems entirely new to the administrators, and these each city is working out in its own way. Cleveland by government by commission, and the other cities by reform mayors running on independent platforms, and everywhere by intelligent open discussion of such questions as municipal ownership of street railways, control of corporations, labor questions, and other matters of public interest which make the party divisions based on live social and industrial issues, not on state and national party platforms. The region of the lower lakes is a political storm centre for the nation as well as for the immediate locality, and conditions there are likely to have great influence throughout the country.

Municipal improvement has long been the watchword of all parties, and the result has been the development of splendid water fronts, the setting apart of land for beautiful park and boulevard systems, the provision of playgrounds for children, and the constant beautifying of the cities. Modern architecture has had its chance here, and has proved itself. The results have made our modern lake city the admiration of all visitors, both from this country and from across the water.

The two periods of rapid industrial growth and of broadening self-improvement each lake city has passed through in the last sixty years. Into the local details of each we have not space to enter, although each is an interesting story by itself. One city has come to be in size and standing the second city of our nation, and in passing briefly over the steps of her growth we can see on a large scale what have been the conditions which have been met in a smaller way by her neighboring cities.

With our traveller of 1840, we visited Chicago and found her a flourishing and rapidly increasing town of nearly five thousand inhabitants. Even then she was recognized as a centre for the region immediately surrounding her. The radius of her influence has extended in a way that would have seemed at that time inconceivable. Her population has run up to over two millions, and in wealth as well she has come to be the second great financial centre of the United States, ranking in this as in population next to New York. She began her city life in 1837 with $1993 in her treasury. To get money for sanitary drainage, for paving a few streets, and purchasing two fire engines the finance committee of the common council applied to the State Bank of Illinois for a loan of twenty-five thousand dollars, to be paid back within five years,--a request which the State Bank politely but curtly declined to grant. To-day her bank clearances amount to some seven thousand million dollars. And so we might go on with striking and astonishing contrasts. We have come to take large statements and superlative adjectives for granted about Chicago’s size, wealth, and commerce. Do we realize that she is the leading lake city in the other lines of which we have spoken?

The public school system of Chicago with its million of children has been and is being developed along the best modern pedagogical principles by men and women who are recognized leaders in the educational world. As a centre for higher education the city takes high rank. Besides its technical schools, like the Armour Institute, it has two great universities, Chicago and Northwestern. The former began its career when John D. Rockefeller decided to take the name and property of the old denominational university of that name, sold at auction under foreclosure, and to found a great institution. To this end he set apart a large sum of money and secured as president Dr. William R. Harper of Yale. With the remarkable growth of the university since it opened in 1892 with seven hundred and two students, we are all familiar.

In music and art Chicago is preëminent, both for its high grade of achievement and for the widespread diffusion of its culture among its citizens. In 1905 Orchestra Hall was dedicated as a home for music, and this building, one of the finest in the world, had been built by a popular subscription, to which thousands of the middle and poorer classes contributed their dollars. The Chicago Art Institute has an attendance yearly of over half a million visitors, a number exceeding that of any art museum in America, and its library is consulted annually by fifty thousand people. Such a record is remarkable, and such enthusiasm has produced and is producing recognized artists. In architectural excellence the story is the same. In philanthropy and social settlement work Hull House, under the leadership of Jane Addams, is only the most conspicuous of many powerful agencies for good.

For the Great Lakes to have developed, in the sixty years that have marked the growth of the big city throughout the land, five of the twelve largest cities of the United States is a remarkable showing. Not only have these cities become leaders industrially, politically, and socially, but they are constantly increasing at a rapid rate in size, volume of commerce, and most of all in plans and forecasts for the future. From 1880 to 1890 the most rapid growth of the city was in this region. During these ten years, while the rate of increase of the ocean ports ranged from San Francisco’s fourteen per cent to New York’s thirty-eight per cent, and that of the river cities from Cincinnati’s nine per cent to St. Louis’ twenty-seven, no one of the six great ports of the lakes fell below an increase of thirty-seven per cent, and Chicago’s ran up to fifty-four, and Toledo’s to sixty-one. This is a striking exhibition of the movement of population in the wake of commercial opportunity.

In the Old World such a group of cities situated close together on immense bodies of water would create an individual empire of great wealth and prosperity. In the United States they are recognized as a leading factor in our prosperity, and a centre from which not only will great wealth and natural resources be evolved and distributed, but great leaders, great policies, and great ideals will come forth, making the lake region a force to be reckoned with and depended upon in the future of the Nation.

A BRIEF LIST OF BOOKS

_General Works_

There is no important general work covering the entire field. The best single book is Charles Moore’s _The Northwest under Three Flags, 1635–1796_. B. A. Hinsdale’s _Old Northwest_ (2 vols.) deals with this region, but with especial emphasis on the geographical and political phases. Francis Parkman treats of French and English occupation in his _Series of Historical Narratives, France and England in North America_, the nine volumes of which will be cited under their individual names. Besides his _Narrative and Critical History of America_ in eight volumes, Justin Winsor has three books on the history of this region: _Cartier to Frontenac_, 1534–1700; _The Mississippi Basin_; and _The Westward Movement_. Under this heading should be mentioned the publications of the various historical societies of the lake states, especially the Buffalo, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota collections.