Book review: “Chicago before the Fire: An Economic History” by Louis P. Cain

For much of Chicago’s history, its strident boosters with their overblown assertions of the city’s present and, even more, its future greatness have been a subject of ridicule. In 1952, writing in The New Yorker and then in his book Chicago: The Second City, A.J. Liebling skewered the decades of over-enthusiastic predictions of coming glory.

A quarter of a century before that, in Chicago: The History of Its Reputation, historian and journalist Lloyd Lewis poked fun at the boosters and their propaganda, such as newspaper publisher William Bross:

By [1854] he was issuing pamphlets of such enthusiastic hosannahs that not only America but also Europe was reading them. Everybody agreed that Bross’ beating of the tom-toms induced tens of thousands to seek Chicago as a home for either themselves or their dollars.

Yet, boosterism wasn’t just the “beating of tom-toms” and the singing of “enthusiastic hosannahs.”

 

Making economic sense

Indeed, in Chicago before the Fire: An Economic History, new from the University of Illinois Press, Louis P. Cain argues that a certain kind of booster was an essential element of the wild growth and unprecedented success of the newly minted Chicago in the mid-19^th century.

More than just talking up the city, the importance of this sort of booster was his — they were all white men — willingness to invest his money and time and vision into a place that, in 1830, had been little more than a smudge on the map with fewer than a hundred residents.

Far from the stereotypical loudmouths later sharply satirized, these boosters were one of the four key reasons that Chicago grew to 4,470 people in 1840, to 112,172 in 1860 and, then to 298,977 in 1870, on the eve of the Great Chicago Fire. And, then — despite the huge destruction of the fire — nearly doubled to 503,185 in 1880 and, then, to over a million in 1890.

For Cain, a Loyola University Chicago professor emeritus, now teaching at Northwestern University, the new city worked because it made economic sense.

His Chicago Before the Fire is an important addition to the Chicago history bookshelves, going deep into the historical documents and pre-Fire accounts of the city and city residents to tease out the key economic factors behind its unprecedented success.

 

Location, location, location

The often-cited oversimplified reason for Chicago’s success was its location near the southern end of Lake Michigan. Yet, as Cain notes that, if circumstances had been different, a city such as Chicago might have arisen where Gary or Michigan City, Indiana, are today.

Indeed, Cain argues that Chicago is where Chicago is because of a complex set of geographic, historical and economic variables that are best explained by the location theory of groundbreaking Black economist William Henry Dean.

Dean, who faced stiff discrimination throughout his career and died by suicide at the age of 41, developed his theory as a means of understanding why one city succeeds while another withers.  It focused on three factors which are inter-related:

• Trade routes: For centuries, Indigenous traders and later French voyageurs used the four portages in the Chicago area as natural highways. After his historic exploration of the upper Mississippi River with the Jesuit Jacques Marquette in 1673, Louis Joliett reported that a canal through a portage could connect the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean with the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Cain writes that it is unclear which portage the explorer meant, but, when the land became American territory, the focus was on the development of the Illinois & Michigan Canal through the Mud Lake portage at the end of the South Branch of the Chicago River.
• Position: The site of Chicago was where the lake and the river meet which meant that it linked water traffic from the lake and river with land traffic, serving as a crossroads for the transshipment of goods. This position is what prompted the idea of the I&M Canal which, in turn, made the site even more attractive as a crossroads.
• Nodality: The Chicago site was in competition with other commercial sites, and, through many small transactions and decisions, businesses and people decided it was a better place to use for their interests. These choices made the site even more of a an intersection point. And, as with the canal, they made Chicago an attractive crossroads for the railroads that came in the 1840s — and those trains, in their part, made the city even more of a link.

Trade routes, position and nodality — or, put another way: Location, location, location.

 

“Creating a city”

However, as Cain details, that’s only part of the story. There’s nothing deterministic about the rise of a city such as Chicago. Above and beyond location are the acts and commitments of the people who come to the place.  This is where the boosters come in for Cain.

He cites four important figures:

• Jean Baptiste Beaubien, a former fur trader who was an important investor and developer in the new city of Chicago;
• Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, another fur trader who was a key early business leader and land speculator;
• John Stephen Wright, an endless optimist of Chicago’s future who worked tirelessly to develop businesses and establish civic projects for the city’s growth; and
• William Butler Ogden, the city’s first mayor who was an investor in and operator of bridges, canals, railroads, steamboats, banking and manufacturing and helped found the first University of Chicago, the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum).

Cain points out that opening a business at the mouth of the Chicago River in the 1820s and 1830s “involved a great deal of risk.” Those who came and invested their time and their money — and their lives — were boosters “in the sense that they helped attract settlers and economic activity to the growing area.”

 

…and boosters

The term “booster,” writes Cain, came from real estate to describe someone with land to sell who act to “boost” the price of the property.  This could be self-serving, of course, but, as Cain notes, those like Ogden and Beaubien understood that “creating a city requires a great many things, not merely a promising location and a few investors.”

What was good for Chicago, in other words, was good for their investments.

The best of these early business people were generalists, operating in many areas of business life and working to develop civic amenities. Cain writes:

Beaubien was a leader in the city’s formative years, then retired to the life of a farmer. Hubbard became involved in many activities and became one of Chicago’s most long-lived and celebrated citizens. Wright was a prophet, a man whose vision came close to what Chicago became. Ogden was Chicago’s first venture capitalist, a peerless entrepreneur, and an urban booster who put his money behind his boast.

As a result of their efforts, Chicago’s position was established, trade routes were established, and its nodality was enhanced.

Or, put another way, the success of Chicago is due to location, location, location and…boosters.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.31.25

 

This review originally ran at Third Coast Review on 8.4.25.