Entrepreneurs, heroes and the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago (Columbian Exposition), Part 2

See the book Chicago's White City of 1893 by David F. Burg. Excerpt:  

"The most American city and yet unique, Chicago finally both defies and invites summation. As a microcosm it may explain the values, concerns, problems, and expectations of the urban-centered culture of America that rose to dominance in the nineties. But even as a microcosm it resists analysis. Often it is easier for poets or novelists to evince succinct interpretation than it is for historians. And it is certainly true that, whether they were patronized or not, Chicago writers of the 1890s and the years leading up to the World War, distilled from the city's atmosphere a new kind of literature that was at once distinctly American, prophetic of the dominant subject-matter of our modern literature, and revelatory of our society's commercially dominated, urban-centered values. It was in Chicago that the view of the city in our literature became that of the city-dweller rather than that of the writer of rural prejudices. "The creation by the Chicago writers of a common perspective on urban life was a major achievement in American letters.,, Subjects for this city literature were the Great Fire, money, social classes, commerce, politics. The exposition would provide still another subject. Since rebuilding after the fire made architecture so prominent, architects were frequent heroes of Chicago novels. But the prevailing hero, the hero discovered and interpreted by Chicago writers, was the businessman. "A new hero type in American culture, the 'business man,' emerged in Chicago . . . . Chicago writers faced the task of creating a 'society' life based on business because business was the main concern of chicagoans." As the exemplary American city Chicago revealed with a vengeance the new commercial ethic. Though Stead's view was somewhat skewed, it nevertheless contained a large kernel of truth, when he wrote, "It is impossible to describe Chicago as a whole. It is a congeries of different nationalities, a compost of men and women of all manner of languages. It is a city of millionaires and of paupers .... This vast and heterogeneous community, which has been collected together from all quarters of the known world, knows only one common bond. Its members came here to make money. They are staying here to make money. The quest of the almighty dollar is their Holy Grail." Again, it is a judgment that must be taken with a grain of salt-even Stead would admit that there were many in Chicago, like Jane Addams of Hull House, who labored selflessly and praise them for that fact. But it is true that Chicago was heterogeneous, that she owed her present fate and her future to commerce, upon which everything from her fine arts to her politics depended. Chicago was, after all, a genuine Horatio Alger city-enterprise was her gospel. 

Probably no other writer has been more enthralled by nor written more evocative paeans to the spirit of American enterprise that Chicago symbolized than Theodore Dreiser. One of his most ebullient evocations of the city which so fascinated him appeared in The Titan, the second volume of his trilogy based upon the life of Charles T. Yerkes-the Cowperwood of the novels. Cowperwood came to Chicago in 1873 to seek a new life and immediately relished the spirit of the place. Returning in 1913 to study the city while writing his novel, Dreiser recollected the lure of Chicago: "This singing flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin, this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city! By its shimmering lake it lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering yokel with an epic in its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities . . . . Take Athens, oh, Greece! Italy, do you keep Rome! This was the Babylon, the Troy, the Nineveh of a younger day .... Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.,, If such extravagant words were appropriate to the Chicago of 1873, when Cowperwood arrived, then they became doubly appropriate to the Chicago of 1893, when the World's Columbian Exposition opened. 

It was ironic but certainly apt that one of the members of the board of directors of the World's Columbian Exposition Corporation was that rapacious businessman Charles T. Yerkes. For it was he and his fellow titans of commerce who made possible the creation of the exposition, a world that for millions of visitors would make tangible the poetry and energy of Chicago's spirit. Within the reclaimed miry wastes of Jackson Park on the shore of Lake Michigan near the heart of her teeming, striving commercial empire, Chicago would build for herself and for the world a smaller but more harmonious empire. And the White City would cry forth a still more eloquent glory in the mud."