The Great Chicago Fire of 1871

Re-releasing my interview with Professor Scott W. Berg

Today, as L.A. burns, I thought I’d reshare an interview about one of the most famous fires in U.S. history: the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Though a very different time, that fire also spread due to strong winds and depleted firefighting forces. More saliently, maybe, Professor Scott W. Berg describes fire’s capacity to destroy and transform. I’ve been mulling his words while reading the news from afar. Sending lots of love to subscribers based in Southern California!

Professor Berg (George Mason University) is the author of The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City's Soul. We discussed how Chicago was in its adolescence heading into the fire—and how, when immigrants were scapegoated in the resulting chaos, the working class pushed back, forming “a lasting political sensibility... that has never died.”

A condensed transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen to the audio, which includes more details on Chicago’s unpreparedness for disaster, how the fire spread, the enormous wildfires that slammed the Midwest at the same time, and more:

Beer also has the power to transform

Ben: To begin, could you talk about Chicago leading up to the fire? I like how you describe it as paying more attention to its future than its present.

SB: Chicago in 1871 was incredibly young. Cities today often feel like permanent features of the landscape. You feel like L.A. has been there forever, or New York has been there forever.

Ben: Ditto Fran Lebowitz

SB: Ha, exactly. 

But back then, Chicago was this young, vibrant, and rowdy place. I compare it to an adolescent—confident, sometimes overly so, with a sense of invincibility. That attitude made Chicago feel exciting and full of potential, but it also had this underlying recklessness. Also, most people weren’t “from” Chicago—they came from elsewhere. That played into the social and political conflicts after the fire. There weren’t native versus outsider tensions; it was more about which outsiders were seen as the “right” ones.

Another thing to note is Chicago’s role in physically moving goods. It was the hub for transporting grain, lumber, livestock, and other goods across the country. Chicago was set up to receive and send things out at a pace we can’t quite imagine today. But this constant movement also made it chaotic, teetering on the edge of being out of control.

Ben: How did those dynamics contribute to Chicago being a place at once vulnerable to fire and unprepared to handle it?

SB: That’s at the core of it. In 1871, the city’s logic was, “We’ve never had a huge fire, so we won’t have one.” Chicago’s population had exploded to over 300,000 from just 50,000 twenty years earlier. But the firefighting force was tiny—only 193 firefighters for a city that size, and one company for every 4,500 buildings. Today’s cities would never have that ratio, even with better technology. 

To be fair, Chicago had already increased the fire department’s budget tenfold since the Civil War. There wasn’t much motivation to spend more on a fire that hadn’t happened yet. There was just a sense that this is not going to happen.

Ben: Maybe not surprisingly, it wasn’t one catastrophic error that caused the fire, but a series of smaller mistakes, some starting well before the fire began. Can you talk about the chain of errors, including the infamous misidentification of the fire’s location?

SB: It’s a perfect example of the “Swiss cheese model,” where small problems line up to create a disaster. I don’t know who coined that phrase—

Ben: —I believe it was the Swiss—

SB: —ha, probably. It certainly applies here.

Chicago had a pretty sophisticated fire monitoring system for 1871. At the top of the Cook County courthouse, two firemen would keep watch over the city. There was also a telegraph system connecting fire stations and hundreds of fire alarm boxes throughout the city. If you spotted a fire, you could signal the courthouse by turning a crank in one of these boxes.

The problem was that Chicago is big, and at night, the city was full of little lights. The fire started in a residential area across the river, making it hard to pinpoint. A fireman named Mathias Schaefer saw the fire from the courthouse but guessed the wrong location, sending the firefighting crews too far south. Schaefer quickly realized his mistake and corrected it, but another fireman decided it was too late and figured the crews would spot the real fire on their way. That lost them about 15-30 crucial minutes. Meanwhile, a few engines closer to the fire reached it, but there weren’t enough of them.

The night before, there’d been another large fire that almost got out of control. The firefighters were exhausted, and their equipment was in poor shape. And again, the firefighting force hadn’t kept up with the city’s growth. 

Any one of these issues alone wouldn’t have been catastrophic, but together, they set the stage for disaster.

Ben: Can you describe how the fire spread, how long it burned, and the overall damage?

SB: The fire started in a poor neighborhood on the West Side. Firefighters were trying to contain it when an ember jumped four blocks north, landing in a church steeple, and setting it ablaze. At that moment, the fire chiefs knew the city was lost—they were already struggling with the original fire, and now a major church surrounded by a mattress factory, match factory, and oil storage (you can’t make this up) was burning.

From there, the fire kept jumping. It crossed the river, igniting the downtown area, and then crossed again to the North Side. The wind and dry conditions made it impossible to control. With only 18 working fire engines, the city was doomed. By noon the next day, most of the city was burning.

The fire lasted until the following night. The official human toll was 300, though that’s likely too low. The downtown, much of the North Side, and parts of the West Side were completely destroyed. In modern terms, it would be like wiping out downtown D.C. and its suburbs, causing tens of billions of dollars in damage.

Ben: Can you talk about how one woman became the scapegoat?

SB: Sure. Kate O’Leary is infamous, unfairly so.

Chicago’s newspapers quickly blamed O’Leary, an Irish immigrant, for the fire. The Chicago Times depicted her as an angry, destitute immigrant who intentionally started the fire in rage against the city. The narrative was baseless—she had a very clear alibi and a lot of incentive not to burn the city down. In fact, O’Leary was sort of a model immigrant—her family owned a house and had a successful business. 

Still, the legend that she started the fire stuck and became the legend many kids are still taught today. 

Ben: We’re beginning to touch on the centrality of the immigrant community in Chicago. How did Joseph Medill set it aflame (no pun intended)?

SB: Joseph Medill, the namesake of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, was a major figure in Chicago’s media and political landscape. After the Great Chicago Fire, political factions briefly united to form the “Union Fireproof Ticket” and elected Medill, editor of The Chicago Tribune, as mayor, hoping his influence could help rebuild the city.

Medill’s vision was strict: he proposed that all new buildings within Chicago’s extensive city limits be constructed from brick, banning cheaper wood construction. While the idea seemed logical to prevent another disaster, it would be economically disastrous for the city’s 200,000 poor, largely immigrant laborers. They couldn’t afford brick, and Medill’s policy essentially said to them: get out, we don’t want you here. 

In a nutshell, his attempt at passing the new policy ignited a lasting political sensibility in Chicago that has never died. When you think of Chicago, you think of rough at the edges people, the working class, right? That identity, though it’s evolved, was born in that moment. Among Chicago’s working class, there were protests, some violent, which triggered a compromise allowing wood construction in some areas. 

Ben: And then something even more powerful awakened Chicago’s political consciousness.

SB: Yes, the one thing Irish and German immigrants agreed on above all others...

Ben: Beer!

SB: Exactly. In the wake of the fire, the temperance movement sought to capitalize on the turmoil and accomplish a longstanding goal: the closing of saloons on Sundays. They blamed the opening of saloons on Sunday for the unrest in poorer neighborhoods.

But for many immigrants, Sundays were their only day off, and saloons served as crucial social hubs. They didn’t just go to saloons to drink—they went there to network, to talk, and to get jobs.

Medill, in another blunder, gave the temperance movement the green light to close saloons on Sundays. Two Sundays later, the most Chicago thing ever happened: a defiant citywide celebration. Basically, in this event called the Grand Reopening, the entire city got drunk. Several saloons completely ran out of alcohol by mid-morning.

In the end, the ordinance didn’t pass, but saloons grew better regulated. The working class had forced another compromise. The roots of Chicago’s unique political culture—its rough-and-tumble image and strong labor base—trace directly back to this period of social and economic upheaval.

Ben: You write that just two years after the fire, Chicago “was fast becoming a hothouse of populist democracy, a locus of political power and ambition for a much wider swath of the citizenry than had ever been imagined before.”

SB: That’s right. Fire has the power to transform, and disasters accelerate things that otherwise might stretch out over a longer period of time. So when you think about Chicago, it’s often seen as a rowdy, brawling town—well, that reputation has many of its roots in how the city’s identity formed, quickly, in the aftermath of the fire.