USA > Illinois > Cook County > Growth of Cook County; a history of the large lake-shore county that includes Chicago, Vol. I > Part 11
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How do people react at such a moment ?
Again, no one knows because no one observes a disaster. Disasters have some spectators-ghoulish creatures who, for a moment, pause to watch what's happening, to draw excite- ment from the danger and damage about them, as some people did in Chicago, looking at the tumbling buildings; the col- lapsing roofs; the gorgeous flames; but these are watchers only for the moment. They are quickly turned into partici- pants, enwrapped in the horror themselves. The fire creeps closer, is at their heels, and they become fugitives, themselves. We can only pick up fugitive impressions, vague or vivid images that outline a picture when assembled.
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PITTSBURGH.
R.
CHICAGO ELEVILAND LAKE SHORE R.R.
Engraving from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, published Oct. 28, 1871, depicting, in Leslie's words, "The Great Fire in Chicago-Panic-stricken citizens rushing past the Sherman House, carrying the aged, sick and helpless, and en- deavoring to save family treasures.' Courtesy Chicago Historical Society
Here, for instance, is a picture of a panic-stricken crowd. (See accompanying picture.) Obviously it was drawn after the event, shortly after the fire, and it represents what the artist imagined the panic and the horror must have been like. But even so, the picture has a synthetic symmetry ; the people seemed to be moving together, and however startled and frightened they are, they form some kind of an organized whole.
The worst thing about such a fire is that it creates vast confusion; every man, even though he is surrounded by thou- sands of his fellows, feels himself essentially alone. Let me try to tell you something now, not of the path of the fire itself, but what people afterwards said they saw. These, as I said, are only snatches, impressions that I am putting together.
First of all, it was an astonishing phenomenon to the people who saw the fire that it seemed to generate very little smoke. High gusts of flames leaped up in the air and devoured the smoke that they presumably created, so that the whole city,
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and the people running before the fire, seemed to be enveloped in a bright sea of living flame.
The fire had its own sound. It had that muffled, pulsating roar that flung a rumble ahead of itself clear across the city. As the fire progressed, not only the sound but the stench of the burning buildings ruled the air; and amidst the roar of the fire, the sights and the sounds, and the enormous heat that it threw off, there seemed to be a general impression that every- one involved in it was speaking at the top of his voice, yelling, making sounds, speaking to no one in particular, hurtling forward with urgent movement. Above the high roar of the general noisiness of the people who were stampeded and panic-stricken there were further, sharper screams. Suddenly, the city seemed full of horses-horses trapped in burning stables and screaming as they were engulfed in the flames.
Sea That Cannot Be Stemmed
A crowd in panic, it hardly needs to be pointed out, does not move in any orderly fashion. It is a sea of people that cannot be stemmed, and occasionally the enormous mob would fling aside some of the people in it and trample upon them, or else suddenly part, at an onsetting charge of a fire engine plunging forward.
Nothing, as I said, can really describe all that happened, and seemed to be happening at once. Let me, however, sketch one or two vignettes. The fleeing people, the multitude of carriages and horses, the screams and the sounds, apart, the domestic animals of the city, the cats and dogs, were under- foot and fled like the people. As the houses were consumed from cellars and from wainscotings poured rats in great hordes, and filled the streets. Children were separated from their parents; wives from their husbands. It is difficult to describe what was anarchy in an organized discussion.
In addition to the confusion, the flight, the fear, and the danger attendant to the fire, there were still enough people who paused to capitalize on the disaster for a dangerous moment ; the looters and the criminals who paused to snatch up what they could. Looting was started, perhaps, by some of the prisoners who had been released but in the end was more widespread.
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There is one dreadful anecdote that was told by a partici- pant who saw a man, in his shirtsleeves dancing a wild jig drunkenly on the top of a piano, howling at the top of his voice that the fire was the poor man's friend. Others, half- crazed by greed, plunged their naked forearms through glass windows and with dripping hands gouty with their own blood snatched up what they could. In one instance a man was halted as he filled up a wagon with loot and was threatened with a pistol. The looter was heedless to all danger, scoffed at the gun and said, "Shoot if you will." He was not fired upon ; the man with the gun shrugged in despair and let him drive off with his spoils.
For the rest there was a frantic bacchanalian quality super- imposed on the fire itself ; men drinking wildly to allay their terror. Strangely enough, some saloons remained open selling whiskey until the flames licked the very edges of the bar.
The fire drove the people before it, and as they were driven forward, not only the buildings were destroyed but the whole social fabric of the city seemed to collapse. Only half of the police force was on duty when the fire broke out, and it spread so quickly that the rest could not be assembled. The firemen, exhausted from the very start, fell back increasingly before the onslaught of the blaze, abandoning their fire equip- ment; outmatched and outrun by the fire.
The city government, society, was just as much in retreat as were men in the face of the fire. There were some attempts, some pitiful, some savage, to stem the disorganization. .. . A poster printed in the full fury of the fire by Pinkerton's Private Police, tells a story. Strangely enough, the poster is entitled, TO THE ATTENTION OF THIEVES AND BURGLARS. It actually was an instruction to the officers of Pinkerton's police and is addressed to his lieutenants, ser- geants, and to the private policemen. It says in part :
"Any person caught stealing, or seeking to steal, any of the property in my charge, or attempting to break open the safes, as the men cannot make arrests at the present time, they shall kill the persons by my orders. No mercy shall be shown them, but death shall be their fate. Allan Pinkerton"
A desperate measure, and if the prose is a little less awk-
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ward and excited in another proclamation (struck off on the ninth as the fire was still raging), it still touched the same critical issue. In this proclamation the mayor of Chicago for- bids the sale of drink in any saloon until further notice. Of course, this was a futile gesture. The ordinance could not be enforced.
Let me turn now to say a little about the fire itself, and how it spread, because a fire that runs uncontrolled through a great city is quite unlike any fire that we know from experi- ence or that we can easily imagine. Even the great blazes that fill the pages of the newspapers are somehow less than a fire running through a city unchecked. Ordinary kinds of fires are checked by the police and fire departments and are contained and controlled. Even tho their damage may be vast, they don't threaten a whole community to its very roots.
Fire Created Its Own Wind
The Chicago fire was entirely unlike this. It was a holo- caust to which no human help could stay. First, the fire itself must not be thought of simply as a mass of flames. These, to be sure, were enormous and shot up high into the heavens. But they were surrounded and clothed by an invisible curtain of very heated air, as hot or hotter than the flames themselves. As the heated air rose from the fire, cooler, upper air rushed down, sometimes with a force approaching that of a gale. And what I am describing to you now is how the fire in effect cre- ated its own bellows, which fanned and spread it.
The great path of the fire as it flickered through the city was not simply a passage of flames. What was astonishing and terrifying to those who experienced it was that masses of this heated air would move, carrying within them tremendous amounts of burning material, which would be flung down on other combustible parts of the city. It was not contact with the flames that spread the fire, but the movement of this in- visible and enormously heated fire cloud.
How hot and bright was the fire?
Here, again, it is impossible to say ; but it has been claimed, authoritatively, that a hundred miles away, in Holland, Mich- igan, men had to lie down in ditches to escape the scorching wind that blew from Chicago clear over the cooling surface
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of the lake. And it was said, on the other side of the country, that sailors passing Cape Hatteras were astonished to find themselves caught in a rain of soot and dust, and were puzzled where this came from. They discovered later that this rain of ashes came from Chicago, carried along on the gusts of the upper air.
The heat of the fire can perhaps be illustrated by these few relics, which the Chicago Historical Society has been kind enough to lend me, to show you. I am holding here a group of teacups which rested in some family's larder, stacked for use at the next meal. As you can see, they melted and fused together.
I wonder if any number can express the intense heat that is required not only for the melting of these ceramics, but for the complete destruction of the glaze. These cups were burned as if left in a kiln. . . .
Here were a group of egg cups, taken from the same set as the teacups I just showed you. When the fire struck them, the first blaze of heat, ranging perhaps between 750 and 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, split the cups; broke them; and caught them before they fell apart, melted down the clay, and spread the glaze over them so that you can see that the broken parts themselves are now covered with the glaze that originally covered these cups.
But perhaps the greatest and most terrifying testimony was what the fire did to metal, iron and steel, supposedly so resistant to fire. It was said that one pile of steel ingots, 200 yards away from a blazing building, turned first cherry red, then white-hot, then fused together, like a mass of glowing maple syrup. . . .
The destruction of sections of the city, as the fire passed out of control and ravaged through it, drove people into herds and clusters, and one of the most hideous shelters that was sought by no less than 30,000 people, and their animals, was in the cemetery at Lincoln Park. Here they improvised a tem- porary camp, gruesomely enough among the local gravestones and the mausoleums which had, themselves, been attacked by the fire and split open.
Many people had rushed to the lake shore and had at-
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tempted a desperate expedient to get away from the heat. They had thought first to bury themselves in the sand up to their chins, while one of them remained outside, dousing the rest with water. But the heat crept on them, and they were suffocated.
On the whole, the city attempted to improvise relief as quickly as it could. ... In a poster issued on October 10th, two days after the outbreak of the fire, the city government declares, I'm afraid a little futilely, that all public school buildings and churches will be opened to shelter the homeless and to provide food and succor those who are, themselves, without it. Little, however, could be done at the very outset. Later on, more organized and effective relief was available, and a pattern of soup kitchens and shelters was established. . .. It is astounding how quickly Chicago managed to retrieve itself from the fire.
When Chicagoans looked up from the ruins, what did they find ?
They found, in essence, that strange phenomena almost unprecedented in modern times, of a city very nearly wholly destroyed. ... What was really impressive in the face of this enormous destruction, was the rapid development and the increase of recovery and relief. Fifty carloads of relief food and clothing arrived very promptly. All the railroads cooper- ated by sending these freights entirely free of charge; and the telegraph companies did not charge anything for sending their messages. The disaster was too great for ordinary economics to rule. ...
Supplies were gathered from such far away places as New York to be sent to Chicago; and these supplies . . . repre- sent only a fraction of what was sent from areas nearby. Milwaukee, while the fire was still raging, sent three fire engines, and by Monday had already sent many carloads of provisions.
By Monday night, St. Louis, a traditional rival of Chicago, sent a full train of supplies and had 80 more tons waiting at the station to be sent as soon as transport could be arranged. In a matter of hours, a half-million dollars was raised in St. Louis.
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Cincinnati, another urban rival, raised $160,000 by Monday sunset, and by mid-November Chicago had received two and a quarter million dollars. All told the city received, in con- tributions and in help, very nearly five million dollars, with nearly a million of that coming from foreign countries ....
Thus ended one part of the drama, the fire, the disaster.
Perhaps the greater drama came later on, as Chicago refused to recognize the fire as a defeat, as an ultimate and fatal calamity. Its attitude is perhaps symbolized by a real estate promoter, an indigenous species in Chicago, Mr. Ker- foot, who put up the first building after the fire. .. . It was a mere shanty, raised up as a defiant gesture to the hot ashes which surrounded it. Mr. Kerfoot proudly announced he had lost everything except his wife, his children, and his energy; and this might have been a slogan set for the rebuilding of Chicago.
Not long after that the first cornerstone was laid ... for the resurrection of the city. Here, again, the figures of recon- struction are as fantastic and as rapid as those of the destruc- tion itself. A week after the fire, the ashes still hot, nearly 6,000 temporary shelters were raised. Five weeks after that, 200 permanent buildings were being built. And 12 months later, 100,000 carpenters, masons, teamsters, and other workers were putting 10,000 impressive new structures on the map.
Unique Form of Advertising
It was a testimonial to Chicago that the fire which had sought to destroy it, to wipe it out, in fact became an adver- tisement for the city's growth. The extent of the calamity proved how large, how prosperous, and how economically important Chicago was. Many contemporary explanations of the disaster, however, ran in another direction. One Metho- dist minister insisted that the calamity was a direct result of the wrath of God at the city of Chicago because it would not close its saloons on Sunday.
A southern newspaper insisted that the fire was due entirely to Divine retribution for the ravaging of the South by the North in the Civil War.
In the end, however, over the claims and boasts of rivals
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who thought to see the city destroyed, and despite all other explanations, a great constructive cry arose within the city that it was now necessary to capitalize on the city's great future, that Chicago would rise up after the fire more prosperous than ever before; and if I may use a humble illustration the lowly hog, to indicate the later prosperity of Chicago: In 1872, the year after the fire, twice as many hogs arrived for butchering in Chicago as had come in 1870.
The fire itself deeply impressed the imagination of the country. ... A poster issued by the mayor of Wooster, Ohio, who was deeply impressed by the need of civic protection from fire, and fearing a calamity like Chicago's .. . declared that "the bosoms of the people in Wooster are heaving with sympathy for the calamity that has been suffered in Chicago," and it goes on to say that on the coming Fourth of July, no fireworks shall be released in the city, lest it be overtaken by the same dire fate.
As Chicago rapidly recovered from its fire, it began to pro- claim the disaster as a great commemorative event, celebrating not the disaster, not the horror of the conflagration, but the great and triumphant recovery that had been made. ...
Henry Ward Beecher, a man of the Lord, with a gift for nice phrasing called Chicago, after the fire, the Phoenix City, the city that had risen restored from its ashes. A city, after all, is killed only if its spirit dies, not if its property is destroyed, nor if its wealth is dissipated, or even if some of its inhabitants are killed, and not even the great fire in Chicago could kill Chicago's spirit. There was glory in rising above the ruins to rebuild the city, but it was a painful glory, a great triumph won by a great sadness.
With that Prof. Wohl ended his dramatic presentation of certain aspects of the Chicago fire.
In concluding this chapter, let us, the author of this history, point out that Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago early in 1959 announced plans for construction of a $3,000,000 academy and drill school for the Chicago fire department.
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And where was Mayor Daley's project to be located? As a reader might guess, it was none other than the square block that encompasses the 558 DeKoven street address, where Mrs. O'Leary's cow, so long ago, allegedly kicked over the lamp that started the fire that destroyed Chicago.
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CHAPTER 9
WORLD'S LARGEST HOSPITAL
A CROSS the street from the great Cook County hospital, 1825 W. Harrison st., is a small, grassy plaza, in the center of which stands a statue of Louis Pasteur, the French chemist who con- tributed so much to medical science.
Inscribed on the statue's base is the following Pasteur quotation:
"One doesn't ask of one who suffers: What is your coun- try and what is your religion? One merely says, you suffer, this is enough for me, you belong to me and I shall help you."
Cook County hospital, with its 3,200 beds, is the largest general hospital in the world. In 1958 a total of 97,644 per- sons were admitted to it as bed patients, and the average daily population of such patients was 2,711.
An additional 161,900, tho not admitted as bed patients, were cared for at the hospital, and 78,272 (representing 240,857 patient visits) were cared for at the county's out- patient clinic across the street. (Outpatients are those afflicted
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with less serious ailments for which hospitalization is not required. )
Thus in 1958 Cook county, principally at the expense of the taxpayers, treated a grand total of 337,816 persons at County hospital and outpatient clinic. This is a greater number than the combined populations (1950 census) of the cities of Peoria, Rockford, and Evanston.
Nor do these charity patients include 3,480 long-term, chronically-ill, and 806 tubercular patients now cared for annu- ally at the county's Oak Forest hospital, licensed by the state in 1956 to operate as chronic disease and tubercular hospital units. (More about Oak Forest in a later chapter.)
The 1959 county appropriations for maintaining and oper- ating County hospital was $20,085,286. (This included $10,351,563 appropriated for the Cook County School of Nursing which provides the nursing care in the hospital in addition to the operation of the training school.)
The annual appropriation, which is from the county's cor- porate or housekeeping fund, does not cover any portion of the construction costs of the 21 buildings which comprise the County hospital group. If erected at present prices, these build- ings would cost the county tens of millions of dollars.
Cook county's 1959 appropriations for administering charity in all its institutions totaled $36,295,249, or 52 per cent of the $69,694,868 cost of operating the entire county govern- ment for the year.
Altho other taxing bodies-state, city of Chicago, and Cook county townships outside of Chicago-assist Cook county an- nually to the extent of about $16,000,000 in helping defray its diversified charitable administrative expenses, these funds, it should be remembered, also come from taxes.
The $36,295,249 cost does not include the almost stag- gering figure of $107,000,000 in state, federal and city of Chicago funds expended annually by Cook county's welfare
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department in meeting relief needs of the old, the disabled, the blind, the dependent children, and the unemployed.
Why, one may ask, does the Cook county government pro- vide care for the medically indigent?
Illinois law requires it of all counties. Other states have similar laws. In fact, from time immemorial enlightened nations and groups of men have provided in varying degrees for the less fortunate in their society.
One portion of the Illinois law, dealing with assistance to the medically indigent (Chapter 23, paragraph 439-14 of the Illinois Revised Statutes, 1955) says, in part:
"When any person . . . shall fall sick or die not having suf- ficient money, property, or other resources, including income and earnings available to him over a twelve-month period, to meet the cost of necessary medical, dental, hospital, boarding or nursing care, or burial, the supervisor of general assistance charged with the duty of providing general assistance to the governmental unit in which he should be at the time of his JOHN J. TOUHY County Commissioner illness or death shall give or cause to be given to him, such care as may be necessary and proper ... "
This does not mean, however, that an indigent person will be given free care at either County hospital or at the Oak Forest hospital if there are other members of his immediate family who may have means with which to pay.
If a father or mother, son or daughter, brother or sister can do so, and fails to pay the County hospital or Oak Forest hospital expenses of any family member, he or she, under ex- isting law, can be brought into court and compelled to pay.
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During 1958 Cook county collected $514,887 from patients and their families who were able to pay in full or in part for such hospitalization, and $1,357,685 from insurance companies whose policy holders either were hospital patients or were the ones legally responsible in accident cases involving hospital patients.1 In 1958 the charge for patient care at County hospital was $18.48 per day, and with ever-mounting costs, indications were that this would go higher. (Patient care at the county's Oak Forest chronic disease and tuberculosis hospitals is figured at $150 per month.)
Altho the state paid the county $12,656,851 for patient care at both the County and Oak Forest hospitals during 1956, under the then existing state law, the county was permitted to keep but $8,500,000 of this. The remaining $4,156,851 was abated, which means the amount of taxes the county could levy for corporate or operating purposes had to be reduced by that amount.
In 1957, however, the county board was successful in obtain- ing state legislation changing the $8,500,000 figure to $13,- 000,000, thereby increasing the county's hard-pressed cor- porate fund revenues by $4,500,000. Leaders in obtaining this legislation were Board President Daniel Ryan; County Com- missioner John J. Duffy, chairman of the board's finance com- mittee; and County Commissioner Wm. N. Erickson, chairman of the board's legislative committee.
(Cook county, in odd-numbered, non-election years, is per- mitted by law to levy a corporate tax of 22 cents on each $100 of assessed valuation, and in even-numbered election years, 26 cents. Special elections which fall in "non-election" years are costly and must be paid for by the county out of its regular funds which always are insufficient to meet properly the county's many needs.)
1. From report of Cook County Department of Welfare, Raymond M. Hilliard, Director.
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The Cook county's other charitable institutions and en- deavors to which we have alluded include the Oak Forest hos- pital, the Arthur J. Audy Home for Children (formerly the Juvenile Detention Home), Department of Welfare, Public Health Department, Family Court, and public defender. The remainder of this chapter shall continue with the story, both past and present, of County hospital.
Babies By The Thousands
To further point up the magnitude of the activity carried on at County hospital, Dr. Karl A. Meyer, medical superin- tendent of all county institutions, and Fred A. Hertwig, warden of the hospital, announced that during 1958 the hospital's surgeons performed 14,749 operations. Its doctors also deliv- ered 17,784 babies at the institution that year. (In 1959 the number of births rose to 17,992.) Some expectant mothers, when asked to which hospital they are going for delivery, reply with a twinkle in their eyes: "To Mr. Cook's hospital, of course."
Further statistics show that during 1958 the X-ray diagnostic department took 292,656 pictures; the X-ray therapeutic de- partment, which has one of the few Cobalt units in the coun- try, gave 28,819 treatments; the sterile solutions laboratory made 343,318 preparations which, if purchased on the open market, would have a value of approximately one-half million dollars; the blood bank administered 13,913 transfusions, and the laboratories ran 755,683 tests.
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