Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [55]
By Sunday, after five days of blistering heat, Chicago’s streets had become festering rivers of filth. With no rain to wash away the horse manure and urine, nor the organic refuse of the businesses and residences, the blistering heat made every street noxious and dangerous. Venturing out into the street at night to catch a breath of air meant making one’s way amid animal feces, rotting produce, and discarded meat trimmings from butchers.
Ironically, the large rectangular garbage containers found on every street became sought-after perches for individuals and families to rest safely above the muck. “The garbage boxes were a godsend to those who found the streets too wet and filthy to lie in,” a reporter from the Tribune observed. “Wherever one of the foul-smelling receptacles was, there was sure to be at least one person stretched upon it. Some of the boxes were covered with an old quilt, and babies, stark naked, lay stretched upon them without any one, apparently, having any fear of their falling off.”
This was the situation in Chicago as the Bryans arose at 10:00 AM, with the temperature already 84 degrees. At the First Presbyterian Church of Englewood they attended a service given by their old friend from Omaha, the Reverend John Clark Hill, who had just been called back to Nebraska to become pastor of a church in Lincoln. Riding in a carriage to and from Englewood, on Chicago’s southwest side, from their hotel at Madison Street and Wabash Avenue, Bryan must have been reminded of the time he had once lived in Chicago, attending Union Law College from 1881 to 1883. Although Bryan was familiar with the small cities of the American West, his nearly two years in Chicago, a city of over half a million residents at the time, constituted his first experience living in one of the country’s truly large metropolises. Indeed it may have been those very years that impressed on him the transient and even corrupting role of the city.
For a number of personal reasons, Bryan’s months in Chicago were most likely miserable. His father, Silas, had died in 1880, when Bryan was a junior in college, and twenty-one-year-old William left for his law studies while his family was saddled with Silas’s debts. He also left behind his beloved Mary for two years. While his mother paid for tuition, Bryan was responsible for paying for his own room and board in Chicago, which he was able to do only by skimping and sacrificing, budgeting himself a mere $4 a week. He lived in a single, windowless room far from the city center. To save the 5-cent transit fare Bryan walked the four miles to school. To support himself he worked in the law offices of an old friend of his father’s, the former United States senator Lyman Trumbull. Working part-time, Bryan swept the floors and managed the office’s supplies of paper and ink.
Bryan had arrived in Chicago one decade after the Great Fire had devastated the downtown area. The city had rebounded with astonishing speed. Chicago was growing exponentially, from a population of 100,000 just before the Civil War to 500,000 when Bryan arrived as a student. It was a city of immigrants, with 40 percent of the residents the foreign-born and their children.
Chicago was foremost an industrial city, where huge corporations squeezed the independent businessman and exploited their own workers. Bryan visited the shops of the great Pullman Company,