Gary Krist, photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders |
Gary Krist is the author of five works of fiction and two of non-fiction. His most recent book is City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
Q: How did
you come to focus on the particular time period you examine in City of
Scoundrels, and what was the most important impact on Chicago to come out
of those 12 crucial days?
A: I wanted
to write about a great American city at a critical moment of transition. The evolution of any city, particularly a
city of immigrants like Chicago, invariably involves lots of conflict, with
various ethnic, racial, and class-based groups competing against each other for
power and prominence.
When things
are going well, this kind of competition can work to the city’s advantage,
channeling energies in constructive new directions. But 1919 was one of those times when the
energies of competition turned destructive, and instead of working to build the
city, started tearing it apart. That
notion—of a city suddenly threatened by the same restless dynamism that had
built it in the first place—is what attracted me to this period.
Probably the
most important impact left by those 12 days of conflict was the changed racial
landscape of the city. The riot—really
the first one in which African Americans aggressively fought back when attacked
by whites—marked a moment of arrival for black citizens in Chicago as a
political and social force to be reckoned with.
The violence
on the streets actually galvanized the African-American community to finally
stand up to discrimination and assert their rights as American citizens. On the other hand, the bitterness left by the
riot also ended up hardening the color line that had been developing in the
city during the Great Migration, and left a legacy of residential segregation
in Chicago that persists to this day.
Q: Chicago's then-mayor, William Hale Thompson, was a controversial character,
whom you describe as "the blustering, flamboyant, unscrupulous, but always
entertaining political phenomenon known to all as 'Big Bill.'" What is
Thompson's place in Chicago history?
A: Corruption
existed in Chicago long before Big Bill and continues long after him, but few American
politicians have matched his record of dishonesty and malfeasance. Thompson’s various buffooneries—from his
campaign debate against two caged rats to his well-publicized threats to punch
the King of England in the snoot—all made him an object of some well-deserved
scorn. In fact, historians generally
regard him as one of the worst urban mayors in American history.
But while he
definitely was no Fiorello LaGuardia, I argue in the book that he did have some
virtues. For one thing, he was one of
the first American mayors to bring African Americans into the political process
in significant numbers. Granted, this
was partly self-serving—he and his campaign managers realized, before virtually
anyone else, that blacks could be a powerful voting bloc.
But Thompson
actually did fulfill many of his campaign promises to the community—doubling
the number of African Americans on the police force and naming black leaders to
some important posts in his administration.
And this was at a time when many self-styled good-government types were ignoring
the black community.
Also, as
someone who called himself “Big Bill the Builder,” he really did get a lot of
infrastructure-building done in his three terms. Many of the monuments that make Chicago such
an architectural showplace today—the Michigan Avenue Bridge and the Magnificent
Mile it made possible, Navy Pier, Soldier Field, the numerous broad avenues and
parks—are to a large extent legacies of the Thompson administration, as corrupt
as it was.
As one of Big
Bill’s critics once admitted: “Thompsonism does build roads and bridges, even
if they cost more than they should.”
Q: Your
previous book, The White Cascade, examines a deadly avalanche and
railway disaster in 1910. How did you conduct your research for this book?
A: Since I’m
a narrative historian—with an obligation to keep general readers interested and
turning pages—my goal is to tell the stories of history in as concrete a way as
possible, with plenty of scenes of conflict and interpersonal drama.
But since I
try to hold myself to very strict standards of scholarship, I of course can’t
make anything up. That means I have to
find those scenes in the written historical record, which is why I’m always on
the lookout for memoirs, letters, court transcripts, newspaper interviews—any
kind of source in which a participant in the drama tells exactly what happened when
and how.
For the
avalanche story, there was fortunately a court case that included hundreds of
pages of depositions and testimony from victims and witnesses. I also found a day-by-day diary that had been
kept by one of the passengers, and a long letter written by another passenger
to his mother (both documents were found in the wreckage of the railway train
after the avalanche).
Of course, I
had to read extensively in the secondary literature as well—about everything
from avalanche science to railroad history—but it was mostly in the primary sources
that I found the specific details necessary to bring the whole story to life.
Q: You also
have written three novels and two collections of short stories. Do you prefer
writing either non-fiction or fiction, and if so, why?
A: As you
point out, my work so far has been all over the map. I started my writing career with two
collections of literary short stories, moved on to two thrillers, published a
comic historical novel, and then turned to historical nonfiction narrative with
my last two books. From a branding
perspective, then, I’ve mismanaged my career terribly!
But the
various forms and genres I’ve worked in are not really as different as you
might think. I’ve always considered
myself in the narrative business, whether the narrative is fiction or
nonfiction, short-form or long-form. And
although I’ll probably return to fiction at some point, for the foreseeable
future I’m sticking with my current obsession with history.
Q: What are
you working on now?
A: I’m
working on a book about New Orleans in the 1890-1920 era. I’ll be focusing on a thirty-year conflict
pitting the city’s social and commercial elite against the members of its
various demimondes—prostitutes, jazz musicians, ethnic criminals, etc.
Basically,
it’s the story of how the white establishment in New Orleans tried to “normalize”
the city, to bring it more into line with Southern Protestant ideals of
morality, racial hierarchy, and civic order.
Obviously, things didn’t work out quite as the reformers had hoped, which
is why New Orleans today remains pretty much sui generis.
But for a
while, at least, they successfully suppressed much of what made the city unique
and hard to control. So the new book
will be another story about a great American city in transition, which seems to
be my favorite subject these days.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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