Mother Chicago: Truant Dreams and Specters Over the Gilded Age

Chicago lauded as hog-butcher by poet Sandburg, then damned as a cannibal in Sinclair's The Jungle, was also a city of wanderers, truants, and delinquents. It was home to the largest tuberculosis sanitarium in the country, as well as a dizzying number of public and private institutions for wayward children, indigents, the mad, and the poor. Chicago's socially progressive institutions were influential and respected as saviors of the immigrants and "lower classes." Yet, the savage race riots ...