Conspiracy theories and rumors dogged news of the Great Chicago Fire
Compounding the tragedy of the recent Western wildfires have been rumors out of Oregon that blame antifa for purposely starting them. That this isn’t true hasn’t stopped the rumors from spreading on right-wing media. This in turn has inspired armed vigilante groups near the fires to confront strangers, including journalists covering the fires, as would-be arsonists.
These developments reveal less about the fires than about how preexisting beliefs seize on any disturbing event as a confirmation of their validity, regardless of the lack of evidence. It’s an old story, a sadly predictable and dangerous part of every disaster.
When Chicago suffered its legendary fire of Oct. 8-10, 1871, which destroyed the entire commercial downtown and left 90,000 people instantly homeless, false rumors abounded. And not just that it all started when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern. There were wild tales of malefactors on the loose, setting more fires. Traumatized local residents credited the rumors enough to pass them on. Chicago businessman Joel Bigelow wrote to his brothers that “there are some that assert that it is a preconcerted plan by a lot of villains to meet here and burn the city — for plunder.”
Such stories did not just end there. Many continued to spin tales of immediate righteous retribution. In the same letter, Bigelow wrote that two of these villains were hanged on the spot by outraged citizens, while another was shot dead. There are grisly contemporary illustrations of this rough justice. In one of them, the supposed incendiary is hanging upside-down from a lamppost as two men carry out an impromptu execution. One wields a rifle butt, the other a hatchet. There was even a story afoot of Catholic priests shooting seven men as they tried to torch a church.
None of this ever happened. A reader is hard pressed to find a single story among dozens in which the teller witnessed the events. Bigelow admitted that all his information was second- or even third-hand. Of the lynching narrative, he said it came from “an acquaintance of mine (who) says he is reliably informed.”
Two weeks after the fire, the Chicago Times, the most popular newspaper in the city then, published the purported “confession” of an unidentified American who claimed to have helped set Paris ablaze during the bloody fall of the Commune at the end of the Franco-Prussian War earlier that year. He stated that he and several accomplices started Chicago’s fire as part of a worldwide left-wing plot to visit chaos on great cities.
Such preposterous stories owe their persistence to individuals and groups who use disasters as fuel to keep conspiracy theories alive. The Chicago Times, in this period when virtually all newspapers were unabashedly partisan, had ridiculed Lincoln and the Northern cause during the Civil War, opposed Reconstruction in the South and called workers who struck or demonstrated “our communists.”
The Times ran the “confession” on its front page, evading the issue of its authenticity. One thing the paper knew for sure was that, amid the turmoil and apprehension caused by the fire, the story would sell copies.
Recently, in a story about fires out West and the damage rumors can cause, The New York Times noted that a tweet in circulation falsely claimed that the Portland police had asked the Black Lives Matter movement and antifa (the tweet lumped them together) to “please STOP setting fires.” In fact, the sheriff ’s office of Oregon’s Douglas County was asking on its Facebook page that people oppose such misinformation efforts, pleading, “Do your part, STOP. SPREADING. RUMORS.”
This did not stop podcast host Joe Rogan or Fox News host Laura Ingraham from observing, as if it were established fact, that antifa members were among those intentionally setting wildfires. This was denied by local authorities and the FBI, who pointed out that such misinformation cost the police valuable time.
In Chicago, the rumors — or at least the underlying anxieties and uncertainties that animated them — were powerful enough to convince leading citizens to get Mayor Roswell Mason to agree to a de facto martial law. He authorized Gen. Philip Sheridan, the Civil War hero then commanding the Army’s Military Division of the Missouri from an office in Chicago, to lead a force of regular soldiers and volunteers in policing the streets. This was in spite of the fact that Sheridan had no civilian authority, and that he stated that reports of arson and looting were rooted in the agitated public mind rather than reality.
Military rule in Chicago ended when an untrained recruit on patrol, a college student who had never fired a gun before, fatally shot a prominent citizen, prosecuting attorney Thomas Grosvenor — himself a decorated officer in the Union Army. Grosvenor, Sheridan later pointed out, was among the leading citizens who had urged him to take charge.
His homicide provided evidence that the rumors that swirl around disasters can end up being as dangerous and deadly as the disasters themselves.
Carl Smith is the Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English and American Studies and professor of history, emeritus, at Northwestern University and the author of, most recently, “Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City,” out i this month from Atlantic Monthly Press.