While the Great Fire of 1871 is often remembered as a unifying tragedy, Murphy’s account reveals a more complicated reality: The disaster exposed existing class divisions and intensified them during the rebuilding process. The initial chaos seemed to level social hierarchies, as panic and desperation afflicted rich and poor alike. This temporary sense of shared suffering quickly faded in the aftermath of the fire. Chicago’s wealthier and more influential residents played a major role in shaping public discussions about the disaster and the city’s recovery. Poor and immigrant communities were frequently blamed for disorder and destruction, while rebuilding policies often placed heavier burdens on working-class residents. The Great Fire thus demonstrates how a city’s response to catastrophe can leave existing social inequalities more firmly in place.

The fire’s immediate onslaught affected residents across social classes, challenging assumptions about upper-class composure and control during crises. Alexander Frear, a visitor from New York, expected to see an orderly retreat among the city’s “better class” but was instead shocked by the reality. He witnessed mansions being emptied with “the greatest disorder and the greatest excitement,” observing “a mob of men and women, all screaming and shouting” (69). This scene of raw panic directly contradicted the prejudiced notion that only the poor and immigrant classes would succumb to chaos. While reporter Joseph E. Chamberlin documented the terror among the “wretched female inhabitants” of the poorer West Side (51), Frear’s testimony reveals that fear was experienced across social boundaries, showing that wealth and social standing offered no immunity to the chaos and fear caused by the fire.

Once the flames subsided, however, wealthier and more influential residents played an important role in shaping public accounts of the disaster and the city’s recovery. Many public narratives emphasized order and resilience, while reports of disorder were often associated with poorer communities. Horace White, the influential editor of the Chicago Tribune, offered a sanitized version of the evacuation, claiming there was “no panic, no frenzy, no boisterousness” and that “everybody was good-natured and polite” (75). Murphy juxtaposes this with the pandemonium described by Chamberlin and Frear, suggesting that White’s account helped project an image of stability and confidence to outside observers and potential investors. In the aftermath of the fire, Catherine O’Leary, a working-class Irish immigrant, became a central target of public blame. The press unfairly portrayed her and her neighborhood as a den of “blear-eyed, drunken, and diseased wretches” (134), using anti-immigrant stereotypes that shifted attention away from the city’s unsafe construction practices and infrastructural weaknesses.

The rebuilding process further entrenched these class divisions, as rebuilding policies often favored wealthier residents and businesses. City officials proposed strict “antifire” building regulations that required the use of expensive brick or stone, materials far “beyond the means of poorer citizens” (135). Without insurance or access to loans, working-class families who lost their wooden homes were effectively priced out of the city’s core. They were eventually permitted to rebuild with wood, but only outside an expanded commercial district. Murphy highlights the irony that the fire came to be seen as beneficial for classifying real estate, a process that pushed many poorer residents away from the city’s valuable commercial center. In the end, the new Chicago rose from the ashes as a city with even sharper social and economic divisions than before.