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In “Faith and Doubt: The Imaginative Dimensions of the Great Chicago Fire,” Carl Smith discusses how two clusters of beliefs arose from the flames of Chicago’s great fire of 1871. From it came a belief in Chicago’s transcendent purpose as a sort of divinely sanctioned landscape with boundless potential and a special place in history. The other belief was a worry that at any moment, places like Chicago could explode into anarchy if the social order weren’t carefully guarded. After the Chicago fire occurred, residents and interested parties across the country recognized the needs for a city to have stable society. For many concerned citizens, the fire was an act of God purifying the city of sin and allowing those left to start anew on moral high ground.
This reading is strongly related to Henry’s in that natural disasters came to be an indication of God’s judgment in the American conscience. Though Smith didn’t mention it, I thought that Henry’s point about Bradford’s “City upon a hill,” and American exceptionalism would have been pertinent. Indeed some citizens believed Chicago to be this “City upon a hill.”: “Bright, Christian capital of lakes and prairies/Heaven had no interest in the scourge and scath;/Thou wert the newest shrine of our religion,/The youngest witness of our faith” (135). In this line of thought, Chicago is no longer unique, and the Great Fire fits into a larger narrative about the relationship between God and America rather than God and Chicago.