TALES OF THE BOURBON KING

Chicago. 1884. The Remus family steps off a train into the fastest-growing city in America. Foundries hammering. Construction crews shouting in a dozen languages. This is the world that forged George Remus — and it was brutal.

This episode, hosted by award-winning cultural historian Bob Batchelor, shows you the Gilded Age America Remus inhabited. The era of unprecedented wealth and crushing poverty existing side by side, separated by two miles and an impossible gulf.

When George arrived at age eight, Chicago was exploding. Population grew 118 percent in a decade — five times faster than New York. Nearly half a million residents had German heritage. Fifty-six percent of the workforce was immigrant.

But the American Dream came with a price. George's father earned $9-11 per week when he could find work. The family lived in a one-room "rear house" — a wooden shack on posts with no plumbing. Twenty percent of boys under 15 worked full-time instead of attending school. Six hundred seventy-five workers died every week in industrial accidents nationwide.

Economist Henry George captured the era: "This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times."

George Remus saw it all. The grind. The desperation. The way the system crushed people who couldn't keep up. And at 14, working behind his uncle's pharmacy counter, he decided: He would not be one of them.

This episode is essential context for everything that follows. You need to understand the world Remus inhabited to understand the empire he would build — and the violence that would end it. This is social history from the bottom up, using one immigrant kid's story as a lens into Gilded Age America.

Tales of the Bourbon King is based on the research and writing of Bob Batchelor, Assistant Professor of Communication, Media, & Culture at Coastal Carolina University.

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