March 11, 2007
Chicago Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:50 PM EST I am in Chicago, a town where my father was raised on and off, and which I barely know. What seems odd is that if you observe current American mass culture through popular culture and literature, I am not sure how much anyone else would know about Chicago either, and that seems a vast change from the way we used to imagine ourselves. When I was a kid, Chicago was more central. Called, originally slightingly, the second city, meaning second to New York, Chicago seemed the capital of an inland empire. Saul Bellow set novels here, as did Dreiser and Cather and a fair number of others. The sort of poetry schoolchildren remembered memorialized Chicago—it had spawned phrases like “hog butcher to the world” and “city of big shoulders”—and world revolution was supposed to triumph here: The Jungle ended, very memorably, with the stirring vow that “someday, Chicago will be ours. It was thus a hyper-modern and ultra-American city, more modern and in a sense more American than New York, which predated the Republic. The quintessential American architectural form, the skyscraper, was invented here, and approaching the city from its airport the spires rise above the plain like Oz. L. Frank Baum had lived in Chicago, and I think it shows. Or, more harshly, the city rises like Babylon, and one of the old stories we told ourselves was of the farm girls come to Chicago as to Babylon. There were contradictions to the images of Chicago. It was the promised land, one of the goals of the great migration out of the old South, and it was simultaneously a starkly and brutally segregated city. It was the city of a new kind of political order—the big city machine—and was simultaneously a place of violent anarchy, for it was the city where Dillinger was gunned down, and it was Al Capone’s city. A fantasy of Chicago made a vast impression on people like Bertholt Brecht, for whom it symbolized immensely violent capitalist energies. Chicago no longer seems to evoke that intense energy in the minds of foreigners, or for that matter for too many Americans, and we seem to have also lost the once more varied sense of its history as well. On that drive in from the airport it still rises up out of the fields where as child I was taught they otherwise raise only corn and the regiments, harder than hickory, that brought the jubilee. A decade or so ago, when the merits of displaying the Confederate battle flag were being debated in the House of Representatives, an Illinois congressman, I think from Chicago, observed with deceptive mildness that there was no harm in the practice, and that 20-odd rebel flags were indeed displayed in the Illinois statehouse, where he had once served. Asked to explain himself, he noted that they were battle trophies. It would be nice if we thought more about Chicago when we thought about who we are. Rather bizarrely, by the time I was a young man Chicago was conspicuously represented in popular culture only by one TV police show and by the teen comedies of John Hughes, and neither was too explicitly identified with Chicago. I suppose when we thought about ourselves in those days, we were reduced to two nations, and Chicago was a reasonable venue to serially dramatize that, in principle no different from someplace like Philadelphia.
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