Authors: Jan Morris
So, on the frontiers of the Middle West you can meet two such totally disparate societies: the northern iron-men, living among their wild lakes and intrusive moose, dealing in big things, iron and ships and great steam trains, a strong and open-air community: and the people of Louisville, at once cultivated and emotional, fond of the comfortable facets of existence, in delicate and lovely countryside of white fences and inviting green fields. Between these extremes (and the other outposts, east and west) lies the expanse of the Middle West, fitting into no convenient category, like the child who finds no school to suit her, or the man who takes size 12 in shoes.
I
ts summit (if one can use the word of a region so uniformly flat), its crown and symbol, the prime product of its energies, the pride of its heart, is the city of Chicago, on the shores of Lake Michigan. I first approached this place by train, and since there is perhaps no city in the world more readily and universally preconceived, I looked out of the windows of my sleeper to glimpse some token of its vigour or catch the distant staccato flashes of its guns. I was prepared for almost anything in Chicago. Was not one nineteenth-century traveller informed, as he rode on
his
train into the city: “Sir, Chicago ain’t no sissy town”? Had we not been told by Middle Westerners everywhere of the unsurpassable blast, bustle and energy of Chicago, its boundless intentions, its sprawling size, its self-confidence, its incomparable resources of brawn and muscle? Did not Carl Sandburg, poet of the Middle West, describe it (with a perfectly straight face) as “laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of youth, half-naked, sweating”? Even Bismark, whom one somehow does not instinctively associate with Illinois, once remarked wistfully to an American visitor: “I wish I could go to America, if only to see that Chicago”.
On my first evening in Chicago I was taken down to the waterfront to see the lights of the city. Behind us the lake was a dark and wonderful void, speckled with the lights of steamers bringing iron ore from Duluth or newsprint from Canada. Until you have been to Chicago—crossing half a continent to reach it—it is difficult to realize that it is virtually a seaside city. It has its sea-storms and its rolling waves, its sunny bathing beaches, its docks; you can board a ship for Europe in Chicago, and see the flags of many nations at its quays. So wide is this Lake Michigan, and so oceanic in aspect, that more than once I have been compelled to walk down to its edge and reassure myself that it really contains fresh water, not salt. It is not only vast, but also treacherous; the captains who navigate the big Lakes steamers are greatly skilled and highly priced seamen. As for the foreign sailors who arrive in the Middle West by way of the St. Lawrence Seaway, they must surely be approaching a state of lethargy by the time they put into Chicago; for having crossed the dreary Atlantic they have then had to make their slow way through the Gulf of St. Lawrence and into the St. Lawrence River; past Quebec and Montreal into Lake Ontario; past Buffalo, in New York State, into Lake Erie; past Detroit, in Michigan, into Lake Huron; beneath the Mackinac Bridge into Lake Michigan; until, after days of this intolerable
succession, they arrive at the port of Chicago—2,261 miles from the ocean at Belle Isle.
So we stood with this queer landlocked sea behind us, and looked at the city lights. The lakefront is the best façde in America; more regular and uniform than New York’s, so that it presents a less jumbled and tangled mass of structures; bigger and grander than Miami’s, which shines with a beckoning gaiety across the water from Biscayne Bay; less brassy and frontier-like than the waterside aspect of Seattle. Its glittering row of big buildings extends for miles along the lake, brilliantly lit; some of its skyscrapers are clean and clear-cut, some are surmounted by innumerable pinnacles, turrets and spires, so that the generally functional effect is tempered by a few touches of the educational. Beside this magnificent row there sweeps a great highway, following the line of the lake, and along it scurries a constant swift stream of lights, with scarcely a pause and scarcely a hesitation, except when some poor unacclimatized woman stalls her engine or loses her way, and is deafened by a blast of protest from behind; then the line of lights wavers for a brief moment, until with a roar of engines and a spinning of wheels the traffic diverts itself and races away; leaving the poor lost soul behind, biting her lower lip, and having a terrible time with the gears.
For Chicago is still a heartless town, in many ways. The incompetent will meet few courtesies in its streets; the flustered will be offered no cooling counsel; it is necessary in life to get places, and to get there fast. Between the buildings that stand like rows of hefty sentinels above the lake, you may see numbers of narrow canyons leading covertly into shadier places behind. The façade of Chicago is supported by no depth of splendour; hidden by its two or three streets of dazzle is a jungle of slums and drab suburbs, a dirty hodge-podge of races and morals.
In the daylight, indeed, the bright glamour even of the business district is not quite so irresistible, if only because of the din and the congestion. This must surely be the noisiest place on earth. The cars roar; the elevated railway rumbles; the policemen blow their strange two-toned whistles, like sea-birds lost in a metropolis; the hooters shriek; the horns toot; the typists, on their way back from coffee, swap their gossip at the tops of their tinny voices. Across the crowded intersections scurry the flocks of shoppers, like showers of sheep, while the policemen wave them irritably on and the cars wait to be unleashed. The tempo of Chicago is terrible, and the over-crowding desperate. Just as each new plan to improve the life of the Egyptian peasant is overtaken and swamped by the inexorable march of the birth-rate, so in Chicago every new parking-place is obliterated, every new freeway blackened, by the
constantly growing flood of motor-cars. Each morning the highways into the city are thick with unwearying cars, pounding along head to tail, pouring in by every channel, racing and blaring and roaring their way along, until you think it will be impossible to cram one more car in, so bulging and swelling is the place, so thickly cluttered its streets, so strangled the movement of its traffic. It is good business in Chicago to knock down offices and turn them into parking lots. And it is decidedly unwise for the nervous or over-considerate driver to venture into the turmoil of its streets, for in this respect, as in others, Chicago still ain’t no sissy town.
Crime and corruption are still powerful influences here, and the best-laid plans of honest men to clean up the city and rid it of its crooked parasites nearly always seem to go a-gley. I talked to a number of young politicians who had such an ambition, some of them bravely outspoken in their comments on the Syndicate, the shadowy and nebulous body of corruption that still controls so much of Chicago’s life. “You may say the old gags about gunmen in Chicago are exaggerated‚” said Alderman Robert Merriam in one public speech, “but there have been 700 unsolved murders
since
the days of prohibition and Al Capone. Perhaps the crimes of violence have diminished … but they have diminished only because the Syndicate has murdered its way to monopoly. Here in Chicago … segments of both political parties are in cahoots with this monopoly of murder.” When I lived in Chicago nearly everyone admitted the truth of all this, but few were ready to fight the situation; and when Merriam stood for Mayor, he was, to nobody’s surprise, defeated. People have too much to lose to meddle with such perilous matters. The big man may lose contracts, the little man the dubious cooperation of his local policemen or petty boss. Extortion, on many levels, is still a common-place in Chicago. A policeman wrote to the
Chicago
Tribune
not long ago complaining about the word “cop”, which he said was derogatory. The letter brought a blistering and revealing reply from a Chicago citizen. “How do you address a you-know-what‚” he asked in a series of such rhetorical demands, “when he stops you without cause and questions you or searches you or your property? How do you address a you-know-what when you’ve been looking for one of them a long time and finally find one mooching free drinks in a saloon?
How
do
you
address
a
you-know-what
when
one
comes
around
to
your
place
of
business
soliciting
funds
you
don’t
dare
refuse
to
give?”
Everyone knows that a five-dollar bill slipped to your examiner will help you along with your driving test. Everyone knows too, if only by reading his papers, that murders occur almost every day in Chicago; but when I talked to a
senior Chicago police officer on the subject, he adroitly slipped away to the twin topics (for they seem to go arm in arm) of traffic congestion and prostitution.
All this sordid unhealthiness would be less intrusive if the city itself were spacious and wholesome of appearance. But despite the illusory grandeur of its lakefront, Chicago is a festering place. From the windows of the elevated railway, which clangs its elderly way through the city with rather the detached hauteur of a bath-chair, you can look down upon its disagreeable hinterland. The different sectors of slumland each have their national character—Italian, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Lithuanian—but externally they merge and mingle in a desolate expanse of depression. Here is a brown brick building, crumbling at its corners, its windows cracked or shattered, its door crooked on its hinges, with a negro woman in a frayed and messy blouse leaning from an upstairs window with a comb in her hand. Here an old Italian with long moustaches squats on the steps of a rickety wooden tenement, its weather-boards an off-white colour, its balcony railings sagging and broken. Slums are slums anywhere in the world, and there are probably areas just as blighted in Glasgow; but here the misery of it all is given added poignancy by the circumstances of so many of its inhabitants, people of a score of races who came to America to be rich, and have stayed on to live like unpampered animals.
In such a climate of existence racial prejudices thrive, and you can often catch a faint menacing rumble of their dangers in a bus or on a street corner—a drunken negro cursing the white people as he slumps himself in his seat, a white man arrogantly pushing his way through a group of negro women. There have been some tragic race riots in Chicago, and there may well be more. During my stay there, hundreds of policemen were on duty each day at a big new housing project erected in an inflammable quarter of the city; for into one of the apartments a young negro family had moved, and their white neighbours (of many national origins) had sworn to drive them out by force; so that sometimes in the evening, when the policemen were momentarily distracted, the negroes in their shuttered rooms would hear the thud of a stone on their window, or the murmur of threats and imprecations from the street below.
Such standards of morality have inevitably eaten away like a corrosive at the old blithe and regardless self-confidence of Chicago. Not so long ago Chicagoans were convinced that their city would soon be the greatest and most famous on earth, outranking New York, London and Paris, the centre of a new world, the boss city of the universe. During
the period of its fabulous nineteenth century growth, when millionaires seemed to be two a penny and the treasures of the continent were being summoned to Chicago, it was not unnatural for such an eager and unsophisticated community to suppose that the centre of terrestial gravity was fast shirting to the Middle West. In a sense, I suppose it has—the railway tracks, the sprawling stockyards, the factories of Chicago and its sister cities are the sinews of the United States, and so of half the world—but the blindest lover of Chicago would not claim for the place the status of a universal metropolis. So much of the old grand assertiveness has been lost. Nobody pretends that Chicago has overtaken New York; instead there is a provincial acceptance of inferiority, a resignation, coupled with a mild regret for the old days of wild boasts and ambitions. For one reason and another, the stream of events generally passes Chicago by, for the city is so isolated in the centre of this enormous heartland, so very far from either Europe or Asia (though you can now fly to Paris direct from Chicago). Even the Chicago theatre, once a lively institution, has fallen into dull days, and makes do with the second run of Broadway productions, and a few mildewed and monotonous burlesques. Even the Seaway has not so far fulfilled its burning promises. Despite the tumult and the pressure, Chicago sometimes feels like a backwater.
The impression is only partly accurate, for there are many wonderful and exciting things in this city. There are magnificent art galleries—one of the best modern French collections in existence—and splendid libraries. There is a plethora of universities, of varying degrees of academic distinction. The symphony orchestra is good, if hampered in the past by the determinedly fashionable character of its audience, which has apparently restricted some of its conductors (so intricate are the channels of snobbery) in their choice of programmes.
Nor indeed has the old manly energy entirely evaporated; there is still much virility and enterprise in Chicago life. The city itself is physically expressive of this continued resilience. The huge marshalling yards lie lounging over the countryside, littered with trains. The bridges over the Chicago river open with a fascinating and relentless ease to let the great freighters through. The
Chicago
Tribune
‚
which calls itself the World’s Greatest Newspaper, is certainly among the sprightliest and most vigorous. There are brave schemes of expansion and improvement—plans to run a new highway bang through the heart of the place, to build a new suburb on an island in the lake, to erect a huge new office building astride the elevated railway, so that the trains will rattle through its open legs. It was for Chicago that Frank Lloyd
Wright conceived his last marvellous effrontery, a skyscraper a mile high.
But such driving activity no longer represents the spiritual temper of the city. Chicagoans are still pursued by the demon of progress and haunted by the vision of possible failure, so that the pressure of their existence is relentless; but the strain of it all, and the malignant rottenness of the place, has blunted some of their old intensity and lavishness of purpose. They have accepted their station in life, no longer swaggering through the years with the endearing
braggadocio
of their tradition, but more resigned, more passive, even (perhaps) a little disillusioned. Chicago is certainly not a has-been; but it could be described as a might-have-been.