10) African American Entrepreneurs, The Jazz Age And The Rise Of The Leisure Class

Synopsis: Baldwin situates his story within the Great Migration and the evolution of a consumer culture within Chicago's burgeoning Black belt—breaking with the traditional narrative of the Migration as catalyzed by Northern industrial expansion and the cutoff of European immigration during World War I, Baldwin audaciously reckons the period as beginning with the racial conflict that surrounded boxer Jack Johnson's victory over Jim Jeffries in 1910. Taking examples of entrepreneurs as diverse as beauty tycoon Madame C.J. Walker, gospel music pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey, and Rube Foster, founding father of Negro League baseball, Baldwin demonstrates that new arrivals to Chicago used engagement with the developing capitalist marketplace during the 1910s and 1920s to prevail over established social hierarchies within the Black community.

Chicago resident Jack Johnson:

fought defeated the original  "Great White Hope", Jim Jefferies, in "The Fight Of The Century".

Johnson's victory set of a series of riots (and celebrations) across America, the story was later dramatised by Howard Sackler in a Pulitzer prize winning play and film.

The Jazz age, and the rise of the leisure class, links well with modernity, technology, the American dream and Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century.

09) Chicago Defender And The Great Migration

     --Bessie Smith Chicago Bound Blues

At the end of World War I, immigration form eastern Europe slowed down, as demand for American industrial products grew, African Americans  found it easier get jobs in the railways, steel works and factories, and the The Great migration  started in earnest.
between 1915 to 1925  about half a million African Americans from the South to migrated to Chicago, the migration was vigorously  advocated by The Chicago Defender, and with them they brought their culture and music and ushered in a the Jazz And Blues age in Chicago, and it's renaissance in the 1930's.
This  resonates well with the notion of American aspiration for improvement and change, and movement and immigration in the search for this improvement, which acts as a catalyst  for changes in cultures and cities.  As times change and major industries die our, leaving behind a decaying industrial city, the question is whether the city and people can reinvent themselves again.

08) The Jungle

Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant – a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor – a process known to the workers as "giving them thirty per cent."

Published in 1906, The Jungle, tells the powerful and graphic story of the immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus and his family as they are churned out and spat out by a corrupt economic system, that treats them no better than the meat in Chicagos Packingtown district, where they attempt to make a living.

07) I Am Not A Crook...(just a misunderstood Illinois governor)

 

Never a dull day in Chicago and Illinois politics. Blagojevich, only convicted  on one count of lying to the FBI. Three governors  in jail since the seventies and counting.

Chutzpah... 'Blago' being interviewed on the John Stewart Show, after his court case, where he declined to testify in his own defence and was convicted of only one of the 24 offences he was charged with.

06) Hog Butcher For The World

                            CHICAGO

   HOG Butcher for the World,
     Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
     Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
     Stormy, husky, brawling,
     City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
     have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
     luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
     is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
     kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
     faces of women and children I have seen the marks
     of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
     sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
     and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
     so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
     job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
     little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
     as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
     Bareheaded,
     Shoveling,
     Wrecking,
      Planning,
      Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
     white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
     man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
     never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
     and under his ribs the heart of the people,
     Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
     Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
     Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
     Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

                            - Carl Sandberg, 1916.

05) Democratic Convention Chicago 1968

When Chicago's  $35 Million -- ugly, and environmentally unsound -- McCormick Place Convention Center, burned down in 1967, Mayor Daley (one of the few "supporters"  of the center),  determined to hold on to the the Democratic convention of 1968, moved it to the out of town Amphitheater, at the edge of the now closed Union stockyards. The delegates  would still be put up in a hotel across from Grant Park.

During the democratic primaries for the 1968 presidential election, anti-war senator Eugene McCarthy had scared president Johnson out of the race, Bobby Kennedy had joined in and won some major primaries before being assassinated.

McGovern (another 'liberal' candidate), inherited his candidates, and mantle, and yet at the convention, in smoke filled rooms, behind closed doors, "middle class, middle aged, white men", picked Hubert Humphrey (who had not even run in a single primary). The crowd gathered outside the Convention in Grant Park exploded.

The police and Illinois National Guard overreacted, and by many accounts, lost control, assaulting anyone within sight. The brutality  was condemned on the floor of the convention floor by Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff: 

 “with George McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”

The T.V. Cameras pick up the vision, but not the sound of "Boss" Daley shouting a response to Ribicoff, amateur and "professional" lip readers alike, have claimed what Daley said went something along the following lines:

“Fxxx you, you Jxx son of a bxxxx! You lousy motherfxxxxx! Go home!”

After Nixon's victory, McGovern lead the commission that reformed the Democratic nomination process, and it is credible to say " you can draw a direct line from the riots in Grant park in 1968, to Obama's  of victory speech at the same location 40 years later on November 4, 2008."

04) The Most Theatrically Corrupt American City

Chicago is unique. It is the only completely corrupt city in America.
  -Charles Merriam, unsuccessful mayoral candidate in 1911

Chicago is not the most corrupt American city, it's the most theatrically corrupt.
  -Studs Terkel Dick Cavett Show, June 9, 1978

The theme of corruption, politics, and Chicago is hard to shake. I am looking here for an angle as it being the dark side of the American dream,of progress, egalitarianism, populism. The deeper you go the darker it gets, The yang to the yin is difficult to find.

03) Mayor Daley

- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail, 1973

Coming into land at Chicago's O'hare airport sometime in 1990 (near the end of my 1989-1990  round the world "traveller" tour), I remember being engrossed by Hunter S. Thompsons, Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail: 1972 (with its account of The Democratic party machine, and mayor Daley in Chicago). Walking through the terminal --  judging by the date on the the dedication to mayor Daley in the terminal,-- I  was somewhat struck by the fact that mayor Daley was still around, and not retired or in jail. As it transpired, Thompson was talking about Richard J. Daley:

Considered the last of the "last of the big city bosses", he  served as mayor of Chicago from 1955 till his death in 1976. The mayor Daley of O'hare airport is his  son and protege, Richard  E. Daley:

First elected in 1989, he is now (behind his father) is now the second longest serving mayor of Chicago, who was elected to a sixth consecutive term in 2007, with 70% of the popular vote.

Though situated in the mid-west of the American republic, Chicago (having had a mayor named Daley for 40 out of the last 55 years), nonetheless seems to have  it's own Irish working-class royal family.

The two pictures (Of Kennedy With Daley, and Obama with Daley), work well on many levels. Visually, the positioning of the characters, the context of Kennedy and Obama, the role of the "The Chicago Democratic Machine". 40 odd years on and the more things change the more they stay the same ... On the other hand looking at the light side of the story, Obamas election night speech at Grant park contrasts very differently to the riots in Grant park that occurred during the Democratic Convention of 1968 (subject of another entry in this blog). 

02) World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893

The lecture on urban architecture and Chicago history around the turn of the century fascinating and engaging. The themes were tied together beautifully. The World's Columbian Exposition held at Chicago in 1893 was mentioned. It reminded me of Fredrick Jackson Turner and his "Frontier Thesis", which  he  first presented at a meeting of the American Historical Society at the Chicago World Fair of 1893: "The Significance Of The Frontier In American History". 

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom-these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

In particular, I was struck by the resonance of,  Sullivans Transportation Building -- a rejection of  the classical Beaux-Arts style of the rest of "White City" --  and Turner's thesis, that stated that the   "expanding frontier", and the it's interaction with settlers, had produced, a newer, "American Man", and a distinct, democratic, American culture and rejected the previously accepted "Germ Theory" -- that American history is an extension of European history, and American culture derived from it's Germanic origins.

01) Second Pick

Without the (obvious) choice of New York, selecting a city to study -- through literature, music, film, art, stories and people -- boils down to a choice between New Orleans and Chicago. After some consideration, it is hard to go past the prohibition, blues, speakeasies, Al Capone, mayor Bradley, the democratic party machine, the other mayor Bradley... And "The Second City",  with "Big Shoulders", selects itself.

1857 Map Chicago