A FEW CHICAGOANS
The disappointing and unsatisfactory thing about a motor trip is that
unless you have unlimited time, which few people ever seem to have, you
stop too short a while in each place to know anything at all about it.
You arrive at night and leave early in the morning and all you see is one
street driving in, and another going out, and the lobby, dining-room and
a bedroom or two at the hotel.
Happily for us, we have been staying several days in Chicago, and, while
we can scarcely be said to know the city well, we have had at least a few
glimpses of her life and have met quite a few of her people.
Last evening at a dinner given for us, our hostess explained that she had
asked the most typical Chicagoans she could think of, and that one of
the most representative of them was to take me in to dinner. “He is so
enthusiastic, he is what some people would call a booster,” she whispered
just before she introduced him.
In books and articles I had read of persons called “boosters,” and had
thought of them as persons slangy as their sobriquet; blustering, noisy
braggarts, disagreeable in every way. I think the one last night must
have been a very superior quality. He was neither noisy nor disagreeable;
on the contrary, he was most charming and seemed really trying not to be
a booster at all if he could help it.
He began by asking me eagerly how we liked Chicago. Had we thought the
Lake Shore Drive beautiful? Were we struck with Chicago’s smallness
compared to New York? I told him we had, and we were not. He thereupon
generously but reluctantly admitted—the list is his own—that probably
New York had more tall buildings, more wholesale hat and ribbon houses,
a bigger museum of art, a few more theaters, and yes, undoubtedly, more
millionaires’ palaces, but—he suddenly straightened up—“Chicago has
more real homes! And when it comes to beauty, has New York anything to
compare with Chicago’s boulevard systems of parks edged by the lake and
jeweled with lagoons? And yet she is the greatest railroad center in the
whole world. And let me tell you this,” he paused. “New York can never
equal Chicago commercially! How can she? Look on the map and see for
yourself! From New York to San Francisco, north to the lakes and south to
Mexico—that’s where Chicago’s trade reaches! What is there left for New
York after _that_? She can, of course, trade north to Boston and south to
Washington, but she can’t go west, because Chicago reaches all the way to
New York herself, and there is nothing on the east except the Atlantic
Ocean!”
After dinner we were taken to the small dancing club, a one-storied
pavilion containing only a ballroom with a service pantry in the
back, that a few fashionables of Chicago built in a moment of dancing
enthusiasm. Although we met comparatively few people and had little
opportunity to talk to anyone, I noticed everywhere the same attitude as
that of my companion at dinner. The women had it as much as the men. As
soon as they heard we were from New York they began to laud Chicago.
Mrs. X., one of their most prominent hostesses and one of the most
beautiful and faultlessly turned out people I have ever seen, instead
of talking impersonalities as would a New York woman of like position,
plunged immediately into the comparison of New York’s shoreline of
unsightly docks with the view across her own lawn to the Lake. Imagine a
typical hostess of Fifth Avenue greeting a stranger with: “How do you do,
Mrs. Pittsburgh; our city is twice as clean as yours!” However, I felt I
had to say something in defense of mine, so I remarked that the houses on
Riverside Drive faced the Hudson, and across a green terrace, too.
“Oh, but the Palisades opposite are so hideously disfigured with signs,”
she objected, “and besides none of your really fashionable world lives on
your upper West Side.”
Having staked out our fashionable boundaries for us, she switched the
topic to country clubs. Had we been to any of them?
We had been given a dinner at the Saddle and Cycle Club, and we had
to admit it was quite true that New York had nothing in its immediate
vicinity to compare with the terrace on which we had dined, directly on
the Lake, and apparently in the heart of the wilderness, although the
heart of Chicago was only a few minutes’ drive away.
“You must come out to Wheaton and lunch with us tomorrow!” Mrs. X.
said. You could tell from her tone that she was now speaking of her
particularly favorite club. “I think they will be playing polo, but
anyway you must see what a beautiful spot we have made of it, and there
wasn’t even a tree on the place when we started—we have done everything
ourselves.”
Doing things themselves seemed to me chief characteristic of the
Chicagoans. A “do-nothing” must be about the most opprobrious name that
could be given a man. Nearly all of Chicago’s prominent citizens are
self-made—and proud of it. Millionaire after millionaire will tell you of
the day when he wore ragged clothes, ran barefooted, sold papers, cleaned
sidewalks, drove grocers’ wagons, and did any job he could find to get
along. And then came opportunity, not driving up in a golden chariot,
either! But more often a trudging wayfarer to be accompanied long and
wearily. You cannot but admire the straightforwardness—even the pride
with which these successful men recount their meager beginnings, as well
as the ability that always underlies the success.
Another thing that impressed us was that cleverness is rather the rule
than the exception, and the general topics of conversation are more worth
listening to than average topics elsewhere. For instance, their city is
a factor of vital interest to them, and therefore their keenness on the
subject of politics and all municipal matters is equaled possibly in
English society only. They are also interested in inventions, in science,
in all real events and affairs, both at home and abroad. At least this
is what we found there, and what I am told by many people who have spent
much time in Chicago.
To compare Chicago with Boston is much like comparing a dynamo with a
marble monument, yet paradoxically there is a strong similarity between
the two. There is no public place where people congregate. Both are
cities of homes, and hotel life has little part in the society of
either. Boston society is possibly the most distinguished in America—and
Boston front doors will never open to you unless you have cultivation
and birth to the extent of proving satisfactorily who your grandparents
were. Chicago, of course, cares not at all, in a Boston sense, who
your grandfather was so long as he was not a half-wit who transferred
his mental deficiency to you. Boston society is distinguished and
cultivated. Chicago society interesting and stimulating. At least that is
what the people I have met in these two cities seem to me.
But to go back to the evening of our first dinner party in Chicago: the
attitude of everyone rather puzzled and not a little amused me, and after
I had gone to bed I lay awake, and their remarks, especially those of the
man at dinner, recurred to me and I began to laugh—then suddenly stopped.
The mere bragging about the greatness and bigness of his city was not
the point; _the point was his caring_. The Chicagoans love their city,
not as though it were a city at all, but as though it were their actual
flesh and blood. They look at it in the way a mother looks at her child,
thinking it the brightest, most beautiful and wonderful baby in the
whole world. Tell a mother that Mrs. Smith’s baby is the loveliest and
cleverest prodigy you have ever seen, and her feelings will be those
exactly of Chicagoans if you tell them anything that could be construed
into an unfavorable comparison. They can’t bear New York any more than
the mother can bear Mrs. Smith’s baby. At the very sight of a New Yorker
they nettle and their minds flurry around and gather up quickly every
point of possible advantage to their own beloved Chicago. Not for a
second am I ridiculing them any more than I would ridicule the sacredness
of a man’s belief in prayer. Their love of their city is something
wonderful, glorious, sublime. They don’t brag for the sake of bragging,
but they champion her with every last red corpuscle in their heart’s
blood because they so loyally and tremendously care.
I wonder, is it their attitude that has affected us, too? Otherwise why
is the appeal of Chicago so much more personal than that of other cities
we have come through, so that even we are feeling quite low-spirited
because tomorrow we leave for good! To be sure, the Blackstone is a
beautiful and luxurious hotel, and we are not likely to meet its double
again between here and the Pacific Coast, but it is not that, neither
is it that we have any sentiment for the city or those that dwell
therein. We have no really close friends here, we have met only a few
people—in fact, we are ordinary tourists merely passing through a strange
city, running into a few acquaintances as people are sure to run into
occasional acquaintances almost everywhere.
I don’t think I can explain this personal and sudden liking that I feel
for Chicago. Once in a very great while one meets a rare person whom one
likes and trusts at first sight, and about whom one feels that to know
him better would be to love him much.
To me Chicago is like that.
I don’t suppose a New Yorker ever wants to live anywhere else, but if
sentence should be passed on me that I had to spend the rest of my life
in Chicago I doubt if I would find the punishment severe. There is
something big, wholesome, and vitalizing out here. It is just the sort
of place where one would choose to bring up one’s children, the ideal
soil and sun and climate for young Americans to grow in. New York is a
great exotic hothouse in which orchids thrive; but the question is this:
in selecting a young plant for the garden of the world, is an orchid the
best plant to choose?