Great hog butcher
H. G. PITT
Prairie State : Impressions of Illinois 1673- 1967 by Travelers and other Observers edited by Paul M. Angle (University of Chicago Press 112s 6d) The state of Illinois has just celebrated its first century and a half of existence. In this com- memorative volume, the Sesquicentenoial Com- mittee presents the whole development of the region through the eyes of visitors from its first discovery by French missionaries in the late seventeenth century. Few of the contribu- tions are striking on their own but the cumu-
lative effect is impressive. In 1800 Illinois territory had fewer than three thousand in- habitants. By 1860 it had a million and a half. Today it has ten million, half of them in the Chicago conurbation.
Chicago itself was only incorporated as a village in 1833 with a population under four hundred. In less than two centuries Illinois passed from a state of nature to the full com- plexities of western capitalist society, a pro- cess that has taken most countries a millen- nium. The real development came after the removal of the Indian, beaten to submission in the Black Hawk war of 1832, when the result- ing security removed all hindrances to the exploitation of the rich prairie soils of the northern counties. 'Think of Windsor Park or Strathfieldsaye,' wrote the Scot, James Stuart, at this time, 'to be had at a dollar and a quarter an acre, in the neighbourhood of such rivers, and all consisting of -land of the richest soils . . . all laid out by the hand of Nature as English parks are,—the woods far more beauti- fully.'
Travellers disagree about the quality of frontier life. The urban English visitor saw it differently from the farmer from the poorer soils of the eastern states or the peasant hold- ings of Europe. For Harriet Martineau the settler lived in insulation if not isolation: 'a single house . . . has clumps of trees near it, rich fields about it: and flowers, strawberries and running water at hand. But when I saw a settler's child tripping out of home-bounds, I had a feeling that it would never come back again. It looked like putting out into Lake Michigan. in a canoe.'
Such conditions bred those qualities of in- dependence and mutual aid which in the frontier thesis are the formative influences of the American character. They receive due praise here from the traveller: even in their curious mutation in the twentieth century into 'joining' and 'participation' as self-conscious activities in the planned villages for the well-to- do on the outskirts of Chicago. 'You belong in PARK FOREST! The moment you come to our town you know: You're welcome, you can live in a friendly small town instead of a lonely big city. You can have friends who want you—and you can enjoy being with them.' Not every visitor would agree with James Morris's rosy view that 'this tight little tom- munity, living so comfortably among trees and shady lawns . . . has evolved its own polished and intricate civilisation.' In many ways the new suburbs are a return to the isolation of the frontier.
Professor Angle has resisted the temptation to • allow Chicago, the City of the Big Shoulders, to push the rest of the state off
the map. But one is left with the impression that care has been taken in an anniversary year to include nothing which might cause offence. Justice is done to its position as the great 'Hog-Butcher of the World, Tool- maker, Stacker of Wheat.' But the wilder and crueller aspects of its life are missing, except in a fine impressionistic piece by Simone de Beauvoir, who penetrated to the negro slums.
The prohibition era and the gangsters are mentioned only to be slurred over. The city bosses might never have lived. The corruption of city administration at the beginning of the century is seen only on the surface in a prim piece by Sidney Webb: an odd choice, when W. T. Stead's If Christ Came to Chicago, pub- lished only four years before Webb's visit, pro- vides a • vivid impression of what was going on inside the seething cauldron. It is a pity, too, that the exclusion of fiction, and so of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, leaves us with a description of the world's greatest cattle-market and meat-packing industry by a Hungarian. nobleman (who was in the stockyards just when Sinclair was writing about them) which de- liberately avoids any discussion of their horrors.
But the greatest weakness of the book is the complete exclusion of politics, one of the state's major industries. It is odd enough to have Chicago without Louis Sullivan (except for a footnote) or Colonel McCormick, and Illinois without Carl Sandburg: but the ab- sence of Lincoln and Stephen Douglas levels the landscape out and leaves it like the topography of the state itself—rich, flat and dull. There is nothing distinctive about this Illinois: it might be any of the Middle Western grain states. These travellers do scant justice to the greatest and most remarkable of them.
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