Diamond - Chicago on the make: power and inequality in a modern city

Former president Barack Obama joined a long line of observers when, while addressing officials gathered at the 2012 NATO Summit in Chicago, he referred to the host city as a quintessentially American town. Perhaps the first recorded expression of this idea came from British ambassador James Bryce, who in 1888 mused that Chicago was perhaps the most typically American place in America. Years later Sarah Bernhardt opined it was the pulse of America and H.L. Mencken quipped that it was American in every chitling and sparerib. By contrast, few have made similar claims about either New York or Los Angeles. New York has long remained the great American city, but its greatness has rested more upon a sense of particularity than typicality. Most Americans residing between the two coasts think of the Big Apple as a somewhat strange and daunting place. Moreover, if Hollywood has played a leading role in exporting American values and norms throughout the planet, it has also made Los Angeles into a surreal and idiosyncratic place in the minds of most Americans living east of the San Fernando Valley.

Chicago, on the other hand, has evoked so much that is patently American, and it continues to do so today even after President Trump attempted to make it into an aberration by evoking the carnage on its streets. First and foremost, with its 2.7 million residents (nearly 10 million in the entire metropolitan area), it is the clear-cut capital of the Midwest and thus of the fabled American heartlanda nebulous place that politicians of every stripe appeal to in order to convince voters that they represent the real people. And Chicago strikes this populist chord in ways that other great American cities do not. In contrast with the dominant image of the good people residing in the older, educated cities of the eastern seaboard, for example, the While notions of class justice (and injustice) now struggle for legitimacy within the realm of mainstream political discourse in the United States, American patriotism nonetheless remains infused with celebrations of average working men and womenwhich keeps Chicago a working-class town in the American imagination, even if it now ranks among the most economically powerful global cities in the world.

Although nobody knows with certainty why Chicago popularly became known as the Windy City around the 1880s, the city has taken numerous other nicknames since its rise to national prominence in the late nineteenth century, and some of the most recognized and enduring of these have related to its working-class identity. Carl Sandburg coined two such monikers in a single stanza of his 1914 poem Chicago, when he referred to the city as both the Hog Butcher for the World and the City of the Big Shoulders. The latter still resonated several decades later, when Chicago had picked up yet another slogan seeming to pay tribute to its industriousness: the city that works. Currently, in the postindustrial era, when jobs in the service sector are far more plentiful than those in factories and mills, such homages to the citys industrial strength seem anomalous. If Chicago still possesses a considerable industrial labor force, its packinghouses and steel mills have shut down, and many of its warehouses have been converted into galleries, lofts, and condos. But when Sandburg was penning his famous lines, Chicago was emerging as the symbol of American industrial power worldwide. Americans are nostalgic for this golden age of global leadership, and such yearnings further support Chicagos bid to be the quintessentially American town.