The Middle West

CLAUDE ANET

A Few Good Words for the Growing City of Chicago, and a Prediction of Its Future Importance

IS Chicago the Middle-West? Very little, in the sense in which we use the phrase, implying a mixture of virtues and defects strongly tinged with Puritanism. Chicago is Chicago. That is enough.

Under the name of the Chicago Tribune one reads: "The World's Greatest Newspaper." On the editorial page one sees, in italics: Chicago Will Be the Greatest City in the World. I spent several days in Chicago, and I said to myself: "Well, as a matter of fact, why shouldn't Chicago become the greatest city in the world?"

Just now New York, with its six or seven million inhabitants, is ahead; Chicago has only four. But one can conceive it possible that New York has almost reached its highest point. The narrow peninsula of Manhattan can accommodate no more residents, and has all it can do to furnish transportation for the swarms of workers its suburbs send each day to the business centre.

ALREADY, in the heart of the city, traffic is impossible from ten o'clock in the morning until six in the evening. New York has nearly 800,000 automobiles. When it has 1,200,000, how are they going to move in avenues and streets it is impossible to widen? Those who laid out the plan of New York in the first quarter of the nineteenth century were timid men, without an eye for the future. If only they had given Fifth Avenue the width of the Champs-Elyséesl

But Chicago lies on the flat shore of Lake Michigan and extends for more than twenty miles; there is nothing to prevent its stretching out to fifty or a hundred. Its new avenues have the necessary width. Is more land needed? It is reclaimed easily by filling in the shallow waters of the lake, and a magnificent driveway with vast sidewalks runs the length of the Chicago waterfront.

New York is on the sea-coast; it has, with the Hudson, the finest harbour in the world. Where is there another city whose residents can say: "A short distance from, my house, I can touch the gangplank of a ship that will take me to any point on earth?" However, New York has to pay for this privilege. It is at the extreme end of an immense country. Great distances separate it from the greatest agricultural centre of the United States, the Middle West, which will soon be the industrial centre as well: the vast Mississippi Valley which in itself is almost as great in area as all France. Days and nights of travel in express trains are required to reach the Western states that are fully developed.

Chicago, touching the great lakes, has easy communications by water with vast and rich territories; it dominates the Mississippi Valley, with its innumerable tributaries.

As the Far West grows richer, Chicago proportionately grows and prospers—nearly a thousand miles from New York. Grain, cereals, lumber, hides, cattle, all are there. All must be handled, prepared for the ultimate consumer, re-shipped finally, for distribution to the whole country. Is there anything they can not do in Chicago to-day?

One can imagine New York's remaining the great market place of the empire and the financial centre of the world—the war gave it that eminence—while Chicago, full of power, between an East and a West equally rich, extends its manufactures, its textile industries, its factories, its warehouses, along sixty miles of the Lake Michigan shore, until Chicago does become, finally, the greatest city in the world.

At the moment it is tumultous, disordered, noisy, with an incursion of aliens and vagabonds. Negroes, who used to ignore the city, have invaded it since the war, and have their own quarter now. In Chicago a great deal of money is made. Things are not yet organized; there is disorder; in city and state politics there are allegations of graft, theft, conspiracy; one finds there, even more than in New York, gangs organized for robbery, which make their own laws for themselves, pistol in hand. Not a week passes without open outbreaks of gang warfare, which go on in broad daylight under the eyes of a police force either indifferent or too weak to suppress them.

Yet along with all this there is a life of luxury, there are magnificent shops, opera, theatres, restaurants, splendid museums— the finest modern French paintings in the United States are in Chicago—, a university richly endowed. There are buildings that follow the New York pattern, skyscrapers, which, they say, are necessary only in New York where land is lacking, but which are, in reality, the precise architectural expression of certain of the demands of modern business life. One finds them all along Michigan Avenue and in the central portions of the city; they are building them now opposite the park that follows the lake front, apartment hoqses of 20 or 30 stories.

THE Chicago Tribune building is a tall tower, of a bizarre Gothic. Opposite it one of the greatest buildings in Chicago has been reared out of the profits of a chewing gum—which gives an excellent idea of the power of the jaws of the American people. I never passed that enormous mass of steel and concrete but that my teeth began, automatically, to bite on nothing.

At dusk these buildings are illuminated by. powerful searchlights on the roofs of neighbouring structures. A hundred beacons, at night, lend a dazzling whiteness to the façade that testifies to the American preference for a particular chewing gum. The Gothic coping of the Chicago Tribune building lights itself; foundation and main structure remain dark; above the arched buttresses the pinnacles leap up, glowing in a light the source of which is invisible. Before long the people of Chicago will find a way to write in letters of fire on the clouds that the winds will carry away with them: "Chicago will be the greatest city in the world."

They have, out there, a somewhat different taste in the matter of publicity from that which I found in the East.

In New York the eloquence of figures and the language of business were enough. Extremely clever men use them, and are trained to awake—and to hold—the attention of the reader. That is most ingenious and intelligent. The Middle West appeals rather to the heart and to sentimentality in its publicity. A great Chicago bank covers its walls with posters: "You are assured of a cordial welcome at the Safety-Trust." One wonders what the heart has to do with the handling of a bank account.

A company that maintains a fleet of taxis which operate in Chicago at a high rate carries in its cars a note which reads: "Our patrons will be happy to know that they are entrusting the lives of their wives and children (why not their own?) to an honourable company which can meet its liabilities." This is signed Kahn, Kohn, Kuhn and Co.

Henry Ford takes a whole page in the newspapers in which he boasts, and not without reason, of the cheapness and excellence of his cars. But that is not enough; he must finish with a humanitarian and extenuating couplet in which he congratulates himself on having contributed to the spiritual progress of the world and his own country.

HERE I cannot help smiling. On my way to Detroit I read in a magazine the results of an inquiry made by one of those leagues that busy themselves in watching over and regulating public morality. This report, dealing with young girls, was alarming. It proclaimed two causes for the increasing immorality among young girls: the use of liquor (an amusing reflection on a country officially dry), and the development of the automobile.

At night in the parks, beside the roads, even in the suburbs of cities, one sees hundreds of parked motors, lights dimmed. No one is shocked; police seldom interfere.

Oh, moralistic Mr. Ford, how many souls your cars have brought to destruction!

In Detroit how can one escape visiting the Ford factories, which turn out 7,000 cars a day, with an apology because there are not more and the hope of doing better?

These works are a world in themselves, and a world marvelously representative of the United States of to-day, which is directing all its efforts to the production at the lowest possible selling cost of standardized products of all sorts—everything, even, before long, men. Yes, by a thousand signs I saw that they are working everywhere, in homes, in schools, in universities, to produce a model, standardized man, interchangeable, of great productive capacity, and without much originality.

The Ford management put a car at my disposal, to take me from one factory to another in an area as large as that of a city of 80,000 inhabitants—that being the number of workmen employed. In one whole afternoon I saw everything. How they broke up the old steel ships, built during the war; the tall furnaces, the manufacture of glass, the turbines that supply the motive power for the shops, the fleet on the river which leads to Lake Erie and the endless chain on which a stripped chassis is placed to receive, ten minutes later and four hundred yards away, in its body, already fastened into place, a driver, who steps on the self starter, starts the engine, and begins the car's journey to its waiting purchaser.

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Between these two points a swarm of workmen are busy; most of them are seated, legs crossed, on little, low wagons that are like the tiny vehicles provided for the hopelessly crippled who use them to get about. They follow the chassis for five yards. During this short trajectory those whose business it is to place bolts do so; those who must drive in rivets do that. The bolt expert never drives a rivet; the riveter never fastens a bolt. Two men know only how to adjust the brakes; that and nothing else. It is enough to obsess one. What frightful tedium! What wouldn't I give to be able to strike a blow with a hammer that would break this monotonous rhythm?

The workmen, mostly of foreign birth, make from six to ten dollars a day. They have Saturdays and Sundays off. At the end of the day they go off in trains, trolleys or motor buses from the factory, or in their own cars, cars only two or three years old but which, by that peculiar and miraculous quality of Ford cars, seem to date from a prehistoric period, or to be, at least, pre-war.

When I left those factories I was overcome. The day before I had visited the equally celebrated stock yards in Chicago, where a pig goes in alive and is turned out a half mile away in the form of sausages and a pigskin bag. I had had enough of this mechanistic business, of time too well employed, of the endless repetition of identical gestures. In the night I had a dream. I saw a happy little pig enter the Chicago stockyards squealing; an hour later he emerged as a Ford, loudly proclaiming his delight.