Chicago: An Impression
p. 293-302
What demon has possessed me? Have I eaten poison? Do I have a fever? Is it because I’ve just crossed west to east over the Mississippi? It’s nothing like that. I’ve just arrived in Chicago, the most terrifying city in the world.
I don’t want to try to give a picture of this city, not even a little map of its discomforts. Only a couple of sounds, smells, sights, a little smoke and restlessness from its atmosphere should leave enough of an imprint on the paper.
Right now it brings me to the wild chicagua onions for which the city is named -- they grew in bunches, where now the world-famous warehouses, the world-famous slaughterhouses, the world-famous grain exchange and the world-famous red light districts stand -- they bring tears to the eyes. At nine in the morning, as I walk the streets, a cyclone of people rushing around me violate my eyes and ears. They have all the jerky movements of the people in cinematic recordings. My guidebook is seven years old and useless. I push myself forward and turn through the revolving door of a stationary store, where I ask the clerk, one of those pale young men who are already dead tired by the early morning, how a person might find the sights worth seeing in this city.
“There’s nothing worth seeing here,” the tired clerk says. “There’s only business here.”
A low noise rests over the city, a rumbling coming from over or under the earth, a pulsing which sounds like somebody endlessly beating a carpet. Coal dust goes up one nostril, the scent of boiling glue goes up the other. This paste rests on the surface of your brain and behold, the Chicagoan’s consciousness is born.
The people here pursue their business like they’re all desperately running away from each other. Two nuns run by me on Van Buren Street. They run in and out of doors collecting money. Their faces are buried deep in their dirt-colored habits; their faces, which should hold their joy, are strained and distorted from running after money in the streets.
But I will keep myself from making the mistake of confusing all of America for Chicago, whose pace seems to be bred out of a lack of air and cramped conditions.
So far as I can tell, this city, this rapid city, “the windy town”, diese windige Stadt is really more of a caricature of America. At barely seventy years old, it is the second largest city on the continent, in which there live more Germans than in Hamburg, more Swedes than in Stockholm, more Jews than in Palestine. It has undergone the sort of development which frightens and astonishes the rest of the Union. All of America gazes in terror at this city, and the city shouts back, “Just wait, in a few years I’ll be #1 here, and then, in a few years more, #1 in the world.” In three directions it shoots out into the corn fields. In spite of traveling straight ahead on a tram line for half a day, I could not reach its borders. Like the newest of its skyscrapers, this empire of individuals rises quickly to a dizzying height. As it sweeps through the fields, making endless suburbs out of wood and dirt, it spreads the misery and poverty of its people disturbingly far and wide. It produces the irrational splendor and mad power of houses and businesses built like palaces. And it also produces the desperation of darkened souls in factories and tenements. It produces a constant back and forth, a tension, an eternal multiplication of houses and people. It produces a dance of greed, extravagance, burning, belittling, crime, pity, psalm singing, manslaughter, uglification, and shame -- But on the graves of four martyrs in the Waldheim Cemetery lay fresh flowers! --
Hopefully it’s not always like this here, in this first week of November 1911, when I arrive in Chicago. But year in, year out, it’s always the same pace, so I really don’t hesitate to say that Chicago is Hell.
In the best area of the city, I wake up in the morning after my arrival. It’s still early, barely five, and there’s an explosion. I leap out to the window and look out at the hotel courtyard, trying to see if anyone has jumped off the roof. Two days later I wake up to the same explosion, but now I stay in bed. By now I know it’s not a suicide, no glorious repetition of the Haymarket Riots, but instead it’s just a neighborhood morning greeting, a small bomb laid before the door of a business competitor.
After the first frost, the newspaper reports seven murders and three attempted rapes on the outskirts of town. The papers are full of poisons, the unexplained sudden falling deaths of influential people, and shootings on busy streets in the middle of the day. (Everyone knows that while in other cities you can have a man murdered starting at upwards of two hundred dollars, you can get one in Chicago for eight.)
In the courts, the state’s attorneys skirmish with the magnates of the meat industry. They’ve tried to break the Sherman Law, so that they can corner the market in meat and tighten their stranglehold on consumers. The courts are full of young lawyers. They come here from all directions to learn how the famous attorney springs his accusation on the hogbutchers. But when a tiny loophole shows up between two letters of the law, the whole prosecution slips away. By now everything has already been done to render the accusation invalid. (The magnates will tell you that the matter has already been decided by the high courts in Washington.)
There have been raids around Armour Square on the institutions of the bordello industry. A couple of streets to the east, Jim O’Leary, the king of gamblers, has tried to render gambling dens bombproof with steel-armored doors. All three industries, meat, bordello, and gambling, have held up all well-meaning attempts at reform. The newspapers don’t mince words. They report about the city in detail: about the politicians, who are in the service of the meat interest, about the police, who are in the service of the bordello interest, and about the orderlies, who have calmly drawn Jim’s odds on their blackboards. (Will there be two days in January with a temperature under zero degrees Fahrenheit or not? Five to one.) Like in nearly every large city, a new mayor takes a stance against corruption in every aspect of public life. I can still hear the reformist and political nicknames buzzing in my ear: Hinky-Dink, Bathhouse John, and others. For the first time on my entire trip, I keep a revolver in my back pocket at all times. As easily as you’ll find a thief or murderer waiting in the small alleys of this city, you’ll also find a policeman or orderly in the corner of a bar.
An old man with a white Vandyke beard sits next to me upstairs in the gallery of the grain exchange in the Board of Trade Building. He’s stretched out his hand, covered in brownish-yellow hair, and explains to me the sights below. He names the names of the howling dervishes who stand around “the Pit” where the golden grain plunges into the world and flutters out to the deceived masses on the wings of imaginary finance.
There are three other pits in this auditorium: the corn pit, the oat pit, and the pork pit. But the wildest howling and the most desperate crowding happens around the wheat pit.
In-between the pits for the wheat and corn brokers, inspectors stand on a high, commanding bridge, carrying long sheets of paper which are the logbooks of the exchange. Gleaming metal capsules shoot over to them on thin steel threads from the hundred telegraph machines at the end of the auditorium. From the chalkboards, where the names of the harvest districts of America are written out, a constant cracking sounds out over the raging voices. On the other side of the hall, the wheat receipts trickle from hundreds of paper sacks into wooden bowls underneath them.
The old man next to me owns four thousand acres of land in Nebraska and is taking a trip to the east, where his children study. So far this year he’s satisfied that the hyenas of “the Pit” have torn neither him nor his children to pieces. A weasel-like, tiny Jew stands on the lower steps of the pit and stares blinking at the roaring jaws around him. This is the same man who for two weeks attempted an “operation” in wheat and failed miserably. He was stopped short, that is, three million bushels sit on his accounts in the grain elevators of Chicago, Madison, and St. Louis, from where he attempts to sell them to millers at an enormous loss.
Pleasant Gretna, the quiet nighttime walkways of Altona up in Manitoba! The gleaming metal capsules shoot here and there and link together the fates of men who don’t even know each other, strange fates . . .
A raging cry shoots up from the howling kennels, where three downward steps lead into a breathing pool. Hundreds of hands stretch up as if in oath. People run into the pit from all corners of the auditorium, arms and elbows swinging as if ready to fight. The inspector bends an ear down from the bridge, then writes a figure onto the paper. A flash shoots from the bridge to the telegraph machines. A hundred thousand tickers tick at one and the same time, hair is mussed up on a hundred thousand heads, and tonight they will be sleepless in a hundred thousand beds, exhausted men poring over the numbers until the dawan of day.
My neighbor takes leave of me smiling. His hairy hand goes barely into my own as we say goodbye to each other with a good handshake.
Downstairs, the roars, the gesticulations, and the witchery continue around the pit. The raised hands now become clenched fists. Everyone showers the next with threats. The good, warm fists of agriculture. Manly, broad, quiet fists calloused like the crust of the earth! --
In the shadow of the corridors leading to the steps, a dark, tall woman sits on a bench. Under her wide-brimmed hat, the veil is pushed away from her face, which is pale and has lovely, grand, and simple features. She can’t be older than 35. She looks straight ahead and not at the passersby. She wears a heavy black fur. Her hands, in black gloves, rest on her lap. She holds a small pencil and a crumpled piece of paper. Whenever the howls from the auditorium penetrate her dark corner, the woman, without looking, mechanically scribbles a drawing or a figure on the paper. What is she writing? What is she listening for?
Two weeks later, I make my way again to the exchange at noon and run into the gallery, where I see the woman sitting in the same place. Pale, she stares ahead into nothing. Her hands, which seem lifeless, hold the pencil and the piece of paper . . .
But downstairs, in front of the house, it looks like St. Mark’s Square in Venice. Thousands of white pigeons flutter around smoke-blackened crates. The seeds scattered from sacks don’t stay on the pavement very long. Many of the howling dervishes, who above all things want to snatch the last piece of grain from their colleagues, stick a handful into their pockets before leaving “the Pit”.
In this fleeting sketch I should say a little something about holy Sunday, when the rabid, feverish city pretends to rest from its work. It’s nothing like the European notion of a restful Sunday, but you do see fewer people on the streets than in large European cities. The people never allow themselves to swing over from Sunday to Monday without losing their speed and poise in the transition, but instead they are prepared at all times to rush in at full speed.
Especially in America, a 24-hour day is a long time. Since the law forbids making business with men on Sunday, the American makes business with his conscience on Sunday and revises his contract with his beloved God, which contract must remain binding seven days long for both parties. --
On a Sunday in Chicago, God has a different name and a different face every five steps. On elegant Michigan Avenue, Chicago's Via del Corso spread out against the shore, you can see seventy-five different worldviews lined up in a row. Everyone runs in a different door, behind each of which stands an auditorium with hundreds of chairs. By ten o’clock, every spot in these auditoriums are taken. Everyone will hold up their God or their conscience or the figments of their imagination, beginning with songs and Bible passages and ending with the ringing of bells. Lying in-between is an extraordinary collection of declarations, religious insanities, Indian mysticisms, more or less the business tricks and quackery of the conscience which the world endures and participates in on a Sunday morning in November. Later, I plan to write a chapter on the church in America, but here I’d like to give a report on the final moments of the strongest religious movement America has experienced.
The prophet Elijah, Elijah the Restorer of the New Zion, is dead. In life he went by the name John Alexander Dowie and was one of the greatest business geniuses of the new America. Two hours north of Chicago lies Zion City, the town that was pronounced to become the New Zion. The New Zion with the Holy Tabernacle of Belief in the middle of town, a colossal administrative building erected behind it for the exploitation of human stupidity, and a central office for the dollars of the converted believers of the human race.
Neither the tabernacle nor the buildings behind it were ever built. All that remains of Zion City is the name and a thriving lace factory, Dowies’ only successful venture.
In a rented church in Chicago, there is a last desperate attempt to bring together a handful of Zion’s faithful. The “Overseer of the Christian Catholic Church of Zion over the World” has sat down after his speech. Now one of the faithful stands up and asks for an explanation about some of the unfulfilled promises of the Prophet, namely his flesh rising from the dead and undergoing a transformation. Five years have gone by and he still hasn’t transformed. The questioner has sat for a night at the grave of the Prophet and even put his ear on the stone. No noise. Nothing.
The “Overseer” stands up and announces that the promise is to be interpreted as follows: Christ would appear simultaneously with the Prophet in the City of Zion. Since, however, with the secularization of Zion, asphalt has been laid over the earth of Shiloah, the last hope has faded. Christ’s pierced foot would never rest on the asphalt of a new era . . .
The next Sunday, the 26th of November, the New Zion lay waiting for death. The widow of the Prophet, Mrs. Jane Dowie, a small well-dressed lady who looks like a housekeeper or fortune teller, preaches in a meager little rented room in the Loop District. The thing begins with about twenty diminished old women and small men, who sing along to the songs shivering and trembling.
Then the widow speaks. She has her husband’s robes on, the same ones the Prophet wore for seven years in Madison Square Garden, New York City, as he spoke in front of thirty thousand people. Her speech isn’t Do This and Don’t Do That, but instead a lecture on smatterings of the Bible, some reminiscences of her husband, whom she alternately calls “the Prophet” and “my husband”, and a blunt scolding of those successful widows, whose rooms next to Vanity Fair maintain an extensive clientele. -- The widow she refers to is Mrs. Baker Eddie, the proprietress of the faith healers, the Christian Scientists.
“My soul is in need, but Christ takes away my want. I wouldn’t deceive anyone for the world, a world made of lies and deception, a world that grows rich through falsehoods. I know that I can trust my God, but this room costs ten dollars, and if you know a cheaper one, just tell me the address. We will now pray for strength and power, and then comes the small collection. Remember, the room costs ten dollars, a poor weak women such as myself really can’t afford it.”
During the closing psalms, the widow of the Prophet pounds her right hand in rhythm, while with her left she counts the gold in the little basket that the usher of the “New Zion” has stood on the altar next to her.
In dark crowds, excited and hysterical, the Americans stream out of their seventy-five churches along Michigan Avenue. At home, they’ll become afraid of their descent into nothingness, carried along by their galloping speed. It takes effort not to stumble over the unemployed, who are loitering and begging every ten steps on even the most elegant avenues of the city. Miserable and hollow-eyed, they stand there and beg in crowds, and that sort of thing is only customary in Italy, the land of the blue-golden sun and godly laziness.