CHAPTER VIIIA 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 afterthat? 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, andthere 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—eventhe 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 societyis 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. Theydon’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 punishmentsevere. 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?