Характеристика Чикаго
Chicago,
1 with a population of about three and a
half million, is the second largest city in the United States(New York is the
first). It is a centre of
industry for the middle part of the country, the most important Great Lakes
port,
2 the largest city of Illinois and the seat of Cook-County.
3
Chicago is also the place where Mayor
"King Daley"6 directed the police to brutalize
the young people protesting against the US aggression m South-East Asia while
the Democratic Party convention was going on there in August
1968.
The city is first in the nation in manufacturing of machinery and
electronic parts. Famous are the stockyards and meat-packing plants, i where cattle from the western prairies are
shipped and from which meat is
distributed all over the couritry.7 Called the "Great Central
Market of the USA", Chicago is
the railroad and grain centre of the nation. Chicago has a vast commerce by many railroads and by the
lake, and exports wheat, meat and
manufactured goods.
An unrivalled rail centre, Chicago is called the "Cross-Roads of
the Continent". It is served by 19 trunk lines and handles 50,000
freight Cars daily. Also, 40 per cent of the country's motor freight
moves in and out of
Chicago. More airlines converge on Chicago than any other city of the USA.
Chicago is also an important centre of culture and science.
It is the
seat of the University of Chicago and of
several other institutions, and
has -important libraries and art collections. Chicago was the site of the
first nuclear chain reaction (1942) and is still a leader in nuclear
research.8
Owing to its
position, Chicago has been the meeting-place of many political
conventions. From six to seven million tourists come to Chicago fevery year, and another million
and a half who come to business and political
gatherings.
In its rapid growth, Chicago survived the
great fire of 1871,9 the gang wars of 1920's and early 1930's, political machinations of
its "bosses" and financial speculations of its tycoons. The city was
from the start a big melting-pot of different nationalities. For years Chicago
had a racial stratification unusual even for American cities. It was German, Polish, Italian, Slavic, Greek, Jewish. Half a
million Black Americans live in its
South Side, which is one of the most exclusively black areas in the world. About one in four Chicago citizens is
black. The Chicago Negroes are
almost as numerous as those in New York, a city twice as large. Chicago's Negroes have a long history of participation
in basic industry. They are the most proletarian
of all nationality-ethnic groups, and today together with other militant workers they wage a
particularly bitter and difficult battle
for their right to live and work. Called the "City of the Big Shoub ders",10 Chicago has long become
the centre of American working-class movement In the 1880's Chicago was
already a scene of bitter labour wars, and
the big strike of Chicago workers of 1886 led to the establishment of May Day as the holiday of workers of the whole
world.
THE CITY
OF SUPERLATIVES
Chicagoans like to claim that their
city has the biggest and greatest of just about everything. Chicago is the
second largest city, in the United States; it is also the tenth biggest in the
world. It is important not to say this in Chicago. The point to bear in mind
about Chicago while talking to Chicagoans is that, no matter what its
own size, it has the biggest everything in the world. Other places in America
have the biggest something, but Chicago has the biggest everything. You may
be convinced after all that most Chicago things are bigger than anywhere
else; it is unfortunate that they are never the things that one wanted to
be big enough. There is, for example, the Merchandise Mart, which claims
to be the world's largest commercial building, with seven and a half
miles of corridors and its own police force.
In their claims to the biggest and
greatest, Chicagoans in a remarkable number of ways are right Although it is no longer the nation's
largest meat-packing centre—Omaha, Nebraska, now claims this distinction,
Chicago is the nation's busiest air, rail and truck centre, and, since the opening of the St Lawrence Seaway in 1959, the
world's greatest inland seaport.
Chicago also has the world's largest grain exchange (the Chicago Board
of Trade), the world's 'largest hotel (the Conrad Hilton with 2,600 rooms), and the world's largest convention
and trade-show facilities. Chicagoans resent any implication that their
home is in any sense the "second
city" in the US, as New Yorkers have been known to call it. They believe Chicago is really an American city
(while" "New York is not America") and point with pride to,
among other things, the number of red-blooded American authors—including Theodore Dreiser," Frank Norris,12
Upton Sinclair'3 and Carl
Sandburg14—who have called Chicago home.
SKY-SCRAPERS IN THE PRAIRIE
When you arrive in Chicago, you may
find it hard to believe that this busy, noisy, modern metropolis with its
towering sky-scrapers was until well into the 19th century a muddy onion
swamp. But by 1871 this unpromising site had become a city of 300,000, the metropolitan centre
of the American Midwest. Then, on October 8 of that year, disaster struck. It all began in the barn of a certain Mrs. O'Leary
on West De Koven Street where, as the
legend goes, a cow kicked over a kerosene lantern, starting a fire that quickly swept the city. The blaze
destroyed more than 17,000 buildings
that left third of the city's people homeless. Yet in one sense this tragedy was responsible for Chicago's main
contribution to the development of
modern architecture. The fire levelled the entire business district, and the city's engineers and architects •.
had to rebuild from the ground up.
Armed with a series of technological innovations—most notably steel framework and the hydraulic, lift—they set to work
and in the last decades of the 19th
century the sky-scraper was born..William-Le Barren Jenny, one of the construction engineers, used this new
method when he received the
commission to build the Chicago office of the Home Insurance Company. It was ten stories high, much taller than
any building ever before erected.
The building was the first
"sky-scraper", a term now so common for a high building that few people realize
that, to begin with, a "skyscraper"
was a triangular sail used high on the mast of sailing vessels before steamships came into use.15
Quickly a new Chicago arose of brick and stone. Within a year the
business district was restored along the crescent
formed by Lake Michigan in the city's west. Here lies America's second-ranking canyon of finance, La Salle
Street, where the Board of Trade
Building towers above a forest of sky-scrapers. Each sky-scraper is stamped by
a specific commodity: the Wrigley equals chewing-gum, the "Chicago
Tribune" and the "Daily News" mean newspapers, the Continental Illinois—banking, the Chicago
Temple—offices of reputed firms, the
Merchandise Mart—wholesale dry goods, the imposing Marshal Field—department
store de luxe, and so on. Each building stands as if a huge monument to a trust. While you ride through Chicago you have an opportunity to see a little of the city. The
streets are usually crowded with traffic at whatever hour you arrive.
Over your head thunders the local elevated train, which runs on a platform. If
your route takes you near the shore of Lake
Michigan, you will see a broad boulevard along the water-front with eight lanes of fast-moving traffic. Beautiful, tall
office buildings and hotels make a spectacular
picture against the blue waters of the lake. If your route lay further back
from the lake, you would see narrow, crowded streets lined with rows and rows
of red-brick houses.
Vegetable
sellers may push little carts through the streets and call out \the names of things for safe in any one of a
number of languages. \ One of
Chicago's many nicknames is the "Windy City", and despite me
US Weather Bureau, which lists Chicago as only the nation's 19th windiest, it richly deserves this nickname—as you will
soon agree if you a\e caught on a Chicago street corner when an icy
January gale screams oflf Lake
Michigan. Wind is not the only extreme characteristic of the lo^al weather. Chicago is noted for its subzero
(Fahrenheit) temperatures in winter
and 90°-plus temperatures in summer. And don't be misled if you arrive in winter and it seems unreasonably
warm. Chicago weather changes
quickly.
THE CENTRE OF CLASS WARS
The most proletarian of American cities, Chicago was a
scene of bitter labour wars, of the Haymarket
affair (1886) and of the Pullman strike (1894). .
Called the "Red Square" of
Chicago, Haymarket has become world-famous for the Haymarket affair of 1886.
(The official US history books call it the "Haymarket Riot".)
The spring
of 1886 was marked by a national strike movement for the 8-hour working day. At
the giant McCormick Harvester plant in Chicago,
six striking workers were killed by the police. A mass meeting for May
the 4th was called in the Haymarket. Suddenly the crowded square shook with the explosion of a bomb thrown
by an unknown hand. Seven policemen
and four workers were killed, and many were injured. Amid wild hysteria eight
labour leaders were arrested. All eight arrested workers were convicted in what is now commonly recognized as a frame-up.
Four of them—Parsons, Spies, Fischer
and Engel—were hanged. Five years
later, Governor John Altgeld of Illinois, a rare type in US politics, freed
the four Haymarketers remaining in prison and proclaimed their innocence. The movement for the 8-hour working
day and the Haymarket affair caused a great swell of trade-union
organization. Furthermore International May Day emerged from this movement,
for the International Socialist Congress, convened in France in 1889,
declared May the 1st as the day of
celebration by world labour. A monument in honour of the Haymarket martyrs, erected by the labour
movement, now stands in Waldheim
Cemetery outside Chicago. The Chicago police have not forgotten Haymarket either. In fact, they put up.
a monument on the site of the tragedy. Not to the victims, but to their
executioners: a 3-metre statue of a
policeman was put up on a tall pedestal in the hope, apparently, that the people of Chicago would cover it with
flowers in token of their respect.
There were no flowers, but there were bombs. In fact, the "New York Times" remarked that this was
"Chicago's most frequently bombed statue".
There was a series of explosions in October 1969 in protest against the police attack on a youth demonstration during
the Democratic Party convention. A
year later there was another explosion; it cost $ 5,500 to repair the damage. Guarding the statue became a
problem. In 1970, after it had been repaired, it was placed under
round-the-clock guard. To make double-sure, it was constantly scrutinized
by a hidden TV camera., This cost the city $ 68,000 a year, more than the
statue had cost. There were several suggestions how to reduce the cost.
'In the end, it was decided to/ remove the bronze statue from Haymarket Square and put it in a safe
place. It now stands in the lobby of
Chicago police headquarters.
THE "GANGLAND CAPITAL OF THE
USA"
In its bustling growth, Chicago survived the political machinations of mayors
like "Big Bill" Thompson,16 the speculations of Samuel
Tnsull17 and the gang wars of Al Capone's days.18 The
one thing for which Chicago is known around the world is crime. In
January 1919, the sale of whiskey was prohibited in the USA. Prohibition gave
rise to the. illegal liquor trade with big profits for the powerful criminal
gangs who shared the money with the police and politicians in order to
buy immunity from arrest. The gangs competed with each other in the
illicit liquor trade ("bootlegging"), gambling, the operation Or "protection"
of night-clubs and illicit bars ("speakeasies").
They also supplied strike-breakers to employers and the trade-union chieftains who used them against the
militant left-wing. Murder, arson and
vandalism were engaged in as business enterprise on a practical basis. The
combination of war profits, polyglot political structure, building boom
and prohibition turned Chicago, figuratively, overnight in the crime centre of the USA, the "gangland
capital of the USA". • And
even now, thanks to countless film and television shows depicting that era of
^Chicago's history, some visitors expect to see black limousines filled with scarfaced gangsters roaring about the
streets. Organized crime is still a
part of Chicago's life—as it is in most US cities.
1 "Chicago" seems to have a clearly
established than usual. A French explorer who visited the region in 1688
said the natives called it "Chicagou" because of the abundance
of wild onions growing there. Scholars have thought it was the disagreeable
odour Of the little wild onions that inspired the Indian name, and that "place of
the bad smell" might be more accurate
interpretation of the name.
2
Among Chicago's numerous nicknames are the "Lake City" and the
"Queen City of the (Upper) Lakes".
3 Similar to other US cities, Chicago
has a dual city and county government. Chicago and its suburbs comprise Cook
County which exercises certain governmental functions over the entire area.
Other functions are retained individually by the City of Chicago and the
suburbs in a municipal form. This political structure, based on a
capitalist economy, provides
fat profits for
bankers, bondholders, real-estate dealers, public utility;
interests, politicians, the police and
criminals.
4 The
American Peace Crusade—an American organization embrac/ ing peace supporters
of all walks of life.
5 The Young Workers Liberation
League—a progressive youth organization of the United States. It fights
against militarism and racism, for democracy and socialism, for all young
people's demands for work and education. Its main aim is a democratic
government and full civil rights *' for all.
6 "King Daley"—Richard J.
Daley, former mayor of Chicago, "boss" of the Democratic
political machine fbr Cook County. Got notoriety in 1968 when he
brutally dispersed the peaceful demonstration of students during the Democratic
Party nominating convention in Chicago.
7
Today new process and techniques have made it unnecessary to move America's meat to Chicago for processing (the
butchers have gone to the prairies)
and the memories of those moutains of flesh, that pervasive scent of the
stockyards, are like many other things of Chicago's past, just a terrible ghost-story.
8 In 1942, at
the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi and other scientists set off the
world's first controlled atomic reaction.
9 The Chicago fire
(October 8—9, 1871) devastated an area three and one-half miles
square, left almost 100,000 persons homeless. By 1871 Chicago was a city
built of wood. Even the side-walks were of pine and a dry season preceding the
fire made the city a virtual tinder-box.
10.The phrase is taken
from "Chicago" (1914), a poem in free verse by Carl Sandburg:
"Hog Butcher of the World, Tool-Maker, Stacker of Wheat; Player with
Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler: Stormy, Husky, Brawling City
of the Big Shoulders."
11. In 1912
Theodore Dreiser (1871 — 1945) published "The Financier", a novel
about Frank Cowperwood, a shrewd and ruthless businessman, who accumulated a fortune through
financial machinations. The fashionable
North Side of Chicago could not bear "The Financier", for it cut too close to the bone, so the publisher,
Harper's, refused to publish its
sequel "The Titan". Frank Cowperwoo,d was too clearly identified with
Charles Yerkes, the Chicago magnate
(who donated the Yerkes Observatory to the University of Chicago). Yerkes'
earlier corrupt manipulation of Philadelphia's municipal funds, followed by
imprisonment, was known to his
colleagues in Chicago, but he was given access to the public funds
again. Dreiser had become familiar with tVse "robber barons" while working as a journalist in Chicago.
12 "The Pit", a novel by
Frank Morris (1870—1902), brought to life the spectacular wheat market on La Salle
Street in Chicago. "The Pit" was
actually a sequel to "The Octopus", which tells of the struggle
between the California wheat farmers
and the railroad companies.
13. "The Jungle", a novel by
Upton Sinclair (1878—1968), was published in 1906. Its detailed
first-hand description of conditions in the Chicago stockyards sparked
off a campaign that led to the passage of a Pure Foodand Drug Act and a Meat
Inspection Act by the US Congress. The novel gave a most
compelling picture of the humans engaged in the industry where only the
squeals of the animals escaped being converted into profits.
14. Sandburg, Carl (1878—1967). Born in
Illinois, Carl Sandburg wrote in his free verse of the turbulent life he
had observed in the small prairie towns of Illinois and in the raw metropolis
in Chicago. He first gained reputation with his "Chicago
Poems" (1915). He was awarded the Pulit-zer Prize (1951) for
his "Collected Poems".
15. Within a decade, however, New York City captured the
tallest sky-scraper lead and held it. The
champion until May 1973, was Manhattan's
1,350-feet-high, twin-towered World Trade Center, which tops the Empire State Building by 100 feet. But now,
after a lapse of about 80 years, Chicago again boasts the tallest
tower—the Sears, Roebuck and Co. Building,
which soars 1,450 feet above the city.
16. "Big Bill" Thompson (1869—1944)
served three terms as mayor of Chicago, became notorious for political
machinations. Thompson practised what in American political terminology is known
as the "spoils system"—"to the victor belongs the
spoils". In the 1920's it seemed that power in Chicago was shared between
Thompson, entrenched in City Hall, and
Capone, sitting with his gunmen in the Lexington Hotel. This state of bliss was enjoyed by the financiers,
industrialists, gangsters and
politicians.
17. Samuel Insull
(1859—1938)—public-utilities financier. By 1907 he overcame the
competing publjc-utilities companies in Chicago and soon he came to control
the city's transit system. When the Depression broke out in 1929,
Insult's pyramid of corporations was one of the first to collapse into
bankruptcy. Thousands of his stockholders were ruined. Insull disappeared
before he could be brought into court
18 Al
Caponet(1899—1947)—American gang leader in Chicago in the 1920's. He received
tribute from businessmen and politicians. His crime syndicate terrorized
Chicago and controlled the gambling there. Capone' was mysteriously
murdered and given a funeral featured by more than twenty truckloads of
floral wreaths and numerous limousines filled "with gangsters. Thousands
watched while the newsreel cameras cranked away. Crime as big
business went on; in time the warfare between gangs produced a new "czar".