A. J. Liebling Goes to Chicago
I’ve never lived in Chicago but have always been fan. To me, it’s a city of amazing architecture, great parks and restaurants, and football, basketball and baseball teams full of vivid history and lore.
Chicago has 77 major neighborhoods and many smaller ones; and Jewish people, Irish, Polish, German, Swedish, Czech, Greek…. Chicago has a rich labor history. Mother Jones herself lived in Chicago.
Chicago has a great art museum, and a great university.
Chicago was one of the main northern cities where southern blacks came in the great migration 1910 1950. Southern blacks like Muddy Waters helped make the South Side of Chicago one of the blues capitals of the world.
Chicago has been a literary city, the city of Sherwood Anderson, Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow.
There’s a vigor and a passion to Chicago. A Chicago mayor, William Hale Thompson, publicly threatened to punch King George V “right in the snoot.” The great Chicago defense lawyer Clarence Darrow used to say “I have never killed a man — but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
Middle-class reformers have had great settlement houses, charity groups and university research programs — and dynamic people from Jane Addams to Jesse Jackson to Barack Obama have tried to wrestle social change from them.
What other U.S. city has such great downtown architecture, so many compelling characters and rich history, so much good music and open green space, and such a vital waterfront?
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In 1952, when the journalist A.J. LIEBLING wrote a three-part series about Chicago for the New Yorker magazine, Chicago was blooming. In 1950, the poet Gwendolyn Brooks of Chicago had become the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, and Leonard and Phil Chess founded Chess Records. In 1951, Mies van der Rohe’s striking steel-and-glass towers had gone up on Lake Shore Drive.
But Liebling wrote that garbage collection was poor in Chicago; that the city was cheerfully corrupt, and its cops easily bribed; that Chicago had the dingy, dreary aspect of a factory town; and that around 1930 the city had stopped growing because it had stopped impressing people.
He wrote that Chicago was bizarrely Isolationist before Pearl Harbor, perhaps because the city was suffering jealousy over not having come up to New York City in stature; and that Chicagoans tried to pretend that they were warm and sociable, but actually weren’t.
Liebling wrote that the city’s social life “spreads boredom as evenly as cream cheese on a drugstore sandwich,” that none of the city’s four newspapers were great and only the Tribune was good. For good measure, Liebling mocked the Tribune’s publisher, Colonel Robert McCormick, as “the town’s tutelary deity.”
He insisted that Chicago theater audiences laughed at the wrong times, and that taking a genuine interest in theater was considered naïve by Chicagoans; and that, for a city with a lot of printing business, oddly little publishing was done here.
Also, Liebling added, Chicago had few good writers, both its National League and American League baseball teams were second-rate, as were its boxers and fight promoters, and its restaurants. Chicago’s restaurants, Liebling added, used menus which were inaccurate; they embellished the truth.
Liebling further noted that Chicago’s strip-tease joints were run by employees of decidedly low character; and that its cabbies couldn’t be trusted.
He said Chicago was not really a city at all, just a loose confederation of wards; that Chicago’s mayor looked like “a bit player impersonating a benevolent banker,” and that the aldermen were selfish and opposed new housing even though their constituents needed it.
Also, Liebling pointed out, city housing inspections in Chicago were inadequate, which led to tragic and unnecessary deaths. Do-gooders in Chicago set up a lot of councils and commissions which sounded important but achieved nothing. And Robert Maynard Hutchins, head of the University of Chicago, was not nearly as great as he was cracked up to be, and was running a university “full of neurotic juveniles.”
Liebling’s views raised some hackles in Chicago. Asked, a bit facetiously, if he had any more observations about Chicago, Liebling replied, ‘Yeah, they’re too touchy about their image.’
