Chicago: the power of space

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A couple years ago, I heard about a UW-Madison professor who was under attack by local Republicans, after criticizing actions by Governor Scott Walker to strip unions of collective bargaining rights and insinuating connections between ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization with strong ties to the Koch brothers). The university was subject to a FOIA request on his emails as they might pertain to Republicans, and while UW did release some of his emails, they also withheld others, and argued that the FOIA request was essentially an attack on academic freedom. That professor, I recently learned, was Bill Cronon.

I share the above because it is a personal connection to Cronon, given that I was born and raised in Madison, and count it as my home. I think that one of the greatest struggles in life is self-understanding, and I have found that history is an incredibly effective avenue through which to pursue that understanding. From before early modern Europe to 20th century America and beyond, everything that we understand about our past informs us of our present. Perhaps that is why, as a midwesterner who lives three hours from Chicago and has spent days and weeks there and in its suburbs, I found Cronon’s work so interesting. While I realize that it is a long assignment, I encourage you to read it. It is revealing and fascinating in ways that pushed me to think differently about a wide variety of things.

Turner argued that in the frontier we saw civilization rebuild itself. Yet, what we truly saw was a civilization that already existed push its way into seemingly boundless space in a way that had never been done before. Cronon wrote of American imperial desires, and certainly these existed. Westward expansion was its own form of imperialism, and not many years after the Chicago fire the U.S. expanded overseas. Yet, part of the ethos of America, especially of the past, which I am beginning to understand is the desire for commercial hegemony. The empire that Americans envisioned was commercial, not political. This vision has largely been realized, and a plethora of examples come to mind: the Panama canal, banana republics, our dominance of the World Bank and the IMF, the massive amount of money which foreign citizens and governments our willing to lend us, New York as the center of the financial world, our power to affect drug policy in Latin America, the power of free trade agreements to make or break developing countries.

The history of Chicago is fascinating. Boosters argued that the city had the natural benefits which would enable it to succeed: it’s location on the Chicago river, which would serve as a natural harbor on the Great Lakes and its central location. Yet, these benefits did not seem to be so beneficial after all. The government was forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to allow ships passage on to the Chicago River, and the swamp-like characteristics of the surrounding area limited passage to the city for a significant part of the year. And yet, Chicago still managed to achieve significance with the building of a canal that connected it to the east. Then, railroads expanded, first with a line intended to stretch from Chicago to Galena, and then the Illinois Central railroad. Over time, the “geography of capital,” as Cronon brilliantly describes it, came to favor Chicago at least as much as its natural geography.

I am humbled by my inability to adequately communicate Cronon’s sublime understanding of Chicago, but I will try to contribute my own thoughts. It is amazing to me that Chicago succeeded at all, for every benefit seemed insignificant and every drawback, paramount. Yet, it did succeed. Perhaps the relentless boosterism should take credit, though it seems that other cities had as many proponents as Chicago. Rather than ask why Chicago succeeded, perhaps we might acknowledge that some midwestern city had to succeed in such a way. Chicago functioned as a gateway to the west, and while it did not have to be Chicago which succeeded, it had to be some city. As Cronon illustrated, Chicago came to exist both on the boundary of two literal watersheds, as on the boundary of two watersheds of capital. In the later parts of its development, its function as the terminal for so many rail lines made its success inevitable. Clearly, however, the competition offered by transportation on waterways to eastern markets made rail lines compete, which I imagine had some positive effect.

I also want to add that I thoroughly appreciated Cronon’s elucidation of railway economics, with high fixed costs, which is a cornerstone of microeconomic thinking and, I think, helps the reader to understand why the railways, though mighty concentrations of capital, were not immune to bankruptcy.

I think that Marston made a good point regarding  Cronon and Turner: whether or not Cronon changed one’s mind on Turner, he certainly cast him and his work in a better light. Cronon forced me, though ready to heap criticism upon Turner, to reconsider his thesis in a different and more sympathetic light. Cronon’s work pushed me to examine the ways in which Turner had contributed to historiography and to American imaginings of the frontier and our history. Rather than endearing Turner to me, this makes me more wary. Consider, please, the way in which Turner has shaped historical views of the west and the frontier. Consider, again, the way in which Cronon is able to recast Turner’s work and defend it. These examples illumine the significant power that historiography and general academic exegesis have to shape our perceptions. Perhaps we should be even more careful and critical in our readings, so as not to be led astray.