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Chicago: The Second City

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The 1890 census showed that, for the first time, Chicago was the second most populous city in the nation, supplanting Philadelphia. New York, then as now, remained at the top. This one-down relationship gave the Windy City its other famous nickname, "The Second City," which in this book suggests both its inferiority to New York and its incessant striving. Chicagoans seem ambivalent about their status. "People you meet at a party devote a great deal more time than people elsewhere to talking about good government, but they usually wind up the evening boasting about the high quality of the crooks they have met." An alderman tells Liebling that Chicago "is the only completely corrupt city in America." When Liebling reminds him of other corrupt cities, the alderman replies defensively, 'But they aren't nearly as big.'"

Essayist, reporter, humorist A.J. Liebling, himself a New Yorker (who first visited Chicago in 1938, and lived there for about a year between 1949 and 1950, and briefly in 1951), takes a Big Apple-centric view in these 1953 essays originally published in The New Yorker, a magazine to which he frequently contributed. Today, he is perhaps best remembered for his sports writing, especially boxing ("The Sweet Science)" and each year pugilism's top journalistic prize is the "A.J. Liebling Award." Here, Liebling takes aim at the decline of Chicago in the arts, industry, and design, noting the city's brief but glorious apotheosis at the turn of the century and its largely futile self-aggrandizement since then. "The city consequently has the personality of man brought up in the expectation of a legacy who has learned in middle age that it will never be his." As a good journalist, Liebling wanted to discover the cause of the turnabout, and Chicago natives who agreed with him offered their own theories:

"Chicago could have had the automobile if Chicago money had gone after it,' a Chicago stockbroker once assured me. "But the big boys let it go by default, they didn't want an industry here that would dwarf them.'" Others trace it to the pacifist stance of Jane Addams (of Hull House fame) during the WWI. In any event, says Liebling, Chicago has been playing catch-up ever since, and the native seems to feel taken. Plays in Chicago are presumed inferior to the New York production of the same play, or, "if they are the New York production, with original casts intact," the actors are presumed to give an inferior performance. Mid-20th Chicago's response to its percieved victimization and inferiority is a pathetic boosterism; pathetic because, try as it may, the Second City's efforts are invariably second-rate, bourgeois, and unknowingly kitschy. FOr example, Liebling complains that Chicago restuarants, unlike those in New York, feel they must actually convince you drink or dine, and so stage hokey shows and color their menus with decorous prose:

"The Porterhouse, a restaurant in the Hotel Sherman, when I last looked in on it, had six cowboys violinists in fringed pants to play "Tales from the Vienna Woods," at your table in order to sell you a hamburger, and the menu listed credits for costume and scenic design. The urge to embellishment found literary outlet in the listing of things to eat, such as `Ah, the PORTERHOUSE! Aristocrat of steaks...most delectable of steaks. Greatest of all the steaks, for within it are encompassed the Tenderloin, the Sirloin, the meaty bone of the full loin.'"

As in his brilliant "The Telephone Booth Indian," Liebling seems drawn to the proletariat, and especially, the scam. Part of Liebling's appeal-and his power as a satirist-is his ability to cloak subjective opinion in the details and tone of the objective journalist. His field reports, however, are highly selective. Liebling's liberal quoting of slang adds to his authenticity: "The Chicago bars also employ blondes known as dice girls, who...keep score on customers attempting a ten-dice game called Twenty-Six. If you win, the house pays four to one, which gives it a seventeen-percent edge. This is about the same as the take of the parimutual machines in New York State. The bar, however, pays its four to one in trade, on which there is a profit of perhaps three hundred percent. One of my most astute Chicago friends, a native, believes the girls [cheat]. I do not believe this for a minute, but it illustrates the working of the Chicago mind. It is inconceivable to my friend that the house should be content with the monumental advantage it already has." Liebling also toys with the Chicago natives who wrote to protest his "New Yorker" pieces. One critic wrote that he hoped he would be the first to "...grasp the hand of Mr. Liebling as he staggers (I hope) backward from reading such reactionaries as this one of many of which he must be in recipience daily!" Liebling, explaining that he will add some of his own comments to the book's footnotes, writes that he has "added a few of my own reactionaries to those of which I have been in recipience."

Saul Steinberg, also of "New Yorker" fame, augments the text with his stylized line drawings. Liebling writes that the view from Lake Michigan is a "serrated wall of high buildings," but that Chicagoans know that "what they see is like a theatre backdrop with a city painted on it"; Steinberg draws a convincing picture of a façade. The sense of fakery extends to Chicago's long running scams in politics, the judicial system, and law enforcement. Liebling interviews a crooked otherwise well-intentioned alderman, who innocently talks about his responsibilites to procure (i.e., buy) votes and procure jobs for the loyal. He describes the city's fixation on the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre, contrasting this with its shorter attention span to current, but more prosaic homicides. Other objects of Liebling's reportage include Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick, Chicago sports (though this section is surprisingly brief), strip joints' fleecing of conventioneers, racial tensions ("Chicago's greatest present danger"), and Chicago's intellectual climate: "Everyone you meet belongs to a Great Books Discussion Group [but] the samplings of them are exceedingly small." "In Chicago intellectual circles, a man who can't do a psychoanalysis between two Martinis ranks with a fellow who can't change a tire."

"The Second City" is an interesting though largely dated book; many of the then-current colloquialisms and allusions are obscure today. While Liebling doesn't seem secretly fond of Chicago, his other books suggest that he sees urban and proletarian shortcomings as something indelible in the American way, and there's a kind of sympathetic undertone. However, Chicagoans (and others) who read this Liebling book only might rightfully take offense at some of his pot shots, comments that seem to unfairly single out Chicago. Although Liebling is a master wordsmith and his dry humor is keen, the writing doesn't seem quite as nimble, witty, and strong as in "The Sweet Science" (about boxing) or the aforementioned "Telephone Booth Indian." Still, Liebling's observations skills--his eye and ear for the telling quote or description-are intact and entertaining.

A.J. Liebling is America's most incisive and poetic journalist. And Chicago is a city worth reading and writing about. But this is not the place to start reading Liebling or reading about Chicago.

Joe Liebling was not of the "what, where, when, who" style of journalism., He needed something to spark his creative interest, someone to admire, if only a likeable rogue. Liebling found nothing and nobody in Chicago to admire, just plain rogues. And here the rogues were Republican press barons, Colonel McCormack of the Chicago Tribune foremost among them. His professional enemies. Moreover, Liebling was bored by what we now call "Middle America", and he didn't like being bored, either.

Unlike his colleague Joe Mitchell at the New Yorker (most of whose work is collected in "Up in the old hotel"), Liebling didn't subscribe to "nihil humanum a me alienum puto". There were simply people and places out there that he had no use for. New York City con men, Norwegian sailors, Louisiana rabble rousers and Nevada cowboys have their place in Liebling's world, but 3 million people all trying to conform to something they themselves couldn't define did not. That's the way Liebling understood Chicago. The various Bohemias that Chicago had nourished or tolerated (see Kenneth Rexroth's "Autobiographical novel, for some examples) were reduced or gleichgeschaltet by Liebling's visit in the Fifties. He hated the place so much that he never made the connections that would help him see behind the facade that Chicago was so anxious to present to the world.

In spite of all I've just said, this is actually an entertaining and in some ways very enlightening book, especially for those now living in Chicagoland. Those unfamiliar with Liebling (and Chicago) might better try his early paean to his native New York City, "Back where I came from", in which Liebling employed his unforgiving eye and mordancy of phrase much more productively.

This is the second A.J. Liebling book that I've read. The first was Between Meals which was absolutely fantastic. Chicago... is a beautiful piece of reportage about the city in which I live. It is marred (seriously) only by its shrunken size. It is a mere 140 pages long and much of the text is bloated by lengthy footnotes and cartoons. Liebling's description of my town is a riveting historical relic that recreates the personality of Colonel McCormick, the newspapers of the past, a social scene that has no bearing to current reality, and demographics that are totally baffling to present residents. This a fifties, pre-riots take on the second city and, as such, one cannot help but be surprised by some of its rhetoric. Parts of the city that were in massive decline then are worth more than all but a few areas in the United States now. This is notably true of the Old Town neighborhood which once possessed only German and Hungarian restaurants but now is a lively center of commerce with one bedroom condos worth as much or more than mansions in the suburbs. Yet Liebling, like everyone else, should not be faulted for not predicting the future as gentrification is something that few thought possible until the eighties--which was long after he died. Nearly all readers will marvel at the complexity and grandeur of his style, however. This man was king of the metaphor as cliches were unknown to him. His example enriches all writers who come across him. If I were you though, I'd try to find these essays for free online somewhere because the price is too excessive for what you actually receive. It's just too short to justify a cover price of $19.95.

This book has so many flaws that its difficult to know where to begin. The most fundamental flaw is that Liebling, as a New Yorker, prides himself on being open-minded, in contrast to the narrow minded Midwestern rubes he finds in Chicago. The thought process is roughly this: the New Yorker is open-minded, open-mindedness is a virtue, and therefore other places that aren't open-minded are deeply flawed, and therefore far worse than New York. The end result is that the New Yorker prides himself on being open-minded, while looking down on the 99% of the people that don't live in New York, London, or Paris. Liebling's smugness blinds him to the obvious irony -- that one can't simultaneously be both open minded and dismissive of the vast majority of the population.

Liebling's distaste for Chicago leads him to make statements that are manifestly untrue. A discussion of one issue Liebling continually raises will suffice to illustrate this point. Liebling, who like all liberals believes that population density and small living spaces are signs of sophistication and virtue, contends that Chicago isn't a real city/urban center because the vast majority of its buildings are low-rise. In fact, Chicago has far more sky-scrapers than Paris, London, or LA (to name a few), and Paris and London (like Chicago) have vast stretches of low-rise buildings. If, as Liebling seems to suggest, a great city is determined by the number of tall buildings that is has (a poor metric I would argue), than neither London (London and Chicago have comparable population densities) nor Paris (for example) is a city. Of course, Liebling would never argue that London isn't a city; Liebling's double standard suggests a certain intellectual dishonesty. Chicago was also of course a great industrial city. Liebling's implicit contention that only high-rises and office buildings, not bungalows and factories, constitute a city, speaks volumes about his intellectual's disdain for industry and the aspirations of the middle-clas.

Liebling doesn't have a wry, bemused, or even insightful attitude towards Chicago. He heaps nothing but condescension and scorn on Chicago and its citizens for what he perceives to be their physical, intellectual, and cultural shortcomings. If Liebling had written a book that portrayed poor minorities, or foreigners, as negatively as he protrayed Chicagoans, he would be pilloried as a close-minded bigot (or xenophobe). Instead, he is lauded by the self-anointed intellegentsia for mocking a great American city, a double standard that is as predictable as it is distressing.