This solidified its importance as the commercial, industrial and cultural hub of the Midwest. The World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago gave the city even more reason to celebrate its new prestige with an elaborate "White City" and exhibits up and down the Midway right next to the brand-new University of Chicago. Remnants of this extravaganza still remain — including the Midway itself and the Museum of Science and Industry originally built as the Palace of Fine Arts.
However, since the midth century, the use of the term Second City has been affectionately self-deprecating at best and snidely dismissive at worst. These disparaging connotations seem to have come directly from one book, published in "Chicago: The Second City," written by A. Liebling, a disgruntled and displaced New Yorker whose few months' sojourn in Chicago provided him enough ammunition for a malicious attack on the City of Big Shoulders.
For the cosmopolitan Mr. Liebling, Chicago consisted of an "exiguous skyscraper core and the vast, anonymous pulp of the city, plopped down by the lakeside like a piece of waterlogged fruit. To Liebling, the city was a conglomeration of dullards and conventioneers whose idea of a night on the town was a meal of "pig's ribs" followed by a trip to the nearest strip joint.
Chicagoans had delusions of their city's grandeur, according to him, and he remained unmoved by any and all attempts to convince him that the city might have something of value to offer the world. Even worse, according to Liebling, was the domination of the town by Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, as much of an elitist as Liebling but his polar opposite in terms of politics — an isolationist America-firster who despised FDR's New Deal, liberal Democrats, liberal Republicans, the United Nations, labor unions and, naturally, Easterners.
Liebling quotes McCormick as claiming in a speech that "if New York were destroyed, with it would be destroyed all the subversive elements of our country. Liebling was also left unimpressed by Chicago's corruption and ties to the mob, a leftover from Prohibition days.
Liebling did score some points, but he passed judgment on Chicago a bit too soon. Chicago, at the time he lived and wrote there, was admittedly undergoing a period of economic stagnation that undoubtedly made its boosterism seem all the more obtuse. Chicago was still the home of a great printing industry, but other than railroad timetables and telephone directories, Liebling found little publishing of significance.
The writers and journalists had fled—Ben Hecht, he pointed out, had been residing in Nyack for some time—and columnists like Milton Mayer, Sydney Harris, and Irv Kupcinet had taken their place.
Nor did the other arts offer Liebling any compensatory sustenance. Liebling was an avid patron of the theater and the concert hall, and in these areas found Chicago remarkably deficient. This lack, incidentally, of what he considered to be fine cuisine was a particular hardship for Liebling, who was to become a gourmet of substantial reputation and girth. The sporting scene was equally dispiriting. In this instance Liebling was clearly mistaken, having confused a healthy inbred skepticism with indifference.
The single spectacle that appealed to him was the International Livestock and Horse Show, which he preferred to the stiffer New York version.
These were not suitable subjects for light treatment, although Liebling did find some amusement in the antics of the City Council and its inability to deal with such crises. From this depiction of municipal paralysis he turned to the political impotence and intellectual pretensions of the lakefront liberals.
But people were no longer eliminated in such numbers and in so many spectacular ways, and Liebling audaciously suggested that the Syndicate had become largely a fiction, a shadowy front for a vicious and corrupt government.
Born on the Upper East Side, Liebling was a resident of Manhattan for much of his life, and most of his earlier works—particularly his New Yorker pieces—were drawn from his observation of its streets and citizens. With the exception of Paris. As a boy Liebling traveled to France several times with his family, and he lived on the Left Bank as a student for a year. In late he replaced Janet Flanner as the New Yorker Paris correspondent, fleeing from the Germans only hours before they occupied the capital.
He was one of the first journalists to return to the liberated city, and he visited Paris and Europe frequently thereafter. Yet despite his cosmopolitan tastes and a formidable intellectual arsenal he was a friend of Camus and well acquainted with Sartre and his work , Liebling was not a snob. If anything, he was susceptible to reverse snobbism, more at ease with the rank and file than the celebrated or powerful, fascinated by the con man and hustler, attracted to the lower depths and the declasse.
His New Yorker profiles were often of figures like Father Divine a flamboyant black evangelist ; Samuel Burger a cockroach-race promoter , and other assorted pitchmen, hangers-on, and minor-league impresarios. The transition to the Loop and its tall buildings was abrupt, like entering a walled city. I found it beguilingly medieval. Not that he was much taken with the Loop which, as a downtown, was too small and too congested for his taste — "the heart of the city, as small in proportion of the city's gross body as a circus fat lady's.
Even so, Liebling was a very good reporter, and he felt compelled to report that "one of my most astute Chicago friends," like many other Chicagoans, had a deep affection for the Loop:. He loves that grim rectangle, bound in its iron crown of elevated-railroad tracks, and says that during the war, when he was overseas and he thought of Chicago, it was always of the Loop in the rain, with the sound of the low-pitched, bisyllabic police whistles, like sea birds' cries.
Generations of Chicago boosters have had nothing but bad things to say about Liebling and his book. One local publisher called him "that creep," while a Tribune columnist dismissed the book as "filled with startling inaccuracies which comforted New Yorkers in their oneness. Extended by popular demand! Find joy in their takes on everything from trips on the CTA Brown Line to guilt trips from your immigrant parents. Laugh together about obsessions, our favorite telenovela, what we're bingeing on Netflix, The Vaccine, code-switching, and even Black Republicans.
Yes, they do exist. Don't miss this party and quit sleepin' on love from the Bob Curry Fellows! Baby Wants Candy, one of the most celebrated and popular comedy ensembles in the world, is thrilled to be landing for a limited engagement at Judy's Beat Lounge Theater. BWC has performed over improvised musicals all over the globe and, and has shows in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York as well as national and international touring companies.
Come see where it all began!
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