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Preface and Acknowledgments
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
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Preface and acknowledgments Some one hundred years ago, the lowly postcard prompted a true enthusiasm for popular visual art. Scenic postcards were mailed and collected annually quite literally by the hundreds of millions, thus coming to play a vital role in how Americans conceptualized their nation’s geography . Through postcard art, Americans learned what was important both in big cities such as Chicago and in small-town and rural locales beyond .Postcards pictured the important aspects of local landscapes and places, especially buildings, streets, and parks. They taught how such things were best visualized. So also did they help to anchor Americans in history. As often as not, what got pictured spoke to a sense of progress over time whereby life in the United States had only gotten better, at least in regard to things material. For many Americans,the consumption of postcard art became a form of self-congratulation. Postcards said:“I belong here.”“This is my place.”“This is my kind of place.” Well before 1900, when postcards’ popularity soared, Chicagoans had already come to think of their city, and by extension themselves, as something largely apart from the remainder of the state of Illinois—almost a state in its own right. And for good reason: Chicago had become the economic capital of a vast Middle Western region that stretched from the High Plains and the Rocky x ] Preface Mountains in the west to the Appalachians in the east, and from the Canadian border southward to the Ohio River and the Ozark Uplands. A word about nomenclature is in order at the outset. Today, Illinoisans colloquially refer to Chicago as including Cook County, and to locales beyond as “Downstate,” including the remainder of northern Illinois. Excepted, of course, are the so-called collar counties, which contain Chicago’s outer suburbs and which, accordingly, are also very much part of the Chicago metropolis. For occasional convenience, “Downstate” and “downstaters ” are used throughout this book, but for certainty that two domains exist in Illinois and in recognition of Chicago’s elite cultural and economic supremacy beyond the state boundaries, the term “beyond the metropolis” is applied often throughout the text. For its part, Downstate Illinois was quintessentially Middle Western, comprising a mix of small cities (albeit molded in Chicago’s image), small towns, farms, and wilder landscapes and spaces. The dichotomy between Chicago and Illinois beyond the metropolis was, of course, a false one. Chicago’s wealth depended upon its central location within an emergent regional transportation infrastructure: lake and river shipping, shipping by canal (the Illinois and Michigan Canal most importantly), the moving of people and freight by railroad, then by automobile and motor truck, and finally by air. Thus it was that the resources of a broad hinterland moved to Chicago’s factories and workshops, including corn, wheat, cattle, hogs,lumber,cotton,coal,and petroleum.Flowing back the other way were industrial products,such as iron and steel, finished lumber and millwork, and farm implements, as well as a growing array of consumer goods from wholesalers andretailers, including mail-order houses.Chicago was also the Middle West’s premier financial center. But without its supportive hinterland, with its rich soils and abundance of industrial raw materials and its consuming population,there could not have been a Chicago.Chicago and Downstate Illinois existed in necessary symbiosis. In this book, we examine that symbiosis by looking at how Chicagoans and downstaters saw their geography visually depicted through postcard art a century ago. In the early twentieth century, Chicago was America’s boom metropolis, the pride not just of its citizens but of Illinoisans in general, and of midwesterners and, for that matter, most Americans as well. What the United States was thought to be, both at its very best and at its very worst, seems to have been symbolized there. No assessment of the American experience was complete without somehow “picturing” life as lived in Chicago , but, as we would emphasize, neither was it complete without considering life as lived in the city’s Middle Western hinterland. From beyond the metropolis had come Abraham Lincoln, the martyred savior of the nation. Without Lincoln, the American political order, so essential to the nation’s economic progress, might not have survived the Civil War. The whole state of Illinois begged to be pictured, especially in postcard art. No other American city,save perhaps New York City,attracted more attention from postcard publishers than Chicago.Indeed,given its central location and its status...