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Introduction
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
introduction If Chicago was the great American success story, how could the city and its state possibly escape the focus of postcard representation? From a frontier trading post,Chicago had risen seemingly overnight to become one of the world’s largest metropolises. As the twentieth century dawned, Illinois was both the nation’s leading agricultural state and its third-leading industrial state. It was part of the prosperous Middle Western heartland, perhaps the most quintessentially American of regions. Around 1900, when the picture postcard craze hit the United States, Chicago and Illinois beyond the metropolis offered scenes variously spectacular, picturesque, and fundamentally American.Indeed,the picturing of Illinois not only fostered a substantial catalog of postcard art, but made Chicago an important production and distribution center for a booming postcard industry. Chicago was certainly Mid-America’s main postcard attraction. But fully appreciating what Chicago had become required an understanding of its surroundings—its regional context—and not just the city itself. Chicago influenced, and was influenced by, an extensive hinterland of small cities, small towns, and rural countryside. Like all big cities, it was knit into larger fabrics: real worlds of people and things fully contained by landscape, as well as imagined worlds of belief and attitude centered in people’s minds. The 2 ] Introduction images produced in the past enable us to explore those worlds today. Vintage postcards make it possible for us to see what they saw, and, equally important, to understand what it was that they were encouraged to visualize.“How do I hold you, city, in the mind / When my backward memory goes exploring?” So asked Christopher Morley in the opening lines of his poem “Chicago.” the Past in POstcard art Picture postcards readily sustain an objectivist view of history,supplying facts as to what existed when and where.One can look at a card and make a judgment about what did or did not exist in a place as pictured. But we see postcard scenes as both inside and outside the flux of time. We also subscribe to what has come to be termed the constructionist view of history,in which the past continues to reside with those in the present who look back in time and assign meaning to what it is they think they see.Picture postcards are historical documents whose contents their creators negotiated with a former audience,a postcard-buying public. Consequently,they can yield meaningful insights about not just what, but how people in the past imagined places such as Chicago and Downstate Illinois to have been. Why were certain views selected? Why were they pictured as they were? What did it all mean? Equally as important, what might (even what ought) it mean to us today? Viewers of Illinois postcards early in the twentieth century were intended to see mainly the positive. Put before them were images that spoke in superlatives: of technical prowess, of economic prosperity, and, as well, of the cultural accouterments of heightened civility that seemingly derived therefrom. Views of State Street, Chicago’s main retail street, were highly favored, especially those that featured one or another of the city’s large department stores. An advertising postcard circulated by Chicago’s Yellow Cab Company (figure 1) shows the clock at Marshall Field’s at the corner of State and Madison Streets. The intersection is swarming with the company’s taxis. Like all early multicolored postcards, this image started out in black and white, with overlays of colored ink added in the printing process. Here a yellow hue clearly dominates. With such depictions , postcard viewers were invited to see places as delighted visitors would see them: to witness, thereby, the successes of modern life, life now fully removed from the primitiveness, if not the savagery, of what had only a short time before been a wilderness frontier. Although wilder images of nature (where nature appeared to be unspoiled ) and pastoral images of farm life (where nature appeared improved through human stewardship ) could readily be purchased as postcard views, the bulk of Illinois’s postcard art celebrated urban places, especially Chicago. Indeed, the state’s smaller cities, and even its small towns, were often pictured as if they were very much like Chicago: wannabe places seemingly as urbane as the big metropolis itself. Photographers traditionally emphasized the grand and the monumental in picturing urban places. That was what sold, especially to more affluent customers,who largely preferred to ignore, and often denied, the unseemly aspects of life...