March 1, 1914: Carl Sandburg Publishes "Chicago"
March 1, 1914: Poetry: A Magazine of Verse publishes "Chicago," a poem about the city of the same name, by Carl Sandburg, the magazine's founder.
Born in 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois, about 200 miles southwest of Chicago, Sandburg moved to Chicago in 1912, and founded the magazine. The city already had a reputation for crime and corruption, and Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, about the meatpacking industry, didn't help. Sandburg wants to elevate the city's image, as if to say, "Yes, we've got our problems. So does every other city. And, like every other city, we've got our virtues, too."
Chicago, photo taken from an airplane, March 24, 1914,
right after the poem's publication
The text, in its entirety:
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
In later years, Sandburg would call the poem "a chant of defiance by Chicago... its defiance of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. The poem sort of says, 'Maybe we ain't got culture, but we're eatin' regular.'"
The poem would be included in the volume Chicago Poems in 1916, to be followed by similar verse, in Cornhuskers in 1918, Smoke and Steel in 1920, Slabs of the Sunburnt West in 1922, and, much later, Harvest Poems in 1960. He continued the Illinois theme, if not specifically the Chicago theme, with biographies of both Abraham and Mary Lincoln.
When he died in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."
Although his name was spelled "Sandberg" at the time he was born, he appears not to have been related to a later Chicago legend, Cubs 2nd baseman Ryne Sandberg.
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March 1, 1914 was a Sunday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. While professional hockey did, neither the National Hockey Association (in Eastern Canada) nor the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (in Western Canada) played games on Sundays. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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