Warday

The other passengers kept away from Mr. Sampson. It might have been better for him to travel in ordinary clothing. His Joliet prison guard’s uniform made his fellow passengers uneasy, and he had a lonely trip.

Twenty-five miles from the Loop, we began to pass through Chicago’s suburban and then industrial outlands. The suburbs are mostly depopulated. People have moved into the city centers or rejoined the small-town economy rather than contend with the difficult transportation problems of suburban life.

Just as Chicago’s skyline appeared ahead of us, we passed a tremendous sign, red letters on a white background:

CHICAGO, THE “I WILL” TOWN

HAVE WE GOT A JOB FOR YOU?

I had again that sense of strangeness, as if I had come upon the spirit of the past alive and still moving in the land. It was a little frightening, but it could also fill me with the reckless energy of boosterism gone frantic.

We moved through a sea of factories with names like Ryerson Steel, Kroehler, Burlington Northern, and Nabisco. Some of these establishments were empty, but others were running—Nabisco, as it turned out, on what must have been an all-out schedule. A fifty-car freight was sided there, being loaded. People were swarming along the loading bays where trucks once came and went, hauling boxes on trolleys to the new rail siding. Another brand-new sign was in place here: NABISCO FEEDS AMERICA. I remembered them as a cookie manufacturer, but a passenger whose brother worked there explained that the company was now producing high-protein baked goods of all kinds: breads, biscuits, noodles, and other basic foodstuffs. I could not resist asking about Oreos. The answer:

“Available on a limited basis.”

By the time we reached Union Station, we had been thoroughly indoctrinated. Word had spread through the train that we were writing a book about the present condition of the country. “We’re sick of the ‘devastated Midwest’ cliché,” Tom Walker of Chicago said. “You guys make sure you see the real Chicago. Stay in the Loop. The Loop is Chicago.”

This is true, but not in the way he meant. From our own estimates, it appears that the city has lost perhaps half of its population in the past five years. Considering the destruction of agriculture, the famine, the flu, the lack of transportation, the economic chaos, and the massive depopulation, it is amazing that the city has retained such a strong governmental organization. All that’s left is the Loop. But the Loop is a good town.

Seeing the Loop, one would never know that Chicago had lost a single citizen. It has none of the subdued intensity of San Francisco or Los Angeles. The Loop is exploding with energy. The El works, and where it goes, the city works too. In the Loop there are buses and trolleys, seemingly by the thousands. At times it seemed hard to cross a street without stepping into one.

We are quite frankly at a loss to explain why this city, in the middle of what is arguably the most harmed area in the country, is so very much alive—or why the rural population we met on the train was so uniformly determined to reconstruct. We might have felt better about it if the energy of the place had seemed deeper and stronger. There is a frantic, gasping quality to it, as if the city were a runner who is beginning to know that, no matter how much he wants to succeed, he is going to have to drop back.

People who stay in places this badly hurt do so because they are in love with them. I suspect that the only people left here are the passionate.

A lot of prewar Chicago shops are closed. Jim stated this observation to a woman on Upper Michigan Avenue. She replied, “Sure. And a lot of them are open, too.” It would be outrageous to fault Upper Michigan for being less grand than it was before the war.

Gucci and Hermes are closed, as are Neiman-Marcus and Bonwit Teller. I. Magnin is selling suits for two paper dollars, and other no-nonsense apparel. They had a good selection of imported perfume, but all of it was priced in gold. This was generally true of imports throughout the store. The two exceptions were Canadian furs and British clothing. The British sell soft goods for paper dollars; they get their American gold through direct transfer for government services and such things as the sale of automobiles.

Judging from the aggressive British presence in the store, the program of tax incentives for accepting dollars, which Number 10 Downing Street announced last summer, is beginning to work. Jim and I both hope that Neiman’s in Dallas (which is very much open) will have some British things by the time we get back.

The Gold Coast is densely populated, but it does not glitter as it once did. Many of the high-rises have a noticeable proportion of boarded windows. Glass is in short supply locally, as it is almost everywhere.