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’ cliche,” 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.
Lake Point Towers has had especially severe problems in this regard, and is no longer the uniform bronze color it once was. In addition to boardings, there are many areas of differently tinted glass, some of it even clear.
The
DUST STORM STRIKES MIDWEST. WINDS TO 110 MPH. RADLEVEL MEASURES LOWER THAN EXPECTED.
TRACTION SCANDAL. NORTHSIDE TRACTION BOND FRAUD THREATENS TO STOP THE TROLLEYS.
BODY FOUND IN TRUNK OF CAR. FIRST WARD COUNTS ITS SIXTH FOR THE YEAR.
BOARD OF TRADE RIOT. DUST CAUSES BIDDING FRENZIES IN WHEAT, CORN. “NO LIMIT” PRICES TRIPLE IN MINUTES.
MAYOR INAUGURATES FAR-REACHING ART RECLAMATION PROJECT AT ART INSTITUTE CEREMONIES.
The last story went on to explain that the Chicago Art Institute had joined with museums in Boston, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh to reclaim and restore paintings and other works of art abandoned in New York.
This project has been undertaken in response to the removal by many European museums of works by their national artists from New York galleries. A team from the Louvre even dismantled the Chagall murals from the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center and took them to Paris.
At the Art Institute, we stood looking at a painting from New York. It was Van Gogh’s
While at the Art Institute, we met a member of its board of directors, Chandler Gayle. He informed us that the reclamation project was essential not only to forestall further losses to Europe, but also to protect the paintings themselves, which were deteriorating rapidly.
Dr. Gayle, it turns out, is director of the Nonspecific Sclerosing Disease Research Facility at the University of Chicago. We eagerly made an appointment to interview him about NSD later in the day.
By the time we were finished at the Art Institute, it was nearly eleven-thirty. Jim and I agreed that a visit to the Board of Trade was essential, especially in view of the headline in the
We took a bus across Adams to La Salle and walked down to the weathered Art Deco structure.
Things have changed since the war. We asked a guard about this. “Better than ever,” he snapped.
The first sign of change is the number of messengers running in and out of the building. This area is not nearly as heavily rewired as is, say, California, and the most reliable method of conveying information from rural communities about the state of farm output is by hand. These messengers would pull up in orange Americars and Consensuses with CBT markings on the doors and rush inside, bearing their field information in briefcases similar to the one carried by the farmer on the train.
The whole length of La Salle was taken up with their cars, so much so that some of them had to scramble over the roofs to get to the building. A few had walkie-talkies, but most were without such sophisticated equipment. Inside the exchange were more runners, from the big trading houses and from individual traders on the floor. The Agriculture Department is also a major trader, using such warehoused grains as it has to attempt to stabilize prices.
As we entered the gallery and looked out over the Wheat Pit, a shout rang out: “Aggie’s out! The bull’s buried Aggie!” A split second of stillness, and then there was a renewed frenzy of trading, and the clerks began racing back and forth, changing their prices on the big chalkboards that have replaced the electronic quotation devices of prewar days. November wheat went from thirty cents to thirty-two to thirty-three-and-a-half in minutes.
I noticed that some of the traders wore green hats with what looked to be a bite taken out of the rim. Later I found out that this had to do with the war. Traders so decorated had been present on the day after Warday. (The Board had already shut for the day when the nuclear exchange took place.) On that day, with no electric power and the Board’s electronic devices out of commission, trading was active but extremely difficult. About noon, the Bond Pit closed for lack of information. Then a rumor swept the pits that there had been a nuclear exchange the afternoon before. Communications were so bad that Washington had been destroyed and New York burning for eighteen hours before Chicago learned about it.
The rumor precipitated a massive run-up in prices until one of the Board managers sounded the gong and entered the pit. The exchange was closed. At that moment the pit’s oldest trader, Willie “Eat My Hat” Dobbs, collapsed and died of a stroke.
The hats are in memory of him.
We stood in the gallery, watching the wild action. By twelve-thirty the price of wheat had gone to fifty-six- and-a-quarter cents.
As we left, it reached sixty cents. The dust storm had flattened hundreds of thousands of acres of wheat just
