Product Code Database
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book:I: II. AMERICA IN THE MAKING THERE is no peace in Chicago. In Chicago the past and the future give birth to an unruly being that angrily shakes the fetters of one tradition as it creates another which it throws away as it goes, like a snake which wearies of its skin and sloughs it off for a new one. It is a city of terror and light, untamed and unwearied. It has harnessed a white-hot energy to beginnings; upon its roofs it erects cities; it has torn the vitals of its streets for railway cuttings, set up porticoes as promises of colonnades. Grim is the heart within, 2tnd hot as molten metal. The city writhes in its narrow communications, as the head of Medusa among its tangled hair. Its suburbs lie like disjointed members, deprived of easy transit, to the body: the suburban stores forbid it; they fear for their custom, and the politicians tumble and crawl in, graft, threat, and proclamation, over the great body that heaves, angry and chafed, yet negligent of what is not its daily labor, like a dray horse with bent head that shakes the tenaciousflies. Here is room fo:' lust and its repression, none for listlessness; hare is everlasting struggle, no mild aspiration to f eace. There is no peace in Chicago. . In my first chapter I recorded impressions of the Land of the Bean and the Cod, but now, with the Middle West before me, dazing me by the clash of its trolley cars, blinding me with the fire and cloud of its smokestacks, I hesitate. I hesitate partly because the Middle West is big, because it is real, and because, erected upon the pedestal of its worth, America attendant upon its triumph, it may not care to be analyzed at all. For it is a fable that the truly great tolerate criticism; nearly all detest it. Already I have earned trouble, hardly by criticizing
|
