Show f Chicago's Other t Side I 4 DURING JURING few years Chicago h s been known as a sort of bad boy among American citieS citieS' It is the horrible example to which we point when we want to set forth a 3 moral Its underworld is the final argument in a dozen different attacks attack's on curf cur cur- current f r rent nt social trends Now a cultured and and scholarly Englishman St. St John Ervine a dramatist and critic of l reputation draws a picture of Chic Chicago go and shows s the city in a a different light Listen to his tribute 4 Chicago is a a city of shining t towers vers a city which one day I 1 believe will vill excite the envy of all civilized men It is in this place and not in neurotic New York that the genius ot of America is found Here Her is energy here her i is' is bewildered but indubitable strength here too is emerging beauty That isn't the sort of thing yere used to hear about Chicago Not a w word rd about gangsters gang gang- beer runners Big Bill Thompson pineapples pine pine- apples or stockyards in this Indeed Mr II Ervine continues I There is i a social consciousness spreading throughput throughout the city and its citizens citizen are resolved re- re i solved to to make na e it the greatest town in the I believe they will do it I believe they wi eventually make Chicago the most h city in th the world There is a vitality vitality vital vital- ity i the place that is s amazing A c century ago lonely Fort Dearborn an outpost of the emerging American empire had the flat prairies on the shore of Lake Michigan pretty much to itself A. A few soldiers soldiers sol sol- diers a a few fur traders and trappers a few of the wild souls that always find their way extreme frontier that frontier that WaS Chicago Then the interior of America began to ome to life Amazingly turbulently the fiver valleys and the prairies filled up flie Io wagon trains were forever heading west a and struggling towns were coming into being that until recently had been roamed r painted savages Forests Fore were cut d down wn steamboats appeared on the rivers white sails dotted the the Great Great Lakes the rich prairies were cu cut up into farms railroad tracks tacks begaii to reach hr black ck tentacles through the valleys The rhe tide of humanity Shad had overflowed the stern astern arid and was populating the continent Chicago became the a apex of this great change The wealth of the new land poured into o the city active great noisy dirty tu tumultuous It Ii d the tIle virtues and the vices of tile the new new civilization Like the theland theland land behind it it was strong and blind greedy and reckless violent and lusty t it was the perfect mirror of American life Thus Chicago has our national failings more strikingly than any other city But as Mr Ervine points points' out tile the city also exhibits our national virtues New York is detached following a culture of its own a aShOW ashow show place and a bankers banker's office strangled in its own oi size Chicago is a magnified cross cross- section of America If Chicago has gangsters and grafting politicians it means that all tile the rest of uS have these things fIlings too but boit if Chicago Chicago Chi Chi- cago is also showing strength vitality and a growing appreciation of beauty and civic con con- science that t too means that those qualities con I are coming tp flower in the rest of the nation |