'Unholy Chicago singularity' and 'Metropolis of the West': Contextualizing a joke about Chicago as a nexus of modernity (through Progressive Era print promotions)
(Originally posted elsewhere on 14 August 2025.)
Was thinking on this meme-y joke (image attached above) circulating among friends.
Maybe Chicago was kinda perceived--or at least marketed--that way from 1875-ish to 1925-ish (speaking very vaguely). That's what the 1893 Columbian Exposition might've claimed. The city was the epicenter hub of US railroads, telegraph lines, and other logistics networks.
Chicago as a funnel collecting Corn Belt products of the Midwest. Chicago as the logistical hub of "rural"/"remote" Great Plains agriculture and (white) homesteading and settlement of the Rockies, facilitating industrialized agriculture across the continent. Chicago as the site of meat-packing houses to process cattle shipped from Texas, facilitating ranching industries across the continent. Chicago as a Great Lakes waterway shipping hub that facilitated timber harvesting and Iron Ranges mining. Chicago as the center of railyard labor. Chicago as center of "management sciences," policing institutions, and filing-cabinet records-keeping. Chicago as ideological center of Progressive Era thinking about urban planning, social "reform," municipal policy, medical practices.
Chicago as "the third coast" and the gateway to the "Great West." the glistening modernist metropolis. the host of the quintessential archetypal world's fair. site of Gilded Age opulence and early twentieth century wealth and institutional power. waterway docks, railyards, warehouses, civic buildings. the node through which routes of physical material and immaterial ideas circulated.
at a time when the US simultaneously"conquered" the "Western frontier" of its "own" continent (Wounded Knee, 1890) and expanded its dominion globally (Panama, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, Guam, Philippines by the end of that same decade), with Chicago implicated in both.
Compare the meme to this "Chicago singularity" from 1921:
"Chicago: The Greatest Railway Center in the World" (1921)
"See what we have given the World. HOLD TO THE LIGHT." (Chicago's Columbian Exposition trade card, 1893)
"Chicago of Today: The Metropolis of the West. The nation's choice for the World's Columbian Exposition." (Cover of Chicago of Today, 1891)
"A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THE TRANSCONTINENTAL ROUTE" showing Chicago's railways extending tendrils across the continent to San Francisco, with the Pacific and the setting sun on the horizon (California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence, 1882)
