State by State

by Matt Weiland

  A person can still go into the country and find a few ghosts, some picto-graphs, a stone hunting blind, a stick or two from a forgotten sheep trap.

  “You people of low lands,” wrote Private Hoffner in 1878, “have no idea how loud thunder can roar or how bright flashing the lightning is on the mountain tops.”

  A person can still walk into the mountains and stare up at the welter of stars.

  ILLINOIS

  CAPITAL Springfield

  ENTERED UNION 1818 (21st)

  ORIGIN OF NAME Algonquin for “tribe of superior men”

  NICKNAME PrairieState

  MOTTO “State sovereignty, national union”

  RESIDENTS Illinoisian

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 19

  STATE BIRD cardinal

  STATE FLOWER violet

  STATE TREE whiteoak

  STATE SONG “Illinois”

  LAND AREA 55,584 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Logan Co., 28 mi. NE of Springfield

  POPULATION 12,763,371

  WHITE 73.5%

  BLACK 15.1%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 0.2%

  ASIAN 3.4%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 12.3%

  UNDER 18 26.1%

  65 AND OVER 12.1%

  MEDIAN AGE 34.7

  ILLINOIS

  Dave Eggers

  The slogan on all license plates in Illinois, for as long as anyone can remember, has been Land of Lincoln. Everyone in Illinois and all sensible people elsewhere believe it to be the best license-plate slogan of all the states in our union. The closest runner-up would be New Hampshire’s fiery Live Free or Die, but that slogan scares children. A license-plate slogan shouldn’t scare children and shouldn’t include the words “or die.” A license-plate slogan shouldn’t encourage death in the face of curtailed personal liberties. A license-plate slogan should, without threats or hysterics, evoke the moral essence and scenic grandeur of a state, and if possible it should be alliterative and should mention everyone’s favorite president. The slogan on the 9.6 million registered vehicles in the state of Illinois does all those things, and sets the tone for all conduct, personal and public, in the state, and guides and inspires all of our plans and pursuits. It is the best of all license-plate slogans. Is Illinois, therefore, the best of all states? This has been often argued and often proved. Through the course of this essay, many examples of the first-ness of Illinois will be offered into evidence—the state is first in everything from snacks to bombs—but perhaps no endorsement is more important than Lincoln’s own: He himself believed Illinois best.

  He was born in the Kentucky wilderness, raised in a log cabin with a dirt floor, and by the time he was a teenager, he was ready for better things. His father, a pioneer broken by the early death of his wife (whom Abraham called his angel mother), brought his new wife and family to Indiana for a spell and then to Illinois, where his gangly son would grow into a man, would reinvent himself and soon the nation.

  They settled close to the center of Illinois, in Macon County, and there the future president’s father set up a homestead near the north bank of the Sangamon River. Thomas Lincoln was accustomed to putting his strapping son to work, and so set him on building a fence around the fifteen acres. Abe split dozens of logs to form the barrier, and though this task was onerous, it was not without benefits: When he ran for president decades later, his party, the Republicans, needing a nickname as catchy as “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” and “Old Hickory,” dubbed him “The Rail Splitter.” Someone even painted a Harlequin-style portrait of Lincoln, his foot on a rail, hammer high overhead, and shirt agape. It was to be the one and only time sex appeal was used to sell the concept of Abraham Lincoln.

  When he wasn’t working on the farm, he was reading—constantly reading books and newspapers, educating himself about politics, law, and the world, and after just a few months in Illinois, he was inspired to give his first political speech. The site was Renshaw’s store in Decatur, then a village of less than a dozen cabins, and the subject was the future of Illinois. As the legend goes, there were a few local candidates in the shop, holding a debate, and Lincoln’s teenaged buddies asked Abe to demand some beverages for the audience—a standard thing at the time, apparently. Abe stepped forward, and instead of demanding lemonade for all or else, he gave a moving soliloquy about the potential of the Sangamon River to bring wealth to the region. If they could encourage trade to swing into the state via the Mississippi, into which the Sangamon flowed, then prosperity would ensue. All who saw him speak were impressed, and his name was linked even then with the residents’ ideas of a better future for their pioneer land. Shortly after that Lincoln left home for good, pursuing a half-dozen careers—carpenter, store clerk, post master, surveyor, soldier—before finally settling on the law. But his first love was the river, and a few months after his speech at Renshaw’s, he set about becoming a steamboat man. He took a job on a flatboat headed down the Mississippi to New Orleans. He was eighteen and his life as an independent and self-made man had begun.

  While on the subject of water and gumption and Illlinois being first among states, it has to be pointed out that Chicago opened the nation’s first aquarium, in 1893; that puts us at Number One in fish and oceanography and all related pursuits. Just a few years before that, Illinoisians invented the skyscraper. We were first, erecting the Home Insurance Building in 1885, the first of the so-called Chicago School’s contributions to urban architecture. That innovative structure, the first steel-framed building, set the high standard for architectural courage and discerning taste that has been key in Chicago’s having the reputation, forever after, for the best high-rise architecture in the nation. Home to Louis Sullivan, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the John Hancock, the gorgeous Gothic at 35 Wacker, and now Millennium Park’s Gehry and Kapoor—Chicago would be No. 1 even without the Sears Tower. At 1,730 feet the Sears was the tallest in the world when it was built and remains today the tallest building in the United States. If one discounts, and one should, the inelegant towers of Dubai and Taipei that are now by some voodoo measurement “taller” than the Sears, ours remains the highest structure on the planet.

  Lincoln also was tall. Six-foot-four or so, he was almost freakish in an age where the average height was well under six feet. He made an immediate impression in New Salem, a tiny town along the Sangamon just west of Decatur. Founded just two years before his arrival in 1831, Lincoln settled in the town almost by accident. A flatboat he was manning became stuck in the river astride the town, and he and the boat’s crew had to unload it before it sank. The whole town watched as he worked with two men to save the provisions aboard. Seeing his strength and ingenuity, he was offered a job on the spot, at Offut’s general store, and that’s where he stayed, more or less, for the next six years. It was in cozy New Salem where he was encouraged, where he continued to educate himself, and where the locals bolstered his confidence such that he ran for office just a year after arriving in the town. He was twenty-three. He described himself as “an uneducated, penniless boy,” and his contemporaries were quick to point out that he “had nothing, only plenty of friends.” He didn’t win that first time out, but he did collect 277 of the 300 votes cast in his own precinct, and he would be sent up the ballot at the next available opportunity.

  He was elected in 1834, and went to Vandalia, then the state capital, in a new suit he bought with sixty borrowed dollars. (It was the first proper suit he ever owned, and even then it looked funny. For years, even at his famed speech at New York’s Cooper Union, he would catch grief for his poor sartorial sense. It could be that nothing short of a miracle would look right on such a strangely shaped man.) When the legislature was not in session, Lincoln struggled to make ends meet; the salary for a state senator was meager. But as always, his friends helped him find a way They found him a job as a surveyor, and this gave him the opportunity to see ever-more of the beautiful state he represented. In his spare time, he educated himself in the law. Without any formal training—all
this time he’d had only one year of proper education—he passed the bar. Eventually he traveled downriver, riding a horse lent by a friend, to live in Springfield, now the state’s capital, and to practice law. Very soon his firm was considered one of the best in the state (let’s assume it was the best), and if Lincoln was Number One in Illinois, it would follow that Lincoln was therefore the Number One self-educated attorney in the country.

  That do-it-yourself spirit infuses The Adventures of Augie March, Illinoisian Saul Bellow’s breathless, rollicking novel about a young man emerging from the slums of Chicago to make his way upward and outward in the world. It begins: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way …” This beginning could describe any number of innovators, like Lincoln, who struck forth from Illinois, from Chicago. The state’s contributions to the arts are vast, from jazz (Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Benny Goodman all were born there), the blues (Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells all made a home there) to theater (Steppenwolf) to comedy (Second City), there is something unique about the place: It’s big enough to challenge and buttress the bold, but it’s small enough to nurture with skepticism—but not cynicism—the fragile nature of the avant-garde.

  It follows, then, that Chicago would be where Oprah Winfrey would get her start. Born in rural Mississippi to a young unmarried mother, Winfrey eventually maneuvered—free-style, if you will—into a job co-anchoring the evening news at nineteen years old. That was in Tennessee, but she was noticed in Chicago, and in 1983 was brought north and given a job hosting the low-rated morning show AM Chicago. Through a combination of her great empathy and quick wit, her program was soon immensely popular, was renamed the Oprah Winfrey Show, and within a few years was being broadcast nationally. Taking advice from Roger Ebert, another product of Illinois and in our lifetime the Number One plainspoken explainer and champion of film, Winfrey signed a syndication deal that gave her control over her show and allowed her to reap the benefits of her work. Because she started in Chicago and, like Lincoln, chose to remain in the state that embraced her, Winfrey has for over two decades brought in approximately all of Illinois’s tax revenue.

  And because Winfrey has led the most readers to the greatest number of books in contemporary times, Illinois is the most important state in terms of reading, sales of books, and the resurgence of book clubs and quantity of people who have recently read Anna Karenina and Middlesex (by now-Chicagoan Jeffrey Eugenides). Not surprisingly, Chicago is home to the largest public library system in the world, with more than two million volumes—all of them better than the books held in other cities’ libraries. This overwhelming evidence of a civic commitment to literacy led directly to Illinois ranking first in the number of Nobel Prize—winning American authors. We have two: Bellow (Chicago), and Ernest Hemingway (Oak Park).

  The list of Number Ones is endless and will be touched on only. Illinois is Number One in snack foods, as the place where Cracker Jack was introduced (at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893); where the most cookies were ever produced in one year (Oreos, Nabisco, Chicago, 1996); and where “I Wish I Were an Oscar Mayer Wiener” was written, in 1963, by Richard Trentlage from Fox River Grove, who was responding to an open contest for a new hot dog jingle. It was Illinois that brought the world McDonald’s and Dairy Queen, and Chicago that produced the confectioner Walt Disney. We have for decades produced the most pumpkins, considered by tastemakers the Number One fruit in the world, and have produced the two best sports teams of the modern era, the 1985 Bears, and the 1995 Bulls. It goes without saying that Illinois is Number One in places where Michael Jordan played, and where Scottie Pippen often played better. It is Number One in places Walter Payton goosestepped and talked in his strange falsetto, and Number One in all things Ditka, Singletary, Fencik, Perry, and Dent. It is Number One in number of mayors named Daley. Number One in corn production (or probably close to number one), and ethanol production (almost definitely). Number One, definitively, in birthplace of essential bands of the 1970s: REO Speedwagon (of Champaign-Urbana); Styx (of Chicago); Cheap Trick (Rockford). Number One in settings for John Hughes movies (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Home Alone, Home Alone II, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, among others). We have the Number One most beautiful and charming baseball park in the country, Wrigley Field, and we also have its opposite, the Number One most timidly designed and charmless ballpark, Cellular Park, which looks far worse than it sounds. That park’s team, the White Sox, has fans that hail from any one of suburbs made possible through permutations of the following seven words: River, Lake, Ridge, Stream, Woods, Forest, and Park (452).

  Illinois—the most in the world—ranks first in the frequency with which its name is mispronounced. No one seems to make the mistake of pronouncing the s in Arkansas, but far too many do so with our s—including Ron Zook, coach of the University of Illinois football team, who did so at the rally welcoming his arrival to the school in 2004. There was great suspicion about him for some time, until he brought the team to the 2007 Rose Bowl, which would have been fine had he not forgotten to continue coaching after the game had begun. But about the mispronunciation: This tendency led some to suggest legislation that would make pronouncing the s a crime. The proposed law would impose the following penalties on mispronouncers:

  First offense: $50,000 fine

  Second offense: Vocal cord scraping

  Third offense: Vocal cord adjustment

  Fourth offense: Execution

  That may seem extreme, but Illinois, a low-lying and uncomplicated land, has long been home to towering and passionate iconclasts. Take the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy. A Presbyterian minister, he settled in Alton, in the southwestern portion of the state, and there he began to publish the Alton Observer, a Puritan newspaper full of soaring rhetoric exalting his God and denouncing all vice and weakness. Eventually he turned his attention to slavery, and found his life’s purpose in doing all he could in print to bring the abomination to an end. And though he found many people who agreed with him, many southern Illinoisians, being geographically so close to slave states and being themselves connected by blood and tradition to the South, were not so keen to have a rabble-rouser living and agitating in their midst. They asked him to stop publishing anti-slavery screeds. He continued to do so. Then they asked again, and then they threatened. Nothing dissuaded him, so mobs destroyed his press. He bought another press and resumed. They destroyed this press, too. He bought another one, and continued with his work until a mob beset him on November 7, 1837, and he was killed while defending his press and his family, rifle in hand. His death was a martyr’s end, and accordingly, disciples continued the work he’d begun. In his honor Benjamin Lundy published the Genius of Universal Emancipation—easily the best-named of all abolitionist (or any other) papers—and that led to the less-grandly-named Genius of Liberty, which gave way to the Western Citizen, no doubt an important periodical but with a name that puts in mind land-usage laws in Idaho.

  Alton was one of a number of towns, most of them south of the suburbring encircling Chicago, which have long been immortalized as settings of the most famous set of debates in American history, those between Lincoln and his pint-sized adversary, Stephen Douglas. Charleston, Quincy, Galesburg, Freeport, Ottawa, Alton—we know their names chiefly because a great fight was fought in these town squares and parks, that, in Lincoln’s own words, represented “the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.” The two debated slavery and the freedom of men throughout 1858, and it was in part Lincoln’s oratory that vaulted him into the presidency two years later.

  When the struggle over slavery gave way to the Civil War, it was not just Lincoln who directed, via I
llinois, the course of history. Ulysses Grant, yet another man self-made of our state, emerged from Galena, on our western edge, where he had been hired as a leather-worker. A heavy drinker whose family had largely given up on him, Grant seemed destined to a life of binges and brokenheartedness. But by the time the war came around, he was sober enough to think his experience as a soldier might prove useful to the war effort. The Union army was disorganized, for sure, and badly needed a man like him, well trained and stalwart. He rose quickly, from a command in Cairo (pronounced, for no good reason, Kay-ro) to command of the northern armies, to victory for them and the nation.

  Not to underline the obvious, but if we assume that the Civil War was the most important war in our country’s history, and Illinois was the most important state involved in that conflict, then it follows that Illinois is the most important to the history of the country, most essential to the Union being held together against all odds and most indispensible to the country’s resurrection and continued existence. Had our forebears not elected Lincoln, had they not nurtured him and provided for him a sturdy foundation from which to launch his presidential hopes, he would not have been elected to that office, and instead the country would have been stuck with some lesser light, who would have preferred the dissolution of the Union and god knows what other wrongheaded stew of appeasement and compromise. Suffice it to say that the country would have had to live, for years or decades more, under the wretched shadow of the atrocity that was slavery. Illinois gave America Abraham Lincoln, a man who was at once humble, morally unshakeable, courageous, and preposterously eloquent.