by Sarah Vowell
It is my project to tell the whole history of America from this corner, and there’s no telling of that history without the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president here in Chicago at the Republican National Convention in 1860, on the very site, by the way, of the old Sauganash Hotel where the Indians and drunken ladies used to dance.
And the Chicago Tribune Tower, standing on North Michigan Avenue a stone’s throw from the bridge, not only campaigned for Lincoln, its editors talked him into running for president in the first place. Lincoln was considering going for vice president. Maybe.
As a subscriber who reads the Trib every morning, it is difficult for me to get all misty-eyed with idealism over the paper’s current state. Let’s just say I identified with the guy I saw not long ago on Michigan Avenue, at the height of the Age of Lewinsky, grab a Tribune vending machine and wrest it from its moorings in the sidewalk, slamming it to the ground. But the Tribune’s heroic past is another story. Every time I’m about to cancel my subscription just to save myself from recycling, I remember that Abe Lincoln subscribed, and throw yet another fat Sunday edition on top of the little Tribune tower in my apartment.
The Trib’s great editor Joseph Medill helped found the Republican Party to advance the antislavery cause. Medill was such a passionate abolitionist that he wrote in a Tribune editorial in 1856, “We are not unfrequently told that we crowd the Tribune with antislavery matter to the exclusion of other topics . . . we plead guilty.”
Medill and company’s friendship with the president wasn’t necessarily always in their favor. At the height of the Civil War, they went to the White House and pleaded to get out of the president’s new request for six thousand more Union draftees from Cook County and Chicago—this after the area had already given up some twenty-two thousand men. According to writer Lloyd Wendt, after Medill asked for mercy, Lincoln turned on him with that Lincolnesque biblical wrath, scolding, “It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you. Whatever you have asked you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men which I have made to carry out the war you have demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I have a right to expect better things of you. Go home, and raise your six thousand extra men.”
Needless to say, Lincoln got his Chicago soldiers. And, reporting the news of the president’s assassination on April 15, 1865, the headline of the Chicago Tribune simply reads, “Terrible News.”
The whole city burned to the ground, in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the city became the place where every major architect in the country, from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright on down to Mies van der Rohe, worked on reinventing what a city skyline is supposed to look like. Montgomery Ward—just a few blocks down Michigan from the bridge—and Sears and Roebuck revolutionized consumer merchandising, with mail-order catalog sales. In 1920, Al Capone came to town, the same year Prohibition went into effect. One year after that, Vincent “The Schemer” Drucci, a member of the Dion O’Banion gang, chased by police, drove onto the Michigan Avenue Bridge just as it was opening to let a boat pass. He jumped the gap, only to crash straight into the other side.
Decades pass. Manufacturing at the corner gives way to the service economy—now it’s all banks and advertising agencies and law firms, skyscrapers instead of warehouses. Railroads give way to the world’s busiest airport, on the north side of town. Only an eight-minute walk from the corner is the site of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, the place, you could argue, where modern televised democracy begins, since that’s the debate Nixon was said to lose not because of the issues but because he looked so ghastly sweating under the lights. And just a short walk from there is the building where Hugh Hefner ran Playboy magazine during its heyday.
As long as we’re on the subject of the decline of Western civilization, the second floor of the NBC Tower, tucked between the Equitable Building and the Tribune Tower, is where The Jerry Springer Show is taped. It just wouldn’t be the haunted landscape around the Michigan Avenue Bridge if some symbolic television apocalypse did not happen here each day. The constant profanity makes the show into an unintelligible barrage of bleeps. Watching it is like listening to a constant storm warning, which is exactly what it is.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but one way you can measure the importance of this corner to our national psyche is the number of times it shows up in motion pictures—specifically, the action-adventure kind. Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Tommy Lee Jones, Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford, Kevin Spacey—there’s barely an actor worth the cover of Entertainment Weekly who hasn’t been in a film with a scene shot right at the corner. And why? Because these films are about the motion of planes, trains, automobiles, boats, helicopters, motorcycles—every modern means of transportation. And so where better to film them than the place that three centuries ago was spotted as our country’s leading transportation hub by Hollywood’s favorite unintentional location scout: Louis Joliet.
In one typical offering, Chain Reaction, Keanu Reeves plays a fugitive motorcycle-riding University of Chicago machinist being framed for murder, treason, and terrorism. Being framed is usually a big part of all these movies. Attempting to elude the police, he’s chased down Michigan Avenue to the Michigan Avenue Bridge. The bridge starts opening, and Keanu scurries up, a cop not far behind. He does a little better than Vincent “The Schemer” Drucci did in the ’20s, but then, Keanu’s a movie star, has a stunt double, and can do retakes. As the angle of the raised bridge gets steeper, the cop slides to the bottom. Keanu’s at the top. What should he do? He looks up—a police helicopter. He looks down—a police boat. He crawls into the bottom of the bridge as it’s lowered and ducks into a garbage truck to safety. When he meets his fellow, shapely fugitive, who nervously awaits him at the train station, the conductor asks, “What took you so long?” To which Keanu deadpans, “The bridge was up.”
Up, down, north, south—whatever. The point is that the bridge was. Right at the center of attention, in the middle of the action, at the hub. We used to ship grain from this corner. Now that entertainment is America’s second biggest export, the product we ship is Keanu.
Species-on-Species Abuse
I AM STANDING ON DISNEY World’s Main Street, U.S.A., watching Cinderella go by. I am watching, but the three-year-old next to me plays with a knob on his stroller. His grandparents, or at least I assume they’re his grandparents, are sweating and waving their arms and wearing panicked smiles trying to get his attention, pointing at Cinderella and then the Little Mermaid, yelling, Look! Look!, their eyes full of melting dollar signs, wondering why oh why they came all this way and shelled out so many Disney Dollars to fly here and stay here and be here just so the little fellow could obsess over a plastic bump—a beige plastic bump—on his goddamn stroller. After a few minutes, Grandma gives up and, I’m pretty sure, vows to amend her will.
Me, I’m with the kid on this. So is my friend David, who, as Cinderella’s procession passes, tells me, “Look at all the communications majors!” There is better stuff to stare at in the Magic Kingdom than coeds dressed up like cartoon characters. The sadly underrated lifesize animatronic Lyndon Johnson, for example.
David and I came to Disney World for the same reasons everyone comes to Disney World: to reaffirm our faith in the U.S. Constitution, contemplate the profound influence of the American presidency on our lives, and revisit the literary legacy of Mark Twain. Well, that’s not true. We came to Disney World because we had nonrefundable plane tickets to Orlando to see a NASA shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center and when that got scrubbed, we figured, what the hell, Disney.
Neither of us has ever been to a Disney anything before, except of course for the movies. I lived in Oklahoma as a child. My family never went to Disney World or Disneyland for the same reason we never went to either coast. My parents’ U.S.A. is a triangle of the conti
nent fenced in between Butte, Santa Fe, and Little Rock. So my childhood theme park was Dogpatch, a hillbilly wonderland in Arkansas with banjo players, faux run-down shacks, and ample goat-petting opportunities. There are a lot of pictures of my sister and me with our arms around cartoonish mountain folk with corncob pipes clenched between their blackened teeth who bore an unsettling resemblance to our own grandparents.
It isn’t that difficult to talk a boy into going all the way to Florida to watch a rocket launch, even a gay, Jewish Canadian resident of Man hattan like David. Coaxing him into Disney World was another story. When I inform him that the shuttle launch has been postponed and broach the subject of Disney World instead, his first reaction is horror. He talks himself into it as a scientific experiment. He sounds like an ambivalent med student about to dissect a corpse when he theorizes, “Disney World is like the liver of the country where the blood of America gets filtered.”
“I’m going to take that as a yes,” I answer, and book a hotel room.
The Magic Kingdom, which opened in 1971, is the oldest section of Disney World. We walk through the famous Cinderella castle, which I’ve seen so many thousands of times on the opening credits of television’s Wonderful World of Disney, and I find myself looking up into the sky for Tinkerbell to twitter by. We’re on our way to the patriotic neighborhood called Liberty Square.
Supposedly, other childless adults do vacation at Disney World. Though when I met him at the Orlando airport, David informed me that because of all the screaming kids on his flight he could make a fortune setting up a tubal ligation and vasectomy clinic at the gate. The obvious reason for childless adults to visit Disney World is to recapture a bit of their youth. Which is precisely what I’m doing as I pull David into the Hall of Presidents. Nobody said everyone’s youth was fun! fun! fun! Aside from the occasional Dogpatch outing, my childhood tourist experiences were mostly of the semi-grisly edutainment variety: Boot Hill, Civil War battlefields, the site of Custer’s Last Stand. I have no roller-coaster nostalgia whatsoever, though I do sometimes pine for getting my picture taken next to old tombstones and Confederate cannons and sitting in dark, air-conditioned rooms watching film strips with stiff narrators coughing up a bunch of dates and casualty statistics and phrases like “brother against brother.”
Hence the Hall of Presidents, a theater resembling a Federalist Vegas lounge. David deems the wainscoting appropriately sober, but sizes up the shimmering textiles in front of us by exclaiming, “Those curtains are fabulous.” An authoritative voice warns against flash photography “in order to preserve the dignity of the presentation.” But that doesn’t inspire the man behind us to remove his mouse ears. The lights go down and the fabulous curtain goes up and “Dr.” Maya Angelou, the original Goofy, narrates a brief film highlighting American history from the Declaration of Independence through the space age. Angelou’s voice is so irregular, so bumpy, she might be skateboarding down a cobblestone street. She jiggles around syllables so that the first phrase of the Constitution comes off as “We the peephole.” Which is unintentionally accurate, now if not then, when one takes into account the rise of voyeurism, surveillance, and princess-killing tabloids. The film lacks a certain razzle-dazzle. I thought Disney was all about showbiz, but the dramaturge of this spectacle is so wrapped up in the tension between the central government and states’ rights that it features a weirdly longish segment on South Carolina and nullification. I haven’t heard the word “nullification” spoken out loud since eleventh-grade AP American history with Mr. Corne. What’s next? Ladies and gentlemen, the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970! Disney’s decision to include like three whole minutes on the debate over whether South Carolina, and therefore everyone else, could nullify bits of the Constitution à la carte is a sort of subtle choice, but Angelou’s lionization of anti-nullification president Andrew Jackson as “brilliant, roughhewn, and courageous” makes sense considering there would be no Disney World at all if Jackson had not stolen away the very land we’re sitting on from the Seminole tribe. But I digress.
The Lincoln segment is the best. (Isn’t it always?) It features imposing music and pictures of the president brooding over the impending, according to Angelou, “bit-tah and blood-eeeeee wa-ar.” We hear the “house divided” speech, watch as slavery is outlawed and the Union is preserved. After that, it’s a quick clip from the golden spike to a rocket blasting off. Then—surprise!—the curtain rises to reveal all forty-two American presidents, or at least their audio-animatronic likenesses. They’re all here—every last wig-wearing, waistcoat-sporting chief, every familiar face and forgotten bureaucrat from Washington to Clinton, who, according to my guidebook, recorded his voice especially for this presentation. The presidents are a little creepy, not quite real but not quite dead, just not quite right. I swear the Reagan is looking at me. Then, like some kind of presidential graduation day, the name of each man is called and a light shines on his face. Lincoln’s name is greeted with a big “Woooooo!” from the back of the hall, as if he were the captain of the football team. When it’s Chester A. Arthur’s moment in the spotlight, my green card–carrying Canadian companion whispers, “I’ve literally never heard of him.” When the list ends at the current president, Bill Clinton spouts the kind of Americana rhetoric he’s so good at, words that I fell for back in his first presidential campaign—words that I’m falling for now. When he says, “Let us pause to honor the very idea of America,” he has me. I’m a sucker for such talk, and so what? “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” He might even mean it, and what’s more, I might even believe it. By the time the fabulous curtain comes down, to the strains of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” thank you very much, I am wiping a tear from my eye and David has his hand over his heart.
Boy, all that glory glory hallelujah sure makes you hungry. We exit the theater and agree that it is time to “Liberate Your Appetite” with a late lunch at the Liberty Tree Tavern, a re-created eighteenth-century pub complete with fireplace, plank flooring, pewter, and realistically blurry windows of hand-pressed glass. It is staffed by servers in traditional period costumes, costumes which come to a screeching halt at the footwear, unless black Reebok high-tops were on the market in 1776.
The maître d’ announces customers as if they’re representatives to the Continental Congress, barking their last names and that of their home state. He gives a bell to a small child from “the Great State of Pennsylvania” who is supposed to ring in the meal. The child yells a phrase the maître d’ whispered into his ear: “Hairy! Hairy! Hairy!” Probably he’s supposed to say “Here Ye,” but I’m not one to knock the healing power of childhood Disney mispronunciation: When I was four, my parents made an appointment with an ear, nose, and throat specialist the moment they realized I was half deaf, rendering the Mickey Mouse Club theme lyric “Forever let us hold our banner high” as “For every little polar bear to hide.”
“The Vowell Family from the Great State of Illinois” is seated and served the Patriot’s Platter—a family-style Thanksgiving dinner. I’m not quite sure if I feel particularly patriotic about strawberry vinaigrette on my Declaration Salad, though I gladly pledge allegiance to the mashed potatoes of the United States of America. We order Cokes because there’s no ale in the pub. Magic Kingdom is dry for the kiddies’ sake, though one wonders if Sam Adams’s generation would have fought so hard to build a democratic nation with such despotic liquor laws.
It is a dizzying meal in that its Disneyness lurches in and out of focus. David and I talk about whatever it is we always talk about—our shared affinity for Warren Beatty’s Reds, his idea for a support group he wants to start called Adult Children of Parents. But every few minutes, one of the poor bastards dressed up as a Disney character saunters over to our table to interact. Some of the other adults in the room are really good at this—videotaping, pretending to tickle Chip (or is it Dale?), joshing around with Minnie Mouse. As Minnie approaches our table, I
quickly finish my sentence, a sentence ending in the word “bereft.” In order to ward off the characters, David suggests that every time one of them comes over one of us should stage whisper, “Are you saying nobody’s ever given you the clap before?” But mostly we just freeze in speechless horror every time one of them stops by. Unbeknownst to David, who is going on about his alma mater Columbia University, Goofy is standing behind him flashing the victory sign over his head and I’m in stitches. When David finally notices Goofy, he admits, “I was wondering why the General Studies program was getting such a laugh.”
We march out of the ersatz Philadelphia of Liberty Square into the ersatz Wild West called Frontierland. We stop off in the Frontierland Shootin’ Arcade. David, one of my all-time favorite sissies, has a cabinet in his Manhattan apartment which he refers to as the “craft cupboard” when he isn’t calling it the “art supplies armoire.” Nevertheless, here he is in Frontierland squinting at a fake fur gopher through the scope of an air rifle and ruggedly pulling the trigger. It must be something he picked up on the wild frontier of downtown Toronto. If the shootin’ comes naturally to him, he cannot get over Frontierland’s favorite snack—Henry VIII–sized roasted turkey legs. These gigantoid drumsticks are being consumed as if they were the most normal fast food on earth, like pretzels or hot dogs. No one is asking anyone, “Hey! Get a picture of me with a giant turkey leg!” But then we notice a family throwing scraps of turkey leg at some pigeons, i.e., feeding birds bird, which David deems “species-on-species abuse.”
