Quote:
Originally Posted by Handro
I have a hairbrained theory about how the east coast media was hell-bent on ruining Chicago's chance of overtaking NYC as the economic engine of the country during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Their campaign of propaganda to paint Chicago as a crime-ridden winter hellscape was so successful that it's remained the predominant image of the city to this day, including in the minds of Chicagoans. It's a collective neurosis that could be overcome with some smart leadership to "rebrand" winter in a way reminiscent of Northern European countries.
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No, the East Coast media frenzy over Chicago did not begin over economics.
When the major East Coast media attacks on Chicago first began, Chicago was still a smaller city than St. Louis, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, and not even in the same galaxy as NYC.
NYC media in particular starts picking on Chicago over
politics. The politics in question being so awful that modern NYC does not like to acknowledge why Chicago got so embroiled in a rivalry.
Chicago was a hard core
abolitionist city. NYC was more
pro-slavery.
The Winter stuff came from Chicago itself and was popularized by other Midwest cities. Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis and others loved to roast each other for fun in the newspapers. All the time. “Windy City” was a Cincinnati joke referencing how Chicago could never
shut up during a Newspaper spat and that Chicagoans would brag and brag and brag some more about Chicago followed by complaining, complaining, complaining.
Quote:
CHICAGO ON THE RAMPAGE.
We have ever held the young City of Chicago in fair esteem as a representative of Western enterprise and prosperity. Its natural position at the extreme southern point of Lake Michigan, made it the gateway of a large commerce seeking water transportation to the East, and its bifurcated little river could not have been planned better by art to accommodate the trade that the young city was destined to control. . . . But in the year 1860 aforesaid, the National Republican Committee selected Chicago as the place at which their National Convention should be held . . .
From having been the most busy, business-like and admirable, if not modest city in the country, Chicago, since that Convention, has become one of the most blatant, crazy, and arrogant political communities that we ever read of. It has acted since 1860 as if it had not only created ABRAHAM LINCOLN from the dust of the earth, but had made him President; and would unmake him, and make others in his stead; and so continue ordering men and things for this poor Republic ad infinitum, according to the will and pleasure of the said City of Chicago. We can hardly remember a week since the present Administration came into office, when the newspaper press of Chicago was not badgering it for want of sense or backbone—not a month has passed without bringing a delegation to Washington to “look after things” and instruct the President. . . . . . .
Chicago surpasses Boston in conceit and self-idolatry, and, refusing to be only the “hub,” arrogates the importance of the axle-tree of creation. It is time to put down the breaks on this too ambitious town. It is going too fast. . . .
A pause, a season of reflection and a little ice-water to the head, will do all classes in Chicago a vast amount of good.
New York Times,
June 14, 1863.
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Quote:
THE DAY NEW YORK TRIED TO SECEDE
During the first three months of 1861, New York City boldly flirted with leaving the Union. The reasons were decades in the making, but the sentiment was never more pointed than on January 6, 1861, when New York Mayor Fernando Wood addressed the city council. “It would seem that a dissolution of the Federal Union is inevitable,” he observed, noting the sympathy joining New York to “our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States” and suggesting that the city declare its own independence from the Union. “When Disunion has become a fixed and certain fact, why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master—to a people and a party that have plundered her revenues, attempted to ruin her, take away the power of self-government, and destroyed the Confederacy of which she was the proud Empire City?”
Wood was preaching to the converted. Then, as now, New York City was the nation’s financial hub, and had made its reputation—and the lion’s share of its revenues—by supplying goods and services to the slave South. Most New Yorkers were decidedly pro-Southern and for years leading up to Abraham Lincoln’s election, two scoundrels—Wood and U.S. Marshal Isaiah Rynders—nurtured pro-slavery practices, both legal and illegal, in the city.
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https://www.historynet.com/the-day-n...ied-to-secede/
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