Happy birthday, Illinois — where the fix was in from the start
If Illinoisans had played by the rules to get statehood, Chicagoans would be cheeseheads. By all rights, the Wisconsin border should have been set at the southern tip of Lake Michigan when Illinois was admitted into the union, 200 years ago Monday.
That would have made a 60mile strip of what’s now northern Illinois a part of southern Wisconsin. Stripped of the smokestacks of Chicago’s factories, Illinois’ landscape would have been dominated by grain elevators and dairy barns. But that didn’t happen.
The fix was in, even as the state of Illinois was conceived.
Some readers may wonder: “And that is a cause for celebration?”
But hold on, we’ll deal with that presently. For now, let the record show that Illinois was born amid shenanigans worthy of future ward heelers.
The fix was orchestrated by Nathaniel Pope, Illinois’ congressional representative when it was not yet a state. His nephew Daniel P. Cook was a newspaper publisher and a leader in the movement for statehood. Cook County would be posthumously named for him, though he probably never set foot there.
Cook got the honor because he used his paper to lobby members
of the local legislature to pass a resolution asking that Illinois become a state. It was sent to Washington, where Pope was in a good position to shepherd it through Congress. He was on the committee that considered Illinois’ application for statehood.
But Cook and Pope had a problem. Illinois didn’t meet the requirements for statehood.
A territory was supposed to have 60,000 inhabitants before being bumped up, and Illinois was a thinly populated slice of the western frontier. There was a loophole: Congress could set a lower bar, and Pope persuaded his fellow legislators to grant Illinois that exemption. Pope seems to have claimed there were 40,000 Illinoisans, though a special census could only find 34,620 of them. And even that number might have been inflated by counting migrants who were just passing through Illinois on their way farther West.
Meanwhile, as the statehood bill was passing through committee, Pope moved to replace the description of Illinois’ northern border from Lake Michigan’s southern tip to “north latitude 42 degrees 30 minutes.” That added 8,500 square miles and 14 future counties to Illinois. For years, Wisconsinites screamed: “Foul!”
Should the tale of their state’s origins leave present-day Illinoisans squeamish, let’s consider the alternative:
What if Pope hadn’t worked his magic? Chicago would be in Wisconsin. There wasn’t much on the site of what would become the Windy City in 1818, but like real estate agents say, location is everything.
To the east were the Great Lakes, which connect with the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean. To the west was the Des Plaines River, which connects with the Illinois and Mississippi rivers and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico — except for a small gap that was carved out with a canal. That made Chicago a transportation hub, and it became not only a metropolis but a lodestone for creative talents.
Except for Pope’s machinations, Carl Sandburg and Nelson Algren might be remembered for their roles in the Wisconsin Renaissance. Louis Sullivan and Mies van der Rohe could be known worldwide as members of the Wisconsin School of modern architecture.
Cities have slums as well as boulevards, and that inspired Jane Addams to establish Hull House, a pioneering social-service agency, on Halsted Street. Her partners in the venture fought for reforms — like not treating young offenders as hardened criminals. But for Pope’s map, Wisconsin would hold the honor of establishing the nation’s first juvenile court.
To the south would be a truncated Illinois. Its license plates wouldn’t read “Land Of Lincoln.” For without the northern region Pope tacked on, its populace would have been indifferent, at best, to slavery and even pro-South in the run-up to the Civil War. Could Lincoln have emerged from that political environment and gone off to end slavery and save the Union?
But he could and did because Pope, an abolitionist, bound southern and northern Illinois together. Ever since, our state has been a wondrous pastiche.
We celebrate big-city novelists like Saul Bellow and small-town poets like Vachel Lindsay, the bard of Springfield. Our schoolchildren learn that Barack Obama served an apprenticeship at a South Side community group, a legacy of Jane Addams.
Yet old-timers reminisce about elections that pitted the Chicago machine against the Downstate vote.
We even debate who most unabashedly continued the tradition of Pope and Cook. Was it Paul Powell, a Downstater who, contemplating spoils of an election victory, said he could “smell the meat acooking?” Or the saloonowning Ald. Paddy Bauler who proclaimed: Chicago “ain’t ready for reform”?
So blow out those 200 candles, and cut me a slice of the birthday cake. I’ll lift up a glass and offer a toast: “Here’s to you, my beloved Illinois. For better and for worse, you’re forever the land of wink and nod.”