128: Four Corners

This American Life

This American Life explores the symbolic power of 'four corners'—both literal and metaphorical—through stories from across America, focusing on history, identity, love, and community. The episode uses Chicago’s Michigan

Key takeaways

• Monuments often hold arbitrary meaning despite deep emotional resonance.

Transcript preview

Let us speak of our nation's monuments. When you're at the Statue of Liberty or standing under the rotunda at the U.S. Capitol, or when you're at the Alamo, it is clear what they mean. But why do thousands of tourists go every day of the summer to four corners that spot in the wilderness where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, four different states, meet at one point. I went on summer, drawn inexturably, magnetically, without quite knowing why. other wandering tourists who strays within 250 miles of the place. Chances are you have done this yourself. You've driven three or four hours out of your way. And you show up and there's a marker on the ground. Bring by dozens, literally dozens of t-shirt stands and families come and they stand on the supposed spot where the four states meet. And what? They hold hands, they sit on the ground and then mom or dad or sis. for this purpose and takes a snapshot. And then, often, there's this kind of aftermath moment, where everybody stands around haplessly, like, what was that all about? You know, we came for this? And then the next group comes in. The arbitrariness of it all, I think, is lost on no one. I saw one family with young kids who simply placed a teddy bear on the spot where the Four States Meet, and snapped a picture of that. Couldn't any four corners hold just as much meaning as this place? And my friend, the answer of course is yes. And today on our program, we offer our own little national monument here on the radio, our own picture of life in America, our own four corners. From WBEC Chicago, this American life, Myra Glass. Today on our program, four corners, we tell the story of life in America through portraits of life on four different corners in four different states across this great nation. Act 1, History, Act 2, Love, Act 3, Neighbors, Act 4. How to become an American. Stay with us. Let's begin with the most epic of our four stories today. Back when we made this episode, writer Serra Val had a theory that she could tell the entire history of America by describing what happened on and around one single street corner. Specifically, the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive here in Chicago. She thought she could just swivel around and point at the whole dark and inspiring tale. Here then, her story. When I started I had only a few things to go on, a couple of French explored. A couple of French explored explored. a plaque on the bridge said passed by in 1673, an Indian massacre in 1812 right there in front of the Burger King, vague notions of Abe Lincoln's debt to the Chicago Tribune whose quaint Gothic tower looms over the bridge as North Side. I thought that's enough American history and I'd just make up the rest. a corner, it's a vortex. The deeper I dug into the history of Chicago and its relationship to the history of the country, the more crowded the Ghost Traffic Jam clogging up the Michigan Avenue Bridge got. Okay, I'm standing here right now on the Michigan Avenue Bridge and the Chicago River is right underneath me. There's some ducks floating under there and a boat just went by, and here's another one coming. Out there is where the river meets Lake Michigan to the east. I'm looking south, the place where the bridge hits land is the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive, where you can get your vision checked or buy a nice fur coat should you desire. I'm swiveling around and the view from the bridge is just picture postcard pretty, especially at night when the Wrigley Building is just lit up so soft it glows. Supposedly, the building so delighted Joseph Stalin that he has had the University of Moscow designed in its image and who can blame him? The American National mythology revolves around the idea that the promise of America is best seen in the West, home, home on the range, etc. Existentially that might be true, but economically the real place to witness the promise of America is the Midwest where for most of this country's history the products of the range were manipulated for fun and profit When the Cowboys sang, Get a Long Little Doggy, they left out the part where the Little Doggy is railroaded to Chicago to be slaughtered by some underpaid, overworked immigrant en route to its manifest destiny as a New Yorker's supper. as he's known around here, Joliet. Back when his name was still said with a French accent, Joliet was a 27 year old fur trader who accompanied a Jesuit missionary named Jacques Marquette on a canoe expedition from Quebec in 1673. They were to map the Mississippi in the name of France, unaware that Spain had already claimed the river some 130 years before. On the return trip at the suggestion of their Indian guide, they traveled from the Mississippi into the Illinois into the Illinois Illinois River and then the Displains. They got out and carried their canoes a few dozen miles to the Chicago River, where they got back in their canoes and paddled to this very spot, right where the river meets the Great Lakes, just below the corner at Michigan and Wacker. And Joliet then had a vision. His map of North America, an oddly pretty, delicate ink drawing he made in 1674, is concerned with one thing and one thing only. Water. His America is all great. Lakes and Mississippi. Look close and you can see what he saw. There's Lake Michigan and at only one spot, the future side of Chicago, does it connect to a river that connects to a couple of other rivers that could connect it to the Mississippi? This is what Joliet saw. That this place is a continental hub, the missing link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and thus the Atlantic and the Gulf. All that was needed was a short canal spanning the miles of prairie between rivers. He wrote, we could go with facility to Florida in a bark and by very easy navigation. Thus Joliet's map isn't so much a map as a prophecy. Stick your ear up against it, you can practically hear cash registers ring. Surprisingly, they only built a bridge here in 1920. Engineers also strained out the Chicago River and put in massive landfills over there, so the lake is further from the corn. than it was in Joliet's day. And I like to picture Joliet sometimes walking up or down Michigan Avenue to the bridge, a go cup in his hand from either the Starbucks over there from the north side of the river or the Starbucks over there on the south side of the river spinning coffee lace saliva into the Chicago river, knowing it'll float with facility all the way past New Orleans into the ocean from there. at Cracking on Joliet's dream was Chicago's first permanent settler, Jean Baptiste-Dusabel, a traitor who built a cabin here on the north side of the river in 1779, a century after Joliet paddled by. DuSable's mother was an African slave and his father was French. He lived here on what is now the site of a 35-story office tower called the equitable building. With his Potawatomy wife Catherine, DuSable's marriage bed was itself a map of America. of European, African, and Indian blood to make a son and a daughter, true American children with three continents in their dark eyes. Chicago school teachers like to impress upon their students that Chicago's first resident, DuSable, was a black man. And just think, it only took two hundred and four years for the town to elect its first black mayor. In 1803, the United States established Fort Dearborn at what would become the corner of Michigan and Wacker to protect the portage of the Chicago River. During the War of 1812, hundreds of Potawatomy Indians descended upon the soldiers and their families and killed them, burning down the fort. The site of Chicago was then abandoned for four years. When soldiers arrived to rebuild the fort, they first had to bury the scouthed human remains which still lay there. Today the side of the fort is weirdly commemorated here with these little bronze markers embedded than the sidewalk at Michigan Wacker so that tourists can dance around its former perimeter as if learning to chaw chaw chaw chaw. And over here there's a there's a wildly racist relief sculpture commemorating the defense of Fort Dearborn where a soldier from the fort is kind of battling off this savage Indian brave. There's a there's a wildly racist relief sculpture commemorating the defense of Fort Deere where a soldier from the fort is kind of battling off this savage Indian brave Indian brave Indian brave Indian brave Indian brave. while a mother and child are kind of cowering behind him basically waiting to die. And underneath that is a plaque that says the people of the fort were brutally massacred by the Indians. They will be cherished as martyrs in our early history. What it doesn't say is that those Indians technically hadn't given over their rights to this land, but it looks like they ran out of room to put that on the plaque. Now I'm going to walk around here. And I'm looking west across the Chicago River. And if you look down river at the turn in the river a few blocks west you can see the site of the old Sauganash Hotel right over there. playacting the juiciest bits of the country spanking new constitution every night. Historian Donald L Miller writes, at the Sauganash and its neighboring hotels, men and women of every color and class were welcome, and whiskey, song and dance were the great democratizers. Visitors from more civilized parts were shocked to see Indian graves spinning the white wives of fort officers around the dance floor of the Sauganash to the frenzied fiddling and tow tapping of hotel owners to the frenz Mark Bébéin, or white and Indian women drinking home distilled liquor straight from the bottle. To add an edge to the evenings, local white traders would put on feathered headdresses and spring into the crowded tavern with war whoops and raised tomahawks scaring the wits out a tight-buttoned easterners. I cannot overemphasize how much I love that story. Not just the metaphor of it, that it is the best ideal of America I can think of, the picture of, the picture of the picture of liquor up like, ladies and dancing Indians, the strangeness of reenacting the Fort Dearborn massacre to scare the queasy easterners, turning what must have still been an open wound into a practical joke. I love that story as proof of the theorem that then, as today in Chicago, the mysterious equation of whiskey plus music equals what can only be called happiness. The ladies of Chicago wouldn't be dancing with Indians much longer because there wouldn't be any Indians left to dance with. The city of Chicago was officially incorporated in 1833, the year the Potawatomy Chief stood near the old Dusabalhome and signed away their land in Illinois to the administration of Andrew Jackson, who found time in his busy schedule of relocating the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chickasaw, to have the Potawataw, West government surveyors had called land too poor for snakes to live upon. Three years after the Potawatomy signed away their land and the city was incorporated, construction began on that canal that Joliet had envisioned to connect Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. The canal worked pretty much exactly as Joliet had imagined. this corner that Chicago expanded from a muddy little hamlet of a few hundred people to a city of over a hundred thousand in just 25 years. Cyrus McCormick built his McCormick Reaper works right here on the river in 1847. His machine, the Reaper, turned out to be one of the most significant inventions in the history of history. Before McCormick it took three hours to gather a bushel of wheat and with the reaper it took 10 minutes. Because McCormick helped mechanize agriculture farms could take up more space and use less labor in less time. By speeding up and emptying out the country, McCormick populated the city. Not that the March of progress is necessarily benign, especially if you're one of those urban workers. Just ask the dead of the hay market, Riot, who laid down their lives just 15 blocks from here for the eight hour work day. or Reed Upton Sinclair's the jungle about what the Stockyard employees went through on the south side. By the Civil War, most of America's grain from the west and the vast prairie around Chicago was unloaded from trains here, traded on the commodities exchange, and then sent east on ships from Lake Michigan. All within a five minute walk of the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wight Wacker Drive. Drive. It could have been this very spot the poet Carl Sandberg was thinking of in his famous poem about Chicago Hog Butcher to the World. He called the City, Toolmaker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight handler. Stormy, Husky, brawling, city of the big shoulders. So over here, Toolmaker,