Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves: A Plain-Spoken History of Mid-Illinois
Autor James Krohe Jren Limba Engleză Paperback – 21 iun 2017
Winner, ISHS Annual Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2018
In Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves, James Krohe Jr. presents an engaging history of an often overlooked region, filled with fascinating stories and surprising facts about Illinois’s midsection.
Krohe describes in lively prose the history of mid-Illinois from the Woodland period of prehistory until roughly 1960, covering the settlement of the region by peoples of disparate races and religions; the exploitation by Euro-Americans of forest, fish, and waterfowl; the transformation of farming into a high-tech industry; and the founding and deaths of towns. The economic, cultural, and racial factors that led to antagonism and accommodation between various people of different backgrounds are explored, as are the roles of education and religion in this part of the state. The book examines remarkable utopian experiments, social and moral reform movements, and innovations in transportation and food processing. It also offers fresh accounts of labor union warfare and social violence directed against Native Americans, immigrants, and African Americans and profiles three generations of political and government leaders, sometimes extraordinary and sometimes corrupt (the “one-horse thieves” of the title). A concluding chapter examines history’s roles as product, recreation, and civic bond in today’s mid-Illinois.
Accessible and entertaining yet well-researched and informative, Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves draws on a wide range of sources to explore a surprisingly diverse section of Illinois whose history is America in microcosm.
In Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves, James Krohe Jr. presents an engaging history of an often overlooked region, filled with fascinating stories and surprising facts about Illinois’s midsection.
Krohe describes in lively prose the history of mid-Illinois from the Woodland period of prehistory until roughly 1960, covering the settlement of the region by peoples of disparate races and religions; the exploitation by Euro-Americans of forest, fish, and waterfowl; the transformation of farming into a high-tech industry; and the founding and deaths of towns. The economic, cultural, and racial factors that led to antagonism and accommodation between various people of different backgrounds are explored, as are the roles of education and religion in this part of the state. The book examines remarkable utopian experiments, social and moral reform movements, and innovations in transportation and food processing. It also offers fresh accounts of labor union warfare and social violence directed against Native Americans, immigrants, and African Americans and profiles three generations of political and government leaders, sometimes extraordinary and sometimes corrupt (the “one-horse thieves” of the title). A concluding chapter examines history’s roles as product, recreation, and civic bond in today’s mid-Illinois.
Accessible and entertaining yet well-researched and informative, Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves draws on a wide range of sources to explore a surprisingly diverse section of Illinois whose history is America in microcosm.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780809336029
ISBN-10: 0809336022
Pagini: 360
Ilustrații: 57
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.57 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN-10: 0809336022
Pagini: 360
Ilustrații: 57
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.57 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Notă biografică
In more than forty years as an award-winning magazine journalist, essayist, and critic, James Krohe Jr. has explored the history, politics, and culture of his native Illinois. His work has been published in more than fifty magazines and newspapers, including Illinois Issues and the Chicago Reader, and he is a longtime contributor to Springfield’s Illinois Times. He has written two popular monographs published by the Sangamon County Historical Society and edited the society’s anthology, A Springfield Reader, which in 1977 received the Illinois State Historical Society’s Award of Merit. He lives and works in the Chicago area.
Extras
IN THE MIDDLE OF EVERYWERE: AN INTRODUCTION TO MID-ILLINOIS
Say “Illinois” to people from other places, and most of them will think first of one of two things—corn and Abraham Lincoln. Both the staple and the statesman were products of the place, and since each is unlikely to have developed in quite the same way anywhere else, neither can be perfectly understood without knowing the middle part of the state that is the middle of the Middle West.
Like Lincoln, corn was a homely product of the countryside that grew into something unexpectedly important to Illinois and the nation. Its cultivation transformed what at one time might have been dismissed as thirty thousand square miles of weeds into one of the globe’s most productive agricultural empires. Where mid-Illinois farmers once cultivated corn using horses and mules, their descendants do it in air-conditioned machines steered by satellites and sensors. These modern tractors can vary the application of chemicals row by row to match variations in soil quality, the better to nurture bug-repelling plants that yield twice the kernels with half the water of those that sustained Great-Grandpa. Such technological miracles have more of Silicon Valley than Sunnybrook Farm about them, and many of them were invented or perfected in the middle part of the state.
Lincoln too was bred to flourish here, where Southerners’ tolerance for treelessness, flatness, and cold overlapped most Northerners’ tolerance for Southerners. People from half a hundred different places brought to mid-Illinois nearly that many different ideas about God, humanity, and government and the proper relation of each to the others. Imported sectional rivalries manifested themselves politically in not-always-civil wars between Democrats and Whigs, states-righters and abolitionists, Copperheads and Unionists. What better place for a future president in the 1850s to prepare to lead a divided nation?
For decades, the Illinois period in the rail-splitter’s life was dismissed by biographers who saw as unimportant its relative uneventfulness compared with his career as president and commander in chief. Most writers saw Lincoln’s years in Springfield as merely a prolonged pupation during which a hack lawyer, snug in his cocoon, awaited the miraculous transformation into a leader that could only occur in Washington. The history of the region itself therefore is widely regarded as interesting only to the extent Lincoln once was part of it. A case can be made, however, that Lincoln was interesting because so much of mid-Illinois was a part of him.
Mid-Illinois is the territory that lies wholly or in part between the Indiana state line and the Mississippi River and between interstates 70 and 80. It sprawls across twenty-nine thousand square miles, an area larger than Ireland, much larger than the Netherlands, Belgium, or Denmark, and twice as large as Switzerland. These are the corn latitudes, whose climate and geology are so perfectly suited to its cultivation that any seed seems to come up corn. Nearly everywhere in this expanse the prominences on the landscape are the interstate overpass and the occasional coal mine slag heap. The glaciers’ meltwater laid down mud and gravels so smoothly atop most of mid-Illinois that a person could see on Wednesday who was coming to dinner on Friday. That part of eastern mid-Illinois once known as the Grand Prairie is one of the flattest parts of a famously flat state. (There really is a Flatville, Illinois, a hamlet about ten miles northeast of Urbana.) A mid-Illinois vista thus is all foreground. Only occasionally, as during a storm, does the modern Illinoisan feel that dread of exposure reported by so many travelers left adrift on the prairie 170 years ago; even such trees as grew here at settlement didn’t offer much shelter, as they tended to hide themselves (from prairie fires, mainly) in the creek bottoms.
Whether and in which ways such a setting shaped the culture that took root there has been debated for decades, and it will not be settled in these pages. Transplanted Vermonter Stephen A. Douglas said that his mental horizon had been widened by the unadorned prairies, which relieved his eyes of the cramp of hills and mountains they were used to back home. If pioneer reminiscences are to be believed, many more people found all that space discomfiting and, turning their backs on it, developed a crabbed and inward frame of mind. In a place so exposed, it was probably inevitable that isolationism should become a persistent strain of thought.
Unfortified by mountains or deserts or forest, mid-Illinois always was open to settlement by what one historian describes as “diverse, entangled peoples.” Native American peoples from the eastern and northern forests shared the region for more than a century with French fur traders and priests and British soldiers and colonial administrators. The arrival in the latter 1700s of settlers from the east (mostly Kentuckians) began the Euro-American era. Arriving by wagon and flatboat in the 1830s were emigrants from mid-Atlantic states and their western outposts such as Pennsylvania and Ohio. They in turn were joined by Yankees and, later, northern Europeans (mainly Germans, Swedes, and Irish) pushing south from Chicago after voyages by boat through the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. The railroads later brought African Americans from the Deep South and refugees from a dozen unhappy countries in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.
Springfield was typical of mid-Illinois’s larger towns and cities. Its founders hailed from Kentucky, Virginia, and Connecticut, and its most prominent early businessman was a former New Jerseyan. The authors of a 1920 social survey of the capital noted that because it stood about midway between the northern and southern states and near the center of population of the country, “[Springfield] has shared in the cross-currents of political, social, and economic forces of the East and the West, the North and the South.” Not everyone agreed that this cross-breeding produced a superior hybrid. John Hay famously said that Springf ield combined “the meanness of the North with the barbarism of the South.”
Geographer Douglas Meyer would later make the point more circumspectly when he noted of the region that “cultural coherence was not the norm.” One might think that a stew with so many flavors in it would be spicy indeed, but the result is just the opposite. Mid-Illinois’s architecture, for instance, is a bland blend, and its residents’ indeterminate patterns of speech make them sound like people you’ve heard everywhere and nowhere. (Springfield, according to that 1920 study, “may hardly be regarded as a city of many extremes; it is rather a city of many averages.”)
Mid-Illinois is thus defined by its lack of definition. The region as a whole lacks Chicago’s and southern Illinois’s self-consciousness as a place. Quincy and Macomb (the latter the home of Western Illinois University) consider themselves emphatically part of western Illinois, but the rest of state is so little aware of the region that disgruntled locals in the 1970s began referring to it as Forgottonia. “Eastern Illinois” also scarcely exists as a popular term of identification, in spite of the fact that, smack in the middle of it, in Charleston-Mattoon, there is Eastern Illinois University; instead, eastern Illinois is generally considered to be part of “central Illinois,” which on the maps is actually east-central Illinois. Thus this book’s resort to “mid-Illinois,” a term that while unfamiliar to some locals at least has the merit of coherence.
In sum, mid-Illinois is a mini-Illinois. Only in this part of Illinois did the mix of immigrant populations achieve the same proportions as those in the state as a whole; its averageness, its lack of a specific identity, its unambiguous ambiguity, its Illinois-ness, is mid-Illinois’s true identity—the region of Illinois that is both the most and the least like itself.
Say “Illinois” to people from other places, and most of them will think first of one of two things—corn and Abraham Lincoln. Both the staple and the statesman were products of the place, and since each is unlikely to have developed in quite the same way anywhere else, neither can be perfectly understood without knowing the middle part of the state that is the middle of the Middle West.
Like Lincoln, corn was a homely product of the countryside that grew into something unexpectedly important to Illinois and the nation. Its cultivation transformed what at one time might have been dismissed as thirty thousand square miles of weeds into one of the globe’s most productive agricultural empires. Where mid-Illinois farmers once cultivated corn using horses and mules, their descendants do it in air-conditioned machines steered by satellites and sensors. These modern tractors can vary the application of chemicals row by row to match variations in soil quality, the better to nurture bug-repelling plants that yield twice the kernels with half the water of those that sustained Great-Grandpa. Such technological miracles have more of Silicon Valley than Sunnybrook Farm about them, and many of them were invented or perfected in the middle part of the state.
Lincoln too was bred to flourish here, where Southerners’ tolerance for treelessness, flatness, and cold overlapped most Northerners’ tolerance for Southerners. People from half a hundred different places brought to mid-Illinois nearly that many different ideas about God, humanity, and government and the proper relation of each to the others. Imported sectional rivalries manifested themselves politically in not-always-civil wars between Democrats and Whigs, states-righters and abolitionists, Copperheads and Unionists. What better place for a future president in the 1850s to prepare to lead a divided nation?
For decades, the Illinois period in the rail-splitter’s life was dismissed by biographers who saw as unimportant its relative uneventfulness compared with his career as president and commander in chief. Most writers saw Lincoln’s years in Springfield as merely a prolonged pupation during which a hack lawyer, snug in his cocoon, awaited the miraculous transformation into a leader that could only occur in Washington. The history of the region itself therefore is widely regarded as interesting only to the extent Lincoln once was part of it. A case can be made, however, that Lincoln was interesting because so much of mid-Illinois was a part of him.
Mid-Illinois is the territory that lies wholly or in part between the Indiana state line and the Mississippi River and between interstates 70 and 80. It sprawls across twenty-nine thousand square miles, an area larger than Ireland, much larger than the Netherlands, Belgium, or Denmark, and twice as large as Switzerland. These are the corn latitudes, whose climate and geology are so perfectly suited to its cultivation that any seed seems to come up corn. Nearly everywhere in this expanse the prominences on the landscape are the interstate overpass and the occasional coal mine slag heap. The glaciers’ meltwater laid down mud and gravels so smoothly atop most of mid-Illinois that a person could see on Wednesday who was coming to dinner on Friday. That part of eastern mid-Illinois once known as the Grand Prairie is one of the flattest parts of a famously flat state. (There really is a Flatville, Illinois, a hamlet about ten miles northeast of Urbana.) A mid-Illinois vista thus is all foreground. Only occasionally, as during a storm, does the modern Illinoisan feel that dread of exposure reported by so many travelers left adrift on the prairie 170 years ago; even such trees as grew here at settlement didn’t offer much shelter, as they tended to hide themselves (from prairie fires, mainly) in the creek bottoms.
Whether and in which ways such a setting shaped the culture that took root there has been debated for decades, and it will not be settled in these pages. Transplanted Vermonter Stephen A. Douglas said that his mental horizon had been widened by the unadorned prairies, which relieved his eyes of the cramp of hills and mountains they were used to back home. If pioneer reminiscences are to be believed, many more people found all that space discomfiting and, turning their backs on it, developed a crabbed and inward frame of mind. In a place so exposed, it was probably inevitable that isolationism should become a persistent strain of thought.
Unfortified by mountains or deserts or forest, mid-Illinois always was open to settlement by what one historian describes as “diverse, entangled peoples.” Native American peoples from the eastern and northern forests shared the region for more than a century with French fur traders and priests and British soldiers and colonial administrators. The arrival in the latter 1700s of settlers from the east (mostly Kentuckians) began the Euro-American era. Arriving by wagon and flatboat in the 1830s were emigrants from mid-Atlantic states and their western outposts such as Pennsylvania and Ohio. They in turn were joined by Yankees and, later, northern Europeans (mainly Germans, Swedes, and Irish) pushing south from Chicago after voyages by boat through the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. The railroads later brought African Americans from the Deep South and refugees from a dozen unhappy countries in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.
Springfield was typical of mid-Illinois’s larger towns and cities. Its founders hailed from Kentucky, Virginia, and Connecticut, and its most prominent early businessman was a former New Jerseyan. The authors of a 1920 social survey of the capital noted that because it stood about midway between the northern and southern states and near the center of population of the country, “[Springfield] has shared in the cross-currents of political, social, and economic forces of the East and the West, the North and the South.” Not everyone agreed that this cross-breeding produced a superior hybrid. John Hay famously said that Springf ield combined “the meanness of the North with the barbarism of the South.”
Geographer Douglas Meyer would later make the point more circumspectly when he noted of the region that “cultural coherence was not the norm.” One might think that a stew with so many flavors in it would be spicy indeed, but the result is just the opposite. Mid-Illinois’s architecture, for instance, is a bland blend, and its residents’ indeterminate patterns of speech make them sound like people you’ve heard everywhere and nowhere. (Springfield, according to that 1920 study, “may hardly be regarded as a city of many extremes; it is rather a city of many averages.”)
Mid-Illinois is thus defined by its lack of definition. The region as a whole lacks Chicago’s and southern Illinois’s self-consciousness as a place. Quincy and Macomb (the latter the home of Western Illinois University) consider themselves emphatically part of western Illinois, but the rest of state is so little aware of the region that disgruntled locals in the 1970s began referring to it as Forgottonia. “Eastern Illinois” also scarcely exists as a popular term of identification, in spite of the fact that, smack in the middle of it, in Charleston-Mattoon, there is Eastern Illinois University; instead, eastern Illinois is generally considered to be part of “central Illinois,” which on the maps is actually east-central Illinois. Thus this book’s resort to “mid-Illinois,” a term that while unfamiliar to some locals at least has the merit of coherence.
In sum, mid-Illinois is a mini-Illinois. Only in this part of Illinois did the mix of immigrant populations achieve the same proportions as those in the state as a whole; its averageness, its lack of a specific identity, its unambiguous ambiguity, its Illinois-ness, is mid-Illinois’s true identity—the region of Illinois that is both the most and the least like itself.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations
Map of Mid-Illinois
In the Middle of Everywhere: An Introduction to Mid-Illinois
1. A Classic Mixing Zone: The Peopling of Mid-Illinois
2. Eden Despoiled: Nature’s Economy in Mid-Illinois
3. “Wondorous plant”: The Industrialization of Nature in Mid-Illinois
4. Town Mania: The Urban Frontier of Mid-Illinois
5. “Well known repugnances”: Antagonism and Accommodation in Mid-Illinois
6. “Making the world a little more Christian”: The Salvation of Mid-Illinois
7. The Urge to Improve: Educating Mid-Illinois
8. Realizing the Ideal: The Perfectionist Impulse in Mid-Illinois
9. Jiggery-pokery: Practical Politics in Mid-Illinois
10. Rollover Territory: Getting from Here to There in Mid-Illinois
11. Growing Factories: Mid-Illinois’s Industrial Heyday
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Map of Mid-Illinois
In the Middle of Everywhere: An Introduction to Mid-Illinois
1. A Classic Mixing Zone: The Peopling of Mid-Illinois
2. Eden Despoiled: Nature’s Economy in Mid-Illinois
3. “Wondorous plant”: The Industrialization of Nature in Mid-Illinois
4. Town Mania: The Urban Frontier of Mid-Illinois
5. “Well known repugnances”: Antagonism and Accommodation in Mid-Illinois
6. “Making the world a little more Christian”: The Salvation of Mid-Illinois
7. The Urge to Improve: Educating Mid-Illinois
8. Realizing the Ideal: The Perfectionist Impulse in Mid-Illinois
9. Jiggery-pokery: Practical Politics in Mid-Illinois
10. Rollover Territory: Getting from Here to There in Mid-Illinois
11. Growing Factories: Mid-Illinois’s Industrial Heyday
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Recenzii
" Krohe does an excellent job explaining the urban development of the region economically but also socially and politically. Nevertheless, he does not neglect rural life either, for Corn-Kings One-Horse Thieves presents a rich history of life, community, and work on the mid-Illinois farm. Krohe's study, at the end of the day, is a fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship."—Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
"After years of perceptive and sometimes sardonic journalism, Krohe's Corn Kings is a book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians as well as local historians generally. Teachers on any level can mine it for nuggets of information. Scholars can check it for new perspectives on old topics. And historiographers can marvel at the distance the field has come since the Centennial History of Illinois. The book is indeed a useful, if wholly unintended, contribution to the state's bicentennial."— John Hoffmann, The Journal of Illinois History
“As promised in the title, Krohe has written a plainspoken story about a certain place in mid-America. The author speaks with the warmth of familiarity, while at the same time maintaining a critical eye on the old chestnuts of history. There should be more books about the past like this one.”—Robert Mazrim, author, The Sangamo Frontier: History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln
“For four decades, Jim Krohe has been the premier writer about things Illinois. Here he brings to vibrant life an unassuming yet fertile swath of flat land—and its surprisingly variegated people—in a historical travelogue that draws, for readers’ delight, on the author’s sparkling use of metaphor and simile. Krohe is especially strong on the period between the Civil War and World War II, when mid-Illinois played a large hand in jump-starting the nation to its economic preeminence, creating a sweeping, colorful canvas of who we were, and are.”—Jim Nowlan, lead coauthor, Illinois Politics and Fixing Illinois
“Krohe is a delightful curmudgeon who goes to bat for underdogs while bringing the high and mighty to heel with witty and insightful prose. His unique take on life makes Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves an incredibly entertaining read.”—Taylor Pensoneau, author, Governor Richard Ogilvie: In the Interest of the State
"Written with wry detachment, streaked with affection, Krohe’s book is no exercise in regional cheerleading. The result of the “wrenching transformations,” he concludes, “was a mid-Illinois that by many measures was dull, complacent, cautious, and bland.” Even by Illinois standards, it “can seem like a backwater,” for “the economic, social, and political centers of Illinois have shifted well to the northeast.” It was not always thus: the region enjoyed a heyday between the Civil War and the Great Depression."--Michael Burlingame, Illinois Times
"Krohe is both entertaining and enlightening on a wide variety of issues, events, and personalities. His literary voice is knowledgeable and bemused, with a dry wit that makes for an enthralling narrative." --James A. Edstrom, The Annals of Iowa
"After years of perceptive and sometimes sardonic journalism, Krohe's Corn Kings is a book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians as well as local historians generally. Teachers on any level can mine it for nuggets of information. Scholars can check it for new perspectives on old topics. And historiographers can marvel at the distance the field has come since the Centennial History of Illinois. The book is indeed a useful, if wholly unintended, contribution to the state's bicentennial."— John Hoffmann, The Journal of Illinois History
“As promised in the title, Krohe has written a plainspoken story about a certain place in mid-America. The author speaks with the warmth of familiarity, while at the same time maintaining a critical eye on the old chestnuts of history. There should be more books about the past like this one.”—Robert Mazrim, author, The Sangamo Frontier: History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln
“For four decades, Jim Krohe has been the premier writer about things Illinois. Here he brings to vibrant life an unassuming yet fertile swath of flat land—and its surprisingly variegated people—in a historical travelogue that draws, for readers’ delight, on the author’s sparkling use of metaphor and simile. Krohe is especially strong on the period between the Civil War and World War II, when mid-Illinois played a large hand in jump-starting the nation to its economic preeminence, creating a sweeping, colorful canvas of who we were, and are.”—Jim Nowlan, lead coauthor, Illinois Politics and Fixing Illinois
“Krohe is a delightful curmudgeon who goes to bat for underdogs while bringing the high and mighty to heel with witty and insightful prose. His unique take on life makes Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves an incredibly entertaining read.”—Taylor Pensoneau, author, Governor Richard Ogilvie: In the Interest of the State
"Written with wry detachment, streaked with affection, Krohe’s book is no exercise in regional cheerleading. The result of the “wrenching transformations,” he concludes, “was a mid-Illinois that by many measures was dull, complacent, cautious, and bland.” Even by Illinois standards, it “can seem like a backwater,” for “the economic, social, and political centers of Illinois have shifted well to the northeast.” It was not always thus: the region enjoyed a heyday between the Civil War and the Great Depression."--Michael Burlingame, Illinois Times
"Krohe is both entertaining and enlightening on a wide variety of issues, events, and personalities. His literary voice is knowledgeable and bemused, with a dry wit that makes for an enthralling narrative." --James A. Edstrom, The Annals of Iowa
Descriere
A general history of mid-Illinois for the curious nonacademic reader, Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves draws on a wide range of sources to explore a surprisingly diverse region whose history is America in microcosm.