Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/528

 512 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

IV. JOURNALS FOR LETTERS IN THE MARKET METROPOLIS,

1880-90

" It is universally conceded that Chicago is rapidly achieving world-wide reputation as the great literary center of the United States." From Culture's Garland, Being Memoranda of the Gradual Rise of Literature, Art, Music and Society in Chicago, and Other Western Ganglia, by Eugene Field (Ticknor & Co., Boston, 1887).

Chicago arrived at the rank of a metropolis during the decade of 1880. A position of metropolitan character was reached, as far as the groundwork of materialistic supremacy in a large terri- tory is concerned. In tracing the origin and character of the literary periodicals outcropping in these years, and the interplay of literary and other interests, the first requirement is a picture of Chicago as a material metropolis.

It has often been said by the citizens of older centers that a nation can have only one metropolis, only one "mother-city." Unquestionably, New York city has been the metropolis of America for many decades. But the essential idea of metropolis is that of the relation of the city center to an expanse of its sur- rounding country. The United States covers so large a sweep of country that several European cities of metropolitan rank, along with their supporting empires, could be set down in it. In posi- tion Chicago is the center of the most fertile and extensive expanse of valley and prairie in the North Temperate Zone a territory which by 1880 had become populous. And in every way before the close of the eighties Chicago had become the chief city of the West, and also the first of the nation, and indeed of the world in not a few phases of business and commercial command.

The foremost of the chief positions of which Chicago men could and did boast was the rank attained as the greatest railroad center. Ever since the prairie days Chicago had been growing rapidly as a railroad center. This growth had come out of the food-supply industry, and had been reared on the bringing of wheat and cereals to Chicago for shipment over the lakes, and of live stock to the Union Stock Yards, the greatest wholesale meat- market in the world. Established in 1865, after commissary work for the Civil War had demonstrated the importance of