Freakonomics Radio - 136. The Middle of Everywhere

Episode Date: August 15, 2013

Chicago has given the world more than sausage, crooked politics, and Da Bears.

When I say Chicago, you say... Hot dog. Jazz. Deep dish. Sausages. The Bears. The Bears. Slaughter houses.

Windy city. Stinky cabbage. White Sox. Cubs. Oh, second city, of course. Cold weather. The L. BLT pizza.

Chicago. Chicago. Chicago. All right, I get it. Even though I've spent a fair amount of time in Chicago myself, and I like it for a lot of reasons, the fact is that we don't talk about Chicago the way we talk about New York or Los Angeles, or for that matter, Austin or Boston, even Vancouver. Now, why is that? And more important, why should we care?

From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dupner. On today's show, I'd like you to meet a friend of mine. Hi, my name is Thomas Dija. Tom Dija is from Chicago. I was born there, grew up on the northwest side. We still have the house that my father was born in, in 1929.

So I think we go pretty deep there, and I feel I do too. And Tom's a writer, a good writer. He recently published a new book, and he did what we writers do. He went to the local Barnes & Noble here in New York to give a reading. I'm the author of a book called The Third Coast, When Chicago Built the American Dream, which really covers the years, late 30s through the late 50s. Now, most bookstore readings, as you may know, are not very exciting. So an author will get up behind this shaky podium and will nervously read a couple sections of his or her new book and then take a few questions if anybody actually bothered to show up for the reading. And the writer is always hoping that someone will ask about the very deepest themes of the book, this book you've been slaving over for a few years.

But usually, well, here are two questions that every writer gets asked at every reading. One, do you prefer writing on computer or longhand? And two, do you have particular times set aside every day to write or do you write just when the muse strikes you? So most bookstore readings are, how should I put this, low-impact events. But when Tom Dijda did his bookstore reading for his new book about Chicago, it was nothing like that. It helped that it was packed. But what really made it work is that Dijre didn't just stand there and read random passages. He basically delivered a sermon, a detailed and fascinating and, to me at least, very compelling testament as to how Chicago, as he puts it, built the American

dream. Why America as we know it today would be unrecognizable without Chicago's many contributions. Now, there was just one problem with this amazing lecture, which is that I didn't have a tape deck with me. But Tom Dijer did agree to sit down later in a proper radio studio to talk about how Chicago changed America beyond the hot dogs, the sausages, and even the BLT pizza. Well, I think there are 10 ways that Chicago has affected everyone's life, certainly in America. The first one is architecture. I was always impressed by skeletons of skyscrapers. Mies van der Rohe in this period comes over to Chicago in 1938,

chased out by the Nazis, and goes to the Illinois Institute of Technology and rebuilds their new campus there on the near south side. And while he's there, he really brings forward that steel and glass style of architecture. Very simple, very luxurious,

but it's his image of what America can be. There's something powerful, very simple, very luxurious, but it's his image of what America can be. There's something powerful, very rational, very luxurious. And that becomes really the template for the face of big business, the face of big government and the face of the American skyline. So when we travel around today and I go to Charlotte, North Carolina or Los Angeles, I'm seeing second, third, fourth generation me's, yes? Exactly. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Number two, what do you have? Number two, I have music. Now, when I was a young boy at the age of five First place one lands on is the Chess Brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, two brothers on the south side who retake this kind of little hobby label called Aristocrat and turn it into the home of the blues. The first big player they have in there is Muddy Waters, who comes up from Mississippi in 1946, and he trades in his acoustic guitar for an electric guitar, and he really creates this new sound.

I'm a man. I spell M-H-I-N Muddy really kind of speaks, I think, for a lot of black Americans who come north. By the mid-50s, though, you have that first wave of rock and roll, the kind of jangly, rockabilly kind of style of rock and roll. And the bluesmen are shunted a little bit to the side. They go from being really hot to not being able to get a gig. And so almost out of desperation, a number of them, led by Muddy Waters, go to England.

And people line up to see them, people like Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton. And so the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, all of that British invasion rock comes directly from the impact of Muddy Waters and the other Chicago bluesmen. The way I make love to a woman You just can't resist So that is, I think, a deep musical tradition that comes out of Chicago just in these years. Number three, please. Number three is food. I mean, I think we all think of Chicago as being the hog butcher of the world and packing houses and all that. By the mid-50s,

all that is pretty much gone. But there's another guy out in Des Plaines who has a major impact that we all live with today. His name is Ray Kroc. McDonald's is our kind of place. It's such a heavy place. The American public are basically beef-eating people. And it wears well. And I can't give them everything they like, but this one thing I sure can. He grew up in Chicago and is selling Mixmasters when he meets the McDonald brothers in San

Bernardino, California. And they have this fabulous fast food restaurant, which is doing crazy business. And in something about it, the whole system attracts Ray so much. He makes a deal to franchise it with them. And his dream, which I think he pulls through on is he wants to offer kind of quirky entrepreneurs like him at a point when it's all about corporatism, big companies, gray flannel suits getting on the commuter train.

He wants to offer people a way to have a small business, but that is still recognize the economies of scale, the things you get out of being in a big business. Ray was very much into quality. I mean, when you went to a fast food store or a restaurant at this point, you might get a hole in the middle of your hamburger. You might get something that was full of ground up, you know, awful various organ meats instead of ground beef. It was a kind of, if there was a Wild West time in fast food business, this was it. And Ray said, no, we're going to give people good food. We're going to give them something to do out in suburbia. They can put the kids in the car and go do this.

He was all about creativity, independence, and ironically enough, I think small is beautiful. So, which is not something I think we think of as McDonald's now, who is kind of the great Satan to so many people around the world. Number four, please. Number four is kind of the University of Chicago, which produced so many great things. And you get everyone from Kurt Vonnegut. I'm the only creature who has to figure out what to do next and why. Everybody else is a robot. I am pooped.

To, you know, Susan Sontag coming out of there. Every event has a little label on it, which says, and to think that this, too, is within the realm of the possible. Nuclear fission and the great books in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Saul Alinsky and Frederick von Hayek. The idea that the price system is really essential as a guide to enable people to fit into an order. In the Chicago School of Economics, all these things are bubbling out of there,

so it's incredibly influential in that way. But the thing that I think has had more impact that came out of University of Chicago at this point was a theater company that started by a guy named David Shepard, who left New York with a certain amount of money in his pocket, and he meets Paul Sills, and they start the Compass Theater down in Hyde Park. Part of what was in there were what they called scenarios. They would come up with a kind of dramatic arc, and then it was left to the performers to just make it up as they went. So it's improv. It was all, it was improv.

Single, one, two, three, fight! Drive, drive, drive, keep your head down. Sam, look at the ball. Look at the ball, Sam. Sam, get in there, drive! Oh my God, what's the matter with you? I hardly know him. This very basic part, I think, of Chicago creativity, and in 55 with the compass, I think it really does come to flower. And does this all feed into the creation of Second City? Yes, I think as a side note. Name for us some of the alumni of Second City.

The old, you know, kind of the first round, the Alan Arkin, Alan Alda, Joan Rivers. I think the great Saturday Night Live period, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Aykroyd, Gilda Radner. Today, it's people like Tina Fey and Stephen Carell and Stephen Colbert. Number five on Digest's list is television itself. So TV took root in New York and L.A., but it found a different voice in Chicago. Producers there made smaller, more personal shows, shows to fit the American living room. The Today Show and the Tonight Show came out of Chicago. And later, of course, Oprah. John Travolta!

Ricky Martin! Tyra Banks! We're proud of you! Let's get back to Thomas Dyja! If a person can't be happy after that introduction, you can't be happy. Number six on Dyja's list is the modern civil rights movement. Claws down in Mississippi Not so long ago

When a young boy from Chicago Stepped in a southern door Southern door Emmett Till grows up in the early 50s at 63rd and Cottage Grove in Woodlawn. His mom is from the South. The family's from there. So he sends one weekend in early August 1955, he goes to visit family in Mississippi and he's lynched for allegedly whistling

at a white woman in a grocery store. Up to this point, usually, you would expect the body to be sent north, the mother to bury the body in shame. But Mamie Till does something which I think is remarkable and remarkably important. Instead, when the body's opened, she gets photographers there. There are people there from Jet, and she shows the photographs. They end up being in national magazines all over, and it's horrifying. And it becomes a catalyzing, very emotionally catalyzing moment for black America.

This really explained to everyone, no matter who you were, if you were black, this is what white America thinks of you right now. Later that year, that December, is when Rosa Parks does not get up out of her seat on the bus in Montgomery, and she tells Mamie later on that all the time she was doing that, she was thinking of Emmett Till. is when Rosa Parks does not get up out of her seat on the bus in Montgomery.

And she tells Mamie later on that all the time she was doing that, she was thinking of Emmett Till. So in many ways, Emmett Till lights the fuse of, I think, what we can call modern civil rights movement in America. The color of his skin was black And his name was Emmett Till. Number seven on Tom Deige's list of 10 things that Chicago gave America, the Institute of Design, founded by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. It was originally called the New Bauhaus, And it went on to produce a generation of hugely influential arts educators, photographers, and designers, a lot of our corporate American imagery.

So the logos for NBC and Mobile and Chase, PBS, for instance, were all designed by one-time students of the Institute of Design. When we come back, numbers eight through ten. You may not be so familiar with numbers eight and nine, but number ten, believe me, you're familiar with number ten. It's going to be a guide to how to deal with this new consumer culture that has just exploded in America in the 50s. And it's going to have pictures of naked women. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. We are talking today about the ways in which the city of Chicago is underappreciated, the things that Chicago has given the rest of us, often without our necessarily knowing it. Thomas Dyja is the author of The Third Coast, When Chicago Built the American Dream. Number eight on his list of 10 key Chicago contributions, urban preservation.

Yes, a man named Richard Nichol, photographer from the Institute of Design, who really finds meaning in his life by, he becomes obsessed with Louis Sullivan, the great architect in Chicago. Who had died in, well, not in disrepute necessarily, but underappreciated by it. Underappreciated, alcoholic, and really kind of swept under the rug a bit. What Nickel does is he does a project, as all these Sullivan buildings are coming down around Chicago as it's rebuilding, he takes photos of Sullivan's buildings. And in 1960, the Garrick Theater, also known as the Schiller Theater, is slated to come down and be turned into a parking lot. And what Nickel does is begin the first great, I would say, grassroots landmarking campaign. The building does eventually come down. It was torn down.

But Nickel becomes the spokesman for the kind of preservation. And so, you know, through his photography, later on, Nickel actually dies. You can say he's a a martyr to the cause when Louis Sullivan's great stock exchange building is being torn down. He's going in there every day to take photos and preserve what he can from what's in it, and a part of the building collapses and he dies. He disappears and is found months later, his body in there. So it is a very tragic story, but he has a great amount of importance, I think, for landmark preservation. Number nine. Not literature per se, but a romance between two writers that paved the way for just how a stormy romance should play out. I think the greatest writer Chicago produces during these years is Nelson Algren. And his love story during this time with Simone de Beauvoir, a woman who the New Yorker at the time called, quote, the prettiest existentialist. Was it a long list? I don't know.

I don't, yeah. Camus was good looking. I don't know what the other options were there. Algren wrote The Man with the Golden Arm. It's a great novel about a heroin addict named Frankie Machine. Frank Sinatra played him in the film. And Algren encouraged his one-time lover, Simone de Beauvoir, to write The Second Sex, which became one of the Bibles of the feminist movement. Female emancipation is very much related to sexual emancipation. The two cannot be separated from one another, and it is our traditional attitude on sex that has placed women very much

in this second-class, non-human role in which chastity has been more important than human welfare. Chicago, like a lot of great cities, has a way of producing opposites. So the modernist Mies van der Rohe and the preservationist Richard Nichol, the rigorous University of Chicago, and the completely unbridled Compass Theater in Second City. So maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that a city that helped midwife the second sex also produced the man who's number 10 on Tom Diger's list. The magazine, without any question, is a projection of my own adolescent dreams and aspirations.

He grew up in my neighborhood, Hugh Hefner. I consider myself quite possibly the luckiest human being in the entire world. Who was a very, very withdrawn boy. He goes off, kind of finds himself in high school, becomes a big man on campus, goes off, serves in the war, as a typist, comes back, University of Illinois, GI Bill, gets married, does all the right things. But it's 1952, and he is very unhappy. He is obsessed with sex, and his wife is simply not. And two, he had enormous dreams for himself. You know, he could look downtown and had always dreamt of swanky women and jazz music and mink stoles and all that kind of stuff.

And he's not having it. He lives in a little apartment on the south side in Hyde Park, actually. He works at a magazine job that he hates. And so he decides in 1952 to just throw it in. He's going to start this dream magazine that he's always wanted to do. And it's going to be a men's magazine for people like him who don't hunt and fish. It's going to be a guide to how to deal with this new consumer culture that has just exploded in America in the 50s. And it's going to have pictures of naked women, which is a wonderful thing. But they're

going to be classy. And I think what makes Hef successful and Playboy successful is something that's very Chicago-based. New York is, I think it's fair to say, your value is based on what you can do that other people cannot. The doors that you can open or that open to you that don't open for other people. And in Chicago, there is that urge of a city that loves to host conventions, that loves to show people around. And it's about inviting everybody in. And Hef does that. He invites you in.

He wants you to read the magazine and get, you know, you should be able to get a hi-fi. You should be able to get a cool bachelor pad. The Playboy clubs were about going, and if you paid your money every year, you could go to this place that was kind of like the mansion and hang out and be a part of that world. And so it seems sort of it was a calculated and very smart business strategy, but it was about inclusion, not about making it so exclusive.

It was about come on in. And that's really a metaphor in many ways for Chicago on many levels. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think the city, I think it has a very people-oriented aesthetic that comes out of that. As opposed to institutional, yes? Institutional, yeah.

I mean, you don't go to Chicago to get the awards. You don't go there to kind of join an academy. That's a kind of East Coast thing. You go there to work your ideas out. But let's be realistic. Chicago is no longer that place where as many people are working out as many ideas. The fact is Chicago's peak population was in 1950, 3.5 or 3.6 million people. Today, it's 2.7. You know, New York has not lost those people in that period. Other cities have gained those people. It is not going to ever be Detroit. It is not going to implode, I think, in any way. It is still a wonderful, healthy, thriving city, but it's not the city that it could have been.

And that, says Tom Dija, is a shame. Because America, at this moment, needs the kind of balance that Chicago has always provided. What it came out of was the middle. If there's anything we're missing now it's the middle you know what is the middle of america you know people and other we either sniff at it or we hold it up too high and think that it's the you know in chicago had a kind of cynical sensible understanding of what regular was you know you're you're going to mind your own business. You're going to, you know, have your house and your kids and sort of take care of yourself. You're not going to bug other people and they're not going to bug you. And you're going to get to get on with it. And that, that idea of a place in the middle where we all meet and we look at each

other and we try to figure things out. Chicago had that. I mean, those political conventions were just meant for Chicago where everyone came and exchanged. It's where new people came like me and Mahalia from wherever, other countries, other states, and brought new ideas and without feeling that they had to immediately win, you know, and I think that coastal mindset leaves the middle without and we need more middle in America. Now, to be fair, Chicago has also been known for political corruption and cronyism, for endemic racism, and for quite a bit of crime of just about every sort you can name. But there's at least one upside to all that trouble. It's given another friend of mine something to write about all these years. Steve Levitt teaches economics at the University of Chicago. Right. I love the University of Chicago. Couldn't be a better place. How would you describe the ethos or worldview or philosophy, if there is one, of the Chicago Econ Department?

I would say that historically, there was a real unifying theme in the Chicago Econ Department, which is that it was a group of iconoclasts who thought differently about the world and who were challenging the conventional wisdom at every turn. And I think that's less true today. I think we are more representative of the profession, although we certainly have our renegades. What is the layperson's view of Chicago Econ Department? Let's say someone who reads the newspapers and follows a little bit about the markets or economics. How does the layperson typically view the Chicago Department of Economics? The most common question I've gotten when I have said I work at the University of Chicago Department of Economics over the last 15 years is,

is Milton Friedman still there? To which I say, actually, Milton Friedman left in 1978. I was 11 years old. He's been gone now for 35 years. And indeed, he has died. But it's amazing that really Milton Friedman was an incredible communicator of economics. And he really, in some ways, were kind of like the ugly stepsisters of Milton Friedman because he was an economist who managed to get his message out in the public in a way that really changed people's thinking. And we're economists, or at least I am, and you're a quasi-economist who've managed to get our ideas out in the public but not actually change anyone's thinking. Now, there are people who hate the University of Chicago Economics Department, either in their imagination or in reality, and they think that its ideology underlies all that's wrong with modern capitalism. What do you say when you run into that argument? You know, people don't often say that to my face. And I think that may be because they realize that I'm not really part of, you know, the group that went to Chile and worked with Pinochet to try and, you know, put in capitalism, even if it's at the cost of dictatorship.

And I mean, that's where I think a lot of the politicized hatred towards Chicago comes from. And people know I was, you I was a toddler at the time. But I think really what the University of Chicago Economics stands for, in my mind, is the idea that you have this framework, which we talk about all the time, that's wrapped around incentives, that's wrapped around formally modeling things, wrapped around data and cause and effect. And you basically take that framework and you follow it as far as it will take you into every realm of society. So what maybe symbolizes Chicago economics compared to other departments is our willingness to apply our tools, not just to markets and not just to financial things, but to everything. The family, slavery, discrimination, sumo wrestling, names.

I mean, whatever it is, it's been the view that economics is not just a game playing. It's important. It's a way of understanding the world and we take it to everything. A lot of your research about Chicago is not exactly an advertisement for the city. You've written about crack dealers and pimps and prostitutes and school teachers who cheat. So is that the way you see the city as a kind of fantastic laboratory for vice and avarice and cheating? Yeah, more or less. Do you think you would have had as much success chronicling that kind of stuff if you were in St. Louis or Minneapolis or Boston? If I had gone to Princeton, I think I would have had to find a different research agenda.

I wouldn't have had nearly as much fun if I had gone to Princeton instead of University of Chicago. Staring blindly into space Hey, podcast listeners. On the next Freakonomics Radio, we replay one of our very favorite episodes from The Vault, an hour-long show about prediction. The incentives for prediction makers are to make either cataclysmic or utopian predictions, right? Because you don't get attention. If I say that what's going to happen tomorrow is exactly the same as what happened today. You don't get on TV.

I don't get on TV. If it happens to come true, who cares? I don't get any credit for it coming true either. The Folly of Prediction. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Oh, yeah! next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Beret Lamb,

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