Book Excerpt - Dave Eggers on Illinois

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America brings together some of the most interesting voices in the United States in one unique volume meant to broadly describe the landscape. Dave Eggers takes on his home state of Illinois in this excerpt, and goes on to list a number of interesting tidbits about the it: Chicago is home to the world’s largest public library system; Oprah contributes large amounts to the state’s tax revenue; Cracker Jack was introduced at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893; and the state has produced, for decades, the most pumpkins.

Other writers in the collection include: William T. Vollmann on California; Heidi Julavits on Maine; Myla Goldberg on Maryland; Anthony Bordain on New Jersey; and Edward P. Jones in conversation about Washington, D.C. Is there a better way to get to know our neighbours to the south? 

Illinois by Dave Eggers

The slogan on all license plates in Illinois, for as long as anyone can remember, has been Land of Lincoln. Everyone in Illinois and all sensible people elsewhere believe it to be the best license-plate slogan of all the states in our union. The closest runner-up would be New Hampshire’s fiery Live Free or Die, but that slogan scares children. A license plate shouldn’t scare children and shouldn’t include the world “or die.” A license-plate slogan shouldn’t encourage death in the face of curtailed personal liberties. A license-plate slogan should, without threats or hysterics, evoke the moral essence and scenic grandeur of a state, and if possible it should be alliterative and should mention everyone’s favorite president. The slogan on the 9.6 million registered vehicles in the state of Illinois does all those things, and sets the one for all conduct, personal and public, in the state, and guides and inspires all of our plans and pursuits. It is the best of all license-plate slogans. Is Illinois, therefore, the best of all states? This has been often argued and often proved. Through the course of this essay, many examples of the first-ness of Illinois will be offered into evidence -- that state is first in everything from snack s to bombs -- but perhaps no endorsement is more important than Lincoln’s own: He himself believed Illinois best.

He was born in the Kentucky wilderness, raised in a log cabin with a dirt floor, and by the time he was a teenager, he was ready for better things. His father, a pioneer broken by the early death of his wife (whom Abraham called his angel mother), brought his new wife and family to Indiana for a spell and then to Illinois, where his gangly son would grow into a man, would reinvent himself and soon the nation.

They settled close to the center of Illinois, in Macon County, and there the future president’s father set up a homestead near the north bank of the Sangamon River. Thomas Lincoln was accustomed to putting his strapping son to work, and so set him on building a fence around the fifteen acres. Abe split dozens of logs to form the barrier, and though this task was onerous, it was not without benefits: When he ran for president decades later, his party, the Republicans, needing a nickname as catchy as “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” and “Old Hickory,” dubbed him “The Rail Splitter”. Someone even painted a Harlequin-style portrait of Lincoln, his foot on a rail, hammer high overhead, and shirt agape. It was to be the one and only time sex appeal was used to sell the concept of Abraham Lincoln.

When he wasn’t working on the farm, he was reading- constantly reading books and newspapers, educating himself about politics, law, and the world, and after just a few months in Illinois, he was inspired to give his first political speech. The site was Renshaw’s store in Decatur, then a village of less than a dozen cabins, and the subject was the future of Illinois. As the legend goes, there were a few local candidates in the shop, holding a debate, and Lincoln’s teenaged buddies asked Abe to demand some beverages for the audience- a standard thing at the time, apparently. Abe stepped forward, and instead of demanding lemonade for all or else, he gave a moving soliloquy about the potential of the Sangamon River to bring wealth to the region. If they could encourage trade to swing into the state via Mississippi, into which the Sangamon flowed, then prosperity would ensue. All who saw him speak where impressed, and his name was linked even then with the residents’ ideas of a better future for their pioneer land. Shortly after that Lincoln left home for good, pursuing a half-dozen careers-carpenter, store clerk, post master, surveyor, soldier-before finally settling on the law. But his first love was the river, and a few months after his speech at Renshaw’s, he set about becoming a steamboat man. He took a job on a flatboat headed down the Mississippi to New Orleans. He was eighteen and his life as an independent and self-made man had begun.

While on the subject of water and gumption and Illinois being first among states, it has to be pointed out that Chicago opened the nation’s first aquarium, in 1893; that puts us at Number One in fish and oceanography and all related pursuits. Just a few years before that, Illinoisans invented the skyscraper. We were first, erecting the Home Insurance Building in 1885, the first so-called Chicago School’s contributions to urban architecture. That innovative structure, the first steel-framed building, set the high standard for architectural courage and discerning taste that has been key in Chicago’s having the reputation, forever after, for the best high-rise architecture in the nation. Home to Louis Sullivan, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the John Hancock, the gorgeous Gothic at 35 Wacker, and now Millennium Park’s Gehry and Kapoor-Chicago would be No. 1 even without the Sears Tower. At 1,730 feet the Sears was the tallest in the world when it was built and remains today the tallest building in the United States. If one discounts, and one should, the inelegant towers of Dubai and Taipei that are now by some voodoo measurement “taller” than the Sears, ours remains the highest structure on the planet.

From State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. copyright © 2008 by Trim Tables, LLC. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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