Chicago: City on the Make

"Giants lived here once. It was the kind of town, thirty years gone, that made big men out of little ones. It was geared for great deeds then, as it is geared for small deeds now."

"When put in the fix for he tied the town to the rackets for keeps. / [...] Big Bill greeted his fellow citizens correctly then with a cheery, “Fellow hoodlums!” / The best any mayor can do with the city since is just to keep it in repair."

"Yet the Do-Gooders still go doggedly forward, making the hustlers struggle for their gold week in and week out, year after year, once or twice a decade tossing an unholy fright into the boys. And since its a ninth-inning town, the ball game never being over till the last man is out, it remains town as well as s. The ball game isnt over yet. / But its a rigged ball game."

"too knew that Chicagos blood was hustlers blood. Knowing that Chicago [...] forever keeps two faces, one for winners and one for losers; one for hustlers and one for squares. / [...] / For all the poolroom tigers in checkered caps whove never seen a cow, and all the night-club kittens whove never seen a cloud. / [...] For all our white-walled asylums and all our dark-walled courtrooms, overheated district stations and disinfected charity wards, where the sunlight is always soiled and there are no holiday hours. / For hospitals, brothels, prisons and such hells, where patronage comes up softly, like a flower."

"Good times or hard, its still an infidels capital six days a week. / [...] Where only yesterday the evening crow crossed only lonely teepee fires, now the slender arc-lamps burn. / To reveal our backstreets to the indifferent stars."

"A town of many angry sayings, some loud and some soft; some out of the corner of the mouth and some straight off the shoulder. / “You make rifles,” the Hoosier fireman told ten thousand workingmen massed at a Socialist picnic here, “and are always at the wrong end of them.” / “Show me an honest man and Ill show you a damned fool,” the president of the Junior Steamfitters League told the visiting president of the Epworth League. / “I dont believe in Democracy,” the clown from the National Association of Real Estate Boards reassured his fellow clowns. “I think it stinks.” / “Ill take all I can get,” the blind panhandler added, quietly yet distinctly, in the Madison Street halfway house."