top of page
Search

The Loop Chicago Part 5

  • 6h
  • 38 min read

In this series, I explore the sights and scenes of Chicago’s Loop. Post 1 described my walk along Michigan Avenue; Post 2 covered State Street and Wabash Avenue; Post 3 followed Clark and Dearborn; and Post 4 was a walk down LaSalle. While the prior posts chronicled the Loop’s north-south streets, this installment turns to its east-west ones. I begin with Jackson Boulevard, walking from east to west.




Jackson Boulevard


Monadnock Building


The Monadnock Building at 53 West Jackson Boulevard is majestic in its sheer enormity:



The building was commissioned by the Brooks brothers, not to be confused with the owners of the eponymous clothing chain. Peter and Shepherd Brooks were Boston-based real estate investors who commissioned several buildings in Chicago, some of which still survive.


The Monadnock was designed as four office blocks connected by corridors, each named after a mountain in New England: Monadnock, Kearsarge, Katahdin, and Wachusett. The four blocks were intended to operate as independent towers, retaining their own names and having separate elevator banks, heating and plumbing systems, and entrances. According to an account by Joyce Goldenstern, the purpose was to make it easier to divide the property among the descendants of the Brooks brothers. Eventually, however, the entire structure became known as the Monadnock and was managed as a single commercial office building.


The northern half of this 16-story building was completed in 1891, and following its success in attracting tenants, the southern half was completed in 1893. Though the two sides look identical at first glance, closer observation reveals subtle differences. For instance, the roof of the southern side (left in the picture above) has a decorative ledge that is absent on the right.


There is a more fundamental difference between the two halves, one that reflects the evolution of architecture at the time. The northern half is primarily supported by brick, while the southern half is held up by a steel frame—a feature that soon became standard in skyscraper construction. As the Chicago Tribune explained, the southern side is “curtain wall” construction: the façade does not support the building; it is merely a “curtain” that keeps out the elements.

The walls of the northern half are six feet thick at ground level, for a functional reason. In the absence of a steel frame, the walls themselves bore the building’s weight, so the lower floors had to support the cumulative load of every floor above them. To prevent the structure from collapsing under its own weight, the walls became progressively thicker toward the base.


This created a trade-off for building owners. Adding more floors meant sacrificing rentable space on the lower ones, where thickened walls consumed an increasing share of the interior. Steel-frame construction, as used in the southern half, made it possible to build taller skyscrapers without that compromise because the load-bearing function of the walls was transferred to a steel skeleton. Verticality was, of course, also facilitated by another marvel of modern technology—the elevator. The Monadnock had eighteen of them!


A striking aspect of the building is that while its entrance (pictured below) is on Jackson, the side façade (pictured above), facing Dearborn and Federal Streets, is several times wider:



The building’s front entrance was originally designed to be on Van Buren, but construction of the “L” ruined the view on that side, leading the building’s management to do a “180-degree” turn.


The Monadnock’s size elicited a tongue-in-cheek column in the February 24, 1896, edition of the Chicago Tribune. The newspaper reported the findings of a mathematician who had calculated that the building’s 6,000 occupants exceeded the population of many Illinois towns. Should they all attempt to leave at once, the surrounding streets would not merely become crowded—they would stratify. Humanity, the mathematician warned, would stack itself into nine layers, with bankers and clerks balanced atop one another like a grim corporate wedding cake, while typewriters and law books threatened to rain down from the upper floors.


The Tribune’s depiction of thousands of people packed into an office building to serve “the Man” was prescient of an emerging cultural angst—the white-collar equivalent of Charlie Chaplin sliding onto the conveyor belt in Modern Times and becoming, quite literally, a cog in the machine.



Image: Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times


A scene from the silent film The Crowd (see below), which pans across hundreds of identical, systematically arranged desks, became a meme for white-collar dehumanization:




The cultural expressions of white-collar alienation have continued across generations, in works ranging from Office Space to Dilbert. But office workers have inspired not only artists; they have also inspired the mathematically oriented. One intriguing theory is the infinite monkey theorem, which posits that a monkey randomly hitting keys on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely produce the complete works of Shakespeare.


To test whether monkeys given enough time could produce Shakespeare, researchers at Plymouth University left a computer with six macaques. After a month, the literary output consisted mostly of the letter “s,” along with a damaged keyboard that had also served as a toilet. The monkeys had inadvertently replicated a familiar white-collar experience: spending all day at a keyboard and producing very little of value.


The two halves of the Monadnock Building were designed by different architectural firms. The north tower, like the Rookery described in Post 4, was the work of Burnham & Root.


Daniel Burnham was a pivotal figure in the architecture and civic life of Chicago. Those of us who have loved walking along the lakefront can thank the Burnham Plan of 1909. Coauthored with Edward H. Bennett, the plan laid the groundwork for Chicago to be remade with grand boulevards, an expanded lakefront park system, civic monuments, and modern transportation worthy of a global city.



Image: Chicago Lakefront


Burnham’s Chicago masterpieces include Union Station, the Santa Fe Building on Michigan (see Post 1), and Marshall Field’s on State (see Post 2). He also designed the famous makeshift “White City” for the 1893 World’s Fair—an event that commemorated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas and put Chicago on the world map:



Image: White City of 1893


Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root met as apprentices in 1872 and established their own firm the following year. The firm played a key role in shaping the architecture of a city emerging from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1871.


Root designed the northern half of the Monadnock, but died at the age of forty-one in 1891, while the building was under construction. By the time the southern half was to be built, Burnham was busy with the 1893 World’s Fair. The commission for the south tower therefore went to Holabird & Roche, whose Board of Trade building is a Chicago landmark.


The Monadnock’s façade is notable for its lack of ornamentation, in stark contrast to the Rookery, where we stopped by in the previous post. As the photo below shows, the Rookery is covered in carvings—a signature of John Root’s style:



Root had reluctantly set aside his stylistic preferences to accommodate Peter Brooks’s wishes. The Brooks brothers were also the primary investors in the Rookery, through the Central Safety Deposit Company, but they seem to have indulged Root’s artistic flourishes in that building.


It seems strange that a real estate investor would micromanage an acclaimed architect. However, this was par for the course for Peter Brooks. Joyce Goldenstern writes:


"Peter, especially, attended to details. Nothing was too minute for his scrutiny: paint color, faucets, urinals, plumbing, and elevators invited his long distance comments and commands. He was said to have in his study a grid-map of downtown Chicago, dotted with colored pins on which he studied the patterns of speculative office space. Like a chess master, he anticipated competitors’ moves and plotted his own. He knew each block, each corner lot and its potential by heart".

The previous post in this series referenced journalist Colin Woodard’s framework, in which he conceives of the United States as a mosaic of eleven regional “nations,” each shaped by distinct founding settlers and values. In his schema, the Brooks belong to “Yankeedom”—Americans of British Protestant ancestry, often beneficiaries of generational wealth dating to seventeenth-century East Coast settlement, who prized thrift, enterprise, and abolitionism tinged with moral self-assurance.



Image: Dearborn Street south view, 1907, Monadnock is on the right


Peter Brooks considered ornamentation a magnet for dust and pigeons that increased ongoing maintenance costs. In a twist of fate, this minimalism became a model for early twentieth-century architects. In the February 1949 issue of The New Yorker, Lewis Mumford wrote, “In the history of urban development in America, you will come across few office buildings that are as honest, as competent, as downright businesslike as Chicago’s old Monadnock Building.”


The line between the merely functional and the beautiful is often drawn retrospectively. Factories, workshops, and warehouses in urban neighborhoods like Printers Row in Chicago and SoHo in New York had high ceilings to dissipate heat generated by machinery, large windows to maximize natural light for workers, and minimal walls to allow flexibility in space utilization. Brick walls and utility pipes were often left exposed because decorative finishes added unnecessary cost. Today, these “hard lofts” command high prices as residential apartments.




The Monadnock is known for its ornate aluminum staircase:




It is interesting that the architects chose to include an ornate open staircase even though the building had elevators. Perhaps they were compensating for the lack of ornamentation on the exterior.


In Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator, David Dollenmeyer writes that from the late nineteenth century until about 1920, combined stair-and-elevator lobbies were common. Today, if you want to walk up the stairs in a tall building, you often have to search for the hidden staircase.


Dollenmeyer cites Zola’s Pot-Bouille—a novel of intrigues and scandals among the residents of a bourgeois Paris apartment building—as an example of a story that could only have emerged in an era when elevators had made multi-story buildings possible but had not yet supplanted the stairwell.


He argues that stairs made movement through a building continuous: you physically experienced everything between one floor and the next. Elevators, by contrast, turned buildings into discrete units—you think only in terms of “Floor 1,” “Floor 2,” and so on. This engendered a sense of social separation. Zola’s characters would not have encountered one another without the shared social world of the stairwell.


The buildings featured in these Loop chronicles display the three variants pictured below:



By emphasizing the stairwell through its design and the use of aluminum—an expensive metal at the time—in a building of such height, the Monadnock’s architects may have been countering contemporary perceptions of the stairwell. Dollenmeyer notes that growing bacteriological knowledge under Pasteur and Koch shifted public health concerns toward contact infections, framing stairwells as potential vectors for disease transmission.


Public health officials at the time believed that because stairwells were constantly used by people of all ages and professions from morning until night, they required rigorous cleaning, proper ventilation, and continuous illumination. Moreover, in North America, tall buildings needed to distinguish themselves from tenements—cramped, cheaply built apartment buildings that housed large numbers of working-class laborers and had become associated with disease, fire hazards, and harsh urban living conditions.



Image: Illustration shows the spirits of alcoholism, opium dens, prostitution, gambling, and street crime, as well as the figure of Death, issuing from a tenement house


The Monadnock Building holds a distinction in the history of aviation. On September 18, 1901, Wilbur Wright delivered one of his most famous speeches, titled Some Aeronautical Experiments to the Western Society of Engineers at the Monadnock. It was the first time the Wright brothers publicly disclosed their experiments with the gliders they had invented and were testing at Kitty Hawk.


While parts of the speech are quite technical, understandably so given its audience of engineers, Wright’s central message was simple: the challenge of flight lay not in designing wings or engines, but in learning how to steer an aircraft once it was airborne.


To the casual observer, Wright says, a bird appears concerned only with flapping its wings. Beneath that effortless appearance, however, lies a mastery of equilibrium as demanding as riding a fractious horse. Wright argued that, as with horsemanship, flight is learned not by standing on the fence and watching birds but by mounting the machine and mastering its quirks through experience. He suggested that many aspiring inventors of the era missed this insight because they were preoccupied with building the “perfect” machine rather than getting into the air with a functional prototype.


Quite remarkably, the Kitty Hawk experiments to which Wilbur Wright alludes in the speech were financed by a bicycle shop the Wright brothers operated. One is left to marvel that the enterprise that kept people’s feet a few inches off the ground helped create the machine that would carry them thousands of feet into the air.



Image: Wilbur Wright working in the bicycle shop 1897


Wilbur Wright had come to the Monadnock at the invitation of Octave Chanute, a French-American civil engineer who became one of the world’s leading authorities on aviation in the late nineteenth century. Their acquaintance began a little over a year before the landmark speech, when an unknown bicycle manufacturer from Dayton, Ohio, wrote a remarkable letter to the celebrated scientist that began with the sentence, “For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man.”



Image: Wilbur Wright's first letter to Octave Chanute


The Monadnock Building marks the early stages of a historic shift in which livelihood and home were no longer centered in the same place. Hunter-gatherers lived adjacent to where they foraged. In the agrarian economy, well into the eighteenth century, farmers and tradespeople such as blacksmiths and cobblers earned their livelihoods in or near their homes.


The proximity between home and work continued into the early factory era, when workers often lived in crowded tenements within or near factory premises. Factories and workshops were also frequently located within the city. For instance, the Fine Arts Building, built in 1885 and featured in Post 1, housed an assembly plant for Studebaker carriages as well as repair workshops on its upper floors.


By the late nineteenth century, urban transit made it possible for people to live farther from their workplaces without enduring the pollution and noise of urban factories. The ubiquity of cars in the twentieth century widened this separation further, accelerating suburbanization and increasing the distance between work and home.


With the internet, people may not even live in the same city as their “office.” Today, in the age of remote work, office buildings like the Monadnock, located in central business districts, face an existential crisis of occupancy, with some being converted into apartment buildings.


Union League Club of Chicago


Walking further west on Jackson, at 65 West Jackson, I was outside the Union League Club of Chicago:



The Union League Club of Chicago is a private club incorporated in 1879. It is what we would identify today as a rich man’s Republican club. Its original name, the Chicago Club of the Union League of America, was changed to its current one in 1882. The name and history of the club is rooted in the U.S. Civil War.


Following the election of Lincoln in late 1860, Southern states seceded from the Union. Claiming ownership of all federal property within its borders, on April 12 1861 the Confederate army opened fire to take Fort Sumter in South Carolina by force. This was the Gavrilo Princip moment of the Civil War.


Given Abraham Lincoln’s now-legendary stature, we think of the Civil War as an era in which all Northerners rallied behind their great leader. But to those who lived through it, Lincoln would have been akin to Lyndon Johnson or George W. Bush. As with Vietnam and Iraq, large sections of the Northern population bitterly opposed Lincoln’s policies, including the war, conscription, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the suspension of habeas corpus.


By the standards of the 21st century, everyone was a racist then. Singling out Northern opponents of the Civil War as uniquely bigoted would therefore be unfair. Many anti-war Northerners favored accommodation with the South as a means of preserving the Union. Others, such as working-class Irish and German Catholic immigrants, viewed the Republicans as a party of patrician nativists intent on imposing prohibition and forcing shops to close on Sundays. Hence, they viewed Republican endorsed policies with suspicion.


In modern times, intellectuals have invoked textualist interpretations of the Constitution to oppose rights such as same-sex marriage and abortion while carefully signaling their supposedly personal progressive preferences. In much the same vein, anti-war Northern editorials argued that, while slavery was immoral, it was constitutional and therefore beyond the federal government’s authority to abolish.


While the Constitution at the time did not explicitly acknowledge slavery, it firmly accommodated the institution. For instance, representation and direct taxes were calculated by adding the total number of free persons to “three fifths of all other Persons.” It is jarring for a modern reader to learn that this supposedly “conservative” argument was advanced by Northern Democrats.


The anti-war, anti-Lincoln Northern Democrats were dubbed “Copperheads,” after the poisonous snake. Some Copperheads embraced the label, proudly wearing cut-out Liberty heads from copper pennies as lapel pins.



Image: Delegation of Copperheads entreating a Southerner to return to the Union


Much like George W. Bush’s famous “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” formulation, Republican supporters of Lincoln framed anti-war Northerners as disloyal to the Union, portraying dissent as tantamount to treason. Incidentally, treason is the only crime explicitly defined in the U.S. Constitution, which originally mandated the death penalty for it. Lincoln passed legislation in 1862 making the death penalty for treason optional. By then, the Civil War had begun, and millions of Southerners would have had to be hanged even if the Copperheads were excused.


Initially, the war was going badly for the Yankees, which intensified anti-war opposition. It was against this backdrop that eleven men met in Pekin, Illinois, on June 25, 1862, to form the Union League of America. That August, a Union League council was established in Chicago. Union League councils soon proliferated across the Northern states. In his 1955 book Fight for a City: The Story of the Union League Club of Chicago and Its Times, Bruce Grant writes that by 1864, there were 1,300 Union League councils in Illinois alone.


Ideologically affiliated but operating independently, these councils championed nationalism, supported the war, and became “culture warriors” against the allegedly treasonous Copperheads. In some cities, such as New York, these “Loyal Leagues” were sponsored by Republican elites; elsewhere, they emerged from grassroots mobilization. These clubs conflated loyalty to Lincoln with patriotism and were often involved in violent skirmishes—a smaller civil war within the free states.


The bete noir of the Union League was the Knights of the Golden Circle. A colorful character named George Washington Lafayette Bickley founded the organization with the modest goal of annexing Mexico and Central America and establishing them as slave states. It would be more accurate to say he “claimed to have founded” it, because no one could prove that the organization ever existed. Nonetheless, it triggered an enthusiastic response from its Union League opponents. Bickley’s organization thus has a peculiar distinction: its enemies appeared far more certain of its existence than its members.


The wood engraving from 1865, pictured below, presents the theory that Abraham Lincoln’s assassination resulted from the influence of the Knights of the Golden Circle. The left panel, labeled “Theory,” features a three-quarter-length portrait of George W. L. Bickley, identified as the head of the Knights of the Golden Circle. The central panel, titled “Practice,” depicts Booth in profile, concealing a dagger behind his back. The right panel, “Effect,” portrays the slain president, his profile framed by black mourning drapery. I suppose the Indian equivalent would be Hedgewar, Godse, and Gandhi, from left to right!




Bruce Grant writes: “The average loyal citizen of Chicago in 1864 little realized that his city had been selected as the gathering place of conspirators and Southern agents to foment an uprising which the South hoped would result in the formation of a Northwest Confederacy.”


The Northwest Confederacy that Grant is alluding to was to be composed of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, and Ohio. Because the Southern states traded extensively with the Midwest via the Mississippi, the South considered these states natural allies.


Though Grant’s framing reeks of McCarthyite paranoia, there was some basis for it. In November 1864, Confederate agents and Northern sympathizers plotted an armed raid on Camp Douglas, a prisoner-of-war camp in Chicago. The conspirators intended to free the 8,000 Confederate prisoners held there on the eve of the 1864 presidential election and foment a pro-Confederate uprising across the Midwest.



Image: Camp Douglas, Chicago, Ill. 1864


A decade after the Civil War, the Union Leagues in Illinois, as in many other states, had disbanded.


In December 1879, a group of Chicago civic leaders revived the Union League idea by incorporating a new club, this time with the stated aim of promoting good government and fostering responsible citizenship.


The club also had a more immediate political objective: supporting Ulysses S. Grant’s bid for a third term. After remitting office in 1877, Grant embarked on a highly publicized two-year world tour. As the victorious General-in-Chief of the Civil War, he returned home to a wave of renewed popularity. Grant decided to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1880. His bid was controversial because, although the 22nd Amendment would not be ratified until 1951, an unwritten precedent had long discouraged presidents from seeking a third term.


The Club’s formation was timed to coincide with General Grant’s arrival in Chicago in November 1879, where a grand reception was held to celebrate his return to the United States:



Image: the ex-president reviewing the great procession from the Palmer House


In its early days, many of the city’s elites declined invitations to join the Club because they regarded it as a political outfit aligned with the Ulysses S. Grant faction of the Republican Party. But after Grant lost the nomination at the 1880 Republican Convention, and the Club began adding social amenities such as a members-only restaurant, Chicago’s grandees gradually embraced it as something else: an exclusive gentlemen’s club.


The Club’s political role, though diminished, did not disappear. Its political activities offer a mirror of the civic life of both Chicago and the nation. The Club’s crusades against City Hall corruption in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, alluded to in the previous post, occupy a considerable part of Bruce Grant’s book. One of its causae belli became voter fraud.


One man's voter fraud is another man's voter suppression. Given the Club’s Republican character, Grant’s account of corrupt electoral practices in late-19th-century Chicago should be taken with a sackful of salt, particularly since the book was commissioned by the Club itself. That said, the stories are undeniably regaling.


These include ballots cast in the names of dead residents and even historical figures such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, with votes emerging from vacant lots, saloons, and brothels. Partisan judges allegedly tossed unapproved ballots straight into the Chicago River. Political operatives broke into a county vault to replace genuine ballots with forged ones and falsify tally sheets, flipping a state senate race. In one particularly memorable episode, a voter testified that he was held upside down by his feet while casting his ballot—apparently an unconventional attempt to knock some sense into him before it was too late.


One suspects that modern Russian elections would strike 19th-century Chicago politicians as a welcome administrative reform: fewer moving parts, fewer broken heads, and, best of all, a much more predictable outcome.


Within a few years of its founding, the Union Club was successful enough to build its own headquarter. The building that opened on June 10, 1886 is on the same site as the current one. The architect of the original building was a member of the club, the celebrated architect William Le Baron Jenney, whose Home Insurance Building in Chicago (completed 1885) is widely recognized as the world's first skyscraper.



Image: the original club house depicted in 1887


Reading Bruce Grant’s authorized history of the Club, one is struck by how little the mechanics of politics have changed over the ages. In one chapter, he chronicles the first Washington Birthday celebration organized by the Club in 1887, an event that became a signature annual tradition.


The keynote speaker was the poet and essayist James Russell Lowell. Instead of the highly anticipated political address his audience expected, Lowell delivered a dry lecture on literary criticism and Shakespeare’s Richard III. The Republican-leaning crowd that had been hoping for some red meat about Chicago’s corrupt Democratic administration was livid. Personally, I suspect that those who walked out forfeited a thrilling explanation of a misplaced comma that had eluded Shakespeare scholars for centuries.


Lowell was accused of chickening out in deference to the “Mugwumps,” the 19th-century equivalent of today’s RINOs—Republicans in Name Only. But at the banquet later that evening, he redeemed himself by delivering the political speech his hosts had wanted all along. Faced with a choice between displeasing the Mugwumps and displeasing the men paying for dinner, Lowell’s courage returned.


In April 1917, the United States, under President Woodrow Wilson, entered World War I. That same year, the Club wrote to an estimated 95,000 German families in Chicago, urging them to place loyalty to America above allegiance to their ancestral homeland. The internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War is well known; far less remembered is the experience of German Americans during World War I.


Germans were one of the most significant ethnic groups in Chicago’s early years. By one account, one in four Chicagoans in 1900 was either a German immigrant or the child of German immigrants. The Old Town neighborhood where I lived was settled by Catholic immigrants from Germany in the 1830s. The entire area had been marshland, which these German farmers converted into meadows and gardens.



Germans faced racism from the moment they began arriving in large numbers in the mid-19th century. The prejudice was rooted partly in social hierarchy, as two-thirds of these immigrants were working class. Prohibition and Sunday-closing laws became wedge issues between Chicago’s Anglo-Saxon elite and its German community. Temperance advocates saw German beer culture and Sunday revelry as threats to public order, while working-class Germans, for whom Sunday was the main opportunity for sociability, viewed these laws as an attack on their way of life.


The suspicion of German immigrants among Union League Club members stemmed from ideological hostility rather than cultural chauvinism. As mentioned in the previous post, Chicago in the late 19th century was a hotbed of economic discontent and industrial unrest.



Image: police capturing "anarchists" in Chicago in 1886


Grant’s book offers an example of this suspicion. In the days after the Haymarket Riots of 1886, Union League Club member Sidney Corning Eastman circulated an open letter warning that Chicago’s immigrant communities had become vulnerable to radical politics. He pointed to the city’s 209,000 Germans, 28,000 Bohemians, and 23,000 Poles recorded in the 1884 school census, arguing that socialist elements had taken over some of their ethnic societies. He singled out Bohemian organizations that involved entire families and German Turner societies that, he claimed, had degenerated from “noble principles” into anti-American groups.


The handbill below, circulated in Chicago at the time of the Haymarket Riots, was published in both English and German:




Mr. Eastman’s singling out of Germans as socialists was at least partly rooted in the arrival of the so-called “Forty-Eighters,” who came from Germany in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848. At the time, “Germany” did not exist as a single country but was a collection of 39 independent states dominated by Austria and Prussia. Revolutionaries in these German states—students, intellectuals, liberals, and working-class craftspeople—demanded constitutional reforms and national unification. The rebellions failed, and many fled to Chicago to escape political persecution. Though they represented only a fraction of the growing German immigrant population, these newcomers spread radical ideas through local German-language newspapers.


In his open letter to the club, Eastman is careful to distinguish patriotism from “Know-Nothingism.” The Know-Nothing Party was a political movement of the time opposed to immigration, particularly that of German and Irish Catholics. It took its name from members’ instruction to answer questions about the movement by saying, “I know nothing.” The distinction between the Union League and the Know-Nothing movement reflects a dynamic we still see today between the mainstream and nativist wings of the political right.


When World War I began, German community leaders and ethnic newspapers advocated neutrality. The Union League Club of Chicago viewed such sentiments with suspicion. In September 1915, Horace L. Brand, a publisher, was barred from the Union League Club for what members considered “un-American” pro-German views expressed in the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, prompting him to ask, “Is pro-Germanism a crime?”


The political tensions simmering in Chicago echoed those unfolding across the country. A month after Mr. Brand was “cancelled” by the Club, Theodore Roosevelt, who had lost to President Wilson in 1912, famously declared, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.”



The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, which killed many Americans, and the 1917 Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany sought to enlist Mexico in a war against the United States, aggravated anti-German sentiment. In March 1917, the Club passed a resolution urging President Wilson to declare war. A month later, the United States entered the war.


According to one account:


The popular hamburger became a “liberty burger,” dachshunds became “liberty hounds,” and sauerkraut was called “liberty cabbage.

Chicago was not immune. The picture below shows an anti-German sign in the Edison Park neighborhood:




On November 11, 1918, the Armistice was signed:



Image:  Armistice Day celebrations in Chicago


The following month, the Club demanded the deportation of prominent Germans who had been interned during the war for allegedly anti-American activities. One of them, Count James Minotto, was the son-in-law of Louis Franklin Swift, one of Chicago’s wealthy meatpackers and a Club member.



Image:  Count Minotto freed under $50,000 bail bond


Count Minotto, who was later absolved, was accused of being a spy because of his close friendships with several high-ranking German diplomats and suspected spies. Ida Swift, like many other prominent women in Chicago, had to register because her marriage to Count Minotto had made her a German citizen. When the war began, Wilson invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to require all residents who were German citizens to be classified and registered as “enemy aliens.”


Beyond anti-German hysteria, the Club also reflected other social currents of the World War I years, including shifting gender roles. As men were deployed overseas, the Club, like many employers of the time, hired women. The ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 gave women the right to vote. Around this time, the slang “flapper” came into use for a stylish party girl. The 1923 postcard below, published in Chicago, is titled “Making a Flapper Out of Mother”:




Lest we think a brand-new era of feminism was upon us, the Club did not admit women as members until 1987—and then only in response to a city ordinance.


We respond to societal and economic changes, while our individual responses, multiplied across millions of people, in turn generate further social change, setting in motion a flywheel that continually reshapes society. We can see this dynamic in three actions of the Union League Club, each reflecting the broader zeitgeist of the time and, in turn, contributing to Prohibition in 1920.


One, the suspicion of German Americans evidenced in the Club's activities contributed to the broader paranoia that increased the undesirability of alcohol because many prominent breweries were German-owned.


Two, the hiring of waitresses mirrored the emancipation of women, many of whom were leaders in the temperance movement.


Three, the Club had to economize on food as farm output was affected by the deployment of farm labor. Bruce Grant talks about the Club barbershop barring egg shampoos and the bread, rolls, crackers, and pastry containing no wheat flour. Food shortages during World War I encouraged Americans to view the fermentation of grain into alcohol as wasteful.


Thus, while the temperance movement was nearly a century old, the time was ripe for Prohibition in the aftermath of the war.


World War I was followed by the Roaring Twenties, a decade of economic prosperity, unbridled consumerism, and social change. Amid the ebullience of the times, many icons of the Chicago skyline were constructed:



The Union League Club of Chicago, too, demolished its old building, replacing the five-story structure with a twenty-two-story building that opened in 1926.




The picture above shows the Federal Street entrance, which women used because they were not permitted to enter through the main entrance on Jackson. Bruce Grant writes:


On Tuesday, November 16, 1926, Queen Marie of Roumania and her entourage arrived at the women’s entrance on Federal Street with the sirens of a police motorcycle escort screaming and wailing. Not even a queen could come through the main entrance.

One man’s “animal spirits” is another man’s “irrational exuberance.” The large capital expenditure on the new building proved ill-timed. The stock market crash of 1929 marked the onset of the Great Depression. The Union League Club faced financial hardship as membership declined just as the mortgage on the new building came due.


The Club’s institutional lore includes the Million Dollar Room, a private dining room on the eighth floor that was wallpapered in 1934 with members’ “worthless” stocks and bonds. It was named for their pre-crash value and decommissioned in 1936 after members tested whether the recovering market had restored their worth.


As one would expect from a Republican rich man’s club, the Union League was staunchly opposed to FDR and the New Deal. Since principles are often colored by partisan preferences, the Club, unlike during the First World War, was extremely wary of American participation in the Second. Its public stance was that FDR should not be granted wartime powers without the express authorization of Congress. In November 1941, Herbert Hoover delivered a famous speech at the Club titled “Shall We Send Armies to Europe?” His answer was no. Unfortunately for him, the timing was ill-judged: Pearl Harbor was attacked the following month.


The first half of the 20th century encompassed two World Wars, the Great Depression, a disastrous flirtation with Prohibition that seeded organized crime in the country, women’s suffrage, and FDR’s radical transformation of the role of the state through the New Deal. These upheavals shaped the functioning of the Union League Club of Chicago and the concerns of its members. Amid these massive historical shifts, and through the less disruptive but still profound transformations of the postwar decades, the Club was also quietly acquiring artwork. Today, it holds one of the country’s most comprehensive private collections of American art:




While the Club began collecting artwork soon after its inception, an Art Committee was established in 1890 after additions to the building created dedicated space for an art gallery. In 1895, Club member Judge John Barton Payne bought a painting from an exhibition by an emerging painter at the Art Institute and later sold it to the Union League for $500. The Club sold the painting at a Christie’s auction in 2024 for $9 million to fund renovations. The artist was Claude Monet, and the painting was Pommiers en fleurs:





The Chicago Board of Trade


There is no way to miss the grand Chicago Board of Trade Building at 141 West Jackson:



The building, which sits at the intersection of LaSalle and Jackson, anchoring the LaSalle Street canyon, is significant to the global economy.


The Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) was founded in 1848. Its location in Chicago was shaped by the city’s geography. In the 19th century, East Coast cities were far more populous, while Chicago was still a frontier town surrounded by vast farmland. A crucial topographic feature—the Chicago Portage, a short overland crossing between the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers—linked the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River system. Chicago thus emerged as a trade hub where agricultural products from Illinois and the wider Midwest converged before moving north via the Great Lakes or south through the Mississippi.




Image: Crossing the Portage, Tablet, Marquette Building, Chicago


In 1848, two engineering innovations accelerated Chicago’s rise as a trading hub. First, a canal replaced the old Chicago Portage, allowing boats to pass continuously without unloading cargo for overland transfer. Second, the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad began linking the city to the surrounding countryside. The founding of the Board of Trade that same year was therefore well timed.



Image: 1862 map showing the location of the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad


In the beginning, wheat was the principal commodity exported from Chicago. Farmers from across Illinois brought grain to the city in horse-drawn wagons and sold it to grain merchants, who shipped it across the nation. The arrival of the canal and railroad in 1848 broadened the range of commodities and increased the volume of goods flowing into Chicago for onward shipment.


Though commodities trading today is associated with capital markets, the CBOT in its original avatar was simply a voluntary association of grain merchants that intervened in the physical trading process to solve practical problems.


One recurring issue was the glut of grain at harvest time: farmers all arrived simultaneously, flooding the market and crashing prices. The Board encouraged the construction of warehouses so grain could be stored and sold gradually over the following months. Even after paying storage fees, farmers often earned more because prices typically recovered once the harvest surge subsided.


While extending the period over which the harvest is sold smooths out supply and demand, it creates price risk. A farmer who stores his grain to sell six months after harvest may find that the price at that time is lower than anticipated. This encouraged the use of “forward contracts” between grain buyers and sellers.


Consider a farmer who, in June, is worried about the price he will receive for his wheat at harvest in September. The previous year, he received $5 per bushel, but this year he fears the price may fall. The local grain elevator, by contrast, worries that the price may rise. The two sign a forward contract under which the farmer agrees to sell his grain at a fixed price of $5 per bushel, with delivery and payment in September.


When the delivery date arrives, the market price has risen to $6. The farmer therefore forgoes the extra dollar per bushel—but he does not mind. The contract gave him peace of mind while planting and tending his fields.


The friction in the transaction above arose from the lack of trust between the grain buyer and seller, because there was no physical merchandise for the buyer to inspect on the “spot.” Would the two parties honor their commitments when the future delivery date arrived? Would the quality of the grain match what was promised? What would be the “correct” price of wheat at that future date, so that neither the buyer nor seller felt shortchanged? Would the weights and measures used at delivery be reliable?


In its initial years, the CBOT facilitated the kind of forward contracts described above by building the infrastructure needed to create trust. This included independent grain grading, standardized weights and measures, publication of prevailing prices, and rules for settlement. The exchange also helped ensure that buyers and sellers honored their commitments when payment and delivery came due. Grain sellers and buyers could therefore trade at the CBOT in Chicago with confidence that they would not be ill-served.


In 1864, the CBOT listed a “forward contract” that could be traded like a stock. By the time the CBOT moved to the site of its current building in 1885, it had become a hotbed of trading. The lithograph from 1886 below places the CBOT (in the top-right corner) on par with the great stock exchanges of the world:



Image: 1862 map showing the location of the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad


It is this stock-exchange-like version of commodity trading that can be confusing to the layperson. Anyone attempting to develop a generalist understanding of commodities trading is quickly swept away by an avalanche of financial jargon—futures, spot markets, contango, calendar spreads, cost of carry, and so on. But the underlying intuition of commodity trading remains the same as that of the simple forward contract described above.


To understand commodity trading as a capital-markets activity, we can add some complexity to the earlier example.


Instead of the grain elevator, the farmer transacts with a banker from Frontier Bank, who offers to pay $5 per bushel. At harvest, the farmer drives to the local grain elevator and sells his wheat at the spot-market price of $6, then pays the banker $1. If the spot price were $4, the banker would pay the farmer $1. The banker never touches the wheat and may be located hundreds of miles away from the farmer.


The banker is simply wagering on the future price of wheat in hopes of making a profit. On winning bets, he collects from the farmer; on losing bets, he pays out. Only one party—the farmer—ever touches the wheat. From the farmer’s perspective, the transaction with the banker serves the same purpose as the one with the grain buyer.


The Frontier Bank dude proves remarkably good at predicting wheat prices and earns handsome profits by signing similar contracts with thousands of farmers. Envious of this success, competitor Valley Bank enters the same business. But Frontier Bank and Valley Bank reach opposite conclusions about where wheat prices are headed: Frontier expects prices to rise, while Valley anticipates a fall.


Frontier Bank signs a forward contract to buy “phantom” wheat from Valley Bank at $5 per bushel in September. Neither side ever touches a single kernel. Instead, they settle the difference between the contract price and the September spot price in cash. If the spot price is $6, Valley Bank pays Frontier Bank $1 per bushel. If it is $4, Frontier Bank pays Valley Bank $1 per bushel.


In the terminology of the CBOT, the farmer and the grain buyer are “hedgers,” while Frontier Bank and Valley Bank are “speculators”—some might call the latter gamblers; more on that later.


The CBOT’s “forward contracts” of the 1850s eventually gave way to exchange-traded “futures.” Conceptually, the two are the same: both represent a commitment to make or take delivery of a specific quantity of a commodity in the future. In a futures contract, however, all terms are standardized except the price, which is discovered on the exchange.


For instance, at the CBOT, the contract size is standardized at 5,000 bushels. You cannot buy 6,000 bushels on the exchange; you buy one contract (5,000 bushels) or two contracts (10,000). The specific grade of wheat—soft red winter wheat, hard red winter wheat, and so on—must also be specified. Another standardized term is the expiration date: contracts can expire only in March, May, July, September, and December.


The forward-contract illustrations showed that no wheat need actually change hands between the two parties. The same is true of futures. Delivery occurs in less than 2 percent of all agricultural futures contracts traded. Even among that 2 percent, the vast majority of “physical deliveries” simply involve handing over warehouse receipts that confer ownership of the goods—analogous to handing over the valet ticket rather than the car.


It is ironic that that every detail of the wheat is meticulously standardized in a futures contract— so that nobody has to touch the wheat.


While a farmer can technically open a brokerage account and sell wheat futures to lock in prices, the vast majority do not trade directly on the exchange. Typically, during harvest, individual farmers load their trucks and drive to a CBOT-vetted grain elevator, a storage hub that weighs the shipment, tests the grain for quality (including moisture levels), and buys it from the farmer in the spot market. It is the grain elevator operators who hedge the risk that prices might fall before they can resell the grain.


Grain elevators are built directly alongside railroad tracks, major highways, or rivers, making it easy to ship commodities to global food companies.



Image: example of a Grain Elevator by the river


The principal advantage of an exchange-traded contract over a bilateral one is superior price discovery. A farmer, grain buyer, or food processor need not be constrained by geography.


Consider a grain elevator operator like Cargill that has purchased wheat from a farmer but plans to hold the inventory for several months before selling it to packaged-food companies. The distributor can hedge against falling grain prices by trading a wheat futures contract with a food company located in another part of the country, even though both parties buy and sell physical wheat through other entities in their respective local markets, thereby avoiding unnecessary freight costs.


The exchange-traded counterpart of the forward contract thus becomes a financial product akin to insurance. Through the exchange’s price auction, in which buyers and sellers compete, every participant can secure the best available price.


The original CBOT building on the current site, pictured below, opened in August 1885:




The tower, which featured an eleven-foot iron ship, was taken down in 1894 after showing signs of instability. The ship was later displayed in the exchange hall as a souvenir of the old tower.


A new building became necessary after construction of the Federal Reserve building, (described in the previous post), damaged the foundation of the older structure and rendered it unsafe. The old building was demolished, and the one that stands today opened in 1930. It remained the tallest building in the city for more than two decades.


Right by the CBOT, in the LaSalle Street Piazza, stand two statues:



The two statues represent agriculture and industry and once stood directly above the main entrance of the original structure, beneath the clock, though they are not easily visible in the postcard below:



Image: old CBOT building, pictured dated 1907


The statues were thought to have been lost forever when the building was demolished in 1929 to make way for the current structure. In 1978, Forest Preserve District officials uncovered the twelve-foot, five-and-a-half-ton granite statues at Hidden Lake Forest Preserve near Downers Grove, Illinois. The preserve had once been the estate of Arthur Cutten, a prominent Chicago Board of Trade speculator in the early 1900s.


Until the 1960s, floor traders physically traded with counterparties on the exchange floor—the pit. The photo below, from 1920, when the CBOT was still in its older building, shows traders in the Board of Trade’s wheat pit:




To enter the pit, you had to be a paid member of the exchange. Even today, with electronic trading, you must be a CBOT member to trade. This is similar to stock exchanges: while anyone can initiate a stock trade through a brokerage account, only a brokerage firm that is a member of the exchange can submit the trade.


A trader in the pit could trade exclusively for his own account. A floor broker, on the other hand, executed buy and sell orders on behalf of outside clients, such as corporate agricultural giants, institutional funds, or retail investors. They earned brokerage fees for obtaining the best possible quotes for their clients amid the chaos of the pit.


The photograph below, from 1900, shows the CBOT trading floor:




In the picture above, our eyes are drawn to the massive octagonal Wheat Pit in the center-right, the sun around which the rest of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) orbited. Less visible are the pits closer to the walls and windows for other grains, such as corn and soybeans, as well as provisions such as salt pork, lard, and other processed agricultural products. The stepped, octagonal pits created an amphitheater-like setting that allowed traders to see one another clearly.


The year 2015 marked the end of “open-outcry” grain futures trading. The pits were no longer needed as trading had moved to electronic platforms.


The CBOT lexicon, as mentioned earlier, distinguishes between hedgers, who are actually involved in the real world of the commodity and speculators who have a purely financial interest. But even speculators can be distinguished from gamblers. Thomas Sowell describes the contrast between speculation and gambling thus:


Speculation isn't evil in itself. It's not the same as gambling. When someone gambles, they are creating a risk that isn't there (e.g. playing the slots or poker when you don't have to). Real speculation, on the other hand, acknowledges the inherent risk in a situation (e.g. whether harvest season will boom or bust), and attempts to help people in that situation to make a profit over time.

In a contract where only one side is engaged in the physical commodity supply chain, the other side is clearly a speculator within Sowell’s framework. However, even in the scenario described earlier, where Valley Bank and Frontier Bank were wagering against each other, they may have been speculating rather than gambling. For instance, Valley Bank may have held a large “buy wheat” position with a farmer and offset that risk with a “sell wheat” position.


The distinction between speculators and gamblers is not an academic one. Gamblers can distort the physical commodity market, affecting farmers and consumers alike.


Consider a horde of traders who believe a glut of wheat is coming into the market and that wheat prices will fall to $4 per bushel in three months because India will lift its export restrictions. They rush to sell wheat futures at $5 per bushel, with delivery due in three months. The glut of sell orders drives the price of these futures down to $4, even though the anticipated lifting of India’s export restrictions never occurs.


Grain elevators see the future “paper” price fall to $4 and conclude that they will not be able to sell their physical grain for much more than that three months from then. Hence, when a farmer drives into the grain elevator, it offers him a lower price. In this way, the futures market can influence the physical market.


The ability to settle a futures contract without requiring physical delivery is enormously beneficial to the commodity supply chain. It allows participants to hedge price risk without transporting the commodity to a distant delivery point, creating at least a partial separation between geography and price discovery.


Yet this very separation also invites entities that are simply gambling on the price of agricultural goods. Freed from the need to maintain warehouses or transport grain, they can participate in the market with little connection to the physical commodity itself. The prevalence of this type of virtual trading in the years following the Civil War generated fierce opposition from organized farmer groups, eventually leading to heavy regulation of commodity exchanges.



Image: farmers lined up to deliver wheat to a grain elevator in Kansas


Banning entities outside the physical industry from trading would hurt industry participants themselves. A farmer who wants to sell corn at $5 per bushel may not find a physical commodity buyer willing to pay that price. But a hedge fund like Citadel may be willing to offer it if its research gives it confidence that corn prices will soar as more countries introduce ethanol fuel mandates in the near future.


Interestingly, one of the most audacious episodes of market manipulation in Chicago was carried out not by gamblers but by traders who controlled the physical commodity. In 1955, Chicago produce dealer Sam Siegel and onion farmer Vincent Kosuga accumulated roughly 30 million pounds of onions in Chicago warehouses, giving them near-total control of the city’s available supply. They then began heavily selling onion futures, after which they deluged the physical market with onions.


Prices collapsed. At the bottom of the crash, the bags themselves were worth more than the onions they contained, financially devastating farmers. In the aftermath, onion futures trading in the United States was banned—a prohibition that remains in force to this day.


As a matter of practicality, it is difficult to distinguish between gamblers and speculators. Operationally, unlike in real estate, where the buyer and seller contract directly with each other, the counterparty in a CBOT trade is the exchange itself. In the earlier example, the CBOT would be listed as the seller to Frontier Bank and the buyer to Valley Bank. Hence, you cannot tell who the real “other” party to a trade is. Stock trading works the same way.


The advantage of this intermediated approach is that traders do not have to worry about whom they are trading with. They can focus solely on market risk. This is very different from real estate, where, in addition to price, the buyer worries whether the seller has clear title and the seller worries whether the buyer will have the cash at closing. The risk never goes away but is assumed by the exchange for a fees akin to how insurance works.


Many would argue that gamblers provide an enormously valuable service. A hedge fund specializing in vegetable-oil futures, for instance, may anticipate that palm oil prices are about to surge because a pandemic has created a shortage of immigrant laborers in Malaysia, where workers are needed to hand-cut oil-palm fruit high atop the trees. When the fund begins buying palm-oil futures and bidding up prices, it transmits valuable intelligence to the broader palm-oil industry.


The history of wheat trading on the Chicago Board of Trade is analogous to the history of money itself. People initially transacted with gold coins, then with currency representing claims on those coins, and eventually with paper money detached from gold altogether. Wheat trading evolved in much the same way. Traders first exchanged physical wheat, then transferred warehouse receipts representing claims on stored grain, and eventually replaced even those receipts with futures contracts that often had little direct connection to the underlying wheat.


From its founding in 1848 to the 1960s, the CBOT dealt primarily in three agricultural products: wheat, corn, and soybeans. This legacy is reflected in the statue of Ceres, goddess of grain, atop the building, holding a sheaf of wheat in her left hand and a grain trader’s sample bag in her right:



The emphasis on grains is reinforced by the two figures flanking the clock:



On the left is a Mesopotamian farmer holding a sheaf of wheat, symbolizing the ancient origins of agriculture and grain trading. On the right is a Native American figure holding corn, representing the indigenous agricultural roots of the Midwest.


Starting in the late 1960s, the CBOT diversified into two major new categories: precious metals and securities. The latter marked a radical break from the past. Instead of betting on the future prices of physical commodities, traders were now betting on the prices of shares and bonds.


Another innovation was options. Unlike futures, where you buy and sell “phantom” wheat, in options you buy or sell the right to trade the "phantom" grain. Abstraction had now acquired a second floor.


The end of the Cold War, the establishment of the WTO, and the rise of Asia have expanded international trade in agricultural commodities, increasing price volatility—a trend further intensified by climate change. Technology, meanwhile, has enabled orders to flow in from across the world. A farmer in the Midwest now finds his prices shaped by events thousands of miles away. The need for risk-management products of the kind traded on the CBOT is therefore greater than ever.


In 1898, fifty years after the Chicago Board of Trade was established, a rival exchange—the Butter and Egg Board—was formed to trade futures contracts in butter and eggs. In 1919, the organization was renamed the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Nearly a century later, in 2007, the two rivals merged in an $8 billion transaction, bringing the CBOT under the CME umbrella.


While the trading pits have been dismantled, I was lucky that my visit coincided with Open House Chicago, when the basement vault was open to the public:



The vault was built into the basement in 1930. While commodities were stored in grain elevators rather than inside the building, the vault was used to store warehouse receipts, physical gold and silver bars, and various forms of collateral that traders required customers to deposit against margin calls.


The vault is secured by the massive steel door pictured below:



At the center of the door, inside the glass casing on the left, are four mechanical clocks. CBOT staff would wind the clocks and set a timer before closing the vault for the night or weekend. Once locked, the time lock physically prevented the door from being opened—even with the correct combination—until the set number of hours had elapsed. This prevented thieves from forcing employees to open the vault after hours.


Round vault doors of the type installed in the CBOT building were commonly used by banks in the early 20th century. While the CBOT vault door is a hefty 22 tons, the one installed at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in 1923 weighs 100 tons:



Image: vault door at the Cleveland Fed


While the Chicago Board of Trade vault door weighs less than the one at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, it is far more beautiful, suggesting that it was designed not merely for functionality but also for spectacle. The distinction is understandable. Unlike the Cleveland Fed, the CBOT had to attract customers who could choose among competing trading venues. In fact, the CBOT floated a separate subsidiary—the Chicago Board of Trade Safe Deposit Company—which issued bonds to finance the construction of the basement vault.


While we are on the topic of basement bank vaults, it is worth recalling the story of criminal masterminds Benjamin Wolfe and Anthony Gavin. In 1971, they rented the leather-goods store Le Sac, two doors down from Lloyds Bank, and built an underground tunnel between the basements of the two buildings. A year earlier, Wolfe had become a client of the bank, renting a safety-deposit box in its vault. During his periodic visits, he measured the room with his umbrella. The burglars walked away with an undisclosed fortune.


Sherlock Holmes fans will be reminded of The Red-Headed League:



Image: Strand Magazine illustration from The Red Headed League


The resemblance was not coincidental. The perpetrators were reportedly inspired by a Sherlock Holmes story. Another detail of note: the burgled Lloyds Bank branch was located on Baker Street.


Strangely, on the night of the robbery, a thirty-five-year-old man named Robert Rowlands intercepted the robbers’ walkie-talkie communications on his ham radio and alerted Scotland Yard. Unable to identify the precise target, the police summoned bank staff from their weekend break to inspect the premises. Finding the vault door locked, the employees assumed everything was in order, unaware that the burglars were already inside, having tunneled in from an adjoining building.


The loss of the reading habit is indeed a tragedy. The burglars, at least, had done their reading.


Walking past the Board of Trade, I stopped to take in the Insurance Exchange Building at 175 W. Jackson:



The building was completed in 1911. A nearby building with the same name was demolished around the same time. Below is a striking aerial view of the city taken from this building in 1912:




Wrapping Up


An alien from another planet walking down Jackson Boulevard in the Roaring Twenties would find little difference between the white-collar workers of the Monadnock Building, the revelers of the Union League, and the pit traders at the Board of Trade. It was a make-believe world of abundance.


Schopenhauer famously wrote, “To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence... But if he lacks opportunities for this, he will create them as best he can... merely to have something to do in order to ward off boredom.” Those who worry that AI will lead to job losses underestimate humanity’s ability to create beautifully complex, entirely unnecessary work simply to keep the theater of human industry running.


It was time to call it a day. I’ll be back shortly with the last installment of this Loop series.






Comments

bottom of page