EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK

Geography no longer
defines who we are, but culture does

by Peggy Boyer Long

Suburbanites are suspicious of Chicago. Chicagoans look down on the suburbs. And true "downstaters" wish the top third of the state would secede. Right? Well, not exactly. That's what many politicians and journalists believe. But recent scholarship shows that most of us spend little time calculating the advantage of one region over another. And where we live turns out to have little bearing on what we think.

University of Illinois political scientists Peter Nardulli and Michael Krassa surveyed Illinoisans in the late 1980s and found little evidence of regional self-consciousness or regional divisions in opinion. Most people thought Illinois was composed of regions, but almost a third couldn't name one. "More people named southern Illinois and northern Illinois [as constituent regions] than Chicago," Nardulli and Krassa noted. "This is startling in a state that has been talked about by academicians and political and media elites in terms of 'Chicago and downstate' for the better part of a century.... Only 22 percent of Chicagoans identified Chicago as a distinct part of the state." Meanwhile, Nardulli, and colleagues Michael Frank and Paul Green, took a closer look at regional voting patterns. What they found is equally surprising: "The Chicago-downstate dichotomy characterizes Illinois elections in only seven of the 22 elections in this century, and no election before 1944."

So much for conventional wisdom. Still, regionalism does have historical roots. And it is worth noting the ways in which geography has influenced the state's social and political culture.

Writer Harold Henderson does just that in his essay beginning on page 12. But Henderson's interest lies in the culture, not in the geography. "Where we live," he argues, "has gradually become less important than who we know and how we think."

Henderson traces three dominant cultures that settled Illinois, generally by region. The traditional southern culture settled at the bottom of the state. The reformist Yankees settled at the top. And the independent-minded business and farming classes settled in the middle. The civic moralism of the Yankees constituted a minority voice. Thus, Illinois developed an individualistic political character, one that leaves to the "professionals" the job of dividing the political spoils so the rest of us can get on with other pursuits. Later immigrants were left to adjust to this dominant culture.

But if regional boundaries are permeable, culture can be fluid, too. The faces of Illinois are continually changing. James D. Nowlan notes in his analysis, beginning on page 21, that the state is becoming more racially diverse. "In 1950," he writes, "one in 13 Illinois residents belonged to a minority group in 1990 the proportion was one in four and by 2020 it's expected to be one in three." Hispanics and Asians make up a growing proportion of the population. And over the long haul, they could help reshape the social and political landscape.

These two articles, as well as the photo essay beginning on page 24, are part of our effort to understand who we Illinoisans are and who we might become. They are made possible by a grant from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

4 / May 1998 Illinois Issues