#1566 How To Be a Chautauquan

I've been doing some Oppenheimer performances and want to do more because of the sensational film of Oppenheimer that Christopher Nolan produced this summer. So how do you? how do you work one of these up? How? what do you do? And I want you to know that. In our hour long conversation, Stephen Decrow of DeKalb, Illinois, and I, we never once mentioned costume. I've made a number of Chautauquan rules over a lifetime of performing.

And one of them is anyone who starts with the costume is going to be a terrible chautauquan. The costume is the last and least part of it. The most important thing is to understand the character, to try to suss out the mystery, to see what their basic view of life is, to be true to their view of life, it's not always pretty. An immense amount of reading, primary work, biographies, and actual works written by these historical figures.

And then secondary works, histories of that era, histories of American poetry, in the case of Steve's work. All those things are really important. Reading, and so you can read 10, 15, 20, 30 books just to get the background. To perform as Aaron Burr or Abigail Adams, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton or W.E..B du Bois. Then you have to turn it into something, a piece of performance art, and that's a whole different business.

And memorization, you know, memorization is always hard, It gets harder as you grow older, but you have to memorize some of the literature. You know, you can't paraphrase the Declaration of Independence, you can't paraphrase Meriwether Lewis's exaltation on leaving Fort Mandan and heading into the wilderness in April of 1805..

If you were doing Thoreau, you can't paraphrase the greatest passages in Walden. You have to memorize them. And then you have to be able to deliver them on stage, which is a very intimidating sort of thing to do anyway, and you have to deliver them organically. It can't be just a series of set pieces with continuity between them, it has to unfold in some logical and organic way. The audience has to be able to follow what you're trying to create.

Anyway, it's a really interesting conversation. I admire his work, he's a beautiful reader, actually, reciter of the poems. And I hadn't really thought about Rachel Lindsay for a very long time.

Now I will go back and read some of his poetry. He read a really extraordinary poem about Buffalo, which is on my mind because of the Great Ken Burns documentary on Buffalo that's premiering on PBS on the 16th of October. I'm in it, I don't know how much I'm in it. But I'm in the 32nd teaser. And I'm told by people who were in the editing booth that I'm in it quite a bit.

So I'm thrilled and honored, and humbled and delighted. I always worry, like, what did I say, what did I get wrong? what will I cringe at? Um, you know, your first desire is to be in it.

Your second desire is to be in it in a way that makes sense and not to say anything terrible. Uh, or something that would touch off controversy. As I once did in a Ken Burns film on Theodore Roosevelt by saying that he was a man who liked to kill things, which, of course, is 100 true. But the protectors of the flame don't like to think of their man, Theodore Roosevelt, in quite that way. So it's a wide ranging conversation about the preparation of Chautauqua characters. I recommend it. And one thing we did not get to talk about, which is important, is that it's a very different thing to talk about. Thomas Jefferson, or to be Thomas Jefferson, you know, it's easy to talk about things with our 21st century sensibility and our own sense of judgment, and so on.

But once you're in the character, then you have to try to think, well, what would he or she say on that occasion? How would Jefferson explain his ownership of enslaved people? I know what I think about it as a historian and humanities scholar. But to be Jefferson, it's one thing to talk about Lewis's Meriwether Lewis's mental fragility. It's quite another to be Meriwether Lewis.

And I think that's the real purpose of Chautauqua is that it dramatizes that, which we tend to look at from a kind of linear, Apollonian, left-brained way, analytical way, evaluative way. When it's actually a history, at its best, is a encounter with the past by way of a rigorous imagination. And so that's one of the reasons I think that the Chautauqua Forum is a valuable one. It can go wrong, and man, have I seen it go wrong? But when it's good, it really can light up a conversation about the past.

After the podcast ended, you know, we have to stay within the clock. We talked a little bit more, he wanted to talk a little bit about my book, The Language of Cottonwoods, and we talked a little bit about Spirit of Place. And so I'm going to include that now as sort of extra content here, and I'll come back for just a minute after that.

But I so much appreciate your listening. I hope you'll tell everyone you know if you can help us out in any way. We have five or six big initiatives, still need that ranch, still need some gas cards, etc. But let's first of all, let's listen to the conversation that occurred once the formal program on how to be a Chautauquan ended.

That was terrific, I hope you liked it.

I just, I wanted to say, people need to read this, people need to read this book.

It even Lindsay's gospel of beauty is really, in some ways, is talking about the seven points you have about, you know, the remedy. We need to really support artists, we need to write about North Dakota, we need to do art about it.

We need to get out into it. We need to take students out on buses to see North Dakota, feel the wind in the prairie and see these places. And and we need to get out into nature. I mean, that that is tied in with that, so Lindsay, and it's really, it's beautiful writing.

You should be, you should be so proud.

Which is a good question because North Dakota has become a hard read state. It's sort of Tucker Carlson's America now, or at least it pretends to be, and this really is disturbing to me.

I'm absolutely fine with conservative, even strong conservative, but I don't like angry grievance, rage, vendetta, conservative. Retribution, I guess, will be the key word in the future here. That really seems to me to be degrading to the human spirit. And I don't know where that came from, and I don't know how soon we're going to work it out of our system.

But we have got to.

So I believe in spirit of place, and so I moved here. Not for the politics, and not for the antique restaurants and theater, um, not for the vibrant book culture. I moved back to my home because I believe in the Great Plains, and I believe that, uh, that I am a child of the Great Plains. And that if I'm so glad I didn't, I wasn't born in Milwaukee or um, or, or Providence or Tampa. Because there's something about the Great Plains. That, uh, that evokes bison and Native Americans, and cottonwood trees and lazy rivers, and endless seas of grass, and, uh, a sense of of, of being swallowed up by the sheer immensity of America's grasslands.

And I absolutely love that, uh, but it comes at a price. Um, but I can't imagine my life without spirit of place, somewhere near the center of it. And I was hoping in that book to to evoke that in a number of different ways, so I appreciate that very much, Stephen.

So that was really kind of of of Stephen to say about my book. Uh, I've had several conversations in the past month of people that that found the book. Speak to them, even though they do not live on the Great Plains. But that, but somehow it, it, it gets close to the heart of of of rural America, the heartland. The way we're being abstracted and drawn away from, uh, land and spirit of place, uh, so fantastic, you know? Um, in every author's greatest dream is that somebody somewhere reads the book in the spirit that she wants it to be read in. And so when people do, better to have that comment than to sell 150 books that people are maybe going to glance into, and maybe not. So that was a delight.

So thanks to Stephen for bringing that up. This is a strange and wonderful time in my life. Uh, it's a it's a new era. I'm in the I'm in the last three innings of my life, let's put it that way.

And uh, but things are cracking and it's going to be an extraordinary few years. And, uh, and I want you along for the ride, so let's go to the show. Thanks for listening.

Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. Today. The Chautauqua method I'm talking with Stephen Ducro of Dekalb, Illinois, about how you create a Chautauqua character by Chautauqua. I mean, a person who dresses up in costume and presents spontaneous monologue in character. In the character of Abraham Lincoln, or the character of Abigail Adams, or, in my case, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and others.

And Steve, as I understand it, you've been involved in promoting the arts now for many, many years. You're now retired, and you've taken on the character of Carl Sandburg.

I think we hear those words when I first heard those words, and I first heard Lindsay's Gospel of beauty. Those words. I mean, they animate you, they get inside you, you, you, you have to say them, and you're almost, I don't know if you feel this way, you're almost possessed in that. You have to say them for other people because you believe in them so strongly that if since they've animated you, you feel that. If you stand in a public square, you say them to other people that it will animate them and move them forward toward whatever end. That is with making the democracy better, furthering the enlightenment, stopping, you know, uh, economic, uh forces and industrialization from rolling over. People. You feel like those words matter and they make a difference.

Mr. Shannon, my English teacher. These words were alive with them, and they performed them, and they had timing, and they had comic timing, and they were passionate. And so you see that you see your uncle's telling stories in small towns, which I grew up in a small town, you hear these stories. And so that sense of theater, you know, sort of becomes you when you start to notice. Well, that was really funny. Or he paused just a little bit before they delivered that line.

And so you you begin to see these things and then hopefully use some of those tools. When, when you're in front of people and in trying to say these words that you hope will inspire them.

You could be performing as Alexander Hamilton or Aaron Burr, um, or Gerald Ford for that matter, but you want to do poets, not historical figures per se.

It may be, it may be six. Um, I know it took him decades to write it, he started, Sandberg started writing out, he just wanted to write a children's book about Lincoln. And then suddenly he worked on The Prairie years, and then, and then he worked on, uh, you know, the four or five, six volumes of the War years.

And and he would say things like, Ain't it hell? The way the book walks up to you and makes you write it, you know? Because he was compelled and had to had to flesh out Lincoln because he felt he was so important. But, uh, Sandberg and Lindsay, now Aaron Burr would be, uh, would be interesting and fun, uh, and then you and Hal could mop the floor with me during some type of discussion.

So he had that gruffness, he had, uh, a musicality about to, about the way he talked, and he had that Swedish and somewhat Irish, uh, flair. That was in his, you know, in his natural way of speaking.

Uh, it's worth hearing him read, He's, He is splendid and magnificent.

He in the 1912 Bull Moose campaign, he sat down with the new world of Uh, Phonograph and recorded a few campaign speeches. Um, but he lowered his voice and it doesn't really capture him. But we do know that much about him and we have many descriptions of how he talked. But I make almost no attempt to recreate the language. I come at it as a historian, as a humanity scholar, and I use the character sort of lightly, as a, as a delivery system for their outlook on the world and their ideas. But let's back up, Steven, I. When I met you again a couple of years ago, um, now in in your part of the world, I was doing a one man Shakespeare sort of thing.

Uh, and you announced that you were interested in doing Carl Sandburg and wondered if we could communicate about that. And I was, of course, glad to do that. So, let's start with Chautauqua 101. You, you chose this character, now what?

That's, I think, what a lot of some of the characters you're talking about, but Sandburg and Lindsay, especially. They they were place mattered, place was democracy for them. That's what you want to be able to do is is get people excited about the words and about place.

Uh, they may not be able to do much. But, you know, whenever I go to Chicago, I automatically find myself saying, Chicago hog, butcher of the world, toolmaker, stacker of wheat. Um, you can't help it. It's, it's. It's his most recognizable single poem, because it's so, it's such an enormously insightful and beautiful evocation of Chicago. At a certain point in its history, it was a central place on the railroads.

It was one of the nation's great stockyards. It was a vibrant, kind of frontier, rough western city, in contrast to, say, Boston, Philadelphia and New York. And Carl Sandburg nailed it. But. But we have to take a break here in a minute. But, uh, you said research and then went straight on, Uh, you made it sound like that's a simple thing.

What do you have to do?

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm speaking with Stephen Ducro about how to create a historical character. I do eight or nine, I've done more in the course of my life, you do two.

You've come at it from a background in the arts, I come at it from a background in English literature and the humanities, so research. If I were going to start with Carl Sandburg, I would do the following. I would start by going to like Wikipedia or Britannica online and reading a simple three-page biographical sketch of the person of Sandburg. So that at least I knew when he was born and when he died, and so on. Um, I assume you do that, but you probably already were familiar enough with both Rachel Lindsay and Sandburg to not be starting from scratch.

But then what, how do you? How do you come to terms with the life of a complicated person like Carl Sandburg? What do you read?

Portray with Lindsay, the solo Penniless walks as a mendicant and beggar across the country. With the absurd notion of I'm not going to carry any money, I'm not going to carry any baggage. Except for my poems and the Gospel of Beauty and a few drawings. And I'm going to arrive on people's doors and saying, I'm the peddler of dreams. And if you allow me to recite tonight, I'll give you an, uh, a reading in exchange for food and lodging. And you know, if somebody did that today, they they'd arrest.

But, uh, so you start, you start reading the prose of them, if it exists. Adventures while preaching the gospel of beauty, a handy guide for beggars. You have his collected poems, you find his letters.

You start searching on a books for essays that have been written, you find dissertations and pull. But you're, you know, you're, you're constantly looking for this late at night, when, maybe when Netflix is on and you're just tired of your, you're on looking. It's like, Oh, there's a dissertation on on Lindsay. There's a book called The Other Sandberg where somebody's saying, Well, he was really a socialist, and boy, he was, you know, really radical. And nobody talks about that. This citizen, this beloved citizen, that's not who he was.

So you you begin to look at all these different sources, and I think you travel. I haven't traveled to Virginia. To see where Lindsay's maps and letters are. I do need to go to the University of Illinois. I don't know how to describe it.

It's just this ravenous, like, I know there's more. Maybe this history isn't complete, so maybe if, oh wait, this guy spoke at the Lindsay House in 1978, that pamphlet's not even around. Let me order that for $50, and then here's this promotional item that Lindsay is. 10. Lectures on cultural diversity delivered right after the race riots in 1908..

I got to get that. So you, you, you start just immersing yourself in finding all those sources, reading them and putting the story together.

I'd have a little biographical epitome and I write all that down, but that's the easy part. But I would try to cram into one page of typescript. Everything that you have to know, everything that's absolutely essential to know about that incident. So that two years from now, if someone calls and says, Oh, please come to DeKalb to, uh, to do a performance as Roosevelt, we want you to talk about the wildlife refuge system. On the plane, I can be paging through, I create these sort of, uh, notebooks that have the sort of glassine slots I can be paging through. Until I find the one pager, as I call it on the wildlife refuge system. And then I go over those facts, okay, that was 1903..

Uh, the attorney general was Philander Knox, uh, the first one was was in Florida, uh, there were 51 that followed. They weren't named wildlife refuges, they were called federal bird sanctuaries.

And all that data is on a single sheet. Which for Jefferson, uh, would also be the circumstances around which he wrote the Declaration of Independence in June and early July of 1776. But they helped me organize my thinking and and remind me that this is about story, these, this work is about stories, it's not about abstractions. Although there are some. And so I found that to be an extremely useful method for me. Not everybody would would would do it in the same way.

And, as you know, I'm militant about not having a memorized script.

So now, now there's his relation, now there's William Butler Yates, you know, there's something with, there's a connection of Yates and Lindsay, and now there's Sandberg and Lindsay's. How did they get along? What letters are between them?

There's Lindsay and Hamlin, Garland, like Garland was a big supporter of of Lindsay. You know, you start to run into these other characters, so it just it just begins to grow and to grow and gets bigger and bigger. Which so, pulling it down to one page forces you to make some choices about material and get the stories because you're right. Uh, the trap is memorizing.

And it's also the hard part, cause you have to, you have to memorize some of it. It really is Randy Otto talked about. He does a churchill, a wonderful churchill, and talks about this wonderful encounter with Hal Holbrook, he said. You know, Hal said. It's the stories, like, you know, and it's transitions between that really, really matter.

Thank you, Randy for sharing that with me. But but that's it, it's it, it is story, cause all art is story.

There are plenty of Hamilton's now, uh, lots of Abigail Adams, Emily Dickinson's, you know, they're they sort of cluster and in a certain set of characters that are our household names. So I wouldn't take on a character like Rachel Lindsay today. Because the phone's not going to ring now, maybe it will ring a little bit more in Illinois than it would on the Great Plains. But but I. One of the first characters I ever did was Hamlin Garland.

I love him. He wrote one of the best autobiographies ever, Some of the Middle Border. His most famous book was Main Traveled Roads. He was a lover of the agrarian, was a big figure in the sort of era of Theodore Roosevelt, but he's utterly forgotten today, even on the Great Plains.

I try to get people to read some of the middle border. They just glare off into the distance. You need to choose somebody that people are going to be interested in. Back to method. So you've done all this reading?

How many books do you, would you say you have to read to become Carl Sandburg?

I suppose somebody could do it in five. They could read Penelope Niven's biography of Sandburg and find it, but I don't. I don't think so. You got to read the letters.

You got to read the biographies, you've got to, you've got to fight.

So that's true of of some characters. If you do, Lincoln, you know, you better be able to. Quote from the Gettysburg address of the second inaugural address and the letter to the mother of the of the Fallen. Because otherwise, you're not going to be adequate if you choose a literary character, as you have done twice now. They have a huge body of poems and other writings, and you have to be able to not only memorize them, but master them so that you can perform them on stage. How many poems of Sandberg do you think you've memorized right now?

It could, it could be more. Some of them are short fizag or primer lesson or losses. They're, you know, short poems, and then there's more challenging ones, like Chicago, which is a great poem. But, you know, there's a rhythm and A and a energy you need to bring to it, and it takes a while to learn and keep it fresh.

Don't you think sometimes you've done your, your work, your memorization, work on some things? And then you don't do it for a while? And then it's like, Oh, and I faster to learn it again, but you still have to stay on it.

And at one point, I if the Santa Fe Trail, I mean, is a very long poem, and at one point in my life I had it all. Not now. You just, you just can't stay on top of that much, you know that much, Lindsay.

There's cause, there's a lot, there's a lot of it.

In days of long ago ranged, where the locomotives sing, when the prairie flowers lie low, the tossing, blooming, perfumed grass was swept away by the wheat. Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by. In the spring that is still sweet, but the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring left us long ago. They gore no more.

They bellow no more, they trundle around the hills, no more, with the black feet lying low, with the pawnee lying low, lying low, lying low.

I don't know how much I'm in it, but I've seen at least I'm in. The 30-second teaser that's being used on public television around the country. And I'm told by people from the inside that I'm in it quite a bit. And I put together a bibliography for books on Buffalo last night and about to post on my website. And I've been scouring my library, which is a mess, but I've been scouring it for books on Buffalo. So here you are.

I asked you to recite a poem. You could have recited one on Ghosts in a Cemetery or The Lost Love of a Maiden who died young. Instead. You, you, you did this poem about Buffalo, which really speaks to me, and so now I will go get that poem. And that's how it works.

I think, Steven, you know, when I was in college at the University of Minnesota, I had a professor named Arthur Geffen. He now lives in Greater Chicago. He's been retired for a long time. He was quite a character and he taught American literature. And one day in class, out of the blue, this was like a class in Melville, I think. Or Whitman.

He recited a sonnet by William Wordsworth that I that, in a sense, it changed my life. The world is too much with us late and soon getting and spending. We lay waste our power as little there is in nature that is ours. We have given our hearts away assorted boon and on and on. And when I heard it, I was mesmerized.

If he had read it, I would have been less so that he recited it, deepened it by magnitudes, and I was. I love the the the theme of the poem, which is that sort of. The scientific revolution and the enlightenment have basically squeezed the spiritual music out of the world and turned it into mere commodity. And and Wordsworth says at the end, Great God. I'd rather be a Pagan suckled in, a creed out worn, that he would, he'd like to. He'd like to jump over the whole Christian dispensation back into the Pagan world and hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. And so that changed my life. I memorized that poem almost immediately.

I, I recite it when it's appropriate, a few times per year, I think that's how it works. And so you've made this poem on the Buffalo come to life for me. And I assume that if you're giving a performance in Aurora or, uh, Dekalb, uh, or, uh, Peoria, that somebody in that audience, it's going to hear. Something they never heard before and couldn't have had the same appreciation for if they saw it on a written page in a high school or college textbook, so that's the magic of oral traditions.

And, of course, we've lost them. And, frankly, most poets that I have ever heard in my life are terrible readers of their own poetry. I can't believe how poor readers they, generally speaking, are of their own work. You really gave that some drama. How and why do you know that?

That's how Lindsay would have done it.

And I'm kind of giving my own flavor. And the recordings of Lindsay, I don't think, do him justice, but he was a great reader. You should, you should listen to, go to Penn, Penn Archives or Penn Sound and listen to him read The Virginians are coming again. Uh, you know, or the Santa Fe Trail. You'll you really get the quirks of Lindsay in there. But I think it's diminished by 50. I think you have to, you got to listen to him and then add another 50 and and now now, you've got, now you have Lindsay.

So, but those it comes back to, those words get in you, you, you say them over and over again. I mean, it's you walk around with a book in your hand. Till you know them, and you're say them out loud in your home. And you know if people are looking in the windows, they're like.

Go, he really lives next to us because you have to say these words, you, you. You have so hearing that poem and being touched by it, you want to bring it to life and it, you're really animating the words. Uh, I think sometimes these poems by Sandberg and Lindsay, and even Jefferson's words, or Gouverneur Morris's words. We, the people, they're these sentinels, these silent sentinels that have been left somewhere. And they're activated when people read them, and if you read them in a public square to people, then you animate and activate these guardians. These words that are pushing us forward, not backwards.

Welcome back to Listening to America with Clay Jenkins. I'm talking with Steven Ducro of Dekalb, Illinois, performer of Chautauqua characters Carl Sandberg, and also the poet Rachel Lindsay, So back to Chautauqua 101. You read five, 10, 15 books, clearly you start to memorize, particularly if it's a poet. At some point. You have to outline, you know, so that sometimes I'm I'm at a rotary club and you've got 20 minutes.

Another time I've got an hour and a half, maybe you're in on a media call and you've got six minutes. So you have to ask yourself, what has to be in any Sandberg program? you cannot give a Sandberg program without what? So what would you say that is?

Those who saw the buffaloes are gone, and the buffaloes are gone.

It's called a coin. Your Western heads here cast on money. You are the two that faded away partners in mist lunging Buffalo shoulder lean Indian face.

We who come after where you have gone, salute your forms on the new nickel.

You are to us, the past runners on the prayer.

Goodbye.

And so partly by policy, but mostly in sort of just a kind of cultural dynamism. We essentially exterminated the Buffalo, and at one point we were down to fewer than 500 on Earth. At the height of when Lewis and Clark came through, for example, there might've been as many as 50 million. We erased them, and now that they're gone, there's a nostalgic commemoration. Somehow, their nobility is in the loss, but we will ennoble them in their sense of tragic loss. I get it.

I like that icon. But it's also, in a sense, deeply offensive because it wants to lock a nostalgia in for a creature that came so close to extinction. That the gene pool has been an issue ever since. And so I love that theme, and I think Sandberg understands that, you know, he's not a New York poet, he's not a Los Angeles poet, he's a Midwestern poet, right?

One, they were born in the Midwest, and two they wanted to innovate. And in the literary world, that's original sin. But getting back to the Buffalo in the I just started reading the Beyond, the Hundredth Meridian and in the notes that Wallace Stegner has. He claims that in one of the books, they talk about measuring the tonnage of bones of buffaloes. And the estimate on the Santa Fe Railroad is the weight of the bones would have been 31 million buffalo removed from Kansas alone. Another gentleman talks about standing by the railroad tracks and seeing 12 foot high piles of bones going a half a mile in length.

So the you can't, even you can't even imagine this, but these poems help us get to this tragic loss, I think.

And yet we are that civilization, right?

Unchallenged, I'm the dimaggio of shooting buffaloes.

You know, most people I meet, including highly educated people, say, I just don't get poetry, I can't do poetry. And so today I think Rachel Lindsay would have a would have a rough walk. I want to go back to Sandberg for a moment, so what everybody knows about Sandberg, who knows anything about Sandberg?

Is that he wrote this immense biography of Lincoln and that he wrote the fabulous poem Chicago? He was maybe a socialist, he was a reformist, he was a critic of American civilization, would have been seen in some circles as a radical.

He, uh, he believed in that, and he, he would say things like, And if I fail at this task, it's because I simply could not do any better. He wrote The Dago Shovel Man, which is like one of the first poems that takes an Italian immigrant and treats them seriously. And not not as a comic character. So, yeah, Sam Sandberg was invested in taking the common man. He said. Uh, to write about the lowly, you need to know the lowly.

I knew the lowly.

Oh, if led by the spirit, they should wander the whole nation in the search of the secret of democratic beauty. At the same time, with our hearts overflowing with the righteousness of God.

But then they should come home and they should come back to their own hearth in neighborhood, and they should gather a little circle of their own sort of workers about themselves. And strive to make the home and the neighborhood more beautiful and more democratic and more holy with their special art.

Gospel of Beauty by Rachel Lindsay.

And then he'll go into story and he might start talking about millionaires. Millionaires who laugh are rare. He'll talk about Woolworth, and he'll talk about Bill Wrigley and Marshall Field. And then he'll morph into things about Hell, where he said, You know, Milton and Dante wrote about hell, never saw the place. I wrote about it after living for years and years in Chicago, you know? And then there'll be, you know, assort meditations, some poems on, you know, some of his stories. But it'll be probably a mix of 60 story, 70 story. And the poems will be in there to flavor, to illustrate, to help illustrate some of his points.

He's from Velva, North Dakota, he's our favorite son, he's one of my heroes, and I try to shape my own life. As a public commentator on his capacity for fairness, open-mindedness, erudition, um, and clear commentary. But we can't finish this conversation without Chicago. So let her rip.

Let's let's hear Carl Sandburg's, in my opinion, most popular and probably greatest poem, Chicago.

Oh, butcher for the world, toolmaker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and freight handler to the nation, stormy, husky, drawing city of the big shoulders. They tell me, you are wicked. My reply is yes. I have seen the painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys, and they tell me, you are crooked. And my answer is yes. I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me that you are brutal. And my reply is on the faces of women and children, I have seen the marks of wanton hunger. And having answered. So, I turn to those, turn to those once more who sneer at this. My city, and I give them back the sneer. And I say, Come show me another city. With lifted head singing. So proud to be alive, so coarse, so strong, so cunning.

Here's a tall flinging, magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job. Oh, here's a tall, bold slugger. Set vivid against the little, soft cities. Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage, pitted against the wilderness, bare headed, shoveling, wrecking, planning, breaking, rebuilding. Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth, under the terrible burden of destiny. Laughing as a young man, laughs, laughing even as an ignorant fighter, laughs who's never lost a battle, bragging and laughing. That under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs is the heart of the people. Laughing, laughing, the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of youth.

Bare headed, shoveling, half naked, proud to be hog butcher, tool maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and freight handler to the nation.

I am coming your way in November to get back on stage with my friend John Williams. I hope to see you there. If you do. Aaron Burr, you know how to find me. We'll get you on this program again and again. So thanks for your time today to all of you.

We'll see you next week for another important edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. Thanks for listening.