“In the advanced, inventive, scientifically equipped and eminently post-Victorian city of Chicago the criminal class is quite as advanced, inventive, and scientifically equipped as the government, if not more so. If our modern society is breaking up, may it not break up into big organizations having all the armament and apparatus of independent nations; so that it would no longer be possible to say which was originally the lawful government and which the criminal revolt? God knows there are criminals enough in both of them.”—G.K. Chesterton, “The Gunman and the Racketeer,” in As Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors, 1673-1933, edited by Bessie Louise Pierce (1933, reprinted 2004)
(I couldn’t get away from the unfolding story of Rod Blagojevich without thinking of the rich criminal soil of corruption in which the Illinois Governor took root. Chesterton’s essay, originally published as “Mr. Chesterton Looks Us Over” in The New York Times Magazine in 1931, looked at “an entirely new development” in the Windy City: “the organized use of machine guns by the ordinary criminal classes.” His droll acknowledgement that there are “criminals enough in both” the government and the underworld seems especially relevant these days, as we see how the current governor—who, a few weeks ago, was making up an extortion list rather than a Christmas list—has been operating.)
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