The Chris Moeller Archives

Why we should root against the Cubs in the World Series

The infamously corrupt government of the city of Chicago not only runs roughshod sometimes over its own citizens and common decency itself, but it has, at times, made mincemeat of neighboring communities as well.

In the 1820s, political "horse trading" in the Illinois legislature and in Washington allowed a canal to be built in northern Illinois that connected the 96 miles lying between the Chicago River at Bridgeport near Chicago (later the hometown of the Daley political machine) with the Illinois River at LaSalle that flowed southward into the Mississippi River. This act created the first direct water link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and helped to shift the hub of inland U.S. trade from St. Louis to Chicago. The federal government gave nearly 300,000 acres of prime farmland to the project, and it has long been considered a fabulous financial success for the country. At least it was for some.

The depth of the canal was always very shallow, as it would have cost too much at the time for a crew to dig into bedrock, and the flow of the Chicago River, which served, then as now, as the city's pungent sewer, still ran in its natural direction towards Lake Michigan. By 1860 and the start of the Civil War, the Chicago River was a smelly, toxic stream of filth, and politicians there decided that the direction of the river should be reversed to alleviate the problem that the lake was the source of the city's drinking water. So, instead, their giant liquified garbage can and its contents would run towards the Mississippi, the great river of Mark Twain, jazz and blues music, and championship baseball teams. The canal was deepened, but not enough so to power a change in river flow. A new canal was needed, and work began late in the century on moving 43 million cubic yards of earth. Cities downstream, St. Louis chief among them, were obviously concerned about inheriting 1,500 tons of undefecated sewage and putridity. Fearing that a legal injunction would soon be filed, workers dynamited a temporary dam at Kedzie Street in Chicago on the second day of the 20th century (1/2/1900). Two weeks later, after water had flowed into the breach, they opened the dam at Lockport, Illinois, and the Des Plaines River filled with Chicago's feces water, which in historical publications, is usually not referred to by its trademark name, Old Style Lager. Eight years later, the Chicago National League baseball club won their most recent World Series championship.

What does the world of water in the American Midwest look like a century later? Commercial traffic on the Illinois River between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basically dried up to nothing by 1914 and has remained that way. In 1922, the state of Wisconsin filed the first of what would be many lawsuits from neighboring states blaming the man-made, commercial-based "Chicago Diversion" for siphoning a dangerous amount of water from the Great Lakes. The states of Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York have all been party to lawsuits as well on the same. At various times over the century past, the Supreme Court has ruled that, indeed, too much water is being drained from Lake Michigan at the Port of Chicago.

There's no longer a financial benefit to the United States to have this canal in place or for water to be flowing out of the Great Lakes. Global climate change will certainly make water levels on these lakes an even larger issue in the future, and the hot topic to arise during the last couple decades is invasive water species flowing in both directions between what were two separated entities-- the continent's great river and the Great Lakes. The zebra mussel has found its way from the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Illinois River. These original natives of the lakes of Southern Russia are commonly found latching themselves to the bottoms of boats, eating the algae that is food for fish. Each sea craft must be inspected for these mussels before it's permitted to leave a port.

Moving in the other direction, imported Asian carp introduced to Arkansas in the 1970s to combat pond algae escaped into the Mississippi during the Flood of 1993, and the voracious eaters have now made their way to Chicago. The Army Corps of Engineers has been forced to set up an electrical barrier (read: zapping the little critters) to keep them out of Lake Michigan, but recent DNA tests have found traces of the Asian fish in the lake. The attorney general for the state of Michigan filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court to attempt to legislate greater protections against what could be a devastating invasive species for the Lakes, and he has made the specific call for Chicago to close its locks and water gates, an action that would effectively end cargo traffic on the river.

If you've been near the Chicago River downtown also, you may have seen the warning signs that have long been posted by the Chicago Water Reclamation District. Despite years of unnatural southwestern flow designed to benefit the city, the water is still rank with impurity. The signs read, "No wading, swimming, jet skiing, water skiing/tubing, or (my italics) any human body contact."

There were no environmental advocacy groups in the 1800s, but judging by modern actions taken by Hogtown politicos in disregard of the future health of the lake that gave the city life, they wouldn't have given any of their greedy actions a second thought. Richard Lanyon, executive director of the Reclamation District, claims that "Chicago would not have survived-- as simple as that" without the canal, but of course that's an absurd claim. The city had-- and has-- the advantageous southernmost positioning on the banks of the second-largest fresh-water lake in the world. But what they likely wouldn't be is the third-largest city in the United States, and St. Louis, a city more centrally-located, and sitting naturally upon the Great River, would certainly be much larger than it is.

I'm rooting desperately for the Cubs to lose the 2016 World Series, but the team looks very strong. They have famously failed to win a World Series championship since 1908. For perfect historical symmetry, though, in combating a city of bullies masquerading as "lovable losers," the Cubs' inevitable World Series conqueror would be St. Louis, a city that has had to put up with Chicago's garbage, literally and figuratively, for more than a century. Alas, though, the gradual population decline of St. Louis, sped by Chicago's 19th century greed, has left it without a team in baseball's American League. (The Browns left the Gateway City for Baltimore in 1953.) A fine substitute to root for in keeping Chicago's metaphysical punishment on the books is the club from Cleveland, a Great Lakes city with a lowering lake level that will host the first two games of the Fall Classic Tuesday and Wednesday.

I suspect you won't read this water angle on the Series from any of the writers at ESPN or spoken about by any of the on-air commentators at FOX. Cleveland's team has not won the Series since 1948, the second-longest existing championship drought, but nearly all expressed public support for Cleveland has been muffled this week by the clammer of all those Americans jumping hands-first onto the Cubs' proverbial bandwagon. Indeed, these Cubs fans stamped with that new baby smell are an invasive species all their own. Many of us have been weary of the threat they pose throughout our lifetimes, particularly those of us that root for regional foes St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and perhaps the biggest Cubs haters of all, the White Sox, the American League team and their fans who share the city of Chicago. I am not including them in my criticism of the city, of course, because they are denizens of the South Side, and therefore, have also been victims for generations of the canal garbage of the Chicago River that floats in the wrong direction past their homes and not at far remove from the location where Sox Park currently stands.

posted by CM @ 3:27 PM