Second Thoughts

Back in January I repeated one of my time-worn rants about the environmental damage being done by factory-style cultivation of corn. I stated,   A good field in mid-illinois these days is likely to have more than 30,000 corn plants per acre. Such intense corn production is responsible for increased fertilizer use (and consequent water […]

 I am grateful to the Washington Monthly — not for the first time — for alerting me to the release of a new biography of Lincoln that focuses on his Springfield years.  Allen Guelzo, the Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, reviewed Sidney BLumenthal’s A Self-Made Man: The Political Life […]

I appreciate the governor of Illinois confirming a point that I made in my drafts of “Graduation exercise” but which I couldn’t squeeze into the finished piece. From Doug Finke:    Rauner, speaking at an event in Springfield Monday, said a graduated state income tax would be a bad idea for Illinois, especially for small […]

 In “More jet-age wonders” I praised the  jet-age barn on the state fairgrounds known as the Illinois Building, which was completed in 1950 to plans drawn up by the Chicago firm of Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett.  I wouldn’t want you to take just my word for it. Here is Emil Smith, then the editor and publisher […]

Samuel Scott III, the retired chairman and CEO of Corn Products International, which now calls itself  Ingredion. He gave a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in which he examined the crisis in Chicago’s African-American community, which was excerpted recently in Crain’s Chicago Business.  Among his remarks, which were otherwise unremarkable, was this remarkable fact.  […]

 A drearily familiar story came briefly back to mind in today’s Trib. The campus in Harvard in northern Illinois that Motorola opened in 1997 to make cellphones. and which had been closed since 2003, was sold to a Chinese investor. Motorola played Illinois against Wisconsin against each other to bid up the subsidies it demanded […]

 This week I take up, and just as quickly put down, the question of a graduated income tax for Illinois. Not many states have a flat rate tax on incomes. Illinois does so for reasons that have nothing to do with economic efficiency or philosophical principle. The flat rate was a constraint of 1870 constitution. […]

 The article on Illinois Indian language by Michael McCafferty that I referred to in “Mis-say it loud, mis-say it proud” appears in Protohistory at the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia: The Illinois Country on the Eve of Colony (Illinois State Archeological Survey, Studies in Archeology No. 10, Urbana, 2015), a collection of articles edited by […]

 The Chicago Tribune, summarizing the day’s events in the General Assembly: A Senate committee advanced several measures that would overhaul the Illinois Constitution to eliminate the lieutenant governor’s office, replace the flat income tax rate with a graduated system based on income and overhaul how legislative districts are drawn. . . .  All of those […]

When the National Park Service in 1971 took over the blocks of Eighth and Jackson streets around the Lincoln home, it ruthlessly cleared them of any structures that had not been standing when the Lincolns lived there. The resulting grassy lots surrounded by wood fencing look like pastures or paddocks that  suggest a country village more than […]

Space limitations kept me from discussing all of Springfield’s International Style buildings in my recent column on jet-age architecture. You’d think that the basic building model for the state fair and similar expositions is the barn, and so it is at the state fairgrounds, but one of the barns at the Illinois State Fairgrounds is […]

In “Off the rack” I chided the governor for his too-casual choices of attire while on the job. I concede that my standards in such matters were shaped by my first tow governors, William Stratton and Otto Kerner. Stratton was a bit of a dandy, Kerner went dignified.  Kerner was named Best Dressed in his […]