The great divide between Chicago and the rest of Illinois

a series of stamps illustrated by Chris Ware for the united states postal service's 250th anniversary. a scene of people delivering mail in a city Chris Ware created stamp artwork for 250 Years of Delivering, a new pane of 20 interconnected stamps issued this month by the United States Postal Service. USPS art director Antonio Alcalá worked with Ware on design. The stamps are available for purchase at the USPS online shop . Credit: Chris Ware, courtesy United States Postal Service

In retrospect, while driving with my 12-year-old daughter from our home near Chicago to an empty cornfield in southern Illinois to see the 2017 total solar eclipse, I should’ve been a little more alarmed by the number of Confederate flags we counted along the way.

Four years later, when the pandemic seemed to have eased and we wanted to just go somewhere, anywhere, a day trip through central Illinois took us past not only more Stars and Bars but also “Trump 2024” placards and Trump-as-Rambo banners flapping over apartment balconies, as well as “Piss on Pritzker” lawn signs—all of which seemed a little overdone, given how laughably Trump had emceed the pandemic. (Also nasty, since I’d thought Governor J.B. Pritzker’s daily briefings were a heartwarmingly awkward spectacle of human anxiety and vulnerability, the corn-fed answer to New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s officious, patronizing scolding.)

Illinois basically has two regions: Chicago and “downstate.” Dense Chicago is reliably Democratic, whereas downstate skews conservative, but rarely enough to flip the electoral switch. (The last time Illinois voted in the federal elections for a Republican president was in 1988.)

A fragment of a street called Blue Island Avenue still runs southwest from Chicago toward the town of Blue Island (the name apparently inspired by the low moraine that early 19th-century travelers could see gently bellying up from what Frederick Law Olmsted called the “flat, miry, and forlorn” Illinois landscape), a place that was then a day’s wagon ride to the city, where beleaguered immigrants could stop for a rest and a beer. Overlaid on the scar of a Native American trail, the route endures as a diagonal slice of space-time through the gridlocked blocks of Chicago and its suburbs.

“Blue island,” however, could just as easily describe our state, bordered to the north by purple Wisconsin and to the east by reliably red Indiana. Illinois has had the highest property taxes in the nation in recent years, and my painter and sculptor friends who migrated to Indiana over the past few years didn’t do so because of the weather.

We’re losing population at an alarming rate: Between 2010 and 2019, Illinois disgorged more people than any other state (and, embarrassingly, many of them were African American, in a sort of reverse Great Migration to a more affordable—and less Chicago-level-policed—south).

Nowadays, my drive to the empty eclipse-viewing cornfield seems ominous. I find myself second-guessing my words, my thoughts self-braking. Did downstaters feel the same way as me hearing about “cancel culture” and “woke” DEI? How can it be that nearly half of the American population voted for all of this?

I’m originally from Nebraska, and I love the midwest. The brown-and-gray humility of its homes and streets, its flat talk averaging out from all corners of the world. I realize I live in a blue state, if not a blue island. But how did we all let ourselves get so red with anger at one another?

Chris Ware is a Riverside-based artist and the author of the 1995 graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth. Ware was a cartoonist for the Reader from 2002–2006 and is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. A traveling retrospective of his work began at the Centre Pompidou in 2022 and concludes this year at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

This column originally appeared in the Nation magazine’s 160th anniversary issue, “These Dis-United States,” out now and available at thenation.com/issue. Founded by abolitionists in 1865, the Nation has chronicled the breadth and depth of political and cultural life from the debut of the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical, independent, and progressive voice in American journalism.

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