33.. That’s the number of Illinois’ counties where voters have passed non-binding resolutions backing the idea of forming a new U.S. state that would include every Illinois county except Cook County.
That’s about one-third of Illinois’ 102 counties, as of November 2024, who want to be independent of Cook County.
Cook County is home to Chicago and more than 40 percent of the state’s population. It’s also home to the Chicago blues, if you’re a music fan.
According to Governing magazine, these non-binding resolutions are part of a burgeoning “breakup movement” gaining momentum across the U.S. in states where red-leaning rural counties are dominated by a few blue cities… and don’t want to take it anymore.
How Chicago can fit 40 percent of Illinois’ population into that tiny blue dot, I have no idea. But they manage it somehow. I guess it helps if you build skyscrapers.
We have a similar situation going on in Colorado. Our smaller rural communities, like Pagosa, are red, and Denver Metro is blue. Not “slightly blue” but, like, “royal blue”.
But when I look at the map of Illinois, above, and take note of the rural counties who want to form their own private state, separate from Cook County, it would appear — to an amateur humor columnist like myself — like they are making a big fuss over nothing. Most of these 33 counties are nowhere near Cook County.
Massac County, for example, is 328 miles from Chicago, as the crow flies.
That’s farther than from Pagosa Springs, Colorado, to Amarillo, Texas… which are not even in the same state.
This news, about the 33 red-leaning counties, piqued my interest in Illinois, and in whether the rural residents of a state can actually break away from its largest city. My research suggests that you probably want to do that kind of thing during a civil war, when things are already falling apart. Like, when the northwest part of Virginia split itself off to form West Virginia, in 1863. There was so much fighting going on that people hardly noticed a new state being admitted to the Union.
1863 would have also been a better time for rural Illinois to split off from Cook County, except there wasn’t really a good reason to evict Chicago in 1863. The reasons didn’t start to become obvious until later, when Chicago became known as the “hog butcher for the world.”
The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co. was the meatpacking district in Chicago for more than a century, starting in 1865. The district was operated by a group of railroad companies that acquired marshland and turned it into a centralized processing area. The stockyards became the focal point of the rise of some of the earliest international companies, who made and refined industrial innovations and influenced financial markets.
From the Civil War until the 1920s — peaking in 1924 — more meat was processed in Chicago than in any other place in the world.
In the photo above, you can barely make out part of the name “Armour” in the upper right corner. As in Phillip Armour.
Industrialized meat for mass consumption.
But can you imagine the smell? They could probably smell Chicago all the way down in Massac County.
But the folks in Massac County could also send their hogs to Chicago by train, and earn some cash. So we could call it, “the smell of money” if we wanted.
Now, you can no longer smell the money. It’s all been digitized, and used to finance skyscrapers in downtown.
I don’t understand why the people who work in those Chicago skyscrapers have become blue-leaning liberals. If there were a smell coming from Chicago in 2024, it would be the smell of Democrats, and high finance. Not a hog in sight. But you can still hear people playing the blues, late at night.
Meanwhile, the hog farmers in Massac County have become red-leaning conservatives, who play banjos.
Hog farms have their own kind of smell. You get used to it, though. Pretty soon, you don’t even notice.
But you might notice the banjos.