Springfield (Ill.) -- Fiction; Springfield (Ill.) -- In literature; Utopias in literature
Confectioneries, auto trucks, popcorn vans, pleasure machines, and the
passing crowds are decked with ribbons and streamers. Many families have
a flag pole in the front yard with a row of tiny ancestral flags, one
over the other, each indicating some form of skilled or unskilled manual
labor by which the ancestors of the house made their way, and it is
considered a disgrace to display any other type of ancestral flag, but
one which shows some form of manual labor.
But many staffs have only three flags, that of the town, that of the
International Government, and above these, the Star Spangled Banner.
These people pride themselves in being more democratic, and not parading
their ancestry. Nearly all business houses, particularly the large and
wholesale houses, have their own especial banners and bunting, and some
give out toy balloons and the like to the children, marked with the same
schemes. The Star Spangled Banner is above everything, even on the
International buildings, to indicate that the United States has the old
South Carolina privilege of secession from the World Federation,
whenever she pleases.
And so I am walking with Avanel, on the late afternoon of March third,
2018. We find ourselves very near the center of the group of slender
Sunset Towers. Seven of them are of the seven colors of the rainbow, one
for each color, placed in a circle around the Truth Tower, which is in
the very center of the star-plan system of boulevards. We climb the
Truth Tower and look about. The Truth Tower is also called The Edgar Lee
Masters Tower, and it is high above the rest. At the foot of it is the
circular green with Golden Rain-Trees from New Harmony, Indiana. This is
called the Edgar Lee Masters Park. Near by is the Lincoln Memorial Park,
containing the marked sites of Lincoln’s three law offices, and in the
center our first State House, now the Lincoln museum. On the sides of
all the Sunset Towers that one may see from the old public square is
spread the Red Star of Springfield, set in the White Star of Illinois.
Searchlights blaze through it, spreading red and white light. Outside
the white Truth Tower that soars above all the city, and outside its
rainbow circle of campaniles, the ninety-two other campaniles shimmer in
the sun, their hues ranging from grey to rose-grey, and grey-gold to
rose-gold. And they grow wilder in the red, black and white gorgeousness
of the night.
The fifty towers on the outermost circle are the newest. They are the
only separate buildings of the World’s Fair of the University of
Springfield, except one long street called “The Street of Past History,”
which is about a mile to the south beginning at Bunn Park and sweeping
toward the northwest in a quarter of a circle to the high hill of
Washington Park. Every building in the city is officially a part of the
fair and in theory at least, the City is the Fair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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