This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
When I was approaching adolescence, my Sunday School teacher warned me about Catholic girls, and the way they enticed boys into marriage in order to have more Catholic children. Back in the 19th century, the good citizens of Moline felt similarly threatened, not by Catholics, but by Rock Island.
Moline felt particularly threatened whenever there was idle talk of merging the two cities into one metropolis, as was the case in 1874. "Absolutely not," thundered Joseph Huntoon, one of Moline's prominent names, "Rock Island has always had a bad influence on its neighbors. That degenerate city," said Huntoon, "has ruined many noble young men, the pride and hope of Proud Moline." There were hints that Sodom and Gomorrah paled in comparison with Rock Island.
The Rock Island Argus had to admit that this was all too, too true. Why, the editor had seen with his own eyes the way prominent Moliners sneaked across the border and in the side door of a Rock Island tavern, slapping down ten cents for a shot of whiskey. Didn't they know any better? Whiskey was fifteen cents a shot.
The Argus editor was amazed that Moliners found time for such recreation. One minute out of every hour Moliners are awake, he reported, they are engaged in active prayer for their degenerate neighbor; the other fifty-nine minutes is spent in self-congratulation.
The editor admitted that Rock Island would be even more degenerate were she not so lucky as to be in the vicinity of Moline's moral atmosphere. He recommended that the Rock Island City council proceed to the Moline border with pop bottles, fill them with some of Moline's moral atmosphere, cork the bottles, and store them for emergency use by Rock Islanders who had come down with a case of conscience.
Until then, Rock Island could simply not compete with Moliners. "If Moline's little dam, he wrote, in reference to the power dam between that city and Arsenal Island, "If Moline's little dam were wall full of the suds of salvation, and a June rise of piety were to come down from the north, Moline would drink herself dam dry."
Hardly an appropriate metaphor, but what can one expect. The editor was one of those degenerate Rock Islanders.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
