This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Domingo Sarmiento was born in 1811 to a poor family in San Juan, Argentina. Unable to afford formal schooling, he was taught to read and write by two uncles. That was how he came across Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. Franklin and his advice became Sarmiento's role model, giving him a vision of what Argentina could become with proper guidance. A trip to America in 1847 assured him that Franklin's principles were indeed sound.
Twenty years later, just before he was to become the first great democratic president of Argentina, Sarmiento returned to the United States to renew that vision. Franklin, of course, was unavailable, but Sarmiento found an excellent substitute: Chicago.
Chicago had been a small village in 1847. Now, in 1866, Sarmiento stood in the middle of a city of 254,000 citizens: Yankees, southerners, immigrants from Poland, Sweden, Italy, Greece. And it seemed as if every one of them had read Franklin's Autobiography. "In this Hercules city," Sarmiento wrote, "masons are building wherever my eye falls, like the myriad of bees that one sees increasing the number of cells in a honeycomb." Chicago was a city of schools and elevators, universities, hotels, factories, clubs, and churches—and the most magnificent opera in the United States.
Chicago had not stopped with Ben Franklin. New York and other eastern cities exhibited the same Franklin work ethic, but Sarmiento noted one thing put Chicago a step ahead: a desire to go beyond Franklin's common sense and attempt the superhuman. Chicagoans had already built a two-mile tunnel to bring water from Lake Michigan, and they were planning to reverse the whole course of the Chicago River just to wash away their sewage. "What is South America doing while this is going on up here?" Sarmiento asked.
Inspired by both Franklin and Chicago, Sarmiento returned to South America to become president of Argentina. As president, he brought to his country an age of prosperity and hope, establishing free elections, a free press, and a public-school system. He opened Argentina to immigration from Ireland, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy.
Had Argentina not returned to a dictatorship after Sarmiento died, Buenos Aires might well be known today as the Chicago of South America.
Rock Island Lines is supported by grants from the Illinois Humanities Council, the Illinois Arts Council—a state agency—and by Augustana College, Rock Island.
