Encyclopedia o f Chicago

Historical Sources : Bound Volume
Historical Source
C
"Chicago" by Carl Sandburg, 1916

"Chicago" by Carl Sandburg, 1916
Carl Sandburg's poetic epithet for Chicago, "hog butcher for the world," is often misremembered as "hog butcher to the world," but that is perhaps less a mistake than a sign of how much the phrase now belongs to popular memory, along with the phrase "city of [the] big shoulders," from the same poem. Though the stockyards have long been closed, the repetition of these phrases continues to carry a memory of Chicago's industrial past, even to many who will never read Sandburg's poems nor any of the many histories of the stockyards.