Some in Illinois want to get rid of Chicago

MOUNT VERNON, Ill. – It is midday and hot as a firecracker in the southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon.

At the Fairfield Inn out by the highway, people make their way inside the lobby; retirees in couples; middle-aged people carefully shepherding white-haired parents in their 80s; a few younger folks.

The July 20 event, planned for about 60 people and advertised on Facebook, drew around 200. On the screen at the front of the room, the first slide of a PowerPoint presentation hovers: "A Plan for Splitting the State of Illinois."

In Mount Vernon, a town where Abraham Lincoln once argued before the State Supreme Court in the dignified old courthouse, Ron Carnell and all the other Illinoisans in the room have crowded in eagerly to hear about a plan to secede from the Land of Lincoln.

Or, to put it another way, they'd just like to kick Chicago out.

Over the past two years, the movement to divide the state of Illinois into two states — Cook County in one, the other 101 counties in the other — has been gaining support. In February, as Gov. J.B. Pritzker was pursuing an agenda for Illinois that included new tax and abortion policies, state Rep. Brad Halbrook, one of the event's organizers, refiled a resolution in the Legislature, HR 101, in which he and six cosponsors asked the U.S. Congress to recognize Chicago as the 51st state. "I hear it a lot from my constituents, that we need to be separate from Chicago," Halbrook said. "I thought yep, this is what we need to do."

The resolution, which could be dismissed as simple political maneuvering, has scant chance of seeing daylight in the Legislature. But it is backed by several grassroots groups agitating for separation. One of them, Illinois Separation, founded by Collin Cliburn, of Athens, has 24,000 followers on Facebook, and is growing. Cliburn is also holding events at venues from wineries and gun shops to community centers around the state through August and September to capitalize on the momentum.

Not a new idea

G.H. Merritt, a Lake County woman who founded New Illinois, the group hosting the Mount Vernon event, points out to the crowd — now using New Illinois brochures to fan themselves — that the idea of a state split isn't new. In fact, groups from either downstate or Chicago have tried to secede from Illinois several times since 1840, when a group of northern counties asked to be given to Wisconsin. (The state line was set above the tip of Lake Michigan in 1818.) In the 1970s, a group of western counties dubbed themselves the Republic of Forgottonia. And in 1981, a Chicago legislator pushed a secession bill through the state Senate, as a public poke at downstate counties for complaining about CTA funding. The bill was tabled by House Speaker George Ryan. Most recently, downstate legislators proposed a split in 2011, after election data showed that in 2010, Gov. Pat Quinn won only three downstate counties — and gained the governorship by carrying Cook County.

But the current us-versus-them drive to "divorce" Chicago from the rest of Illinois, while it shares elements with earlier efforts, comes in an era of heightened political conversation in the U.S. More important, it's a direct outgrowth of the stubborn urban-rural divide that underlies many of today's most divisive social and economic issues.

"It's really important to note that this has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican," said Merritt. "It has to do with urban, rural and suburban. The economies and cultures and needs and interests of non-urban areas are different from those of a big city like Chicago. The problem is, in our state government we have a one-size-fits-all approach, and things are foisted on the other parts of the state."