Chicago

Chicago is a city of transit and transformation in East of Eden, a place where characters confront their pasts, make fateful decisions, and engage with the larger economic forces of the nation. It appears at three critical junctures in the Trask family saga, each time marking a shift in a character's trajectory.

Adam Trask's Crisis and Re-enlistment

After his discharge from the cavalry in 1885, Adam Trask begins a slow journey home to Connecticut but stops in Chicago, where he rents a furnished room for a week and stays in it for two days, unable to face returning to his brother Charles and the farm he does not love. He then goes to Niagara Falls, watching the water for hours, stupefied and hypnotized by its roar. One evening, crippled by loneliness for the close men of his barracks, he rushes into a crowded little bar, thronged and smoky, and orders whisky, feeling warm and good as he absorbs the contact of the human clot. As the bar empties, he becomes fearful of going home. The bartender, who has a strawberry mark on his forehead, eventually tells him bluntly, "How the hell to get you to go home and let me close up." Adam replies that he will go home in the morning—meaning his real home. Instead, he returns to Chicago and re-enlists, asking to be assigned to his old regiment. On the train going west, the men of his squadron seem very dear and desirable. This decision, born of panic and a desperate need for the familiar routine of army life, sets Adam on a path that will keep him away from his brother for another five years and lead him eventually to the West.

Cyrus Trask's Washington Power and the Chicago Connection

While waiting to change trains in Kansas City after re-enlisting, Adam is ordered to report to the Secretary of War's office in Washington. There he finds his father, Cyrus Trask, transformed into a great man. Cyrus has become a spokesman for the Grand Army of the Republic, a political force of nearly a million men, and his voice is heard clearly in Washington. He is consulted on army organization and is responsible for making the G.A.R. a cohesive and potent force in national life. Cyrus's power is such that he can get senators defeated and pick appointments like apples. He offers to get Adam into West Point, but Adam refuses. The Chicago connection is indirect but significant: the city is a hub for the national military and political networks in which Cyrus operates, and it is from Chicago that Adam's regiment would have entrained for the 1886 packinghouse strike, though the strike was settled before they were needed. Chicago thus represents the impersonal, powerful machinery of the nation that both entraps and elevates men.

Cal Trask's Bean Speculation and the Chicago Market

Decades later, Chicago reappears as a center of commerce and war profiteering. Cal Trask, seeking to make a fortune to repay his father for the lettuce failure, partners with Will Hamilton. Will reveals that he has a contract with the British Purchasing Agency and a friend in the Quartermaster Corps, and he believes they can sell all the dried beans they can find at ten cents a pound or more. The beans are to be sold into the national market, with Chicago as a key distribution and pricing hub. When Cal's speculation succeeds, the profits come from the British Purchasing Agency, which is buying food for the war in Europe. The city thus becomes the unseen engine of Cal's attempt to buy his father's love, a place where the abstract forces of war and commerce are translated into crisp gold certificates. The failure of Adam's lettuce shipment also passes through Chicago, where a confusion of orders leaves the six cars of lettuce standing in the yard for five more days, ensuring their ruin. Chicago, in both success and failure, is the place where the Trask family's economic dreams are tested against the impersonal logic of the market.

The Monster and the City's Underworld

Chicago also appears in the backstory of Cathy Ames, the novel's monstrous figure. After her childhood in Massachusetts and her involvement with Mr. Edwards in Boston, Cathy's trajectory is shaped by the urban underworld. Mr. Edwards, the whoremaster, runs his circuit of small-town brothels from Boston, but the city of Chicago is mentioned as a place where the big packinghouse strike broke out in 1886, a strike that Adam's regiment was called to suppress. This brief reference links the city to the violent labor struggles of the era, a world of organized vice and class conflict that Cathy will later inhabit in Salinas. The city's vastness and anonymity provide a backdrop for the kind of predatory existence that Cathy embodies, a world where a woman like her can disappear and reinvent herself.