#industrialist history

[menandwomanofhistory]

Andrew Carnegie

[severalowls]

I know this line has been made fun of endlessly already and their core point is like "its 'punk' because the nightmarish conditions arising from immense societal change was the birthplace of the counter movements, ideologies and revolutions which form the basis of modern conceptions of anticapitalism" but this IS inches from wording it as "capitalism is punk as fuck"

[scotianostra]

George Lauder was born on November 11th 1837 at Dunfermline, Fife.

Lauder is probably a wee bit more well known in his native Dunfermline, or maybe so Americans, I would think this is due to him being a bit overshadowed by a guy described as his "cousin-brother", Andrew Carnegie.

George Lauder was the son of George Lauder, Sr. and Seaton Morrison. His father, a local shop owner on the high street, Dunfermline. Very well read, Lauder Sr. was instrumental in the upbringing of his only son George, as well as his nephew the aforementioned Carnegie.

Lauder Jr. and Carnegie were two years apart in age and best friends as a result of their shared experiences. They affectionately referred to one another as “Dod” and “Naig”, as young children. After Andrew and his family left for America, George stayed in Scotland where he would go on to graduate from Glasgow University with a degree in mechanical engineering while studying under another famous name Lord Kelvin.

Carnegie wrote to Lauder asking him to join him in America as a partner in the Carnegie Steel Corporation. At the time, the major shareholders were Carnegie himself, Carnegie’s brother and two others.

Lauder brought several new developments to the steel business in America, including the process for washing and coking dross from coal mines, which resulted in a significant increase to the overall value of the business.

Lauder would go on to lead the development of the use of steel in armour and armaments. By the turn of the Twentieth Century, Lauder was a director of Carnegie Steel and its second largest shareholder behind his cousin Andrew. Throughout the course of his career, Lauder created a number of patented scientific advancements useful both in the steel industry and beyond.

The sale of Carnegie Steel to JP Morgan in 1901 created U.S Steel where Lauder sat on the board of directors. This became the first corporation in the world with a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion ($43 billion today).

Lauder’s oldest daughter, Harriet married Dr. James C. Greenway combining the Lauder and Greenway families into what is now known as the Lauder Greenway Family, their influence in American political and economic affairs dates from the 1640s through the contemporary era. Their primary contributions have been in the sciences, government, and intelligence. His son George Lauder III, was a high-profile sailor who set the record in 1900 (held until 1905) for the fastest trans-Atlantic crossing with his yacht, Endymion,

In 1905 Harriet bought, what has become known as The Lauder-Greenway Estate a 50-acre property in Greenwich, Connecticut, where George lived out the last eleven years of his life passing away on August 24th, 1924.

The Estate, for a time, was the most expensive private residence in the United States in 2014 when it sold for an eye watering $120 million.

Pics are of George Lauder, the second is Andrew Carnegie, George Lauder, and Thomas Miller in 1862 taken in Glasgow, it is one of very few pics of Carnegie without a beard, Thomas Miller is said to be the man who started Carnegie in the steel business.

[dresshistorynerd]

This really is right up my alley!

I would go even further and say ready to wear clothing was also just another iteration of this long line of progression, just like fast fashion. The overarching problem, which latest iteration is the fast fashion gig economy a la Shein (I have a whole post about it), is industrialism and capitalism.

The disconnect between the consumer and the production described in the original post is very good example of what we in the biz call commodity fetishism. Not to go too deeply into Marxist theory, but... Commodity fetishism describes how production and exchange has gone from a relationship between people into a relationships between things under capitalism. So let's start with how production and exchange worked (in very simplified way) before capitalism. Production was very local and small scale, instead off mass-manufacturing, you had cottage industries. For example most wool in medieval Europe was weaved by the sheep farmer's wives and other female relatives. They would sell it on a market or to a merchant who would sell it on another market. The value of the exchange was determined in these personal interactions and it was mostly based on the object's material use and the labour that produced it. (This is of course complicated by serfdom and landlords, but landlords were usually payed in grain, so the social nature of these interactions still stands but this is very simplified.)

When capitalism came along this relationship changed. Accumulation of capital allows mass-production and therefore high levels of specialization, or in other terms, division of labour. This combined with capitalist markets, where capital can be exchanged, builds a relationship between things, commodity and money, rather than people, producer and buyer. The value of a commodity is severed from it's material use and the labour of it's production, and is instead tied to almost metaphysical idea of market forces. This is why it's called fetishism, a term that describes a religious use of a fetish object that represents more than it materially is. Value is something that the "invisible hand of markets" gives to the object, which does sound almost religious. This new relationships masks the production of the commodity and the humanity behind the labour. This is very much seen in the original post, where the acquaintance thinks of the market value of pants, not the value of the use they might get from these specific pants or how much labour would go into their production.

The fucked up thing is, all clothing is handmade. We often differentiate the industrially produced ready made clothing and self-made or tailored clothing by calling the latter handmade. The implication is that the industrially produced clothing was produced fundamentally differently, not by hands, but by machine, but they are not. To this day, basically all clothing is sewn together with very similar sewing machines any one of us might have at home, operated by human hands, and most often patterns are cut too by human hands. This is one of the most blatant examples how commodity fetishism masks the production. And when you take into account the massive profit margins often involved in the products of the clothing industry, it's paints a very dark picture on how little the worker is payed for 20 dollar trousers.

Ready made clothing definitely reinforces the commodity fetishism of clothing, since if you go to a tailor or seamstress to get a custom made clothing there's still some remnants of the interpersonal relationship, but it's not where it started. Textile production was one of the first to be industrialized. Cotton especially was even one of the driving forced behind industrial revolution and colonialism. (I go in depth about it in this post.) It started with raw cotton production in 1700s, that "market forces" made cheap aka England forcibly and violently de-industrialized the Indian continent, forced them in exploitative condition and drove down the raw cotton prices even further with slave labour they used in America. This masked the very intensive labour that went into production of raw cotton. It was not an accident that it started with colonialism. The racism and the distance made it easier for the English workers to accept this divorcing of value from labour, especially because the claim at first was to protect native wool and silk production by de-industrializing the competition. This turned out quickly to be not the case, when similar process (less violent of course) was done to set up the English textile industry. The factory production masked the exploitation of labour with ideas about technological advancement. So even in same city the consumer could be distanced from the real price of the cheap fabric they could now buy from a respectable fabric store and never think about the labour that went into it. It was cheap because marvels of technology of course! This of course didn't save the wool or silk producers, since the value of all textiles divorced from use and labour went down with the market value of cotton.

Industrializing clothing production proved to be harder to accomplish since sewing had long been seen as house work, aka women's work. This was harder to commodify than other types of labour since women's work under the capitalist patriarchy was devalued because from the perspective of capital most of it wasn't productive. Raising children for example doesn't produce more capital in return of the labour, at least not directly. However, clothing manufacturing is productive in this frame work. Industrial clothing production though couldn't compete with the free labour of women who couldn't work for wages anyway, but through the Victorian Era fashion was still commodified and eventually clothing manufacturing was industrialized. Fashion houses were born in this era and worked closely with the textile industry. High fashion was used to create early forms of brand image, which then could be used to sell new trends but also mass-manufactured clothing from the fancy brand. The fashion houses along with fashion magazines created the seasonal trend cycle which continued almost to this day till it was broken by the increasingly fast micro trend cycles. They did figure out they could sell more clothing if they continuously reinvented the fashion decades before commercial ready to wear clothing. If you look at the latter half of the Victorian Era, there's massive changes from year to year even in the silhouette.

I have to disagree with the idea that ready to wear clothing came later to women's fashion, because women's clothing was more tailored (it was not) and because of the excessive ornamentation typical to that. Before uniforms readymade clothing started with cotton undershirts, breeches and shifts for upper and middle class people in early Victorian Era, because they weren't fitted anyway, so no one had to bother with the issue of sizing. After standardizing uniform sizing around the middle of the Victorian era men's suits started to be mass produced. The thing is women's clothing were generally not tailored, but men's clothing were. In fact tailoring is much better suited as a construction method for mass production that draping, which was the method women's clothing were generally constructed. With tailoring, you measure the body, transfer the measurements into a flat 2D pattern, cut the fabric and sew it to be 3D. With draping, you drape the fabric on the body, mark where you'll cut in 3D and then cut it and sew it into a 3D shape. This I think is why all men's clothing became mass produced quicker. However, the few women's clothing items that were traditionally tailored were also mass produced early (in addition to underclothing). Corsets were tailored and their mass production started in mid-1800s. Women's cloaks and jackets also were one of the first items to be mass produced. I think this is also one of the reasons why tailoring in women's clothing was promoted by the feminist Dress Reform Movement. They argued for tailoring in women's clothing mostly for practicality and to oppose vanity (they were a mixed bag as Victorian feminists tended to be), but also tailored clothing could be mass produced and in that sense had a potential to relieve women's house hold duties.

Also I would argue that mass production technology was in fact one of the reasons women's clothing was so ornamented during the Victorian Era. Sewing machine and increasingly cheap fabric made it easy and inexpensive to add all the possible frills and bows to a dress.

By 1890s men could basically get their whole wardrobe readymade, and there was a lot of readymade options for women too. By this point readymade clothing had become very middle class. I find it interesting that mass produced clothing was at the very beginning aimed for upper class people and then middle class people and after it became more established by 1890s then also lower class people could afford it too, because it's so often framed as happening so that everyone could afford fashion. (Though there were early on some mass production of clothing for the very poor and especially slaves in US, because the slavers rather paid for cheep mass produced clothing than diverted the labour of their slaves to clothing.) The big breakthrough of mass production of women's clothing happened in 1920s. It was again driven much more by upper and middle class women than the working class. In 1920s Modernism and it's idealization of industrialism were big. Most socialists saw industrial production as answer to the class divide but for the mainstream it was the fruits of technological and capitalist progression. Industrial products were not seen as cheaply made, but new and new was for a Modernist always better. This reflected in fashion as simplified forms and cuts that were much easier to mass produce. Mass production was part of the appeal.

By that point clothing had definitely become a fetish. Commodity fetishism is by now such a standard state in our world, that it's our default way to understand the exchange relationship of buying and selling. Even when we have a personal interaction with a worker whose labour we want to buy, we don't think about the value of the use, or the value of the labour, but the compare it to the market value. It is in fact forced on us. Our wages, rent and food are all valued with that logic, so if we want to make that equation to work in a way we can survive, we have to compare any product cost to our wages and rent and if we can buy food for the rest of the month. Most of the time we are not afforded to think about how much is the use or the labour value. It alienates us from each other, even from our material possessions, and stands in the way of solidarity. Building that solidarity though is probably the most important way to fight the effects of commodity fetishism. That requires learning about production in different industries and the working conditions that industries try to hide.

still thinking about the brainrot that fast fashion has caused in people, like i made this pair of pants that are black and white with a cool flowery design, and an acquaintance saw them and said "wow i'd pay like 20 dollars for you to make me a pair" and i could barely think with how utterly horrified i was at that; i told them that 20 dollars wouldn't even cover the materials, let alone the hours of work that went into cutting, sewing, ironing, hemming, altering, etc. they just had this look on their face when i told them that, when i said i wouldn't make them a pair for even 100 dollars because that was still way too low of an amount, a look that said "you're crazy for thinking that those cost 100 dollars" and maybe i am crazy but holy shit, 20 dollars for a pair of handmade, durable, lined pants fitted specifically to your measurements? 20 dollars for upwards of 60 hours of work? 20 dollars for several yards of high-quality fabric, thread, and buttons? 20 dollars???

[townpostin]

Piloting a Nation through Uncharted Territories: The JRD Tata Story

JRD Tata, a legendary industrialist, guided India’s growth with visionary leadership, ethical principles, and a deep love for the nation. Chanakya Chaudhary Vice President, Tata Steel JRD Tata’s leadership and ethical values shaped India’s industrial landscape, creating lasting impacts through his dedication to excellence and social responsibility. In the archives of Indian industry, few…

[thebloggingbuzz2024]

"Legacy of Innovation: Speech at Krupp Factory" Speech, Krupp Factory, L...

[immaculatasknight]

The cycle repeats

[hoodienanami]

this post about indiana jones annoys me so much bc the answer to why he fights nazis is so incredibly simple if your head isnt up your ass. hes jewish. hes a jewish character created by one of the most famous jewish filmmakers in history who made the most famous movie about the holocaust in history. he is literally played by a jewish actor. its not anachronistic for him to hate nazis

anyway watch this video about how raiders of the lost ark and the last crusade are structured around the punishment of nazis and their collaborators- including rich white american industrialists. steven spielberg made indiana jones hate nazis bc HE hates nazis

[spaceprincessleia]

"The magistrate is a former Imperial, but she's an industrialist. My idea was that she had a knowledge of metallurgy and obviously knew what beskar was. And she was pillaging this planet and stealing all of its resources - people who were willing to take everything from a world and give it to the Empire were valuable to the Empire. And even after the fall of the Empire, the people who built the war machine were still out there and really dangerous. They need to be tracked down because otherwise, they're going to keep doing what they're doing and find new ways to exploit people." (Dave Filoni, The Art of Star Wars - The Mandalorian S2)

MAGISTRATE VERSION 1B “It was around this time

that they wanted to make the magistrate a woman and

to maybe wear more red, the wine palette.“ Matyas

MAGISTRATE VERSION 119 “I really like graphic elements, something that has a really strong silhouette, especially for Star Wars; it‘s so important. [My concept art mentor] Dermot Power does such a good job with side profiles of characters. I think some of that, in my brain, it came out in this side view. [I was also exploring] the airbrush Blade Runner look for combat makeup and different hairstyles; if you can get the hair to work with the origami look for the clothing, heat-pressed hair that can be like very chiseled in structure.“ Matyas

MAGISTRATE VERSION 02 Matyas

MAGISTRATE VERSION 4B Matyas

MAGISTRATE VERSION 122 Matyas

“Jon was very insistent that the person playing the magistrate had to be somebody who was obviously skilled with martial arts, and we did a deep search trying to find somebody who could embody this character. Then I happened upon Diana Inosanto‘s name, and her history and her father [Dan Inosanto], who is a martial arts legend. Her family‘s connections to Bruce Lee [Dan Inosanto being his student and Diana, his goddaughter]. And that just felt right to me. Then, when we called her in, [we found out that] she‘s somebody who watches Clone Wars and Rebels with her kids. And she was just ecstatic. I said, ‘Well, you know who you‘re going to fight, right?’ She almost fell over right there.“ Filoni

MAGISTRATE VERSION 109

“I was also looking at kendo uniforms, or something that has that really graphic read [with strong shapes and silhouettes] like an origami look. They weren‘t saying ‘No,’ so I kept exploring things in that realm. Maybe her combat outfit is hidden under her formal look.“ Matyas

[menandwomanofhistory]

Oskar Schindler

[seat-safety-switch]

There is a secret war happening in the heart of our world, friends. Combatants strive for absolute supremacy, a way to force their onerous new rules on regular human beings just like you and me. You only need to go to the cereal aisle at your local grocery store to see it for yourself.

When I was a kid, there were thousands of breakfast cereals. It was big business: fill kids with sugar laced corn byproducts. Quick breakfast, get them out the door. That was before the Carb Panic, which is not related in any way to carburetors, which remain a perfectly valid form of fuel metering and injection. Suddenly, breakfast cereal wasn't "cool" anymore. Sales dropped. MBAs freaked out. And a huge portion of our shared cultural history evaporated, just like that.

Even now, people of a certain age still have these brands woven into their sense of identity. You will lumber through the rest of your life, sleeper-like, until abruptly activated by a series of names that industrialists tattooed onto your prefrontal cortex. Post Oat Flakes, your brain will screech, we remember the titan it once was. A gentle frisson of nostalgia, followed by a haunting void and an awareness of the irreversible march of time.

Reduced competition means an easier time making money, right? Not so: as our civilization slowly looks down, Wile E. Coyote-like, and realizes that we actually stopped doing anything at all a couple decades ago in favour of moving some numbers around in Excel, people are cutting out things like Fruit Loops in favour of "eating actual food" and "paying my rent." This time, though, the cereal pushers learned their lesson. If the grocery stores don't want to stock their cereal because of low demand, they can simply hike the prices so that everyone gets their respective beaks wet. Seven bucks a box! Sir Grapefellow would have been ashamed.

Don't worry, though. I've got a plan. You see, the Canadian government stocked a bunch of anti-nuke bunkers with food and water and other supplies way back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. In the 80s, they had kind of gotten used to the whole idea of being obliterated in a millisecond and largely stopped caring as much. All that cereal is still perfectly good. If you bring your dad's old bolt cutters, we can probably sneak out a couple boxes before the Mounties figure out we're there. Might be a little stale, but that's better than living under the whip hand of Bob Kellogg's. I swear to whatever deity is listening that I will once again sup of Count Chocula.

[scotianostra]

May 3rd 1768 saw the birth of Charles Tennant who became a chemist and an industrialist.

Tennant was born at Laigh Corton, Alloway, Ayrshire to John Tennant and his second wife Margaret McClure. Tennant’s family had farmed there for generations - and had been friends of the local poet Robert Burns. They moved to Glenconner, Ochiltree, Ayrshire, shortly after his birth and Charles attended Ochiltree parish school. After leaving school, he was apprenticed as a weaver.

In his work he saw that the weaving industry was being constrained by the method used to bleach cloth which involved crude chemicals and long exposure to sunlight for many months. He started his own bleaching fields in Ayrshire and looked at the methods used for bleaching. There had already been progress (times had been reduced from 18 months to four) but in 1799 Tennant (in partnership with Charles Macintosh who is best known for his technique of macintosh waterproofing clothing) patented a new method to create a dry bleaching powder that could be used indoors. He built a factory at St Rollox in Glasgow and demand for his bleaching powder soared. By the 1830s and 1840s it was the largest chemical plant in the world, with over 1,000 workers.

Later, he was to become a social reformer, helping to create one of the most productive periods of social progress and reform in Scotland’s history. His works needed large quantities of coal and as he was a good friend George Stephenson, the great railway engineer, Tennant was one of the prime movers in railway expansion. He was mainly responsible for getting a railway into Glasgow. The chemical business founded by Tennant eventually merged with others in 1926 to form the chemical giant Imperial Chemical Industries, that’s ICI, in case you were wondering!

As well as a social reformer they say that he was sharply aware of the atmospheric pollution his works were creating and so he ordered the building of the worlds highest chimney - 450 feet high - in an attempt to lose his fumes into the upper atmosphere. Tennant’s Stack was a Glasgow Landmark well into the twentieth century. Of course pumping it into the atmosphere was doing as much damage up there as it was in Glasgow. I call into question his credentials in this respect as over the decades the St Rollox works has been one of the cities worst eyesores. Chemical waste was dumped in the Sighthill area causing a deadly spread of contaminants through the soil, which local people called the Stinking Ocean. Many of his workers suffered perforated septums and blindness due to continued exposure to toxic chemicals and were colloquially known as ‘Tennant’s White Mice’.

Charles Tennant died suddenly at his home in Abercrombie Place, Glasgow in 1838 aged 71.

Pics are of Tennant, his St. Rollox Chemical Works in 1831 and his grave on the Necropolis.

[hard--headed--woman]

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

(i am so glad i learned about her!)

Born in 1908 and died in 1942, she is a Swiss writer, poet, explorer, philosopher,  photographer, journalist and traveler (yeah that's impressive!).

Her family was a family of Swiss industrialists from the upper bourgeoisie and close to the far-right ; openly lesbian, she lives with difficulty with them and can't wait to leave.

From 1927, she studied history and literature in Zurich and Paris and then began writing articles for the Swiss press.

In 1930, she became friends with Klaus Mann (writer) and Erika Mann (writer, actress, singer) children of Thomas Mann (writer) and had a long affair with the latter. She supported them in their fight against Nazism. The three friends joined the anti-fascist magazine Die Sammlung.

In 1931, she obtained a doctorate. At the age of 23, she published her first novel, Les Amis de Bernhard. She became friends with Claude Bourdet, Catherine Pozzi's (poet and writer) son and a future member of the French Resistance.

In 1933, Annemarie Schwarzenbach made her first trip as a journalist, travelling to Spain with the photographer Marianne Breslauer.

That same year, she travelled to Persia and decided to marry, in Tehran, Achille Clarac, the secretary of the French legation, who was openly homosexual. She did this so that she was no longer dependent on her parents. Thanks to her marriage, she was able to obtain a diplomatic passport, which facilitated her travels. Obviously, it wasn't a love marriage; the two of them did it to help each other and to be able to live free.

She later returned to Switzerland, then left for the Soviet Union and the United States. In 1938, she underwent several detox treatments for her morphine addiction. She fell in love with one of the women in charge of her treatment. During these stays at the clinic, she wrote "La Vallée Heureuse","Das glückliche Tal" (The Happy Valley).

In 1939-1940, when Europe was once again embroiled in war, she travelled by Ford from Geneva to Kabul, via Iran, with the Swiss traveller, writer and photographer Ella Maillart, a journey marked by her addiction problems. The two women's epic journey is recounted by Ella Maillart in her book "La Voie cruelle". It was during this journey that Annemarie Schwarzenbach wrote "Un hiver au Proche-Orient". She also wrote various reports for Swiss newspapers.

On her return, she went back to the United States, where her addiction to morphine, her depressive tendencies and her suicide attempts forced her to undergo several psychiatric treatments. She then became interested in the trade union movement. In New York, she befriended Carson McCullers, who fell madly in love with her and dedicated "Reflections in a Golden Eye" to her.

During a stay in the Belgian Congo, Annemarie Schwarzenbach joined the Free French forces in Brazzaville; she was mistaken for a Nazi spy. Disturbed by this comparison, she began writing a series of poems, including Les Rives du Congo-Tétouan. In 1942, having regained her serenity, she decided to return to Switzerland.

On 7 September 1942, a fall from her bicycle seriously injured her head. She was treated in a psychiatric hospital in Prangins, with electric shocks. Her mother then had her taken back to the Engadine, where she died on 15 November, aged 34.

After her death, her mother chose to destroy a large part of her correspondence. However, the Annemarie Schwarzenbach fonds is preserved at the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern and was made freely accessible on Wikimedia Commons in 2017. She was nicknamed the "inconsolable angel" by the French writer Roger Martin du Gard.

She has created a number of novels, poems, photos and reports during her many travels, and I invite you to take a look at her work!!! She was such an interesting person!!!

I love women with a thirst for life and the world like that; she wanted to discover everything, and created such interesting things!!!

Do check her books, her poems and her photos!

[howardduck1490]

Teen Titans Go! Batman

Batman is the super-hero protector of Gotham City, a man dressed like a bat who fights against evil and strikes terror into the hearts of criminals everywhere. In his secret identity, he assumes the alias of Bruce Wayne, billionaire industrialist and notorious playboy; though "Bruce Wayne" is technically his real name, this Bruce Wayne is a disguise--that of the man he would have been had his parents not been murdered before his eyes when he was no more than a mere boy.

Although Batman possesses no super-human powers, he is one of the world's smartest men and greatest fighters. His physical prowess and technical ingenuity make him an incredibly dangerous opponent. He is also a founding member of the Justice League and the Outsiders. Dick Grayson, the first "crime orphan" to assume the identity of Robin and be nicknamed "The Boy Wonder," who currently uses the alias of Nightwing, is Wayne's hand-picked successor.

Batman was created by writer Bill Finger and artist Bob Kane, first appearing in Detective Comics #27. (1939) Since then, Batman has been one of the most well-known DC Comics characters rivaling Superman and Wonder Woman, throughout his entire publication history and even in other media. This also extends to his supporting cast and his rogues gallery, particularly his archenemy the Joker.

[racefortheironthrone]

Now you mentioned i, I am a bit surprised Smallville is prominently and consistently in Kansas? It's Smallville, Kansas. There might be others and certainly cities located vaguely within a real region, but it's definitely the first fictional town or city of D.C. in a real-world American state to come to mind.

So this gets to the weirdness of D.C geography. When Superman was first established, there was much less of a cohesive "universe," so if Siegel and Shuster wanted Superman to specifically be raised in Kansas, that's where he was from and the rest of the geography would have to work itself out.

IMO, this early slapdash approach to world-building has (over time) led to some things that just don't make sense to me as a student of urban history and urban studies:

Metropolis shouldn't be in Delaware. It doesn't make sense in terms of urbanization, given the context of an already-crowded Northeastern Corridor - Delaware simply does not have the capacity to sustain a city of 11 million people, and you wouldn't get a municipality of that size right next door to New York City (as well as D.C's other fictional cities in the area). The whole idea of Metropolis and Gotham being across the river/bay from each other has never really worked for me; you can still do Superman/Batman team-up stories no matter where they are, because Superman can fly and Batman has his own personal fighter jets.

More importantly, it doesn't make sense in terms of historic patterns of urban migration. Moving to the big city in search of the American Dream is a big part of the Clark Kent story, but historically people moving from rural to urban areas overwhelmingly go to the nearest large city, depending on how transportation networks are arranged, whether we're talking about train lines or direct flights or highways or bus routes. There is a reason we can track regional movements of black communities during the Great Migration, because who went where depended on which train lines ran through which states:

This is why I've always felt that, while Metropolis has aesthetically been associated with New York City, it logically should be Chicago. It is the biggest city in the Midwest, one very much associated with robber baron industrialists and corruption at the highest levels, and absolutely stuffed with art deco architecture for Superman to pose on top of. Up until the Tribune Company began to strip it for parts, it's also been a major newspaper town with a long tradition of muck-raking investigative journalism that would inspire a starry-eyed cub reporter like Clark. As one of the original transit hubs and the U.S' own "nature's metropolis," it is precisely the place that a Kansas farm boy would hop a train to, because all trains go to Chicago. Also, culturally I like it better that Clark Kent represents the City of Wide Shoulders whereas Bruce Wayne is the typical Tri-State Area Type-A personality.

Going back to D.C's bizarro Northeast geography, I likewise have an issue with Gotham being in New Jersey...if New York City is also supposed to be a major metropolitan area in the D.C universe. Just as Delaware would struggle to support a city of 11 million people, it would be very difficult to grow Gotham into a city of 10 million people so close to the gravity well of the Greater New York Metro Area. New Jersey is a pretty urbanized state, but its biggest cities tend to range in population from 300,000 to 100,000 - which works very well for a place like Blüdhaven, which is supposed to have something of an inferiority complex vis-a-vis Gotham - because a lot of the population tends to gravitate to NYC for work and eventually housing as well.

I've already said my piece about the lack of cultural specificity of D.C's Midwest.

As far as the West Coast goes, I've always found it a bit odd that Star City isn't where Seattle is supposed to be. Let's face it, the only place where Oliver Queen's facial hair would go unnoticed is Seattle. Also, Coast City is often depicted too far north on the map - if it's supposed to be a half-hour away from Edwards Air Force Base, it should be significantly more southern, down by Kern County and San Bernadino County, not practically up in San Francisco.