Quote of the Day: Sarah Bernhardt on Politics & Power

Notice Bernhardt chooses the word “pulse” instead of a safer synonym like “center” or “hub.” A center can be static; a pulse is alive, measurable, vulnerable, and impossible to fake. It carries tempo and consequence. With one anatomical metaphor, she turns a city into evidence. “I adore Chicago. It is the pulse of America.”

To adore a place is more intimate than to admire it. Admiration can remain at a distance, the way you nod at a skyline from a taxi window. Adoration is proximity: the sense that a city’s character gets under your skin, that its smells, noise, and stubbornness begin to feel like your own. Bernhardt’s sentence doesn’t flatter Chicago into a postcard; it diagnoses it as a heartbeat.

Chicago earned that metaphor the hard way. In Bernhardt’s era, it was less a destination than a circulatory system, rails, lake traffic, stockyards, grain, steel, moving the country’s appetite and ambition at industrial speed. After catastrophe, it rebuilt with an almost defiant scale, inventing new vertical architecture and a civic imagination that refused to think small. But a national pulse isn’t only commerce. It’s the cultural syncopation of neighborhoods shaped by immigration and the Great Migration: music that bent into blues and jazz, language that learned candor, a public life forged in unions, newsrooms, courtrooms, and stages.

Sarah Bernhardt knew how energy travels. A pioneering French actress who conquered stages and early film, she understood the drama of reinvention and the resilience required to keep performing through changing times.

May 30 arrives with summer on the horizon, when cities reveal their truest rhythm: parks filling, trains humming, sidewalks becoming theaters again. Bernhardt’s test still holds, if Chicago’s beat feels strong, the American experiment does too, and our task is to protect the resilience and humanity that keep it going.