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A City on the Move . . . or on the Make? Personal Reflections on Recent Scholarship on Chicago History

2021; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/23283335.114.3.4.07

2328-3335

Timothy Dean Draper,

American Environmental and Regional History

One of the greatest challenges to editing book reviews for a journal such as this one is to avoid the pitfall of favoring one or two significant subjects over others. In the case of the history of the state of Illinois, two topics in particular threaten to overwhelm the rest both due to the number of published studies but also more transcendent historiographical interests. These two subjects are, of course, Abraham Lincoln and the city of Chicago. During my nearly eight years as book review editor of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, I have assiduously attempted to balance my own particular historical sensitivities with the interests of the society's members, needs of the historical community, and the realities of scholarly and trade publications in state history. It has not been an easy task, especially as one of my fields is American urban history and my oldest son is named Lincoln, which may evidence some personal biases. However, looking back on the over two hundred book reviews published during my tenure, I believe our journal has offered perspectives on a wide variety of books related to Illinois and midwestern history. Nevertheless, at times, there comes a seeming convergence of scholarship that merits an exceptional emphasis on a historical topic, and the five books listed above that focus on aspects of Chicago history fall in that category.While our state is famed as "the Land of Lincoln" and has myriad claims to historical significance as well as mass culture appeal, the city of Chicago looms perhaps even larger in the public consciousness. Al Capone, the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Black Sox, Chicago-style pizza, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre: these and many other images surface when reflecting on the history of the city. And nicknames—the Windy City, the City of Big Shoulders, Hog Butcher of the World, among others—abound. These diverse portrayals reflect the vibrant and multifarious nature of a world-class city such as Chicago, and they also reflect the reality that a major urban center focused on development, commerce, expansion, and energy often appears as much an environment of hustle, corruption, and crime as progress, confidence, and construction. Therefore, the "city on the move" may also appear the "city on the make," and Illinoisans' ambivalent attitudes on the metropolis, such as talk of secession,1 represent the challenge historians encounter when defining the place of Chicago in not only the national but also state narratives. The five volumes reviewed in this essay certainly suggest the historical dichotomy of Chicago as not only a city on the move with purpose and vigor but also a city on the make with problems and perils.At first glance, other than discussing features of the Chicago historical experience, these five volumes might not seem amenable to an integrated review narrative. The chronological period covered by these histories runs from the late Gilded Age through contemporary times. Patrick T. Reardon's The Loop: The "L" Tracks that Shaped and Saved Chicago begins with discussions of early to mid-nineteenth-century Chicago urban and transportation development and centers much of its analysis on the first four decades of the twentieth century; both Ed Bachrach and Austin Berg's The New Chicago Way: Lessons from Other Big Cities and Matthew L. Schuerman's Newcomers: Gentrification and Its Discontents offer commentary largely on more contemporary issues of urban political economy. In fact, the latter two volumes, in particular Schuerman's, operate from comparative perspectives with other American cities, seeking to understand the recent Chicago experiences in urban politics, city management, social stratification, urban renewal and development, racial and ethnic demographics, and other phenomena of modern American city life. Not all of the studies are purely historical studies either. The New Chicago Way is in part urban study and part political polemic, while Newcomers combines sociological and economic commentary with historical narrative. Patrick T. Reardon's The Loop is more of a structural than narrative work, combining a chronological overview of the elevated system with a critical economic and political assessment of the transportation modality's impact on the city, as well as a paean of sorts (as suggested by the title) to this unique part of Chicago infrastructure and character. Erik S. Gellman's Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles through the Lens of Art Shay is one of those rare finds that melds coffee table historical narrative with insightful primary source materials. The photojournalism of Art Shay during the Civil Rights Movement years of post–World War II Chicago alone are worth the price of the book, but Gellman's careful and comprehensive discussion of individual and institutional racial justice issues in the city make this a valuable historical contribution. Robert Lewis's Chicago's Industrial Decline: The Failure of Redevelopment, 1920–1975 is probably the most traditional historical narrative of these studies despite the fact that the author is a professor of geography and planning at the University of Toronto rather than history. Despite such different approaches to the Chicago historical experience, a review of these five studies not only represents the interrelationships among politics, economics, and social constructs that have dominated American urban life over the past century or more but also the uniqueness of Chicago as a major global metropolitan area with its own identity and ongoing challenges. Patrick T. Reardon, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist with the Chicago Tribune, explores the fascinating nature of Chicago as metropolis and community in The Loop. While focused seemingly on the narrow topics of municipal geography and urban transportation, Reardon provides readers with a heartfelt and, frankly, critical perspective of how Chicago developed as the principal metropolis of the American Midwest. Those of us "downstaters" (a well-known Chicago appellation to any Illinoisan outside Cook County regardless of location) who travel to Chicago for business, pleasure, or education know that transportation is a key to the city: Metra, RTA, CTA, elevated, and so forth. The Loop, at first, appears monolithic and foreboding: an entity at once hostile to outsiders but glad to accept monetary obeisance. Reardon's volume, however, suggests that the Loop is less an expedient transit of the city than an outgrowth of the exuberance, expansion, and expectations of an urban center defining its identity.Published by Southern Illinois University Press, this volume demonstrates how vital the voices of non-academics remain to historiographical traditions. A former feature writer, columnist, and editor for a major metropolitan newspaper, Reardon both displays an emotive fascination with his topic and a broad analytical perspective on the centrality of transportation to Chicago historical development—and, by extension, American urban historiography, such as seen by Sam Bass Warner's Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (1978). Divided into four parts, Reardon's analysis seeks to complement urban history with economic and social realities. Part 1 examines the Loop in terms of geography and nomenclature, while part 2 focuses on the concept of the "Union Loop," a problematic nexus of capital, mobility, and boosterism. In part 3, Reardon examines in greater detail the economics, politics, and urban realities of the Loop in eras of economic change. Finally, part 4 brings the reader to the more recent past, when Chicago politicians and policymakers sought to balance the needs of a deindustrializing national economy with urban spatiality, especially as American civil society sought to cope with issues of race and class in a highly competitive global arena. While demolishing historic ethnic and racial neighborhoods in the name of urban progress, civic leaders, capitalists, and activists sought to negotiate the maintenance of systems that defined Chicago as place, culture, and system.The author concludes his study with the short essay "The Loop, New Year's Day, 2019." Therein he combines historical reflection with personal observations. He reflects that on that New Year's Day, "riders on this train, late on the last day of the year, can look out onto some of the same buildings that a Chicagoan taking one of the first rides around the Union Loop would have seen" (p. 221). In Chicago, the Loop is a reminder of energy and enterprise, politics and patronage, capital and corruption. Reardon opines that historically "this rectangle of elevated tracks continues to root the center of Chicago—and the center of the metropolitan area—in this spot on Earth" (p. 230). The success of this study translates to both Chicagoan and outsider the complex intersections of commerce, transport, politics, and culture that comprise the changing ethos of this midwestern metropolitan area for nearly the past two centuries.As Reardon's work evidences, the role of transportation is central to the development and maintenance of enterprising urban areas. After describing the natural obstacles to early nineteenth-century economic development in Chicago, William Cronon, in his opus Nature's Metropolis, notes that it was railroads that "had made Chicago the most important meeting place between East and West. But they also continued the process begun long before with the harbor and the canal."2 Yet, transport networks operate both as a means of ingress and egress, and the railroads and interstates that served Chicago's economic growth and commercial development also over the course of time provided opportunities for enterprising individuals and corporate interests to move from the city center to the collar counties and beyond, removing vast sums of capital, complicating sociopolitical networks, and eventually disrupting the community-based nature of Chicago neighborhoods. These developments and the multivaried attempts to arrest their potentially devastating effects on the people of Chicago are at the center of Robert Lewis's Chicago's Industrial Decline.As a specialist in geography and planning, Lewis has published extensively on urban political economy. His books include Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape, 1850–1930 (2000), Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis (2008), and Calculating Property Relations; Chicago's Wartime Industrial Mobilization, 1940–1950 (2016). In this important work, the author explores the challenges facing the capitalists, managers, and policymakers of a major world industrial metropolis of the twentieth century. Importantly, for a twenty-first-century readership, this volume explores not only the development of industrial capitalism but also its social consequences, political ramifications, economic exigences, and historical evolution—particularly in the sense of maintaining socioeconomic vibrancy when material forces pose fundamental challenges in relation to not only the post–World War II global competition for industrial leadership but also national political debates over economic sustainability and regional realities of spatial and cultural change.Lewis's perspective on how Chicagoans dealt with the issues of industrial decline is nuanced, moving from the local to the larger realm of increasingly interconnected national and international economies of the twentieth century, while reaffirming the subtleties of suburban and exurban development. After his review of earlier studies, the author states that his study reveals that "industrial decline in Chicago has a specific intrametropolian geography from the early twentieth century. While the forces driving deindustrialization after 1970 may have swept many of the older industrial regions of the United States, industrial decline before then operated at a different spatial scale. The closing of factories, the loss of employment, and low reinvestment in older facilities that haunted the Rust Belt after the postwar gory days had parallels in the pre–World War II period. The suburbs become the growth engine of metropolitan development, leaving the central cities behind" (p. 9).Therefore, the narrative of industrial decline that begins with the tumultuous 1960s and the overheating of the national economy due to delinquent Keynesian overinvestment in guns and butter may be revised to a story of entrepreneurial and corporate commitment to profitability in relation to the geographical resources and infrastructure afforded by place.Our standard narrative of industrial capitalist development highlights metropolitan areas that moved chronologically and geographically from the Northeast to the West with the Midwest as a region of both agricultural and transportation innovations as a crossroads. St. Louis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Omaha, and especially Chicago stand as case studies of boom, boosterism, and business. Yet, as enterprise flourished, so, too, did its reach into new areas. Mail order catalogs offered commodities to the hinterland. Railroads and then highways made egress of goods as well as ingress of consumers from and to the urban center easier and affordable. And eventually, mass communications provided means by which production facilities and investment capital did not have to cohabit the same geographical space. With such development, as Lewis shows, perils to central city manufacturing appeared as early as the 1920s, and both capitalists and politicians realized such with potentially competing agenda. Thus, much of the twentieth century witnessed efforts to negotiate the continuing primacy of the urban industrial space in Chicago with the increasingly attractive resources of the growing collar counties, which, especially by the 1970s, appeared threatening to the political leadership and economic well-being of America's Second City.Elected mayor first in 1955, Richard J. Daley, a Democratic machine politician of the old school, was tasked with dealing with such increasing challenges of post–World War II midwestern urban society. In his monumental study Chicago: A Biography, Dominic A. Pacyga introduces the elder Daley's entry into the mayoralty by averring: "The new mayor faced a city with immense problems, not the least being the lack of downtown investment. Scant new construction had occurred in the Loop since the Great Depression. The Prudential Building, begun during Kennelly's term, opened in 1955 and broke that cycle, but it would take much more for Chicago to maintain its position in the nation's economy."3Managing infrastructure issues such as the Loop and downtown development, as well as the potential relocation of key manufacturing enterprise, dominated the Daley years, as well as negotiating traditional white ethnic political alliances and dispensing the all-important political patronage to allies and cronies. But then came the outsiders—at least in a Daleyesque perspective—who challenged age-old Democratic machine politics and its alliances with conservative media and corporate power. Commenting on this point of confrontation, Tom Hayden, recollecting the early 1960s Students for a Democratic Society sociopolitical experiment in Upton as well as Dr. King's involvement in the Chicago Freedom Movement, stated: "Chicago under Mayor Richard Daley was a difficult city to reform in any way. Backed by the rabidly conservative editorials in the Chicago Tribune, the Daley machine treated critics as mortal enemies and employed all forms of harassment against them."4While Hayden's perspective was fundamentally shaped by the events of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and ensuing Conspiracy Trial, many of those Chicagoans who did not directly benefit from the Daley machine might have agreed—especially in the non-white communities. A testament to the troubled ethno-racial realities of post–World War II Chicago may be found in Erik S. Gellman's Troublemakers—a coffee table–style work that transcends the genre to offer compelling narrative and graphic testimony to the turbulent history of Chicago as it experienced the challenges of the Great Migration and the following redefinition of local demographics and ensuing political, economic, social, and cultural transformation. Gellman, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, has published on urban life, the working class, and social movements. Utilizing the photographs of Art Shay, a prolific photographer who worked for Life, Time, Sports Illustrated, and other noteworthy publications, as well as collaborating with Nelson Algren, Gellman seeks to examine how "Chicago's postwar social movements advanced ambitious visions of a democratic society that drew swift retaliation from city authorities" (p. 1).At the heart of this volume is the concept of "Democracy" and its contested definitions and realities. Chapter 1 introduces readers to the vagaries of democratization in post–World War II Chicago by referencing "democratic dreams deferred," and the photographs highlight the fault lines in a city experiencing the Great Migration, southern white ingress, transfer of municipal political power, and the vibrancy of working-class activism. A particularly artful narrative is the juxtaposition of the experiences of Chicago African Americans Muddy Waters and Mahalia Jackson during this early period. The second and third chapters of the work reveal the differing landscapes of urban and suburban Chicago at the time, ranging from analysis of police corruption in relation to racial politics in the city to issues of civility and tolerance in areas facing racial residential integration, such as Deerfield. The coming together of an organizationally vibrant Chicago Civil Rights Movement by the early 1960s is the theme of chapter 4, where the NAACP, Urban League, Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, and other groups "boldly declared their own resistance campaigns" (p. 118). The chapter's full-page opening photograph highlighting young NAACP activists against an industrial backdrop represents the first color picture in the volume, suggesting graphically the pivotal nature of this transformational time. As one might expect, the final two chapters, covering the period from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s appearance in Chicago through the emergence of Black Power and the Chicago Black Panther Party, offer the most dramatic and revelatory photographs of the work. While not excluding connections among student, New Left, Civil Rights, and Black Power activists, including the 1968 Democratic National Convention demonstrations, these portraits evidence the significant cleavages within activist ranks, particularly involving matters of racial justice.As Gellman's prose and Shay's photography suggest, housing and residential issues were among the core issues of democratization during Chicago's Civil Rights years. From the beginning of the twentieth century, African American migration to the city faced significant obstacles to finding adequate housing, contributing to the spatial segregation embodied in the Black Belt, which the Chicago Housing Authorities siting practices only intensified following World War II.5 The struggles to democratize housing in Chicago were both specifically grounded in the Windy City and emblematic of similar challenges throughout the Rust Belt. In her award-winning study The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson notes that "Chicago was trying to discourage the migration of any more colored people from the South. . . . [But] with close to half a million colored people overflowing the black belt by 1950, racial walls that had been 'successfully defended for a generation' . . . were facing imminent collapse."6 The racial dynamics of residential housing were further complicated in post-industrial America by economic opportunities afforded by public housing, urban renewal, and downtown revitalization projects, whether wholly public, private, or hybrid. Journalist Matthew L. Schuerman's Newcomers: Gentrification and Its Discontents, utilizing a comparative approach to the subject, evidences how Chicago's story was at once unique and representative.Claiming that "gentrification is all around us," the author seeks less a historiographical examination of the phenomenon in recent American experience than a value-free analysis of the term's social, economic, and political characteristics and consequences (p. 1). In assessing whether gentrification is good or bad, Schuerman argues, "It is not a cause, but a symptom of a macroeconomic transformation much larger than any of us, the transformation from an industrial economy to a professional and then a 'creative' one" (p. 5). His analytical focus centers on three cities over six decades, from 1956 to the early 2000s in Brooklyn Heights, San Francisco, and Chicago. The period is significant since it represents the transformation of the United States economy from manufacturing to post-industrial service and information sectors with the concomitant impact on organized labor, middle-class status, and family economic arrangements. The sites themselves represent principal urban regions of the post–World War II period, especially in relation to eastern and Rust Belt economic change and West Coast demographic and financial development. Unlike standard histories of urban America, Newcomers purposefully seeks to teach lessons. Referring to twenty-first-century demographic and residential realities as perhaps a "current crisis" (p. 13), Schuerman argues that "some of what we should learn NOT to do are ways of thinking. Chief among them is the stance, adopted too often over these past six decades by people in power, that gentrification is a fringe phenomenon that is not likely to grow, and whose benefits outweigh its costs. We had solutions to displacement all along; what we failed to do was to implement them" (p. 13).The author offers the guidance to readers that they must consider the abject conditions in post–World War II America to fairly appraise the realities and consequences of gentrification. In the context of New York City—especially in the early period of this study—affordability intersected race and class in perplexing planners and politicians, while San Francisco witnessed the travails of population growth, public transportation exigencies, and counter-cultural invasion. In between, as evidenced previously, postwar Chicago approached housing issues while attempting to negotiate industrial decline, political change, and racial demographics. Schuerman begins by focusing on the Near North Side Old Town, where, according to the author, the challenge to city officials and urban planners was to negotiate a geography where the Gold Coast containing "one-third of the members of the city's social register" lay just a mile from "what was then known as 'Little Hell,' where Italians, along with some African Americans, lived in squalor and poverty. One intersection, 'Death Corner,' was purported to have the highest number of murders per square foot anywhere in the world" (p. 91). The author then explores the challenges facing city hall, the Chicago Housing Authority, the Urban League, and other stakeholders throughout the years between Daley senior and Harold Washington. Comparing Chicago and New York City, 1975–1997, Schuerman sees innovation, especially with the work of noted architect Harry Weese in his work south of the Loop. Unfortunately, the author finds little to herald in the more contemporary history of Chicago urban planning and development, concluding that by the 1990s public housing residents showed few gains in education or employment, while younger Chicagoans had "gained little more than a slightly better quality of life" (p. 209).So, then, one might inquire, why did civic governance fail to address more adequately the challenges facing twentieth century Chicago? Another comparative analysis of urban complexities provides a lens specifically on Chicago political culture and its impact on city life. The New Chicago Way by Ed Bachrach and Austin Berg is both an ambitious and frankly critical examination of Windy City politics and municipal governance. The authors are certainly not timid in expressing their assessment of local government and politicians. Chapter titles including "Cutting the Mayor Down to Size," "Discouraging Democracy," "Chicago's Fiscal Ruin," "Pension Apocalypse Now, Not Later," and "Overdue Oversight and the Reality of Corruption" suggest authorial tone; however, the final chapter "Audacity of Hope?" represents a more sanguine view that perhaps the misfeasance and malfeasance detailed in the previous two hundred pages may be redressed. Unfortunately, the lack of historiographical analysis and narrative objectivity complicate not only the authors' conclusions but categorical judgments throughout the book. Ed Bachrach, a retired garment manufacturer, heads the Center for Pension Integrity in Chicago, an organization highly critical of overly generous public pension plans; coauthor Austin Berg, an independent writer, serves as an executive for Illinois Policy, a self-proclaimed advocate for Illinoisan personal freedom. While the polemical nature of The New Chicago Way, especially as published by a university press, might trouble some readers, it does provide a welcome fresh view on the problematic nature of Chicago politics, a system that has clearly shown the fault lines evident in big city representative government—especially in Rust Belt metropolitan areas in the post–Great Migration period.Bachrach and Berg's volume is perhaps less useful for today's historians than future scholars investigating metropolitan politics, urban economies, and electoral demographics. The first two sentences of the book's introduction clarify the authors' thesis and intent: "Although Chicago is not a tyranny, the mayor's power appears unlimited. The mayor of Chicago is the chief executive of the city and runs all city departments, including police, fire, streets and sanitations, and all other municipal workers" (p. 4). Decades earlier, noted attorney William Kunstler, in a federal courtroom, charged, "Mayor Daley obtained and maintains power in Chicago by the creation and maintenance of a corrupt political machine, which is supported by those individuals and corporations standing to gain the most by a continuation of present American domestic and foreign policies."7 Putting aside the ideological hyperbole both right and left, it is perhaps incontestable that post–World War II Chicago municipal governance has not reflected core democratic values. Richard J. Daley is well known as the last, great American political boss. Bilandic and Byrne fought over the ghost of the machine, while Harold Washington and Eugene Sawyer sought to redistribute local political power. Richard M. Daley toyed with old school patronage as he sought to transform the city into a post-industrial global player. Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot represented new constituencies coming to power but without real reform (although the latter, of course, has been severely handicapped by the COVID-19 pandemic). The New Chicago Way does provide a needed lens onto Chicago's one-party system and its failure to offer constructive solutions to contemporary problems. The consolidation of power into the city executive and the ongoing nature of patronage politics is clear. And the authors proceed to highlight the negative effects of such a political system: limited electoral accessibility, poor education administration, inept financial planning, inability to solve pension challenges, failure to investigate systemic corruption, problems in urban policing, commercial and residential urban planning flaws, and more. The authors approach their subject as private sector entrepreneurial critics and conclude their study by channeling Chicago's favorite son Barak Obama's mantra of "audacity of hope." Their concluding statement, however, suggests that their comprehension of hopefulness might be skewed by contemporary partisan perspectives, for they aver: "Hope is a feeling that something good will happen or be true. Audacity can be a willingness to take bold risks, but it may also entail rude, disrespectful behavior" (p. 213). Having perused the volumes above, I must admit that I have missed Chicago during the pandemic. Our family would routinely take two annual trips into the city from DeKalb. During the summer—usually July, we would visit Soldier Field to watch the annual global soccer match: Gold Cup, International Champions Cup, MLS all-star match; and, in December, we would brave the bracing winds off the lakefront to walk Michigan Avenue, shop Water Tower Place Christkindlmarket, and catch a holiday show at the CSO or Goodman Theater.The city is truly a global metropolis, and its history is resplendent with the good and bad, promising and troubling, and hopeful and hopeless of the urban experience. While the volumes reviewed here suggest the challenges not only of urban life, economics, and politics but that of urban historiography, three brilliant books of the past few years attest to the vibrancy and significant of Chicago not only to Illinois and the Midwest but to the national and transnational experiences. In 2010, DePaul University professor Larry Bennett explored the transformational nature of Chicago as both urban and architectural canvas in The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism, which offers a fascinating look at metropolitan place, change, and identity.8 Five years later, Thomas Dyja's award-winning volume The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream appeared. The author audaciously declares, "Understanding America required understanding America. . . . Restoring Chicago to its central place in American history is a crucial step toward reassembling a nation that has lost its shared sense of identity and experience."9 Finally, Liesl Olson's pathbreaking study Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis places Chicago at the heart of the modernist movement, where the creative forces of the city moved sociocultural borders to articulate modern ethos.10 What these three very important works and the five informative volumes discussed above suggest is that the Chicago historical experience is multifaceted, representing aspiration, failure, opportunity, restriction, decay, rebirth: a city on the make and the move and so much more. Perhaps the best testament to the city and its people is reputed to have been uttered by Bill Veeck, who spent the most profitable of his peripatetic baseball career in Chitown: "If you can't outsmart people, outwork them." Yes, a city on the move and the make!