Chicago on the Make thus draws some of its inspiration from Robert Sampson’s more recent turn towards neighborhoods and communities as vital forces in shaping urban life at the grassroots, as well as from older “bottom-up” approaches pioneered by British Marxist historians like E.P. Thompson. It is, above all, a “people’s history” of Chicago—an attempt to capture the city as it was lived by its ordinary residents. Yet, telling the story from this perspective by no means entails marginalizing the more formal, institutional dimensions of policy making, governance, and electoral politics. Nor does it mean looking past economic circumstances, technological changes, and demographic shifts—the broader structural forces that so powerfully shaped Chicago’s political culture, social context, neighborhoods, communities, and built environment. The goal here is to integrate the bottom up with the top down, to combine total history and microhistory, to bring the political, social, cultural, and economic into the same frame.
Taking this kind of approach over more than a century, as Chicago grew from an unruly tangle of railyards, slaughterhouses, factories, tenement houses, state-of-the-art skyscrapers, and fiercely defended ethnic neighborhoods into one of the world’s mightiest global cities, comes with its share of pitfalls. Certain celebrated facets of Chicago’s past have been slighted and even omitted in the effort to fit this grand narrative between the front and back covers of this book. For one thing, the orientation from below entails devoting a great deal of attention to the work, community, and leisure activities of Chicago’s laboring classes—to what was going on in its neighborhoods of African Americans, immigrants, and ethnics—at the expense of the city’s more prosperous districts. As a consequence, this particular history overlooks some related facets of Chicago’s history that may be of great interest to some readers. For example, while it would be impossible to deny the enormous impact that the famed Chicago and Second Chicago Schools has had on the broader architectural history of the United States, the interest in the majestic buildings that have defined Chicago’s skyline here relates mostly to their role in the city’s political economy and in the structural transformation of its neighborhoods. When references are made to Chicago’s great literary works, moreover, it is usually as a way into understanding social conditions. And when Chicago’s art scene comes into the story, it is mainly in relation to the popular art forms emerging out of the city’s vibrant neighborhoods—such as jazz and the blues or the striking wall murals that began appearing in Chicago’s black, Mexican, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods beginning in the 1960s.
Chicago on the Make seeks to move beyond such fables of exceptionalism to highlight a range of historical dynamics and processes that have, to one extent or another, characterized much of the metropolitan United States. Unlike most of the other biographies of U.S. cities, this book endeavors to make a new and much-needed contribution to reflections on the “history of the present” for both Chicago and the urban United States in general.10 By traversing a period of more than a century and devoting substantial coverage to the more immediate twenty-first-century past, it seeks to accomplish what historian Joan Scott has defined as the crucial burden of this historiographical project—to unearth the historical processes behind structures, policies, and ideas that now appear “inevitable, natural or culturally necessary.”
Nothing has seemed more natural and inevitable in Chicago over the past several decades than authoritarian mayors and racial segregation. According to some measures, Chicago is “the most segregated city in the United States” and has ranked high on the list for much of the last century. Only one other thing has rivaled its level of segregation as a distinguishing feature of the city’s history: the extraordinarily long dynasty of Mayor Richard J. Daley and his son Richard M. Daley, whose respective styles of authoritarian “machine” rule, taken together, dominated Chicago’s political scene for forty-three years between 1955 and 2011. For over four decades of Daley rule—a period that spanned the rise and fall of the modern civil rights movement, the spectacular growth of white middle-class suburbs outside the city limits, the ghettoization of huge swaths of its West and South Sides, a massive wave of immigration from Latin America, and the transformation of the city from a motor of industry to a postindustrial node of the global service economy—Chicago scarcely witnessed a legitimate mayoral election or heated city council vote.11 While it is tempting to view Chicago’s rigid racial order and its particularly undemocratic political culture as pure products of the Daley dynasty, these problems, as the story to follow seeks to reveal, had deeper roots.
Excavating the conditions of demobilization and political quiescence that prevailed in Chicago between the 1970s and the first decade of the twenty-first century—a period that saw the city’s racial order hardening and its social inequalities widening—lies at the heart of this history of Chicago. I was living in Chicago during Congressman Bobby Rush’s 1999 mayoral primary run, when the former Black Panther tried to challenge the all-powerful regime of Richard M. Daley, which had spent the previous decade pursuing a global-city agenda that had left all but a handful Chicago’s working-class black and Latino neighborhoods in shambles, by evoking the idea that there were, in fact, “two Chicagos.” The result: Daley defeated Rush by 73 to 27 percent. Eight years later, with corruption scandals mounting and Daley pursuing an austerity program that was essentially punishing the poor for the city’s exploding debt, it was hard to argue that things had not gotten worse. One of these scandals, it should be remembered, involved revelations that the police had been systematically torturing African Americans at the Area 2 police station on the South Side for years. And yet in the 2007 election, Daley’s last, overall voter turnout barely surpassed 30 percent, with 70 percent of black voters and 80 percent of Latino voters casting their votes for Richard M. Daley.
Most scholars attempting to explain this state of demobilization have focused on the more than four decades of autocratic machine rule that shaped the city’s political institutions, modes of governance, and political culture. To be sure, the fact that Chicago’s machine outlasted its analogues in other major cities by decades must enter into any reckoning with politics and power in the Windy City, and Chicago on the Make pays particular attention to this story as well. Where this new history of Chicago diverges from most political histories of the American city in the twentieth century is in its effort to view the dynamics of inequality and demobilization as manifestations of a process of neoliberalization, which in the antidemocratic, political-machine context of Chicago advanced somewhat more rapidly and more aggressively than it did elsewhere. The term neoliberalization is invoked not merely to connote the implementation of a package of economic-minded policies that had inadvertent social and political consequences—such policies were in fact implemented and they did have important social and political consequences, especially beginning in the early 1990s under Richard M. Daley. A more important dimension of the story of neoliberalization being told here involves revealing how market values and economizing logics penetrated into the city’s political institutions and beyond them into its broader political culture.12 This political history of Chicago seeks to understand from both the top down and the bottom up how this happened and how the advance of neoliberalization crippled the political forces standing in opposition to it: labor unions, municipal reformers, neighborhood planning boards, civil rights organizations, and a range of other political organizations that sought to challenge injustices within the prevailing social and political order.
The interpretive thread that weaves together the seven chapters of Chicago on the Make unravels out of the broader project of tracing the evolution of urban societies during the neoliberal moment of late capitalism. It seeks to historicize and delineate the social, political, and cultural conditions of City Hall’s transformation into what Eric Klinenberg refers to as an “entrepreneurial state”—characterized by deregulation, fiscal austerity, outsourcing of city services, market solutions to public problems, and the overriding view o
f residents as consumers (rather than citizens).13 But my account of Chicago’s neoliberal turn takes the discussion in three somewhat new directions.
First, as perhaps the first book-length history of neoliberalization at the urban grassroots over the longue durée, this study makes a historiographical intervention in a field thus far dominated by sociologists, geographers, and political scientists. The Reagan revolution’s neoliberal takeover in the 1980s did not happen overnight but rather developed out of an ideological and cultural framework that had been decades in the making. While scholars like David Harvey have viewed the context of the mid-1970s as pivotal to the neoliberal turn, this history of Chicago views neoliberalization as a process that unraveled gradually and unevenly over much of the twentieth century.14 In Chicago, the mid-1950s proved to be a critical moment in the city’s neoliberal turn. If some of the guiding principles of neoliberalism are the supremacy of free market values, the placement of the state at the disposition of private enterprise, and the attenuation of expansive notions of “the public good,” then Mayor Richard J. Daley’s administration fit the description quite well for most of its more than two decades in power. Beginning in the late 1950s, when Daley took the city council out of the game and turned over the task of planning the city’s future development to an alliance of downtown business interests and technocrats, “Boss” Daley presided over a municipal government in which key policy decisions had been moved out of the hands of the public and into corporate boardrooms. In Daley’s Chicago, a federally funded urban renewal program intended to uplift the poor ended up subsidizing downtown development projects that reinforced the walls around the black ghetto. It was Richard J. (not Richard M.) Daley who brokered the deals that built the John Hancock Center, the Sears Tower, and many of the other iconic skyscrapers that launched Chicago into the global age—all this while the South and West Sides were turning into depopulated hyperghettos. But the Daley administration’s ability to push this agenda forward depended on the inability of democratizing forces to gain traction within Chicago’s political culture during the interwar years, when progressive labor and grassroots forces fought what was ultimately a losing battle against business elites striving to economize the city’s governance criteria, align their own economic interests with “the public interest,” and prescribe entrepreneurial values as the cure for pressing social problems.
Second, unlike most of what has been written on the neoliberal turn, this book places the local politics of race at the center of the story. “Economics are the method,” Margaret Thatcher once remarked, “but the object is to change the soul.” These words suggest that to view neoliberalism too narrowly as simply a policy regime that rose to international prominence beginning in the mid-1970s is to misunderstand how much its triumph rested upon the construction of what David Harvey has referred to as “a neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism.”15 Chicago on the Make seeks to show that racial issues often played crucial roles in changing the “souls” of many Chicagoans—that the politics of race, in effect, pulled residents into the political sphere and shaped feelings, sensibilities, and ideas that paved the way for the acceptance of neoliberal values and policies. This was true on both sides of the color line throughout the long twentieth century, even in the decades prior to the pivotal 1950s. In the city’s white ethnic neighborhoods the formation of an increasingly more inclusive white identity during the interwar era worked to weaken the voice of organized labor, disrupt the efforts of reformers, and, more generally, to enable the administrations of Mayors Cermak, Kelly, and Kennelly to preside over political machines that effectively submerged the politics of social justice beneath a progrowth, antilabor agenda between the 1930s and 1950s. And, in black Chicago, a range of businessman race heroes, religious leaders, and syndicate kingpins managed to tether the politics of racial advancement to the gospel of black capitalism, an achievement that worked to stifle political organizations seeking to organize working-class African Americans around housing and labor issues and to challenge the relationship between the businessmen of the “Black Metropolis” and the white power structure. Tragically, such developments paralyzed the forces opposing the prevailing racial and social order at the very moment when the system of American capitalism was most vulnerable to attack.
Of course the rest of the story does not follow a straight line towards neoliberal domination. There were some big bumps in the road. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed significant challenges to the Daley machine in the form of powerful identity-based mobilizations. And yet, if these movements posed real threats to the machine, they ended up accelerating the process of neoliberalization in their own ways. On the one hand, working-class white Chicagoans took to the streets against racially integrated public housing projects and the black drive for civil rights between the 1950s and 1970s, articulating languages of whiteness, antistatism and consumer rights—the building blocks of a neoliberal populist culture. On the other hand, minority empowerment movements emerged out of black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican neighborhoods, challenging the Daley machine’s downtown agenda and demanding political rights and representation. While these minority rights movements did manage to create a tradition of antimachine activism that stretched across racial and ethnic lines—a situation that bore fruit in the 1983 election of the city’s black reformist mayor Harold Washington—my story about their ultimate fate is not a triumphant one.
In fact, Chicago on the Make reveals how the politics of racial identity and recognition these movements put into practice came to be powerfully incorporated into the neoliberal project of Richard M. Daley in the 1990s. Unlike his father, Richard M. Daley understood the importance of the politics of recognition for different ethnoracial communities, and he bestowed this recognition in the forms of strategic minority appointments within his administration and official acknowledgement of the physical boundaries and cultural significance of key ethnoracial neighborhoods. Such policies enabled him to create local “brokers” and “middlemen” whose ethnoracial legitimacy allowed them to advance the larger neoliberal agenda, especially in the form of progentrification and protourism policies that worked to the disadvantage of renters and public housing residents. Along with the new economy of tourism, the gentrification imperative has driven a range of policies that have ushered in neoliberal sensibilities and forms of governance. It has given private developers an even larger role in the planning process, transformed more and more homeowners into individualistically minded investors, and turned many middle-class Chicagoans against public housing and other state programs that appear to threaten their property values.
This form of incorporation was but one facet of a larger story that constitutes the third somewhat new contribution that this book offers: an attempt to examine at the grassroots level how neoliberalization combined with other forces to create the conditions of political quiescence in Chicago over much of the twentieth century. Part of my explanation for this quiescence builds upon Wendy Brown’s thinking on how the “business approach to governing” and the “market rationality” that characterize neoliberalism militate against democratic governance and a democratic political culture.16 In Chicago, moreover, the de-democratizing forces of neoliberalization were augmented by a political context that worked to effectively depoliticize many of the city’s most pressing issues—segregation, gang-related murders, drug trafficking, failing public schools, and high minority unemployment and poverty rates—by attributing them to cultural rather than political causes. Mahmood Mamdani has referred to this process as the “culturization of politics”: the transfer of political acts and events onto the terrain of culture, where they become dissociated from questions of structure, power, and, ultimately, political mobilization.17 Like neoliberalization, the culturization of politics is part of a story that has transcended the borders of Chicago, but these trends had particularly powerful de-democratizing effects during the more than four decades of Daley rule.
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nbsp; And yet, if Chicago on the Make seeks to shed new light on how the interplay of race and neoliberalization shaped Chicago’s political culture, this by no means suggests that the more traditional story of demobilization and repression should be discarded. Of course other factors worked to dampen the forces of grassroots democracy in Chicago—for one, the city’s patronage machine, which Richard J. Daley was building up to its full potential as cities across the nation were dismantling theirs. Daley distributed patronage resources to his loyal aldermen based on the votes their wards added to his margin of victory, and as chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party he controlled the entire war chest for waging reelection campaigns. An alderman could thus not hope to remain in power without devoting unconditional support to the Boss, a situation that explains how Daley was able to maintain his base in black Chicago even as a local civil rights movement was agitating actively for rights and justice. All this has been well detailed in a number of studies on the Daley machine.18
But observers of the Daley machine have paid too much attention to the carrot and not enough to the stick, thereby omitting a key factor behind Daley’s ability to weather the great political insurgencies of the 1960s and 1970s. Historians have generally undervalued the decisive role that state-sponsored countersubversion played in many major U.S. cities in the postwar era. A quick inventory of the massive collection of surveillance files produced by the Chicago Police Department’s Red Squad division between the 1950s and 1970s suggests that this is a particularly serious blind spot in the case of Chicago.19 Hence, the story here will revise the city’s well-known history of postwar political struggle by better incorporating the part played by the Daley machine’s repressive apparatus. Saul Alinsky’s and Florence Scala’s movements against unjust urban renewal plans in the 1950s and 1960s, the politicization of Chicago gangs by black power militants and federal grant programs, Martin Luther King’s open-housing marches in 1966, the notorious student protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the Black Panther Party’s efforts to form a “rainbow coalition” with the Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization in 1969—all these campaigns fell short of their objectives, in part, because of Red Squad countersubversion. Sometimes the effects of this repression were all too direct, as in the police assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton or in the well-documented infiltration and harassment of Chicago street gangs and black power groups during the civil rights challenges of the late 1960s. In other instances the impact of repression was more abstract and must be construed by reflecting on what could have (or should have) happened but did not. Why did the movements of Alinsky and Scala fail to snowball? Why didn’t Chicagoans come out in the tens of thousands to participate in the demonstration at the 1968 Democratic National Convention? Why didn’t Martin Luther King succeed in mobilizing several thousand (rather than several hundred) African Americans for the open-housing marches? The answer to all of these questions, Chicago on the Make contends, has to do with the fact that forces of state repression hindered the development of a vibrant culture of dissent that could link up universities, labor unions, and progressive political organizations.
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