Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  5. Michael J. Dear, ed., From Chicago to LA: Making Sense of Urban Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002). In fact, one can find the genesis of the Los Angeles School more than a decade before this when Mike Davis claimed to be “excavating the future in Los Angeles” in his classic book City of Quartz. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1991, repr., London: Verso, 2006).

  6. Dick Simpson and Tom M. Kelly, “The New Chicago School of Urbanism and the New Daley Machine,” Urban Affairs Review 44 (November 2008), 218–38. Students of New York politics have also weighed in on this discussion; see, for example, John Mollenkopf, “School Is Out: The Case of New York City,” Urban Affairs Review 44 (November 2008), 239–65.

  7. See John P. Koval, “An Overview and Point of View,” in The New Chicago: A Social and Cultural Analysis, ed. John P. Koval, Larry Bennett, Michael I.J. Bennett, Fassil Demissie, Roberta Garner, and Kiljoong Kim (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 3–17; and Terry Nichols Clark, “The New Chicago School,” in Dennis R. Judd and Dick Simpson, The City, Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 220–41.

  8. Simpson and Kelly, “New Chicago School of Urbanism,” 238.

  9. Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

  10. The only other book on Chicago that moves in this direction is Larry Bennett, The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). While Bennett, one of the leading proponents of the New Chicago School, is not a historian, he is attentive to how Chicago’s past has weighed upon the city’s recent evolution. Yet Third City is largely concerned with the Richard M. Daley era (1989–2011) and with questions of urban form. Moreover, Bennett’s minimal coverage of black Chicago leaves a large part of the Chicago story untold. To this day, the only other serious historical monograph on Chicago over the longue durée is Dominic Pacyga’s Chicago: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), but this book’s treatment of the high era of globalization is rather schematic. Richard M. Daley’s twenty-two years in City Hall, for example, receive merely twelve pages of a book that numbers more than four hundred.

  11. Fittingly, during the twelve-year interregnum between the administrations of Richard J. Daley and Richard M. Daley, Chicago politics became quite contentious—especially during the “council wars” that broke out during the term of the city’s only popularly elected black mayor, Harold Washington.

  12. My conception of neoliberalization is informed by the work of Wendy Brown, who defines neoliberalism as a “rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life.” Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 30.

  13. Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  14. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  15. Ibid., 42.

  16. Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-democratization,” Political Theory 34 (December 2006), 695.

  17. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

  18. See, for example, Milton Rakove, Don’t Make No Waves . . . Don’t Back No Losers: An Insider’s Analysis of the Daley Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976); and William L. Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931–1991 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

  19. Similar “red squads” operated in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, but none were as sophisticated and aggressive as that in Chicago. Surprisingly, the only study of the role played by these organizations is Frank J. Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). Unfortunately, Donner did not have access to the Chicago Police Red Squad files, which were turned over for public scrutiny after a 1987 federal court order.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of Nations (1904; repr., New York: Dover, 2004), 192, 163.

  2. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 5.

  3. Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, Plan of Chicago (1908, Commercial Club of Chicago; repr., New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 1.

  4. Report of the City Council Committee on Crime of the City of Chicago, March 22, 1915; Chicago Tribune, December 21, 1903.

  5. Chicago Tribune, December 25, 1903.

  6. Jeffrey S. Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 15; on working-class male “sporting culture,” see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1992), 99–106.

  7. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906; repr., New York: Dover, 2001), 15.

  8. Robert Hunter, Tenement Conditions in Chicago: Report of the Investigative Committee of the City Homes Association (Chicago: City Homes Association, 1901), https://archive.org/details/tenementconditio00city, 128, 132.

  9. Wesley G. Skogan, Chicago since 1840: A Time-Series Data Handbook (Urbana, IL: Institute of Government Affairs, 1976), 24.

  10. Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 61.

  11. Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 63.

  12. Daniel Bluestone, chap. 4, in Constructing Chicago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).

  13. Report on the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, part I (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), 672; Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, vol. 1, Population 1910: General Report and Analysis (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 829. The size of the Jewish population is estimated using the census figures for Russian-born immigrants. A tiny community before the 1890s, the foreign-born Greek population leaped forty-seven-fold between 1890 and 1920.

  14. Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Black Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 12–15.

  15. Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt, 44.

  16. Chicago Socialist, October 8, 1904, quoted in David H. Bates, “Between Two Fires: Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1904–1922” (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012), 36.

  17. Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1905.

  18. Bates, “Between Two Fires,” 55.

  19. Chicago Tribune, May 8, 1905.

  20. Frederic Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927), 131.

  21. James R. Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States,” Journal of American History 79 (December 1992), 996–1020; James R. Barrett and David R. Roediger, “The Irish and the ‘Americanization’ of the ‘New Immigrants’ in the Streets and in the Churches of the Urban United States, 1900–1930,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Summer 2005, 3–33

  22. New York Times, November 1, 1903.

  23. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Immigration, Report of the Immigration Commission: Immigration and Crime, vol. 36 (Washington, DC, 1911), 144.

  24. Chicago Record-Herald, July 31, 1906, quoted in Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt, 161–62.

  25. Maureen Flanagan, “Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Woman’s City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era,” American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (October 1990), 1032–50.

  26. John J.
Glessner, The Commercial Club of Chicago: Its Beginning and Something of Its Work (Chicago: Privately printed for members of the Commercial Club, 1910), www.forgottenbooks.com/en/books/TheCommercialClubofChicago_10519965.

  27. Paul DiMaggio, “The Problem of Chicago,” in The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 209–32. If Chicago’s brand of progressivism stood out in some ways, such activities of cultural patronage suggest its elites were more focused on changing the behavior of the laboring classes than addressing the structural roots of inequality. My thinking here thus concurs with recent work challenging the coherence and impact of the progressive era: see, for example, David Huyssen, Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

  28. Joseph M. Siry, “Chicago’s Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57 (1998), 137.

  29. On the promotion of the plan, see Carl Smith, chap. 7, in The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  30. Burnham and Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 1, 50.

  31. Ibid., 8.

  32. Ibid., 32.

  33. Ibid., 108.

  34. Ibid., 8.

  35. Ibid., 50.

  36. Robert Lewis, “Modern Industrial Policy and Zoning: Chicago, 1910–1930,” Urban History 40, no. 1 (February 2013), 96–97.

  37. Chicago Tribune, July 8, 1917.

  38. William Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (1970; repr., Chicago: Illini Books, 1996), 75–76.

  39. Chicago Commission on Race Relations (CCRR), The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 3.

  40. James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 178.

  41. Arnold R. Hirsch, “E Pluribus Duo?: Thoughts on ‘Whiteness’ and Chicago’s ‘New’ Immigration as a Transient Third Tier,” Journal of American Ethnic History 23 (Summer 2004), 7–44; see also James R. Barrett and David Roediger, “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16 (Spring 1997), 3–44.

  42. Frederic Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927), 16.

  43. Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York: Dutton, 1971), 37.

  44. CCRR, The Negro in Chicago, 8.

  45. Annual Report of the Crime Commission, 1920, quoted in CCRR, The Negro in Chicago, 342.

  46. John Landesco, “The Gangster and the Politician,” 8, Ernest Watson Burgess Papers, box 132, folder 7, University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center.

  47. James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 13–35; see also Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–1954 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 7–43.

  48. Sinclair, The Jungle, 30.

  49. Thrasher, The Gang, 174.

  50. Ibid., 17, 194.

  51. Thomas Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 90.

  52. Dominic Pacyga, “Chicago’s 1919 Race Riot: Ethnicity, Class, and Urban Violence” in The Making of Urban America, 2nd ed., ed. Raymond A. Mohl (Scholarly Resources: Wilmington, DE, 1997), 187–207.

  53. Hirsch, “E Pluribus Duo?”

  54. Thomas Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle Class Reform, Chicago, 1880–1930 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1991), 195.

  55. Pacyga, Chicago, 220.

  56. Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 101.

  57. “Igoe Flays Negroes in Harsh Terms,” Plain Truth 1, no. 1 (October 1930), box 102, folder 3, Charles Merriam Papers, Special Collections–University of Chicago.

  58. Douglas Bukowski, Big Bill Thompson, Chicago, and the Politics of Image (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 133.

  59. Ibid., 151–52.

  60. Chicago Tribune, October 3, 1924.

  61. Mary J. Herrick, Chicago Schools: A Social and Political History (New York: Sage, 1970), 159.

  62. Chicago Daily News, Jan 10, 1928.

  63. Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 4.

  64. Paul M. Green, “Anton J. Cermak: The Man and His Machine,” in The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition, ed. Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 109.

  65. Roger Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), 26–29.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. “Business in Bronzeville,” Time, April 18, 1938. The caskets and hair-straightening products mentioned here reflect the facts that undertakers were one of most important business groups in black Chicago and beauty parlors topped the list.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Quoted in Wallace D. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 87.

  4. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 433.

  5. Ibid., 438.

  6. Ibid., 380.

  7. Ibid., 439–43.

  8. Christopher Robert Reed, chap. 3, in The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920–1929 (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011).

  9. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 217–23.

  10. Ford S. Black, comp and arr. Black’s Blue Book: Business and Professional Directory (Chicago: Ford S. Black, 1918), xv.

  11. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 434, 438, 629. By the late 1910s churches rivaled beauty services as the most prominent “business and professional” listings in Black’s Blue Book.

  12. Ibid., 629, 650–51.

  13. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine, 84.

  14. Ibid., 85.

  15. On the “slumming” craze in Chicago, see Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), chap. 5.

  16. On the evolution of “racial uplift ideology” among black leaders and intellectuals during the interwar years, see Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 234–53.

  17. Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 45.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Chicago Defender, May 17, 1919. For an excellent study of how such class-biased prescriptions exemplified the Chicago Urban League’s tendency to embrace behavioral models of uplift, see Touré F. Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

  20. Half-Century Magazine, January–February 1923, 13.

  21. Chicago Defender, April 24, 1920.

  22. Chicago Defender, November 17, 1923.

  23. Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), 138–39.

  24. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 45.

  25. Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White, Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)
, 221.

  26. Chicago Defender, September 26, 1931; Chicago Defender, August 22, 1931.

  27. Perhaps the most significant inquiry into “the minds of individual gamblers” during this era is White et al., Playing the Numbers, especially chap. 8. See also Victoria Wolcott, “The Culture of the Informal Economy: Numbers Runners in Inter-War Black Detroit,” Radical History Review (Fall 1997), 46–75.

  28. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 576.

  29. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969), 106.

  30. William A. Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32.

  31. François Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 199.

  32. I borrow the term linked fate from Michael Dawson, who uses it to convey the feeling among African Americans that their individual interests are closely connected with the collective fate of the group. Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

  33. Political Scientist Wendy Brown uses the term economization to describe how the advance of neoliberalism “construes subjects as relentless economic actors” or as “human capital.” Wendy Brown, chap. 1, in Beyond the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).

  34. Chicago Defender, June 24, 1922.

  35. Chicago Tribune, August 4, 1931.

  36. Mayor Thompson had slated DePriest to fill the vacancy opened up by Representative Martin B. Madden’s death just prior to the general elections that year.

  37. Harold F. Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935), 236–40.

  38. Douglas S. Massey, “Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Conditions in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, vol. 1., ed. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001), 394. The dissimilarity index measures the relative separation or integration of groups across all neighborhoods of a city or metropolitan area. The dissimilarity index score of 85.2 means that 85.2 percent of white people would need to move to another neighborhood to make whites and blacks evenly distributed across all neighborhoods.