Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City - Softcover

Diamond, Andrew J. J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520286499 ISBN 13: 9780520286498

Verlag: University of California Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

"Effectively details the long history of racial conflict and abuse that has led to Chicago becoming one of America's most segregated cities. . . . A wealth of material."--New York Times

Winner of the 2017 Jon Gjerde Prize, Midwestern History Association

Winner of the 2017 Award of Superior Achievement, Illinois State Historical Society

Heralded as America's quintessentially modern city, Chicago has attracted the gaze of journalists, novelists, essayists, and scholars. Yet few historians have attempted big-picture narratives of the city's transformation over the twentieth century. Chicago on the Make traces the evolution of the city's politics, culture, and economy as it grew from an unruly tangle of rail yards, slaughterhouses, factories, tenement houses, and fiercely defended ethnic neighborhoods into a global urban center. Reinterpreting the narrative that Chicago's autocratic machine politics shaped its institutions and public life, Andrew J. Diamond demonstrates how the grassroots politics of race crippled progressive forces and enabled an alliance of downtown business interests to promote a neoliberal agenda that created stark inequalities. Chicago on the Make takes the story into the twenty-first century, chronicling Chicago's deeply entrenched social and urban problems as the city ascended to the national stage during the Obama years.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew J. Diamond is Professor of American History at Sorbonne Université. He is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and books on the history of race, politics, and political culture in the urban United States, including Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969.

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'Andrew Diamond's wide-ranging and significant book movingly tells the history of Chicago, how it has become a tale of two cities, from the shimmering and branded opulence of the Loop to the poverty-filled and underserved streets of the South Side. And this isn't, as Diamond makes clear, a matter of chance or culture, but of deliberate and long-standing policy decisions. This is an honest and truthful book for this difficult moment in history.''Bryant Simon, author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America

'Original and sophisticated, Diamond's Chicago on the Make offers a fresh take on a city, country, and indeed a concept we thought we knew. We've taken of late to using 'neoliberalism' to describe any number of entrepreneurial impulses and austerity measures shaping our contemporary political culture. But as Diamond's probing look at the twentieth-century city so brilliantly instructs, when it comes to market-based approaches and state violence shaping political outcomes, there's really nothing 'neo' about 'neoliberalism.' Excellent.''N.D.B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida

'Chicago on the Make is a forcefully wrought and persuasive synthetic account of race, ethnicity, and power in modern Chicago. Diamond brilliantly ties together the histories of machine politics and social movements, of major figures like both Mayor Daleys, and of ordinary Chicagoans'black, white, and Latino. This is the indispensable history of the Windy City, a work of urban history at its best.''thomas J. Sugrue, author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North

'With the attention to detail and narrative depth that only a historian can bring, Chicago on the Make explains how and why Chicago has become a city of extremes: wealth and poverty, power and resignation. Its grand scope'which stretches across time, from downtown to the neighborhoods, and from grassroots organizing to City Hall'makes it a definitive, must-read account.''mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City

'Few American cities have been as subject to neoliberal transformation as Chicago. Fewer still have seen leaders so adept at absorbing the discontent generated by such policies. But as Andrew Diamond makes clear in this sweeping, highly readable history, the roots of such policies run deep. Anyone interested in understanding how Chicago became the racially and economically stratified metropolis that it is today'or, more ambitiously, how to resist such stratification'should read this book.''micah Uetricht, Jacobin magazine, author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers against Austerity
 

 

Aus dem Klappentext

&;Andrew Diamond&;s wide-ranging and significant book movingly tells the history of Chicago, how it has become a tale of two cities, from the shimmering and branded opulence of the Loop to the poverty-filled and underserved streets of the South Side. And this isn&;t, as Diamond makes clear, a matter of chance or culture, but of deliberate and long-standing policy decisions. This is an honest and truthful book for this difficult moment in history.&;&;Bryant Simon, author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America

&;Original and sophisticated, Diamond&;s Chicago on the Make offers a fresh take on a city, country, and indeed a concept we thought we knew. We&;ve taken of late to using &;neoliberalism&; to describe any number of entrepreneurial impulses and austerity measures shaping our contemporary political culture. But as Diamond&;s probing look at the twentieth-century city so brilliantly instructs, when it comes to market-based approaches and state violence shaping political outcomes, there&;s really nothing &;neo&; about &;neoliberalism.' Excellent.&;&;N.D.B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida

&;Chicago on the Make is a forcefully wrought and persuasive synthetic account of race, ethnicity, and power in modern Chicago. Diamond brilliantly ties together the histories of machine politics and social movements, of major figures like both Mayor Daleys, and of ordinary Chicagoans&;black, white, and Latino. This is the indispensable history of the Windy City, a work of urban history at its best.&;&;Thomas J. Sugrue, author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North

&;With the attention to detail and narrative depth that only a historian can bring, Chicago on the Make explains how and why Chicago has become a city of extremes: wealth and poverty, power and resignation. Its grand scope&;which stretches across time, from downtown to the neighborhoods, and from grassroots organizing to City Hall&;makes it a definitive, must-read account.&;&;Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City

&;Few American cities have been as subject to neoliberal transformation as Chicago. Fewer still have seen leaders so adept at absorbing the discontent generated by such policies. But as Andrew Diamond makes clear in this sweeping, highly readable history, the roots of such policies run deep. Anyone interested in understanding how Chicago became the racially and economically stratified metropolis that it is today&;or, more ambitiously, how to resist such stratification&;should read this book.&;&;Micah Uetricht, Jacobin magazine, author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers against Austerity
 

 

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Chicago on the Make

Power and Inequality in a Modern City

By Andrew J. Diamond

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28649-8

Contents

List of Illustrations, viii, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 Capital Order, 15, 
2 Black Metropolis, 59, 
3 White and Black, 94, 
4 The Boss and the Black Belt, 128, 
5 Civil Rights in the Multiracial City, 165, 
6 Violence in the Global City, 203, 
7 A City of Two Tales, 260, 
Epilogue, 323, 
Acknowledgments, 339, 
Notes, 343, 
Index, 377, 

CHAPTER 1

Capital Order

GROWING CHAOS

In 1903 renowned muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens traveled to Chicago in search of a scoop on the graft, corruption, and brutality that Americans across the nation associated with the country's second largest metropolis. He did not exactly find the story he was expecting to write. After all, this was a city run by Carter Harrison II, a mayor who had proven his reformist mettle by working with the "goo-goos" in the Municipal Voter's League (MVL) — a group of upright businessmen, professionals, and social workers unified by the mission of bringing "good government" to their city — to appoint city council committees on a nonpartisan basis. And Harrison had just a year earlier taken an unequivocal stand in defense of the public interest in his dealings with the traction magnates — the robber barons looking to cash in on their soon-to-expire franchises on the tangle of streetcar lines inflicting impossible traffic jams downtown. If, for his part, Steffens judged Harrison a reluctant reformer, the mayor nonetheless advocated municipal ownership of mass transit and a popular referendum to decide the issue — a stance that certainly did not win him favor with railroad tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes and the so-called Gray Wolves on the city council who had enabled him to amass a fortune of some $30 million since his arrival in Chicago more than a decade earlier. What impressed Steffens most of all were the earnest efforts of the MVL and its new secretary, Walter L. Fisher, which gave him cause to proclaim: "The city of Chicago is ruled by the citizens of Chicago." And yet Steffens did not leave Chicago without something sensational to report. If Chicago reformers seemed to Steffens to be fighting the good fight, they also seemed no match for the miasma of ills that plagued its residents: its tainted drinking water, its unpaved streets, its "stench of the stockyards," its "insufficient (and inefficient)" police force, its "mobs" and "riotous strikers," its "extra-legal system of controlling vice and crime." Summing it all up in the oft -repeated phrase that would come to identify Steffens's view of Chicago much more than any of his accolades about its engaged citizenry and reformers, he dubbed the city "[f]irst in violence, deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the "tough" among cities, the spectacle of a nation."

While some may have thought Steffens was merely displaying the hyperbolic flair that was the signature of turn-of-the-century muckraking journalism, his claims were, in fact, right on the mark. By the early twentieth century, Chicagoans were killing each other at an astounding rate; its muddy streets were piled with trash, animal excrement, and seemingly all the detritus of humanity; its rivers were brown with sewage; and its skies black with coal soot. In fact, the vigorous civic engagement Steffens found so remarkable signified that an increasing number of its notables were beginning to reckon with these horrid conditions and with the idea that their city was quickly turning into the world's reference point for urban dystopia. Indeed, Steffens had arrived in Chicago at the dawning of a new era of reformist zeal, whose intensity had something to do with a growing sense among civic and political leaders that their city had fallen behind other great cities throughout the world in its manner of dealing with the social costs of laissez-faire capitalism. This new reformist spirit had taken shape within the context of what Daniel T. Rodgers has referred to as "the Atlantic Era," when "American social politics were tied to social political debates and endeavors in Europe through a web of rivalry and exchange." For pioneering social worker Jane Addams, this meant traveling repeatedly to London's East End to observe the Toynbee Hall social settlement before launching her own Hull House settlement on Chicago's Near West Side. And for architect Daniel Burnham, who would set to work on his visionary Plan of Chicago several years later, it meant using the inspiration of Baron Haussmann and his renovation of nineteenth-century Paris "to bring order out of the chaos."

It came as no surprise to most that Steffens had bestowed upon Chicago the dubious honor of being "first in violence" — certainly in the nation and perhaps in the world. By 1913, its murder rate was four times higher than New York's and was about fourteen times that of London. In fact, this situation had begun to arouse concern in 1903, when juvenile court judge Richard Tuthill had organized a group of businessmen, religious leaders, and other reform types into an "anti-crime committee" to put pressure on the police, whom they viewed as inefficient in fighting criminal activities, if not complicit with them. Holding up Chicago's startling number of murders in comparison with London's, the editors of the Chicago Tribune spoke of "an attitude of mind which prevails in Chicago and which cannot be shaken except by long years of struggle on the part of individual Chicagoans to bring individual souls to a nobler conception of individual life." In the years to come, as racial theories and social Darwinism would take center stage in campaigns to close the country's borders, anticrime discourses would increasingly identify this "attitude of mind" with African Americans, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a range of "races" that poured into the country from southern and eastern Europe between the 1880s and 1910s. But in turn-of-the-century Chicago, perceptions of criminality were still surprisingly democratic, more so, it seemed, than in comparable cities. "Crime in Chicago," the Tribune's editors made sure to point out, "is a matter of individual tolerance of sharp, illegal, wrongful, violent practices, either at mahogany tables or in dark alleys."

Chicago in the first decade of the twentieth century was certainly a place where even political officials at times settled their arguments with their fists, and one's ability to do so convincingly could earn respect. For example, when, as a young foreman for the Chicago Sanitary District in 1907, future mayor Edward Kelly punched out an insubordinate worker, his supervisor, Robert McCormick (a staunch Republican and future owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune), granted him a raise and a promotion. McCormick told him he admired his "guts," as the story goes. Nonetheless, in most people's minds the violent crime problem that was the object of law-and-order campaigns and sensationalized newspaper reportage belonged almost exclusively to Chicago's laboring classes. "Homicide," as historian Jeffrey Adler has argued, "was a public and shockingly visible activity in late-nineteenth-century Chicago," where a good many murders took place in and around saloons, brothels, and other spaces defined by the male working-class "sporting culture" of the time. And...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520286499
• ISBN 13: 9780520286498
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 434
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland