Chicago on the Make Read online

  PRAISE FOR CHICAGO ON THE MAKE

  “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

  Chicago on the Make

  MAP 1. Chicago’s community areas. All maps by Bill Nelson.

  Chicago on the Make

  POWER AND INEQUALITY IN A MODERN CITY

  Andrew J. Diamond

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Oakland, California

  © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California

  French versions of chapters 3–7 were originally published as Histoire de Chicago, by Andrew Diamond and Pap Ndiaye. © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2013.

  Parts of chapters 1 and 5 originally appeared in a somewhat different form in Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908–1969 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Diamond, Andrew J., author.

  Title: Chicago on the make : power and inequality in a modern city / Andrew J. Diamond.

  Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017026928| ISBN 9780520286481 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520286498 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520961715 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Chicago (Ill.)—Politics and government—20th century. | Chicago (Ill.)—History—20th century. | Chicago (Ill.)—Social conditions—20th century.

  Classification: LCC F548.5 .D525 2017 | DDC 977.3/1104—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026928

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  To my family, near and far, past and present

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  1 • Capital Order

  2 • Black Metropolis

  3 • White and Black

  4 • The Boss and the Black Belt

  5 • Civil Rights in the Multiracial City

  6 • Violence in the Global City

  7 • A City of Two Tales

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  FIGURES

  1. The Union Stockyards

  2. Homicidal violence around stockyards during 1919 riot

  3. Overton Building

  4. South Side kitchenette apartment

  5. Louis Armstrong

  6. Zoot suiters at Savoy Ballroom, 1941

  7. Young rioters confronting police in Cicero, July 1951

  8. Richard J. Daley celebrates first mayoral election, 1955

  9. Stateway Gardens, ca. 1958

  10. White gang members, Near Northwest Side, ca. 1961

  11. Martin Luther King at Soldier Field, July 10, 1966

  12. Black power militants at Soldier Field, July 10, 1966.

  13. The Wall of Respect

  14. The Chicago skyline, 1974

  15. Daley the builder, ca. 1958

  16. Harold Washington campaign

  17. The other Chicago: view north on S. Dearborn towards Robert Taylor Homes, 1998

  18. Richard M. Daley in Mexican Independence Day parade

  19. Mural of Benito Juárez in Pilsen

  MAPS

  1. Chicago’s community areas

  2. Communities, gangs, and boundaries on the South Side, ca. 1919

  3. Bronzeville and the Stroll, 1920

  4. Major incidents of racial violence and the black population, 1946–1952

  5. Downtown development and public housing in the 1950s

  6. Major Loop building projects, 1963–1977

  7. The gentrification frontier west of the Loop

  8. Ethnic Chicago, 2000

  Introduction

  Former president Barack Obama joined a long line of observers when, while addressing officials gathered at the 2012 NATO Summit in Chicago, he referred to the host city as “a quintessentially American town.” Perhaps the first recorded expression of this idea came from British ambassador James Bryce, who in 1888 mused that Chicago was “perhaps the most typically American place in America.” Years later Sarah Bernhardt opined it was “the pulse of America” and H.L. Mencken quipped that it was “American in every chitling and sparerib.” By contrast, few have made similar claims about either New York or Los Angeles. New York has long remained the “great” American city, but its greatness has rested more upon a sense of particularity than typicality. Most Americans residing between the two coasts think of the Big Apple as a somewhat strange and daunting place. Moreover, if Hollywood has played a leading
role in exporting American values and norms throughout the planet, it has also made Los Angeles into a surreal and idiosyncratic place in the minds of most Americans living east of the San Fernando Valley.

  Chicago, on the other hand, has evoked so much that is patently American, and it continues to do so today even after President Trump attempted to make it into an aberration by evoking the “carnage” on its streets. First and foremost, with its 2.7 million residents (nearly 10 million in the entire metropolitan area), it is the clear-cut capital of the Midwest and thus of the fabled American “heartland”—a nebulous place that politicians of every stripe appeal to in order to convince voters that they represent the “real” people. And Chicago strikes this populist chord in ways that other “great” American cities do not. In contrast with the dominant image of the good people residing in the older, educated cities of the eastern seaboard, for example, the stereotypical Chicagoan speaks in a thick accent, pronouncing words like the and these as “da” and “dese.”1 While notions of class justice (and injustice) now struggle for legitimacy within the realm of mainstream political discourse in the United States, American patriotism nonetheless remains infused with celebrations of average working men and women—which keeps Chicago a working-class town in the American imagination, even if it now ranks among the most economically powerful global cities in the world.

  Although nobody knows with certainty why Chicago popularly became known as the Windy City around the 1880s, the city has taken numerous other nicknames since its rise to national prominence in the late nineteenth century, and some of the most recognized and enduring of these have related to its working-class identity. Carl Sandburg coined two such monikers in a single stanza of his 1914 poem “Chicago,” when he referred to the city as both the “Hog Butcher for the World” and the “City of the Big Shoulders.” The latter still resonated several decades later, when Chicago had picked up yet another slogan seeming to pay tribute to its industriousness: “the city that works.” Currently, in the postindustrial era, when jobs in the service sector are far more plentiful than those in factories and mills, such homages to the city’s industrial strength seem anomalous. If Chicago still possesses a considerable industrial labor force, its packinghouses and steel mills have shut down, and many of its warehouses have been converted into galleries, lofts, and condos. But when Sandburg was penning his famous lines, Chicago was emerging as the symbol of American industrial power worldwide. Americans are nostalgic for this golden age of global leadership, and such yearnings further support Chicago’s bid to be the “quintessentially American town.”

  Moreover, as the symbol of a triumphant industrial past, Chicago also emblematizes another of the country’s grand narratives: its long tradition of immigration and cultural pluralism. If in recent years the increasing economic insecurity of middle-class Americans has fueled the growth of anti-immigration sentiments, especially in the southwestern states along the Mexican border, the cherished idea of the United States as a country of immigrants persists. Well recognized is the fact that waves of immigrants and African American migrants worked many of the jobs that made Chicago and the United States with it an industrial giant during the American Century. The urban landscape in the minds of most Americans is a multiethnic place that mixes distinct ethnoracial communities and cultures, and in this sense Chicago once more appears as the prototypical American city. Its folklore is filled with many of the things that conjure up the multiethnic urban experience: gangsters, hot dogs and sausages, pizza, jazz and the blues. The city’s recent campaign to brand itself as “the city of neighborhoods” represents an attempt to renew its association with this dimension of the urban experience, even if not every neighborhood mapped by this campaign was an ethnic or racial community per se.

  Thus, Chicago has meshed with key cultural and ideological currents that have shaped mainstream conceptions of the American city. Its central location within the landscape of popular culture has mirrored its geographical position in the midst of the American heartland. Yet, Chicago’s centrality to the U.S. urban experience also owes a great deal to the key role it has played in the production of knowledge about urban society. The University of Chicago was the birthplace of modern urban sociology in the 1920s and 1930s, when scores of researchers associated with the Chicago School of sociology plunged into the city’s ethnic working-class neighborhoods to produce ethnographies that demonstrated—among other things—that poverty, crime, family dysfunction, and immorality were due more to social structures and physical environmental factors than to biological or cultural characteristics.2 By 1930 the University of Chicago had trained over half of all the sociologists in the world, and the behavioral and ecological models of its faculty soon structured the way a generation of social scientists viewed the American city and its problems—for better or for worse. Using the city of Chicago as a laboratory, Chicago School pioneer Robert Park conceptualized the “race relations” paradigm that would come to shape the country’s understanding of its racial “dilemma” into the distant future, and two University of Chicago graduate students, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, gave the social sciences the first book on the “black ghetto” with their 1945 classic Black Metropolis.3 By midcentury, Chicago had become the case study for the rest of the nation.

  It was not until somewhat recently that scholars began to challenge this paradigmatic status, arguing that its emphasis on concentric zones surrounding a central business district no longer captured the decentered, postmodern arrangement of numerous American cities in the twenty-first century.4 Many of these criticisms have come from researchers identifying themselves with the so-called Los Angeles School of urbanism. In 2002, geographer Michael Dear claimed that Los Angeles was more paradigmatic than Chicago for understanding the evolution of the metropolitan United States.5 Dear’s argument rested on the idea that Chicago’s spatial logic of a centrally organized, modernist city, in which the economic and political activities of the central business district organize the surrounding metropolitan region was outdated. Much more prototypical, he asserted, was the kind of sprawl and fragmentation exhibited by the postmodern metropolis of Los Angeles, where cores of economic activity have sprung up with little relation to any kind of city center. Proponents of the Los Angeles School, moreover, claimed that the case of Los Angeles aptly demonstrated that forces of globalization were far more powerful than local politics in shaping the city, and pointed to Los Angeles’s gated communities patrolled by private security forces—a common feature of many southern U.S. cities that has been largely absent from the Chicago scene. Such claims also reflected a key development in the history of the postwar United States. In the decades following the Second World War, massive federal government spending on military, aerospace, and other high-tech programs in the country’s southern, Sun Belt regions accelerated the political and economic decline of the northeastern and midwestern industrial cities belonging to what, by the 1980s, became known as the Rust Belt. Los Angeles, far more than Chicago, resembled the sprawling Sun Belt cities that rose to prominence during this era.

  The Los Angeles School critique provoked a strong reaction among researchers working on Chicago, a number of whom came together to establish what they referred to as the New Chicago School of urbanism. While most of these political scientists and sociologists concurred that the old Chicago School model of concentric rings around a central business district needed to be updated to reflect the new realities of decentralization in the urban United States, they reasserted the relevance of Chicago’s model of development by arguing that “the city center is critical (even as there is growth on the metropolitan periphery) and that public services are a core organizing element in such a global city.”6 Another fundamental point of agreement among this school’s scholars, moreover, was that while global forces have had a strong impact on the city’s evolution, the local political structure, from the neighborhood level up to City Hall, continues to play a major role in determining how the city develops and how
it is governed.7 “Politics,” as two of the New Chicago School’s leading proponents put it, “still matters and . . . it does in other cities as well.”8 This quintessentially Chicago School (old and new) emphasis on local context recently received further validation with the publication of Robert Sampson’s widely acclaimed Great American City, a book that marshals an enormous body of data gleaned from decades of fieldwork in Chicago to convincingly defend the critical importance of “neighborhood effects”—the roles of neighborhoods and communities in shaping the lives of those living within them.9

  While settling the debate between the Los Angeles and New Chicago Schools is decidedly not one of the stakes of the narrative to follow, there is much about Chicago on the Make that will be welcomed by those who continue to view the story of Chicago politics as somehow emblematic of the American urban experience. In contrast with an increasing tendency among scholars of contemporary U.S. cities to look beyond the grassroots to the forces of global capital, local politics, broadly defined, lies near the center of this new history of Chicago. Politics for my purposes here is not merely something that happens during elections, city council sessions, and in the meetings of labor unions and a range of other political and civic organizations; politics also transpires on street corners, in parks, corner bars, stores, coffee shops, and restaurants, around schools, at block meetings and parties, and in nearly every place in which people come together to share stories, discuss the issues that are important to them, and, ultimately, to form ideas about themselves, their neighbors, and their neighborhood. Such an approach unavoidably veers onto the terrains of local culture and everyday life, for it is here that average residents of the city have most commonly engaged in political activities and formed their political views.