I was really surprised at how good this book was. I went in just expecting a basic survey of Chicago's history. What I got was a narrative of the social history of Chicago in the 20th century, mostly from a racial and ethnic perspective. The author sort of describes what the book is all about in the introduction, stating that the only thing that rivals segregation as a distinguishing feature of the city's history is the long rule of Mayors Richard J. and Richard M. Daley, who dominated the city's politics from 1955 to 2011, with only a relatively short gap for other mayors. The author also identifies two more things that are unique about Chicago: first, Chicago was the first major city to adopt the free market neoliberalism that swept through the country by the 1980s. In Chicago, it started in the 1950s. Second, Chicago was the last major American city where machine politics survived, continuing under Richard J. Daley well into the 1970s.
The story begins in the early 20th century in a city filled with immigrants from Europe. In 1910, the foreign born and their children made up almost 80 percent of Chicago's population. But with the Great Migration of black southerners, these Europeans slowly started to put aside the differences between Irish, Polish, Italian, etc. and begin to unify against the new black migrants. This was aided by the Catholic Church, which worked against ethnic parishes and unified Catholic groups. Between July 1, 1917, and July 27, 1919, whites in neighborhoods next to Chicago's Black Belt bombed twenty-four black homes and stoned or vandalized many others. This was all before the 1919 race riots broke out. In 1917, the Chicago Real Estate Board declared a block-by-block policy of racial segregation, and promoted homeowners' associations and racially restrictive covenants to prevent residents from selling or leasing homes to blacks. The racial boundaries drawn in the 1910s would be a battle in the 20s, with racial consolidation occurring in the 30s. By 1940, these restrictions would cover 80 percent of Chicago. Street gangs would also police the racial boundaries.
The 1940s brought a "Second Great Migration," which lasted into the 1960s. This made the majority of the American black population into urban dwellers, and led to confrontations in every city that Chicago had already been dealing with for decades. White racism was felt most in neighborhoods and on housing, much more so than at work. Whites and blacks worked together in factories in the 1940s, but neighborhoods became more segregated. The racism meant to keep blacks in white neighborhoods, and between 1944 and 1946, fifty homes in Chicago were firebombed, stoned, or vandalized, killing three occupants. But despite this, Chicago's Democratic machine remained strong and maintained enough patronage positions for Black Chicagoans to keep winning elections.
Richard J. Daley was the perfect product of the Chicago machine. He was essentially without ideology. He maintained his position as Chairman of the Democratic Party while serving as mayor. Daley had the power not only to disburse city funds, but party campaign funds, and to select the party's ballot each election. Daley also turned the city council into a "rubber-stamp advisory board" by changing procedures to transfer responsibility for budget formation to his own hands. During his time as mayor, segregation worsened because it was popular among the majority of Chicagoans. He ended up building ghettos with federal money, because without a strong leader supporting integration, racists would be able to push their agenda.
Daley's highway plans reinforced segregation. The Dan Ryan Expressway makes two sharp turns after crossing the Chicago River today because it was originally planned to bisect Bridgeport, Mayor Daley's old neighborhood. Instead, he diverted it to run along Wentworth Avenue, the old dividing line between the black and Irish neighborhoods that Daley's youth group/gang used to enforce in his younger days. Moreover, Garfield Park and North Lawndale were cut off from the Loop, and turned into ghettos. North Lawndale transformed from 97 percent white (mostly middle-class Jews, Poles, and Czechs) to 91 percent black between 1950 and 1960. In the 1980s, the neighborhood had just one bank and one supermarket for a population of 66,000, but 99 bars and liquor stores and 48 lottery vendors. The highways really feel to me like a late-stage New Deal problem of decadence that caused very justified NIMBYism for years afterward.
The 1950s and 60s were a boom and bust period in Chicago, in which jobs tended to leave the city even as the numbers of job-seekers increased. Black Chicagoans increased from 14 percent of the population to 25 percent from 1950 to 1962. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans also started migrating to Chicago, with numbers of Mexicans in the city increasing from 24,000 to 108,000. The overall Spanish-speaking population went up from 35,000 to 247,000, while the total population dropped from 3,600,000 to 3,300,000. Chicago's west side became a more mixed "mosaic of black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and white neighborhoods."
I'm getting bored of writing this now, so I'm gonna stop. There was more and it was a good book!
Miscellaneous Facts:
- By 1930, the University of Chicago had trained more than half of the world's sociologists.
- Chicago's "L" doubled in size from 35 miles to 70 miles from 1900 to 1914, making it one of the longest metropolitan railways in the world at the time.
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