Abstract
Possibly due to the complexities of any great city, or possibly due to the particular complexities of Chicago, one is hard-pressed to imagine three books presumably sharing a given topic—recent and contemporary Chicago—that are so unlike one another as Thomas Dyja’s The Third Coast, Robert Sampson’s Great American City, and Christine Walley’s Exit 0. The novelist and editor Thomas Dyja’s cultural history of Chicago during the 1940s and 1950s is the most conventional of the three, tracing the city’s “greatest—and final—period as the nation’s primary meeting place, market, workshop, and lab. . . .” (Dyja, xxiii). Great American City is Harvard sociologist Sampson’s summation of the nearly two-decade-long Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a multi-disciplinary research effort that from the early 1990s examined Chicago neighborhoods, their residents, and their local institutions. Christine Walley is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) anthropologist whose Exit 0 is the most eccentric of these volumes. A native of Chicago’s southeast side, a group of communities once dotted by a half-dozen major steel factories—notably U.S. Steel’s huge South Works complex—Walley characterizes her book as “autoethnography,” an examination of a particular community’s social life and evolution, but as well, a personal account of her family and her own moving beyond family and community into the larger world.
Each book offers great insight into Chicago’s recent development, yet in striking ways, each is imperfectly realized. Dyja and Sampson are victimized by what I will broadly characterize as their “genre conventions.” Walley’s relentlessly self-scrutinizing book ultimately founders on the shore that for a generation and more has undercut the American Left: how to articulate a socially just future in a time when staple Marxian categories have lost their relevance?
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Thomas Dyja’s highly readable account of Chicago arts, media, and politics at mid-century is attached to a thesis—paraphrasing “On the Waterfront’s” Terry Malloy, “Chicago coulda been a contenda”—that both speaks volumes about the city’s embattled self-image and is perfectly unverifiable. Organizing his narrative via several short spans of years from the late 1930s up to 1960, Dyja first introduces us to émigré figures Mies van der Rohe and László Molholy-Nagy, Europeans who prodded Chicago aesthetics into a full engagement with continental modernism and injected life into important local institutions. In the case of Mies van der Rohe, the latter was the Illinois Institute of Technology architecture program. Moholy-Nagy was the guiding force behind the Institute of Design, a multi-disciplinary applied arts academy that was briefly known as the New Bauhaus. Dyja also introduces us to poet Gwendolyn Brooks and the South Side, largely African American arts community of the 1930s/1940s and Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago in the same period. What follows is a torrent of individual and group profiles: the dozen or so notables associated with the pioneering Compass Players of the early post-war years, First Lady of gospel singing Mahalia Jackson, the young Hugh Hefner on the verge of reorienting middle-class American male culture, and of course, the variously tormented Nelson Algren, member of no conventionally classifiable community whatsoever.
Dyja’s cast of characters is far too numerous to recount in toto. His method in presenting many of them incorporates the appealing and very dubious fly-on-the-wall technique. Here is a sample of the set piece by which we first encounter jazz keyboardist, composer/arranger, and bandleader Sun Ra (at this point still known as Sonny Blount): He began another verse of “Buttons and Bows” with Lonnie Fox the trumpeter and Buggs Hunter on drums. A tatty velvet curtain strung on a pipe hung between them and the sloppy, sweaty flesh of the white women dancing on the other side, the drooling white men; a scrap of petty racism that Sonny was actually grateful for. An entire room of people thinking about nothing but sex made it clear that he was supposed to care, but Sonny Blount wasn’t like everyone else. (Dyja, pp. 135-36)
One supposes that Dyja’s rendering of the Peacock Club’s décor is more or less on target, but what was on Sonny Blount’s mind at the time—much less the minds of his audience—surely owes more to the imagination of Thomas Dyja than to that of any of the individuals he has placed in that room at that moment.
Such conjectural embroiderings render the unpatterned historical record far more legible, in large part by imposing a narrative—chains of events, private interconnections linking public characters, a logic to sequences of vignettes—that resolves to a story. Dyja’s Chicago at mid-century turns on the notion that a hothouse of creative energy was both reinvigorating the city’s local cultural life, and that in turn, the broader dissemination of Chicago creativity was giving American mass society a distinctively populistic inflection. There are both internal and external problems with this claim, especially its insistence that Chicago was the source of this national mass culture. The external problem is obvious. Dyja may claim that Hugh Hefner unleashed the American male libido, but determining the relative impact of some alternative disturber of 1950s sexual conventions, say, the persona of Marilyn Monroe, is really impossible. The more cautious, and obviously less eye-popping observation to make about Hugh Hefner and his Playboy team is that they contributed to a broader redefinition of male and female sexuality, and in so doing—as some would assert—contributed to the unraveling of the American nuclear family.
Equally problematic is Dyja’s imposition of coherence on a local cultural world that was, in fact, diverse and even self-contradictory. There is simply no thematic connection between Sun Ra’s esoteric big band jazz—Ellingtonian horn charts shading into keyboard-initiated beeps and trills, in live performance, band members periodically dropping brass in favor of portable percussion and marching off stage and into the audience like a mad second-line procession—and the cozy, left-wing optimism of “Studs’ Place,” soon-to-be famous interviewer Studs Terkel’s brief foray into network television. What was occurring in Chicago during this era was what tends to occur in flourishing metropolises. A variety of creative people produced art and products that inspired substantial followings. These people, objects, and products are linked by contemporaneity and place, but they are otherwise quite separate in inspiration and consequence. Then, in retrospect, imaginative writers like Thomas Dyja find a way to link the otherwise disconnected dots and argue that a movement, or better yet, a renaissance occurred.
Surely the most novel aspect of Dyja’s book is his revisionist view of Richard J. Daley, who is typically remembered as either a magnanimous party boss determined to hold his city together in the face of a phalanx of hostile forces, or as a wily political manipulator who blocked a generation of reformers from opening up local government, advancing civil rights, and otherwise “cleaning up” a corrupt metropolis. In Dyja’s account, Daley’s hold on Chicago transcended elections and policymaking, approaching cultural hegemony in its scope. Daley’s social vision imposed on Chicagoans a sense of “regular” life that was intrinsically hostile to the creative ferment that distinguished the city in the two decades preceding his rise to power in the mid-1950s. In offering this sinister interpretation of the city’s most notable mid-20th-century figure, Dyja slips into the trough of received clichés that often mar accounts of Chicago politics. At one point, we are informed that Richard J. Daley “loved [Chicago] with all his heart,” as if love is measurable, or to make a comparative point, as if John Lindsay’s difficulties in governing New York during the 1960s were attributable to anemic mayoral affection. In another passage, Dyja introduces one of Daley’s opponents, Robert Merriam, as a “do gooder,” Chicago political shorthand for a well-intentioned fool (who has lost an election). Maybe Merriam was a well-intentioned fool, but there is nothing in Dyja’s account of the 1955 mayoral contest pitting Merriam against Daley that props up this oft-employed stereotype other than the fact that Daley defeated Merriam.
By 1960, Richard J. Daley was firmly in control of local government in Chicago, and the accompanying cultural pall brought to an end the city’s final moment in the sun. Sun Ra debarked to New York (and ultimately Philadelphia), various members of the Compass Players troupe relocated to the far corners of North America, and so forth. By clocking out Chicago’s era of cultural ferment in 1960, Dyja excludes from his narrative the emergence of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a jazz collective whose compositions, arrangements, instrumentation, and yes, even their performing costumes, were as weirdly imaginative as Sun Ra’s. Nor can Dyja accommodate within his time frame the rise of “off-Loop theater” in Chicago, which produced among other notables the dramatist David Mamet. By the late 1960s, and in the wake of Chicago’s tumultuous 1968 Democratic Party presidential nominating convention, local experimental theater had become a vocal counterpoint to the resolute conformities of Richard J. Daley’s Chicago. The local cultures of great cities are not just diverse; they even engender counter-movements. Thomas Dyja’s traversal of mid-20th-century Chicago is entertaining and at times quite astute in summing up individuals, institutions, and movements. But his thesis—that for a moment the city blossomed but that blossoming was cut short by a small-minded political vision—withers on close inspection.
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Sociologist Robert Sampson has titled his recent book Great American City, but truer to the author’s aims and his volume’s content would be Great American Longitudinal Research Initiative. In a text exceeding four hundred pages, Sampson takes approximately the first quarter to “warm up,” laying out his methodological strategies and recounting the at times fraught execution of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). Sampson is a social scientist on a mission, and the PHDCN was indeed a formidable effort. Eighty small geographic areas (“neighborhood clusters”) were tracked over the course of the project, and within these neighborhood clusters seven cohorts of individuals (totaling a few thousand) were interviewed and monitored. Separate time-specific surveys of local residents were also administered. Using SUVs and video recorders, the physical conditions of nearly twenty-four thousand city blocks were documented. The PHDCN also included specialized, one-off research such as a letter-drop (on city sidewalks) experiment that sought to determine whether there were variations across neighborhoods in local residents’ propensity to recover and drop into mailboxes seemingly lost correspondence.
As to mission, Sampson advances a particular line of argument that has come to be known as the “neighborhood effects” interpretation of urban social problems/well-being: that apart from the demographic traits of particular local populations, collective mentalities that range, approximately, from desperately enacted self-interest to optimistic magnanimity are to be found. These variations in local attitude are derived from several sources, but among the most frequently noted is local organizational life (as such, functioning at the neighborhood level much as civil society theorists propose that broad-scale organizations and other collective mobilizations contribute to national democratic processes). Missionaries require nonbelievers, which Sampson identifies on two fronts. On the one hand are the demographic literalists who purport that neighborhood ill/well-being is a direct function of individual-level variables such as income and education. On the other flank are structuralists purporting to explain everything that is local via large-scale processes and institutions and “world is flat critics” (Sampson, p. 431, fn. 56) who contend that globalization and new telecommunications technology render “the local” inconsequential.
A term Sampson never uses is big data, but in effect, the PHDCN is big data analysis directed at the neighborhood processes of a major metropolis. Sampson’s big data analysis exposes much of interest. He reveals in detail, for instance, how geographic mobility serves some groups of Chicagoans better than others. When whites move from neighborhood to neighborhood within the city, or out to the suburbs, “upward mobility” in the classic sense is often achieved. For blacks and Latinos, this is typically not the case; indeed one variety of move by some number of individuals/families of color is “out” of more prosperous, mixed-race areas into poorer less racially diverse areas. Sampson, similarly, maps the interconnections among citywide and local elites. In so doing, he offers considerable insight regarding communication patterns among philanthropic foundation leaders, neighborhood activists, and other civic notables.
At one point, Sampson’s (p. 205) multivariate analysis prompts him to observe that “the density of churches is negatively [emphasis in original] related to collective efficacy and one of its core indicators—trust.” He adds, “Trust in one’s fellow man is apparently not enhanced by the church.” Yet remarkably, that is the terminus of this particular discussion. The point is sufficiently notable for Sampson (p. 372) to reiterate it later in Great American City, but he never offers an explanation. Sampson appears to be one of Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehogs, an observer of the world animated by a particular, all-encompassing notion. In Sampson’s case, this is the centrality of quantitative analysis in grasping fundamental social phenomena. In all likelihood, there are explanations for church affiliation as a human endeavor that may be alienated from the basics of human empathy, but Sampson evidently has encountered no objective measures of this paradox.
Even as Great American City excels in mapping and specifying the relationships among a variety of social indicators, Sampson often fails to connect his particular analysis to literatures (qualitative observation of cities) that fall outside the author’s intellectual comfort zone. Early in the volume, Sampson devotes a few paragraphs to Jane Jacobs and her legacy (at this point in time, an intellectual Siren to be passed by every ambitious American neighborhood researcher), shoe-horning her into the “broken windows” camp of criminology. The problem with this equation is that Jacobs was a critic of conventional notions—in her day, as expressed by city planners—of urban order and disorder. Unlike the broken windows theorists, evident physical disorder, in Jacobs’ view, was not necessarily a sign of neighborhood decay or social pathology. Later, Sampson (p. 370) observes that “[t]he resurgence of nonprofit community organizations in cities around the country in recent decades is the latest manifestation [of Americans’ propensity to join organizations], but urban scholars have been slow to chart the implications.” This is an astounding assertion. Without much effort, I can identify three distinct strands of journalistic and social science analysis of just this phenomenon: (1) Saul Alinsky’s albeit self-promotional writing—but also, the many scholars who have documented the virtues and deficiencies of the “Alinsky method”; (2) the Harry Boyte–initiated “backyard revolution”—sometimes characterized as neo-Alinsky community organizing—literature of the 1970s and 1980s; and (3) the assets-based community development discussions of the last couple of decades.
Great American City is also a work of incessant reiteration. Near its end, Sampson “confess[es],”
[T]his book is . . . an intellectual history of an idea, the story of a major research project, the tale of an iconic city, a systematic theory of neighborhood effects, an empirical account of community-level variations in a range of social processes, an analysis of competing approaches to social inquiry, and a sustained analysis that was designed to uncover new facts while adjudicating and integrating exiting hypotheses. (pp. 357-58)
In preceding pages, Sampson has time and again restated particular components of the neighborhood effects argument. Does the sociologist, in fact, protest too much? Certainly there is a portion of Great American City devoted to the numerical elaboration of ideas that are already perfectly familiar, such as the effects of adjoining neighborhoods on particular sections of any city. Indeed, is not half the wisdom of the real estate agents based on the working out of just this proposition?
More troubling is how little all that Sampson has just claimed for his project helps when it comes to “adjudicating” the actual Chicago. In his penultimate chapter, Sampson walks his readers through several Chicago neighborhoods, including South Side Woodlawn. Here is his assessment of that neighborhood’s long-standing powerhouse community organization, the Woodlawn Organization (TWO): [T]here can be little doubt that TWO is a political and organizational force. The Key Informant study independently reveals that Woodlawn ranks highest in Chicago on the centralization of organizational contacts in 1995 and in the upper quartile in 2002—networks of influence converge on a small number of leaders within Woodlawn. The provocative alliances formed by TWO and other community organizations, presumably aided by the structural cohesiveness in network contacts, have combined with intervention from the University of Chicago to have sharply altered Woodlawn—for better or worse. (Sampson, p. 392)
For all the data Sampson has marshaled, he never offers a conclusive judgment as to the effect of this long-standing and well-documented community organization! Also telling is Sampson’s use of the term intervention, which, across the pages of Great American City, appears in many guises: as an idea or application of ideas (Sampson, pp. 41, 42), as a shift in national policy (Sampson, p. 108), or in this instance, some local-level program or initiative on which TWO and the University of Chicago have collaborated. A few pages later, Sampson (p. 403) explains the increase in “internal and external perceptions . . . of efficacy” in another South Side neighborhood, Oakland, as the probable result of “major structural interventions, including the dismantling of segregated high-rise public housing and public investment by the city.” The recent story of Oakland is more intriguingly convoluted than that. The southern portion of the neighborhood, in particular, has experienced a wave of gentrification, at first driven by individual African American “pioneers,” later augmented by concerted real estate development that on occasion explicitly linked property value appreciation and local security gains to public school improvements. Many poor Oaklanders were pushed out of the new neighborhood, and there has been intense conflict over matters such as the construction of scattered-site public housing. 1 As such, growing “efficacy” in Oakland must, in part, be attributed to the fact that the current population includes a substantially larger cohort of prosperous, well-educated professionals. By reducing this complicated and ambiguous process to an “intervention,” Sampson dances on the borderland of obfuscation.
Great American City is an example of virtuoso social science. Robert Sampson and his research team have amassed and analyzed huge quantities of data. In so doing, he derives many insights regarding the perpetuation of poor neighborhoods, how individuals and families both perceive their locales and move from neighborhood to neighborhood, and how elite civic networks reach into neighborhood Chicago. Near the end of this volume, Sampson (p. 384) unforeseeably trims his methodological sails, observing that “no technique can be said to constitute the gold standard” of social research. One wishes that Sampson, as he assembled the many components of his book, had adhered to this premise. A book less triumphantly correlational and more broadly engaged with the unquantifiable complexities of the great American city it purports to document would have yielded a richer portrait of its subject and, in all likelihood, would have more practical utility.
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Christine Walley is a native of Chicago’s southeast side, a warren of waterways, wetlands, industrial sites, and pocket neighborhoods. Some readers of this review may be familiar with the area through the crime fiction of Sara Paretsky. Paretsky’s dogged private investigator, V. I. Warshawski, hails from the southeast side, which, as presented in those novels, shares many of the traits highlighted in Exit 0. Walley’s father was a steelworker whose life in the mills ended with the wave of plant closures that struck the southeast side in the 1970s and 1980s. For the remainder of his life, Charles Walley drifted from one menial job to the next, unable to support his family as he once had and ever regretful of the turn his life had taken. Walley’s mother thereafter held the household together; Christine Walley views herself as another source of family instability. Following a surprising chain of events and scholarship in hand, the teenaged Walley departed the southeast side for Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. So propelled from her origins, Walley went to graduate school in anthropology and subsequently joined the faculty of MIT. In time, her parents took pride in their waywardly ambitious daughter’s accomplishments, and for her part, many strands of empathy continued to tether Walley to her home ground. Nonetheless, she goes to great length discussing the alienating effects—on herself and others—of her rise up through the American social class structure and out from the deindustrialized southeast side.
Far more than Dyja or, surprisingly, Sampson—the latter views neighborhood effects as universal in scope—Walley foregrounds Chicago to address broader aspects of contemporary American society: “Although Southeast Chicago may seem like an obscure place to some, it is the vantage point offered by such marginalized places that may offer the most revealing angle from which to view and understand what has been happening at the American center” (Walley, x). Through her memoir of family and community, Walley offers a first-hand account of the sequential abstractions known as industrialization and deindustrialization. Walley’s family antecedents came to the southeast side from near—central Illinois—and far—Scandinavia—and through years of toil secured reasonably comfortable lives in the urban working class. Nevertheless, achieving this modicum of comfort was an often brutal struggle, Walley (p. 35) noting that her great-grandfather, in a late-in-life memoir, characterized his immigration to the United States as a “mistake.” Moreover, for the men, women, and children living and working in the southeast side during its post–World War II “heyday,” industrial prosperity exacted a deadly toll. Steel production generated a myriad of toxins, and lax environmental regulations permitted U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Wisconsin Steel, and other local companies to dump copious volumes of waste in the immediate vicinity both of their factories and the adjoining residential districts from which they drew their workforce. Walley’s community reconnaissance discovers an inordinate number of cancer cases—including her own—whose sources, very likely, were environmental. Even as Walley mourns the decline of her community and regrets her father’s crushed self-esteem in the aftermath of big steel’s collapse, she documents the hidden but deadly underside of Chicago’s once flourishing industrial economy.
Christine Walley’s ultimate subject is social class: its multiple ingredients, the price paid by those who cross social class boundaries, the particular costs exacted on members of the class hierarchy’s lower ranges. In her view, Americans need to more openly commemorate the contributions of working-class men and women such as her parents. Walley further argues that by developing a more sophisticated understanding of the multiple meanings of “working class”—both as economic situation and social psychological experience—a more progressive politics of social justice can be articulated. I wish that Walley were correct in this proposition, but I fear she is not. Important as the concept of social class is, and as crucial as it has been to forging a once-compelling vision of social democracy, I am not convinced that “class”—and in particular, “working class”—as analytical category or rhetorical device, works in the ways that it once did. The multiple fragmentations of the American workforce render the experience of laboring within a context of social class—characteristically, on that long assembly line—memory rather than reality. And if that experience of prospective solidarity is unavailable, is resultant working-class political mobilization likely to be sparked? Nor am I convinced that the Occupy Movement’s “99 percent” trope succeeds, but it comes closer to specifying a relevant language of social transformation. If asked, I would propose that “citizenship”—equal rights for all, basic human needs guaranteed, with none (racial/ethnic minorities, women, immigrants, the transgendered, the disabled) excluded—comes closer to what most Americans desire and offers an experiential underpinning for contemporary social justice aspirations.
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In the April 18, 2013 edition of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, one of the texts I have discussed, Thomas Dyja’s The Third Coast, was among three books profiled by Chicago author Rachel Schteir. Near the close of her review, Schteir offered the incendiary comment: “So Chicago is not Detroit, not yet.” By hurling at Chicago what political scientist Edward Goetz has called the “Detroit scenario,” 2 Schteir’s review provoked a cascade of typically hostile counter-commentary. In the early months of 2013, a much-reported uptick in local murders occurred, so one supposes that Schteir’s provocation rankled already touchy civic and business leaders. Over a longer span of time, Chicago’s obsessions with greatness (local media outlet WGN’s call letters refer to the “world’s greatest newspaper”), tallness (should the Willis Tower’s roof-topping mast be incorporated into skyscraper verticality computations?), and firstness (as in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, winner of the first National Book Award competition) have tended to mask an equally powerful current of self-doubt: “Why didn’t Chicago overtake New York City?” Schteir’s parting shot was surely intended to be a provocation, but it does prompt one to wonder: if Chicago is to avoid the fate of other once-grand industrial metropolises, what is to be learned from reading The Third Coast, Great American City, and Exit 0?
Although I am sure the thought—much less the intention—never crossed Thomas Dyja’s mind, The Third Coast can be read, without much logical distortion, as a paean to Chicago’s “creative class” of the 1940s and 1950s. For the contemporary reader, who might be a city council member or city planner, the lesson to be derived is that Chicago must once more make itself attractive to visionary artists and entrepreneurs. This would appear to be a central premise of current Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration, indeed, a premise so dominant that it excludes from direct consideration how to bring back the South and West Side neighborhoods that receive so much attention in Robert Sampson’s volume. In the trickle-over cultural economy espoused by creative class proponents, if a city can take care of its start-up kings and web-designers, everything else will take care of itself. And as candidate-for-president Ross Perot would have it: “problem solved.”
As to Great American City, I must return to Robert Sampson’s master term, intervention. Again, imagining myself the alderman or city planner who has absorbed Sampson’s text, I would recommend supporting ongoing neighborhood “interventions” such as the MacArthur Foundation and Local Initiatives Support Corporation–sponsored New Communities Program, which has brought together planning professionals and neighborhood activists in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods to create local improvement plans. 3 Premised on attracting private investment in a political economic context that substantially limits what can be accomplished by the public sector, these neighborhood plans are explicitly practical in their articulation of aims and specification of means to achieving their aims. Thus far, these New Communities initiatives seem to have yielded very little in actual neighborhood development, but there are chroniclers of these exercises, notably D. Bradford Hunt and Jon B. DeVries in Planning Chicago, who view them as promising first steps on the road back. 4 Nonetheless, a disconnect exists between Sampson’s diagnosis—persistent and gaping across-neighborhood inequalities—and his prognosis, “interventions” that presumably will not disturb the main stream of governance and capital accumulation in this or other great American cities.
Once again, the outlier among these three volumes is Exit 0. Christine Walley devotes several pages to assessing ongoing efforts to revitalize the southeast side and finds much to admire in the pluck and determination of local activists but not all that much on-the-ground progress. Walley’s agenda from the start is broader than documenting or rescuing her “lost community.” Instead, she seeks to articulate how the trials of her former home illustrate the broader trials of the American working class. Although I am not convinced that social class is the rhetorical key to saving either the southeast side, or Detroit, or more broadly, America’s former “industrial heartland,” Walley’s basic approach to documenting and reconsidering her former home is compelling. Is it not possible that one of the most powerful means to articulating a new vision of the post-industrial United States is to begin locally, to think of how the future will deviate from the past even as it extends some valuable threads of the past into the future, and to root calls for social justice in a vision of good, diverse, and concretely articulated local communities? But acting locally will not be enough. Such a diverse yet local vision of livable, just communities necessitates coalition building and the articulation of a broad policy agenda. And more, this effort to envision better communities and define policies to achieve this vision must insist on its rightness even in the face of government, business, and civic elites whose priorities, at present, cannot countenance what is required to deliver the good life, broadly defined to all Americans.