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.
Chicago on the Make thus draws some of its inspiration from Robert Sampson’s more recent turn towards neighborhoods and communities as vital forces in shaping urban life at the grassroots, as well as from older “bottom-up” approaches pioneered by British Marxist historians like E.P. Thompson. It is, above all, a “people’s history” of Chicago—an attempt to capture the city as it was lived by its ordinary residents. Yet, telling the story from this perspective by no means entails marginalizing the more formal, institutional dimensions of policy making, governance, and electoral politics. Nor does it mean looking past economic circumstances, technological changes, and demographic shifts—the broader structural forces that so powerfully shaped Chicago’s political culture, social context, neighborhoods, communities, and built environment. The goal here is to integrate the bottom up with the top down, to combine total history and microhistory, to bring the political, social, cultural, and economic into the same frame.
Taking this kind of approach over more than a century, as Chicago grew from an unruly tangle of railyards, slaughterhouses, factories, tenement houses, state-of-the-art skyscrapers, and fiercely defended ethnic neighborhoods into one of the world’s mightiest global cities, comes with its share of pitfalls. Certain celebrated facets of Chicago’s past have been slighted and even omitted in the effort to fit this grand narrative between the front and back covers of this book. For one thing, the orientation from below entails devoting a great deal of attention to the work, community, and leisure activities of Chicago’s laboring classes—to what was going on in its neighborhoods of African Americans, immigrants, and ethnics—at the expense of the city’s more prosperous districts. As a consequence, this particular history overlooks some related facets of Chicago’s history that may be of great interest to some readers. For example, while it would be impossible to deny the enormous impact that the famed Chicago and Second Chicago Schools has had on the broader architectural history of the United States, the interest in the majestic buildings that have defined Chicago’s skyline here relates mostly to their role in the city’s political economy and in the structural transformation of its neighborhoods. When references are made to Chicago’s great literary works, moreover, it is usually as a way into understanding social conditions. And when Chicago’s art scene comes into the story, it is mainly in relation to the popular art forms emerging out of the city’s vibrant neighborhoods—such as jazz and the blues or the striking wall murals that began appearing in Chicago’s black, Mexican, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods beginning in the 1960s.
Chicago on the Make seeks to move beyond such fables of exceptionalism to highlight a range of historical dynamics and processes that have, to one extent or another, characterized much of the metropolitan United States. Unlike most of the other biographies of U.S. cities, this book endeavors to make a new and much-needed contribution to reflections on the “history of the present” for both Chicago and the urban United States in general.10 By traversing a period of more than a century and devoting substantial coverage to the more immediate twenty-first-century past, it seeks to accomplish what historian Joan Scott has defined as the crucial burden of this historiographical project—to unearth the historical processes behind structures, policies, and ideas that now appear “inevitable, natural or culturally necessary.”
Nothing has seemed more natural and inevitable in Chicago over the past several decades than authoritarian mayors and racial segregation. According to some measures, Chicago is “the most segregated city in the United States” and has ranked high on the list for much of the last century. Only one other thing has rivaled its level of segregation as a distinguishing feature of the city’s history: the extraordinarily long dynasty of Mayor Richard J. Daley and his son Richard M. Daley, whose respective styles of authoritarian “machine” rule, taken together, dominated Chicago’s political scene for forty-three years between 1955 and 2011. For over four decades of Daley rule—a period that spanned the rise and fall of the modern civil rights movement, the spectacular growth of white middle-class suburbs outside the city limits, the ghettoization of huge swaths of its West and South Sides, a massive wave of immigration from Latin America, and the transformation of the city from a motor of industry to a postindustrial node of the global service economy—Chicago scarcely witnessed a legitimate mayoral election or heated city council vote.11 While it is tempting to view Chicago’s rigid racial order and its particularly undemocratic political culture as pure products of the Daley dynasty, these problems, as the story to follow seeks to reveal, had deeper roots.
Excavating the conditions of demobilization and political quiescence that prevailed in Chicago between the 1970s and the first decade of the twenty-first century—a period that saw the city’s racial order hardening and its social inequalities widening—lies at the heart of this history of Chicago. I was living in Chicago during Congressman Bobby Rush’s 1999 mayoral primary run, when the former Black Panther tried to challenge the all-powerful regime of Richard M. Daley, which had spent the previous decade pursuing a global-city agenda that had left all but a handful Chicago’s working-class black and Latino neighborhoods in shambles, by evoking the idea that there were, in fact, “two Chicagos.” The result: Daley defeated Rush by 73 to 27 percent. Eight years later, with corruption scandals mounting and Daley pursuing an austerity program that was essentially punishing the poor for the city’s exploding debt, it was hard to argue that things had not gotten worse. One of these scandals, it should be remembered, involved revelations that the police had been systematically torturing African Americans at the Area 2 police station on the South Side for years. And yet in the 2007 election, Daley’s last, overall voter turnout barely surpassed 30 percent, with 70 percent of black voters and 80 percent of Latino voters casting their votes for Richard M. Daley.
Most scholars attempting to explain this state of demobilization have focused on the more than four decades of autocratic machine rule that shaped the city’s political institutions, modes of governance, and political culture. To be sure, the fact that Chicago’s machine outlasted its analogues in other major cities by decades must enter into any reckoning with politics and power in the Windy City, and Chicago on the Make pays particular attention to this story as well. Where this new history of Chicago diverges from most political histories of the American city in the twentieth century is in its effort to view the dynamics of inequality and demobilization as manifestations of a process of neoliberalization, which in the antidemocratic, political-machine context of Chicago advanced somewhat more rapidly and more aggressively than it did elsewhere. The term neoliberalization is invoked not merely to connote the implementation of a package of economic-minded policies that had inadvertent social and political consequences—such policies were in fact implemented and they did have important social and political consequences, especially beginning in the early 1990s under Richard M. Daley. A more important dimension of the story of neoliberalization being told here involves revealing how market values and economizing logics penetrated into the city’s political institutions and beyond them into its broader political culture.12 This political history of Chicago seeks to understand from both the top down and the bottom up how this happened and how the advance of neoliberalization crippled the political forces standing in opposition to it: labor unions, municipal reformers, neighborhood planning boards, civil rights organizations, and a range of other political organizations that sought to challenge injustices within the prevailing social and political order.
The interpretive thread that weaves together the seven chapters of Chicago on the Make unravels out of the broader project of tracing the evolution of urban societies during the neoliberal moment of late capitalism. It seeks to historicize and delineate the social, political, and cultural conditions of City Hall’s transformation into what Eric Klinenberg refers to as an “entrepreneurial state”—characterized by deregulation, fiscal austerity, outsourcing of city services, market solutions to public problems, and the overriding view of residents as consumers (rather than citizens).13 But my account of Chicago’s neoliberal turn takes the discussion in three somewhat new directions.
First, as perhaps the first book-length history of neoliberalization at the urban grassroots over the longue durée, this study makes a historiographical intervention in a field thus far dominated by sociologists, geographers, and political scientists. The Reagan revolution’s neoliberal takeover in the 1980s did not happen overnight but rather developed out of an ideological and cultural framework that had been decades in the making. While scholars like David Harvey have viewed the context of the mid-1970s as pivotal to the neoliberal turn, this history of Chicago views neoliberalization as a process that unraveled gradually and unevenly over much of the twentieth century.14 In Chicago, the mid-1950s proved to be a critical moment in the city’s neoliberal turn. If some of the guiding principles of neoliberalism are the supremacy of free market values, the placement of the state at the disposition of private enterprise, and the attenuation of expansive notions of “the public good,” then Mayor Richard J. Daley’s administration fit the description quite well for most of its more than two decades in power. Beginning in the late 1950s, when Daley took the city council out of the game and turned over the task of planning the city’s future development to an alliance of downtown business interests and technocrats, “Boss” Daley presided over a municipal government in which key policy decisions had been moved out of the hands of the public and into corporate boardrooms. In Daley’s Chicago, a federally funded urban renewal program intended to uplift the poor ended up subsidizing downtown development projects that reinforced the walls around the black ghetto. It was Richard J. (not Richard M.) Daley who brokered the deals that built the John Hancock Center, the Sears Tower, and many of the other iconic skyscrapers that launched Chicago into the global age—all this while the South and West Sides were turning into depopulated hyperghettos. But the Daley administration’s ability to push this agenda forward depended on the inability of democratizing forces to gain traction within Chicago’s political culture during the interwar years, when progressive labor and grassroots forces fought what was ultimately a losing battle against business elites striving to economize the city’s governance criteria, align their own economic interests with “the public interest,” and prescribe entrepreneurial values as the cure for pressing social problems.
Second, unlike most of what has been written on the neoliberal turn, this book places the local politics of race at the center of the story. “Economics are the method,” Margaret Thatcher once remarked, “but the object is to change the soul.” These words suggest that to view neoliberalism too narrowly as simply a policy regime that rose to international prominence beginning in the mid-1970s is to misunderstand how much its triumph rested upon the construction of what David Harvey has referred to as “a neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism.”15 Chicago on the Make seeks to show that racial issues often played crucial roles in changing the “souls” of many Chicagoans—that the politics of race, in effect, pulled residents into the political sphere and shaped feelings, sensibilities, and ideas that paved the way for the acceptance of neoliberal values and policies. This was true on both sides of the color line throughout the long twentieth century, even in the decades prior to the pivotal 1950s. In the city’s white ethnic neighborhoods the formation of an increasingly more inclusive white identity during the interwar era worked to weaken the voice of organized labor, disrupt the efforts of reformers, and, more generally, to enable the administrations of Mayors Cermak, Kelly, and Kennelly to preside over political machines that effectively submerged the politics of social justice beneath a progrowth, antilabor agenda between the 1930s and 1950s. And, in black Chicago, a range of businessman race heroes, religious leaders, and syndicate kingpins managed to tether the politics of racial advancement to the gospel of black capitalism, an achievement that worked to stifle political organizations seeking to organize working-class African Americans around housing and labor issues and to challenge the relationship between the businessmen of the “Black Metropolis” and the white power structure. Tragically, such developments paralyzed the forces opposing the prevailing racial and social order at the very moment when the system of American capitalism was most vulnerable to attack.
Of course the rest of the story does not follow a straight line towards neoliberal domination. There were some big bumps in the road. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed significant challenges to the Daley machine in the form of powerful identity-based mobilizations. And yet, if these movements posed real threats to the machine, they ended up accelerating the process of neoliberalization in their own ways. On the one hand, working-class white Chicagoans took to the streets against racially integrated public housing projects and the black drive for civil rights between the 1950s and 1970s, articulating languages of whiteness, antistatism and consumer rights—the building blocks of a neoliberal populist culture. On the other hand, minority empowerment movements emerged out of black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican neighborhoods, challenging the Daley machine’s downtown agenda and demanding political rights and representation. While these minority rights movements did manage to create a tradition of antimachine activism that stretched across racial and ethnic lines—a situation that bore fruit in the 1983 election of the city’s black reformist mayor Harold Washington—my story about their ultimate fate is not a triumphant one.
In fact, Chicago on the Make reveals how the politics of racial identity and recognition these movements put into practice came to be powerfully incorporated into the neoliberal project of Richard M. Daley in the 1990s. Unlike his father, Richard M. Daley understood the importance of the politics of recognition for different ethnoracial communities, and he bestowed this recognition in the forms of strategic minority appointments within his administration and official acknowledgement of the physical boundaries and cultural significance of key ethnoracial neighborhoods. Such policies enabled him to create local “brokers” and “middlemen” whose ethnoracial legitimacy allowed them to advance the larger neoliberal agenda, especially in the form of progentrification and protourism policies that worked to the disadvantage of renters and public housing residents. Along with the new economy of tourism, the gentrification imperative has driven a range of policies that have ushered in neoliberal sensibilities and forms of governance. It has given private developers an even larger role in the planning process, transformed more and more homeowners into individualistically minded investors, and turned many middle-class Chicagoans against public housing and other state programs that appear to threaten their property values.
This form of incorporation was but one facet of a larger story that constitutes the third somewhat new contribution that this book offers: an attempt to examine at the grassroots level how neoliberalization combined with other forces to create the conditions of political quiescence in Chicago over much of the twentieth century. Part of my explanation for this quiescence builds upon Wendy Brown’s thinking on how the “business approach to governing” and the “market rationality” that characterize neoliberalism militate against democratic governance and a democratic political culture.16 In Chicago, moreover, the de-democratizing forces of neoliberalization were augmented by a political context that worked to effectively depoliticize many of the city’s most pressing issues—segregation, gang-related murders, drug trafficking, failing public schools, and high minority unemployment and poverty rates—by attributing them to cultural rather than political causes. Mahmood Mamdani has referred to this process as the “culturization of politics”: the transfer of political acts and events onto the terrain of culture, where they become dissociated from questions of structure, power, and, ultimately, political mobilization.17 Like neoliberalization, the culturization of politics is part of a story that has transcended the borders of Chicago, but these trends had particularly powerful de-democratizing effects during the more than four decades of Daley rule.
And yet, if Chicago on the Make seeks to shed new light on how the interplay of race and neoliberalization shaped Chicago’s political culture, this by no means suggests that the more traditional story of demobilization and repression should be discarded. Of course other factors worked to dampen the forces of grassroots democracy in Chicago—for one, the city’s patronage machine, which Richard J. Daley was building up to its full potential as cities across the nation were dismantling theirs. Daley distributed patronage resources to his loyal aldermen based on the votes their wards added to his margin of victory, and as chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party he controlled the entire war chest for waging reelection campaigns. An alderman could thus not hope to remain in power without devoting unconditional support to the Boss, a situation that explains how Daley was able to maintain his base in black Chicago even as a local civil rights movement was agitating actively for rights and justice. All this has been well detailed in a number of studies on the Daley machine.18
But observers of the Daley machine have paid too much attention to the carrot and not enough to the stick, thereby omitting a key factor behind Daley’s ability to weather the great political insurgencies of the 1960s and 1970s. Historians have generally undervalued the decisive role that state-sponsored countersubversion played in many major U.S. cities in the postwar era. A quick inventory of the massive collection of surveillance files produced by the Chicago Police Department’s Red Squad division between the 1950s and 1970s suggests that this is a particularly serious blind spot in the case of Chicago.19 Hence, the story here will revise the city’s well-known history of postwar political struggle by better incorporating the part played by the Daley machine’s repressive apparatus. Saul Alinsky’s and Florence Scala’s movements against unjust urban renewal plans in the 1950s and 1960s, the politicization of Chicago gangs by black power militants and federal grant programs, Martin Luther King’s open-housing marches in 1966, the notorious student protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the Black Panther Party’s efforts to form a “rainbow coalition” with the Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization in 1969—all these campaigns fell short of their objectives, in part, because of Red Squad countersubversion. Sometimes the effects of this repression were all too direct, as in the police assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton or in the well-documented infiltration and harassment of Chicago street gangs and black power groups during the civil rights challenges of the late 1960s. In other instances the impact of repression was more abstract and must be construed by reflecting on what could have (or should have) happened but did not. Why did the movements of Alinsky and Scala fail to snowball? Why didn’t Chicagoans come out in the tens of thousands to participate in the demonstration at the 1968 Democratic National Convention? Why didn’t Martin Luther King succeed in mobilizing several thousand (rather than several hundred) African Americans for the open-housing marches? The answer to all of these questions, Chicago on the Make contends, has to do with the fact that forces of state repression hindered the development of a vibrant culture of dissent that could link up universities, labor unions, and progressive political organizations.
And yet the Red Squad was not solely responsible for Chicago entering the momentous years of the mid-1960s with a somewhat anemic left political culture in comparison to cities like New York and San Francisco. The city’s entrenched pattern of racial segregation imposed significant barriers to political collaboration across racial lines, and Daley’s policy of directing urban renewal funds into downtown development projects only made the situation worse. Other important factors also contributed to the political quiescence of the Richard J. Daley era—policies that fit within the neoliberal framework this book lays out. For one thing, Daley’s very early turn to a global-city agenda had an important cultural component. In an era when groups associated with the New Left were offering scathing critiques of the materialism and meaninglessness of white-collar, middle-class society, Chicago was quickly casting off its working-class identity and morphing into the kind of city white-collar professionals felt good about living in. By 1968 it possessed the country’s second tallest skyscraper, the world’s highest apartment building, and a range of luxurious middle-class housing complexes, one of which had its own marina, gymnasium, movie theater, swimming pool, ice rink, and parfumerie. Major transnational corporations like John Hancock, Standard Oil, Chase, and Sears were putting their names on its tall buildings downtown, and the city’s Playboy Club had well over 100,000 members. By the early 1970s Chicago’s two commodities exchanges were recording nearly $200 billion in transactions.
Certainly, Daley’s efforts to attract corporate capital and make the city desirable for white-collar workers responded to some grim economic realities related to the rapid loss of Chicago’s industrial base and the flight of capital and people to the suburbs. Yet the choices he made when faced with this situation followed a pattern he had established early on of handing the task of planning the city’s future development to the business community—as far away as possible from public scrutiny and democratic process. And this trend dovetailed with the gradual evaporation of federal urban renewal and housing funds after the 1960s, which meant that private capital would increasingly drive the city’s development. Richard M. Daley’s administration brought this style of governance to a whole new level, devising innovative outsourcing and privatization schemes while shifting nearly a quarter of the city’s tax revenues into a tax increment financing program (TIF) that constituted a virtual shadow budget for financing infrastructural improvements and subsidizing private sector investments. Moreover, unlike his father, Daley embraced the politics of identity and recognition, essentially buying out the emerging segment of middle-class minority homeowners, who, like their white counterparts, wanted to realize the gains that came with the gentrification of their neighborhoods. And unlike his father, he used a slick public relations machine that told Chicagoans that their schools were the best in the nation and that everyone had a fair chance to succeed in the city. The result of all these circumstances, Chicago on the Make seeks to demonstrate, was the formation of a political culture in which the forces of dissent and reform were much less capable of identifying the political, structural, and historical sources of injustice and inequality. And in this, Chicago was and still is a lot like many other American cities.