Chicago and the Riddle of Race

The Independence, Diversity, and Vitality of Early Black Chicago Ian Rocksborough-Smith (bio) Christopher Robert Reed. Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900–1919. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014. xi + 390 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00. Margaret Garb. Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 306pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $50.00. These recent books by Margaret Garb and Christopher R. Reed explicitly treat the history of Black Chicago’s formative years leading up to and including the first Great Migration years of World War I. In both books, which overlap in the treatment of the twentieth-century’s first two decades, we get rich vignettes of some of Chicago’s earliest African American political elites and prolific community leaders, sites, and institutions. Some of these are already well known, while others less so. We learn of the influential John Jones, who became the city’s first elected black official in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, and of the city’s first black alderman, Oscar DePriest, elected in 1915. DePriest’s political ascendance demonstrated Black Chicago’s critical support for the famously corrupt yet relatively beneficent administration of Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson and the GOP machine that dominated civic politics in those years. We also learn about important clubwomen, activists, and reformers such as Fannie B. Williams, Ida B. Wells, and the Reverends Reverdy C. Ransom and Archibald J. Carey with the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. The latter two competed to influence congregations of black Southerners newly moved to the city within the local community. We learn especially about how long-time black Chicago residents worked in coalition with newcomers (mainly recent Southern migrants) to the City of Big Shoulders to engage with and impact Chicago’s infamously corrupt machine-driven civic politics. As these two studies show, black Chicagoans became vital constituents and political activists for both local Democratic and Republican politicians and party organizations (not just the party of Lincoln affiliates). Such engagements set the stage for important models of independent black civic politics sustained [End Page 665] elsewhere in urban America in later decades. Moreover, each book offers compelling analysis of Black Chicago’s earliest labor, commercial, cultural, and religious institutions and organizations as the city’s African American population grew exponentially through the first two decades of the twentieth century. Black Chicago’s history through the middle of the last century is, of course, now well examined. From the signal contributions of pioneering urban sociologists like Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake (Black Metropolis, 1945), to the prolific and contemporary writings of novelist Richard Wright, to the manifold studies of the University of Chicago’s School of Sociology, Chicago—for better or worse—has long acted as a critical “laboratory” and/or site for the study of black community formation and strivings. There is now a vast scholarly literature on Chicago through the mid-twentieth century, much of it extended well beyond the formative insights of these authors. Indeed, recent scholarship on Black Chicago has taken exciting new directions from examinations of migrant consumer and religious cultures to local studies of housing; neighborhood politics; labor, educational, and cultural activism; and related issues. Many of these newer studies uncover complex histories of community formation mainly rooted in the years from World War I through World War II, when the Great Migrations of African American Southerners occurred, thus shaping many contemporary and scholarly understandings of urban America.1 However, fewer scholars have specifically examined the years prior to these watershed moments of mass migration to the urban North before World War I. Read together, both Garb and Reed show how African Americans from Chicago, many of them long-time residents (descendants of the “old settlers”—or the first resident black families whose roots went back to the antebellum period in the city) worked to form diverse, vital, independent, and influential cultural and political networks, especially on the city’s South Side. These patterns of community engagement occurred many years before the city’s African...

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

Medicine and the Media: Balancing the Public's Right to Know With the Privacy of the Patient

Reviewed by: To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement by P. Allen Krause Josh Parshall (bio) To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement. By P. Allen Krause with Stephen Krause, edited by Mark K. Bauman. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2016. xviii + 402 pp. At the 1966 convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in Toronto, Hebrew Union College rabbinical student P. Allen Krause interviewed thirteen acting or former rabbis of Reform congregations in southern cities about the civil rights movement. Although Krause wrote a thesis based on his interviews and published some of his findings [End Page 163] (stripped of identifying information about the interviewees) in the American Jewish Archives Journal, the recordings and other research materials were partially sealed for twenty-five years. To Stand Aside or Stand Alone makes these interviews widely available as transcripts for the first time. Rabbi Krause returned to historical research around the time of his retirement in 2008 and, with encouragement from historian and editor Mark Bauman, developed the now fifty-year-old interviews into a book project. After Krause died in 2012, his son Stephen worked with Bauman to finish the manuscript, which supplements the transcripts with biographical sketches and brief local histories by Rabbi Krause as well as introductions to the interviews by Bauman. Both the author and editor provide important contextual information in their introductions, and Bauman's bibliographic essay situates the newly available primary sources in relation to the historiography of southern Jews and African American civil rights. Krause's interviews follow a standard format. Each rabbi discusses the development of local civil rights activism, the reactions of the non-Jewish white community in comparison to the views of local Jews, white Christian clergy's responses to the challenges of civil rights, their own participation or lack thereof in local struggles, and their opinions about the actions of national Jewish groups and northern Jewish activists. The rabbis' responses vary according to the hostility with which white communities reacted to the prospect of desegregation and also according to their own activities. Krause labels more progressive environments "The Land of the Almost Possible" and the most reactionary cities "The Land of the Almost Impossible." While differences in local political climate greatly affected the availability of potential allies among white Christian clergy and white civic leaders, the interviews demonstrate that rabbis' political perspectives, personal experiences with race and racism, and strengths and weaknesses as religious leaders all affected the actions that they took (or did not take) in regard to civil rights. For the most part, the interviews represent the experiences and activities of moderate progressive rabbis, and (as Krause intended) the book establishes them as part of the liberal contingent of the white South. Some, such as James Wax in Memphis and William Silverman in Nashville, publicly supported African American civil rights and were well known throughout their local communities for their progressive attitudes. A larger number promoted desegregation from their pulpits and worked behind the scenes with ministerial and civic groups to support civil rights reforms. Only a few of the rabbis expressed strong reservations about desegregation or reported no concrete civil rights action. With a few interesting exceptions, then, the rabbis featured in the book deserve credit for helping to smooth the path of desegregation in [End Page 164] their respective locales, even if courts, the federal government, and direct action by local protesters played more significant roles. At the same time, many of the interviews encapsulate the moderate liberal viewpoints of the time, which often second-guessed activists' tactics; predicated the extension of civil and economic rights on black southerners' adherence to white, middle-class norms; and exhibited a strong sense of racial and class-based paternalism. As a result, the rabbis' testimonies reflect the complicated tensions among liberal white southerners' empathy for African Americans, their internalized acceptance of segregationist logics, and the various risks—social, economic, and bodily—that constrained would-be allies in the civil rights struggle. Their stories become useful not merely as tools for praising or critiquing southern Jews and their rabbis but also for understanding how...

Reviewed by: The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the Northed. by Mary Lou Finley, Bernard Lafayette Jr., James R. Ralph Jr., and Pam Smith Tom Adam Davies The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Edited by Mary Lou Finley, Bernard Lafayette Jr., James R. Ralph Jr., and Pam Smith. Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century. ( Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. Pp. xiv, 495. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-6650-6.) In January 1966 Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) spearheaded a nonviolent direct-action campaign in Chicago alongside a local umbrella group, the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO). Targeting slum conditions in the city's black neighborhoods and the racially discriminatory practices of [End Page 473]local housing officials and realtors, the SCLC, the CCCO, and others in the broader Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM) conducted a series of marches through lily-white neighborhoods that met with fierce, and often violent, resistance. The deeply hostile reaction of white Chicagoans to calls for open housing laid bare the extent of white racism and institutional bias in the North for all to see. Dismayed with the disruption and controversy caused by their marches, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley eventually agreed to negotiate with King and CFM leaders. The so-called Summit Agreement reached in late August 1966 brought an end to the CFM's direct-action campaign but secured only limited reforms and weak commitments from city officials and local real estate representatives to eradicate discriminatory housing practices. Contemporary critics labeled the campaign a failure and called it a defeat for King, the SCLC, and the CFM—a judgment echoed by many historians over the last half century. This book, however, succeeds in overturning that analysis. Examining the "deep impact" of the CFM's campaign, it makes a compelling case that, in the longer term, the campaign and its adherents made a real difference in the city and beyond (p. 3). Divided into five parts, the book begins with two sections that together historicize the CFM's housing campaign by revealing its roots in earlier black protest and activism in the city and illuminate the lived experience of organizing in the urban North by drawing heavily on firsthand accounts from a range of movement participants. The remaining three parts trace the impact and programmatic legacies of CFM activism in a number of different areas, including the passage of landmark fair housing and fair lending legislation at both the local and national levels, the development of tenants' rights activism in the city and beyond, and the growth of independent black political power in Chicago from the 1980s up to the present day. Overall, as the authors suggest, the book makes clear that "the ripples spreading out from the Chicago Freedom Movement changed Chicago and the nation" (p. 4). In the process this book makes a valuable contribution to civil rights historiography in several respects. First, by placing Chicago—not popularly recognized as an important site of civil rights activism—firmly within a "long civil rights movement" framework, the collection helps further undermine traditional civil rights narratives that tend to focus only on events below the Mason-Dixon Line and bring the curtain down on the nonviolent movement after the SCLC s direct-action campaign in Selma, Alabama, in May 1965 (p. 100). Second, although King is an important focus, the book really does more to underline the limits of his role. Innovatively combining the voices of both activists and scholars, the book highlights the extent to which the CFM was a broad, diverse, and, to a degree, multiracial and interfaith grassroots effort that relied on the support and industry of a range of different organizations and people from communities across the city—and that was not free of its own internal divisions, pressures, and problems (especially concerning gender). Finally, by taking the longer view of the CFM's short-lived housing campaign, this book also reminds us that progress is often slow and [End Page 474]incremental, and it forces us to reconsider how...

Toward a Jurisprudence of the Civil Rights Acts

Reviewed by: Abraham and Mary Lincoln by Kenneth J. Winkle, and: Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley by Gregory A. Borchard, and: Lincoln and the Civil War by Michael Burlingame, and: Lincoln and the Constitution by Brian R. Dirck, and: Lincoln and the Election of 1860 by Michael S. Green Matthew Pinsker (bio) Abraham and Mary Lincoln. By Kenneth J. Winkle. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Pp. 160. Cloth, $19.95.) Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley. By Gregory A. Borchard. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Pp. 168. Cloth, $19.95.) Lincoln and the Civil War. By Michael Burlingame. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Pp. 176. Cloth, $19.95.) Lincoln and the Constitution. By Brian R. Dirck. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Pp. 184. Cloth, $19.95.) Lincoln and the Election of 1860. By Michael S. Green. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Pp. 152. Cloth, $19.95.) The Concise Lincoln Library from Southern Illinois University Press is a shrewd idea, well executed and full of surprises even for the serious Lincoln student. The growing collection of short monographs on Abraham Lincoln’s life and times edited by Richard W. Etulain, Sara Vaughn Gabbard, and Sylvia Frank Rodrigue aspires to reach a broad audience but refuses to do so by catering to the lowest common denominator. The editors have instead recruited some of the finest Lincoln scholars to help launch the series and have given them wide berth to craft their narratives with large interpretive questions at stake. This is no easy task, and anybody familiar with Lincoln scholarship will instantly recognize the risk-taking nature of the endeavor when contemplating the editors’ decision to call upon Michael Burlingame to produce a 130-page volume on Lincoln and the Civil War. Burlingame might well be the most significant Lincoln scholar working in the field today, but nobody would ever associate his immense talent with the term “concise.” During his long career, Burlingame has dazzled readers with the depth and breadth of his archival research. He also became something of a legend among fellow scholars when he reportedly returned a large book advance from a commercial publisher in order to transform a planned one-volume biography of Lincoln into the multivolume Abraham Lincoln: A Life, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2008. Yet even that exhaustive 2,000-page-plus study, for which Burlingame won the coveted Lincoln Prize in 2010, left him unfulfilled. He has since turned to the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College to post online his entire unedited manuscript from that project (see http://www.knox.edu/academics/ [End Page 260] distinctive-programs/lincoln-studies-center/burlingame-abraham-lincoln-a-life.html). Now here is the tireless scholar attempting to summarize Lincoln’s wartime presidency with fewer words than he once devoted to endnotes in a single volume of his great work. The result is a far more readable and effective summary of Lincoln as wartime president than the scholar’s prizewinning but dense study. Those who bought Burlingame’s two-volume biography but haven’t quite been able to find a summer vacation (or two) long enough to read it should consult this volume. More important, those who teach the Civil War but struggle to find short monographs that convey the complexity of the challenges that President Lincoln faced should assign it. Burlingame is especially adept at explaining the partisan politics of the second half of the war. His chapter on the reelection campaign of 1864 is about as good as any short reading on the topic currently in print. So far, politics appears to be one of the strengths of the Concise Lincoln Library. Michael S. Green has produced a highly readable study of the 1860 election, which even more self-consciously than Burlingame’s volume appears designed for undergraduate classroom adoption. Green is meticulous about providing context essential for guiding student understanding of a complicated four-way campaign. He also provides sharp portraits of the contest’s memorable cast of characters. But most significantly, Green offers a nuanced depiction of candidate Lincoln, one that manages to emphasize both his “shrewdness and, when necessary, his selfishness” (37). Gregory A. Borchard’s Abraham...

Reviewed by: Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist by Cynthia E. Orozco Philip Samponaro (bio) Cynthia E. Orozco, Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist. University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. 254. Adela Sloss-Vento (1901–1998) is not a widely known name. At first glance, this native of Texas's Rio Grande Valley seems a typical borderlander/fronteriza woman of her era. Like most contemporary women of Mexican descent in the region, Sloss-Vento followed the prescribed paths of heterosexuality and domesticity by marrying and raising a family. Born working class, she labored at lower-middleclass jobs available to Mexican American women after graduating high school, first as a secretary during the 1930s and later as a jail matron. But Sloss-Vento broke the mold. She transcended the homosociality that restricted much of the Latina experience of her times by donning the roles of archivist, political activist, and citizen-commentator in the male-dominated Mexican American civil rights and Chicano movements that together spanned the 1920s through 1970s. She publicly critiqued the low wages, poverty, Bracero Program, and exploitative agribusiness that characterized life in the Rio Grande Valley. Sloss-Vento was a Democratic Party activist and, in the 1970s, supported the Raza Unida Party with its challenges to white-only politics. As a fronteriza, she was vocal about Mexico's policies that affected La Raza in Texas. By engaging directly in the masculine domains of civil rights, writing, and politics, Adela Sloss-Vento added the title of feminist to her many accomplishments. Still, Sloss-Vento remains almost invisible. Cynthia E. Orozco, Professor of History at Eastern New Mexico University–Ruidoso, remedies that marginalization with Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist. Orozco analyzes Sloss-Vento's correspondence with male civil rights figures and her numerous opinion pieces and letters published in newspapers from the 1930s into the 1970s. She argues that Sloss-Vento was the most important Mexican American woman civil rights activist and public intellectual in Texas, the only Tejana to write publicly on social issues across seven decades. Ultimately, Orzoco concludes that Sloss-Vento "was one of the most important Mexican American civil rights activists, public intellectuals, political party activists, and feminists of the twentieth century" (171). Orozco is concerned with how Sloss-Vento surpassed gender boundaries through political associations with men. For that reason, she highlights [End Page 141] Sloss-Vento's interaction with leaders of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the seminal Tejano civil rights organization founded in 1929 and a subject on which Orozco is an expert from previous scholarship. Typical of its era, LULAC operated as a male-only homosocial space. Sloss-Vento nonetheless established relations with three of LULAC's founders: J. Luz Sáenz, José Tomás "J. T." Canales, and her personal hero, Alonso Perales. By exploring relevant correspondence, Orozco demonstrates that Adela was a civil rights insider. Simultaneously, Orozco points out that Sloss-Vento wrote her letters at home as a wife and mother, making her "a gendered outsider" (11). The author underscores this theme by stressing that Sloss-Vento steadfastly believed that women had the right to advocate for social justice, affording her the praxis of infusing the civil rights struggle with a feminist framework. In the same manner, argues Orozco, Adela sought to democratize the white male establishment in Texas politics before the social movements of the 1960s gave other women entry after 1970. Orozco is well suited to have undertaken this study. The author is an established historian of Texas, women, civil rights, and politics. Moreover, she has a unique relationship with her subject as the only scholar to have corresponded directly with Sloss-Vento, doing so while an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1970s. Those letters, which Orozco draws upon here, offer invaluable insights. The author also enjoyed access to Sloss-Vento's private archive, still in family hands. Agent of Change contextualizes that resource as having, among other attributes, the most important collection on the Harlingen (TX) Convention of 1927, which led to...

Though the study of black Chicago arguably began with the publication of Horace R. Cayton and St. Clair Drake's landmark study Black Metropolis (1945), scholars in the past three decades have continued to illuminate and redefine the history of blacks and the Windy City. Lionel Kimble Jr.'s study is an important addition to the field that explores black working-class desires, demands, and strategies for procuring equal access to housing and employment in Chicago from the Great Depression to the post–World War II era. Kimble's study illuminates two problems confronting black Chicagoans during this period: a severe housing shortage and limited job opportunities. Kimble asserts throughout the book that the goal of black working-class activists addressing these issues was not to integrate neighborhoods and workplaces but to have access to safe, clean, and affordable housing and equal employment. Black working-class activists employed several strategies to address discrimination in housing and employment. The first was to lay claim to the rhetoric of rights-based New Deal liberalism and, later, “equating patriotism and nondiscrimination” (p. 92). Second, black working-class activists aligned themselves with allies in the labor movement and in black Chicago, and with local, state, and federal coalitions in government who created and adhered to nondiscrimination policies.

Race, Place, and Belonging in the Midwest Kathryn Schumaker James Endersby and William Horner, Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2016. 336 pp. $36.95. Mary Lou Finley, Bernard Lafayette Jr., James R. Ralph Jr., and Pam Smith, eds., The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 495 pp. $40. Lena Hill and Michael Hill, Invisible Hawkeyes: African Americans at the University of Iowa during the Long Civil Rights Era. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. 230 pp. $20. Natalie Y. Moore, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016. 272 pp. $28.99, cloth. $17, paper. Kerry Pimblott, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 334 pp. $45. Sun Yung Shin, ed., A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2016. 224 pp. $18.95, paper. June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. $32.99, paper. In January 1966, Martin Luther King Jr., arrived at his new apartment in Chicago’s West Side, where he and his fellow activists faced a set of concerns that could not properly be classified as the Jim Crow of the South. Legally, the shape of racial injustice differed in the Midwest. Many states in the region [End Page 121] had relatively liberal civil rights laws. And yet African Americans in the Midwest experienced many of Jim Crow’s most pernicious effects including high rates of poverty, limited access to jobs and housing, and poorer educational opportunities compared to their white counterparts. The books reviewed here explore the tension between the image of the Midwest as a welcoming land of opportunity and the reality of persistent racial discrimination and the attendant perpetual struggle for equity and inclusion. Ultimately, each book confronts the issue of belonging—the ability to be recognized as a constituent part of a community, not in the name of “diversity” but instinctively, as it if were common sense. The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North, which chronicles King’s Chicago years, includes a series of essays by historians, musicians, and activists. The collection as a whole argues for the importance of King’s work in Chicago as a turning point in a longer struggle for racial justice in the city. The first chapter, “In Their Own Voices,” includes a wealth of first-person accounts that tell of the distinct issues addressed by the short-lived Chicago Freedom Movement and the diverse ways in which black Chicagoans engaged in the struggle. The rest of the book, which contextualizes the Movement and examines its legacies, focuses heavily on issues of housing, including efforts to secure open housing policies, combat discrimination in lending to black homebuyers, and defend the rights of tenants. Many of the essays confront the characterization of the Chicago Freedom Movement as a failure, which likely accounts for the focus on housing, where the experiences of activists and organizers in Chicago unquestionably had national significance. Less attention is paid to other issues that were central to the Movement, especially education and employment, though the essays engage with other issues including the role of gangs in community organizing, the debate over the concept of nonviolence among the city’s activists, and efforts to combat lead poisoning among the city’s children. Natalie Moore’s engaging book, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, blends autobiography, sociology, and history to understand the historical roots and contemporary shape of the color line in Chicago. The South Side focuses primarily on the issue of residential segregation and its seeming intractability, centering primarily on Bronzeville. The book is largely animated by a desire to understand how the fate of Bronzeville, once the heart of black Chicago, has diverged so dramatically from that of Harlem. The two neighborhoods share [End Page 122] similarities—historically home to vibrant black communities with proximity to natural features and urban centers...

Reviewed by: St. Louis & Empire: 250 Years of Imperial Quest & Urban Crisis by Henry W. Berger John Reda Henry W. Berger, St. Louis & Empire: 250 Years of Imperial Quest & Urban Crisis. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 353 pp. $39.50. With a book that either defies or transcends categorization, Henry W. Berger gives us a history of St. Louis from the perspective of its imperial aspirations as expressed through two hundred and fifty years of commercial initiatives. In "shifting and relocating the focus of foreign relations history from the traditional confines of nation-state formation," Berger does an admirable job of using St. Louis to demonstrate the domestic foundations [End Page 58] of foreign policy while also evaluating the effect of international relations on a particular metropolitan area (1). He does so in service to two broad arguments: the first being that a succession of St. Louis's business and political elites possessed enduring confidence that their imperial endeavors would be of benefit not only to themselves but to the city and its environs; and the second being that those initiatives ultimately constituted a benign neglect of domestic affairs that resulted in great harm to the city and its people. In the final analysis, "Empire and community were profoundly discordant" (3). Moving quickly through the early decades of St. Louis history as an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fur trade entrepôt and gateway to the West, Berger chooses Thomas Hart Benton as the first of several St. Louis elites whose careers he sketches from an imperial perspective. In the 1820s–1830s Benton rode a wave of populist support for efforts to carry the US flag into the trans-Mississippi West before crashing in the 1840s on the rocks of sectional differences involving the expansion of slavery in lands acquired following the Mexican-American War. Benton's dream of a transcontinental railroad moving west from St. Louis would never be realized and the east-west imperial ambitions of St. Louis's leadership would be reoriented to a north-south axis following the Civil War. During the 1870s increased agricultural output and falling domestic prices drove a push by St. Louis business interests to open markets to the south—to Mexico and the Caribbean—as a chance to return to prosperity. Henry Clay Pierce became a key figure in trade between St. Louis and Mexico and eventually became a major investor in Mexican railroads. When Mexico entered a protracted Revolutionary period Pierce found himself, along with other American imperialists, in the middle of a complex situation that culminated in the nationalizing of many Mexican businesses—at great loss to US investors. Berger moves into the twentieth century and traces the opportunities presented for St. Louis elites to hitch a ride on American imperial initiatives surrounding the opening of the Panama Canal and followed closely by World War I. Shoes (Brown Shoe Company) and beer (Anheuser-Busch) produced in the St. Louis metropolitan area were soon being sold around the world, but with particular success in the newly opened China market thanks to the leadership of entrepreneurs such as Leonidas Dyer and Arthur Bostwick. In World War I pharmaceutical companies such as the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works and the Monsanto Chemical Company make great [End Page 59] inroads in markets stretching from Europe to Asia while St. Louis politician David R. Francis became the United States ambassador to Russia—just in time for the Russian Revolution. St. Louis was particularly hard hit by the Great Depression but by the early 1940s St. Louis business and political elites such as Charles J. Hardy, Arthur Holly Compton, and Stuart Symington parlayed alliances and relationships with the Roosevelt administration into lucrative war supply contracts that made St. Louis a major player in the emerging military-industrial-academic complex. Berger explains, however, how the success of such industrial giants such as the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, "postponed and disguised the deterioration of the industrial central core of St. Louis" (199). The city's population peaked at about 850,000 in 1950 but by then was already a shrinking portion of the wider metropolitan area. In the second half of the twentieth century corporate giants such as Anheuser...

The Doubts of Their Fathers:The God Debate and the Conflict between African American Churches and Civil Rights Organizations between the World Wars Stephen Tuck (bio) In february 1923, William Pickens, the field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), penned an article in the black radical journal The Messenger called "Things Nobody Believes." The nobody was anyone "with intelligence." The things included bible stories, creation, miracles, Christ's resurrection, Christian creeds, a material heaven, and hell—which was "a helluvanidea." Most Christian teaching was "superstitious buncombe," Pickens asserted, and any "man who believes anything simply because somebody believed it two or three thousand years ago, is an idiot."1 "Pickens Denies Resurrection" and "Dean Pickens Says There Is No Hell" were front-page headlines in African American newspapers.2 Born in South Carolina in 1881, the son of former slaves, Pickens was one of the most high-profile African American leaders of the era, a renowned educator, columnist, orator, and civil rights activist. The NAACP's press release for Pickens's appointment as field secretary in 1920 trumpeted, "No orator of the race is so well known to colored Americans as Mr. Pickens." Pickens published his second autobiography in 1923, his speeches attracted large audiences, and his postbag [End Page 625] was full of fan mail, including one poem that started with the somewhat predictable rhyme, "Pickens, you're the dickens."3 Outspoken, impulsive, and frequently combative, Pickens was quick to get into arguments with anyone who crossed his path, from Marcus Garvey to his daughter's dentist.4 Or as he put it to his NAACP colleague W. E. B. Du Bois in 1921, "I have heard of men without enemies and I have often wondered what they could be doing." High on Pickens's hit list were the superstitions and dogmas "that dispense with the necessity for reason or judgement," including the Christianity that was preached in—as Pickens put it—"the average Negro church."5 Pickens had, in fact, been active in African American church circles earlier in his career. In 1922, just the year before "Things Nobody Believes," he had been a speaker at the Bishops' Council of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. But from the publication of this article onward, the NAACP's main ambassador to local communities spoke out with the zeal of the convert that he was from his self-described traditional Baptist upbringing.6 Part of Pickens's critique was of the institution of the black church and its personnel. After a meeting in [End Page 626] Pennsylvania in 1923, Pickens complained to the NAACP head office, "'The preachers help here in the usual way—by not hindering much. … [T]hey do nothing to help.'"7 Pickens frequently lampooned black clergy for their immorality, too. "We ordinary sinners," he mocked in a newspaper column, "have not even a chance to hit the spotlight any longer."8 (He also condemned "Ku Kluxed pulpits" in white churches, where the Klan had bought preachers by making "donations."9) But Pickens argued that the problem with Christianity in the "average Negro church" was not just misguided behavior that needed reform but also misguided beliefs that needed debunking. For Pickens, these beliefs not only were out-of-date and irrational but also had practical, detrimental consequences for the struggle for equality and the state of the country. He was frustrated when people appealed to their maker rather than applying themselves to make society better.10 In articles and speeches, Pickens insisted that progress for African Americans would come through self-reliance and scientific thought.11 He also noted that white supremacists were quick to invoke the "God alibi." When people "drag God into the argument," he warned, "you can usually look out for some scoundrelism that could not get by on any real logic."12 "Things Nobody Believes" was a liberal theological position expressed with Pickens's characteristic gusto. But such a position, asserted Levi J. Coppin of Philadelphia, an influential AME bishop, "is out of harmony with the prevailing doctrine of the Christian Church." "So greatly at variance is his [Pickens's] credo from what is...

Reviewed by: Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937 Scott R. Irelan Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937. Jonathan L. Chambers . Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. Pp. xv + 268. $55.00 (cloth). Over the past five years the Southern Illinois University Press's "Theater in the Americas" series, edited by Robert A. Schanke, has produced an array of manuscripts that explore some of the most provocative and largely overlooked practitioners, organizations, and movements of the modern theater tradition in the United States. Titles have included works on Sophie Treadwell, the little theater movement, and Mordecai Gorelick; with this new study of John Howard Lawson, the SIU Press series continues not only to preserve, but also to enhance, its inimitable voice in the study of both modernity and theater within U.S. national culture. This recent addition to the SIU Press series deftly situates the marginalized, half-hidden work of communist playwright John Howard Lawson within a broader community of socially-aware, politically-engaged creative artists. It also offers an astute look at the trials and tribulations of the literary and artistic left in the years between the First World War and the Second World War. In doing so, Messiah of the New Technique encourages not only the "reconsideration of Lawson's career and the cultural and political left of the interwar years" but also the "larger cultural matrix of that historical moment" (3). The potency of this much needed study is enriched by Chambers's meticulous examination of Lawson's lived experiences, play scripts, letters, and theoretical writings regarding 1920s and 1930s theater as "material manifestations chronicling one man's journey to define who he was and where he belonged in the world as he ventured from 'artist-rebel' to 'political revolutionary'" (204). From the start it is apparent that Chambers is neither necessarily concerned with, nor particularly intrigued by, value judgments of Lawson's plays in production, choosing instead to concentrate his efforts on illustrating ways in which Lawson "was both a product and producer of the social energy specific to this era" (204). By way of introduction, Chambers takes great care to highlight the fact that a preponderance of existing scholarship has all but dismissed Lawson as a key "player in the evolution of United States drama" (4), with many publications offering nothing more than a "reductive view of Lawson's career in theatre" (5). This judgement, argues Chambers, warrants greater reflection given that during the interwar years Lawson penned Roger Bloomer (1923), Processional (1925), Success Story (1932), Marching Song (1937), among several other plays, as well as the innovative [End Page 197] fusion of his Marxist aesthetics and writing style, Theory and Technique of Playwriting (1936). Chambers's egalatarian approach provides a thoughtful, cogent inquiry into all of Lawson's life in theater. Having carved out both niche and need, Chambers sets about the task of delineating his research frame, which is noticeably indebted to both neoMarxist criticism and the tenets of New Historicism. This deployment of materialist historiography provides a "long-overdue new reading of Lawson scripts for the theatre" as well as "a much needed study of the context that enveloped him" (13). Opening with Lawson's early life as the son of practicing Christian Scientists, continuing through his 1914 graduation from Williams College, and converging on the awakening of his aesthetic sensibilities and political beliefs, Chambers recounts the beginnings of Lawson's "intellectual and spiritual upheaval that would continue and intensify through the middle years of the 1930s" (21). This upheaval led Lawson both to make an early foray into commercial theater and then out of it shortly thereafter when he enlisted in the French ambulance corps where he became fast friends with John Dos Passos. For Chambers, the relationship with Dos Passos and wartime service in France provided the seed for both Lawson's commitment to revolutionary politics and his certainty that theater is a "pulpit from which he could communicate radical content" (22). Aesthetically and ideologically somewhere between Sheldon Cheney and Michael Gold, Lawson's scripts of the mid-1920s bore the mark...

The United States of Hippies Roger Chapman (bio) AMERICAN HIPPIES. By W. J. Rorabaugh. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2015. AMBIGUOUS BORDERLANDS: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture. By Erik Mortenson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2016. Hey Jack, now for the tricky part, when you were the brightest star who were the shadows? —Natalie Merchant, "Hey Jack Kerouac" (1987) Every picture has its shadows And it has some source of light —Joni Mitchell, "Shadows and Light" (1975) The hippies were seemingly everywhere in the 1960s and 1970s, but in actuality their sense of presence in American society was greater than their number. The term "hippie" can be honorable, pejorative, or flippant, all depending on context and speaker. Everyone knows what is meant when "hippie" is uttered, [End Page 19] but the truth is no one precisely knows. According to W. J. Rorabaugh, in his very readable American Hippies, the hippie counterculture movement not only made a lasting impression on American culture, but it largely remains a work in progress. What the author hopes to convey is the hippie aspect of hippies; in other words, their diversity and complexity. Of course, it would be less than hippie for hippies to be uniform and standard. Rorabaugh approaches the topic with just the right flow, avoiding bogs of minutia, and he is to be congratulated for doing so while making use of archival material (including a finely selected array of photographs of the period). Appropriately for the "blast to the past," there are footnotes as opposed to endnotes. The organizational structure of American Hippies divides hippie culture into two broad categories: hedonism/spiritualism (covering drugs and music) and politics (covering the antiwar movement, the politically engaged/politically disengaged, and libertarianism). American Hippies is comprised of five chapters, plus an introduction, conclusion, and index. In chapter one, the origins of the hippie movement is explained; and reasons are offered for why the counterculture movement is important history to study: first, it was a major contributor to the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, including concern for social justice, civil rights, black power, feminism, environmentalism, and socially liberal politics. Second, for a period of time it held hundreds of thousands of young people in its sway. Third, its past is not past. Drugs, music, and spirituality are the topic of chapter two, and the keywords are "individualism" and "authenticity." The third chapter is devoted to the sexual revolution, emphasizing the advent of the birth control pill, the love of the naturalness of the naked human body, the natural "male wildness" (97) of beards and long hair, and also the imbalance of free love that led some female hippies, (the future feminists), "to reconsider whether the counterculture was nothing more than the creation of a male fantasy world at the expense of women" (130). Chapter four explores the political aspects of the counterculture movement, while communes are the topic of chapter five. Readers of wry humor will be amused by how communes were often places of refuge for hippies escaping the burdens of hedonism, but having all things in common did not extend to record albums. Communes allowed hippies space for exercising one of their important values: community. Hippies such as the freaks were apolitical; others, like the diggers, were socialistic. There was a tension between hippies and the New Left—Todd Gitlin, for instance, faulted hippies for their "frivolity" (133)—but in actuality the yippies, though claiming "no ideology" while promoting a "cultural revolution" (153), were in accord with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its opposition to the Vietnam War. Overall, Bruce Schulman is correct in his observation: "political protest and countercultural sensibilities went hand in hand."1 Hippies, it is self-evident, were too loose and free to subscribe to the dogmatic Marxism that typically animated lefties; indeed, the hippie embrace of anarchism and its skepticism of government anticipated the libertarian movement. In his conclusion, though conceding that the hippie legacy in American culture is ambiguous, Rorabaugh points to the counterculture's lasting impact with respect [End Page 20] to sexual practices, recreational drugs, music, fashion, individualism, and multiculturalism. Rorabaugh suggests that the values of the hippie movement are "still...

Reviewed by: Black Chicago's First Century: 1833–1900 by Christopher Robert Reed Brian McCammack Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago's First Century: 1833–1900. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017. 600 pp. $45.00. Originally published in 2005, the first paperback printing of Christopher Robert Reed's Black Chicago's First Century: 1833–1900 in 2017 aims to establish "a long-term, comprehensive saga of continuous African American community life, including both setbacks and accomplishments" (3). The monograph begins with a historiographical introduction that discusses the dearth of scholarship on nineteenth-century black Chicago, examines at length the source material Reed uses to tell his story, and ventures some overarching arguments about black Chicago's class structure that borrows from St. Clair Drake's sociological research. A prologue examining the area's first permanent settler, black trader Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, precedes five chronologically-organized chapters, each of which begins with a brief section on the city's black demographics before examining various aspects of the community including labor, politics, intra-and interracial relations, and associational culture (religion, club life, leisure, and the like). Composing a history of nineteenth-century Chicago—particularly of the antebellum decades when black Chicagoans numbered fewer than one thousand (always around 1 percent of the city's total population during the nineteenth century, even with the influx of black southerners after the Civil War)—poses some methodological problems because the source material is somewhat scant. Reed's narrative relies heavily on a handful of published reminiscences of early settlers (sometimes at a distance of half a century or more) as well as the federal pension records of black Civil War veterans (which provided accounts of as many as two hundred black Chicagoans' lives); as he puts it, "First-person accounts based on memory are herein accorded special treatment as representative of particularized, valued experience" (25). This methodology has its benefits and drawbacks. The first-hand accounts Reed highlights help offer unparalleled insights into the lived experiences of notable black Chicagoans like abolitionist and businessman John Jones and the activist and clubwoman Fannie Barrier Williams. But memories are malleable and experiences vary widely; here they tend toward what is perhaps an overly optimistic account of inter- and intra-racial harmony—a saga that emphasizes accomplishments over setbacks—crafted largely by the comparatively small black middle- and upper-classes. That is not to say that Black Chicago's First Century sanitizes or ignores intra- and especially interracial conflict. Indeed, one the book's strengths [End Page 56] is the glimpse it offers of emerging class stratification and respectability politics in the black community. Even stronger are accounts of the Illinois Black Laws, the rise of anti-black sentiment during the Civil War, the painful struggles of black working-class Civil War veterans, the exploitation and subjugation of those who held service jobs in the restaurant industry or for the Pullman Company, and the emergent pattern of residential race segregation dating to the city's founding. All of this points to the myriad ways in which the race discrimination that would plague black Chicagoans in the Great Migration era actually originated decades earlier, somewhat paradoxically in a city that also had been a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. But the dissonance between those struggles and rosier first-hand accounts are not entirely resolved and leave the reader wondering how to square these seemingly disparate histories. Contentions that "a cultural like-mindedness among African Americans provided the group with a cohesive base for unified action against external constraints" (59) and, later, that "Impoverishment produced interracial commiseration" (391), for instance, are thinly supported—even contradicted elsewhere—and risk casting this pre-Great Migration era as an idyllic period of intra- and interracial harmony before the flow of black Southerners further exacerbated tensions. Representative of this central narrative tension is Reed's account of black Chicagoans' involvement in the 1893 World's Fair (for Reed's more extensive treatment of the Fair, see All the World is Here! The Black Presence at the White City). Consistent with the monograph's more general tone of optimism, Reed argues that "African Americans claimed and won a meaningful role as workers, patrons, lecturers...