Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest by Jon C. Teaford

Abstract

368 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE thesis: urban growth actually produced the neighborhood and its identity through its impact on economic, social, and political inter­ action in Jamaica Plain. Commerce, manufacturing, business, and real estate projects fostered neighborhood ties and brought together the area’s different social classes and ethnic communities. But at the same time, “external relations nurtured the internal growth of neighborhood society and promoted neighborhood identity ofplace within the urban matrix” (p. 119). Factory owners, merchants, and shopkeepers were likely to live in the community, building social bonds as well as economic ones. The ties fashioned within Jamaica Plain were manifest in the political and governmental issues of the time, promoting a pro-growth philosophy and demand for neighbor­ hood and infrastructure improvements, but they also led to some conflicts. Those on both sides of the annexation debate, for exam­ ple, saw themselves as advancing the best interests ofJamaica Plain. After annexation, however, the city reform movement, guided by universalist principles ofcentralized control and administration, un­ dermined neighborhood attachments. Instead of promoting unity among Boston’s different social classes and ethnic groups, the re­ form movement drove them further apart—to Boston’s detriment, von Hoffman argues. In the final chapter, von Hoffman offers an analysis of 20th-cen­ tury urban life and calls for a return to the “neighborhood society” of yesteryear. At first glance this may seem a little naive. However, von Hoffman does not simply wish to return to the turn-of-the-century city; instead he seeks to re-create and incorporate those ele­ ments emanating from local communities and attachments that ben­ efited the common good. The picture von Hoffman creates of city neighborhood life is sometimes too rosy, but on the whole, Local Attachments is well written, accessible to the general reader, and highly valuable to historians and urbanists. William Leonard Mr. Leonard is a doctoral student at Boston College, at work on a dissertation on Boston’s African-American Catholic community. Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest. By Jon C. Teaford. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Pp. xii+300; illustrations, tables, notes, index. $39.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). For Jon Teaford, the cities located between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River share not only the accident of having once been part of the Old Northwest but also a general legacy of industrial growth and decline, a “common heartland consciousness,” and a deep real­ ization of being a region apart. Teaford has written a biography of TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 369 the urban areas of this heartland region, in which he includes St. Louis, “whose development was intrinsically tied to its rivalries with Cincinnati and Chicago” (p. vii). That is to say, he presents a cityfocused economic, ethnic, and cultural history of the region, but­ tressed with many examples from the varied industrial centers of this area of the Midwest. For those interested in the history of technology, Teaford provides a great deal of material on the interaction of transportation systems and industrial development, on ethnic and labor history, and on the reaction to or use of new technological regimes by artists and cul­ tural elites. Of particular interest are Teaford’s overview of Progres­ sive Era artistic and political experiments (including Milwaukee’s flirtation with socialism), and his treatment ofthe rise of the automo­ bile industry as a regional, as opposed to a Detroit, phenomenon. He also has some striking points to make concerning the importance of antebellum German migration to the cultural life of the heart­ land, and concerning the fact that the post-1920 great southern mi­ gration consisted of more whites than blacks. (By the 1980s, he notes, “nowhere were there fewer mixed residential districts than in the industrial Midwest” [p. 235].) The general frame Teaford uses for the industrial history of the region is familiar: nascent industry, manufacturing colossus, rust belt. Teaford’s chronology of the region’s “interior mentality” may prove more intriguing: 19th-century emulation of centers of culture in the East; early-20th-century confidence in the quintessential Americanness of the heartland, together with literary and architec­ tural flowering in Chicago; post-1920 return...