Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873-1935 by Derek Vaillant

Abstract

Book Reviews 145 and are years if not decades away from the restoration of what the IJC's water-quality board calls beneficial uses. This slender, thoughtful volume is particularly valuable in light of a new Great Lakes Basin Collaborative strategy released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in December 2005 that calls for $20 billion in public spending to restore and protect the Great Lakes. Spreading a layer of cash over existing, and sometimes dysfunctional, governmental efforts to restore the lakes will not deliver the anticipated results, however, as Restoration of theGreat Lakes illustrates. Even so, the author remains hopeful, arguing that "the potential remains great" (p. 115) for Great Lakes rehabilitation if governments can learn the value of working in close partnership with ecosystem users and citizens at large and cede or share some of their management authority. Dave Dempsey Saint Paul, Minnesota Derek Vaillant. Sounds of Reform: Progressivism andMusic in Chicago, 1873 1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. 291. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95. Derek Vaillant presents a detailed, nuanced examination of music as the handmaiden of progressive reform and charts the motivations, triumphs, failings, and ideological limits of using music for civic uplift. In the years covered by this book, Chicago provided music progressives with a seemingly vast opportunity to impose Americanization and democratization on newly arrived working-class European immigrants. Competing plans for reform, however, and the claims of Chicago's many different ethnic groups meant that most proposals for musical uplift were contested. Additionally, the necessity of rebuilding following the disastrous Chicago fire engaged the musical reformers in designing and locating new parks and spaces for musical performances. Not only were musical progressives divided about which musical forms best suited their purposes, but also the ethnic communities, targets of this musical largesse, had ideas of their own that usually conflicted with the reformers' aims. Given the multiplicity of competing expectations it is awonder that the musical progressives did not give up. Instead, they fought for their ideas, sometimes compromising their plans for formal park structures and classically oriented concerts in order to achieve their objectives. While concentrating on music as a reform tool, 146 Michigan Historical Review the usually middle-class civic authorities and reformers had to contend with each other over the allocation of funds and the maintenance of the racial status quo. Vaillant asserts that immigrant communities, civic authorities, and musical progressives usually shared antiblack sentiments. Yet from the 1890s onward, all of these groups had to deal with the incursion of Dixieland and other syncopated, popular forms of music into the reformers' world. Music's commercialization further challenged reformers' efforts and continued to have an impact on and modify shifting racial and musical boundaries. The chapter, "They Whirl Off the Edges of a Decent Life: Unmasking Difference at the Dance Hall, 1904-1933," is a brilliant analysis of social dancing in Chicago, commercial taxi-dance parlors, and the ways that whiteness was challenged and interrogated in these venues. This chapter illuminates the struggles of new jazz musicians, second generation ethnic community members who received their training through progressive music-reform initiatives, but then sometimes opposed the middle-class reformers' musical norms. Any history of reform in Chicago must include Hull House's contribution to civic life and change. Vaillant does not disappoint, as this institution's work is interwoven throughout the volume. His tour de force concludes with a brief, imaginative comparison of Jane Addams with Tupac Shakur as an exemplar of music's continuing reform impulse, even in our postmodern world. This study may serve as a template for uncovering musical progressive activism in midwestern centers such as Detroit, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. Harry A. Reed, Professor Emeritus Michigan State University Phyllis Vine. One Man's Castle: Clarence Darrow inDefense of theAmerican Dream. New York: Amistad, 2005. Pp. 349. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper, $13.95. Most people associate racial activism with the civil rights movement that began in the 1950s. But long before that movement started, African Americans committed to the defense of civil rights asserted their rights to equality and citizenship. One of these people was Dr. Ossian...