The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream by Thmas Dyja

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream by Thmas Dyja Elaine Lewinnek Thmas Dyja, The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream. New York: Penguin Books, 2013. 508 pp. $29.95. In this ambitious book, Thomas Dyja aims to make mid-century Chicago central to American art history and cultural history. With vivid writing, he traces the arc of Chicago architecture, literature, music, television, theater, visual arts, and politics from the 1940s through to 1960, following Chicago culture from Mies van der Rohe to McDonald's. Nineteen-fifty-five is the central hinge year, for Dyja, and persuasively so. That is the year that Richard Daley first became mayor, Hugh Hefner invented Playmates, Chuck Berry gave birth to rock-and-roll (in Dyja's view, 293), Mamie Till Bradley "catalyzed" the civil rights movement through her open-casket funeral for her son (317), Ray Kroc founded McDonald's, actors around the University of Chicago launched improv theater, Sun Ra refined his Afrofuturism, O'Hare airport opened, a series of unsolved child abductions dominated the Chicago news, and Chicago's urban population began its decades-long decline. As that list suggests, Dyja is prone to fall into a sort of great-man theory of history, asserting that a single Chicago person invented rock and roll [End Page 109] or postwar urban renewal or even hip-centered dancing (29)—though at other times his careful research does lead him to credit groups or eras. His personality-driven history may seem dubious to many academics, but it does make for great storytelling, as each chapter focuses on a few vivid people and places, often with surprising, creative pairings, for instance in his chapter connecting the controversies over the Farnsworth House and Cicero Riots. Dyja describes the stormy relationship between Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir as one useful synecdoche for Chicago's mid-century arts scene. He has a knack for selecting memorable details, including what Richard Daley and Hugh Hefner each ate for breakfast: a poached egg every day for Daley and the first of the day's two dozen Pepsis for Hefner. Dyja also has a terrific ability to select memorable quotes, so that one of the most teachable explanations of white flight that I have ever read is Dyja's account of Mahalia Jackson's experience purchasing a home at 8353 S. Indiana Street. Dyja's theme is the way that Chicago-based ideas of "regular" folk culture, community, art, and individuality all eventually twisted through corporate commodification, Cold War consumer culture, racism, and too much top-down control from both politics and business. The American dream in his title means both consumer culture and ideas of the common man. Given this theme, he might have engaged more with academic theorists concerned with similar ideas. Michael Denning's analysis of images of regular folk in the 1930s cultural front, Lizabeth Cohen's work on how mass consumer culture both strengthened and then eroded Chicago's 1930s labor movement, and Margaret Garb's work on Chicago-based ideas of property values that structured the American dream as early as the 1920s might have better informed this book. Dyja's strength lies elsewhere. In his acknowledgments, he calls one friend a "cultural spelunker extraordinaire" and that is not a bad explanation for Dyja himself. He highlights important overlooked literature, including Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha and Frank London Brown's Trumbull Park. He persuasively asserts that Chicago's contributions to early television, including Studs' Place but especially the Kukla, Fran, and Ollie show, represent a calm, "regular," improvisational, intimate, intelligent, and creative alternative to the hectic "wasteland" that came to dominate television created on the two other coasts. His prose sparkles, his primary-source research is deep, and he writes with admirable fairness to potential human villains, like Leonard and Phil Chess of Chess Records or Chicago businessman and arts patron Walter Paepcke, who relocated to Aspen. [End Page 110] Unfortunately, Dyja's is a binary Chicago, black and white, without any Asians or Latinos, although in the 1940s, Chicago was the most popular resettlement destination for Japanese-Americans banned from the West Coast during World War...