Chicago Workers Research Articles

Becoming Entitled: Relief, Unemployment, and Reform during the Great Depression

Becoming Entitled: Relief, Unemployment, and Reform during the Great Depression

Educating Communists: Eugene Bechtold and the Chicago Workers School

“The educator must himself be educated.”Third Thesis on Feuerbach“Workers’ Education Is Workers’ Power.” This slogan—emblazoned atop the brochure announcing the courses for the Fall term of 1936—ca...

Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Who governed American cities? The question has been central to urban studies over several generations and of special importance to those examining metropolitan public life during the late nineteenth century. For some, post–Civil War cities were quintessentially pluralistic settings, with power distributed across a multiplicity of groups and interests. Others argue that economic changes concentrated power in the hands of a new business elite. The labor historians John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov join this debate in Chicago in the Age of Capital, a thoroughly researched and convincing assessment of the interplay between the spread of industrial capitalism and the evolution of American democracy in an important city. On questions of power, the truth is usually in the details, and Jentz and Schneirov provide plenty of them. In their telling, the Civil War triggered a sudden transformation in the local economy, as Chicago shifted from being a trading entrepôt with a merchant elite to a city increasingly dominated by large-scale manufacturers. For workers, this change meant a shift to wage labor that undercut their aspirations for independent citizenship. Slowly, and in complex ways, they began to coalesce into a self-conscious class with a coherent political program. Only after the great fire of 1871, when the issues and alliances connected with the Civil War had faded, did the city's elite unite around an agenda of low taxes, municipal efficiency, and, for a time, temperance. Business leaders gained the upper hand in the battle against workers after the panic of 1873 but could not hold it. The city erupted during the great strike of 1877, at which point it became clear that Chicago workers were becoming a cohesive group capable of challenging capitalist power. Democratic mayor Carter Harrison Sr. (1879–1887, 1893) crafted a governing settlement, ensuring that the limited government and low taxes business leaders craved would endure by accommodating working-class demands, including leniency on temperance, the curtailment of police interference in strikes, and official appointments for labor leaders. The result was a new order that accepted industrial capitalism, wage labor, and limited government while also incorporating the immigrant working class into the polity where it restrained elite power.

The Historic Chicago Greystone: A User’s Guide for Renovating and Maintaining Your Home

The Historic Chicago Greystone: A User's Guide for Renovating and Maintaining your Home. Eds. Dan Wheeler, James Wheaton, Tasneem A. Chowdhury. (Chicago: UIC City Design Center, 2008. Pp. 108. Illus. glossary. Paper $21.95.) The Historic Chicago Greystone is a coffee table book for aspiring and actual Greystone homeowners. Apart from aspirants and owners, one can hardly see a wider authence for this book, which is unfortunate as it is beautifully presented and organized. In fact, book is a celebration of some of 100+ year-old architecture of Chicago and a refreshing celebration of potential for urban renewal in a throw-away society. That it also creates potential for other municipalities to see opportunity for re-making their communities is just one of lessons of this book. The Greystone was, and is, the simple brick box, with a limestone facade, to give it more dignity and presence along street, nothing more than a set of worker's cottages, somewhat expanded in size, piled one on top of other to form a multi-storey building. These buildings were erected between Chicago World Fair of 1893 and World War I and were rented to Chicago's working class and their families. One would question as to why building owners would build these extremely solid structures for Chicago's workers and, here, it is explained that financial security and upward economic mobility followed rental income and over time real estate appreciation. . . increased their (the owner's) net worth. (p.8) It gives an answer but not initial motivation for such granthose and luxurious, for time, construction. Split thematically, The Historic Chicago Greystone takes us from dilapidated image of building through investigation into various means of renovation to a photograph of completed building, but it does not end there. Assessments of potential building includes maintainer, fixer-upper, rehabber, and total gut. Once level of necessary work has been determined, editors take us through many of eventualities of remodeling illustrating their commentary with clear layout and isometric drawings and photographs. We are taken on a journey through physical rehab process: facade, opening up masonry walls, roofing, foundations, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. Little, if any, of actual refurbishment is left out, including ideas for front and rear yards. …

Of Dreams and Real Estate

Margaret Garb. City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 256 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index, $40.00. Amanda Seligman. Block By Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005. 320 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). An important and interesting trend in urban historiography is the number of scholars at work on some facet of housing. The influential University of Chicago Press monograph series, "Historical Studies of Urban America," re-issued Arnold Hirsch's path-breaking study of public housing in Chicago, Making of the Second Ghetto, and published both of the books reviewed here—an original account of homeownership in the late nineteenth century and a social history of urban renewal in a postwar neighborhood. Both authors, Margaret Garb and Amanda Seligman, at least allude to Hirsch's argument that group conflict and racism determined residential patterns, while complicating any sort of monolithic and potentially racialist image of the white neighborhood. To differing degrees, they join a sophisticated and complex debate on urban political economy staked out by leading scholars Sven Beckert and Lizabeth Cohen, as well as Thomas Sugrue and Robert Self. Some of this writing examines real estate, neighborhood, and mobility to understand the so-called urban crisis, defined by Sugrue for the postwar era as the flow of capital to suburbs, the failure of renewal, and the immobilization of black neighborhoods by white violence. By now something like a preliminary synthesis of local and federal housing and renewal policy has emerged, which includes innovative books on ethnicity (settlement, prejudice, and assimilation) by Thomas Gugliemo and David Roediger arguing that the housing boom turned immigrants of color into white men. Thus the monographs discussed below profitably return us to a narrower conception or subject of housing, but from new vantages of time and place.1 In City of American Dreams, Garb draws on newspapers, reform tracts, and municipal archives to chart the rise of a popular desire to own one's own [End Page 194] home, which was shaped by the changing context of struggles over municipal regulation and middle-class reform. In the 1870s and 1880s, the thrust of municipal policy advantaged the wealthy over workers and the poor such that owning proved a challenge even for upwardly mobile craftsmen. Surprisingly, the status-conscious middle class preferred renting a single-family house to buying, but also demonstrated a concern with the respectability of an area. Meanwhile, Chicago's workers gathered in protest of new building regulations established in the wake of the Great Fire of 1877, which among other provisions prohibited wood frames, because many could not afford the cost of brick. Although workers and professionals alike celebrated the triumph of the contract and the end of slavery, several classes of citizens simultaneously contested and embraced the prerogatives of private property. Like Lizabeth Cohen's description of the essentially liberal orientation of white ethnics by the time of the New Deal, Garb's analysis seems to find that this earlier generation of workers embraced industrialization "by combining wage labor with access to residential property rights" (p. 27).2 At a time when many Irish, Polish, Slavic, and Italian immigrants had purchased cottages, duplexes, triplexes, and moved into tenements, and as some immigrants became concentrated in particular neighborhoods that sometimes exhibited socialism, each group of newcomers formed different views of and responses to private property. In addition, working-class apartment-dwellers protested conditions in the tenements, and their labor leaders pressed for new building codes to be drawn up and enforced by city hall. Popular discourse cast renters as a dependent class—like female workers—that merited special protection. If many of the upwardly mobile responded to the recession-prone economy with the desire for investment, working-class African Americans failed to do the same (p. 39). Garb found that in 1890 only 250...

The Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT)<subtitle>A Return to a Landmark Trial</subtitle>

In 1982 the results of the landmark Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT) were published in JAMA . 1 MRFIT was a randomized primary prevention trial funded by the National Heart and Lung Institute (now the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute) to test whether multifactor intervention in 12 866 high-risk, asymptomatic middle-aged men would prevent fatal coronary heart disease (CHD) events compared with usual care. Minimum follow-up was 6 years. MRFIT grew from the Task Force on Arteriosclerosis convened in 1970 by the National Heart and Lung Institute to devise a long-range strategy for preventing, treating, and controlling arteriosclerosis and its complications. 2 The task force thoroughly reviewed data that had come from epidemiologic observations in the United States and abroad—including the findings of the Framingham Heart Study, the Seven Countries Study, and the Chicago Workers Study—and from clinical observations and smaller clinical trials linking risk factor modification

The Word Made Flesh: The Chicago Catholic Worker and the Emergence of Lay Activism in the Church by Francis J. Sicius

The Word Made Flesh: The Chicago Catholic Worker and Emergence of Lay Activism in Church. By Francis J. Sicius. (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. 1990. Pp. xiv, 197.) Chicago Catholicism's reputation for social and ecclesiastical progressivism in period prior to Vatican Council II has generated any number of books, articles, and dissertations. This has been made possible by abundance of documentary material left by many of principals, accessibility of archdiocesan archives, and volubility of many of participants of those heady days. Into this current of scholarship has stepped Francis Sicius' study of Chicago Catholic Worker, especially House of Hospitality on Blue Island Avenue and its most prominent alumni, John Cogley, James O'Gara, and Edward Marciniak. For anyone remotely connected with any movement or organization of Chicago Catholicism's progressive cadre, this place was Camelot. In addition, Sicius demonstrates wider influence of Catholic Workers in Chicago by demonstrating linkage between their action-oriented idealism and many of movements for social and economic justice in thirties, forties, fifties, and even sixties in city. Dorothy Day's and Peter Maurin's distinctive program of social reconstruction, manifested in pages of The Catholic Worker, found a fertile field in depression-ravaged cities of America. Chicago's House of Hospitality developed after a speaking tour by Peter Maurin in 1936. The guiding light of first effort was Arthur Falls, an African-American physician and a practicing Catholic, who saw in Catholic Worker a means of bringing Catholic Church behind cause of racial justice in northern cities. But unlike Day's effort in New York, independent-minded Falls shied away from soup-kitchen/shelter aspects of work and turned Worker house into an education center on public issues and Catholic social teaching. This first effort was able to attract bright young men like John Cogley, James O'Gara, and Edward Marciniak, all of whom would eventually gather again (after stints in seminary) to form Blue Island Avenue Catholic worker house in 1938. Housed in an old factory, this enterprise more closely resembled Day's model in New York, replete with soup kitchen and shelter. With Cogley's skill, Chicago Workers were able to put out their own version of Catholic Worker and disseminated thousands of copies to workers, sympathetic parish priests, and others. Many idealistic young people volunteered to serve at House. Clerical leaders such as Reynold Hillenbrand gave it support; he even brought Dorothy Day to seminary to speak to future levites. Through power of pen and their own indefatigable idealism, Catholic Workers of Chicago gave critical public support to a host of liberal causes--improved racial relations, industrial unionism, and coordinated efforts to attack anti-Semitism of Charles Coughlin and his followers--all issues where a deliberate Catholic presence was both a surprise and warmly welcomed. The house on Blue Island Avenue did not enjoy a long life. Economic conditions improved, thereby mitigating need for shelter and soup kitchen (its most popular feature). Moreover, Dorothy Day's insistence on a pacifist stance during World War II divided Workers internally. Cogley enlisted in armed forces while Marciniak refused to cooperate or fight. The house closed its doors in 1941. Other efforts were made to resuscitate Catholic Worker presence in Chicago. But in Sicius' estimation none of them had appeal or effectiveness of house on Blue Island Avenue. In his final chapter, Sicius eulogizes movement of thirties as the model for institutional church of decades that followed. There is much to commend In this slender volume. Sicius covers an important wellspring of progressive mood of Chicago Catholicism. …

Employment Relations and the Labor Market: Integrating Institutional and Market Perspectives

From a market perspective, workers' access to bureaucratic personnel structures at work is related to the transferability of their occupational skills. An institutional perspective emphasizes normative and coercive factors like union power, establishment size, occupational status, and extent of government employment. Building on these two perspectives, we examine the impact of an occupation's external marketthe extent to which it offers systematic within-occupation movement among employers on internal job mobility and protection structures and the availability of grievance procedures. Data from a sample of Chicago workers and their employers confirm aspects of both market and institutional theory. Results also support our core hypothesis, that incumbents of occupations embedded in strong external markets are less likely to have these governance structures available.

Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s

IN 1929, THE PUBLISHERS OF TRUE STORY MAGAZINE RAN FULL-PAGE ADVERtisements in nation's major newspapers celebrating what they called the American Economic Evolution. Claiming be recipient of thousands of personal stories written by American workers for magazine's primarily working-class readership, they felt well placed report that since World War I, shorter working hours, higher pay and easy credit had created an economic millennium. Now that nation's workers enjoyed an equal opportunity consume, capital-labor war which has been going on now for upwards of three hundred had virtually ended. True Story claimed that twenty years ago, Jim Smith, who worked ten twelve hours a day in a factory and then returned home to his hovel and his woman and his brats, was likely resort strikes and violence when times got tough. Not so his modernday counterpart. Today, magazine asserted, Jim Smith drives home suburbs after a seven or eight hour day earning him three seven times as much as before, which helps pay for automobile, house and a myriad of other possessions. Now an upstanding member of middle class, Jim has learned moderation. Mass consumption had tamed his militance.1 Advertising executives at J. Walter Thompson Company shared True Story Magazine's confidence in homogenizing power of mass culture. In an issue of their own in-house newsletter devoted the New National Market, they too claimed that due standardized merchandise, automobiles, motion

Factors in Work-Residence Separation: Wage and Salary Workers, Chicago, 1951

THE literature on urban structure and function indicates that the workplaces of labor force members are spatially separated from their residences, in part because of the differentiated pattern of urban land use. There is also some evidence of appreciable variation in the degree of workresidence separation among different component groups of the labor force.' On the basis of previous studies, it may be expected that two of the major determinants of the degree of work-residence separation are the socio-economic level of the worker and the centralization of the workplace. It is hypothesized (1) that the degree of workresidence separation varies directly with the socio-economic level of the worker, (2) that the degree of separation is directly related to the centralization of the workplace, and (3) that the degree of separation is greatest for workers of high socio-economic level with centralized workplaces. Although the relationships between socioeconomic level, centralization of workplace, and degree of work-residence separation may obtain as hypothesized for the total labor force, they may be modified or reversed for particular subgroups. effects of other demographic and economic factors, including color, sex, and duration of employment with the present establishment, on the relationships are examined. Data. data which the study analyzes were obtained as a by-product of the Occupational Mobility Survey, conducted in January and February of 1951 in Chicago.2 A systematic sample of approximately 2,000 households was drawn from the city, and work history schedules were completed for each person twenty-five years or older in the sample households who worked full-time for pay or in his own business for a month or more during 1950. schedule number permitted identification of the census tract of residence. Information on color, sex, income, occupation, family status, and duration of employment was obtained directly from the schedules. All identifying information on current workplace was examined. schedule provided no identifying information on workplace for self-employed persons; hence, they are excluded from this analysis. In most cases, the industry group and the name of the employing firm were available for wage and salary workers. addresses of the employing establishments were located through telephone directories or published firm listings and assigned to census tracts by means of a street address coding guide. For assignment of a workplace location, it was necessary that there be a single determinable workplace. Cases for which no workplace could be assigned are of two types: * Revision of a paper read at a meeting of the Society for Social Research of the University of Chicago, June, 1953. This research was supported in part by the U. S. Air Force under Contract Number AF 33 (038)-25630, monitored by the Human Resources Research Institute. Permission is granted for reproduction, translation, publication and disposal in whole and in part by or for the U. S. Government. 1J. Douglas Carroll, Jr., Some Aspects of the Home-Work Relationships of Industrial Workers, Land Economics, 25 (November, 1949), pp. 413-22; Carroll, The Relation of Homes to Work Places and the Spatial Pattern of Social Forces, 30 (March, 1952), pp. 271-82; Helene M. Conant, The Locational Influence of Place of Work on Place of Residence, M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, March, 1952; Otis Dudley Duncan and Beverly Davis, Nos. 5, 13, 20 in the unpublished series of Urban Analysis Reports, Chicago Community Inventory, University of Chicago, 1951-53; Kate K. Liepmann, Journey to Work, New York: Oxford University Press, 1944, Part B, Chapter II; Leo F. Schnore, The Separation of Home and Work: A Problem for Human Ecology, Social Forces, 32 (May, 1954), pp. 336-43. 2 For a summary of the entire Occupational Mobility Survey, see Gladys L. Palmer, Labor Mobility in Six Cities, New York: Social Science Research Council, 1954. transfer of the information from the original schedules for Chicago workers to a card form suitable for an analysis of work-residence separation was planned and supervised by Evelyn M. Kitagawa.

Hypophysectomy of birds IV-Plumage changes in hypophysectomized fowls

We have previously described the effects of hypophysectomy on the reproductive organs and comb of the fowl. It remains to consider the plumage changes. Castration of the normal male fowl causes no plumage changes except slight lengthening of the feathers. Ovariectomy of the hen, however, results in reversal of the plumage to the male type. The plumage of the normal male is thus of the asexual or neutral type found in the gonadectomized bird of either sex (Goodale, 1916; Pézard, 1918). We expected, therefore, to find little change in the plumage of the hypophysectomized cock, in spite of the virtual destruction of the testis (Hill and Parkes, 1934), but a definite reversal of the hen’s plumage to the male type. The changes observed were actually very different; Brown Leghorn cocks have shown remarkable plumage changes, the hens much less obvious ones. We are convinced that the chief factor concerned in these plumage changes is thyroid deficiency. It is well known that there is an intimate relation between hyper- and hypo-thyroidism and plumage type (see Greenwood and Blyth, 1929). Thyroidectomy causes inability to produce the black pigmentation on certain areas of the body, especially in such breeds as the Brown Leghorn, and increases the fringing of the feathers due to lack of barbules. Changes such as these are the most obvious feature in the hypophysectomized fowl, and since we have demonstrated that they can be corrected by the administration of thyroxine, there seems little doubt that the thyroid atrophy which is known to follow hypophysectomy in mammals also occurs in birds and that this is the decisive factor in the post-hypophy-sectomy plumage changes. The study of plumage has now become a specialized branch of developmental physiology, largely owing to the researches of the Chicago workers in America, of Zawadowsky in Moscow, and of Greenwood in this country (see Lillie, 1932; Lillie and Juhn, 1932; Zawadovsky, 1927; and Greenwood and Blyth, 1929, for comprehensive papers with references). In the circumstances we have hesitated to attempt any complete analysis of the effects of hypophysectomy on plumage; such an analysis will clearly demand detailed knowledge of the subject. Our aim in giving the present description is to indicate the general nature of the changes, in the hope that they will be fully dealt with by other workers.