Reviewed by: Gary, the Most American of All American Cities Andrew Highsmith (bio) Gary, the Most American of All American Cities. By S. Paul O'Hara. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Pp. ix+195. $19.95. Over the past generation, scholars have written prolifically on the fate of urban America in the twentieth century. Included in this immense body of work are untold numbers of articles and monographs addressing issues of political economy and the material transformation of metropolitan spaces. As a result of such scholarship, we now know a great deal about the rise of mass suburbs, the decline of urban manufacturing, the persistence of social inequalities in modern American society, and other significant developments. Until very recently, however, work probing the cultural dimensions of metropolitan change has been largely absent from the canon of urban and suburban studies. With Gary, the Most American of All American Cities, historian S. Paul O'Hara offers a deeply researched, carefully narrated corrective that is both insightful and important. O'Hara's account focuses on shifting narrative constructions of Gary, Indiana, from the city's founding in the early twentieth century as a mass-production center for the U.S. Steel Corporation through the waves of "white flight" and deindustrialization that decimated the area's economy in the 1980s. Throughout the book's seven chronologically and thematically arranged chapters, O'Hara emphasizes the contestation over perceptions of Gary, especially among members of the corporate media and privileged outsiders. Building on the works of Peter Fritzsche and Judith Walkowitz, O'Hara persuasively demonstrates that narratives about Gary and its people helped to create a "word city" that profoundly influenced the area's twentieth-century development. "Gary," the author argues, "became what [End Page 710] observers wished it to be" (p. 53). Although O'Hara only rarely strays beyond the city's borders, this is not a local history. Instead, the author attempts to show how the stories people constructed about Gary reflected broader American concerns over the meanings of modernity, (de)industrialization, decline, and empowerment. In the opening two chapters, O'Hara traces the mythology that emerged following Gary's founding in 1909. During the city's first decade, many observers described local steel mills as triumphs of modern technology and planning. Others characterized the city as an urban analog of the western frontier—a place of both danger and opportunity. After the bitter race riots and steel strikes of 1919, however, many of the area's chroniclers jettisoned such notions and began characterizing Gary as a failed model city. Although many working-class residents maintained a sense of pride in their hometown, they were unable to counteract the dominant dystopian narratives purveyed by Chicago journalists and other outsiders. By the time the Depression arrived in 1929, Gary's image had already lost its sheen. Following World War II, the declension accelerated as cultural producers began portraying Gary as a dangerous and polluted ghetto. Despite boosters' efforts to emphasize the city's positive attributes, Gary's reputation sank even further during the deindustrialization crisis of the 1980s. As the author suggests, the emphasis on crime, grime, and pollution became a means of "othering" the hard-luck city and its growing black majority. Without question, O'Hara's work marks an important contribution to the literature on urban cultural history. Although its relative inattention to technology will disappoint some readers of this journal, the author does a splendid job of narrating and analyzing discursive changes over time. In addition, he makes a very persuasive case that cultural products have been as important as material forces in shaping Gary's destiny. Nevertheless, the book suffers from several significant omissions and interpretive lapses. The most serious of these problems stems from the author's disregard for the agency of local actors. Although O'Hara rightly points out that outsiders were powerful image makers, citizens of Gary routinely contested the town's one-dimensional reputation as a wasteland. Nevertheless, local residents—including major figures such as Richard G. Hatcher, the city's first African-American mayor and a powerful symbol of black political power—receive short shrift in this account. A second concern is that O'Hara...