Progressive Era Chicago Research Articles

Unlawful Intimacy: The Criminalization of Interracial Relationships in Progressive-Era Chicago

This article shows how Progressive-Era state actors in Chicago employed open-ended, low-level criminal charges directed at regulating the moral health of the community to criminalize interracial relationships—even though interracial marriage had been legal in Illinois since 1870. Capacious legal definitions of offenses like vagrancy, disorderly conduct, adultery, and fornication allowed police officers and judges to delineate moral and immoral relationships along racial lines. Using newspaper articles, writing from contemporary social reformers, and court reports, this article reconstructs the treatment of interracial couples in the Chicago legal system to show how discretion in criminal law can reinforce racial hierarchy. I offer three historical arguments: first, that individual arrests and prosecutions of interracial couples labeled lawful, interracial relationships as a form of unlawful “vice,” second, that large-scale raids on spaces for interracial socialization reinforced the criminality of interracial intimacy in a segregated city, and third, that singling out interracial couples allowed the state to exercise control through intrusive forms of punishment like probation and institutionalization.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Linda Mahood Welcome to the first issue of the sixteenth volume of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Please allow me to thank book review editors Adriana Benzaquen and Hugh Morrison for the additional work they have done to keep the books moving during the restrictions of the pandemic. Reviewing new research on the changing conceptions of children over place and time is important work for the JHCY. In this issue, in very different ways, the articles examine expert intervention in childhood and family life through various techniques of power, institutional intervention, health and welfare policy, and how children experience the processes that govern their lives. In "Caring for Children with Infectious Diseases: Children's Experiences of Fever Hospitals and Sanatoria in Scotland," Andrew Kendrick recalls that diseases were a significant cause of death in infants and children until the early decades of the twentieth century. Smallpox, tuberculosis, typhus, whooping cough, cholera, and measles were rife and epidemics continued to be a regular occurrence. Without effective treatments, infant and child mortality rates were high. According to Kendrick, despite attention to the medical care of children, there was limited concern for their wider social, emotional, and educational needs in Scottish specialty hospitals, sanatoria, convalescent homes for children with disabilities, and lock hospitals for girls with syphilis. Some young patients had very happy memories of their time in hospital, while others had difficult and tragic memories, and still others were lonely for their parents and siblings and found the regimes of hospitals harsh and rigid. Historians of carceral institutions for children note the link between physical and moral contagions. In "Survived and Punished: Incest Victims' Treatment in Progressive-Era Chicago," Grace Argo argues that progressive reformers' treatment of incest victims shows how the child protection systems removed incest survivors from abusive homes and classified them as "sex delinquent" or "feebleminded." Argo argues that incest survivors were victimized twice—first by the crime and second by institutionalization in a girl's reformatory. Viewing [End Page 1] incest survivors as morally and mentally deficient enabled caseworkers to differentiate "redeemable" incest victims from "irredeemable" ones. Argo uses Nirmala Erevelles's theory of the co-construction of deviance and disability to argue that girls were pathologized by the school's doctors, psychologists, administrators, and staff. This framework helps us understand how incest victims came to be understood as both mentally and morally defective by the adults responsible for their protection, as well as to appreciate the impact this pathologizing had on abused girls' lives. The regulation of children's bodies has long been a feature of the history of childhood. In "Athlete and Auxologist: James Tanner's Interest in Physique and his Role in Establishing the Short Stature of Children as a Medical Classification," Aishwarya Ramachandran and Patricia Vertinsky look at the work of James Tanner, who was a central figure in the twentieth century in measuring and treating children considered shorter than optimal for a satisfactory life. The attitudes of medical professionals affirmed and promoted conceptions of "normal" and "abnormal" childhood development. The authors contend that Tanner's studies and charts of children's growth and the quest for the perfect physique was behind his early involvement in promoting human growth hormone for small, non-athletic children. The socialization of children and youth to be bearers of community values has preoccupied of adults in positions of authority. In "Empire, Colonialism, and Place-Attachment in Young Minds: Quebec Students' Imaginative Travels in the Age of the New Imperialism," Catherine Larochelle argues that pre-World War I students in Quebec schools were provided with the geographic knowledge and emotional place-attachment necessary to promote and consolidate settler-colonialism. Larochelle shows how geography lessons imparted imperial, missionary, and literary knowledge to young people, who integrated and appropriated this geographical imagination. Through the voices of Quebec students, Larochelle shows how an attachment to the territory legitimized settler colonialism and imaginary voyages that (re)produced empire and its hierarchies. In "Teenagers in Development: The Economic and Cultural Power of Brazilian Youth in the 1950s and '60s," Anne M. Daniels argues that Brazil experienced rapid economic growth and modernization under a policy of "developmentalism" that...

Survived and Punished: Incest Victims' Treatment in Progressive-Era Chicago

This article examines Progressive reformers' treatment of incest victims in Illinois, which was one of three states in the early 1900s that considered fatherdaughter incest a crime analogous to rape. Despite their legal status as victims, abused girls were nonetheless viewed by reformers as morally and mentally deficient. I explore the vexed relationship between Illinois's criminal justice and child protection systems, where girls removed from abusive homes were classified as either "delinquent" or "feebleminded" and subsequently institutionalized despite being victims of crime. I argue that incest victims were the ground upon which the patriarchal family ideal was contested, mapped, and ultimately reinscribed by reformers, upon whom victims depended for help.

“A Superior Kind of Working Woman”: The Contested Meaning of Vocational Education for Girls in Progressive Era Chicago

AbstractProgressive Era school officials transformed public education in American cities by teaching male students trades like foundry, carpentry, and mechanics in classrooms outfitted like factories. Historians have demonstrated how this “vocational education movement” was championed by male administrators and business leaders anxious to train the next generation of expert tradesmen. But women also hoped vocational education could prepare female students for industrial careers. In the early twentieth century, members of the National Women’s Trade Union League demanded that public schools open trade programs to female students and teach future working women the history of capitalism and the philosophy of collective bargaining. Their ambitious goals were tempered by some middle-class reformers and club women who argued vocational programs should also prepare female students for homemaking and motherhood. This article uses Chicago as a case study to explore how Progressive Era women competed and collaborated to reform vocational education for girls, and how female students responded to new school programs designed to prepare them for work both in and outside the home.

The Bethesda Home: A Case Study of Older Adults, Charity, and Resistance in Progressive Era Chicago

The Bethesda Home: A Case Study of Older Adults, Charity, and Resistance in Progressive Era Chicago

A Theory of African-American Citizenship: Richard Westbrooks, The Great Migration, and the Chicago Defender's "Legal Helps" Column

This article explores citizenship from the ground up, to focus on migration, settlement, local law, and struggles for racial equality in Progressive Era Chicago. In his weekly “Legal Helps” column, which appeared in the Chicago Defender, attorney Richard Westbrooks answered questions about commercial practices, domestic life, civil rights and residential conditions. Westbrooks' answers advocated a theory of African American citizenship that was rooted in the implied equality of local law, rather than in the decreed equality of constitutional law. In expanding his theory from the individual to the collective—to assert that all Black Chicagoans were equal as citizens—Westbrooks would encounter stiff opposition from law clerks, judges, and jailers, as well as pervasive social discrimination that allowed African Americans to be classified and treated differently in their social and legal relationships. In response, Westbrooks broadened his theory of citizenship, articulating individual and collective equality and partial and comprehensive statuses, to reveal a bottom-up legal consciousness that grew out of everyday encounters and social practices.

Space and Status in Chicago’s Legal Landscapes

In Progressive Era Chicago, jobless men, sex workers, and black migrants were regulated through scales of vice, vagrancy, and race. But this regulation was challenged. The jobless and homeless men in Chicago’s vagrancy scale rejected popular censure and criminal sanction. The sex workers who made up Chicago’s vice scale resisted vice prohibitions. Like jobless and homeless men, they disaggregated and produced mini scales that defied the efforts of authorities to contain and eliminate their practices. Black migrants contested the de facto segregation and the racial covenants that bolstered Chicago’s race scale, which developed during the Great Migration on the city’s south side. Tracking the shifts and fluctuations of Chicago’s legal landscapes, this article stresses the agency of marginal men and women in the design and organization of the built environment in the industrial city.

Faith Healing, Medical Regulation, and Public Religion in Progressive Era Chicago

AbstractThis essay examines a six-year campaign against the radical faith healer John Alexander Dowie mounted in the 1890s by Chicago doctors, public health officials, and their “respectable” middle-class allies. The incident demonstrates the important role of religion in the process of medical professionalization. Medical professionals established cultural authority by aligning themselves with a broader discourse of “orthodoxy”—an ill-defined set of beliefs and practices thought necessary to maintain social order. Protestants used this discourse both to exclude outsiders and unite elites across denominational lines. An initial attempt to prosecute Dowie based on legalistic claims of practicing medicine without a license led to a backlash against medical professionals by middle-class Protestants who believed it compromised the integrity of religious liberty. This suggests that the growing efficacy of medical advances was an insufficient basis of social authority. Only when medical professionals self-consciously aligned themselves with the Protestant establishment and portrayed themselves as defenders of the social order (focused especially on the integrity of the family) were they able to rally the middle classes to their cause. This shift in rhetoric was an important step in the process of creating a discourse of “orthodox” medicine. It helped grant medical professionals the right to oversee the public body just as elite Protestants superintended its soul.

The Irish Girls' Rising: Building the Women's Labor Movement in Progressive-Era Chicago

The Chicago Women's Trade Union League (CWTUL), inaugurated at Hull House in 1904, had its roots in the 1900 stockyard strike of Irish women, the short-lived Maud Gonne Club, and Local 183 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, the first women's union in the stockyards. Mary E. McDowell, head resident of the University of Chicago Settlement and advisor to Local 183, served as CWTUL's first president from 1904 to 1907. The working-class leadership of the Chicago branch — unlike its better-known counterpart in New York — was “old immigrant” (primarily Irish Catholic but also including Germans and Scandinavians) with a distinct culture that derived from its ethnic makeup and its settlement-house attachments. In “The Irish Girls' Rising,” Suellen Hoy explores these developments and highlights CWTUL's significance in building the women's labor movement in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century.

Making Meat: Effciency and Exploitation in Progressive Era Chicago

Making Meat: Effciency and Exploitation in Progressive Era Chicago

Women physicians and the cultures of medicine

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: New Perspectives on Women Physicians and Medicine in the United States, 1849 to the Present Part I: Performing Gender, Being a Woman Physician Chapter 1. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Nineteenth-Century Politics of Women's Health Research Chapter 2. Maternity and the Female Body in the Writings of Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, 1829-1902 Chapter 3. Female Patient Agency and the 1892 Trial of Dr. Mary Dixon Jones in Late Nineteenth-Century Brooklyn Chapter 4. A Chinese Woman Doctor in Progressive Era Chicago Chapter 5. Professionalism versus Sexuality in the Career of Dr. Mary Steichen Calderone, 1904-1998 Part II: Challenging the Culture of Professionalism Chapter 6. The Legacy of Masculine Codes of Honor and the Admission of Women to the Medical Profession in the Nineteenth Century Chapter 7. Women Physicians and the Twentieth-Century Women's Health Movement in the United States Chapter 8. Narrative Forms in Our Bodies, Ourselves Chapter 9. Feminists Fight the Culture of Exclusion in Medical Education, 1970-1990 Part III: Expanding the Boundaries Chapter 10. Women Physicians and Medical Sects in Nineteenth-Century Chicago Chapter 11. Ruth A. Parmelee, Esther P. Lovejoy, and the Discourse of Motherhood in Asia Minor and Greece in the Early Twentieth Century Chapter 12. Women Physicians and a New Agenda for College Health, 1920-1970 Conclusion: Opportunities and Obstacles for Women Physicians in the Twenty-First Century List of Contributors Index

Soapy: A Biography of G. Mennen Williams by Thomas J. Noer

Book Reviews 155 Leidenberger deftly shows the importance of organized labor in the politics of reform in Chicago. However, one wonders whether the CFL is properly caUed a trade union. By backing sympathy strikes, entering politics, preaching solidarity across trades, and including women and minorities, the CFL's trade unionism either evolved toward or became something more revolutionary. Given the proposed statist solution to the streetcar issue, the influence of socialistic people in the movement (e.g., Henry Demarest Lloyd, Clarence Darrow, and Upton Sinclair), and the city's strong socialist movement (which was downplayed in this book), perhaps a "socia?st moment" better describes the coalescence and fragmentation of forces in Progressive Era Chicago. Whatever one caUs it, popular democracy gripped Chicago irrespective of class just as in Hazen Pingree's progressive Detroit and Victor Berger's socia?st Milwaukee. Thomas F. Jorsch Ferris State University Thomas J. Noer. Soapy:A Biography ofG. Mennen Williams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. 419. BibHography. IUustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $35.00. G. Mennen "Soapy" WiUiams was the Democratic governor of Michigan from 1948 to 1960, head of the State Department's African Bureau from 1961 to 1966, ambassador to the PhUippines in 1968, and a justice on the Michigan Supreme Court from 1970 to 1986. Despite such an impressive r?sum?, Thomas Noer's Soapy is the first ftdl-length biography of a man who was one of the Hons of twentieth-century Michigan poHtical history. Soapy WiUiams was a comp?cated figure. He was an unabashed ?beral who openly espoused Christian principles. He was an outspoken champion of racial equa?ty when such a position was far from the norm. His down-to-earth campaign style, complete with his trademark green and-white bow tie and folksy demeanor, masked an aggressive poHtical infighter with a sometimes inflated sense of his own correctness. As Noer puts it, Soapy "claimed he could say 'heUo' in seventeen languages. He had a hard time saying, Tm wrong' in any" (p. 9). Soapy's career offered both remarkable successes and stinging setbacks. As governor of Michigan, WiUiams arranged for construction 156 Michigan Historical Review of the Mackinac Bridge and helped to prevent racial discrimination in employment, but he is often remembered most for his squabbles with the RepubHcan-controUed legislature that led Michigan to declare bankruptcy in 1959. He earned national attention for shouting down the otherwise unanimous selection of Lyndon Johnson as John Kennedy's running mate in 1960 due to Johnson's purportedly tepid support for civ? rights. According to Noer, Soapy's inabUity to compromise his ideals for poHtical gain Hkely destroyed his hopes for a shot at the presidency in 1960. Noer isn't shy about criticizing WiUiams for the poHtical cost this stubbornness exacted in terms of his personal ambitions, but he does find his intransigence honorable: "It is his very refusal to compromise, modify, or moderate his positions that makes him admirable. The very traits that doomed his poHtical career are those that are most deserving of praise" (p. 355). Noer is not afraid to stray from the conventions of poHtical biography either; he adds touching flourishes that include love letters from Williams to his wife, as well as excerpts from the thousands of testimonials that poured in from Michigan citizens upon Soapy's death in 1988. Displaying a solid grasp of the nuances of mid-century poHtics, international diplomacy, and Soapy's own character, Noer turns WilHams's Hfe into an engrossing story of power, idealism, and a passionate struggle for social justice. Soapy may be the first biography of WiUiams, but given the impressive nature of Noer's work itmay be the only one we need. John R. Thiel Kirtland Community CoUege Janet Sjaarda Sheeres. Son of Secession: Douwe J. Vander Werp. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006. Pp. 231. Appendix. BibHography. IUustrations. Index. Paper, $25.00. The Reverend Douwe J. Vander Werp (1811-1876) was one of the people who helped sustain the Dutch-American colony Albertus C. Van Raalte founded in west Michigan in 1846. From the moment he arrived in 1864 to pastor a church near HoUand, Vander Werp began to influence...

City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago, by Micheal Willrich

"City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago, by Micheal Willrich." Canadian Journal of History, 40(1), pp. 141–142

Michael Willrich. <italic>City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago</italic>. (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xxxix, 332. Cloth $70.00, paper $25.00

Michael Willrich. City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago. (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xxxix, 332. Cloth $70.00, paper $25.00 Willrich Michael. City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago. (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xxxix, 332. Cloth $70.00, paper $25.00. Elizabeth Dale Elizabeth Dale University of Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 109, Issue 2, April 2004, Pages 548–549, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.2.548 Published: 01 April 2004

Reviews of Books:City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago Michael Willrich

Reviews of Books:City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago Michael Willrich

City of courts: socializing justice in progressive era Chicago

Part I. Transformations: 1. The price of justice 2. A managerial revolution 3. Rethinking responsibility for a social age 4. Socializing the law Part II. Practices: Interlude: Socialized Law in Action 5. 'Keep sober, work, and support his family': the court of domestic relations 6. 'To protect her from the greed as well as the passions of man': the morals court 7. 'Upon the threshold of manhood': the boys' court 8. 'Keep the life stream pure': the psychopathic laboratory Part III. Misgivings: 9. America's first war on crime Afterword.

The juvenile court and the Progressives

Today's troubled juvenile court system has its roots in Progressive-era Chicago, a city one observer described as first in violence and deepest in dirt. Examining the vision and methods of the original proponents of the Cook County Juvenile Court, Victoria Getis uncovers the court's intrinsic flaws as well as the sources of its debilitation in our own time. Spearheaded by a group of Chicago women, including Jane Addams, Lucy Flower, and Julia Lathrop, the juvenile court bill was pushed through the legislature by an eclectic coalition of progressive reformers, both women and men. Like many progressive institutions, the court reflected an unswerving faith in the wisdom of the state and in the ability of science to resolve the problems brought on by industrial capitalism. A hybrid institution combining legal and social welfare functions, the court was not intended to punish youthful lawbreakers but rather to provide guardianship for the vulnerable. In this role, the state was permitted great latitude to intervene in families where it detected a lack of adequate care for children. The court also became a living laboratory, as children in the court became the subjects of research by criminologists, statisticians, educators, state officials, economists, and, above all, practitioners of the new disciplines of sociology and psychology. The Chicago reformers had worked for large-scale social change, but the means they adopted eventually gave rise to the social sciences, where objectivity was prized above concrete solutions to social problems, and to professional groups that abandoned goals of structural reform. The Juvenile Court and the Progressives argues persuasively that the current impotence of the juvenile court system stems from contradictions that lie at the very heart of progressivism.

Black Charity in Progressive Era Chicago

Rapid urbanization in an increasingly segregated society during the Progressive Era created new social problems and needs for blacks. The segregation and exclusion of blacks by organized charity led to the initiation, financing, and administration of black charitable organizations in northern urban centers. Homes for the aged, young women, and juveniles; orphanages; and social settlements were the most common types of black charitable organizations. This study focuses on Chicago, in most respects a typical northern city of the period, and describes both the urban welfare needs of blacks and the organizations which they established.