A\u00a0sunshine-shadow, day-night, light-dark metaphor<\/strong> of respectable law and order civilization competing on an upside\/downside vertical line with barbarians who inhabited the shadow underground basements and sewers of the inner city.\u00a0 A majority of the population especially recent arrivals was now condemned to living within the bowels of darkness. A depraved, dangerous, and criminal cabal of devils hidden by a shadowy existence ruled at the core of the inner city.<\/p>\n A\u00a0physics metaphor<\/strong> where numerical lines of force and fields of energy were\u00a0represented by a draftsman\u2019s design. Beyond the educated and professional classes, the one-dimensional metaphor convinced relatively few as they careered about in continual motion.\u00a0 City people played many roles hurrying about in every which direction, seldom realizing only intended consequences.<\/p>\n Chicago was the nation’s railway hub with its large corridors of yards, steel tracks, rolling stock, iron works, and warehouses streaming in and out from the center city. For natives of the \u00a0Midwest, the sheer novelty of the experience when encountering the inland metropolis of Chicago seemed close to the very bone of existence.<\/p>\n The sardonic humorist Mark Twain (Missouri), laying over in Chicago during his continual travels, observed that it is \u201chopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago\u2013she outgrows his prophesies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.\u201d<\/p>\n The callow country boy Frank Lloyd Wright (Wisconsin) first arriving in Chicago at the Wells Street Station was stunned viscerally by the \u201charsh dissonance\u201d and blinding blue-white glare of the arc lights everywhere, with the crowds \u201cintent on seeing nothing.\u201d He had never before seen an electric light. Signs \u201cfor this, that, and everything else\u201d\u2013saloons, food, eating places, bakeries, laundries, barber shops, tailors, dry goods–pressed against and claimed his eyes in a chaotic wilderness with a dozen strange languages. \u00a0One paid a \u201cheavy toll for being eye-minded\u201d in the city.\u00a0 Chicago was \u201cmurderously actual.\u201d<\/p>\n The greenhorn youth Hamlin Garland (Wisconsin) on his first train trip to Chicago professed, \u201cI shall never forget the feeling of dismay … I perceived from the car window a huge smoke-cloud which embraced the whole eastern horizon … the soaring banner of the great and gloomy inland metropolis …. The train began to clatter through sooty freight yards filled with box cars and switching engines … after crawling through tangled, thickening webs of steel, it plunged into a huge, dark and noisy shed and came to a halt and a few moments later I faced the hackmen of Chicago.\u201d<\/p>\n The aspiring reporter turned novelist Theodore Dreiser (Indiana) observed, \u201cin 1889 Chicago had the peculiar qualifications of growth … which made of it a giant magnet drawing to itself from all quarters the hopeful and the hopeless …. It was a city of over 500,000 with the ambition, the daring, the activity of a metropolis of a million. It\u2019s streets and houses were already scattered over an area of seventy-five square miles.\u201d The city was a modern phenomenon.<\/p>\n Regional observations laid the groundwork for the emergence of a Chicago School of urban studies, the first American city to house an academic sociology built on foundations of empirical investigation to accumulate a body of knowledge for its own sake. Social workers and Hull-House residents drew on fact-based evidence, however their primary objective as reformers was not knowledge but active intervention in blighted neighborhoods to relieve hazardous conditions.<\/p>\n From the perspective of the emerging Chicago School, the inland city was a cultural, social, and psychological environment and \u201cecology\u201d deserving of disciplinary knowledge unto itself. The on-site laboratory selected for empirical and eclectic study was neither the downtown nor the upscale neighborhoods but streets located on the territorial margins overflowing with alien immigrants and peoples of color first on the West Side.<\/p>\n An original essay published in German in 1903 by the theorist Georg Simmel, \u201cThe Metropolis and the Mental Life,\u201d highlighted the unique mental experience of a new phenomenon, the city person. It served to inform academics in the new Chicago project. Simmel’s Jewish origins in an era of Antisemitism made him a permanent outsider in a German professorial system favoring only race-qualified mandarins for civil service university positions. A sociological empiricist, eclectic critic, pluralist (not positivist), and essayist for general audiences, Simmel was in a unique position intellectually and socially to interpret the accelerating intensity and personal distancing occurring in the modern metropolitan experience.<\/p>\n The small town nurtured \u201cfeelings and emotional relationships\u201d rooted in \u201cthe steady equilibrium\u201d of familiar and enduring customs. In the metropolitan life the capitalist money economy required higher and impersonal \u201ccalculating\u201d qualities associated with a heightened intensity of nervous energy and interpersonal conflict. Primary relationships between individuals were weakened in a cosmopolitan environment. \u00a0Partial strangers functioned in complex systems in many roles to the end of a \u201chighly diverse plurality of achievements.\u201d<\/p>\n In the romantic footsteps of Nietzsche, preachers of high-minded \u201ccharacter\u201d and triumphant individual greatness–the ubermensch<\/em> or superman–hated the metropolis. It represented the center of a superficial individuality trivialized in a web belittling the great man. In contrast for Simmel, the metropolitan person adapted to circumstances, adjusted to mediating or functioning secondary institutions, and fashioned the results in forms of an impersonal \u201cmatter of factness.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPunctuality, calculability, and exactness, which are required by the complications and extensions of metropolitan life are not only most intimately connected with its capitalistic and intellectualistic character but also color the content of life and are conducive to the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which originally seek to determine the form of life.\u201d<\/p>\n In the Chicago School of Sociology, the metropolis at the micro-level was an active agent in the heightened mental life of its inhabitants. Analysis, as in the following case studies by Charfles Bushnell, Nels Anderson, Louis Wirth, and William I. Thomas, was detailed and local. By way of criticism, politics relegated to a subordinate factor of social life tended to be neglected as was a positive role for traditional authority. bjb<\/p>\n In 1901 Charles Bushnell published his three part dissertation study on the work processes and work environment at the Chicago Stockyards. He promoted the ethnographic use of photographs as an authoritative form of evidence not communicated by the conventional text, tables, and charts preferred by \u201cexperts.\u201d Unequal gender relationships on the factory floor were now visually witnessed as were\u00a0 social costs to the neighborhood when children scavenged at the garbage dump and black soot polluted the air.<\/p>\n By means of enriching his text with the photographs, Bushnell censured management for its exploitation and neglect of the needs of workers. He took it for granted that the photographs communicated an intimate and immediate sense of the work, the social and neighborhood environments which narratives, descriptions, and tables did\u00a0not adequately\u00a0convey.<\/p>\n Bushnell\u2019s innovative use of photography introduced what Lewis Hine at the end of the decade called “social photography” then\u00a0 later \u201cphoto story\u201d–where images and text complement each other by contributing to a cognitive understanding of the subject.\u00a0 Hine was a graduate student in residence at the University of Chicago when Bushnell published his dissertation on the stockyards in the American Journal of Sociology,\u00a0<\/em>located at the University of Chicago.\u00a0 \u00a0bjb<\/p>\n The keyword was \u201cinvestigation.\u201d The Sociology Department at the University of Chicago sent its graduate students on field trips into the marginal areas on the periphery of the rapidly expanding city\u2013slums and industrial sectors–to investigate undesirable and deteriorating social conditions. Local residents could be less than welcoming to the relatively privileged college outsiders, characterizing them as on \u201cslumming tours\u201d with pencils, notebooks, and survey forms in hand. Nels Anderson, from a hobo family and an insider talking to residents in \u201cHobohemia\u201d was an exception in the Department. The Chicago graduate students as well-to-do outsiders appeared to many locals as pests, a nuisance. Jane Addams became sufficiently concerned to respond that Settlement workers from Hull-House \u201cdo not do that sort of thing …. We never go into anyone\u2019s house unless we have a good reason beyond a mere sociological reason. \u00a0And we never go with notebook and pencil. Our visits are made as neighbors and friends.\u201d bjb<\/p>\n A relatively obscure figure who deserves more attention from historians of Progressive education reforms, Frank Manny (1868-1954) was the operational right hand to the psychological theorizing by John Dewey at the University of Chicago. It was Manny who turned Dewey’s abstracted ideas into real world consequences.<\/p>\n In the 1890s with the group of students in the M.A. program around Dewey and an Assistant Professor of Pedagogy, Manny supervised the formation and working success of the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. In addition, it was Manny who discovered the working class Lewis Hine, introduced him to Dewey, followed his progress as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and hired him as a teached at Felix Adler\u2019s progressive Ethical Culture School in New York.<\/p>\n Manny was a Mid-westerner by birth and education, infected by neither the pretensions of Eastern status nor the entitlements claimed for credentials. Before following his primary passion to be an innovative educator, teacher trainer, and educational administrator, Manny had taught in a country school, coordinated the intricacies of a railroad freight department, and kept the books for a Land Company managing the first natural gas boom in the U.S.<\/p>\n Manny himself published a series of articles in professional education journals and magazines articulating the effective management of the student-centered classroom where students progressed in terms of their own development and immediate interests–not for \u201cresults\u201d satisfying ambitious parents and pretentious social expectations. To advance the quality of teacher education, Manny focused on the unrealized potential of the State Normal Schools that universities were prepared only to supplement.<\/p>\n Holding high-profile positions in Midwestern high schools and a teachers college, Manny became with Dewey\u2019s endorsement the go-to person in the field who everyone of importance knew could get things done. \u00a0bjb<\/p>\n Nels Anderson was born in Chicago in 1891. His father was an immigrant and qualified bricklayer and his mother from Swedish immigrant parentage. The family was Mormon and gave birth to twelve children. With the father\u2019s trade in demand, the family followed the construction jobs traveling around the country. As Nels described it, he belonged to a migratory \u201chobo family\u201d beating its way across the country always in need of making a self-sufficient living in a fluid \u00a0economy<\/p>\n In 1901 the family returned to Chicago and settled in the vicinity of the \u201cmain stem\u201d at Halsted and West Madison Streets. \u201cWe were slum dwellers, which I learned years later.\u201d Money was tight, the family skilled at buying cheaply on the West Side. Hobohemia was home turf, a place of vivid boyhood memories. Nels plied the street trades befriending clerks in flophouses, friendly policemen, and prostitutes who paid him to run errands. (See his account in \u201cThe Mission Mill<\/a>\u201d).<\/strong><\/p>\n After Chicago, Nels moved around as a transient laborer, served in the Army in WWI, did some college work at Brigham Young University in Utah. In 1921 at age 32 he returned to enter the M.A. program in Sociology at the University of Chicago, and supported himself as a full-time male nurse in an asylum.<\/p>\n Nels background was unique. A social class difference separated him as an outsider from the professors and students at the elite university. His chosen research topic was the Hobo, a scandalous topic among his peers. \u00a0They assumed\u00a0he must know other disreputable characters and would have a pernicious influence in the classroom, disqualifying him for recommendation to a teaching position.<\/p>\n Nel’s mentor Robert Park spent no more than fifteen minutes talking with him about the dissertation and asked no questions. An additional irritant to Park must have been that Nels professed no interest in becoming a \u201ctoady\u201d of the current academic practices. He listened rather than took notes in class, and his “unscientific” methodology was to talk with residents in his comfort zone of Hobohemia, a technique later called \u201cparticipant-observation.\u201d<\/p>\n When Park declared his interest in publishing the M.A. thesis with the University Press, with no substantive changes, Nels laughed thinking it was not a publishable piece. \u00a0Why Park recommended publication, beyond the reality that as general editor of the sociology series he needed a first publication, remains unclear. \u00a0bjb<\/p>\n Louis Wirth was born in Gemunden on the Maine, Germany, son of a relatively prosperous cattle-merchant and small-scale farmer, one of only twenty Jewish families in a village of nine hundred persons. Until age fourteen, Louis went to local schools operated by Protestant Evangelicals. He received extracurricular lessons in the basement of the synagogue from the local Rabbi and an itinerant Hebrew teacher. Very few youths from Gemunden matriculated to the academic level of a Gymnasium. In the meantime Louis\u2019s three uncles had migrated to America. In 1911 one proposed bringing Louis with him to Omaha NE to attend public high school and receive a liberal education unavailable in the provincial ethnocentric Rhineland village.<\/p>\n Upon graduation from high school, Louis rejected the career in retail business planned for him by his family. In 1914, he entered the freshman class at the University of Chicago. In 1919 he graduated and began a career in social work as director of the division for delinquent boys for the Jewish Charities of Chicago. He married a non-Jew, the first in his family.<\/p>\n By means of his wife\u2019s salary as a social worker, he returned to graduate school in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1922. In 1924 he submitted a M.A.Thesis, \u201cCultural Conflicts in the Immigrant Family.\u201d And in 1925 he completed a Ph.D. dissertation, \u201cThe Ghetto: A Study in Isolation.\u201d In 1928 with no significant revisions beyond dropping the subtitle, he published the dissertation manuscript with the University of Chicago Press.<\/p>\n Generally speaking, Wirth was open-minded and pragmatic, skeptical at being harnessed to any particular theology, ideology, or dogmatism. His primary interest as a sociologist with a social work background centered on the novelty of human beings in historical, cultural, generational, and emotional transitions.<\/p>\n After New York and Warsaw, Jews in Chicago were the third largest concentration in the world with a difference, “a more diversified set of characteristics in its various parts than either of the other two.\u201d In Chicago, Jews displayed more independent creative life and fewer persistent\u00a0theological and intellectual othodoxies than in New York’s older and much larger ghetto .<\/p>\n In the new academic discipline of urban sociology, Chicago\u2019s \u201cghetto\u201d located at the intersection of Halsted and Maxwell in the slum of an industrial city was not usefully studied as a mirror-image of New York City\u2019s Lower East Side. \u00a0The latter was in many ways an old-world village \u201cshtetl\u201d dominated politically by centuries-old animosities between majority nationalities and defensive minorities.<\/p>\n The West Side of Chicago was \u201cthe most varied assortment of people to be found in any similar area of the world.\u201d \u00a0It presented a real-life laboratory containing adversarial immigrant and race colonies, \u00a0None held a majority or remained in the same place more than one generation or so before moving to second and third settlement residential areas \u00a0in the city and suburbs.<\/p>\n Wirth was attentive to social processes of assimilation, adaptation, and inclusion. \u00a0He observed for example that in a little more than one generation on Chicago\u2019s West Side,\u201cthe Poles and the Jews,\u201d sworn and hateful enemies in their native land, continue \u201cto detest each other thoroughly\u201d but they now \u201ctrade with each other very successfully.\u201d<\/p>\n Antisemitism persisted as a menacing presence and barbaric reality in the Polish homelands. In the U.S. and Chicago, Wirth emphasized successful institutional activities like the Anti-Defamation League and organized responses to Henry Ford and the modern Ku Klux Klan to contain periodic\u00a0outbursts of hate.<\/p>\n The invasion of the West-Side ghetto by the Negro, segregated racially by the white landlords in greater Chicago, became \u201cof more than passing interest.\u201d Jews, Wirth observed, settled in the area \u201cprecisely for the same reason\u201d as the Negro, and presented no \u201cappreciable resistance\u201d to their presence. Contrary to more antagonistic ethnic nationalities in the area, \u201cJewish immigrants in the ghetto have not as yet discovered the colored line.\u201d<\/p>\n Why not? In an economic environment where one price did not fit all, seller and buyer successfully exchanged goods and services with\u00a0an urban solvent that knew only one color. \u201cThe Negroes pay good rent and spend their money readily.\u201d In the context of sharp cultural differences, U.S. coin was a common denominator. Coin from Anglo hands had no more value than from Irish, Italian, or Greek hands. Good business was good relationships. Wirth overstated his positive case on race\u00a0congeniality, nevertheless his observation drew useful perspectives on commercial prosperity and the role played in ghetto markets by suborned Negro labor.<\/p>\n Albeit a small world with a depth of emotion, Wirth\u2019s Ghetto in Chicago was an historically dynamic institution with irreversible changes occurring over time and place in the lives of successive generations of families and individuals. The publication formalized a concept of a local place including the economy, religion, cultural mores, politics, and generational adaptations and assimilation. \u00a0All these themes continue to be borrowed, explored, adapted, and re-interpreted by urban, ethnic, and minority historians and sociologists to this day.\u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n\n
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CHARLES BUSHNELL, CHICAGO STOCKYARDS (1901)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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STOCKYARDS:\u00a0 PHOTO GALLERY<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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\u00a0SOCIOLOGISTS INVADE THE CITY, UNIVERSITY OF CHIC<\/strong>AGO (1901-1929)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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FRANK ADDISON MANNY: PROGRESSIVE EDUCATOR, JOHN DEWEY’S LABORATORY SCHOOL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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JOHN DEWEY LETTERS TO FRANK MANNY (1896-1898)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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UNIVERSITY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL: “DEWEY SCHOOL” (1905-1908)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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\u00a0NELS ANDERSON,\u00a0THE HOBO<\/em> (1923)<\/h3>\n
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\u00a0LOUIS WIRTH, THE GHETTO<\/em> (1928)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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