Posted by Carl Smith  <cjsmith@nwu.edu>

I'd like to respond to some of the comments and questions raised by
Marshall Feldman in response to his reading of Douglas Greenberg's review
of my book. I'd also like to respond to a few points in the review. Before
I do, I'd like to thank Douglas Greenberg for his positive reception of the
book and for submitting a version of it to H-Urban, and I'd like to thank
H-Urban for posting it.

To Feldman's comments and questions in response to the review:

>I'm always suspicious of such poetic reifications.  Places, even
>incorporated political places, do not have conceptions, much less
>self-conceptions.  Such terms, it seems to me, tend to convey
>a tacit assumption of communality and consensus.  In light of the
>specific events here, this seems particularly inappropriate.
>Are we really talking about a struggle for hegemony?

I, too, am very suspicious of poetic reifications.  I got started on my
earlier book on Chicago literature because of my impatience with how people
seemed to accept without thought works like Sandburg's "Chicago" ("Hog
Butcher, etc.") without asking what was going on in their writing and
reception.  My book is largely about the relationship between thinking,
expression (of all sorts) and social action in a troubled period, how the
imaginative dimensions of urban disorder both reveal how Americans thought
about urban life in this period of intense urbanization and how thought,
expression, and action mutually conditioned each other.  I don't use the
word "hegemony" much in my work, but the story I try to tell is of a
struggle for who gets to define disorder and, by extension, Chicago, urban
life, America, and reality.  And a struggle it is, one in which ideas and
expression matter.


>I'm curious as to what the mechanisms were whereby these events came
>to be considered and somehow imprinted on the area's cultural psychology
>(which, after all, is in the minds of individuals).  In other words,
>Are we talking about which "story" about Chicago came to be the
>accepted (hegemonic) one, or does Smith make reference to other, more
>individual and psychological elements in individuals' acceptance of
>different stories?

I'm not sure that the two categories are easily separable, but I talk about
different individuals (who are at the same time members of certain groups
with certain interests) try to get their story (i.e., their interpretation
of what constitutes urban order and disorder) accepted and enforced as
authoritative.  How such "stories" get formulated, who believes in and
accepts (two separate issues) what stories, and how this all matters, is a
very complicated subject that I try to deal with in its richness.
Individual and pyschological elements are always involved.  For example,
running through all the discussions of the three events on which I focus
(the Chicago fire, Haymarket, the making and unmaking of Pullman) are
concerns about manhood, among many other things.


>It seems to me that the anarchists were part of "Chicago" and they were
>trying to define it differently than others were.  The problems facing
>the defenders of the social order was how to reconcile, ideologically,
>the repression of the anarchists with the claims of democracy and
>tolerance that they (the defenders) used to legitimize the social order.
>Some mythical "Chicago" could not have tried to define itself; instead,
>different social groups must have negotiated and stuggled over collective
>images of repression vs law and order, democracy vs intolerance,
>legitimacy vs illegitimacy.

I agree. My subject is largely this negotiation and struggle.


>So is this history written from the standpoint of the victors?

No.  I talk mainly (though not exclusively, by any means) about the attempt
by an elite to enforce a certain vision of urban order and some of their
"victories" (e.g., rebuilding Chicago "their" way after the fire, hanging
the anarchists, breaking down the Pullman Strike), but my main subject is
contextualizing this vision within the history of the time.  I try to show
also how this vision increasingly unraveled throughout this period in the
face of efforts to enforce it, even among some of the "victors."


>Rather than a utopian exercise, I think Pullman is better seen as an
>experiment designed to deal with some of the contradictions of capitalism:
>the need to agglomerate a labor force while diffusing its potential
political
>power that such agglomeration brings short of outright (delegitimizing)
>repression.  There were numeous similar experiments around this time (e.g.,
>worker home ownership in Homestead, "fordism" in River Rouge, etc.).  Some
>worked, others (like Pullman) didn't.  What worked is what we inherited
>today, but these institutions are better seen as innovations that
>ameliorate (and usually displace) contradictions than as utopians
>visions that result from the well-intentioned policies of benevolent
>industrialists.

I mainly agree again. I place Pullman in a context of attempts to find
solutions for the dislocations (a bland word for much that was going on) in
American urban society at the time, and I discuss it not only in terms of
"utopian" works such as "Looking Backward," and more troubling works such
as "Connecticut Yankee," but a also a range of institutions (including some
of the kind Feldman mentions) running from Hull-House to Fort Sheridan,
that latter built in the 1880s at the behest of Chicago's economic elite to
protect the city from internal insurrection.


>As always with reviews, I find myself not knowing if these shortcomings are
>those of the book, the review, or both.  I'd also like to see how Smith's
>book does or does not relate to others with similar themes (e.g. _Nature's
>Metropolis_).  I guess I'll have to read the book for myself, unless other
>H-Urbanites choose to answer this posting.

I think that this was an intelligent and positive review (forgive me if I
am eager to join these two adjectives together) that notes the complexities
of the book but can't be expected to deal with them all, regardless of
their quality.  Cronon's book and mine (and many others) overlap on a broad
subject (Chicago in the nineteenth century), but mine is an intellectual
and cultural history.  I do urge Marshall Feldman to read it (I have to
start paying college tuition the year after next), and I certain hope it
interests other H-Urbanites in any case.

As for Douglas Greenberg's review, it seems to me quite positive, but it
does have a few criticisms. He says I lapse too frequently into literary
and historiographic references that will be of no interest to the general
reader (in the Tribune he was a little more forgiving, saying that they
would be of little interest).  Since the subscribers of H-Urban are
presumably specialists and not general readers but people who've devoted
much of their lives to such references, I don't know if this observation
applies to them, but I obviously I wouldn't have included such references
if I didn't think they were important to all readers.  They are, in some
significant respects, the substance of the book.  I tried to make my main
text interesting and accessible to the general reader, jamming a good deal
of stuff I thought mainly of interest to scholars and specialists in the
100 pages of small-print endnotes.  I think that my brief discussions of
such things as Charles Reade's once well-known novel "Put Yourself in His
Place" are there because they matter--Pullman's relatives claimed that
reading this book in the 1870s was important to his conception of his model
town, which led me to read it and try to explain why.  My three-page
treatment of Twain's "Connecticut Yankee" and the remaking of Camelot in
relation to George Pullman's attempt to remake the American city and the
American worker is perhaps a little more of a stretch, but I hope the
general reader finds at least some interest and value here.

Greenberg also calls for a more nuanced discussion of gender and a fuller
discussion of race.  I think that the book might well profit from more
nuance and fuller discussion in these and other areas, but I do want to
point out that there are quite a few female voices in the book and a far
more than "passing" reference to Jane Addams, and throughout the book
(including in the forty illustrations included in the book and several
others that I also analyze) I repeatedly note the discussion of gender in
the period, especially the continuing conception of the city itself as a
woman and the virtual obsession with what constituted manhood and manly
action that permeated the fire literature, the imaginative understanding of
Haymarket and anarchism, critiques of pre-strike Pullman and analyses
(especially by Debs) of the strike itself.  As for race, Greenberg says
that by 1890 the African-American population of Chicago had reached 60,000,
most of it in Chicago.  I became particularly interested in race when I
read fire accounts that talked about how smoke-stained survivors looked
black or that (I only found this in one place) blacks were part of the
dangerous underclass that surfaced during the chaos of the fire.  Race also
comes up when anarchists spoke of workers as being no better off than
slaves before emancipation.  But the various sources I consulted on numbers
(Pierce, Spear, Drake and Cayton) indicated that the black population of
the city in the period was barely more than 1 per cent, and was under
15,000 in 1890, when Chicago's total population was just under 1,100,000.
Let me know if I've got the numbers wrong.

No community, however small, is unimportant, but it strikes me that perhaps
the more underrepresented element in this book (and this gets back to
Marshall Feldman's questions) is not gender or race but that, with the
problematic exception of the Haymarket anarchists, it doesn't contain
enough immigrant or working class voices in this city of immigrants and
workers.  In the Haymarket section (where there is also a long
consideration of the importance of manhood), I include an extended analysis
of the issue of who and what is "foreign" that figures many other places in
the book as well.  However, as I note above and explain in the
introduction, much of my story is of how an elite tried with great
oppposition and difficulty to enforce (in such instances as the Haymarket
trial) their contested view of urban order and disorder the prevailing view
and basis of social action in the period I examine, a period which
witnessed the breakdown of this view under the weight of social
circumstances.

In closing, I want again to thank Douglas Greenberg for this warm and
reflective review, Marshall Feldman for his questions, and H-Urban for
making it possible to share it with an audience whose response naturally
interests me very much.



Carl Smith
Program in American Culture
20 University Hall
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois 60208
708-491-7136/3525
cjsmith@nwu.edu

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