The Working Man's Reward

Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl

Elaine Lewinnek

Traces the history of suburbanization and urban sprawl back to nineteenth century
Features working class as central actors in suburbanization
Makes use of sources from Chicago's foreign language press

The Working Man's Reward

Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl

Elaine Lewinnek

Description

Between the 1860s and 1920s, Chicago's working-class immigrants designed the American dream of home-ownership. They imagined homes as small businesses, homes that were simultaneously a consumer-oriented respite from work and a productive space that workers hoped to control.

Stretching out of town along with Chicago's assembly-line factories, Chicago's early suburbs were remarkably socially and economically diverse. They were marketed by real estate developers and urban boosters with the elusive promise that homeownership might offer some bulwark against the vicissitudes of industrial capitalism, that homes might be "better than a bank for a poor man" and "the working man's reward." This promise evolved into what Lewinnek terms "the mortgages of whiteness," the hope that property values might increase if that property could be kept white. Suburbs also developed through nineteenth-century notions of the gendered respectability of domesticity, early ideas about city planning and land economics, and an evolving twentieth-century discourse about the racial attributes of property values. Looking at the persistent challenges of racial difference, economic inequality, and private property ownership that were present in urban design and planning from the start, Lewinnek argues that white Americans' attachment to property and community were not simply reactions to post-1945 Civil Rights Movement and federally enforced integration policies. Rather, Chicago's mostly immigrant working class bought homes, seeking an elusive respectability and class mobility, and trying to protect their property values against what they perceived as African American threats, which eventually flared in violent racial conflict.

The Working Man's Reward examines the roots of America's suburbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how Chicagoans helped form America's urban sprawl.

The Working Man's Reward

Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl

Elaine Lewinnek

Acknowledgments
Introduction: "Chicago is America's Dream, Writ Large": Forging the Suburban Dream in Early Chicago
1. "Vast and Sudden Municipality": Boosting and Lamenting Chicago's Growth
2. "Domestic and Respectable": Property-Owner Politics after the Great Chicago Fire
3. Lake and Jungle: The Assembly-line Factory as a Force for Suburbanization
4. "Better than a Bank for a Poor Man": Worker's Strategies for Home Financing
5. Mapping Chicago, Imagining Metropolises: Reconsidering the Zonal Model of Urban Growth
6. The Mortgages of Whiteness: Chicago's Race Riots of 1919
Conclusion: The City of the Twentieth Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index

The Working Man's Reward

Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl

Elaine Lewinnek

Author Information

Elainne Lewinnek is Associate Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton.

The Working Man's Reward

Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl

Elaine Lewinnek

Reviews and Awards

"In her outstanding new book...Elaine Lewinnek explores the fascinating complexity of how Chicago's suburbs have been defined and how they have evolved...Lewinnek has written one of the best books about Chicago in a long time, and reading it will reward any working or thinking man or woman interested in Chicago, or its suburbs, old or new."--Chicago Tribune

"This book provides readers with an insightful case study of patterns of human habitation in metropolitan Chicago...Among the strengths of this study is its determination to place race in its storyline...Lewinnek unflinchingly and deftly manages to integrate race into a broader, much-welcomed demographic context...[A]n insightful, thought-provoking, and highly readable book."--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Lewinnek...adds to the scholarly chorus proclaiming the mixed origins of America's suburbs and the diverse factors molding their development."--Journal of American History

"The Working Man's Reward is a welcome contribution to the history of Chicago and an insightful reminder that the difference between urban and suburban culture can be surprisingly fluid."--American Historical Review

"In the late nineteenth century, before homeownership had become the aspiration of all Americans, it was the particular dream of workers and immigrants. Nowhere was this was more true than in the boom town of the era, Chicago. Drawing imaginatively on an impressive range of sources, in The Working Man's Reward Elaine Lewinnek shows how dreams shaped the place."--Richard Harris, McMaster University

"Well before sunbelt cities like Los Angeles, Chicago was setting national trends as a suburban metropolis. Elaine Lewinnek brilliantly shows how suburban diversity always defined this history. In this exceptionally rich rendering of the working-class suburban experience, Lewinnek has produced a paragon of the new suburban history."--Becky Nicolaides, author of My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965

"Elaine Lewinnek has found new and fascinating things to say about Chicago. Detailing the practicalities and politics of housing during Chicago's great boom decades, this study gives the creation of Chicago's working class neighborhoods pride of place in the city's history. It simultaneously makes an exciting contribution to American intellectual history by revealing the multiple ways in which Chicagoans ranging from real estate promoters to scholars and novelists understood the contested meanings of these so-called 'ordinary' neighborhoods." --Carl Abbott, author of How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America

The Working Man's Reward

Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl

Elaine Lewinnek

From Our Blog

On the 95th anniversary of the Chicago Race Riots

By Elaine Lewinnek On 27 July 1919, a black boy swam across an invisible line in the water. 'By common consent and custom,' an imaginary line extending out across Lake Michigan from Chicago's 29th Street separated the area where blacks were permitted to swim from where whites swam. Seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams crossed that line.

Posted on July 30, 2014

Read the blog post