MAKING MODERN CITIZENS: POLITICAL CULTURE IN CHICAGO, 1890-1930 By Cheryl Anne ...

295 Pages·2011·1.48 MB·English

MAKING MODERN CITIZENS:
POLITICAL CULTURE IN CHICAGO, 1890-1930
By
Cheryl Anne Hudson

Dissertation
Submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of Vanderbilt University
in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
History
December, 2011

Nashville, Tennessee

Approved:
Professor Gary Gerstle
Professor David L. Carlton
Professor Helmut Walser Smith
Professor James A. Epstein
Professor W. James Booth
Copyright © 2011 by Cheryl Anne Hudson
All Rights Reserved

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A Long Story
For Lowl

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Over the course of researching and writing this dissertation, I have accumulated innumerable
debts to many generous people who shared their ideas and suggestions, their friendship, and
sometimes tangible forms of support such as places to stay and hot meals. My chief intellectual
support has come from my two advisors – first, Don H. Doyle, who allowed me the freedom to
develop a dreamily ambitious research agenda, helped me to turn it into a manageable proposition
and offered much helpful guidance as I executed the plan. After Don moved to take up a new
position at the University of South Carolina, he continued his guidance from afar but gave his
blessing for my “adoption” by my second advisor, Gary Gerstle. The dissertation is written better
and argued more tightly because of Gary’s valuable assistance. Gary engaged with my arguments
and ideas and pushed me – hard – to defend them, clarify them and improve upon them. I am
deeply grateful for his input.
The other members of my dissertation committee showed great patience and offered many
helpful suggestions for improving the dissertation. I am grateful to historians David Carlton, Jim
Epstein and Helmut Smith and to political philosopher James Booth for access to their wisdom
and knowledge and for their many intelligent questions. In Nashville, fellow graduate students
and friends, particularly Ed Harcourt, Sue Marasco and Elizabeth Sponheim, provided collegiate
support, lively conversation, good company, shelter from storms and the occasional game of pool
during the time I was so far away from my family. Department administrators Jane Anderson,
Brenda Hummel and Vicki Swinehart deserve my eternal thanks.
I have been lucky to receive substantial institutional support and funding, without which
this dissertation would never have been completed. The History Department at Vanderbilt
provided a full fellowship as well as supplementary research grants and, in the latter stages of my
writing, funding that enabled me to present my research findings at conferences in both the
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United States and at home in the United Kingdom. I am particularly grateful for the Leon
Helguera Dissertation Fellowship that allowed me a full year to get to grips with my topic in the
early stages and for a summer research grant from the College of Arts & Sciences.
By my very good luck, the month I moved to Oxford, England as an ABD student in May
2001, the University of Oxford opened the Rothermere American Institute. The RAI, a centre of
excellence for research and teaching in American history, politics and literature, proved to be a
wonderful environment in which to pursue my research. Americanist scholars at Oxford and
those who became colleagues within the RAI community – particularly Andrea Beighton, Paul
Giles, Laura Lauer, and Alan Ryan – made me feel more than welcome and allowed me working
flexibility so that I might visit the archives in Chicago for extended periods. The University of
Oxford supported research trips to Chicago with two Astor Travel Awards.
Jane Rawson and her incredibly resourceful team of librarians in the RAI’s Vere
Harmsworth Library acted far beyond the call of duty in their personal kindness and professional
support of my research. I would like to thank too the helpful librarians I worked with in Chicago
and Springfield, Illinois, especially the archivist at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential library who
drove me to a supermarket on the outskirts of town so that I could buy some fresh fruit and
vegetables for my six-month-old baby son who accompanied me on my research trip. I am
grateful too for the financial support provided by the Illinois State Historical Society. The
extraordinary generosity of Professors Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen, who allowed me the
use of their Hyde Park apartment for several weeks, enabled me to mine the archives of the
University of Chicago; my thanks to them both.
My thanks go to my parents who helped me in more ways that I can tell. Notably, my
mother overcame her fear of long haul flights to keep me company in Nashville one
Thanksgiving holiday. In Oxford, my father built an office in my garden so that I could write the
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dissertation in relative peace and quiet, away from the kids. Indeed, this dissertation is very much
my third baby; my other two – Frank and Orlando – being born during its gestation and they must
think that “mummy” and her “dissertation” are a natural and eternal combination. My husband,
Alan, knows well this is not the case and I thank him for helping me bridge the divide on so many
occasions; his love and support got me to the finish line. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to
Lowl, who never made it there with me but who always took a great interest. To her I say, the
long story continues.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
DEDICATION………………………..………………………………………. iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………...………………………… iv
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………… 1
Americans, Made in Chicago ….............................................................. 2
Cities and Citizens, Interpreted ………………………………………... 6
Democracy v. Consensus ……………………………………………… 18

II. CITIZEN-MAKING IN CHICAGO ………………………………………. 23
Chicago’s America: Pullman, the World’s Fair and Progressivism …… 28
John Dewey’s Education for Citizenship ……………………………… 48
Jane Addams’s Democratic Spirit and the State of Play ………………. 61
Conclusion ……………………………………………………………... 75

III. WAR! ETHNIC IDENTITY AND AMERICANIZATION …………..…... 78
“Chicago is not in America, America is in Chicago” …………..…….. 81
Claiming American Citizenship ……………………………………….. 89
Proving Group Loyalty during War ……………….………………...… 97
Ethnicization and Ethnic Politics ……………………………………… 103
The Meaning of America ……………………………………………… 114

IV. RIOT! AFRICAN AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP IN CHICAGO …………. 124
Race and Riot, 1919 …………………………………………………… 126
Jim Crow’s Strange Chicago Career …………………………………... 132
African American Claims on Citizenship ……………………………… 142
The New Negro and the Growth of the Black Metropolis ……………... 161

V. CITIZENSHIP BY RACIAL DIVISION: THE CHICAGO COMMISSION ON
RACE RELATIONS, 1919-1922 ………………………………………….. 175

Chicago’s Response to the Riot ………………………………………... 177
The Chicago Commission on Race Relations ………………………….. 181
Mapping out the Commission’s Work …………………………………. 192
The Research Agenda: Johnson, Park and the Chicago Urban League …195
The Final Report and Recommendations ………………………………. 203

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VI. ROBERT PARK’S AMERICA: IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE
1920S ……………………………………………………………………….. 212

The 1924 Immigration Act ……………………………………………... 216
The Progressive Origins of Immigration Restriction …………………... 221
Cultural Pluralism ……………………………………………………… 228
Park’s America …………………………………………………………. 234

VII. CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………….. 254
VIII. BIBLIOGRAPHY ………………………………………………………….. 260

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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
The city which has made its reputation by killing hogs has awakened to the fact that
manufacturing good and sturdy citizenship is even more important.
Graham Taylor, 19071

Chicago is destined to become the center of the modern world . . . if the city can receive a
sufficient supply of trained and enlightened citizens.
Walter D. Moody, 19132

Citizenship, according to Judith Shklar, is the most central notion in politics, the most variable in
history, and the most contested in theory.3 Investigating the contours of American citizenship in a
particular time and place, as I set out to do in this study, presents a veritable minefield, fraught
with methodological, theoretical, historical and political tripwires. Approaching tentatively, I lay
an emphasis on understanding the meaning of American citizenship as citizens themselves
understood it. Did American citizens living in Chicago between 1890 and 1930 perceive
themselves as members of a unified nation, sharing common interests? In what ways did their
perceptions about the meaning of American citizenship change in the urban-industrial context of
this Progressive-era city? If American citizenship meant something different in 1930 than it did
in 1890, what factors and processes contributed to the making of the changes? These questions
frame my examination of the ways in which Chicagoans – black and white, native and immigrant
– thought about, acted upon and negotiated their cultural and political identities in a period of
dramatic and far-reaching social, political and cultural upheaval.
Meaning is created at all social levels. This study of the making of citizenship looks at the

1 Graham R. Tayor, “How They Played at Chicago,” Charities and the Commons 18 (August 3, 1907): 473-4.
2 Walter D. Moody, Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago: Especially Prepared for Study in the Schools of
Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Plan Commission, 1913).
3 Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
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construction of national identity from both the “top down” perspective of urban intellectuals,
reformers and policy makers and the “bottom up” perspective of ordinary Chicagoans. It
documents what cultural and political elites believed about the relation of the mass of citizens to
the nation and how they sought to influence that relationship. It examines the shifts in the
perceptions about and aspirations to citizenship of two groups of new arrivals in the city of
Chicago – African American migrants from the South and immigrants from Europe – and how
they attempted to integrate themselves into the city and the nation. It also traces the connections
between new ideas about national belonging and the novel public institutions developing in the
city at the time. In order to understand the full implications of the changes to the meaning of
modern citizenship, it assesses the ways in which the state at both local and federal levels
structured and directed the forms that racial, ethnic and national identities took. This study allows
a close inspection of the interaction between individuals and groups from a variety of social
backgrounds and between ideas and institutions involved in the process of citizen-making at
neighborhood, city, and national levels.

Americans, Made in Chicago
I have chosen to locate my study in Chicago for several reasons. The city was dynamic
and expanding between 1890-1930 in terms of population size, economic might and political
significance within the nation. Population levels passed the two million mark in 1910 as the
industrial sector mushroomed and the city jumped from fifth to second place in the national urban
rankings between 1870 and 1910. Thickly connected by many economic, transportation and
political links to other parts of the country, Chicago was also home to expanding commercial
enterprises, companies like Marshall Field and Sears & Roebuck, which were later to dominate
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