The Workingman’s Reward, Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl by Elaine Lewinnek (review)

This book provides readers with an insightful case study of patterns of human habitation in metropolitan Chicago. Although Lewinnek fixed its chronological parameters between 1860 and 1930, she nonetheless ventures in the direction of contemporary history.

Lewinnek’s initial sentence stakes the terrain: “Chicago’s first product was real estate.” She subsequently elaborates upon the real-estate marketplace, finance, geography, and construction. But this is hardly a book about joints and arches or dollars and cents. What makes the book interesting is Lewinnek’s clarification of it as “an analysis of ideas as well as actions.” It could have proved a dismal social-scientific treatise filled with theories and statistics. Instead, it introduces “novels and poetry as well was bank records and real estate maps.” Nelson Algren, Theodore Dreiser, Henry Blake Fuller, Louise Montgomery, Upton Sinclair, and Richard Wright step onto the stage. Readers will search in vain for Jane Addams—no entry in the index—who inexplicably hardly figures into this book.

Among the strengths of this study is its determination to place race in its storyline. Although this landscape is well known, Lewinnek unflinchingly and deftly manages to integrate race into a broader, much-welcomed demographic context.¹ The chapter entitled “The Mortgages of Whiteness” revisits the often-told narrative of the race riot of 1919 (“the riot helped move race relations toward a black-white binary”). Lewinnek, to her credit, recounts this narrative at ground level, for example, the paragraph in which she reports that the mean commute to work at the Argo Corn Refining Company for African Americans was one hour and for whites thirty-two minutes.

One aspect of The Workingmen’s Reward warrants elaboration. Lewinnek’s spatial sensibilities—inside Chicago, within the area commonly known as suburban Cook County, and the five outer counties—are lacking. To be sure, she rightfully labels the key word suburban as a recurring trope subject to change. Chicago’s great annexation of 1889 admittedly complicates the narrative. But for all of Lewinnek’s keen attention to mapping and ecology in Chapter 5, at times she might have covered a broader geographical plane. Geddes, who wrote at the turn of the last century, stated the matter of metropolitan geography succinctly: “[I]t takes the whole region to make the city.” It is not always clear whether Lewinnek situates readers within Chicago’s boundaries or beyond them. To this point, the six maps in this chapter—dating back in some instances to the nineteenth century—disappoint. In an age when the nexus of cartography and digital production offers endless, inexpensive possibilities, twenty-first century visuals would have been most welcome, and appropriate, in this book.

The Workingmen’s Reward, in spite of these concerns, is an insightful, thought-provoking, and highly readable book. It will surely appeal to those focused on cities and their diverse real-estate marketplaces. Lewinnek is especially adept at populating her narrative with the variety of people—buyers, sellers, and tenants—who contended with the complex, and even humiliating, contingencies entailed in their pursuit of satisfying human habitation.