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  • The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl by Elaine Lewinnek
  • René Luís Alvarez
Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 239 pp. $45.00.

Elaine Lewinnek’s new book is an excellent analysis of suburbs and suburban sprawl in the United States. While these are well-trod subjects within the field of twentieth century urban history, Lewinnek characterizes American suburban sprawl as a mid-to late-nineteenth century phenomenon. She also recasts suburbs not as a northeastern Levittown for men in their grey flannel suits of the 1950s, but as midwestern and on the edges of industrial areas where factory workers and their families lived. In so doing, Lewinnek, an associate professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, has set an ambitious agenda for this project.

“Chicagoans imagined suburbs, then created them,” Lewinnek writes in the introduction (5). Imagination by its very nature, however, is an abstraction. Lewinnek fulfills her ambitious agenda by ably demonstrating how the imagined or abstract suburbs became a reality. In exploring the creation of imagined suburbs, Lewinnek attempts to tie together what she identifies as “the diversity of urban growth and the inequality that growth both reflects and reinforces” at “the time when diverse Americans first learned to identify as homeowners.” Chicago proves to be an ideal site for Lewinnek’s examination as it was a city that “proclaimed itself to be a typical American city and, through this claim, eventually affected the rest of the United States” (10). Lewinnek masterfully demonstrates how that occurred across the book’s six chapters, each more intriguing than the last.

Lewinnek analysis of Chicago’s real estate market shows how “suburbs were the working man’s reward in several distinct senses.” The first of these senses was a “consumption-oriented reward for work.” Chicago was to be more than a portage point linking the eastern United States to the vast western territories. The city’s very dirt held the potential for hard working men to enter the middle class by owning property in the outskirts of the city. Another sense was that of a “productive space that [workers] hoped to control” in the midst of growing industrial capitalism, a notion that emerged particularly after the Great Fire of 1871. With thousands of people displaced, the city’s elites pushed immigrant workers to the suburbs where they hoped workers would become respectable citizens. Immigrants, however, viewed home ownership as an opportunity to make money through communal lodging by renting to factory workers as borders, a practice that conflicted [End Page 61] with Victorian era ideals of domesticity. Still a third sense of suburbs was that of a racially constructed reward reserved exclusively for whites. Whereas a place like the Town of Lake housed stockyard assembly line workers or Riverside developed exclusively for elites, the Black Belt of Chicago’s South Side emerged as the place where African Americans lived. Neighborhood’s and their boundaries developed as ideals worth defending, and suburbs eventually were contentious spaces over which workers willing used violence to maintain and protect against perceived threats. Two instances in particular warrant Lewinnek’s attention. The first was workingmen’s storming of city hall in 1872 to protest against new fire codes passed in the wake of the Great Fire that required all brick buildings. Protesters objected to what they perceived to be elites telling them how they were to build their homes. The second was the 1919 riots when working class whites and blacks clashed over strict separation of neighborhoods and those that lived there.

Lewinnek utilizes seemingly disparate sources to explore these many facets of Chicago and its early suburbs. In addition to newspaper articles and bank and financial records, Lewinnek analyzes novels such as Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and Henry Fullers’s With the Procession. Lewinnek puts works like these in dialogue with other valuable sources. Promotional materials and advertisements by realtors, such as Homer Hoyt’s One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago...

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