Outward Bound

Bankruptcy court records contain gold mines of information on the workings of businesses. Companies seeking protections under federal bankruptcy laws had to submit internal documents confirming their assets, revenues, expenses, and debts and credits due. With archived lists of creditors and debtors, scholars digging into the records can reconstruct chains of suppliers and purchasers of goods and services; if workers or governments registered claims with the courts, aspects of labor and community relations can be revealed as well.¹ The deposed papers sitting in boxes in regional warehouses of the National Archives and Records Administration are voluminous and daunting, a reason perhaps why greater numbers of historians have not tapped them. If scholars need convincing of the richness of the records (and their potential for innovative use), a reading of Robert Lewis's Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis is highly recommended. The book also bares certain drawbacks to relying on them almost exclusively.

Lewis's book addresses two literatures in industrial history studies. The first involves the geographical location of manufacturing companies and, specifically, their clustering in city centers. The second concerns the interfirm nexuses within which manufacturers operated and, specifically, the salience of networks. Chicago serves for Lewis's investigations. Chicago now is likely first- rather than second-city, in terms of scholarly attention. For more than a hundred years, social surveyors and historians have fixed on the city to examine social stratification, residential patterning, racial and ethnic divides and hostilities, labor organizing and conflict, living and working conditions, reform movements, the built (and rebuilt) environment, urban planning, ward politics in its classic dimensions, and regionalism. Weariness and wariness are understandable responses to the prospects of yet another book on Chicago, but Lewis's Chicago Made, rest assured, contributes uniquely to the brimming historiography. For example, proprietorships, diversified manufacture, and specialization are now considered the hallmarks of such industrial cities as Philadelphia and New York; Chicago, conversely, is still identified with mass production, large and famous industrial corporations—Armour, Swift, Pullman, International Harvester (née, McCormick Harvesting Machine Company), U.S. Steel—and mostly, acres and acres of slaughterhouses and steel mills. Lewis provides a substantially new portrait of Chicago: of a metropolis housing a myriad of firms, the colossal as well as the proprietary, that produced countless goods, standardized and highly specialized alike, rarely operating autonomously, but rather interconnected by flows of information, parts, services, and labor. The bankruptcy records of ninety-seven firms, whose histories stretch from the early 1870s to the late 1920s, allow the author to weave this full story of the nation's great economic powerhouse.

Networking among firms did not require absolute spatial proximity. Economic geographers long ago noted (and theorized about) the clustering of manufacturing concerns in center-city districts. Nearby access to information on technologies and markets, sources of credit, and pools of labor lowered transaction costs. With suppliers and buyers close at hand, firms avoided the expense of warehousing parts and finished goods. They also functioned nimbly, able to adjust to changing demand, retool facilely, and produce on just-in-time bases. Lewis's research confirms the theory, for downtown Chicago emerged as a notable beehive of industrial activity. But Lewis also maps other critical concentrations of manufacture at distances from the center: communities at the fringes of Chicago's borders that were eventually incorporated into the expanding city proper, opening suburban jurisdictions, and satellite cities such as Elgin and Joliet. Decentralization did not represent the movement out of, or placement of, large-scale operations needing uncongested space—the sprawl of industry thus associated with the rise and growth of corporations—because Lewis dates the formation of outlying manufacturing districts as simultaneous to the downtown. Moreover, these areas contained equally diverse firms in terms of size, ownership, and specialized or standardized production techniques and products. Synergistic linkages occurred both within and between Chicago's formidable clusters of industry.

Real estate developers and railroad company executives played prime roles in the creation of...