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作者

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.41,Issue2,P.273-275

语言

英文

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作者单位

University of San Diego

摘要

Chicago’s Gilded Age economy is often portrayed as a tooth-and-claw jungle. While the state sat on the sidelines, titans of industry (the hog butcher Philip Armour, the agricultural tool maker Cyrus McCormick, the dry goods merchant, and real estate tycoon Potter Palmer, among others) amassed extraordinary wealth in large part by callously exploiting workers, cornering markets, putting consumers at risk, and polluting water, land, and air. As the story goes, middle-class Progressive reformers, starting in the 1890s, said enough and demanded that the state aggressively step into the free market and check some of laissez-faire capitalism’s worst abuses. In so doing, these reformers created the preconditions for the 20th-century welfare state.In Liquid Capital, historian Joshua Salzmann contributes to a growing literature that questions this narrative. Drawing on the work of historians William J. Novak and Brian Balogh, he challenges the myth of the weak 19th-century state by documenting a long and largely hidden history of government involvement in Chicago’s waterways.Saltzmann’s first chapter addresses the state’s hidden hand in hydraulic engineering prior to the Civil War. Much of the chapter documents the state’s role in the digging of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which connected Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River and set the preconditions for Chicago’s rapid growth. But he also looks at government action in the dredging of the Chicago River, the creation of a viable harbor, and the construction of bridges and wharves.In chapters 2 and 3, Saltzmann moves to the Gilded Age. As Chicago exploded in size, an ever-growing number of users overtaxed the Chicago River and waterfront. Frustrated ship captains struggled to navigate the busy and polluted river; railroad companies, grain silo operators, and others greedily purchased precious waterfront real estate; meatpackers used the river as an open sewer; pedestrians late for work waited for ship traffic to pass so that they could cross drawbridges; private streetcar companies tunneled under the congested river; and citizens demanded clean water that would not make them sick. The state responded to this mounting chaos by further engineering the river (famously reversing it in 1871 and building the Sanitary and Ship Canal in 1900), regulating private bridges, and fighting in court to make private riverfront property public. Notably, that state expanded its scope in two landmark U.S.Supreme Court cases, Munn v. Illinois (1877) and Illinois Central v. Illinois (1892). The first gave the state to the right to regulate private industries (waterfront grain silos) that affected public interests. The second gave the state title to submerged Lake Michigan land used by the Illinois Central Railroad.In chapters 4 and 5, Saltzmann brings us fully into the Progressive Era. This was not when the state suddenly intervened in a libertarian Wild West waterscape; rather, he argues, it was a moment when the city dramatically repurposed its liquid assets. By the dawn of the 20th century, the already overtaxed Chicago waterfront simply could not accommodate far-larger iron and steel Great Lakes steamships. As a result, ship captains diverted to bigger and more modern industrial harbors at Calumet and in northern Indiana. Rather than competing with these ports, city officials wisely began to transform the Chicago harbor from a place of production into a waterscape of leisure. The success of the waterfront would no longer be measured in terms of grain, steel, coal, or lumber but rather in tourist dollars, civic unity, health, and soothed class tensions. Saltzmann points to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park on the south side, the Burnham Plan of 1909, and the construction of the massive Municipal (Navy) Pier in 1916 as evidence of the turn toward leisure. He notes that Mayor Richard Daley’s Millennium Park (opened in 2004) was hardly the dramatic innovation claimed by some architectural critics but rather an initiative that built on nearly 100 years of precedent.Saltzmann is clearly correct: during the 19th century, the state intervened, and sometimes forcefully. But one important opportunity to bolster his point is missed early on. He sets the stage for his book by discussing Chicago’s early history and in passing mentions the establishment of Fort Dearborn in 1803, the Native American victory at the Battle of Fort Dearborn in 1812, the Black Hawk War of 1832, the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, and subsequent Indian removal west of the Mississippi River. This context, which created the preconditions for later canal building and hydraulic engineering, actually proves his larger point, and I would have liked to have seen him explicitly link earlier incidents of anti-Indian state violence and government-sponsored colonialism to his thesis.Another quibble is that Salzmann’s focus on continuity obscures important change over time. Inspection of grain silos in the 1870s strikes me as an order of magnitude smaller than the sort of government interventions that we see starting in the early 20th century. Just because the state involved itself in markets during the Gilded Age does not mean that the scope of state involvement during the Progressive Era remained the same.Moreover, I would like to see more attention to ideology. In 1877, the Chicago Tribune pitched state intervention as a necessary evil, an unfortunate response forced by conniving monopolist grain elevator operators who threatened an open and competitive marketplace for arguably the city’s most important commodity. By the Progressive Era, Chicago reformers described state intervention into the marketplace as a positive good. Witness not only Daniel Burnham’s rejection of formless unhindered growth but the elements of his famous 1909 plan: neoclassical monuments, ceremonial plazas, broad avenues, a reconstructed public waterfront, and an imposing domed civic center at the center that unapologetically celebrated the state’s commanding power over the city.More attention to Progressive-Era thought regarding the role of the state might actually help us answer an important historiographical question. If the supposed weak 19th-century state is one of the most resilient myths in American history (as historian Brian Balogh would have us believe), then a critical project is to explore where the myth comes from and its ideological work. Perhaps it was Chicago Progressive reformers themselves who helped create the myth of the impotent state? Perhaps by painting the Gilded Age as an inefficient, wasteful, costly, and socially unjust libertarian chaos, Chicago reformers could give greater coherence to their sprawling, heterogeneous, and sometimes contradictory movement?Yet another quibble I have with Liquid Capital has to do with the lack of everyday Chicagoans in the story. By foregrounding the state and economic actors, we miss other players and other axes of power. Historians such as Connie Chiang, Matthew Klingle, and Andrew Kahrl have shown that the transformation of waterfronts by both the state and capital often resulted in the displacement of marginalized people. Moreover, after productive waterfronts were opened as public places of leisure, not everyone was welcomed to the water on the same terms. The 1919 Chicago race riot, which started after a White man drowned a Black boy whose raft drifted too close to an informally segregated Lake Michigan beach, is instructive in this regard. How did the reconstruction of waterways impact the marginalized? Did the marginalized make demands on the state and capital? Did workers and immigrants affect change?These criticisms do not diminish Salzmann’s considerable achievement. Not only does Liquid Capital give us a valuable, long history of Chicago’s waterfront but it also prompts readers to rethink the history of state intervention in Chicago, arguably the very birthplace of American Progressive reform.