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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Notable 100 Book of the year and Chicago Tribune Best Book of 2013
Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America's central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory. Between the end of World War II and 1960, Mies van der Rohe's glass and steel architecture became the face of corporate America, Ray Kroc's McDonald's changed how we eat, Hugh Hefner unveiled Playboy, and the Chess brothers supercharged rock and roll with Chuck Berry. At the University of Chicago, the atom was split and Western civilization was packaged into the Great Books.
Yet even as Chicago led the way in creating mass-market culture, its artists pushed back in their own distinct voices. In literature, it was the outlaw novels of Nelson Algren (then carrying on a passionate affair with Simone de Beauvoir), the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel's oral histories. In music, it was the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the urban blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, and the trippy avant-garde jazz of Sun Ra. In performance, it was the intimacy of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the Chicago School of Television, and the improvisational Second City whose famous alumni are now everywhere in American entertainment.
Despite this diversity, racial divisions informed virtually every aspect of life in Chicago. The chaos--both constructive and destructive--of this period was set into motion by the second migration north of African Americans during World War Two. As whites either fled to the suburbs or violently opposed integration, urban planners tried to design away "blight" with projects that marred a generation of American cities. The election of Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1955 launched a frenzy of new building that came at a terrible cost--monolithic housing projects for the black community and a new kind of self-satisfied provincialism that sped the end of Chicago's role as America's meeting place. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America.
Author Notes
Thomas Dyja is a partner at the book packager and publishing firm Balliatt & Fitzgerald. Dyja lives in New York City.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist and Chicago native Dyja (Play for a Kingdom) delivers a magisterial narrative of mid-20th century Chicago, once America's "primary meeting place, market, workshop and lab." Dyja covers the period from the 1930s through the 1950s, when Chicago produced much of what became postwar America's way of life: Mies van der Rohe's glass and steel skyscrapers; TV's soap operas; Ray Kroc's McDonald's franchise; Hugh Hefner's Playboy empire; and the Chess Brothers' recording studio that unleashed Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, urban blues, and rock 'n' roll. Though the book focuses on Chicago's pivotal role in producing America's mass-market culture, Dyja highlights how Chicago was also wrestling with the counterculture-the improvisational theater of Second City, the urban poor in Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry and Nelson Algren's novels, Moholy's experimental Institute of Design, and new styles in television and music aimed at people, not markets. As Dyja notes, racial strife pervaded all aspects of life in the city, which was home to the National Baptist Convention; the Harlem Globetrotters; major black press outlets (Ebony and Jet, among others); and Emmett Till, whose murder sparked the Civil Rights movement. Dyja explores Chicago's politics, and how the city's leadership attempted to address the "racial wound," caused, in part, by placing all public housing in black neighborhoods. What emerges is a luminous, empathetic, and engrossing portrait of a city. Agent: Lisa Bankoff, ICM. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Dyja contends that Understanding America requires understanding Chicago, and he shows why in this robust, outspoken, zestfully knowledgeable, and seductively told synthesis of biography, culture, politics, and history. Writing with velocity, wry wit, and tough lyricism in sync with Chicago's ballsy spirit, Dyja focuses on the years between the Great Depression and 1960, dissecting the city's three most powerful institutions--the Cook County Democratic Party, the Catholic Church, and the Mob. As vibrant and clarifying as his overarching vision is, what makes this such a thrilling read are Dyja's fresh and dynamic portraits not only of the first Mayor Daley and his machine but also of key artists and innovators who embodied or amplified Chicago's earthiness, grit, audacity, and beauty, including writers Nelson Algren and Gwendolyn Brooks, the multitalented Studs Terkel, singer Mahalia Jackson, architect Mies van der Rohe, jazz visionary Sun Ra, and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Dyja pieces it all together, from the city's epic political corruption, vicious racism, and ethnic enclaves to the ferment that gave rise to world-changing architecture, urban blues and gospel, McDonald's, improv comedy, and the birth of television. Here is the frenetic simultaneity of an evolving city torn between its tragic crimes and failings and tensile strength and creativity.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"Poor Chicago," a friend of mine recently said. Given the number of urban apocalypses here, I couldn't tell which problem she was referring to. Was it the Cubs never winning? The abominable weather? Meter parking costing more than anywhere else in America - up to $6.50 an hour - with the money flowing to a private company, thanks to the exmayor Richard M. Daley's shortsighted 2008 deal? Or was it the fact that in 2012, of the largest American cities, Chicago had the second-highest murder rate and the second-highest combined sales tax, as well as the ninth-highest metro foreclosure rate in the country? That its the third-most racially segregated city and is located in the state with the most underfunded public-employee pension debt? Was my friend talking about how a real estate investor bought The Chicago Tribune and drove it into bankruptcy? Or how 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, who performed at Barack Obama's inauguration, was shot dead near the president's Kenwood home? Actually, "poor" seems kind. And yet even as the catastrophes pile up, Chicago never ceases to boast about itself. The Magnificent Mile! Fabulous architecture! The MacArthur Foundation! According to The Tribune, Chicago is "America's hottest theater city"; the mayor's office touts new taxi ordinances as "huge improvements." The mayor likes brags that could be read as indictments too, announcing the success of sting operations busting a variety of thugs and grifters. The swagger has bugged me since I moved here from New York 13 years ago. So I was interested to learn in "Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker's Guide to the Paris of America" - an 1893 guidebook being reprinted by Northwestern University Press next month - that it initially surfaced in the era of wild growth after the Great Fire of 1871. In their 1909 plan, Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett predicted that by 1950, Chicago would house 13.5 million people. Today, Chicago has fallen short of such dreams. The city's population, for example, is currently at 2.7 million, having dropped since a high of 3.6 million in 1950. But the bloviating roars on, as if hot air could prevent Chicago from turning into Detroit. Before anyone accuses me of being some latter-day A.J. Liebling, whose 1952 book "Chicago: The Second City" infuriated residents, let me say there are some good things about living here. The beauty of Lake Michigan. A former rail yard has become Millennium Park. Thanks to global warming, the winters have softened. In 1968, Norman Mailer called Chicago "the great American city," but he was particularly prone to Chicago's idea of itself. Today, a big part of Chicago's problem stems from that mythology; while the mayor embarks on a PR. campaign for the "global" city, many locals cling to its tough-guy, blue-collar, gangster-worship identity. "Golden," by Jeff Coen and John Chase, is a case in point. The authors describe the ex-governor Rod Blagojevich's crookedness by employing Nelson Algren's garish phrase about Chicago's founders - "they all had hustler's blood" - as if being born here predisposes you to graft. It's easy to see why Coen and Chase, both reporters at The Tribune, lean on such clichés. Blago is the fourth of the last seven governors in this state to go to jail. "Golden" takes its title from a notorious moment in an F.B.I, wiretap, made public during his 2011 trial, when the exgovernor crowed about selling or trading the president-elect's Senate seat. "I've got this thing and it's [expletive] golden," he said. Relying largely on the public record, Coen and Chase tell Blago's story, from his poor beginnings on the Northwest side to his trial in a courtroom downtown. They recount many details of the ex-governor's eccentricities, including his Elvis obsession and his helmetlike coif, which he would groom with one of nearly a dozen hairbrushes his staff kept on hand. There are also bizarre moments, like the one in which Blago complains that David Axelrod, then his media consultant, has declined to commit to his gubernatorial race because of an impression that Blago lacks "gravitas." Nor do Coen and Chase stint on examples of Blago's incompetence, arrogance and venality. Policies enacted could fill a thimble: "He was showing up at work maybe two to eight hours a week." You can tell this book is written for people who live in Crook County - as Chicago's Cook County is known - instead of those on the coasts, because of its tone of weary resignation. Coen and Chase reside here, after all. But if Chicago is to thrive, the nation needs a more animated book, schooling it not merely in who Blago is but in what he represents: a dysfunctional system threatening the city's well-being. The real culprits include Chicago's anemic economy, the crippling legacy of machine politics, the uncompromising unions and the handful of dynasties running the city. Neil Steinberg's memoir, "You Were Never in Chicago," pitches even more indulgently into platitudes. Chicago, he writes, "is a state of mind." His book's title comes from a line on a postcard Liebling received from a disgruntled local. Instead of responding in detail to the New Yorker's complaints, Steinberg, a columnist at The Chicago Sun-Times, argues that payola is both the city's distinguishing feature and his own. "Some reporters never accept a free lunch; I never turn one down," he writes. The book's plot builds up to Steinberg's defense for having pulled strings to get his brother a 30b at the county treasurer's office. More interesting are the chapters about ordinary people, like "Driving With Ed McElroy," a portrait of an old-school publicist whose friendship Steinberg describes as "a Chicago kind," by which he means favors done and returned. Yet a majority of Steinberg's boilerplate observations prevent "You Were Never in Chicago" from rising above his silly argument for the unique charm of Chicago's nepotism. And Steinberg seems to think that Chicago's grungiest corners should be preserved exactly as they are - the grungier the better. "Nelson Algren would vomit" seeing his old neighborhood transformed into chic Wicker Park, Steinberg complains, in a city filled with empty storefronts and vacant lots. An insider gets close to give you a picture the visitor can't see. The picture Steinberg, Coen and Chase paint is how living here bullies writers into repeating the same earnest, desperate story. Reading these books, I wondered if women writers would do better. But that question raised another one: Where are the women writers? In a 2009 Granta issue about Chicago, out of 22 writers, four were women; of those, only one - the septuagenarian Marxist poet Anne Winters - was living here at the time. Hey, Granta: There are cutting-edge women writers in the City of Big Shoulders, like Nami Mun and Eula Biss. Don't let all the tough-guy sentimentalism fool you. EX-CHICAGOANS - whatever their gender - can bring a fresh eye to the city's problems. Thomas Dyja's robust cultural history, "The Third Coast," weaves together the stories of the American artists, styles and ideas that developed in Chicago before and after World War II - the blues, Mies van der Rohe's Modernist architecture, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, and "Kukla, Fran and Ollie." This tragedy, written with greater wit than the insider accounts, contends that by the mid-'50s the American mass market, which flourished here along with big-name brands like McDonald's and Schwinn, snuffed out Midwestern geniuses with radical roots. Dyja, who now lives in New York but grew up in Chicago, still keenly feels the city's wounds. "The real struggle for America's future - whether it would be directed by its people or its institutions - took place in postwar Chicago." This book begins with the death of the architect Louis Sullivan, whose ornate buildings defined the 19th-century Windy City, and then skates from Robert Maynard Hutchins's University of Chicago to Emmett Till, from Chicago's notorious housing problems to Nelson Algren's love affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Some of this is familiar, but Dyja zooms in on the qualities Chicagoans value and does it better than anyone else I've read: informality; the desire to be "regular"; the conviction among artists that "the process was as important as the product." These attributes created hospitable conditions for such distinctive genres as Modernist architecture, storefront theater, improv comedy, poetry slams, oral history (perfected by the city patron saint Studs Terkel) and outsider art, even as they alienated writers and artists interested in more than functionality and social reform. Saul Bellow complained about the lack of cafes. "There were greasy-spoon cafeterias, one-arm joints, taverns. I never yet heard of a writer who brought his manuscripts into a tavern." Like other chroniclers of mid-20th-century Chicago, Dyja partly blames the 1955 election of Richard J. Daley for the city's decline. But he goes further, harnessing Daley's support of segregation and the political machine to Chicago's cultural disintegration: Playboy's founding in 1953 not only commercialized sex, it exemplified tile city's shift from a rich, idiosyncratic art lab championing the individual to a place where only the affluent mattered, a city "demolishing . . . what was best about itself." The city's former strengths betrayed it. "Democratizing the arts and knowledge was a Faustian bargain: it put them into the marketplace where the market would determine their 'value.'" Still, Dyja stumbles when he condemns the University of Chicago, which he depicts as "a place where attacking and defending ideas was honored more than analyzing them." Having studied there, I can say that the university's ethereal, argumentative commitments provide a welcome relief from the crude trade-school mentality at many other institutions of higher learning. At the same time, I have often wondered if geographical isolation - the campus is seven miles away from downtown, connected by a highway that circumvents the poor neighborhoods in between - breeds myopia even more devastating than that in the rest of the city. Did Milton Friedman ever see the burned-out projects as he sped along Lake Shore Drive? Dyja's book ends with the demolition of almost 6,000 buildings, many of them by Louis Sullivan, between 1957 and 1960. (Only 21 of Sullivan's structures remain.) And Dyja, whose book jacket boasts that Studs Terkel once described him as "a real Chicago boy," falls victim to a bit of wistfulness too: "Chicago never became the city it could have been." So Chicago is not Detroit, not yet. But the city is trapped by its location, its past, and what philosophers would have called its facticity - its limitations, given the circumstances. Boosterism has been perfected here because the reality is too painful to look at. Poor Chicago, indeed. 'The real struggle for America's future,' Thomas Dyja writes, 'took place in postwar Chicago.' Rachel Shteir is the author of three books. In 2011, she wrote The Rahm Report, a weekly column about Rahm Emanuel's mayoral campaign, for Tabletmag.com.
Kirkus Review
A readable, richly detailed history of America's second city--which, laments novelist/historian and Chicagoan Dyja (Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America, 2008, etc.), has become a third city, perhaps even less. One reason: Until the very end of the 1950s, most people traveling from coast to coast did so by way of Chicago, where they changed trains and often spent a little layover time. On January 25, 1959, all that changed when transcontinental air service was inaugurated between New York and Los Angeles, making Chicago and the rest of the land "flyover country"; as Dyja laments, "the newly minted jet set' would never need to change trains in Chicago again." Nevertheless, Chicago remained an innovator on several cultural and commercial fronts, the home of Playboy magazine and Chess Records, even as it settled into the strange boss politics of Richard Daley, whose rise to power Dyja carefully records. Daley wielded that power in ways that a modern tyrant might envy, using what came to be known as "The Machine" to capture the minority vote that had become important by the 1950s after the explosive growth of the nonwhite population as a result of immigration and internal migration. However, writes Dyja, it was just one node of power, the other two central ones being the Catholic Church and organized crime, all working against each other as they "protected their power above the needs of the people they served." In the end, Los Angeles and other cities stole much of Chicago's thunder, and Chicago "never became the city it could have been, the city it should have been." A valuable contribution to the history of Chicago, worthy of a place alongside William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (1991).]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Under the light of a single bulb, the old drunk slipped into a coma. Louis Sullivan, the greatest architect in a city of great architecture, lay dying of kidney disease at the Warner Hotel on 33rd and Cottage Grove, five years after the White Sox had met there to fix the 1919 World Series. His last designs had been a series of extravagant little banks in midwestern hamlets, jewel boxes cascading with his glorious ornament, but they'd paid nothing, so old friends like his former protégé Frank Lloyd Wright had chipped in for this dingy room. As the bulb swung and his breathing shallowed, Chicagoans went on shopping in his department stores, cooking dinner in his homes, shuffling papers in his offices, dozing off in his theaters, and praying in the churches he'd created. Few had any clue how Sullivan had given form to the functions of their lives. He'd come to Chicago in 1873, chased west by the year's financial panic to a city whose purpose was to be in the middle. Before Marquette and Joliet came through in the late 1600s, centuries of Potawatomi Indians had portaged here between Lake Michigan and the Des Plaines River, paddling on to the Mississippi. French fur traders set up shop in the 1700s, and as the railroads pushed west in the next century, the frontier outpost named Fort Dearborn grew into Chicago, hub of the expanding nation. From every direction, people, resources, and products moved through its muddy plains, soon the site of the world's biggest, wildest boomtown, and when the fire of 1871 scoured most of the city away, America willed it back into existence, this time even bigger and wilder. Between 1870 and 1890, the city's population grew from just under 300,000 to more than a million souls densely packed and separate, every person there to do, to make, to somehow get theirs. Grain and livestock mattered as much as pig iron; labor confronted capital; new sciences were explored amid back- alley violence. "Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again," said an uncharacteristically prim Rudyard Kipling after an 1890 visit. "It is inhabited by savages." Historian William Cronon has called it "the grandest, most spectacular country fair the world has ever seen." You could probably find fifty just like it now in China, but Chicago was the first of its kind, and Louis Sullivan had loved it at first sight. "Here . . . was power," he wrote, "naked power, naked as the prairies, greater than the mountains." After a short stint at the École des Beaux- Arts in Paris, Sullivan teamed up with Dankmar Adler to design scores of buildings that expressed the extremes of the city that gave America its meat, steel, and the Wizard of Oz. Together Sullivan and Adler refined the idea of what a skyscraper should be. They pushed the limits of technology in buildings such as the Auditorium and the Schiller Theater, while Sullivan developed his distinctive ornamentation, an intricate, organic system that wound around the straight lines of modern industry, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of a grain of wheat the way Bach explored music. Sullivan's florid yet rational ornament mediated between Chicagoans and their buildings. It captured the creative tension between rural and urban, past and present, the individual man and the democratic nation that fueled the city. Sullivan gave form to the idea of Chicago as a crossroads, where all of America's impulses met to converse and trade, battle and build, each structure a message about how technology and man could thrive together. The Columbian Exposition of 1893 ended all that, though. Grand as Daniel Burnham's fair was, it pushed the first generation of Chicago skyscraper builders out of fashion, and the city's progress stumbled. Adler and Sullivan split, and as Sullivan took to the bottle, he warned- or cursed- that it would be fifty years before American architecture recovered. He was off by only five or so. When Sullivan died that night in 1924, he died forgotten. Chicago was no longer his city, as much as it ever had been. In the 1920s virtually everyone went on the take- not just Al Capone but union bosses and corporate heads, aldermen and corner cops; even a few priests were mobsters under the Roman collar. Five years later the stock market crash would drag the city to the brink of collapse. Out of those ashes, Chicago did rise again. It was a slow, often painful progress infused with creativity and greed, overshadowed by the two glamorous cities on the other coasts, but central in all ways to the massmarket America we know today. Beginning in the late 1930s and rolling on through the 1950s, Chicagoans produced much of what the world now calls "American": the liberated, leering sexuality of Playboy; glass and steel modern architecture; rock and roll and the urban blues; McDonald's and the spread of the fast- food nation; the improvisational sketch comedy that's trained everyone from Joan Rivers and John Belushi to Steve Carell and Tina Fey; Ebony magazine and Emmett Till, whose murder catalyzed the civil rights movement; geodesic domes; avant-garde jazz and gospel music; the Nation of Islam; modern photography; the atom bomb and the Great Books; Kukla, Fran and Ollie; and the last great political machine. The Third Coast is the history of Chicago's greatest- and final- period as the nation's primary meeting place, market, workshop, and lab, but it is also the story of how America's uniform culture came to be. As New York positioned itself on the global stage and Hollywood polished the nation's fantasies, the most profound aspects of American modernity grew up out of the flat, prairie land next to Lake Michigan. The real struggle for America's future- whether it would be directed by its people or its institutions- took place in postwar Chicago. Excerpted from The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream by Thomas Dyja All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
