History of Chicago , Andrew Diamond &Pap Ndiaye, Fayard, 2013
The somewhat misleading title of this book seems to offer a synthetic and mainstream "city" history, as Fayard has already published many times, whether from Rome, from Beirut or Vienna. However, this text, written with four hands by two Americanists, does not present an academic and institutional history of the city. The tone, politically engaged, socially oriented, will astonish those accustomed to the reference publications of Fayard editions. This book looks less like a synthesis for the general public than a more academic work, worthy of the catalogs of more committed and more specialized publishing houses like La Découverte. Neither political nor economic, this story is intended, as its authors admit in their introduction, to be a "social and popular history" of the city. It seemed to me, on reading the book, that this programmatic precision was not yet sufficiently limiting. Diamond and Ndiaye did not write a popular history, but a racial history – let us for once use the term in its American meaning, broad, neutral and without the unfortunate innuendoes that we perceive, in France, with this adjective – centered on the Afro-American community of Chicago and its relations with other communities and institutional power. Barely a quarter of the book is devoted to the historical development of Chicago, its impressive industrial development, its relative decline and its more or less difficult reconversion. The remaining three-quarters of the book focus on the interesting history of African Americans in Chicago. The example is sufficiently well treated to present, despite its limits, a real opening on the reality of the American urban terrain to the French reader.
This perspective of apprehending a social object through the prism of ethnicity (I will now use ethnic instead of racial in this note) is based on a bias:the understanding of an American city seems possible, for the authors, only from the communities that found it, their progressive integration or their segregation in the public space. and politics. These communities are constituted as such on quite diverse grounds:ethnic origin, language, religion, skin color. Their mutual recognition as autonomous entities must allow their dialogue and their existence with the administrative authorities. However, they are not a given of urban organization; there is a history of the formation of communities (and their demise). The authors thus show, departing from the Afro-American framework of their analysis, how the Mexican and Puerto Rican communities constituted themselves as social interlocutors, firstly as a "Latino" community, and secondly as two distinct sets, "Puerto Rican" and "Mexican". For municipal power, and this tendency has been increased by the permanent control of the Democratic Party (great "balkanizer") over the city for 80 years, all politics is organized around the communities, by the communities, for the communities. The “balkanization” of the city, which Diamond and Ndiaye explain very well, is the result of repeated interactions between the categories of political apprehension of municipal power and the “ethnic” claims of the different communities. It is very interesting to note that Chicago is not a unified community, the famous melting pot of American mythology, but a marquetry, a mosaic of small communities, all in competition in the social and political field. I particularly insist on this idea of competition for, if it is not explicitly analyzed by the authors, it nevertheless emerges as the primary character of the history of Chicago; it is the competition between communities that structures, in a second time, the phenomena of domination that the two authors observe and analyze. These struggles lead to negotiations, truces and accommodations, from which considerations of economic and social power are of course not absent.
The interior description of Chicago as a field of social and political forces is probably the most interesting aspect of the book, as well as the most exotic, for a French reader unfamiliar with the operation of very large American cities (Chicago is, behind New York and Los Angeles, the third largest city in the country – its nickname, dating from before the rise of the Californian megalopolis, is even The Second city ). This community struggle is observed via the black community.
The French public can discover two historical characteristics of the American city, characteristics that they are probably unaware of:the electoral "Machines" and the very wide latitude of action of the municipal executives. The Democratic Party has dominated Chicago politics for decades through extremely sophisticated clientelism, even nepotism. Let us forget the most heartbreaking examples given by Jacques Médecin, Patrick Balkany or other French municipal executives sentenced by the courts, nothing can come close to the unpunished Machine Daley, named after the two mayors, the father and the son, having ruled the city for half a century. If the son (1989-2011) can boast of a series of economic and urban successes recognized at the national level, successes which the authors nevertheless strongly contest, the father (1959-1976), on the other hand, is seen as boss , a true godfather , corrupt and dishonest. The attitude of the police during the murderous riots of the Democratic Convention of 1968, the murder of a black councilor a few years earlier, or that of the radical Fred Hampton in a shootout far exceeds our entire French experience. Daley assigned markets, places, and functions as he pleased, with no real control from the city council. Its action on the city, if it has been able to maintain a form of economic attractiveness in full industrial reconversion, is very far from the moral standards in force. His weight in the Democratic Party of Illinois even made him a key player in the presidential elections, for Kennedy in 1960 for example. It must be said that he held several key constituencies in his hand, offering positions and rewards to good voters… No Democrat could win the Presidency without Illinois… and no Democrat could win Illinois without Chicago. Daley was untouchable. The picture of Daley senior management is operated through the prism of the African-American community, particularly in difficulty in the economically declining Chicago of the 60s and 70s:the former mayor does not come out of it, it is the least that the we can say, grown up. The Daley son, with very different methods, can on the other hand be credited with several successes:the city, with him, is renovated, it becomes attractive, more dynamic and touristic than ever. The authors only acknowledge in passing his successes, which made him, in the words of President Clinton, "the best mayor in America." On the contrary, they criticize it for having deepened inequalities, strengthened the community functioning of the city, privatized public services, but also for not having fought the economic causes of urban violence which is still very significant in a city infested by gangs etc. Ndiaye and Diamond move away from objective synthesis to document the "neoliberal crimes" of the Daley regime (and his successor, close to Obama, Rahm Emanuel). The reader will judge this indictment in the light of his own political sensibility.
As I said above, the authors' analysis is not only biased by their political biases (quite defensible), but by the choice from the prism of African-American analysis. Chicago, melting pot, city of immigration, could, within the framework of a synthesis such as this, have been apprehended in all the multiplicity and diversity of the communities that founded it:Irish, Wasps, Poles, Italians, and today Hui Indians, Koreans, etc. It is regrettable that the interactions between the democratic "Machine" and the Jewish, Italian and Irish communities are not more developed. The authors, without announcing it explicitly, preferred to restrict their comments to the African-American community only. They only mention the Irish or the Italians, in the first hundred pages of their analysis. Towards the end of the book, they also provide a quick overview of the current ethnic composition of the city. Reading them, one gets the impression that Chicago's only "lower" class, the Chicago of The Jungle of Upton Sinclair, the Chicago of slaughterhouses and factories, the industrial Chicago of gangsters, the economically declining Chicago, was the African-American community. What about poor workers? What about recent immigrants? For a whole part of the 20th century, blacks were only a minority, initially quite small, isolated and economically segregated (the Democratic Party and its unions have long been in the rearguard of racial struggles). It seems essential to me that the analysis take them into account. That it is limited to them is, in my opinion, the main pitfall of the book (from page 131 to 372, the analysis is centered on the Afro-American community, its demographic extension and the problems it encounter, particularly with the Daley administration). On the negative side, the reader can certainly observe the functioning of the "Machine" and the economic evolution of the city, but without ever being able to depart from the community point of view adopted. This choice is moreover the blind spot of the book:the theoretical presupposition of apprehending the history of the American city by that of the communities that compose it is neither presented, nor commented on, nor put into perspective.
The history of the black community in the city is nevertheless very interesting. Chicago has gradually established itself as a capital of black America, a role it has assumed even more in the American imagination since the accession to the Presidency of Barack Obama, a product of the city's democratic system. It is constituted by the regular contributions of the blacks of the deep south , fleeing segregation, from the first decade of the 20th century until the 1960s; they find in Chicago a more tolerant city, in which they can nourish some hopes of social ascent. Neither the collapse of the industrial fabric nor the progressive evolution of the balance of power between communities nevertheless facilitates the socio-economic integration of blacks. Of the promised land for the blacks of the deep south, Chicago became, during the 1950s and 1960s, a huge American-style ghetto, violent, abandoned, spatially isolated. The authors analyze the relationship between the black community and the "white" administration of the city through the prism of an almost institutionalized racism, which the passage to the mayor of the African American Washington between 1983 and 1987 did not not allowed to delete. Even today, despite the renovations and the (fragile) renewal of the city, despite the election of Obama, the black community still seems to be located on the fringes of the city, dominated and without much hope.
As this note helps to point out, this book focuses on the African-American community in the city of Chicago. It was certainly essential to mention it, and the developments that the two authors draw from it are interesting, although sometimes theoretically and politically debatable. But, really, was it entirely fair to call this book "History of Chicago"?