Sunday Trib Book Surf

In today's Trib Patrick T. Reardon tells someone new to Chicago to read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Good advice but remember Sinclair's lament after it became a best seller,

I aimed for the public's heart and hit their stomach.
A newcomer may read The Jungle and for ever overlook our great hot dogs .

Alexander Polikoff reviews Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto. This book is on my to read list because I suspect Clarence Page's right here,

One keen observer, Chicago Tribune of-ed columnist Clarence Page, goes further, asserting in his foreword to the book that the implementation of the Gautreaux decision "succeeded mightily" where even Martin Luther King Jr. failed in Chicago.

I would suggest though, that anyone trying to understand Chicago, read William Tuttle's Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919.

This bloody episode doesn't get much coverage from the local radical-historian community as far as I can tell. (Try some google hits on the riots and compare to your count with those for Haymarket Riots or the Steel Workers massacre of 1938.)

Organized labor doesn't come off very well in this chapter of Chicago History and it's hard to attribute Labor's behavior to anything other than a deeply ingrained racism our Radical Historians would prefer to overlook.

Some sociologist have called the Chicago race riot a "communal" riot or even the "ideal-type" riot. For the Chicago bloodshed was primarily "ecological warfare," involing "a direct struggle between the residents of white and Negro areas." "In no other major urban race riot," a foremost investigator of urban race riots has written, "has a white neighborhood characterized by such high prejudice and such an intensity of anti-Negro social tensions immediately abutted on the central concentration of Negro population." The Chicago riot, unlike the massacre in East St. Louis, where a black enclave in the downtown section had been invaded, homes burned and defenseless people mutilated, was no "pogrom." Blacks and whites in Chicago waged pitched battles. --from Tuttle p 65

It's the intense prejudice among whites I remember growing up in the 1960s. Read Tuttle and you understand how the City and State Government's reaction to 1919: encouraging rigid segregation in housing; shaped the city for the rest of the century and is something maybe just now we're shedding. At least the anger if not the segregation.

Finally, it's not a book, but Steve Chapman writes No shopping, please, we're German about Germany's rigid laws on when stores can open, and how it's encouraged high unemployment.

I remember when the Meat Cutter's Union in Chicago put through the laws making it illegal to sell or buy meat after 6PM on weekdays or anytime on Sundays.

The stores would cover the meat counters with butcher paper to hide the meat. Sometimes you'd see someone from out-of-town pull hamburger from under the paper and then argue with the Clerks at checkout; angry we had such an odd ordinance.

An Indian Sikh bought Johnson's grocery story on South Oak Park Ave and Garfield just south of the Eisenhower in the late 1960s. (It's a coffee place now). He started selling meat on Sundays and had his windows repeatedly busted and one unsuccessful firebombing if I recall right.

That's the sort of direct action Chicago I remember. A tough place if you weren't part of the club, and brutal place if you were inclined to thumb your nose at club members by selling meat on Sundays, or move into their neigborhood.