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The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940. By Andrew Wender Cohen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xviii + 333 pp. Photographs, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $60.00. ISBN: o-52i-83466-x.
The Racketeer's Progress is an ambitious book, and that ambitiousness is announced by author Andrew Wender Cohen in the first sentence of his introduction: "Between the Progressive Era and the New Deal, small businessmen and craft workers in Chicago defied the corporate transformation of American capitalism, redirecting the course of American political and economic development." Cohen declares that small businesses, unions, politicians, and tradesmen created a world in which they enforced their own codes and rules (cooperatively if possible, with strikes and threats and violence if necessary) in opposition to the ideas and desires of the city's corporations, railroads, and big retailers. "Their opposition," he goes on, "provoked a series of violent confrontations between local craftsmen and corporate magnates that spilled into the city's streets, markets, and courts." Modernizing the economy was not a smooth process-it was "violent, contingent, and contested." Powerful labor organizations, which occasionally resorted to tactics like bombings and beatings, prevented national corporations from wholly imposing their will on Chicago; such labor activism also provided the template for federal practices during the New Deal.
Cohen goes on to contest five ideas he says dominate historians' interpretation of the early twentieth century. Modernity implies that the American economy, along with the state and society, had attained maturity by the Progressive Era; that incorporation, technology, mechanization, and free markets had transformed the nation. In fact, large segments of Chicago were still "premodern," in the sense that many workers remained ensconced in small-scale firms where their muscle, knowledge, and skill gave them considerable power. Cohen also questions the value of historical synthesis for understanding this era. Historians in recent years have called for broad national and international histories, but Cohen argues that the smoothing away of details involved in such a project fundamentally distorts history. Close examination of a locale such as Chicago makes it clear that the experiences of workers, owners, and managers are only understood through a closely detailed approach.
Cohen also questions the validity of voluntarism, by which he means the notion that labor unions joined...