Book Review

Several generations of urban scholars have used the housing surveys produced by Progressive Era reformers as evidence of expanding urban poverty and deteriorating living conditions in early-twentieth-century American cities. Some highlighted the reformers' class bias, seeing the work of such people as Jane Addams and Edith Abbott as efforts to remake the immigrant poor in the image of the native-born middle classes. Joseph C. Bigott brings an even deeper skepticism to the reformers' widely used investigations. In a study of working-class housing in the Chicago region from the late nineteenth century to the Great Depression, Bigott argues that the surveys have led us to conceive of working-class communities as more downtrodden and more powerless than they actually were. The key to Bigott's analysis is a focus on the built environment, in this case housing. He contends that analysis of working-class housing reveals immigrant communities that were economically stable, influential in local politics, and able to sustain cultural traditions across generations. 'Historians,' Bigott writes, 'have overlooked the significance of respectable working-class houses because they have accepted the exaggerated claims of reformers.'

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