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Book Reviews
New Wine in Old Bottles
| ADLER, JEFFREY S. First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. 367 pp. Introduction, graphs, appendix, notes. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-02149-5.GREEN, JAMES. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Pantheon, 2006. ix + 383 pp. Prologue, maps, illustrations, notes. $26.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-375-42237-4.
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The authors of these books have chosen approaches that are distinctly unfashionable in today's historiographical climate. The inflated promises of its early promoters unfulfilled, quantitative analysis has been left behind by the linguistic turn. A victim of the shift to the political right in the English-speaking world, labor history has been floundering, its remaining adherents seeking new directions. Judged by the fruits of their labors, Jeffrey Adler and James Green deserve more than recognition of their courage in embracing old-fashioned modes of historical writing. In quite different ways, their books throw new light on significant aspects of American society during the age of industrialization and urbanization. |
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Apart from their contributions to the understanding of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, what the two books have in common can be listed briefly. Both deal with violence in Chicago. Both are fluently written, in prose styles that are a joy to read. Otherwise, they are as different as chalk and cheese. |
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Adler's research began with a data set of 5,645 homicide cases, which includes every homicide reported to Chicago police between 1875 and 1920. After checking the police log for accuracy against other sources, he added to this data set layers of information from newspapers (at least five for every case), court records, clemency applications, coroners' inquest files, and prison records. The final data file contained twenty-six columns for each case. Although Adler analyzed the data using inferential statistics such as regression analysis, his discussion relies almost entirely on simple cross-tabulations. The data set allows exploration of many interesting factors, such as homicides' location; the age, sex, "race," and occupation of victim and perpetrator, as well as their relation to each other; the weapon or instrument of death; and even the state of mind of the murderer: enraged or calm, coolly deliberate or acting in the heat of the moment. With a couple of significant exceptions, only data on ethnicity proved to be too soft for thorough analysis. Adler adopts as his principal theoretical tool the concept of a "civilizing process" first postulated by sociologist Norbert Elias in 1939, in which norms of civility propagated by elites gradually lessen aggressive and impulsive behavior, while state institutions such as the courts and police extend their reach to the same end. |
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Adler shows that homicide in Chicago changed in meaningful ways between 1875 and 1920. During the years before 1890, saloon brawling was a leading cause. Perpetrators and victims were young, single, poor men influenced by "demographic pressures, alcohol, leisure-time activities, and economic forces." "These elements blended in a way that created a coherent plebeian culture, one that celebrated toughness and ferocity, venerated aggression and bloodletting, and encouraged young Chicago men to gather in saloons, to drink, to brawl, and especially to drink and brawl" (23). Adler's portrait of the urban working-class saloon thus resembles more the competitive and often hostile environment delineated by Elaine Parsons than the workingman's club celebrated by Madelon Powers.1 After 1890, the drunken-brawl homicide rate fell, a change Adler attributes to changing conditions such as evening of the sex ratio, reduction in the number of saloons per capita, and the spread of commercialized leisure pursuits. |
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