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Book Review
| Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xxxix + 332. $70 cloth (ISBN 0-5217-9082-4); $25 paper (ISBN 0-5217-9403-X).
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| "And often the question came to me," reflected Charles McKinley, a judge of the Municipal Court of Chicago, "'Whose is the fault?'" That question came often to sociologists, legal theorists, reformers, and jurists in early twentieth-century Chicago, and their answers animate Michael Willrich's masterful new study. Willrich recovers a distinctly modern explanation of urban disorder that located the origins of crime not in the mind of the fallen woman or her rake, but in the dislocations of industrial society itself. Less interested in personal salvation than "social justice" (a neologism of the era), ambitious reformers installed alternative understandings of crime, personal responsibility, and modern citizenship in new legal institutions. Willrich's account of these events provides a sweeping new interpretation of the rise of the modern American welfare state. If socialized law was quite an experiment, City of Courts is quite a book. |
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City of Courts tells the story of the rise and not-quite-fall of socialized justice in the Municipal Court of Chicago (MCC) during the first decades of the twentieth century. Willrich opens with a magnificent chapter on pre-reform Chicago's criminal justice system, supervised by justices of the peace who held court in sweaty, smoky emporia known as "justice shops." He then recounts the political maneuvers that led to the creation of the MCC, ably distinguishing the multiple reformist strands in the Second City. Overworked judges, mugwumpish businessmen, and tender-hearted reformers often worked at cross-purposes, but they shared the notion that the best way to a criminal's heart was through his society. Armed with a sense of mission, weighty statistical tomes, and no small dose of arrogance, the reformers transformed criminal courts into "laboratories of progressive democracy" (xxvi). |
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What was different about "socialized law"? As reformer William Healy put it, "the fundamental question with regard to the whole matter is causation" (246), but for Willrich, intellectual battles over environmentalism and social determinism were merely the beginning. The interventions of parole and probation officers, visiting nurses, social workers, psychological testers, and even the good-hearted volunteers of Big Brothers all followed from the logic of "social justice." All were also integrated into a coercive apparatus for the governance of modern urban life. To believe that the roots of crime run deep is to argue that a socialized criminal justice system must reach deep into the soil of the community to pull those roots up. |
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City of Courts traces the everyday operation of socialized law through case studies of the MCC's specialized courts. The city's Court of Domestic Relations employed social workers and probation officers to manage errant husbands—and, no accident, to manage gender relations under industrial labor as well. Women arrested on charges of prostitution arrived in the Morals Court. Prostitutes, "the quintessential victim[s] of circumstances beyond [their] control" (173), experienced all the new tools of socialized law. But the tools of socialized justice could also be its weapons. At Chicago's Psychopathic Laboratory, reformers practiced what Willrich terms "eugenic jurisprudence," employing the most modern scientific expertise available to root out the social (i.e., "hereditary") causes of crime. Disturbing, of course, but in Willrich's account, it makes perfect sense: if individuals are not fully responsible for their actions in modern society, then criminal justice has little need to protect individual liberty and due process, charming intellectual relics of a horse-and-buggy age. |
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And what about the criminals themselves, whom Jane Addams referred to as the "common lot"? They are hard to find in City of Courts, but they do have agency: working-class families turned in their miscreant children; battered wives used the system to control their husbands; accused criminals accounted for the religious faiths of social workers as they crafted their sob stories. But, if the common lot could manipulate the system, ultimately they did not control it. Their agency was partial and fleeting, and, as Willrich shows, sometimes consisted of no more than a few penknife scratches in the heavy wooden benches of the bull pens where they awaited their fate. |
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Socialized law never triumphed over its critics: ward politicians eager to protect the old JP system, emerging civil libertarians, Catholic critics of eugenic thought, and law-and-order conservatives convinced the world had gone soft on crime. The last group became particularly noisy in the 1920s, signaling an end to the city's great experiment. Interwar Chicago witnessed an upsurge in crime, which also took on new discursive valences after the city's bloody 1919 race riot, a Red Scare, the everyday lawlessness of Prohibition, and the emergence of organized crime. Chicago's crime-busters assaulted the discourse of social justice, but by then it had already taken on an institutional life; they could control the system little more than the thugs with the penknives. Universally unloved but ultimately unfixable, the apparatus of social governance was now stubbornly lodged in the dirty, sticky corners of Chicago's public life, thoroughly entangled in social structures of gender, race, and the raw facts of economic power. Willrich brilliantly shows not only how new policies are enacted, but how difficult they can be to undo. |
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City of Courts is one of the most creative new interpretations of early twentieth-century politics in the recent resurgence of political history. Willrich's research is meticulous, his argument elegant, and his writing clear. He makes Chicago's world of criminal justice come alive, walking readers through the halls of justice with a historical sensitivity that leaves a little bit of sawdust on the bottom of our feet and a whiff of cigar smoke in the air. |
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There is much to learn here beyond the institutional history of urban criminal justice. Historians of the welfare state must contend with his genealogy of its emergence, which demonstrates that attempts at an administrative welfare state preceded by decades better-known interventions in economic regulation; so too must historians consider his case for courts as active agents of its emergence. Finally, they must confront his post-progressive insistence on welfare's connections to domination and coercion. |
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City of Courts is a brilliant exposition of the legal origins of the administrative welfare state in Chicago in the Progressive Era, but it would be a mistake to read it as the story of America, or of modernity itself. Chicago became a model for dozens of cities as socialized justice "radiated outward from the Second City, like so many railroad lines" (29). There it coexisted with a proliferation of forms of social control that were integrated with "modern" life and await further study along the lines suggested by City of Courts. If we are ever to achieve true social justice, we need more books like this. |
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| Christopher Capozzola
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| Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
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