The Racketeer's Progress
Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940

This book looks at economic violence in early twentieth-century Chicago.

Andrew Wender Cohen (Author)

9780521834667, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 May 2004

352 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.63 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Insisting that we look beyond the gleaming factories and department stores that have dominated the historical literature to the highly complex, unstable, and violent world of small businessmen and skilled craftsmen that dominated the early twentieth-century city and fiercely resisted the triumph of corporate capitalism, Andrew Cohen makes us look at the social organisation of the city anew and develops a bracing reinterpretation of the political economy of the Progressive Era and New Deal. Prodigiously researched and boldly argued, this is revisionist history at its best.' George Chauncey, University of Chicago

The Racketeer's Progress explores the contested and contingent origins of the modern American economy by examining the violent resistance to its development. It explains how carpenters, teamsters, barbers, musicians and others organised to thwart ambitious national corporations. Unions and associations governed commerce through pickets, assaults and bombings. Scholars often ignore this defiance, painting modernisation as a consensual process and presenting craftsmen as reactionary, corrupt and criminal. This is ironic, for the tradesmen's reputation derives from their successful struggle to control modernisation and the emerging consumer economy. Their resistance redirected American law. Progressive-era courts rebuked the craftsmen for attempting to govern trade. In the 1920s, the tradesmen inspired new criminal concepts, such as 'racketeering'. But the Great Depression reversed harsh laws. The craftsmen became a model for New Deal recovery statutes and a focus for constitutional debates. Meanwhile, the state began protecting unions against gangsters like Al Capone.

1. Modernisation and its discontents, 1900
2. Ruling the urban economy
3. The struggle for order
4. The progressive reaction
5. Rhetoric into law
6. Containing mass society and the problem of corruption
7. From conspiracy to racketeering
8. The new deal order from the bottom up
Epilogue: policing the post-war consensus.

Subject Areas: Employment & labour law [LNH], Trade unions [KNXB2], Economic history [KCZ], Organized crime [JKVM], Sociology: work & labour [JHBL], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]