U.S. historians have often pointed out that the North as well as the South went through a reconstruction after the Civil War. The attitudes, alliances, and agendas that shaped Union efforts to reshape the postwar South arose from intra-Northern political culture and political economy. In the 1960s–70s, this perception inspired a spate of studies of state and local Reconstruction-era politics within the North, along with broadly conceived studies such as David Montgomery's Beyond Equality (1967), which built an analysis with national implications on a strong understanding of local conditions and politics.Footnote ¹ The two books under review address more recent writing on the national scope of Reconstruction,Footnote ² but they are written in the spirit of that earlier phase, in the thorough way they connect the era's largest themes to the local environments, the workplaces, and cities, where the North's Reconstruction played out most explosively.

Chicago in the Age of Capital is an effort by two long-time collaborators to show how a detailed understanding of “the transformation of society and politics in Chicago” during Reconstruction “contributes to the argument over the relation of capitalism and democracy” (Jentz and Schneirov, 11). The book's title, derived from Eric Hobsbawm, signals its ambition to use Chicago to examine the largest historical questions.Footnote ³ This perspective inspires Richard Schneirov and John Jentz to revisit a host of historians and social scientists concerned with the origins and nature of modern political economy in a tour-de-force example of local narrative used to illuminate historical theory.

Likewise, Sam Mitrani's book, conceived in dialogue with Jentz, Schneirov, and other historians of Chicago and the U.S. urban polity, places contests over the police at the center of the era's struggle “to reconcile democratic politics with the deeply exploitative industrial capitalist order that developed in late-nineteenth-century cities.” As “the most violent, turbulent city in the country,” Chicago was where “the crises accompanying industrialization and the development of the wage labor economy reached their most threatening peak” (Mitrani, 4–5).

Chicago in the Age of Capital builds on Schneirov's writings on class and politics in Gilded Age Chicago, along with Jentz's on German Chicago and its international context. In an essay nearly a decade ago in this journal, Schneirov argued that the Gilded Age (whose separate existence the journal has called into doubt) indeed should stand as a distinct period, demarcated by the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s and characterized by a variety of efforts to come to terms with urban, industrial capitalism's displacement of the producerist, proprietorial market economy.Footnote ⁴ This line of reasoning leads the authors back to the Civil War era. Union victory seemingly ratified the free labor ideal embodied in the early Republican Party. Yet in the war's aftermath, it became increasingly clear that the status of wage-earner was not merely a stage on the way to artisan independence. New leaders, principles, and strategies began to supersede those formed in the era of the citizen worker.

With most Chicago industries small-scale before the Civil War, frequently run by German entrepreneurs imbued with artisan ideals, “transnational social republicanism” seemed to retain potential to draw together the American free laborites, British dissenters and Chartists, German 1848-style radicals, and Irish Fenians who led the city's early labor movement (60). Free labor rhetoric pervaded the eight-hour movement of 1865–67, the failure of which gave an impetus to tendencies within labor that accepted wage labor and class conflict as long-term situations, not the temporary status envisioned by free laborites. In the aftermath of the 1871 fire, the municipality attempted, under pressure from insurance companies, to restrict wooden construction in ways that would have precluded even steadily employed, skilled workers from rebuilding or acquiring new homes within the fire limits. This, combined with Irish and German hostility to the evangelical moralism of the city's elite, gave rise to “an urban, ethnic incarnation of American populism” in the form of the People's Party, which governed Chicago from 1873 to 1876 (153). The urban populists left a legacy of neighborhood-based, interethnic politics that endured alongside class-based tendencies, including Chicago manifestations of the split within the German Left between Lassalle-style political mobilization and a Marxist or anarchist stress on a revolutionary labor movement.

The city's upper class, for its part, veered between updated versions of the older tradition of merchant-booster paternalism and an explicit drive for class rule. Elected mayor in the aftermath of the 1871 fire, Joseph Medill, Republican publisher of the Chicago Tribune, found himself caught between supporters' insistence on stringent fire limits and strict enforcement of temperance laws and popular objections to such measures, with which he could also sympathize. After resigning in frustration in 1873, Medill returned to his newspaper and sought ways to perpetuate the mutualism of the early Republican Party, for example, through cooperative arrangements such as employer-sponsored savings plans. Medill's sometime partner at the Tribune, Horace White, meanwhile became a vociferous proponent of the gloomy anti-paternalist liberalism of the late 1800s: “Cure the elders with club and bayonet, and force the young into schools” (178). The Citizens' Association wove together genteel, good-government sentiment with early versions of structural progressive and Social Gospel-style reformism. Chicago elites repeatedly undermined their power and credibility not only through an inability to contain their ethnocentric, revivalist impulses, but also through a notorious unwillingness to pay taxes in support of the municipal government on which they counted to do their dirty work during strikes.

The hard edge of Chicago's class politics came to the fore during the 1877 railroad strike, with casualties in Chicago greater than in any other city. The next twenty years demonstrated that the upper class by no means gave up on “armed force” as potentially “the only way to protect property and control the immigrant working class” (208). But “toleration and corruption” began to replace stalemate and confrontation as the “new common sense of Chicago politics” (234). This brings the authors around to their earlier writings on Mayor Carter Harrison I, whose election in 1879 marked the emergence of machine-style accommodation for the most part centered in the Democratic Party. To explain the durable local regime that took shape during Harrison's mayoralty, Jentz and Schneirov make subtle use of Antonio Gramsci's frequently oversimplified concept of hegemony. In their view, Chicago's “hetereogeneous and politicized population” combined with the “garrison mentality” of the upper class to preclude either ideology or force as devices for attaining popular consent. That left influence peddling and brokerage. The bourgeoisie in effect surrendered the goal of cultural domination of the working class (the Pullman experiment stands out as an exception). In return, Harrison and his successors offered the elite “low taxes, efficient but limited government, [and] class peace” (236).

Mitrani builds on such thoughts in explaining widespread acquiescence in Chicago to police and judicial suppression of local radicals in the aftermath of the Haymarket bombing in 1886. Harrison's politics hinged on lowering tensions between the working class and the police, whose day-to-day routine—rounding up the drunk and disorderly, “housing foul-smelling, dirty unemployed people in cold, hard-floored police stations; harassing prostitutes”—isolated them physically and psychologically from the neighborhoods and groups from which they derived (122). Under Harrison, the police upgraded their standards and practices, while publicizing benign tasks such as returning lost children or taking the sick to hospital. This, along with a measure of police forbearance regarding both liquor laws and strikes, made possible an alliance between Harrison's Democrats, mainstream trade unions, and moderate Socialists. “The department's legitimacy,” Mitrani concludes, “was secured by becoming a useful city service, as much as it was secured by protecting capitalism from anarchy” (217).

This excellent book leaves no doubt that in Chicago, “a military-style police department” emerged not as a general manifestation of the modernization of urban services but “to keep order in the face of the threats posed by a mobile class of wage workers” (27). A nativist, Protestant city council majority set up a ranked, disciplined, full-time police force nine days after a crowd of German immigrants surrounded the city courthouse, demanding release of imprisoned saloon keepers and setting off the so-called Lager Beer Riot of 1855. Mitrani's ensuing narrative parallels Jentz and Schneirov's, while highlighting the extent that city politics repeatedly “turned on the appropriate activities of the police” (98). Though even Harrison's reforms left the police permeated with machine-style patronage and corruption, the upheavals of the 1870s–80s created “a powerful, permanent institution,” confident in its authority and reputation (206). By the late 1880s, wealthy Chicagoans, who in general “could barely be persuaded to pay their taxes,” ensured funding for personnel and equipment and “competed with each other to see who could donate more money to the pension fund” established in the aftermath of Haymarket (196).

Mitrani further makes clear that the police remained an inadequate institution to deal with life in the industrial city and the tensions that Chicago generated. The depression of the 1870s prompted a desire among some police officials to provide humane and practical help to the displaced, marginalized people whose troubles generated most of their work. Any attempt, however, to charge the police “with solving social problems caused by modern society” was haunted by the “fundamental problem” that “the only tool open to them was force” (121).

Unlike in New York or Philadelphia, let alone St. Louis and Baltimore, these books suggest, capital and labor in Chicago mostly treated the racial dimension of Civil War and Reconstruction debates over wage slavery, citizenship, respectability, and order as an abstraction rather than a factor in their contention with one another. Until the 1890s, the city's black population remained small—under 2 percent—not an inevitable presence in the labor force by comparison to the Irish and Germans. The ethnocultural and class dimensions of the city's turmoil were manifest and overwhelming. The city's Socialists and anarchists at times connected the aspirations and exploitation of freed people in the South with the plight and agenda of urban labor in the North, a theme that runs through various historians' arguments for Reconstruction as national and not Southern. But the transnational perspective of Chicago labor in this era seems to have been mainly transatlantic, intertwined with Ireland, Britain, and Germany rather than across North America or the European empires, a possible shortcoming in the two books' assumptions that Chicago can sum up the era.

The two books end up addressing the conundrum pointed to by such theorists of political economy as Barrington Moore and Richard Bensel: how did the United States become “the only country that remained a republic with a high degree of democratic participation through the trauma of industrialization” (Mitrani, 215). At the time, activists at Hull House and social scientists at the University of Chicago pondered the same. The Pullman Strike amid the depression of the 1890s threw into relief the challenge of maintaining the civic and social attitudes that would enable democracy to thrive in a city fragmented by class, ethnicity, religion, and neighborhood, in which labor and capital had in recent memory organized separate militias with the understanding that they might soon shoot at one another. In Chicago and other cities of the North, Reconstruction came home not simply in the breakdown of the free labor ideal, but in the realization that under enough pressure and with no shared interests or ideals to bind it, society could break down into ruthlessness and violence. The quest of Chicago progressives for new forms of communication and civic responsibility recalls that those who had hope for urban democracy sought a way around these books' stark calculus: hegemony backed when possible by Harrison's negotiation and payoff but when needed by police batons and guns.