A Journey Through Social Change

By Gerald D. Suttles

In this memoir, renowned urban sociologist Gerald D. Suttles examines his own life with the same insights that produced The Social Order of the Slum, The Man-Made City, and Front Page Economics. Having understood so much about different kinds of people, Suttles knew he couldn’t write about himself without writing about the worlds that made him. So he wrote what he called an ethnoautobiography or ethnography. Those who know his work will recognize some familiar themes: social control, cognitive maps, ordered segmentation, contrived communities, and so on. But in the foreground of it all is Gerry himself, a bright kid in the hills of Western North Carolina, a tough sailor on the U.S.S. Essex, a veteran looking for a way forward in civilian life, and finally a bright young sociologist on the brink of a distinguished career.

In A Journey Through Social Change, Suttles shares how he thought of his entire life as a series of accidents, most of which turned out to be — as he put it — “dumb luck.” But it’s what you make of accidents that matters. And Gerry Suttles made the most of every one of them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781716626845

Book preview

A Journey Through

Social Change

FROM THE MOUNTAINS OF WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA

TO THE SLUMS OF CHICAGO

AN ETHNOBIOGRAPHY

Gerald D. Suttles

Copyright © 2020 Gerald D. Suttles.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any

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of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews.

Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-7166-2686-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7166-2684-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020916806

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date:   10/22/2020

Dedication

For Andy

Without whom this book would not have been written

Editor’s Acknowledgements

Gerry’s Ethnobiography was unfinished when he died in May 2017, but he had told his story, and it was a fascinating one. He wanted the manuscript published, and so did everyone who read it. I deeply regret that it wasn’t possible to make that happen before he died and that it has taken so long to do so. But now it is done. And I am glad.

Margie Taylor played an important role in moving this forward. As Gerry’s friend and caretaker, she spent many hours with Gerry, reading and discussing his story, and helping to fill in some gaps. She also helped edit the work. The original manuscript had three asterisks every couple of pages to show breaks in the story. Margie took the first stab at converting some of them into chapter breaks, developing chapter titles, and discussing those options with Gerry.

I am grateful to Margie for her help in starting the editing process. Bill Alkire, Gerry’s friend and roommate from the University of Illinois, guided me through the evolution of the United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and made several other suggestions that I incorporated. I also thank Melba Hopper for her competent copyediting and grasp of Gerry’s story; I accepted most of her changes, but in some cases opted to keep Gerry’s original phrasings. Whatever errors remain, are mine entirely. I am especially grateful to Cynthia Mahigian-Moorhead for the spectacular cover she designed for the book. But, then, she always does outstanding work.

My effort as editor mainly consisted of eliminating some duplicate information and integrating some fragments that were left at the end of the manuscript. I also converted some segments that did not follow the flow of the narrative into Reflection Boxes. Throughout, I have added end notes (prefaced with Editor) with clarifying information or links to information about some of the well-known scholars that Gerry mentions. All other end notes were in the original manuscript.

Finally, I added a postscript of my own, as well as Gerry’s email exchanges with Andy Abbott; three of his publications that portray his approach to ethnographic field work; his Curriculum Vitae; a more or less complete list of Ph.D. students whose committees he chaired or on whose committees he served as a member; memorial tributes; and his obituaries. These additions capture key elements of his life as a scholar and educator and complement his personal story.

I am deeply grateful to several people for helping me realize Gerry’s hope to have his Ethnobiography published. First and foremost, I thank Andy Abbott for encouraging Gerry to write the manuscript in the first place and to keep at it. I also thank him for his insistence that Gerry’s own voice be maintained throughout, for his quick responses to my many questions, and for helping me track down obscure references in the manuscript. Without his support, this book would not have come into being. Dedicating the book to him is fitting and one that I am sure Gerry would have agreed with.

I thank Margie Taylor, not only for her help editing the manuscript, but also for her deep commitment and care for Gerry as his disease progressed and for her ongoing friendship for me since then. I am grateful to my very close friends Rebecca Nannery and Claudia Johnson for encouraging me to complete this work and bearing with me as I weighted the many choices to be made.

But my greatest thanks goes to Gerry. By writing his story and writing it so well, he made his world come alive for me. I thought I knew him — and in many ways I did, but I didn’t know or understand his life before we met, or at least not in any detail. I have now lived with his Ethnobiography for more than three years. It has been a wonderful journey for me and brought me close to Gerry again. Thank you, Gerry!

Foreword

By Andrew Abbott

Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

Gerry Suttles was one of the great community sociologists of the second half of the twentieth century. The Social Order of the Slum was a field-defining work, and the careful ethnography behind it set a standard that many have imitated but few have equaled. His later work built an imposing structure on that firm foundation, and he trained dozens of eminent scholars, both in the community literature and beyond it.

Gerry followed a haphazard path to eminence. He grew up in the backwoods of North Carolina but wandered into upper-class academia. He left the ladder of school success for the excitement of combat service, but then studied afterwards at the most intellectualized college in the United States. He lived in a Chicago slum for his dissertation research, but ended up teaching at the fanciest university in town. Gerry followed his interests of the moment, whether they were an adolescent urge for adventure, canonical social theories, or the pretty Danish graduate student who worked on one of his research projects.

In this autobiography, he turned himself to the task of relating and interpreting his own life. As an introduction to that text, I hope here to sketch the genesis of the project and to say a bit about Gerry’s central intellectual contributions.

The autobiography project grew out of the friendship between Gerry and me. This friendship was not very predictable. Gerry was sixteen years older than I. He was from rural North Carolina, and I was from the Boston exurbs. His parents were a farmer-electrician and a rural teacher, and mine were an electrical engineer and a librarian. He went to local schools and then chose Navy service before college. I went to Andover and Harvard, and only then, unwillingly, went into the Army Reserves.

But there were some points of contact. My time in the military and later work in a mental hospital echoed Gerry’s time in the Navy and working in prisons. My early years had been spent among decaying farms, so I could at least pretend to knowledge of rural life. More important, we were both more comfortable as outsiders and critics than as insiders and power-holders, something Gerry knew about himself naturally, but that I had to learn by hard experience. It was at those difficult moments that Gerry proved my best friend and supporter.

The result of all this was an avuncular friendship in which plain-spun intellectual Gerry calmed down the younger, privileged hothead. We talked together without pretenses, and with that wistful cynicism that comes from broad experience underlain by a romantic idealism about the astonishing variety of the world. Gerry’s experience was far more varied than mine, but he made sure I never felt that. And we talked about everything: literature, methods, the university, colleagues, students. In the process, he told some of the stories that appear in this book. And a few that don’t.

Our friendship had not begun during our brief overlaps at Chicago in the 1970s. We met only occasionally in those years, through Morris Janowitz, at the biweekly Center for Social Organization Studies meetings or at events at Morris’s house or at Jimmy’s. But when I came back to Chicago in 1991, Gerry was the most welcoming of my new colleagues. He was right down the hall, and we talked endlessly. Together we restarted the annual bus tours for first-year sociology students. We were even spoofed one year in the department follies: every fourth time the curtain went up, there was the same group of students sitting in a bus, with the Abbott character still droning on about Chicago architecture and the Suttles character telling yet another episode from field work. The next year, we shortened the tour.

When Gerry retired so that Kirsten could seize a career-making opportunity at Indiana University, I missed his voice down the hall and his wonderful stories about worlds so far from my own. In June 2007 came his bypass operation, and in the aftermath Kirsten talked to me about Gerry being stir-crazy and needing something to take his mind off his troubles. It happened that I had just sent Gerry copies of two papers: one on U.S. sociology in the Second World War and one on W. I. Thomas and The Polish Peasant. Both were biographical in conception. I saw that there was an obvious marriage between Kirsten’s desire to give Gerry something to do and my interest in biography. So I encouraged Gerry to start an autobiography.

On 3 July, a long email made clear his own first approach to this project:

I had intended to wait until more nearly in control of my faculties, but after sampling the first page of the paper [on sociology and WWII] I was hooked. It was fascinating to me partly because I had — as a boy — lived through the period. It brought back memories as well as an understanding of what had seemed to me a unique moment in American history.

Having read that paper, I read the one on WI Thomas. Thomas himself comes across in the flesh, and the surrounding figures become part of a human group struggling to establish a school of thought. The life career of nearly all the sociologists I know has been a simple one of high school, college, graduate school, and university training. No one comes in from the outside. Even when I went to Michigan, hardly anyone other than Charlie Moskos had been in the service. I cannot think of anyone else in the post WWII period although a number — [Bill] Kornblum for instance — were in the Peace Corps.

The manuscript that you asked me to think of would have to be rather different. I have thought of it as primarily an autobiographical account of a world that has now disappeared: not just what it was like to live in what was very nearly a subsistence economy, but also the depression, our wandering for my father to find work, and finally the post war security, one foot on a small farm while my father worked in town. . . . Of course there is more to the tale — Reed, the University of Illinois, and Steward’s inspiration, and then Chicago where I finally found myself and life seemed more than a series of accidents.

I don’t know if this would interest anyone, least of all sociologists. I have thought of doing it only as a way of grouping my life into something that is understandable — something that has an underlying connectedness.

If you would indulge such an account, I would ask you to read a few pages when I start. But that is some time off and I still have a book length manuscript [Front Page Economics] that will require some revision. Hopefully, I will feel up to doing that in a few months — but for pleasure and escape I will also tinker with the autobiographical account.

In the succeeding months there were occasional exchanges. A paper letter of 21 August elaborated his ideas about the project:

I have given some thought to my ethnoautobiography. Undoubtedly I will have to use some of my relatives as informants and what they have to contribute will be more interesting than myself. In the notes I sent you on email I said that I was a good school boy and worked hard on the farm. I should have added that I left for the Korean War as soon as I could. It is easy to romanticize the southern Appalachians. I will not do so.

Although almost all the early settlers seem to have come from the British Isles, they were a mixed lot. Some were escaping indentured servants. Some were ex-convicts, others half breeds or mountain men who lived off the land. Bootlegging became a local industry during prohibition. If one had a bit of bottom land, it was easy to survive but almost impossible to save. Large families sent their children north, where they gained a reputation for violence and drinking. Justified, I think.

There was little in the way of law enforcement; a sheriff could swear in deputies only if there was money to do so. There were no outright feuds, but there were longstanding grudges that separated some families. If they could not be hung after a speedy trial, offenders were usually exiled from the state. My great-grandfather killed three people, but they only made him leave the state.

Such reflections were not the only contents of these emails. There were also the usual characteristic Suttles asides. To be passé in sociology is only to be the stable center around which subsequent attempts are made to explore variation. Or I started out in economics, thinking it might solve the riddle of life. But after three courses, I decided that its view of life was only some minor variations around a production function. That is the strength of economics. It’s so myopic that George Bush can understand it.

With these tidbits I had to be satisfied until the first installment of the ethnoautobiography arrived on 14 November. It was riveting. Gerry’s cover notes forwarding the successive parts to me can be found later in this book. As he was writing, we would exchange thoughts about parts of the MS. Late in 2008 I wrote asking:

I’m looking forward to the next installment. Last I knew you were getting swept off the deck of the Essex by a broken landing cable. Did it occur to you much to wonder at the time how the hell you had gotten from Joe NC, where you didn’t exactly have modcons, to a huge steel warship with super tech jets dropping bombs on people? Or were you just in that zone of youth where everything large scale disappears and all that matters is this afternoon’s testosterone high, bragging about the girls in Yokohama, etc.?"

Gerry’s reply was devastatingly calm:

No, I never thought of myself running around on the deck of an aircraft carrier. But when I tried it, it was a good deal easier than trying to plow with a mule. Indeed, looking back writing these pages I realize that my entire life was a series of accidents most of which turned out to be dumb luck. I never planned anything. The oddity of it came to me only after they gave me tenure at the University [of] Chicago. How the hell did I get a job at the best university in the world? I decided just to wait until the next accident happened.

So that is the origin of the book in your hands. A wife’s concern and a friend’s thirst for stories led Gerry Suttles to turn on his own life and experience the same intelligence that had produced The Social Order of the Slum, The Man-Made City, and Front Page Economics. The result is this book. In it, Gerry’s life remains open for us his successors to puzzle out each in our various ways.

A good way to begin that puzzling is to look at the major works that came out of this improbable life. This is not the place for a comprehensive review. There is too much material, and I have had to omit some personal favorites. But review of the four major books gives a good perspective.

The long arc of Gerry’s work starts in the intimate, profoundly observed world of the Addams area, on which he wrote both the wonderful ethnography and the insightful theoretical book that complemented it. From that beginning, he then moved to the larger canvas of land succession in Chicago as a whole. He then moved up again, to the society-wide medium of the newspaper, before returning in this autobiographical account to one individual’s transitions across many local settings. But despite the gradual move to broader settings and then back to the individual, Gerry believed people always lived and created their social experience in particular, local places — sometimes geographical, sometimes social, sometimes cultural. The central argument of The Man-Made City would be that giant real estate developments were actually made by little groups of people no different from the storefront businesses and street-corner groups of the Addams area. The bigness of the city was merely apparent. Even Front Page Economics would involve localities of columnists, academics, and others, alongside the national theatrics in the newspapers. And his autobiography returns us to the intimate interactions characteristic of the rural farm, the aircraft carrier arrest-wire crew, the college classroom, the prison yard, and the assistant professor’s apartment. But it views them over time, within the life of a single individual.

But taken together, across all these different levels and all these different temporalities, Gerry’s major work is unified by a consistent set of themes. Again and again they return to us, like the old friends and relations who so much livened Gerry’s life.

The Social Order of the Slum

All of those basic themes are announced in The Social Order of the Slum, the product of his long residence in the area just west of the new Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois. It was characteristic of Gerry’s low-key sense of honor that he named his field site the Addams area, after Jane Addams and Hull House, most of which had been destroyed by the university’s construction. It was characteristic, too, that he dedicated the book to Mr. and Mrs. I., my landlords and friends from the Addams area. The book is full of such modest gestures. After all, Gerry had no need to flaunt his concern for his field site and its people. That he thought they were worth three full years of his life says all that needs to be said.

The book has four main sections: one on social patterns, one on communication, one on ethnicity, and one on boys’ corner groups. The sections are linked by common themes: the search for order in a complex and changing community, the conflicting strategies for building trust when it is constantly threatened, the centrality of language and naming, the dynamic and flexible nature of everyday experience. The sections are also unified by the personality of the author — modest, fearless, open, thoughtful, engaged, bemused, tolerant. There is, too, a quietly pervasive optimism in the book. For example, racial difference is treated as just another ethnic line, in keeping with the ideals of the historical moment. The race question does not loom like a catastrophe. Or again, petty criminal activities are treated as everyday parts of the young male environment in the Addams area. They are a life phase that will pass. Even organized crime is just part of the basic community background — another imponderable force to factor into everyday behavior, like city government, urban renewal, and university construction.

Yet the book has at the same time a strong intellectual agenda, growing out of an illustrious tradition. Contrary to what later readers would expect, that tradition is not the Chicago School, which appears mainly through the contributions of the criminologists (Sutherland, Thrasher, Shaw, and McKay) and through the concept of place provided by Anderson, Zorbaugh, and Wirth in their writings about Chicago neighborhoods. Rather the book’s tradition is the cultural ecology Gerry had learned from anthropologist Julian Steward at Illinois. The book’s organizing structural concept — ordered segmentation — comes directly from Evans-Pritchard’s African work. The book’s strong focus on names and language comes from Dell Hymes and from Steward himself. Other concepts come from Gerry’s far-reaching reading. Game theory is invoked several times, and the analysis of metaphors, signs, and emic/etic is featured long before these terms became standard outside linguistic anthropology.

Substantively, ordered segmentation — by ethnicity, gender, age, and territory — provides the dynamics and the low-level structures that combine to make the neighborhood legible to its own residents. (Gerry used that metaphor twenty years before James Scott became famous for it.) Lacking generalized trust, which facilitates public life in less constrained and transitory environments, Addams area residents fall back on private information about particular individuals. Segmentation offers a way to reduce this welter of particular knowledge to cognitive manageability. Different ethnic groups follow different strategies of segmentation, depending on their size, their recency in the neighborhood, and their resources. Commercial establishments and churches also have their ethnicities and markers, but these, too, are sometimes ambiguous. Even corner groups have, essentially, the function of making the units of trust visible, by reducing groups of young men to identifiable types, which can be trusted (or not) on the basis of type. Instead of having to obtain personal information about each other one at a time, the residents can progress group by group. Yet the intense personal contact necessary to such private trust-building provokes conflict, because it makes individuals mutual hostages. Addams area residents know all too much about each other, and can deploy this knowledge all too easily. Trust is always precarious and always only personal. Conflict is therefore most common within ethnic segments but across territorial difference; Italians fight nonlocal Italians, and may call in local Mexicans for help.

In many ways the pearl of the analysis is the detailed study of masculinity among the adolescents and young men. Gerry had the eye, the ear, and the sympathy to capture these interactions perfectly, as the ethnobiography also makes clear, forty years later. The portrait is neither romantic nor hostile:

About three days later some of the Stylists were walking down Harrison Street when they came upon some of the Barracudas at the latter’s hangout. The Barracudas, thinking they were being attacked, started throwing bricks. The Stylists returned their bricks, and a short artillery battle resulted until local adults and the police broke it up. No one was hurt except one boy who was bruised by falling off a roof while trying to heave a brick. (199)

Behind the deadpan humor of the last remark, we see the man who had watched pilots miss their landing wires and plunge to their deaths in the Pacific. There is a reticence and a restraint about Gerry’s analysis that combines with and augments his profound sympathy for the subjects of his research. It’s a unique voice.

Social Order was a condensed and revised version of Gerry’s dissertation. The dissertation itself makes for interesting reading, in part because there are even more good data, and in part because the section on young men — graphic as it sometimes is in print — is even more so in the dissertation. But the most curious fact about the dissertation is that its acknowledgments regard Goffman as its most important single source for theory. This was the pre-language Goffman, about interaction rituals and public behavior. Strikingly, however, both book and dissertation reject the idea — implicit in that early Goffman — of norms. Gerry wanted no contact with the idea of norms. People made up social order as they went along. He rejected even the closet Durkheimianism that we find in the early Goffman. This rejection would be a central theme throughout all his work.

The Social Construction of Communities

One of the last paragraphs of Gerry’s autobiography tells us, And, of course, Morris became much more than a colleague. Morris was like a father to me. At the moment where the autobiography stops, Morris Janowitz was about to become the chair of Chicago’s sociology department (1967–1972). Just before that moment, Janowitz’s student Dan Glaser — Gerry’s dissertation chair — had forwarded Gerry’s dissertation to him. Janowitz responded at once. He engineered Gerry’s appointment, and he pushed both Gerry and the Press through the production phases of The Social Order of the Slum.

Like Gerry himself, Janowitz was an American original. But as intellectuals, they were much alike: smart, passionate, direct, disillusioned. Above all they shared, underneath rough-hewn exteriors, both an unerring eye for the realities of social life and an idealistic faith in the possibilities of people. In the mid-1960s Janowitz was in the middle of what became a life-long project to bring the Chicago School back to life. Hiring Gerry was part of that project. So also were encouraging Martin Bulmer and Lester Kurtz to write histories of the Chicago School and pushing other colleagues and students into the field across Chicagoland. So also was placing Thomas, Ogburn, Park, and Burgess back onto the Prelim Examination reading list. Above all, Janowitz got the University of Chicago Press to reissue collections (and in some cases original works) of the Chicago School. Among the earliest of these were the books of the social ecologists Park and Burgess, represented both by their 1921 textbook and by the 1925 collection on The City, coauthored with Roderick McKenzie.

Internal evidence shows that The Social Construction of Communities is Gerry’s ambivalent response to Janowitz’s insistence on these Chicago School classics. Gerry himself had studied largely within anthropology, although since Joe Gusfield and Dan Glaser were at Illinois in his time, he had met Chicago sociology before. But in reading Social Construction, one finds Morris Janowitz’s insistence on the Chicago School on every page, and one finds Gerry invariably pushing back against that tradition. Gerry was among the first to make criticisms of the Chicago School’s urban sociology that have since become standard: the failure to maintain enough differentiation between the physical city and the mental city; the occasional belief in a near-mythic past stability; the initial belief in ethnic neighborhood stability (later corrected extensively by Shaw and McKay); the ignoring of specific political and economic actions shaping neighborhoods. With characteristic bluntness, Gerry examines (in The Contrived Community) the Burgess-defined community called Douglas Park. He finds it to be quite different from the reality projected (imagined?) by Burgess. Its main decisions are externalized, decided on spatial and economic scales far beyond the sectors Gerry had seen in the Addams area. Its residents view developers and city officials as a vast conspiracy, even though both those groups were in fact very poorly coordinated. The Chicago School approach seems almost irrelevant, although Gerry notes in a characteristically modest aside that he lived in Douglas Park for only two years and so perhaps didn’t get the whole story.

But alongside these criticisms, Gerry focused this book on a concept that would become central for Janowitz himself: the concept of social control. Social control had been a topic for Janowitz since his psychoanalytic studies of prejudice with Bettelheim in the late 1940s, but the concept was little more than a shibboleth for him until the 1970s. By contrast, the replacement of formal by informal social control had been foundational in The Social Order of the Slum, and Social Construction shows Gerry further elaborating the idea of social control, a theme that would continue in The Man-Made City.

Gerry redefined Janowitz’s ideas in other respects as well. In a brilliant piece, he and Al Hunter expanded Janowitz’s notion of the community of limited liability — the idea that people are only partly embedded in the local community, which is itself to a considerable extent a fiction maintained by the community press. In their new version, residential communities were conceived as opposed groupings, nested within each other at several levels, a nesting that permitted them to respond to the external agendas of developers, governments, and other external actors at precisely the level of aggregation that would be most effective. One can see in this essay an almost structural analysis, one that grows directly out of the theory of segmentation that Gerry had taken from Evans-Pritchard and that was then being elaborated in anthropology by writers like Ernest Gellner. At the same time, the paper sounded a cautionary note about community control, which was itself a kind of romantic myth. And the topic of the press would of course return as the focus of Gerry’s final book.

Social Construction also features many of those deadpan remarks that consistently enliven Gerry’s style:

Behind the rational activities of the realtor or the burglar, for instance, there stands an intricate structure of assumptions about how the city is carved into separate pieces. . . . (p. 6)

Apparently, many of the community areas in Chicago scarcely had any identity until Ernest Burgess gave them one. (p. 52)

In some sense the city is wealthier, more efficient, and, believe it or not, handsomer than ever. Certainly there are ghettos, children get bitten by rats, and many buildings are about to fall down of their own weight. But judging from reliable accounts, the city has always had its share of these troubles. . . . (p. 83)

A more extended quote has Gerry summarizing, in a single trenchant page, much of the entire argument of his prior book:

Americans who differ in ethnicity and wealth are literally so frightened of one another that they carry on a sort of slow-paced, internecine war with one another, triple bolting their doors, buying guns by the carload, and frantically searching for a safe neighborhood or suburb in which to live and bring up their children. Americans come by this source of lawlessness honestly, for they have inherited much of it from the traditional antagonism and ethnocentrism which the European immigrants brought with them. The United States has added to its lawlessness by a series of heavily loaded stereotypes which presume that poverty and even a low income are such an intolerable condition that disadvantaged people will resort to any means to better their personal situations. . . . As in Merton’s classical article, there is the assumption that greed, violence, and theft have simple and direct explanations: those who have nothing will simply take it however they can get it. . . . When these stereotypes of low income people are joined to ethnic differences and these to racial differences, the result is an extremely defensive posture on the part of both individuals and ethnic neighborhoods. People lock their doors, fear to walk the streets, and are quick to assume that a good offense is the best defense. To a large extent this belief is self-fulfilling . . . residents frequently assume that their victims are not crowning examples of virtue themselves. Our economic, ethnic, and racial stereotypes thus give even the worst of us an easy conscience. (p. 192)

That paragraph is Gerry Suttles in a nutshell: direct, farseeing, moral. And he would expand this analysis of outsiders in his chapters in Poverty and Social Change, which he coauthored in 1978 with Kirsten Grønbjerg and David Street. There he compares the varying strategies of American outsiders — Chinese, blacks, Okies, immigrants, and many others. All of them are dealing with what Gerry — who knew it well — called hard living. These chapters give a penetrating analysis of what turned out to be a turning point in American group relations, for Gerry noted clearly the shift of blacks towards militant separatism. In twenty years, that separatism would have become the dominant strategy in American politics. Advantage would flow to those who were visible and countable, and many of Gerry’s hard livers therefore disappeared from the political scene. These chapters catch the moment of transition perfectly.

The Man-Made City

Implicit in the destruction of the eastern third of the Addams area to build the University of Illinois was the theme of externally forced unification. This provided the transition to Gerry’s further work. The Man-Made City examined the sources of those external interventions, tracing them to the communities of planners, bandwagoneers, and political figures who produced such policies. In one sense, the big actors were like the citizens of the Addams area. They too functioned in particular arenas, just as local as the sectors of the Addams area: city government, not-for-profits, real estate development, the media, academia. However, projects necessitated alliances across these realms in ways much more consequential and complicated than in the occasional cross-sector alliances in the Addams area. Perhaps more important, these socially more consequential alliances sometimes had to function in extremely public settings.

The difference between public and private worlds that runs throughout Social Order becomes dramatically central in Man-Made City. Indeed, by the end of the book, the media-built, fully public world takes center stage: the last three chapters are entirely about this symbolic zone — as if the cognitive map theme of Social Order had suddenly overwhelmed the rest of the book. This was a sea change for Gerry. One can see the project that became Front Page Economics taking shape throughout these last chapters. Another subtle sign of this change towards symbolic analysis is the plethora of photographs, tables, and even cartoons that fill the pages of Man-Made City. Social Construction had had plenty of maps and tables. But here the visuals have become even more integral to the text. This new mode of presentation would come into full flower in Front Page Economics.

But Man-Made City starts intellectually where Social Construction left off, with Gerry’s encounter with the Chicago School. (It really starts with the Methodological Appendix, which should be read first.) The book’s opening statements take up a theme that ran through both preceding books: the city is more made by human activity (and less by impersonal ecological forces) than Park and Burgess realized. In Chapter Two, Gerry then gives what Park might have called a natural history of the development project as a confidence game: a front man first exudes confidence, then produces props and stakes for various audiences — contractors, residents, ethnic groups, etc. Then there is a hint that these audiences (who are, actually, the marks) are in for a good deal, and should feel OK about their good deal because others are in the project for their own good deals. There must then be a convincer (free parklands, public goods, windfalls) and eventually a statement of existing, irretrievable commitment (we are already in too deep to pull back), and always there are inside men, who can handle minor glitches, find funding, deal with problems, and so on. Gerry meant all this metaphorically — it was a kind of homage to Goffman. In the main body of Man-Made City, the confidence game idea relaxes into a general focus on the theatricality of the public presentation of development and planning. This theatricality conceals, behind the scenes, a staggeringly complex succession of scenarios, strategies, and deals, all taking place in a bewilderingly diverse variety of settings. The analysis of numerous Chicago development episodes within this framework takes up Chapters Three through Seven.

Gerry also introduces in Chapter Two a new and direct (not to say fearless) approach to race. Gerry sees race basically as a topic discussed within a euphemized rhetoric that is further from reality than virtually anything else in this highly theatrical system. He excavates codewords for racial bigotry on both sides, and portrays throughout the book the use of racial arguments to accomplish many kinds of dubious political and economic goals, by actors black and white. (The analysis of South Commons in Chapter Six is noteworthy for its detail.) He says what was — even then — the unsayable: that black politicians are as corrupt as whites, that political and social actors attribute blacks’ problems so absolutely to social causes that they deny any black agency or responsibility, and so on. Obviously influenced by his colleague Bill Wilson’s theory of the declining significance of race, Gerry here (as well as earlier, in Social Order) treats the race problem as primarily a class problem, and one with its solution in job creation, labor upgrading, and the like.

Chapter Three opens up the idea of theatricality, of the public gyrations of projects, and, ultimately, of the comedic character of many attempts to redevelop neighborhoods from above. Here, the analysis is about front-stage versus back-stage, as the public pronouncements and sanitized verbiage are contrasted with deal-making across multiple settings — political, economic, residential, and judicial — in the private realm. At times, the front-stage comedy is so absurd that it preempts the reader’s attention; there is an almost voyeuristic reveling in the scandals, reversals, and lies. Chapter Four turns to the evolutions of particular neighborhoods, getting back down to the level just above that of the Addams area. The chapter focuses on the detailed practices of organizing at the community level, and one is overwhelmed by the complexity of alliances between different kinds of actors, and, as always, by the painstaking collection of data, the variety of sources, the depth of the author’s knowledge. A new theme begins to emerge: any serious project is so extended and complex that it presents myriad opportunities for derailment, as well as myriad opportunities for negative publicity. Bandwagons are often vulnerable.

This theme makes the transition to Chapter Five, which is the centerpiece of the land use con-game argument. Here we see a number of failed major projects: the North Loop, the public library (then still a failure but eventually a success), and the State Street Mall (a dubious success). Chapter Six turns to residential developments, beginning with a discussion of their history in Chicago, which is followed by a brief and trenchant analysis of South Commons. Then come longer discussions of the celebrated successes of Presidential Towers and Burnham Park, both largely due, Gerry thinks, to their focused attention on social control: both are (artificially) safe neighborhoods. This longstanding theme of Gerry’s related directly to the class issue — for it is middle-class conceptions of social control that matter in Chicago’s development. But social control and class are also central political matters, since children — and the schools they require — create the high political and racial stakes that can make (at Presidential Towers, where there were virtually no children) or break (at South Commons, where there were many children) a development or project.

Chapters Seven through Nine are really a meditation on corruption in Chicago. This is a topic that has inevitably arisen in the prior sections of the book, as it had in Gerry’s earlier work. But here it facilitates a basic change in focus. For Gerry develops in Chapter Seven an explicit theory that politicians and reformers need each other, and that both of them need an audience. The reformers make their careers by catching corrupt politicians. The politicians make their careers by claiming to be pragmatic champions of the common man when compared to the impotent floundering of high-minded reformers (p. 216). Chapter Eight turns to yet another level. Here, Chicago is not so much worried about being Second or Third City in the United States, but about being a world-class city. Here is the new marketing ballyhoo, the Windy City blowing at hurricane force. But one worries a bit about the argument. The new level at which Chicago competes is not just ambitious; it is new ecologically. Globalization meant a forced new level and new type of inter-city competition. Perhaps the Chicago School was right, and ecology is what matters.

It remains a puzzle how Gerry thought about this issue. If we extend his segmentary account of levels from Social Order, globalization means that the ecologists were right, after all, but at a new level. By contrast, if we extend the alliance-across-different sectors model from the earlier chapters of Man-Made City, then this is not so much a change of levels as it is the addition of a new set of relevant localities on the same level. Gerry does not decide the debate, but rather, two developing themes dominate these later chapters: the importance of symbolic representation and the centrality of economic factors. Together, these telegraph yet another shift in what Gerry found most problematic and interesting.

Front-Page Economics

In Front-Page Economics, Gerry makes that shift explicit. The book leaves behind the actual communities and vivid social life of his earlier books. Its world is a world of talk. And its subject is the larger force that emerged, over the thirty years of Gerry’s research, as utterly central in people’s lives. This was the economy. That the centrality of economics was man-made was self-evident to Gerry, who had watched the cognitive maps of the Addams area be made from daily experience and rumors, and who thought that economics was simply the same thing writ large. He was not a Marxist, who thought economic centrality followed absolutely from human nature. Rather, the centrality of economics flowed from something quite different: from cognitive maps, indeed a more socially organized and more consequential set of cognitive maps than were studied in Social Order.

The book thus looks back to Gerry’s training in Julian Steward’s cultural ecology. To be sure, the opening chapter starts out with much more recent things: Doug Maynard’s use of conversational analysis; the sociology of culture of Swidler, Alexander, et al.; the various literatures of framing, with their roots in Goffman. But Gerry quickly moves back, drawing his theoretical vocabulary from work far older than all of this, indeed the work upon which most of this cultural turn of the 1970s was based. In the text, this is evident mainly in Gerry’s turning to Kenneth Burke’s five keys of dramatism, which he must have learned from Joe Gusfield at Illinois, who used them to such brilliant effect in The Culture of Public Problems (1980). But most of Gerry’s actual methods in this book come from the midcentury anthropology that was so familiar to him that he doesn’t even bother to cite it: Steward, Evans-Pritchard, and their peers.

This source is perhaps most evident in the Methodological Appendix. There, Gerry spends most of his time defending methods that he knows the sociology of culture people will treat as positivism (that is, as bad, because they are not principally interpretive — to use the codeword). But his method is not really positivism, although Gerry curiously confesses to positivism in the last line of the book. Rather Gerry’s methods in the book are the detailed, data-driven methods that were characteristic of anthropology before Geertz’s 1973 theoretical collection turned it into warmed-over literary criticism: the methods of Geertz’s own early work, of Audrey Richards’s family dietary records, of Malinowski’s endless catalogues of magical spells, of Raymond Firth’s three thousand pages on the culture of an island that is home to one thousand people. They are also always Gerry’s own methods: three years residence to write Social Order, two years to write nine pages on South Commons, thousands of hours in planning meetings to write Man-Made City, and so on.

Another aspect of Front Page Economics recalls that early anthropology as well: its visuality. There are maps, graphs, and charts. There’s an excellent section on cartoons as data. Moreover, Gerry enlisted graphic artist Mike Nannery