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When Chicago Built the American Dream
Penguin Press
April 2013
On Sale: April 18, 2013
544 pages
ISBN: 1594204322
EAN: 9781594204326
Kindle: B008EKOKMW
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes
out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the
nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago.
Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to
coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people
and commodities made it America's central clearinghouse,
laboratory, and factory. Between the end of World War II and
1960, Mies van der Rohe's glass and steel architecture
became the face of corporate America, Ray Kroc's McDonald's
changed how we eat, Hugh Hefner unveiled Playboy, and the
Chess brothers supercharged rock and roll with Chuck Berry.
At the University of Chicago, the atom was split and Western
civilization was packaged into the Great Books.
Yet even as Chicago led the way in creating mass-market
culture, its artists pushed back in their own distinct
voices. In literature, it was the outlaw novels of Nelson
Algren (then carrying on a passionate affair with Simone de
Beauvoir), the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel's
oral histories. In music, it was the gospel of Mahalia
Jackson, the urban blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf,
and the trippy avant-garde jazz of Sun Ra. In performance,
it was the intimacy of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the Chicago
School of Television, and the improvisational Second City
whose famous alumni are now everywhere in American
entertainment. Despite this diversity, racial
divisions informed virtually every aspect of life in
Chicago. The chaos—both constructive and destructive—of this
period was set into motion by the second migration north of
African Americans during World War Two. As whites either
fled to the suburbs or violently opposed integration, urban
planners tried to design away "blight" with projects that
marred a generation of American cities. The election of
Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1955 launched a frenzy of new
building that came at a terrible cost—monolithic housing
projects for the black community and a new kind of
self-satisfied provincialism that sped the end of Chicago's
role as America's meeting place. In luminous prose, Chicago
native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its
postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern
America.
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