|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
spirit of civic engagement. However, such positive projects were tacitly intended to create physical and social barriers around improved residential landscapes, separating them from the city and affirming the distinct, “respectable” middle-class identities of their inhabitants.21 The ambivalent middle-class attitude toward cities was partially responsible for this paradox. At a deeper level, middle-class improvers were influenced by the tension between an ascendant reformist theory of social ethics and an older, illiberal, laissez-faire tradition of rights-oriented, self-interested individualism.22 By examining the changing meaning of grassroots improvement and the motivations of its practitioners, this book helps identify the forces responsible for the apparent contradictions of progressivism and the shifting balance between reform and illiberalism.23
Chicago became a major focal point of grassroots improvement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Grassroots improvers and NIAs were dispersed throughout the United States during this period, though they were most common in the West, Northeast, and Midwest.24 Contemporary observers recognized that Chicago was a particularly active center of improvement activity. In 1900 reform leaders established the National League of Improvement Associations to coordinate the “improvement club movement,” and they selected Chicago as the most logical site for the headquarters of the new organization.25 The reasons for Chicago being a fertile site for grassroots improvement echo those that explain why the city played a defining role in the formulation of reform ideas and activities during the Progressive Era.26 During the early 1900s, Chicago was home to an increasingly large middle class whose strong sense of civic obligation underpinned their roles as key supporters of progressive reform.27 Moreover, middle-class Americans regarded Chicago as an archetypical American city. The spectacular economic, physical, and social development of Chicago after 1850 seemed to epitomize the boundless potential of modern urban America.28 However, the city's dramatic rise amplified the features of urban society that troubled middle-class Americans and compelled them to devise methods of social control.
From a middle-class perspective, massive population growth created a myriad of social and environmental problems in Chicago, including