Bruno: Justified by Work

Justified by Work

Identity and the Meaning of Faith in Chicago’s Working-Class Churches

Robert Anthony Bruno

In Justified by Work, Robert Anthony Bruno sheds light on the simple but rarely asked question: “What role do faith and religious observance play in the everyday lives of working people?” While some historical work has been done on middle-, upper-, and professional-class notions of faith, money, time, and business ethics, the theological beliefs and experiences of working-class Americans have been practically ignored. Bruno’s book is embedded in the contemporary religious practices and beliefs of working-class Chicago-area congregations to show both how faith is inextricably interwoven in the everyday lives of the people who regularly attend places of worship and how class impacts the daily manifestation of these people’s religion (from theology to practice).

Most past religious scholarship has drawn a dichotomy between urban and suburban churches and has compared religious observance and denominational membership by race, gender, ethnicity, and recently, around the emergence of a “knowledge” and “entrepreneurial” class forms of church practice. Diverging from previous models, Justified by Work, based on author interviews with a wide spectrum of working-class Chicagoans, offers a comparative study of working-class religious practice and faith, across race and ethnic identity. Christian churches are represented by a Catholic Mexican congregation, an African American Baptist church, and a mixed eastern European church. Bruno examines as well how religious observance affects the life and attitudes of working-class Jews and Muslims in Chicago.

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Fortin: Faith and Action

Faith and Action

A History of the Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati, 1821–1996

Roger Fortin

Based on extensive primary archival materials, Faith and Action is a comprehensive history of the Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati over the past 175 years. Fortin paints a picture of the Catholic Church’s involvement in the city’s development and contextualizes the changing values and programs of the Church in the region. He characterizes the institution’s history as one of both faith and action.

From the time of its founding to the present, the way Catholics in the archdiocese of Cincinnati have viewed their relationship with the rest of society has changed with each major change in society. In the beginning, while espousing separation of church and state and religious liberty, they wanted the Church to adapt to the new American situation. In the mid-nineteenth century Cincinnati Catholics dealt with a dominant Protestant culture and, at times, a hostile environment, whereas a century later it had become much more a part of the American mainstream. Throughout most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most Catholics saw themselves as outsiders. During the past fifty years, however, Cincinnati Catholics, like most of their counterparts in the United States, have felt more confident and viewed themselves as very much a part of American society.

Moreover, throughout the history of the archdiocese the role of the laity has changed, as has the amount of real authority exercised by Church leaders.

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Jacobs: Getting Around Brown

Getting Around Brown

Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools

Gregory S. Jacobs

Getting Around Brown is both the first history of school desegregation in Columbus, Ohio, and the first case study to explore the interplay of desegregation, business, and urban development in America.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, including over sixty interviews, the book details the causes and consequences of Penick v. Columbus Board of Education (1977). Gregory S. Jacobs argues that school desegregation in Columbus failed to produce equal educational opportunity, not because it was inherently detrimental to learning, but because it was intrinsically incompatible with urban development. As a consequence, the long-term health of the city school district was sacrificed to preserve the growth of the city itself. The resulting middle-class abandonment of urban education in Columbus produced an increasingly poor, African-American city school system and a powerful form of defensive activism within the overwhelmingly white suburban systems.

The title of the book refers not only to the elaborate tools used to circumvent the spirit of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision but also to the need to move beyond the flawed dichotomies and failed policies that have come to define desegregation. The book calls for a reconsideration of the complicated relationship race, class, and housing patterns have with city school reform efforts, a relationship obscured by this country’s vitriolic and occasionally violent battle over busing. Jacobs concludes his study with a “modest proposal,” in which he recommends the abolition of the Columbus Public School District, the dispersal of its students throughout surrounding suburban systems, and the creation of a choice-based “experimental education zone” within the old city school district boundaries.

Readable and relevant, Getting around Brown is essential reading for scholars of recent American history, urban studies, civil rights and race relations, and educational policy, as well as anyone interested in public education and politics.

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Miller and Tucker: Changing Plans for America’s Inner Cities

Changing Plans for America’s Inner Cities

Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine and Twentieth-Century Urbanism

Zane L. Miller and Bruce Tucker

Cincinnati’s historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood began in the nineteenth century as a nonelite suburb and became in the twentieth century an inner-city slum, burdened with a broad range of problems characteristic of such places everywhere in the United States. As Zane L. Miller and Bruce Tucker point out, however, Over-the-Rhine’s history is also the history of planning for both inner-city neighborhoods and big-city downtowns. Beginning in the 1920s, Cincinnati’s government and civic leaders explored the entire repertoire of policies and programs considered or implemented in cities throughout the country for such closed-in neighborhoods. The first set of attempts included schemes for comprehensive planning, zoning, slum clearance, redevelopment, and neighborhood conservation and rehabilitation.

Over-the-Rhine survived this first assault on the slums, but at mid-century a new understanding of the city generated different visions of Over-the-Rhine’s future and long and bitter fights for control of that future. While factions fought, the neighborhood deteriorated, and by the 1990s it was one of the poorest and most violent parts of the city. The story ends with a double irony: the adoption of an Over-the-Rhine “urban renewal” plan that endorsed a ghettoish status quo; and the murder of Buddy Gray, the city's premier white community organizer, by a mentally troubled man whom Gray had rescued from the streets and befriended.

Miller and Tucker look beyond the fight over slums to illuminate other issues in American civilization. They focus on changing concepts of culture, neighborhood, and community as dynamic factors, and basic components of city planning. Changing Plans for America’s Inner Cities is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of urban neighborhoods.

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Burgess; Planning for the Private Interest

Planning for the Private Interest

Land Use Controls and Residential Patterns in Columbus, Ohio, 1900–1970

Patricia Burgess

In this intriguing study, Patricia Burgess examines how both public and private land use controls affected urban growth and development in Columbus, Ohio. Burgess considers how real estate developers applied restrictive deed covenants in order to shape contemporary metropolitan areas, and she examines the simultaneous application of zoning to determine the role of the public sector. She also outlines the planning theory of zoning and measures the actual zoning against the goals of its earliest and strongest proponents, the reformist planners and lawyers of the early twentieth century.

Using Columbus and seven of its suburbs as a case study, Burgess relies on extensive research in public records—recorded plats, deeds, planning reports, and minutes and records of city and suburban planning commissions and zoning boards—to paint a picture of a changing metropolitan area, subdivision by subdivision, lot by lot. Both the private and public controls applied to these subdivisions and lots do much to explain why people live where they live and how our American cities came to be the way they are.

Planning for the Private Interest has implications for the individual landowner because most urban Americans live in zoned communities but have little understanding of how zoning works until their plans for their own property come into conflict with local ordinances. Moreover, studies of this nature indicate the subtle but formidable forces that influence both class and race relations in metropolitan areas and reveal solutions as well as impediments to resolving potential conflicts. Readable and engaging, Burgess’s work will be of great interest to scholars and students of regional history, urban growth and development, city planning, and urban sociology.

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Blackford: The Lost Dream

The Lost Dream

Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast, 1890–1920

Mansel G. Blackford

Mansel Blackford’s The Lost Dream explores the history of city planning in five Pacific Coast cities—Seattle, Portland, Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—during the Progressive Era. Although city planning had diverse roots, Blackford shows that much of the early planning originated with businessmen who viewed it as a way to shape their urban environments both economically and socially.

During the opening years of the twentieth century, the business and political leaders in each of these cities began developing comprehensive city plans encompassing harbor improvements, new street and transportation facilities, civic centers, and parks and boulevards. As Blackford shows, businessmen worked through both established political channels and newly formed bodies outside of those channels to become leaders in the planning process. As the planning campaigns evolved, businessmen found themselves both joined and opposed by ever-changing coalitions of professionals, politicians, and workers.

The way that businessmen had previously interacted with these other parties greatly affected their success in obtaining their goals, but ultimately, Blackford claims, politics lay at the heart of planning. The proposed plans were accepted or rejected in heated citywide elections in which, to be successful, businessmen had to convince others to vote with them—a feat they achieved in only one city. Nevertheless, these plans were often later adopted in some piecemeal fashion, and Blackford concludes his study with an analysis of the legacy of Progressive Era city planning for later periods.

The Lost Dream makes significant contributions to our understanding of city planning in America and particularly in the American West.

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Schwartz: The New York Approach

The New York Approach

Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City

Joel Schwartz

Joel Schwartz's major reinterpretation of urban development in New York City examines Robert Moses's role in shaping the city and demonstrates for the first time that Moses's personal and ruthless crusade to redevelop New York's neighborhoods was actually sustained by his alliance with liberal city groups.

After World War II, New York City forged ahead with urban renewal made possible by Title I of the Housing Act of 1949. While Title I was meant to help big cities replace slums with middle-class housing, New York instead used the program to replace housing for the poor with high-rent apartments, medical centers, and university campuses. When Title I became synonymous with callous relocation and “Negro removal,” New Yorkers blamed Robert Moses, the legendary construction czar. While many concluded that Moses's high-handed ways were behind much that went wrong with their city, few could explain how he operated in a town famous for its feisty neighborhoods, liberal politics, and pioneer interracialism.

From exhaustive research in previously unexamined archives, Schwartz demonstrates the extent to which Moses was abetted by liberal city leaders. He describes how insiders' deals for choice Title I sites emerged from the old ambitions of neighborhood civic groups and public housing advocates, and argues that urban liberals had long been prepared to sacrifice working-class neighborhoods for the city efficient. He explodes the myth of neighborhood resistance to Moses in Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, and Morningside Heights, and instead finds steady collaboration of local civic leaders.

Joel Schwartz's complex, disturbing portrait of Robert Moses and the civic leaders who sustained his power will surprise and enlighten readers interested in the evolution and development of New York and of today's post-industrial cities.

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Spann: Hopedale

Hopedale

From Commune to Company Town, 1840–1920

Edward K. Spann

Edward Spann’s lively study examines two key phases in the evolution of Hopedale, Massachusetts—its development as a radical Utopian Christian community and its establishment as a model company town under George Draper.

Hopedale’s story began in the 1840s when Adin Ballou established a peaceful and prosperous community of “Practical Christians.” The Hopedale Community gradually became a prosperous manufacturing village shaped by elements of the Christian reform culture of its times, notably nonresistance, abolition, feminism, temperance, and spiritualism.

Hopedale’s success in creating an environment for manufacturing attracted the attention of George Draper, an ambitious entrepreneur and the brother of an original member. Draper, taking advantage of a financial crisis in the community, gained control of the village and geared its manufacturing success specifically toward the production of textile machinery. After a period of industrial expansion under Draper, Hopedale developed a renewed sense of idealism, and under the management of Draper's sons, the Draper firm became one of the most innovative and profitable businesses in America. Inspired at least partly by their early years in the Hopedale Community, the sons implemented what can be characterized as an early form of welfare capitalism in their company town. By 1920, though, the firm's profits had begun to decline while new problems set in, ending Hopedale's golden age.

Edward Spann’s study of a town shaped by two distinct dreams of a good society provides new insight into the development of Utopian societies and is essential reading for those interested in Utopian and religious communities, nineteenth-century American history, urban history, and business communities.

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Contosta: Suburb in the City

Suburb in the City

Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, 1850–1990

David R. Contosta

In Suburb in the City, David Contosta tells the story of how Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, once a small milling and farming town, evolved to become both a suburban enclave for wealthy Philadelphians and a part of the city itself.

In 1854, the railroad connected Philadelphia and Chestnut Hill and the village was annexed by the city. Attuned to the romantic currents of the age, the wealthy men and women who moved to Chestnut Hill believed that the village's semi-rural surroundings might uplift them physically, spiritually, emotionally, and morally. At the same time, they wanted to continue to enjoy the best that the city had to offer while escaping from its more unpleasant aspects: dirt, crime, disease, and other shortcomings. They thus cultivated a dual identity with both suburb and city.

Ironically, this led to a sense of division as prosperous suburbanites held themselves aloof from the resident shopkeepers and domestic servants who provided so many of their creature comforts. Being a suburb in the city also meant that Chestnut Hill could not control its political destiny, as communities outside the municipal limits could. In response, residents developed a number of civic organizations that became a sort of quasi government.

Contosta's study of Chestnut Hill thus illuminates the divided and often ambivalent feelings that American hold about their great cities. He includes anecdotes gleaned from dozens of interviews with men and women of many backgrounds—lawyers, nuns, debutantes, grocers, craftsmen, and former servants—who tell of their lives in Chestnut Hill. More than one hundred photographs, many never before published, further enliven this analysis of suburban America.

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Aaron: Cincinnati

Cincinnati

Queen City of the West, 1819–1838

Daniel Aaron

Daniel Aaron, one of today's foremost scholars of American history and American studies, began his career in 1942 with this classic study of Cincinnati in frontier days. Aaron argues that the Queen City quickly became an important urban center that in many ways resembled eastern cities more than its own hinterlands, with a populace united by its desire for economic growth.

Aaron traces Cincinnati's development as a mercantile and industrial center during a period of intense national political and social ferment. The city owed much of its success as an urban center to its strategic location on the Ohio River and easy access to fertile back-country. Despite an early over-reliance on commerce and land speculation and neglect of manufacturing, by 1838 Cincinnati's basic industries had been established and the city had outstripped her Ohio River rivals. Aaron's account of Cincinnati during this tumultuous period details the ways in which Cincinnatians made the most of commerce and manufacturing, how they met their civic responsibilities, and how they survived floods, fires, and cholera. He goes on to discuss the social and cultural history of the city during this period, including the development of social hierarchies, the operations of the press, the rage for founding societies of all kinds, the response of citizens to national and international events, the commercial elite's management of radicals and nonconformists, the nature of popular entertainment and serious culture, the efforts of education, and the messages of religious institutions.

For historians, particularly those interested in urban and social history, Daniel Aaron's view of Cincinnati offers a rare opportunity to view antebellum American society in a microcosm, along with all of the institutions and attitudes that were prevalent in urban American during this important time.

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Tittle: Rebuilding Cleveland

Rebuilding Cleveland

The Cleveland Foundation and Its Evolving Urban Strategy

Diana Tittle

Rebuilding Cleveland is a critical study of the role that The Cleveland Foundation, the country's oldest community trust, has played in shaping public affairs in Cleveland, Ohio, over the past quarter-century.

Drawing on an examination of the Foundation's private papers and more than a hundred interviews with Foundation personnel and grantees, Diana Tittle demonstrates that The Cleveland Foundation, with assets of more than $600 million, has provided continuing, catalytic leadership in its attempts to solve a wide range of Cleveland's urban problems. The Foundation's influence is more than a matter of money, Tittle shows. The combined efforts of professional philanthropists and a board of trustees traditionally dominated by Cleveland's business elite, but also including members appointed by various elected officials, have produced innovative civic leadership that neither group was able to achieve on its own.

Through an examination of the Foundation's ongoing and sometimes painful organizational development, Tittle explains how the Foundation came to be an important catalyst for progressive change in Cleveland. Rebuilding Cleveland takes the reader back to 1914, when Cleveland banker Frederick C. Goff invented the concept of a community foundation and pioneered a national movement of social scientists, business leaders, and government officials that made philanthropy a more effective force for private involvement in public affairs. Tittle follows the Foundation through the 1960s, when it began a major new initiative to establish itself as a civic agenda-setter and problem solver, to the present, as a new generation of Foundation leaders continues to build upon this renewed sense of purpose.

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Williams: Washing “The Great Unwashed”

Washing “The Great Unwashed”

Public Baths in Urban America, 1840–1920

Marilyn Thornton Williams

Washing “The Great Unwashed” examines the almost forgotten public bath movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—its origins, its leaders and their motives, and its achievements. Marilyn Williams surveys the development of the American obsession with cleanliness in the nineteenth century and discusses the public bath movement in the context of urban reform in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston.

During the nineteenth century, personal cleanliness had become a necessity, not only for social acceptability and public health, but as a symbol of middle-class status, good character, and membership in the civic community. American reformers believed that public baths were an important amenity that progressive cities should provide for their poorer citizens. The burgeoning of urban slums of Irish immigrants, the water cure craze and other health reforms that associated cleanliness with health, the threat of epidemics—especially cholera—all contributed to the growing demand for public baths. New waves of southern and eastern European immigrants, who reformers perceived as unclean and therefore unhealthy, and increasing acceptance of the germ theory of disease in the 1880s added new impetus to the movement.

During the Progressive Era, these factors coalesced and the public bath movement achieved its peak of success. Between 1890 and 1915 more than forty cities constructed systems of public baths. City bosses, reform mayors, physicians, women as “municipal housekeepers,” settlement house workers, businessmen, and philanthropists were leaders in the effort to furnish public baths for their cities.

Public bath reformers, however, were disappointed with bath attendance, which seldom reached capacity except on the hottest summer days. After 1915, more and more slum dwellers had private baths and attendance began to decline. By the 1950s, cities began to close their public baths as the need for them virtually disappeared. The bath reformers were successful in disseminating the gospel of cleanliness, but as Williams shows, the private bathroom, not the public bath, became their monument.

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Bright: Cities Built to Music

Cities Built to Music

Aesthetic Theories of the Victorian Gothic Revival

Michael Bright

In August of 1861, a congress was convened in Antwerp to consider why it was that the nineteenth century had adopted no distinctive architectural style as its own. That such a meeting took place is of substantially greater importance than any business conducted and resolutions passed by the delegates, for it suggests the profound dissatisfaction with the state of architecture in Europe that pervaded the continent at the time.

In England, the chief critic of the motley assortment of disharmonious styles was A. W. N. Pugin, who, in 1843, declared that architecture, along with the other arts, was passing through “a transitional state” (the phrase was to recur over and over again throughout the century in a variety of contexts)—an aesthetic wasteland in which, following the decay of the Renaissance, an anarchic individualism fueled by a runaway eclecticism and a shoddy reliance on shams and disguises was ultimately to prevail. Late in the same decade, John Ruskin was to propose a stringent, indeed a radical, reform.

Professor Bright undertakes an etiological explanation of why the Gothic style was able to satisfy the artistic expectations of the Victorians. He dismisses as only partly adequate the frequently offered answers—the “religious,” which points to the intimate relations between Revivalist architects and the Ecclesiologists and between Pugin and Roman Catholicism, and the “literary,” which relies on the immense popularity of the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the mania for all things medieval they inspired. Rather he finds in the return to a style that was dominant before the Renaissance, and in the rejection of the nineteenth century’s earlier preference for the neoclassical, a reflection in architecture of the generally troubled state of Victorian society so apparent in the other arts of the period.

Matthew Arnold’s “ignorant armies clash by night,” and Tennyson’s Arthur “saw not whom he fought” in the “dim, weird battle of the west.” John Stuart Mill identifies as “the first of the leading peculiarities of the present age . . . that it is an age of transition. Mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not acquired new ones.” Carlyle laments, “The Old has passed away: but alas, the New appears not in its stead.” Restlessness, uncertainty, and confusion abound; and the idea is often repeated throughout the century that the momentum of change, far from slowing to the settled condition from which new and universal values can emerge, continues to accelerate at an alarming and vertiginous rate that caused Thomas Arnold to comment that “we have been living, as it were, the life of three hundred years in thirty,” and that left his son, twenty years later, “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.”

For Matthew Arnold, it was culture that would provide the unity—the Scholar-Gypsy’s “one aim, one business, one desire”—that was to be the cure for “this strange disease of modern life, / With its sick hurry, its divided aims.” It was unity, too—“a singleness of aim, of a devotion to and community of effort in the advancement of art”—that Sir George Gilbert Scott urged, as its president, on his colleagues in the Institute of British Architects. For Pugin and a host of other artists and critics of art and society, unity lay in revival of the Gothic.

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