BOOK REVIEW By PETER d'A. JONES
Greeley: Ethnic neighborhoods survive liberal Neighborhood, Andrew M. Greeley, Seabury Press, New York City, 1977, 171 pp., $10.95 FATHER Andrew Greeley's latest book, Neighborhood, which begins with a poem to the late Mayor Richad J. Daley and has 22 pages of proud photomontage by the author, is characteristically affirmative, from the first page to the last. The "muscle and faith" that built Chicago's ethnic immigrant neighborhoods is lovingly described as Greeley takes us through four communities and a later journey down four streets. St. Angela's, formerly of the West Side Irish (viewed as "less clannish" than their kinsmen on the south Side) and later of the Italians, is followed by Beverly, which depicts the only section of the South Side still reserved to whites, many of them city workers. The Bridgeport of Mayor Daley is seen as Irish, yes, but also incredibly plural, including Italians, Celts, Lithuanians, Czechs, Germans, Slovaks, Croatians, Mexicans, black Americans and even, Greeley admits, some Protestants. And Polish Chicago, the Stanislowowo, with its "Polish Corridor" (Noble Avenue), meticulously planned to maintain Polish identity, Polskosc, in a new land, but also a plural neighborhood with Latinos and blacks now apparent. Greeley's account, much of it familiar, of how the neighborhoods suffered and how they survived Polish Chicago at one time was three times more overcrowded than Calcutta or Tokyo is feisty, combative and asserts an unblushing and entirely justified pride in the "ethnic miracle" which is part of the American Dream. Neighborhood, like the regions it describes, is a rich little book, full of color and alive with ideas. Typically, Greeley is incapable of writing a straight description of conditions. His pages are interspersed with opinions, quotes, assertions, attacks and defenses: "The Poles were lucky; the professional do-gooders never did like them. The blacks were unlucky to be the victims of their help." "Chicago had no native elite, as in Eastern cities, which could dominate and control no Cabots, Biddies, Lodges." "The Chicago school of sociology made the Poles their model for what they termed 'social disorganization' some disorganization, that family structure, religious faith, home-building drive which has been the hallmark of Polish-American life!" "If present welfare, urban renewal and public housing legislation had existed half a century ago, the Poles might still be poor, and sociologists might still be writing books about how Polish family structure one of the strongest in America is 'disorganized.'" How did the ethnics succeed and their neighborhoods survive? Here Greeley the trained sociologist emphasizes the primacy of income, "cash money," in the success of many ethnics. Naturally he contrasts this attitude with the policies of the 1960's which placed too much emphasis on schools and education, and more still on public schools and colleges. Greeley also tries to identify and expose the enemies of ethnic neighborhood survival, principally liberal ideologues motivated by bigotry against white ethnics, and conservative exploiters, redlining and selling out whole districts. So-called urban renewal, expressways, high-rise housing projects, the dual (black-white) real estate market with its redlining and blockbusting strategies, the legal fiction of city boundaries which keep the suburbs lily-white and prevent the distribution of the "welfare poor" and public housing projects over the wider metropolitan area, administrative incompetence on the part of HUD officials all are targets of Greeley's wrath. The enemies are many, and behind them, Greeley allows, lie seemingly intractable social problems that have plagued American cities for a century. What is the answer? Succinctly and straightforwardly the author gives us an eight-point policy towards the end of the book. It includes, among other items, property-value insurance (subsidized like federal deposit insurance) and metropolis-wide housing desegregation, encouraged by tax deductions on mortgages (or rather by the threat of withdrawing present deductions). Perhaps some of Greeley's enemies are straw men: his attack on modernization theory seems misplaced occasionally. His attitudes on public v. private education need clarifying and expanding. Perhaps Chicago Circle campus should have been located elsewhere, but it seems rather harsh to claim, as Greeley does, that the "fools who run the university" ignore the city. They could do more; but they don't "ignore" Chicago entirely. Surely it is not a "conscious and explicit" policy of urban public universities to deracinate ethnics. Admittedly, deracination often does take place as kids go from the ethnic womb to the wider world of college. In some ways that may be bad; but is it policy? Quibbles aside, and permitting passion (I speak as a Celt), Neighborhood is a book well worth reading and should be compulsory for city, state and federal policymakers, and planners, architects and urbanists everywhere. Readers of Illinois Issues will not be unduly surprised that this plea for neighborhood, grassroots autonomy concedes that "You cannot defend the neighborhood at the neighborhood level; you have got to change the policies of urban society at the level of city, state and national government." Andrew Greeley would not like me to conclude that his book "celebrates" Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods though it does so, of course, with telling richness of argument, great verve and informed emotion. For Greeley as a Catholic communal social philosopher, the neighborhood is essential to the life of human beings as the social animals we are: "You cannot be free without belonging." What is good for the neighborhood is therefore good for the city, good for the state, good for the nation. To say that Greeley's book celebrates neighborhoods is not to say that it doesn't do much more. Sustaining his neighborhood hymn of thanks is a deep-felt philosophy which he is still in the course of working out and enriching as he writes his steady stream of books and articles. That philosophy, it seems to me, urges disaggregation in all things. Never the motto Bigger is Better and not necessarily Small is Beautiful, but the working goal: No Bigger than Necessary. The federal government, this argument goes, should not do anything the state can do just as well or better, the state in turn should not do anything the city can do, and the city should leave to the neighborhood what it can do. Even the neighborhood organization should do nothing that the family can do as well. This, Andrew Greeley calls the principle of subsidiarity. It's not a catchy word. All the same, the world might be better if the idea behind it caught on.
PETER d'A. JONES November 1978/Illinois Issues/27
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