Off the beaten paths

Top: a bed & breakfast in Galena in northwestern Illinois. Bottom: the village hall in Elsah, on the Mississippi River south of Pere Marquette State Park. Photos by Terry Farmer, Department of Commerce and Community Affairs

Bob Pahula. Guide to the Recommended Country Inns of the Midwest.
Chester: The Globe Pequot Press, 1987. Pp. 301 with illustrations and index. $9.95 (paper).

Rod Fenson and Julie Foreman. Illinois Off the Beaten Path.
Chester: The Globe Pequot Press, 1987. Pp. 162 with illustrations and index. $7.95 (paper).

Bill and Phyllis Thomas. Indiana Off the Beaten Path.
Chester: The Globe Pequot Press, 1985. Pp. 157 with illustrations and index. $8.95 (paper).

The automobile-traveling American nowadays seems quite content to stay overnight in one of the big chain motels, usually located right off the interstate highway. Adventure, romance and having a good time while motoring are not on the agenda. The trip is something to be endured, and little more.

Recently, however, there has been an increasing interest in something different, something more imaginative, in overnight accommodations. Discriminating travelers are seeking out country inns and bed and breakfast places as never before. In the past they were not always easy to locate. But now there is a growing stockpile of books that tell you where these places are and what you will find when you arrive.

One of the best of these books is the carefully compiled and entertaining Guide to the Recommended Country Inns of the Midwest by Bob Pahula. This handsome volume includes all you will want to know about each inn — and there are more than 140 covered in the book. The states represented are Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin. Each state grouping contains a map guide, and there is a pen and ink drawing of each inn by Bill Taylor Jr.

An excellent feature is the special section where the inns are grouped under different headings — for example, "Inns with Swimming Pools," "Inns with Full-Service Restaurants," "Inns Near Lakes" and so forth. Although no rating scheme is used, the author has personally stayed in every inn included in the book, and he gives you the history and flavor of each. His warm and informative bits of first-hand observation are jewels. Here are a few of them:

"Windows set in walls nearly a foot thick add to the pioneer feel of the house. I could imagine early settlers huddling next to the fire during harsh Midwestern winters. That's probably why three fireplaces are scattered throughout the house. They still add toasty warmth in the winter months when modern-day guests return from nearby skiing adventures" (Mother's Country Inn, Galena, Ill.).

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"And then there are the 'trimmings': home-grown fruits and vegetables from the Lovejoys' garden out back; steaming homemade bread and rolls fresh out of the oven; dessert creations like Rhubarb Mousse and Sweet Cherry Bavarian; home-blended jams, jellies, and marmalades; and Arietta's cinnamon-pecan rolls that ooze sweet spices, nuts, and raisins and gooey icing" (The Patchwork Quilt Country Inn, Middlebury, Ind.).

"My room was classically restored to Victorian elegance, with marble-topped dressers, a velvet-covered rocking chair, and two walnut beds sporting high headboards. Later, I found out that antique brokers were commissioned to seek out the nineteenth-century pieces. They searched old British estates, Colorado gold rush mansions, Carolina plantations, and historic New England homes to uncover the splendid pieces" (The Calumet Hotel, Pipestone, Minn.).

"Relaxation is the key here. I just sat on the porch, in the shade of tall trees, feeling the cool summer breeze. Helen wound up the old Victrola for a song. It's also fun to stop by the kitchen to visit with Helen when she's making her famous sticky buns fresh each morning for breakfast treats" (Borgman's Bed and Breakfast, Arrow Rock, Mo.).

Does any of the above sound the least bit like a Holiday Inn or a Best Western motel? You bet it doesn't, and I say thank heavens for that. A good country inn is a much more rewarding place to spend a night or longer, if you have the time.

Illinois Off the Beaten Path and Indiana Off the Beaten Path are current guide books that offer brief descriptions and pertinent information on places of general interest to the tourist. These books are short on down-home observations and stick to hard facts. Therefore, they aren't so much books to read as they are books to refer to — for addresses, telephone numbers and so forth. Nevertheless, they serve a useful purpose, are thoroughly organized and well written, and should prove handy to have around the house when you want to check out what to see in a particular area.□

Dave Etter lives in Elbum, Ill., and has published 18 volumes of poetry, most notably Alliance, Illinois. He loves to travel the back roads of the Midwest and stay in the small hotels and old country inns whenever possible.

Chicago by foot, bike & car

Dominic A. Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett. Chicago: City of Neighborhoods. Histories & Tours.
Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986. Pp. 582. $19.95 paper.

Ira J. Bach and Susan Wolfson. Chicago on Foot: Walking Tours of Chicago's Architecture.
Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1987. Pp. 450. $14.95 paper.

Sherry Kent and Mary Szpur. Sweet Home Chicago: The Real City Guide.
Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1987. Pp. 380. $8.95 paper.

Photo by Terry Farmer, Department of Commerce and Community Affairs Chicago's skyline

Norman Mark. Chicago: Walking, Bicycling & Driving Tours of the City.
Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1987. Pp. 276. $8.95 paper.

Victor Danilov. Chicago's Museums. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1987. Pp. 252. $9.95 paper.

Everyone knows the out-of-towners who drive into Chicago with windows rolled up and car doors locked. Downstaters and suburbanites alike often think of Chicago as a dirty, dangerous place. But Chicago — its ghettoes notwithstanding — remains the gem of the state, a world-class city that annually draws millions to its attractions.

Five new books offer help to those who would like to learn more about Chicago. They all contain tidbits designed to educate natives as well as visitors. The books, available in paperback, give up-to-date coverage of what the city offers.

The most comprehensive, from a historical perspective, is Chicago: City of Neighborhoods. Histories & Tours by Dominic A. Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett. This gargantuan (582 pages) book is well researched and illustrated. It details the history of 15 areas and their neighborhoods. The authors based their work on general reading material as well as books specific to each of the neighborhood areas covered.

This is not a food-and-shopping tour of Chicago, and therefore probably not for the quickie tourist. It's a book for the already initiated who want to understand the city's roots. The authors provide a closer look at the neighborhoods and landmarks that go by in a blur to the nine-to-five commuter.

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In the foreword, M.L. Newman describes succinctly the perspective that the book seeks to eradicate: "The town runs blotchy gray if you look at it fast." Indeed it does, especially during the long cold winters, as one shuffles along with the commuter herd, head low to the wind, only vaguely aware of the familiar path from work to home and back again. But if one looks at the city slowly, piece by piece, as have Pacyga and Skerrett, soon the city is a bright, living splatter of diverse cultures, different architectural periods and brawling political forces.

Another close-look guide is Chicago on Foot: Walking Tours of Chicago's Architecture by Ira J. Bach and Susan Wolfson. The book provides maps for 31 walks of reasonable length. Each walk contains addresses of interesting buildings and homes, architects' names and brief histories about the structures and their past and present uses. Again, the book is intended for the tourist with time, but a one-day visitor with an hour to spare could easily select a nearby walk, using this book as a guide.

Included on the tours are the usual Mies Van De Rohes, Claes Oldenbergs and Helmut Jahns of fame. There are also fascinating "unknowns" to gaze at. Photographs illustrate the vast array of forms that give the city a beautiful skyline and make it a showcase for architectural genius on a smaller scale.

The discussions of the buildings are lively, without being too technical, and they give a sense of period, style and material. One minor drawback is that the book is rather large to carry along on a walk.

A hip compendium of the latest Chicago offers, from night life to legal aid, is the third edition of Sweet Home Chicago: The Real City Guide by Sherry Kent and Mary Szpur. It was first published in 1974 as a guide with a "countercultural slant." The 1987 edition still includes alternatives such as gay and lesbian bars and publications, but also lists some yupster restaurants

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and provides information about entertainment and the arts. Probably a "counterculture" holdover, fee handy section on "Survival" makes is book particularly useful for people who have just moved into the city. There are tips on employment, education and health care facilities. The section on transportation could have used a map of the public transportation system, but explains the various Chicago Transit Authority elevated lines, the bus system, the city's grid street map, and the expressways and commuter trains.

The book offers the fullest description of the city's cultural offerings to be found in any of these guidebooks. Here, one will find the names of the many publications printed in Chicago as well as addresses for the city's libraries and bookstores. The authors also provide a complete list of theaters, movie houses and art galleries.

The guidebook that is best suited to tourists is television entertainment reporter Norman Mark's Chicago: Walking, Bicycling & Driving Tours of the City. This relatively short (276 pages) book is compact enough to fit into a purse or backpack, and contains 15 walks, one bike tour, two drives (north and south side), five "pub crawls" and a "walk on the almost wild side" that takes in the north side gay bars.

Mark says he selected his tours with the idea of safety foremost, and only after consultation with police and local residents. His book is addressed to worried out-of-towners with time on their hands. But tourists need not fear if they can follow the free-hand maps at the start of each chapter tour.

A tightly focused, easily portable guidebook for tourists and natives alike is Chicago's Museums, billed as a complete guide to the city's myriad cultural attractions. Victor J. Danilov has included full descriptions of "the big three" — the Art Institute, the Field Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Science and Industry — as well as addresses and briefer descriptions of other museums, conservatories and nature centers. Here one realizes the true extent of the city's ethnicity, in a list of 13 museums and cultural centers for the Poles, Mexicans, Swedes, Romanians, Lithuanians, Blacks, Jews and American Indians.□

Nina Burleigh is a Chicago journalist covering legal and political issues.

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Abattoirs and packinghouses

James R. Barrett. Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922.
Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 282 with index. $24.95 (cloth).

Upton Sinclair. The Jungle. Edited with introduction and annotations by James R. Barrett.
Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Pp. 388 with index. $32.50 (cloth) $9.95 (paper).

James Barrett's book challenges many accepted ideas about Chicago's butcher workers and Packingtown in the early years of this century. Popular understanding of this subject has come largely from Upton Sinclair's famous novel, The Jungle, published in 1906. Barrett contends that while Sinclair succeeded brilliantly in describing the filthy and dangerous conditions in the packinghouses, he mistakenly portrayed the workers as weak and in disarray.

Barrett also disagrees with historians who hold that a consensus was reached during these years by representatives of big business, labor and the government to support a liberalized version of corporate capitalism. Barrett sees the situation as far more dynamic, with constant struggles at the shop-floor level over issues of control.

By 1900 meat packing had become a mass production industry which relied less on mechanization to achieve speed and consistency than on a minute division of labor. Over the last half of the 19th century the slaughtering process had been divided again and again. The job of all-around butcher, for example, which included responsibility for making decisions about cutting up the carcass and, more importantly, controlling the pace of work, was replaced by 78 distinctive "trades," each of which required an individual to perform a comparatively simple task hour after hour.

The packing companies viewed this as "rationalized production." From the workers' perspective, Barrett correctly maintains, it was irrational, giving the packers greater control over the process, speeding up the work while making it more monotonous, deskilling an important group of workers.

At the same time as they reorganized production, the companies restructured the labor market by importing immigrants from Eastern Europe — Polish, Lithuanian, Slovak — and recruiting blacks as well as women at home. In some cases the need for additional workers arose from increased production; at other times, especially when blacks were hired, it was to break strikes. Restructuring the labor force added new divisions among the workers along lines of race, gender, culture and language. Further balkanization occurred within the neighborhoods where the workers lived.

Despite these divisions, Barrett shows, the butcher workers had much in common. Foremost was their shared experience of irregular employment, long hours, low pay, frequent illness, disease and even death in the packinghouses. Like other social historians in recent years, Barrett emphasizes the role of saloons as sites where (male) workers gathered to voice their grievances and make plans to change their situation.

The key to successful organization of the butcher workers after 1900, according to Barrett, was the willingness of the older and more "Americanized" workers, primarily Irish and German, who also held a disproportionate number of the skilled jobs, to integrate the newer workers into the labor movement. Not only did these older "butcher aristocrats" have to reach out across the barriers that divided them from the newer immigrants, blacks and women, but they also had to agree to substitute some form of industrial unionism for the narrow craft model that had helped assure their own dominance.

To a great extent this is what happened. The Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen's Union, founded in 1897, broadened its base and won significant gains for its members over the next two decades, including the 8-hour day and overtime pay. The companies naturally fought back and after WW I were able to crush the union by exploiting racial discord and introducing programs of "welfare capitalism," such as stock sharing and "employee representation plans" (company unions). But there would be many later battles, notably in the 1930s, and with different endings.

What Barrett's book does above all is allow us to grasp the complexities of class fragmentation and formation within a major American industry. Those who are interested in the packinghouse workers and their communities should still read The Jungle, a new edition of which has just been published, with an introduction and annotation by Barrett. To go beneath the surface of Sinclair's novel, however, they will also need to use Barrett's scholarly study.□

Ralph Stone is professor of history at Sangamon State University and author of numerous books and articles. He is currently researching racial and class conflicts among Illinois coal miners in the late 19th century.

Cracking the color line

Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering. Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise
of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Pp. 515. $17.95 (paper).

Confronting the Color Line is an account of Chicago's infamous civil rights conflict during the 1960s by two professors of theology. The book contains striking descriptions, imaginative explanations and controversial conclusions, but its singular strength is the "insider" perspective it offers.

The story is primarily told by the participants as the conflict unfolds. The authors recreate this perspective by drawing upon three remarkable internal documents: minutes of CCCO (Coordinating Council of Community Organizations) meetings, a participant's record of summit meetings between civic and civil rights leaders and a similar record of meetings of the Chicago

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Freedom Movement's steering committee. These documents — now on file at the Chicago Historical Society — provide rare glimpses of some powerful players in action, notably Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mayor Richard J. Daley, Al Raby, Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson.

The authors assign unusual motivations to the participants in the struggle. Instead of presenting them as conventionally guided by narrow self-interest, the authors view them as motivated by historically rooted moral ideas. As Anderson and Pickering state, "This book is a study in the power of ideas." Accordingly, Mayor Daley is portrayed here as no mere politician, worried about the electoral and organizational consequences of the conflict. Rather, he is said to be upholding what the authors call a "civic credo," a broad "defense of the structural status quo" in which the race issue ought to be addressed gradually within a consensual framework.

Indeed, Daley sounded this way to some extent at the summit meetings. Behind the scenes, however, Daley showed that he was moved more by the idea of power than the power of ideas: "[King] is a dirty sonofabitch, a bastard, a prick. . . [King] came here to hurt [Sen. Paul] Douglas because Rockefeller gave him dough, that's why he came here, to try to get Douglas beaten."

The moral-motivation thesis works better when applied to the civil rights movement's leaders than to their opponents. Civil rights leaders generally are more guided than professional politicians by moral, as opposed to political and economic, considerations. This can be explained by their historic isolation from the mainstream, and — in turn — by the exceptional political influence of the black church.

Anderson and Pickering richly detail the problems associated with such a moralistic political style. The movement's internal conflict hurt it as much as the opposition's strength and skill. Strategy sessions were earmarked by heated debates over "right" principles, as opposed to effective actions. Movement leaders were regularly subjected to doctrinal "purity" tests that left them little latitude to negotiate pragmatically. Achieving success at the bargaining table was nearly impossible because compromises were so likely to be characterized as "sell outs."

Even the leadership's generous impulses often worked against the movement. As a minister, Dr. King was torn between the goals of education and moral uplift on the one hand and practical success on the other. Here is Dr. King, for example, charitably counseling his aides against the view that Mayor Daley was a racist: "Daley is no bigot. Daley is about my son's age in understanding the race problem, [but] he is sincere."

My main quarrel with the book involves its overly pessimistic conclusions. The authors contend that the movement failed altogether in Chicago and collapsed nationally a few years later. "Segregation was still the rule, but the will to end it seemed to have been broken."

This surely goes too far. Nobody would deny that "The color line remains a preeminent fact in our social order." But we cannot ignore the enormous economic and political strides made since the 1960s or the movement's critical role in bringing them about. The subsequent growth, increased economic opportunities, and political strength and vitality of today's black middle class would be unthinkable without the civil rights movement. Far more remains to be done, and the black underclass is worse off now than before, but the movement cracked the color line for many blacks.

Politically, black support for the Chicago machine began to collapse immediately after Dr. King's foray into the city. The effects, again, were greatest in middle-class wards, but even the poorest black wards pulled back from the machine. Who would deny that Harold Washington's victory in 1983 was deeply and directly tied to the civil rights movement's earlier efforts? His campaign manager in 1983, Al Raby, had headed the CCCO in the 1960s, and others in the campaign had received their political training in the movement. Many more voters had also drawn their hopes and aspirations from the movement. Just what blinded Anderson and Pickering to these developments and connections is a mystery I cannot fathom.□

William J. Grimshaw, a political scientist, chairs the Social Sciences Department at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His writing on race and politics in Chicago includes "The Daley Legacy, " "Is Chicago Ready for Reform?" and "Unraveling the Enigma: Harold Washington and the Black Political Tradition."

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Sandburg's life, work and love

The Poet and the Dream Girl: The Love Letters of Lilian Steichen and Carl Sandburg.
Edited by Margaret Sandburg. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 273. $22.95 (cloth).

North Callahan. Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987. Pp. 258 with index. $29.75 (cloth).

"Oh, it's a great time that we are living in," the young Lilian Steichen wrote to Carl Sandburg in 1908, "when workingmen sit in little halls on benches and stand [,] stand around the wall thinking — thinking — the thoughts of social democracy!" Less committed observers might have concluded that those workingmen were likelier to bethinking thoughts of the nearest saloon, but so touching is Steichen's hopeful vision that the generous reader feels cruel even suggesting it.

There are some books which people who are sour on the world should avoid the way a sensible diabetic avoids sweets. The Poet and the Dream Girl may be such a book. A collection of 134 love letters written by the future poet, Carl Sandburg, and his future wife, Lilian Steichen, the book recounts an exceptional long-distance love affair in which sweet nothings were confided to the handwritten page and ardor could express itself only in exclamation points.

The publisher notes that the letters did not merely record a courtship, they were the courtship. Steichen was trapped in Princeton, Ill., during the early months of 1908, teaching at the local high school. Sandburg was busy on the road, organizing and speaking for the socialists. During their six-month courtship they met only twice; everything else that budding love demands was done in words on paper.

The result is an extraordinary record. That theirs was an exceptionally loving marriage we may accept on the word of the collection's editor, daughter Margaret Sandburg. That it was an exceptionally exuberant wooing is proved by the letters. It has been noted that even Jonathan Swift was reduced to baby talk in his letters to the woman he loved. It is hardly surprising, then, that Sandburg, whose mature writing style was a kind of grown-up baby talk, should succumb. Apparently it was infectious. The two invented playful names for each other (he was Cully, she Paula or Liz). They even imagined themselves to be a molecule, two entities joined, a new form of matter. Anyone who has dined with a couple who are newly, vibrantly, effusively infatuated with each other will know the test which awaits the reader of these letters.

Generally the love feast between these two seems to have been all dessert. She writes that he embodies the separate intensities of Shelley, Wagner, Marx, Christ, Buddha, Lincoln, Browning and the Vikings. He calls her "dear sailor girl" and then sings, "Two hearts for wayfaring and for sailing — proud, reckless, and bold —Difficulty we will know — But defeat — never — never! Free and large and lavish, we shall insolently and triumphantly sail and sail" — after which the reader may feel a bit seasick.

Nevertheless, The Poet and the Dream Girl offers more than gush. History and biography are well served here, especially the latter. No doubt the book will find most of its audience among the students of Sandburg's life. In many ways, however, this is Lilian Steichen's book. Her letters are more numerous (95) and often more interesting. A member of the family which also produced the photographer Edward Steichen, Lilian was a feminist, socialist sympathizer and advanced thinker. She was well-educated (a bachelor of philosophy from the University of Chicago, Phi Beta Kappa) and predictably suffered in her exile in Princeton. About politics she was almost as naive as Sandburg. About the world she knew, on the other hand, she was a shrewd observer. She acknowledged that Princeton tolerated her dangerous ideas on marriage, religion, politics and the equality of women because she seemed harmless. Her observations of her mis-mated parents were clear-eyed, unsentimental: "Father simply represented so much friction to be overcome, in mother's life."

Of herself she wrote, "Dull I am often — stupid really," which today's reader may decide is at least half mistaken. Steichen made the decision before her marriage never to write for print, apparently having been embarrassed into silence by the quality of Sandburg's work. That was a shame. Were one to read these letters sans signature, it would be hard to guess which author went on to a career as a celebrated poet and biographer.

Sandburg's letters are more selfconsciously poetic, and one can see how they might impress a lonely teacher of literature and "expression." Many of them were scribbled while on the road (very democratically, on odd scraps of paper) and so lack the scope of Steichen's more leisurely reflections. While Sandburg's letters are interesting because of what their author became, Steichen's are interesting because of what she was. However faulty his judgment of politics may have been, Sandburg knew a fascinating person when he met one.

So did North Callahan, author of Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works. It is a useful summary of a remarkably crowded life by an author with a determined affection for the man he calls "the Lincoln of our literature." The problem is that Callahan's literary judgments are suspect ("Sandburg's original contribution to the vision of the tomb seems to lie in his unique description of one as dusty and cool") and his anecdotes largely secondhand, although he bravely quotes the many detractors of the "professional prophet of democracy." Sandburg was a first-class celebrity even if he was a second-rate poet, and he deserves better than a second-rate biography.

In both books the reader can glimpse an era which today seems almost magically innocent. Steichen and Sandburg's was a horizon unshadowed by Verdunnes or the death camps, by the Gulag or the bomb, by the Depression or Chernobyl. All that remains familiar from that world today are the possibilities of passion and the miracle of losing oneself in love.□

James Krohe Jr. is associate editor of Illinois Times, the Springfield weekly, and a frequent contributor to Illinois Issues.

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From cultural hegemony to plurality

Stow Persons. Ethnic Studies at Chicago, 1905-45.
Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 168. $19.95 cloth.

During the 1920s and 1930s the sociology department at the University of Chicago developed into the major American think-tank on race and ethnic relations. Theories and publications from the department's faculty and doctoral students represented what became known within the field as the Chicago School.

What was so remarkable about the work emanating from this department was its affirmation of the humanity of all racial and ethnic groups at a time when racism permeated both scholarship and life in America, relegating groups that existed beyond the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant pale to perpetual inferiority. The Chicago School's recognition of the worth of non-WASPs did not come without a price, however. The school's solution to the challenge of ethnic and racial diversity in America required assimilation of immigrants into an Anglo-American society which set its own rules for the acceptance of outsiders.

In his study of the Chicago School, Stow Persons first examines how the nature of early American race and ethnic relations relegated Native Americans and Africans to subhuman status. Concomitantly, other non-English immigrants were forced to conform to Anglo-American culture in order to settle among the English colonists peacefully. For example, as early as the 1750s Pennsylvania's Anglo-American leadership, which included Benjamin Franklin among its ranks, wrestled with the problem of absorbing German immigrants into their midst. Fears of ethnic pollution subsided as the newcomers quickly adjusted to their new environment without changing the basic fabric of colonial society.

The next major waves of American immigrants were the Irish and German Catholics of the 1830s and 1840s and the eastern Europeans and Orientals of the 1880s. They presented a much more serious challenge to WASP cultural hegemony. The former groups sacrificed their native cultures as they became assimilated. Congress responded to national uneasiness about the latter groups — viewed as unabsorbable newcomers — by restricting their immigration.

Persons next explores how mounting public hysteria surrounding issues of race and ethnicity influenced some East Coast sociologists to formulate racist theories. At the University of Chicago, however, a different approach led to theories that tolerated immigrants' cultures while they adjusted to America so long as they eventually adopted American ways. Furthermore, rather than stressing distinctiveness among immigrant groups, the Chicago School looked for unifying strains among all of them.

The faculty of the University of Chicago's sociology department was primarily WASP and therefore labored under the burden of promoting Anglo-American tradition and culture. In contrast, their doctoral candidates were purposely selected from among outstanding students of diverse backgrounds — white, black and Oriental, Jewish as well as Gentile. These students represented the benefits of assimilation. They also functioned effectively as missionaries of the Chicago School. Their scholarship was noted for its objective detachment and intellectual rigor. Ironically, the student who contributed most to the refinement of the concept of assimilation — E. Franklin Frazier — rejected many of the Chicago School's misconceptions about blacks.

The original impetus for the assimilation theory came from William Isaac Thomas, who was a member of the sociology faculty until scandal caused his removal in 1918. Thomas also trained his students away from Progressive Era reformism "to an intellectual and genuinely scientific interest in society and human nature."

It was left to Thomas's close colleague, Robert E. Park, to implement Thomas's approach. Park also promoted intellectual detachment over personal involvement, which had marked faculty life at Chicago since the days of John Dewey at the turn of the century. Interestingly, Persons does not mention that Park often practiced less detachment than he preached, as when he accepted the presidency of the newly founded Chicago Urban League in 1917. Park even encouraged his black students, most notably Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, to head the league's research department.

The major publication of the Chicago School was The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918) by William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. This study proved the applicability of the assimilationist model. Importantly, no innate or biological aptitudes were found to be peculiar to any one group, and Thomas was adamant that all humans possessed the same intellectual capability. Within four years Charles S. Johnson produced another impressive study, The Negro In Chicago, which applied the immigrant model to non-Europeans.

While Ethnic Relations in Chicago, 1905-45 is primarily written about and aimed at academics, its tone is not so scholarly that the general public would not enjoy it as well. The prose is highly readable, and the book's arguments flow logically. Professor Persons has produced a major study on how the sociology of the Chicago School contributed to a better social climate in our times.□

Christopher R. Reed is associate professor of history at Roosevelt University. His articles on Chicago history have appeared in the Illinois Historical Journal, Michigan Historical Review, Journal of Ethnic Studies and Illinois Issues. He has used the works of the Chicago School in his research and has completed a study of the first 50 years of the Chicago branch of NAACP.

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