The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940

ISBN-13: 9780521834667 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 352 str.

Andrew Cohen; Christopher L. Tomlins

Opis

A provocative study of law and its social context, this work explores the contingent origins of the modern American economy. It shows how craftsmen - teamsters, barbers, musicians, and others - violently governed commerce in Chicago through pickets, assaults, and bombings. These tradesmen forcefully contested the power of national corporations in their city. Their resistance shaped American law, heavily influencing the New Deal and federal criminal statutes. This book thus shows that American industrial policy resulted not from a "search for order," but from a brutal struggle for control.

Recenzje

Review of the hardback: 'Insisting that we look beyond the gleaming factories and department stores that have dominated the historical literature to the highly complex, unstable, and violent world of small businessmen and skilled craftsmen that dominated the early twentieth-century city and fiercely resisted the triumph of corporate capitalism, Andrew Cohen makes us look at the social organisation of the city anew and develops a bracing reinterpretation of the political economy of the Progressive Era and New Deal. Prodigiously researched and boldly argued, this is revisionist history at its best.' George Chauncey, University of Chicago

Spis treści

1. Modernisation and its discontents, 1900; 2. Ruling the urban economy; 3. The struggle for order; 4. The progressive reaction; 5. Rhetoric into law; 6. Containing mass society and the problem of corruption; 7. From conspiracy to racketeering; 8. The new deal order from the bottom up; Epilogue: policing the post-war consensus.