Adrift in the Big City
SHAPIRO, HARVEY D.
Adrift in the Big City Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago By Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander Harper and Row. 435 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Harvey D. Shapiro Free-lance writer based in Chicago Uptown...
...Uptown, after all, is not Harlem...
...More than half of its 50,000 residents were born in the South, mostly along the Appalachian ridge, and nearly 15,000 are on welfare...
...In addition, a white Young Patriots party, like the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, has been created to channel the discontent of young people into revolutionary rhetoric and self-help action...
...Transcribed tape recordings are fast becoming the literary equivalent of cinema verite...
...Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago attempts to tell the tale of these displaced people and the efforts to organize them politically...
...It was established in 1964 along with several other community groups, including Tom Hayden's Newark Community Union Project...
...Gitlin and Miss Hollander's comments, written in the terse, tough-minded, cynical style usually affected by writers for the Harvard Crimson, do not tell us the basic facts we need to know about the neighborhood and the authors' relation to it...
...When relating his misfortunes, Ras Bryant, a one-armed ex-miner and moonshiner who had been jailed for knifing a man and who had deserted a common-law wife, seems more a real bastard than a victim of circumstances...
...about a neighborhood near Uptown) and Hard Times (subtitled "An Oral History of the Great Depression"), Chicago radio personality Terkel collected a series of recorded vignettes that added up to powerful impressionistic portraits of an area and an era...
...Puerto Ricans and Indians...
...Their book is a result of simply setting a tape recorder in front of a half-dozen Uptowners and letting each tell his story...
...newsreels, they are a potpourri of newspaper headlines, lyrics of folk songs and snippets of conversation...
...The authors, Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander, came to the area as organizers for Jobs Or Income Now (join), a community action group founded by sds...
...Although these groups later collapsed--which may have had much to do with the onset of sds' Narodnik stage--from the remnants of join there emerged a People's Coalition dedicated to exerting pressure on Mayor Richard Daley's machine...
...The soliloquies offered by six Uptown residents prove too thin and disjointed to reveal much about any of them...
...The six talk about their grim lives in both the mountains and Chicago...
...And collectively, their observations are too diverse to transmit a clear picture of Uptown...
...Lewis, on the other hand, concentrated his tape recorder on the life of a single family and, in La Vida and Children of Sanchez, made it possible for these unlettered people to "write" an insightful autobiography...
...Reviewed by Harvey D. Shapiro Free-lance writer based in Chicago Uptown is Chicago's square mile of run-down hotels and six-flats lying in the shadow of the ornate Gold Coast apartments north of the Loop (the backdrop for much of the film Medium Cool...
...My mother was picking cotton for fifty cents a day and feeding eight of us...
...That Uptown has achieved a degree of unity and strength is all the more interesting because its residents and neighbors are not only poor whites but also blacks...
...These white hillbillies, driven north by the decline and mechanization and, again, decline of the coal mines, now find themselves, like midnight cowboys, adrift in the cold confines of the big city...
...Nevertheless, racial antagonisms persist...
...At the end of the book we know a little about the people and a little about the area, but truly understand neither...
...Unable to stay in the hills, and unable to adjust to urban life, they can be seen in Uptown's numerous taverns, or on the street corners and doorsteps, listening to country and western music...
...It is a shame, really, because the fruits of join's labor are significant...
...Besides the selection of tapes, the authors' contributions to the book consist of a brief preface, introduction and epilogue, none of them very penetrating...
...Yet even in Chicago many people are unaware of the existence of this slum and its bewildered, angry denizens...
...The merits of this emerging subgenre range widely, from Dick Schaap's assembly-line sports biographies to the important books produced by Studs Terkel and Oscar Lewis...
...Ultimately, instead of bringing us into Uptown and involving us with the lives of its inhabitants, this book closes us out...
...Perhaps this is because Gitlin and Miss Hollander fail to portray meaningfully the problems these people are actually up against...
...My father was sick off and on all his life...
...The method employed by the authors of Uptown falls between these two alternatives, and is not very successful...
...For the hillbilly heritage is marked by strains of both Southern populism and Southern racism, and these two have been battling like the Hatfields and the McCoys in Chicago...
...For Division Street: U.S.A...
...I grew up pretty hard," says Joe Jamison...
...Yet somehow our sympathies are not engaged...
...Rising Up Angry, a newspaper written by and for poor whites in the Midwest, has recaptured the militant indignation that once flavored trade-union newspapers...
...What information there is, the reader must glean from the chapter divisions (similar to John Dos Passos' U.S.A...
...it is not a neighborhood whose general contours and character are known even by those who have never been there...
...The story of this battle--a fascinating one, I think--is waiting to be told...
Vol. 53 • November 1970 • No. 21
