DORSHA HAYES' SLOPPY JOB ON CHICAGO
Mater, Milton
Dorsha Hayes' Sloppy Job On Chicago CHICAGO: CROSSROADS OF AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, by Dorsha B. Hayes. Julian Messner, Inc. $2.75. Reviewed by Milton Mayer THE effort to reduce universal phenomena...
...Miss Hayes tells us nothing we didn't learn from Lewis and Smith's Chicago: A History of Its Reputation, except, without a word of analysis or even inquiry, that this wonderful, wonderful city was the center of that most terrible of all evils, "isolationism...
...no "why...
...And this is a sloppy job, besides...
...I shouldn't have called Miss Hayes a progressive...
...and no "what does it all mean...
...A newspaperman looks in vain for Francis Parker (or, for that matter, Frances Willard) and Ella Flagg Young...
...The author's (or "historian's") bias relieves the monotony...
...Miss Hayes is biased on the progressive side, so I, being biased that way myself, think her book is the best one written about Chicago...
...Most of the books of this type are sociological in the lowest sense of that science: they describe appearances...
...McCormick, Jake Lingle, Billy Lorimer (or Billy Skidmore), Ed Kelly, Robert Morss Lovett, Umbrella Mike Boyle, Jimmy McCahey, Jimmy Petrillo, of the Everleighs, or of Marshall Field III (or II) ; for the story, defic-tionalized, of Sinclair's The Jungle, of Stead's // Christ Came to Chicago, of Norris' The Pit...
...for so much as a word about Col...
...Reviewed by Milton Mayer THE effort to reduce universal phenomena to geographical limits—and especially to a geographical area that isn't really different from other geographical areas—is bound to fail...
...for a real picture of Yerkes, of Insull, of John Dewey, of Charley Dawes, of W. R. Harper, of Ten-Per-Cent Tony Cer-mak...
...This is another of these manful efforts—the best of the lot, as far as Chicago is concerned—and it fails...
...But of insight, in all these books, there is none...
...I should have called her a liberal...
Vol. 8 • June 1944 • No. 26
