Books in Brief: Chicago: A Personal History of America’s Most American City

Chicago: A Personal History of America’s Most American City, by Finis Farr (Arlington, 428 pp., $12.95). Finis Farr’s “personal history” of Chicago tells us more about Mr. Farr than it does about Chicago. In general, he admires everything that was transplanted to nineteenth-century Chicago from the Eastern seaboard and is repelled by all that is indigenous or contemporary. For Farr the city’s golden age began with the 1893 Columbian Exposition and ended with America’s entry into the First World War. He has nothing but undisguised contempt for the Chicago of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the important question to ask about Chicago is why is it the only American metropolis that still “works.” The answer will not be found at the tea tables of the nineteenth-century near-North Side. Farr despises Mayor Richard J. Daley whom he describes as ignorant and vain, “an embarrassing anachronism in 1968.” And his description of Chicago police officers is, implicitly, his perception of most contemporary Chicagoans: “six-pack, bluecollar men of the sort who stand in reverence to the National Anthem before a wrestling match or the first race at a dog track and choke with anger when they think of a dirty Red showing disrespect to Our Flag.” The people who made Chicago what it is today are not the immigrants from Boston but the immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Greece, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Poland, and the American South. If you want to understand Chicago read George Ade, Studs Lonigan, or Raisin in the Sun—not Finis Farr’s Chicago.

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S. Thorson

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Chicago: A Personal History of America’s Most American City, by Finis Farr (Arlington, 428 pp., $12.95). Finis Farr’s “personal history” of Chicago tells us more about Mr. Farr than it does about Chicago. In general, he admires everything that was transplanted to nineteenth-century Chicago from the Eastern seaboard and is repelled by all that is indigenous or contemporary. For Farr the city’s golden age began with the 1893 Columbian Exposition and ended with America’s entry into the First World War. He has nothing but undisguised contempt for the Chicago of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the important question to ask about Chicago is why is it the only American metropolis that still “works.” The answer will not be found at the tea tables of the nineteenth-century near-North Side. Farr despises Mayor Richard J. Daley whom he describes as ignorant and vain, “an embarrassing anachronism in 1968.” And his description of Chicago police officers is, implicitly, his perception of most contemporary Chicagoans: “six-pack, bluecollar men of the sort who stand in reverence to the National Anthem before a wrestling match or the first race at a dog track and choke with anger when they think of a dirty Red showing disrespect to Our Flag.” The people who made Chicago what it is today are not the immigrants from Boston but the immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Greece, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Poland, and the American South. If you want to understand Chicago read George Ade, Studs Lonigan, or Raisin in the Sun—not Finis Farr’s Chicago.