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

Cohen, Andrew Wender

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 052183466X ISBN 13 : 9780521834667

Editeur : Cambridge University Press, 2004

Synopsis

This book looks at economic violence in early twentieth-century Chicago.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

The Racketeer's Progress explores the contested and contingent origins of the modern American economy by examining the violent resistance to its development. It explains how carpenters, teamsters, barbers, musicians and others organised to thwart ambitious national corporations. Unions and associations governed commerce through pickets, assaults and bombings. Scholars often ignore this defiance, painting modernisation as a consensual process and presenting craftsmen as reactionary, corrupt and criminal. This is ironic, for the tradesmen's reputation derives from their successful struggle to control modernisation and the emerging consumer economy. Their resistance redirected American law. Progressive-era courts rebuked the craftsmen for attempting to govern trade. In the 1920s, the tradesmen inspired new criminal concepts, such as 'racketeering'. But the Great Depression reversed harsh laws. The craftsmen became a model for New Deal recovery statutes and a focus for constitutional debates. Meanwhile, the state began protecting unions against gangsters like Al Capone.

Revue de presse

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

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Cambridge University Press
• Date d'édition: 2004
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 052183466X
• ISBN 13: 9780521834667
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 352
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Avery; https://www.avery.fr/; ; chemin des peupliers 27; Dardilly; France