Not even the stages of the nighttime Stroll, where jazz and blues performers sang about the trials of working-class city life to enthralled crowds of migrants, seemed to offer much spiritual opposition to the gospel of black capitalism. The blues, in particular, has long been associated with a “black cultural front” that brought together writers, artists, musicians, and labor activists in the interwar years, a perspective based, in part, on the number of blues standards circulating around the scene that articulated the injuries of class in northern ghettos—for example, Mamie Smith’s “Lost Opportunity Blues” and Bessie Smith’s “Poor Man’s Blues.” Hence, the blues and jazz opened up discursive spaces for migrants negotiating the difficulties of urban life in the North, and with the explosion of the race records industry in the 1920s, these spaces extended beyond the venues of the Stroll. Okeh Records, which had become a major race records label by the early 1920s, quickly set up recording operations in Chicago, seeking to tap the energy of the local scene there by recording some the Stroll’s most prominent performers: King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, and Duke Ellington, among others. Chicago blues and jazz performers transformed the bars, clubs, and theaters of the Stroll into their own churches, offering spiritual catharsis and fellowship to working-class blacks dealing with the cultural tensions and economic hardships of their new life in Chicago. Gospel great Thomas Dorsey, who worked the club scene before becoming the “father of black gospel music” as music director at Pilgrim Baptist Church, evoked such spiritual powers in describing a performance of blues queen Ma Rainey:
When she started singing the gold in her teeth would sparkle. She was in the spotlight. She possessed her listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned, as they felt the blues with her. A woman swooned who had lost her man. Men groaned who had given their week’s pay to some woman who promised to be nice, but slipped away and couldn’t be found at the appointed time. . . . As the song ends, she feels an understanding with her audience. . . . By this time everybody is excited and enthusiastic. The applause thunders for one more number. Some woman screams out with a shrill cry of agony as the blues recalls sorrow because some man trifled with her and wounded her to the bone.64
This ability to move the hearts and souls of black working-class audiences has led many to focus, almost single-mindedly, on the subversive undercurrents and oppositional power of the blues genre. “The blues,” Ralph Ellison wrote in 1945 in a review of Richard Wright’s novel Black Boy, “is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near comic lyricism.”65 Though relatively few of the songs one heard on the Stroll were explicitly about racism, it was often a given in the stories of hardship and desperation they told. While many point to Billie Holliday’s famed 1939 antilynching song “Strange Fruit” as the landmark contribution of black music to this movement on the national stage, local blues and jazz musicians had been for decades providing working-class blacks with a language that, in the words of Houston Baker, “connote[d] a world of transience, instability, hard luck, brutalizing work, lost love, minimal security, and enduring human wit and resourcefulness in the face of disaster.”66 Moreover, there is much to be said for the argument, advanced most notably by Angela Davis and Hazel Carby, that the women blues singers of the interwar era helped to build bonds among working-class black women around their challenges to the prevailing codes of patriarchy and respectability in black communities.67 Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, under the spotlight, bedecked in elegant satin gowns and covered in gold, jewels, and feathers, certainly projected images of power and autonomy, and their candor about subjects like domestic abuse, infidelity, turning the tables on the unfaithful, and female same-sex relations no doubt raised awareness about the myriad forms of gender oppression that had been naturalized as common sense.
But there was another side to the blues and jazz. The glamorously adorned, gilded, plumed bodies of the blues queens of the interwar years were dual signifiers. The aura of fame and wealth surrounding figures like Rainey, who earned the nickname of “Gold Necklace Woman of the Blues” for her practice of wearing a large chain of gold dollars around her neck, symbolically reinforced the dreams of social mobility that the likes of Binga, Abbott, and Overton were presenting as the logical by-products of black capitalism. The conspicuous taste of performers like Rainey and Smith was not a detail but rather was central to their star power, which was supported by extensive press coverage of their relatively lavish lifestyles. Such circumstances explain a great deal about the resonance of Bessie Smith’s 1929 classic “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out,” which famously begins: “Once I lived the life of a millionaire / Spendin’ my money, I didn’t care.”
While lacking the extravagance of the blues queens, the Stroll’s jazz greats—Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Cab Calloway—also dressed sharply in order to project an unmistakable image of entrepreneurial ambition and success in the big city. This dress code responded, in part, to accusations frequently heard on the other side of the color line that jazz was immoral, baseless, and devoid of artistic value. Yet it also reflected notions of respectability among the race men of the daytime Stroll. Such values, for example, suffused the widely read weekly Defender column “The Musical Bunch,” which was intended to publicize the jazz scene but which also ended up serving as a sounding board for columnist (and former bandleader) Dave Peyton’s moralizing diatribes about the lack of professionalism and sobriety exhibited by Stroll musicians. “When the public learns you are ratty and without culture,” Peyton exhorted in 1928, “they learn to dislike your work.”68 In fact, Peyton even went so far as to list his own “don’ts” and to dispense fatherly financial advice to temper the extravagant spending habits of musicians, imploring them to forego the purchase of cars and to invest their money in real estate, save their money in the bank, and purchase proper insurance.69 While Peyton was certainly an admirer of Louis Armstrong, he celebrated Armstrong’s image as much as his artistic virtuosity, referring to him as a “fine example of ambition and thrift.”70 True to the spirit of the newspaper he was working for, Peyton mixed such moralizing middle-class condescension with strong condemnations regarding the racism stigmatizing black musicians and limiting their careers. Nonetheless, the great influence his columns wielded ultimately indicates that the Stroll’s jazz and blues scene hardly represented an escape from middle-class values of respectability or from the cultural racism of the white gaze.
FIGURE 5. Louis Armstrong looking sharp. Public domain.
It was perhaps for this reason that when Chicago’s jazz front men took to words, they often sang of the pomp and splendor of the Stroll and the Black Metropolis around it in ways that conveyed possibility, opportunity, and mobility. Although Louis Armstrong, perhaps Chicago’s most renowned jazz figure of the era, conveyed the constraining power of racism in his recording of Fats Waller and Andy Razaf’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” this was an aberration.71 In fact, he was more recognized for his fun-loving scat singing style, popularized by his 1926 hit “Heebie Jeebies.” Indeed, Armstrong’s simple lyrics often sought to escape the hard realities of working-class black life by conveying the liberatory excitement of the nighttime Stroll in such songs as “Sunset Café Stomp”—named after the popular Stroll venue. Moreover, Armstrong’s canvases of the nighttime Stroll were juxtaposed in his sets with portrayals of the respectability and bravado that came with financial success, in such numbers as “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” and “Big Butter and Egg Man.” Such tunes were understood within a lexical field in which the cash economy was front and center. Bessie Smith’s evocation of the crass opportunism displayed by “friends” taking advantage of another’s financial success and then turning their backs during hard times made her hit “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out” one of the era
’s classics, but such tales of material considerations shaping interpersonal relations were commonplace within the lyrical landscape of the jazz and blues in the 1920s and 1930s. Louis Armstrong, for example, evoked a similar sentiment in his 1927 song “S.O.L. Blues,” in which the narrator proclaims:
Now I’m with you sweet mama / as long as you have the bucks
(Bucks, bucks, bucks . . . I mean money, mama!)
I’m with you sweet mama / as long as you have ba-rucks, bucks, bucks
When the bucks run out, sweet mama you’re out of luck (out of luck, luck, luck).
Cab Calloway’s 1932 hit “Minnie the Moocher” turned on a related motif with its story of a gold-digging woman who “had a million dollars’ worth of nickels and dimes” and who “counted them all a million times.”
Yet perhaps even more significant than what was conveyed when blues and jazz performers in the Black Metropolis sang was what they left unsung. Virtually nonexistent within the moral universe of the blues and jazz were sentiments and feelings that aligned with the anticapitalist critiques and appeals for class-based collective action being made by those on the frontlines of struggles over labor and housing in the interwar Black Metropolis. While it was perhaps understood that the power of white racism lingered somewhere in the background of the stories of sorrow and hardship being staged on the Stroll, the more specific explanations being offered up revolved largely around bad luck, personal failings, and betrayal. In the end, the spirit of the nighttime Stroll, as it was lived by its habitués in the bars, clubs, and theaters, was not much more than a caricature of its daytime counterpart.
THREE
White and Black
CITY AT WAR
On June 14, 1942, an estimated 400,000 Chicagoans marched in a parade that snaked through more than fifty miles of the city’s streets and lasted more than seventeen hours. The event was held to commemorate Flag Day, a holiday that would not attain official status until 1949 but had been celebrated by cities and towns across the nation since at least the 1880s. In fact, Chicago’s first recorded Flag Day celebration was in 1894, when a reported 300,000 children from its public schools rallied around American flags in parks across the city. But this was the first such celebration since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and thus there was a much more pronounced sense of purpose in the air. Coming in the twilight of an era of bitter labor strife, Chicago’s Office of Civilian Defense organized the affair so as to demonstrate the city’s irreproachable spirit of national unity. While few in the labor movement had forgotten the horror of the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937, when police had gunned down ten members of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee on a prairie near Republic Steel, the procession saw nearly every branch of organized labor marching in step with thousands of local manufacturers and business organizations. Moreover, the patriotic spirit on display in this parade was hardly exclusive to the world of business and work. Every neighborhood affiliated with the Office of Civilian Defense marked its proud participation by contributing a float representing some aspect of the Civilian Defense movement.
Chicago was certainly not alone in its enthusiasm for supporting the war effort on the home front. No war in American history had ever witnessed such a clear consensus of support, nor has any since. While World War I saw some 12 percent of draftees refusing to report or deserting training camps, only 0.5 percent tried to avoid serving during the Second World War. Even black leaders who were vocal critics of the American racial order during the war years, calling upon the government to fight racism at home as zealously as it fought fascism overseas, seldom publicly staked out positions opposing the war itself. World War II was already being mythologized as the “good war” even before American troops set foot on overseas battlegrounds. Although some sense of a national mission in the world had been a fixture of American political life since the revolutionary era, World War II was perhaps the first moment when such ideas became popular heartfelt sentiments rather than merely the rhetorical flourishes of statesmen and civic leaders. And they were sentiments felt in the hearts of a range of ethnic Americans who not so long before, in the years prior to the Democratic Party’s New Deal embrace of “new” immigrants and ethnics from southern and eastern Europe, had found themselves on the outside of American mainstream culture and political life. Prohibition, the antivice crusades, and the moral panic around real-life and filmic gangsters in the 1920s and 1930s all reflected the outsider status of these immigrants and their American-born children. But now their association with the “good war” was promising to deliver them into the ranks of “good” Americans, a message Hollywood drove home on the big screen with a spate of war films like Sahara (1943) and Purple Heart (1944) that depicted multiethnic bands of Americans overcoming their cultural differences and pulling together to save the day.1
What was playing out on the streets of Chicago during this Flag Day parade, however, was as much a managed form of civic boosterism as some kind of interethnic solidarity. Regardless of the importance of national unity on the home front to the cause of winning the war, Chicago found itself competing with other industrial cities for a slice of the war production pie being served up by the federal government. Chicago’s industrial production, after all, had not rebounded from the depths of the Great Depression as quickly as that of many other cities across the nation, and some still feared a renewal of the bitter labor conflict of past years. In fact, in the months leading up to the parade, Mayor Kelly had complained publicly that while the city had received defense orders in steel, railway car construction, and food processing, Chicago was still not getting its fair share. Attracting more defense contracts, as Kelly and the Cook County Democratic Party leadership well understood, hinged on demonstrating that Chicago was a city in which employers and employees knew how to work together to keep production flowing smoothly. This became especially critical as its neighbor to the east, Detroit, began to witness a wave of labor disputes, wildcat strikes, and production slowdowns that led a reporter for Life magazine to exclaim, “Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S.”2 Chicago, by contrast, would boast at war’s end that not one single labor stoppage had prevented a shipment of goods from going out on time, a situation attributable, on the one hand, to the local influence of the less militant American Federation of Labor, and on the other, to Mayor Kelly’s excellent rapport with union leaders. Kelly had so thoroughly wiped from his hands the blood of the Memorial Day Massacre that in the 1939 mayoral elections a steelworker whose eye had been shot out by police in the affair had gone on the radio to endorse his candidacy. Moreover, Kelly’s tolerance of vice and gambling had earned him the blessings—not to mention the kickbacks—of organized crime kingpins, which also contributed to his appeal to the labor movement.
Yet Chicago’s bid for a leadership role in the national war effort rested not merely on the cooperation of its workforce. The Kelly administration had strived to show from the war’s outset that war mobilization in Chicago did not begin and end on the factory floors. Having moved into its Loop headquarters scarcely one week after the war had been declared, Chicago’s Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) lost little time in launching war bond promotions, enlistment campaigns, salvage collection initiatives, and blood drives. Women planted victory gardens, gathered old kitchen utensils, siphoned off cooking fats, baked cakes for soldiers staying at one of the city’s servicemen centers, and eagerly participated in preparedness drills. The public school system ran a salvaging drive for tin, rubber, and scrap metal that had schoolchildren bringing 1,500,000 pounds of scrap to school in toy wagons and wheelbarrows.
The enormous success of these efforts—Chicago led the nation in enlistments, war bond sales, blood donations, and salvage materials collected—was due, in part, to the fact that the city already possessed a vertical chain of command structure par excellence. Since elections were fought like wars in Chicago, the Democratic Party machine was already set up for regimented, block-level mobilization. Chicago’s OCD th
us broke up the city into divisions, zones, and finally blocks, each of which was led by a block captain. The block captain was to be elected and was supposed to hold meetings with his neighbors to apprise them of new developments. The mayor’s office referred to these as “New England town meetings,” but the modus vivendi here was, in reality, much more homegrown.3 That is to say, the roughly twenty thousand block captains in wartime Chicago were much less community organizers than operatives in the chain of command; they enforced participation in blackouts and preparedness drills, helped the OCD investigate the background of citizens, and looked out for draft dodgers, black marketeers, and suspicious characters.4
Chicago’s mobilization plan was so effective that the federal government adopted it as the model for the entire nation. And yet, despite such impressive results and despite Kelly’s frequent lobbying trips to Washington, federal dollars were still not flowing into Chicago at a rate satisfactory to its political and business establishment. That began to change, however, in the second half of 1942, when the city began to see more of the $24 billion that the federal government would spend on military supply orders by the end of the war. This money was divided between more than 1,400 contractors in the Chicago region, leading to a broad-based industrial boom that saw the construction of more than three hundred new manufacturing facilities and the expansion or improvement of nearly one thousand others. Pullman built tanks; International Harvester produced military tractors, torpedoes, and artillery shells; Douglas Aircraft turned out C-54 transport planes; and Dodge-Chicago built engines for the famed B-29 Superfortress bombers in a new plant that employed 31,000 people and cost nearly $100 million. Nor was such high-paced economic activity restricted to the heavy industries. Baxter Laboratories, for example, developed the first sterile, vacuum-type blood collection and storage container, the enormous demand for which required the construction of two temporary plants; its main competitor in that area, Abbott Laboratories, shipped millions of water purification tablets overseas and began the first mass commercial production of penicillin. The communications technology firm Western Electric developed military radar systems, while forty of the city’s electronics factories combined efforts to produce over half the communications equipment utilized by the U.S. military during the war.
Chicago on the Make Page 13
