(iPoster) Blues Politics in Chicago

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics and History

Abstract

White supremacist racial order in Chicago targeted three different areas of vice for the first four decades of the twentieth century. Each threatened the morality and prudence of upper-class White society from prostitution to alcohol to gambling. White supremacist order helped to legitimize itself with each moral boogeyman. Moral panics in the U.S. fall into tropes of building a people, an “us,” versus the dangerous others, “them” (Morone 2003). Chicago was home to several foreign others and dangerous classes to fear, control and manage spatially, each subject to specific moral panics. Whether it was Irish drinking, Italian organized crime or so-called Black hypersexuality, fears about “the lower moral standards” of European immigrants and Black migrants affecting “the better classes” were likely present in the minds of Chicago policymakers and reformers (Ibid., 231). Moral panic was a response to the racial and spatial construction of Black criminality produced by Chicago's urban policymaking and policing (Muhammad 2019). The White City manipulated and managed the very “pestilence” it so feared and yet needed to exist.

South Side blues clubs have consistently across time been geographic terrain for Black Americans to claim autonomy and defend themselves against waves of urban change, moralist and racial targeting, and later redevelopment and “urban renewal”. Instill fear and terror to reform and reconstruct the city was a certain vision of Chicago’s urban politics. The “terror” half of Chicago’s redevelopment machine’s strategy to “terror-redevelop” can be trace back to gambling raids and early tough-on-crime shift from Chicago Police Department under Mayor Anton Cermak (1931-33) (Wilson 2018). Mayor Edward J. Kelly terrorized the everyday illegal gambler while working with organized crime bosses. Mayor Kelly kept the city afloat and allowed it to thrive in the time when the urban blues began to thrive as well.

The blues in Chicago represents the soundscape for commercialized leisure, organized crime and policy actions that expanded the American State. The prosecution of prostitution, prohibition of alcohol, and crackdown on gambling in Chicago all have an immediate connection to the social life of the blues. The blues was within earshot of criminal enterprise and vice. The blues also gave birth to its own informal markets and networks through the house rent parties and the public entertainment at Maxwell Street Market. I use blues politics as a shorthand for the institutional arrangements of Chicago’s blues culture, leisure-based labor economy, and blues music. Blues politics in Chicago is the fruit of the blues epistemology’s branches which support from different roots and trunks from the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans and East Texas blues traditions (Woods 2017). Blues music and making Black space are used to resist white supremacist domination despite constraints of structurally racist policy in the urban context. The blues politics was a means of exacting redress and searching spatial justice in Chicago (Soja 2010).

I discuss blues politics as it moves through different national political eras and local mayoral regimes, various urban spatializations, and eras of music. We see Black Chicago move through the Jazz Age including impressions of blues from New Orleans and Chicagoan piano music to a prominence of South migrant blues to arrive a new production of a specific Chicago urban blues, an assemblage of its predecessors. The Progressive Era, Prohibition, Great Depression, New Deal create political circumstances managed and manipulated uniquely by each mayor and their “machine”: Bill Thompson, William Dever, Big Bill (again), Cermak, Edward J. Kelly. The charisma of the one man alone was the Republican machine for Thompson where Mayor Kelly built the Democratic machine into an organization, for instance. Lastly, the blues comes to life in various settings including cabarets, clubs, buffet flats, house rent parties, and street performing. This project takes head on the difficult task of interpreting and theorizing snapshots of three decades (1915-47) of politics, urbanization, and state building through several blues that drum it along. I will also draw on revival, remembrance, and institutionalization of the blues in an archive from mid-1970s-1985 historicize the need for yet another blues revival which we may be experiencing today.

Cabarets, clubs, and afterhours joints joined together the various influential elements from Chicago’s public life and criminal underworld. The nightlife gathering institutions are missed if we do not include the blues musician and blues/jazz cabaret culture in the picture alongside policy kings, machine politics, and the policing and protection of prostitution, gambling, and alcohol in Chicago. The blues and the cabaret are the sonic-spatial environment hosting and oftentimes providing sonic energy for race enterprise and political deals. The blues is a consistent force for interpretive work and Black congregation amidst each political era.

Author

• Kory Gaines, Johns Hopkins University