Structuring Poverty in the Windy City

Investigations of poverty and of social engineering of the poor are not uncommon topics, nor are studies of urban development in Chicago or the history of the Great Migration. What is unique in Structuring Poverty in the Windy City and what gives power to its analysis is the way the author has created a successful typology of poverty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Compulsory autonomy, virtue, and isolation—the three analytical categories Joel E. Black employs—are seemingly disparate ideas that, together, describe the taxonomy of poverty in Chicago and the groups who embodied the poor and the outcast during the period. Black looks at hoboes, tramps, the jobless, and the homeless, all presumably white men who failed to become “autonomous” and thus failed in “their duty to provide”; women, also presumably white, who were deemed deficient in “virtue” and, under the new vagrancy laws, drew the attention of reformers and the Morals Court; and African Americans of the Great Migration, who, because of race, were excluded from jobs and communal spaces and were physically isolated in their new urban poverty. In Black's work, autonomy and virtue describe seemingly problematic personal “failures,” and isolation, attributed to an entire category of people, and was an uncontrollable fact of life

Autonomy · Basic needs · Criminology · Culture of poverty · Political science · Poverty · Social science · Sociology · Thriving · Underclass · Virtue · White (mutation · Anthropology · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law