City of courts: Crime, law, and social policy in Chicago, 1880-1930

A social and legal history of urban law and order in America between Reconstruction and the New Deal, this dissertation analyzes the widening public role that urban courts assumed as proving grounds for "progressive" social policies and as public arenas for cultural debates over the meaning of crime in an urban-industrial democracy. It is the first study to survey 300,000 criminal case files from Progressive Era Chicago--a major archival discovery--and casts new light upon judges' correspondence, court reports, sociological studies, newspapers, law reviews, case law, and papers of the reform groups that made the "second city" America's progressive crucible. The thesis reconstructs the cultural politics and judicial practice of the Municipal Court of Chicago, the novel judicial bureaucracy that served as the model--institutional and imaginative--for the "modernization" of urban courts across the United States. The municipal court reflected and reshaped Chicago's urban culture and its emerging politics of needs, as well as national trends in legal thought, professionalization, and social policing.; The thesis engages recent histories of the progressive "transformation" of American law and "new institutionalist" studies of the origins of the modern liberal state. I argue that the familiar achievements of progressive jurists in the economic sphere--the invention of a "sociological jurisprudence" that legitimated state intervention into the industrial economy--were institutionally and conceptually tied to a burst of judicial intervention in the "social" sphere: the terrain of everyday life, where the state could address the volatile relations of race, nationality, gender, and generation that so preoccupied progressive reformers. Criminal justice historians apply deterministic models to modern criminal policy, treating it either as a natural and necessary response to "modernization" or as simply a stage in the rise of a Foucauldian "therapeutic state." By taking seriously the political nature of local courts, the dissertation recovers the contingency and contestation that were ever-present at the creation of modern programs of social policing and public welfare. Finally, the project critically addresses new cultural histories of urban social policing by shifting attention from professions and other private disciplinary institutions to law and the state.