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

Andrew Wender Cohen

Cambridge University Press, December 2004

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

A provocative study of law and its social context, this work explores the contingent origins of the modern American economy. It shows how craftsmen - teamsters, barbers, musicians, and others - violently governed commerce in Chicago through pickets, assaults, and bombings. These tradesmen forcefully contested the power of national corporations in their city.

Their resistance shaped American law, heavily influencing the New Deal and federal criminal statutes. This book thus shows that American industrial policy resulted not from a "search for order," but from a brutal struggle for control.