A History of America in 100 Maps

188 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS

In the 1920s and 1930s newspapers relentlessly

portrayed Chicago as a lawless town. Breathless

headlines covered the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

in 1929, when Al Capone and his men set about

murdering rival gang members in a bid to control

the city’s organized crime. This coverage continued

through the 1930s, though almost all American cities

were reckoning with similar challenges that were only

exacerbated by Prohibition.

The explosion of urban crime in the interwar years

was closely studied by sociologists at the University

of Chicago. Robert Park, a product of the Progressive

Era, taught his students to think of cities in ecological

terms, as dynamic systems. The city of Chicago

became their laboratory. One of Park’s leading

students was Frederic Thrasher, who believed the

key to controlling crime was a more thorough study

of gang behavior. In his seven-year investigation,

Thrasher counted 1,000 gangs, composed of over

25,000 members. These ranged from “embryonic”

groups of young boys to sophisticated networks that

controlled organized crime. Thrasher explored gangs

as social units with their own internal logic and social

structure. If they were to be overcome, gangs must

first be understood.

Thrasher’s study is full of extraordinary detail

based on census data, institutions, and his own

surveys. He joined gang members in their haunts

and hangouts to observe their rituals, codes, and

language. He interviewed them at length about

their values and experiences. And, though he did

not use the term “rape,” he discussed shocking

patterns of sexual behavior reported by his subjects.

Later sociologists regarded Thrasher’s work as

unsystematic and dated, but it remained the

most comprehensive investigation of the subject

for decades.

Trained by Park to think in spatial terms, Thrasher

mapped Chicago’s criminal landscape. In the portion

shown here, he identified the location of ethnic

enclaves across the city. Poles, Italians, Lithuanians,

Germans, and the Dutch had settled in Chicago at

the turn of the century while African Americans had

UNDERSTANDING THE UNDERWORLD

Frederic M. Thrasher, “Chicago’s

Gangland,” 1927

migrated during and after World War I. Thrasher also

identified large populations of native born Americans

who were equally involved in the gang culture of the

interwar era.

This ethnic landscape formed the backdrop of

Thrasher’s map. Then he used red ink to identify the

presence and influence of various gangs across the

city landscape. Clear red lines denote the stronger

and more territorial gangs, while smaller icons mark

their less powerful counterparts. A close look at the

map indicates that Thrasher aimed to do justice to

the local vernacular, from Dukies to Mickies, Lake

Front Jungles to No Man’s Land. “Back of the Yards,”

“Wop Park,” and “Bum Park” all signal particular

neighborhoods, if not specific locations. Similarly,

across the city he marked sites where individual

gangs came up against one another.

Like many interwar sociologists, Thrasher

was influenced by the community of Hull House

reformers who had dedicated themselves to Chicago’s

immigrant communities on the South Side at the turn

of the century (page 166). That earlier generation used

maps to isolate particular classes of information—

such as ethnicity or wages—in order to investigate

urban structure. Here Thrasher similarly mapped the

distribution of gangs and their realm of influence

in order to discern their relationship to the urban

landscape. He found that gangs clustered around

canals, rivers, railroad tracks, and industrial areas,

what he termed “interstitial” spaces. Stepping back

further, he noticed that the gangs formed a kind of

semicircle around the central loop, hemmed in by the

more settled and safer residential areas that formed

the outer ring of Chicagoland.

Thrasher’s study was part of the emerging field of

urban sociology. It bore directly on the new realm of

juvenile justice, which aimed to treat young offenders

not in terms of their personal moral failings but as

part of a larger social order. Thrasher observed that

Chicago’s gangs were produced by the colossal influx

of new residents—mostly immigrants—who had

endured massive dislocation. For young men who

were bored at school and too young to work, gangs

offered structure, hierarchy, and a sense of belonging

and purpose. In other words, gangs had a role to

play, and until this was acknowledged and addressed

they would continue to thrive.