New Chicago

CHICAGO: A PORTRAIT--Henry Justin Smith--Century ($5)*

Henry Justin Smith, for five years the spare, bespectacled, kindly managing editor of the Chicago Daily News, knows his city, likes to write about it. His first book on Chicago (Chicago: The History of Its Reputation--TIME, Sept. 9, 1929), written in collaboration with Lloyd Lewis (now Daily News drama critic), delved deep into the gory lore of Chicago's dirty past, took no pains to paint a pretty picture. With a World's Fair in the offing, with a concerted effort on the part of its more worthy citizenry to put raw beefsteak on Chicago's black eye, Author Smith has now changed his vein. In Chicago: A Portrait Mr. Smith, writing alone, turns to glorification.

Contrary to the blurb on its jacket, contrary to its title, Chicago: A Portrait is in a sense also a history. But it is a history piece by piece, park by park, suburb by suburb, a jumpy historical travelog rather than a history of the city as a whole.

"As no narrator fails to mention," the barber-shop floor of the first Palmer House was copiously studded with silver dollars. Engineers turned the tide of the Chicago River, made it flow from, instead of into. Lake Michigan; and "roistering sailors" once had a ditty:

O, Chicago, you make me shiver With your dirty streets and your stinking river.

But much of the stinking and shivering. Author Smith would have you believe, is a thing of the past. He dwells painstakingly on the development of park systems, north, south and west; on the genesis of libraries and statuary; on famed and philanthropic gentlemen who prophesied with money. Even Chicago's Negroes, living in dark solidity in the Black Belt, are not so bad as they used to be: "This migrant from the plantation or the city 'patch' has banks crammed, in normal times, with his savings and his investments. He has his own insurance companies, contracting builders, brokers, merchants, and real estate dealers. . . . The Negro here, as everywhere, is a great organizer. . ."

With a hasty word here & there Mr. Smith glosses over the massacres and riots that once were such vivid reminders of Chicago; and over Alphonse ("Scarface" ) Capone and Cicero. Swashbuckling William Hale Thompson is never mentioned by name. Corrupt governments act-politely adumbrated. Of the city's newspapers the only mention concerns their buildings.

*Published Nov. 5.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.