Pillaging the Vanguard: Chicago and the Neoliberal Shift of Black Politics from 1929 to 1994
Creators: name: Smith, Caleb
Publisher: name: Brandeis University
Year: 2025
Subjects: Black Politics
Chicago
Neoliberalism
U.S. Political History
U.S. Politics
Public Policy
American History

description: ABSTRACT
description: Pillaging the Vanguard: Chicago and the Neoliberal Turn of Black Politics from 1929 to 1994
description: A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the
description: Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University
description: Waltham, Massachusetts
description: By Caleb Smith
description: This dissertation explores the political history of African Americans in Chicago from 1929 to 1994. At the center of this historical examination, I argue that Black legislators in the city underwent a neoliberal shift that spans from the 1940s, accelerates after the 1972 Gary Convention, and completes with the passage of Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. More specifically, these lawmakers gradually abandoned New Deal progressivism in favor of privatization and austerity. Accordingly, I also explore how race and class affected the political choices and strategies Black Chicagoans employed before, during, and after the city’s eras of machine politics and political reform, explaining how such a neoliberal shift occurred, while noting it was neither inevitable nor unintentional.
description: I make several key interventions throughout this manuscript. First, I posit Chicago is foundational in its development of Black politics in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, Black politics in the city of Chicago dramatically reorients and restructures the national Democratic Party’s policy platform on racial inequality and economics. Chicago demonstrates how Black legislators, business leaders, and working-class residents, sometimes reluctantly and other times eagerly, privatized public sector resources as a response to economic downturn and federal austerity measures.
description: Moreover, I introduce the term “Black neoliberalism,” to better contextualize the political history of Blackness and neoliberal policy in the United States. Arising from the fallout of the Gary Convention of 1972, Black neoliberalism argued that the power of the state and public policy must be used to grow Black institutions and wealth. The ideology of Black neoliberalism also co-opted the rhetorical and policy strategies of civil rights and Black Power activism around community control and racial solidarity to defend the use of U.S. institutional power to enhance the influence of private capital. Black neoliberalism provides a unique framework to historicize Black politicians and entrepreneurs’ promotion of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s as the larger historiography rarely comments on these connections.
description: The proceeding chapters examine the circumstances leading toward this political shift, the shift itself, and its aftermath. The first chapter looks at the rebirth of Black politics in Chicago after its exit from the national stage following the Redemption era. The second chapter focuses on the so-called “Silent Six” politicians and the grassroots resistance to the political machine under Mayor Richard J. Daley. The third chapter examines the fight to lead Black politics during the post-Civil Rights Movement era of the 1970s between activists and elected officials. Chapter four delves into how neoliberalism thrived under the reform politics of the Harold Washington mayoralty. Chapter five ends the dissertation with the exploration of neoliberalism’s full entrenchment within Black politics and the Democratic Party in Chicago and across the nation.
description: By examining the lives of several key individuals in Chicago’s government, private enterprises, and activist organizations, I reveal how institutions reshaped Black politics into a weapon of capitalist development. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, Chicago, more than any other city, shaped Black politics in the United States. The consequences of that history remain with the country today as the struggle for multiracial democracy is deeply imperiled. Chicago’s Black political history and its neoliberal turn serve as a warning of the limitations of coalition politics, the dangers privatization poses to multiracial democracy, and as an urgent reminder of paths not taken by those caught in its destructive wake.