Wright State University CORE Scholar History Faculty Publications History 1986 Religion and Reform in the City: The Re-Thinking Chicago Movement of the 1930s Jacob Dorn Wright State University - Main Campus,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/history Part of the History Commons Repository Citation Dorn, J. (1986). Religion and Reform in the City: The Re-Thinking Chicago Movement of the 1930s. Church History, 55 (3), 323-337. https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/history/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the History at CORE Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of CORE Scholar. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Religion and Reform in the City: The Re-Thinking Chicago Movement of the 1930s JACOB H. DORN Historians have produced a rich and sophisticated literature on urban reform in the progressive era before the First World War. It includes numerous studies of individual cities, biographies of urban leaders, and analyses of particular movements and organizations. This literature illu- minates important variations among reformers and their achievements, the relationships between urban growth and reform, and the functional role of the old-style political machines against which progressives battled. Similarly, there are many examinations of progressive-era reformers' ideas about and attitudes toward the burgeoning industrial cities that had come into being with disquieting rapidity during their own lifetimes. Some of these works go well beyond the controversial conclusions of Morton and Lucia White in The Intellectual Versus the City (1964) to find more complex-and sometimes more positive-assessments of the new urban civilization.' Substantially less is known about efforts to reform particular cities and about the ideas and attitudes of urban intellectuals in the interwar years, especially the 1930s.