The Urban Laboratory

The Local Setting
Faculty research on urban problems was spurred in 1923 with a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial for the creation of the Local Community Research Committee. The committee, later renamed the Social Science Research Committee and strengthened by additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, was an important source of funding for numerous Chicago-based studies by University sociologists, historians, and political scientists.

The range of this work was apparent in the volume edited by T. V. Smith and Leonard D. White, Chicago: An Experiment in Social Science Research (1929). In its first six years, the committee had supported investigations of municipal employment in Chicago, patterns of city development, delinquency and crime, rooming houses, the suburban community, the response of churches to racial issues, the Chicago building trades, parks and recreation, and numerous other subjects bearing on the city. University faculty and graduate students working on committee-funded Chicago research included Park, Burgess, Abbott, Breckinridge, Charles Merriam, Paul Cressey, Norman Hayner, Walter Reckless, and others.

Among those supported by the committee was political scientist Harold F. Gosnell, who fixed his attention on the critical issue of voting behavior. His first study, Non-Voting: Causes and Methods of Control (1924), written with Charles Merriam, utilized statistical sampling techniques to examine the drop in voter participation in the 1923 Chicago mayoralty election. Following up with a series of monographs, including The Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (1935) and Machine Politics: Chicago Model (1937), Gosnell applied the latest social survey methodologies to an exploration of the city's legendary political topography.

The committee also funded the research of Bessie Louise Pierce, who was brought to Chicago in 1929 as an associate professor of history and head of the History of Chicago Project. Originally conceived as a centennial history of the city, the project was recast by Pierce as a comprehensive survey of all relevant historical records for a definitive history of Chicago from 1673 to 1915. The Field Foundation, Chicago Community Trust, Chicago Historical Society, and Schermerhorn Charitable Trust provided additional support for the project. Working with student assistants, Pierce directed research that produced a compilation of travel accounts, As Others See Chicago (1933), and three volumes of A History of Chicago (1937-57) describing the city's growth through the conclusion of the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Although the final volume of Pierce's study remained unfinished at her death in 1974, the History of Chicago Project marked an important advance in the development of modern urban history.