Chicago's socially progressive institutions were influential and respected as saviours of the immigrants and 'lower classes.' Yet the savage race riots of 1919 laid bare the eugenic truth of an ongoing, second Civil War operating as the Northern status quo. Mother Chicago is the story of three of these institutions - an obscure juvenile experiment called the Chicago Parental School, the great Municipal Sanitarium, and the amalgam of poor house, asylum, and cemetery that occupied the far northern boundaries of the City. As the City grew larger, these institutions became fissures in the streets and the transport lines, odd reminders of the Gilded Age, which had made them. Mother Chicago tells the story of the corporeal spectres used against the working class: real estate, redlining, property speculation, racism, and collateralised debt.
