Mother Chicago: Truant Dreams and Specters Over the Gilded Age

"I want you to go out and buy Mother Chicago. It is one of the most revelatory, provocative, frightening books I've ever read about Chicago." --Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune

Chicago history as told by the relics of her forgotten people and places. The observed made real to exorcise the hauntings of do-gooders and social engineers.

Chicago was a city of wanderers, truants, and delinquents. It was home to the largest tuberculosis sanitarium in the country, as well as a dizzying number of public and private institutions for wayward children, indigents, the mad, and the poor. Chicago's socially progressive institutions were influential and respected as saviors 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. This sector of quarantine and detention built on stolen lands acted as a limiter on the production of dreams and an orphan zone for people cast adrift by societal decree. Outside its walls, City power worked in ways both mysterious and transparent while the land harbored peculiar hallucinations that still must be banished.

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 specters used against the working class: redlining, property speculation, racism, and collateralized debt. Like the game of snakes and ladders, the City lays her traps for the unlucky on a numbered grid -- easy to navigate yet impossible to escape.

Billheimer turns a life-long obsession with the ephemera of Chicago history to tell the City's story through the relics of her forgotten places.

Author: Martin Billheimer
Publisher: Feral House
Published: 10/05/2021
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781627311090

About the Author
Billheimer, Martin: - Martin Billheimer was born in 1970 in Chicago's working-class Uptown neighborhood, then a hotbed of radical activism. His family moved to Bradford, England, a city in the industrial north, where he spent his childhood, before returning to Chicago in the early '80s. Billheimer founded the semi-notorious noise-punk band the Devil Bell Hippies in 1983 and participated in anti-fascist organizing in the music scene. After dropping out of high school, he continued his education working as a dishwasher, house painter, construction worker, and furniture mover. He continues to perform and record music in various projects around Chicago and has acted in pantomimes, puppet theater, and agitprop. He writes on culture, art, and politics at Counterpunch online and the Chiseler.Van Alst, Theodore C.: - Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr. is Professor and Chair of Indigenous Nations Studies and Interim Director of the School of Gender Race and Nations at Portland State University. His mosaic novel about sort of growing up in Chicago, Sacred Smokes, winner of the 2019 Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing, is now in its second printing. His next work, Sacred City, will be published Summer 2021, also by the University of New Mexico Press, who released his edited volume The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones. He is the Creative Editor for Transmotion (a journal of postmodern indigenous studies). His work has been published in The Massachusetts Review, The Raven Chronicles, Red Earth Review, The Journal of Working-Class Studies, Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and Yellow Medicine Review, among others.