Nature's Laboratory: Environmental Thought and Labor Radicalism in Chicago, 1886–1937

Elizabeth Grennan Browning's Nature's Laboratory argues that between 1886 and 1937 Chicagoans reinvented ideas of nature—in both a human and an environmental context—to address the labor unrest that threatened to destabilize the city's democratic capitalist order (p. 4). An intellectual history, Nature's Laboratory offers a unique contribution to the historiography of Chicago by detailing how public intellectuals and industrial workers used environmental theories to legitimize their approaches to Chicago's evolving social environment.By reflecting on how Chicagoans used “nature,” to address the ills of the United States political economy, Browning challenges readers to consider how America's political and economic systems were not inevitable.Nature's Laboratory begins by contextualizing Chicago reformers’ anxieties toward labor radicalism during the Gilded Age. Armed with the biological theories of Russian revolutionary Peter Kropotkin and dynamite, anarchists destroyed symbols of capitalist exploitation in their pursuit to restore natural law. Chicago's elites turned to urban planners and architects to combat labor radicalism and impose their vision of natural order onto the landscape. Believing that one's immediate environment influenced a person's individual character, urban planners designed a city comprised of castle-styled armories, jails, and police stations alongside factories with more access to light and air to quell social unrest.Next, Browning turns to progressives, such as John Dewy and Jane Addams, to examine how they used the social evolutionary theory of recapitulation to promote social harmony. Popularized by psychologist G. Stanley Hall, those subscribing to recapitulation argued that an individual's development mirrored the progression of humanity's evolution from “savagery” to “civilization” (p. 18). John Dewey's Laboratory School combined nature study with industrial education in which hands-on experimentation allowed teachers to link social, moral, and scientific lessons (p. 97). Social reformers at Hull-House sought to restore the dignity of human labor by reconnecting the working class to the natural world. Jane Addams established the Hull-House Labor Museum whereas Alice Hamilton and Florence Kelly promoted a “sanitarian view of nature” to advocate for public and occupational health reform (p. 18).In part 3, Grennan Browning shows how sociologists from the University of Chicago linked the theory of ecological succession to urban society, yet in the processes, they paradoxically “naturalized racial and economic inequality as inevitable features of city life” (p. 18). Nature's Laboratory closes with the Human Relations movement and its relationship to the development of welfare capitalism. Industrial psychologist Elton Mayo used the Western Electric Hawthorne Works of Cicero, a Chicago suburb, as a “laboratory” to study worker motivation to challenge complaints about physical conditions of the industrial workplace and increase worker productivity (p. 19). The book demonstrates how environmental theories had widespread appeal across political and ideological divides. All the historical actors in Grennan's narrative turned to environmental explanations to make their case.Nature's Laboratory is an important addition to Chicago's intellectual and urban environmental history. By synthesizing these fields, and attention to Chicago's history of labor radicalism, Browning demonstrates how ideas of nature are just as important as natural commodities and physical environments. Browning's use of such archival sources as city-planner reports and sociological interviews moves beyond the “nature” versus “culture” debate and instead shows how thinking about human nature and the natural world produced a myriad of competing, and sometimes counterproductive, visions of a “modern” industrial society that alienated the very people reformers sought to aid.Despite Browning's appeal to Chicago as the “taproot” of the conservation movement, Nature's Laboratory is primarily an intellectual rather than an environmental history (p. 4). Focusing on the application of ideas about nature in urban spaces, then, comes at the cost of sidelining Browning's claims about the connection between these ideas and the conservation movement. The opening vignettes of each of the monograph's parts attempt to rectify this disconnect, but further integrating the perspective of conservationists would demonstrate Chicago's connection to the movement. These connections would support Browning's claims that anxiety over the artificiality of the urban environment that disconnected Chicagoans from the natural world was the impetus for social reform. Nevertheless, the structure and analysis of Nature's Laboratory enables each chapter to be read as its own self-contained environmental biography, a perfect length to assign individual chapters to upper-level undergraduate history students.