Jay Ruby
Department of Anthropology
Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122
I am in the preliminary stages of a long-term
ethnographic study of the village of Oak Park, Illinois. I will
spend the months of June and July in the community. Based upon
my findings, I will begin writing grant proposals for the larger
work. The project will focus on the transformation that has taken
place over the last half century in the socio-cultural structure
of this middle-class suburb of some 50,000 souls located directly
west of the city of Chicago. I propose to study these changes
by comparing the community as constituted in the 1950s with its
contemporary manifestation. The study will allow me to explore
some theoretical concerns: the advantages and limits of reflexive
ethnography, the possibility of "studying sideways"
that is, studying a community of people of the same social class
as the researcher, and perhaps most important to me, can a researcher
"see" culture well enough to take picture of it? It
is also designed to provide some insight into a suburban community
that has been able to maintain itself as a stable and diverse
place.
The idea of the suburb has fascinated Americans since the economic
boom of post-World War II made it possible for millions of Americans
to actualize their version of the American dream and flee the
city for the apparent utopia of suburbs like Levittown, New York
and the whole of Orange County, California. By all indications,
the suburbanization of America is an trend that will not be reversed.
Fictional accounts and social science studies have vacillated
between romantic fantasies about the suburb as the material solution
to everyone's problem to viewing it as a conformist wasteland
that destroys the souls of its inhabitants. Little attention has
been focused upon the older suburbs and especially those places
that exhibit few of the problems characteristic of the newer communities.
Oak Park was incorporated at the beginning of the century and
has been land locked ever since. It reached full size by the 1940s
with the majority of its buildings over a half century in age.
Oak Park is too geographically self-contained to have malls or
sprawl or polluting industrial development - all problems characteristic
of many newer suburbs. It is my hope that this study will contribute
to a broader understanding of the suburban life of America. In
some ways, Oak Park is the success story seldom told.
I bring to this study some unique if not complicated qualifications
that will cause it to be somewhat experimental. I was born in
Oak Park in 1935 and lived there until I went to college in 1954.
As a native born Oak Parker who graduated from high school in
1953, I am a member of the "Old Oak Park" generation.
My grandparents moved to the village around World War I. My aunt
was marginally involved in its transformation. As someone who
has not lived in the community for forty-five years, I was not
aware of the magnitude of the changes until I started this inquiry.
I am therefore somewhere between being a "native" and
an "outsider." I can therefore bring to the study a
depth to the role of "participant-observer" that is
extremely unusual.
While social scientists have paid lip service to studying elites,
they have tended to "study down." They focused their
attention on socially and economically disadvantaged groups, often
concentrating on the pathological aspects of a society. Oak Park
is not without its problems, but compared to many other suburban
communities, it is relatively healthy. As many of the residents
of Oak Park are college educated with graduate degrees, this work
will be an experiment in "studying sideways," that is,
those studied and those doing the studying are of the same "privileged"
socio-economic class.
While researching a community with which I share much cultural
knowledge and linguistic competence has many advantages, it also
means that I must become reflexively aware of how my own knowledge
and opinions will effective the outcome of my research. Without
this reflexive self-consciousness, the study would become an autobiography
instead of an ethnography. The project will therefore be an exploration
of the limits of "insider" ethnography - can a "native"
do an ethnography of his own community? For example, I left Oak
Park harboring negative feelings about the conformity of the community.
Having recently learned about its transformation, I now view it
with some affection but neither antipathy or adoration are useful
attitudes for an ethnographer. I must work through those reactions
before I begin the fieldwork. While some might regard my knowledge
and involvement in the community as a determent, I believe it
is an asset as my goal is to produce a reflexive ethnography where
the relationship between the personal and the theoretical is explored.
I will attempt to make no judgments about the changes. I will
only try to understand them.
I began the preliminary work on this project by attending my 45th
high school reunion in September, 1998. In addition, I spent ten
days in March, 1999 interviewing and exploring possible avenues
of approach. A number of my high school classmates who have remained
in the village have already agreed to participate in the study.
I sent out a questionnaire to approximately 350 of my classmates
to test whether my impressions of Oak Park were shared by people
of my generation. I received over 200 responses and am in the
process of analyzing them. A number of my classmates have moved
far away from Oak Park, making face to face contact financial
unreasonable. However, many are participants in the internet as
are many Oak Park residents with whom I have already begun an
email dialogue about this study. I will take advantage of email
and web pages to circulate preliminary findings for comments and
criticism. It is my intention to give Oak Parkers an active voice
in the construction of this ethnography.
The changes that are the focus of the study have transpired over
the past fifty years. They are profound and far reaching. Using
1968 as a baseline, a contrastive study of "old" and
"new" Oak Park will be undertaken. "Old" Oak
Park's slogan was "where the bars end and the churches begin."
It was a conservative "dry" community where Protestant
and affluent Euro-Americans dominated. These WASPS worked hard
to ignore Frank Lloyd Wright's houses, including his home and
studio, and the fact that Ernest Hemingway was born there because
the moral fiber of those two individuals was in doubt. The "New"
Oak Park is internationally known as one of the success stories
of deliberate stable suburban integration with a significant minority
population (18.0 per cent African Americans and 7.2 per cent other
ethnicities), a highly visible and active gay and lesbian population
(a domestic partnership initiative was passed in an election in
1997) and with restaurants that offer alcohol. During the late
1970s, a portion of the northern half of the village was declared
a national historical district primarily because of the large
number of Wright houses. Hemingway is now touted as the village's
most prominent son - his centennial will be celebrated this summer
with much fanfare. The tour of Wright's home and studio and of
the houses he designed in Oak Park has become one of the primary
tourist attractions in the Chicago area. The tale of Dr. Percy
Julian, an African American and world renown research chemist,
further illuminates the profundity of the transformation. In the
early 1950s when the Julian family bought a house in Oak Park,
it was firebombed twice. Today there is a public school named
after him. His centennial was recently publicly celebrated. Along
with Wright and Hemingway, he is now presented as a famous Oak
Parker.
While it is premature to focus upon specific elements of the community,
three avenues appear to be excellent ways in which to understand
the changes: The 19th Century Woman's Club, the Oak Park Housing
Center and the gay and lesbian community. The existence of The
19th Century Woman's Club in the end of the 20th century is an
anomaly. Most organizations like this one have withered and died
as the result of the transformation of American society in the
twentieth century. Fewer and fewer women have the leisure time
to devote to club activities. This club survived because it was
able to change with the times - admitting African-American women
when the village was integrating and more recently men to make
up for its shrinking female membership. In some respects the transformation
of the 19th Century Women's Club is a microcosm for the changes
that occurred in Oak Park. The Oak Park Housing Center is a 1960s
organization designed to socially engineer the constructive integration
of Oak Park. It concentrates upon the most vulnerable element
- apartment dwellers. Its success is such that representatives
from other communities come to study the Housing Center's approach.
Recently it has expanded its area of concern to other western
suburbs of Chicago. I will be volunteering at the Center this
summer. Finally the public emergence of a gay and lesbian community
in the late 1980s is undoubtedly a byproduct of the success of
ethnic integration. Oak Park became known as a place tolerant
of differences and therefore attractive to people who experience
intolerance elsewhere. Most community studies of gays and lesbians
concentrate on places in which they are a major political and
economic force like Cherry Grove, New York or the Castro district
in San Francisco. I am interested in exploring the integration
of gays and lesbians into the larger community of Oak Park. I
have made preliminary inquires into the feasibility of focusing
on these three aspects of the community. The response has been
overwhelmingly positive. Lest I prematurely narrow myself, I will
also explore other facets of the village, this summer.
In addition to employing the methods and techniques of a reflexive
ethnographer to present a multi-vocal study of this suburb, I
will be extending a long term interest of mine by asking in what
ways are these changes visible? Can I take pictures of the changes
or the results of the changes in a way as to be able to produce
pictorial ethnographies of the community. While it is premature
to speculate on the forms in which the final results of the study
will be circulated, as a visual anthropologist I am dedicated
to attempting to produce photographic and filmic ethnography and
intend to do so for this project.
For some, Oak Park is a model of the diverse and tolerant community
in which many residences are actively engaged in maintaining this
character. It appears to be a kind of place that most Americans
aspire to live in. The community was able to stem the tide of
"white" flight and black ghettoization that moved westward
in Chicago to create economic and social havoc as close as Austin,
a Chicago neighborhood on the eastern boundary of Oak Park. An
important question to be asked in this study, is why was Oak Park
able to successfully integrate and transform itself into a stable
and diverse place when few other places have been able to do so.
Can our society learn something from Oak Park that will ease the
ethnic tensions that appear to be worsening through time? It is
the intention of this study to provide some insights into this
community that may be useful for others.