ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the improbable rise of the city of Chicago, the appearance of the major university that was founded there by means of John D. Rockefeller’s stupendous wealth, and the influential department of philosophy and psychology that was developed there by John Dewey and his colleagues. It begins with an account of Chicago’s revolutionary industrial history, and the unsustainable pressure it placed on the city’s workers. Rockefeller funded a university in the city to compete with the older, more prestigious eastern schools. The first president of this new University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, assembled a spectacular faculty, including a large number of professors “headhunted” from G. Stanley Hall’s Clark University. John Dewey, then at University of Michigan, was brought in as professor of philosophy. Dewey was alerted to the social and political crises underway in Chicago during his move to the city and began to reconfigure his philosophical and educational theories to address the intense sociopolitical problems of Chicago.
