Wrap Up & Segue Way End of the Book 2 Era–Policy Cut from Chap 7/Western Policy systems
Over the last two chapters the reader better understands how two subordinate regions coped with, reacted to, and emulated the Northern-Mid-West regional hegemony. There are three separate tracks of economic development playing out—and within each of these tracts there exist intra-regional variation. Our notion that state/sub-state economic development policy-making rests primarily upon a decentralized policy process, heavily influenced by the balance of a fluid local political culture working within the policy structures established by the culture of its founding elites, is beginning to assume form and substance as we move into the 1920’s. The added dimension that this drama is played out from three regions, none of which experienced equally intense of even identical drivers of change (population mobility, formation of the industrial city, and industry/sector profit cycle) is demonstrably developing sub-state economic development policy systems which pursue varying economic development goals, include different types of business communities (which are the dominant policy-making class in this historical period), and which operate within the context and legacy of its regional past.
Our sense that modern economic development policy-making is an output of an urban policy process is reinforced through the course of the past chapters, but tempered by the varying patterns and intensity of city-formation-city-building, the changing mixtures of its urban population, and the timing, agglomeration, structure and composition of the industry/sector profit cycle, the intra and inter-regional competitive urban hierarchy—and in the case of western/southern cities, the changing nature of its economic base which differed noticeably from that pioneered in the Big City Eastern regional hegemony. Particularly in Pacific Coast cities we can see the early vitality of a rising trade, finance and service sector—the merchants of the West competing with the industrialists of the East—and all coexisting with the life-giving beasts: the railroads and the Wall Street investment banks.
The conquered South, its agricultural economic system led by a almost medieval elite, whose workforce was either former slaves or subsistence-level farmers, confronted if, and how to modernize their economic base to achieve both social-political cohesion and some level of economic autonomy from the hegemon. Guided by a Redeemer business elite, divided in its desire to establish an undefined industrial economy, and its own regional hierarchy of cities, felt it necessary to reach an unholy alliance with railroads and non-Southern investment to lay the required infrastructure, railroads and a basic iron and steel industry, sufficient to bring a modicum of industrialization to the politically Solid South.
A hodge-podge of mostly smaller new cities, textile mill, tobacco-processing and saw mill towns, steel-making satellite cities, and a few potentially developable trade and commerce centers such as Atlanta, Miami, and the oil-boom Texan cities rested upon the mass of traditional cotton towns, the foundation of its core cotton-export economic base. By the end of World War I, the South had made a serious start in its economic/industrial development programs—only to being a half-century emigration of its surplus labor force to the North and West.—an emigration which would intensify in later years due to farm mechanization, natural disasters and a national Depression, finally breaking apart its agricultural economic base and facilitating the formation of a new economic base.
But, at the end of World War, the South remained mostly agricultural-export, with a low-wage, unskilled semi-serf-like workforce, scattered pockets of industrialism and a growing, but still second tier set of industrial cities. Its Redeemer elite as divided as ever, the South could muster only decentralized, mostly promotional chamber-led economic development programs, and a low wage, low-tax, minimum regulation business climate. That given the inherent competitive weakness of its economic base this economic development approach was clearly incapable of reducing the South’s dependence on Northern capital and expertise, creating an regional industrial economy sufficient to achieve a reasonable regional autonomy from its hegemonic regional neighbor.
The West and Pacific Coast, after pushing aside its Hispanic and Native American heritage, did not labor as the South did with its past—but was able to concentrate upon building from scratch a new economy, politics and distinctly western approach to the industrial era. With fewer moving parts with which to contend, the railroads and the federal government (through homesteading and land grants) laid the key transportation and communication infrastructures that permitted settlement of new cities founded by an entrepreneurial business elite and over a very few years transformed into a booster-growth-driven business-led political/policy system, an almost half-continent enterprise zone, in which almost anything was possible. Half-governed by the Congress and the other half by weak, often corrupt, state governments, the many varieties of western cities pursued economic development using a cowboy-style (booster-population attraction-infrastructure) Privatist economic development programs operated by their chambers and boards of trade and augmented by profit-seeking boosterism/incentives by its railroads.
The definition and pursuit of economic development among the cities of these three regions was necessarily quite varied, although some programs-structures and strategies were common across all. The paramount economic development structure across the nation in this early period was the chamber of commerce. The port authority, by nature confined to coastal and water-bounded cities, was also shared throughout the nation. Big Cities, however, in order to confront the challenges of a sprawling physical landscape driven by a diverse, often agglomerated industrial economic base had superimposed an additional layer of economic development structures which included real estate exchanges, boards of trade, neighborhood civic and improvement associations, municipal (charter) leagues, and related but autonomous professional specialties such as planners, neighborhood-based community developers, municipal research bureaus and practitioners in government agencies such as water and sewer, and public works.
Most of what could be called economic development in the Big Cities of this period were private as government spent most of this era slowly augmenting its political authority, developing a professional political class, and creating the bureaucratic structures and programs pertinent to a capable policy system. Eventually, in the last decades of this early era, a new culture, Managerial Privatism, formed within its business elites and those elites injected into early economic development policy area, the foundations of planning, budgeting, modern finance, and a criterion of efficiency achieved through professional competence unfettered by political interference or outright corruption. In these last years, a recognizable public policy system, and modern municipal governance, with new forms of municipal leadership including strong mayors, city managers whose authority rested upon a democratic electoral system, therefore permitting a stable and relatively open and fair policy-making process. A governmental economic development policy system had finally emerged.
The Big Cities first task had to be to confront the hordes of immigrants who constantly poured into the Big Cities. Necessarily, these impoverished new-comers lived in devastated areas of the Big City and were slowly, some not at all, integrated into the economy and society. Big Cities formed a commercial/office/government central business district, a downtown which became the heart and visible soul of the jurisdiction Business and middle classes, however. separated themselves from these residential ghettoes and aided by constant transportation innovation was able to ceaseless move toward the Big City periphery—spilling over into autonomous “suburbs” and driving out the borders of the urban, now metropolitan area. The need to deal with obsolescence and deterioration of the physical landscape of the Big City produced the first identifiable economic development programs and strategies apart from the chamber-style private corporation-focused economic development.
Few of these issues confronted the South, and aside from a few Pacific Coast or “instant” cities such as Denver, western cities started from scratch, dependent upon their rail access and their ability to attract business investment, but mostly population settlement through boosterish promotion and attraction-based economic development. Both regions were able to copy and imitate their Big (industrial/eastern) City counterparts in their own time frames and customize them to fit their distinctive goals and cultures. A second set of cities in the South and West came together to accommodate new industry sectors such as the several Texas-Oklahoma-Southern California oil booms, the foreign direct investment of iron and steel cities, farm machinery, extraction/mining communities, the newly rising aircraft industry, and in the case of Pacific Coastal cities compete for federal government resources and facilities association with national defense. What their economic base shared to some degree was that manufacturing, the core of the eastern industrial city’s economic base, was secondary to trade, finance, government and the service economy.
…. Los Angeles in 1930 housed a higher proportion of its population (94%) in single family homes than any other metropolis of comparable size…. Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile in the 1920’s was the area’s first shopping center…. On 30 December 1940, just in time to take visitors to the Rose Parade, the Pasadena Freeway opened–the first freeway in the western United States.[1]… By the end of the decade (1920) Los Angeles had become the model for other cities in the West; after World War II it became the prototype of the mid-twentieth century metropolis. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the Los Angeles suburban lifestyle was established as the prevailing middle-class model in a thousand situation comedy episodes produced in Southern California
And so we now approach the Roaring Twenties, the culmination, the Last Hurrah of America’s early industrial era.
Like American cities throughout the West, California urban areas carried within themselves a cultural notion, a sense of what a city should be, based upon eastern cities. And through they did not call it that, almost all city boosters believed in what might be called the ‘doctrine of industrial advantages’. The architects of urban California in particular fervently believed that industrialization held the key to urban stability, continued prosperity, economic diversification, and sectional independence.[2]
[1] David L. Clark, Improbable Los Angeles, op. cit., pp. 271-273
[2] IBID. p. 5. Robert Lotchin, Fortress California 1910-1961 (Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1992)
Ron W. Coan 