PART II

“Red Sky in the Morning, Sailor Take Warning”:

The Winds of Depression, War, and Victory, 1930–1961

Within a three-decade period, the most serious depression America has ever known, a World War followed by nuclear Cold War, global world leadership, and no normalcy to return to could have been the Perfect Storm for American economic development. What is so amazing is how much of the past Classical Era persisted through the storm. That is the story for much of Part II. What is also evident is the Perfect Storm changed the fundamentals of the “old order”—in particular tearing down the pillars of the Northern–Midwest hegemony. The hegemony, like the British Empire, survived the storm and sunset less than a generation later.

Make no mistake there were serious changes afoot during the Part II years.

For our purposes the thirty years could be split into two equal phases. The first fifteen years marked the entry and dominance of the federal government forced into state and sub-state affairs by the Depression and the War. The second phase brought victory but America was the only major nation left intact by war and emerged as the leader of “the Free World,” the world’s most powerful economy, and the lead player in a new global finance/trade system. That we were in a sort of Permanent War with Communism meant that war, or its threat, never left us. Domestically, the second fifteen years witnessed a federal pullback, still leaving in place a serious role for the federal government in state and local matters—but locals, especially, resumed what had been the Classical Era’s municipal leadership of American economic development. But they did so in a vastly changed environment. This was not to be a return to normalcy,” but entry into a “brave new world.”

The rise of the federal government in state and sub-state ED was a first-order change. So was Keynesian economics; that economic model injected the federal government into the jurisdictional economic base. The federal government through the Second Reconstruction of the South, western infrastructure, war production, industrial decentralization, and a flood of population mobility drastically altered the economic bases of the West and the South, and dramatically injected a steroidal growth in their local jurisdictions. The abrupt and crisis-driven transformation overwhelmed these cities, but left in its wake completely different policy systems, demographics, and a metropolitan landscape. While the industrial bases of the hegemony seemed to weather the storm in good shape, federal industrial decentralization had planted new gazelle-like sectors firmly in the West and Texas—as well as Route 128. It would take almost two generations for economic development to see the effects of that change.

In an era of “permanent war,” Keynesian economics and the world’s reserve currency, the American national economy enjoyed a rare near-monopoly of prosperity and growth in a bombed-out and exhausted Old World globalism. Another major change was the actors that participated in the jurisdictional policy systems. Federal programs required accelerated capacity and professionalization by state governments. State government emerged as a serious player in sub-state economic development by the end of the period. Unions were players in most hegemonic states; chambers, however, still in charge faced an entirely new municipal landscape with a stronger mayor and municipal government. The one percenters had formed a new powerful EDO, the Committee for Economic Development (CED), with influential local chapters. American ED incorporated a largely new, vigorous, but ideologically prone academic/think-tank/policy institute/foundation nexus that played a serious role in agenda-setting and policy formulation.

The practice of economic development, the Practitioner World, underwent its own disruption, with port authorities developing, in onion-like fashion, their own separate professional identity, grew into vastly more powerful and critical position in their jurisdictional economic bases, but also converted them into transportation service providers and players in the national logistical system. Municipal government EDOs, led at first by transitional quasi-public/private EDOs, emerged by 1970 as independent, leading players in municipal and county-level economic development—displacing the chamber as the jurisdiction’s primary EDO.

From municipal-level ED’s perspective, the second phase could have been called the “Age of Urban Renewal.” A battle between CD’s public housers and Mainstream ED and one percenters over the use of slum clearance—in neighborhoods for public housing, or for a modern, refunction corporate-led CBD, commercial centers, industrial parks, eds and meds, and culturals. Housing agencies competed with redevelopment agencies—but both resulted in demolishing much of the older, deteriorated Second Ghetto neighborhoods. What they missed was destroyed by federal and state interstate highway construction. The federal government, expectedly, was a major player—but was pulled in by the locals. Urban renewal provided the script that rewrote Big City economic development, but the variety and flavor of urban renewal as it was implemented in Big Cities once again demonstrated the power of political culture, as well as the variation in beliefs of its business community. In any event, urban renewal proved to be the midwife of modern era economic and community development.

By the end of the period, more sophisticated suburban policy systems developed; some were engaged in economic development. Western suburbanization was in a league of its own. That is ironic, because the unifying ostensible purpose of urban renewal was to constrain, or at least manage, suburban decentralization so to preserve Big City hinterland’s second competitive hierarchy. That’s why highways to the CBD were so important—so suburbanites could shop and work in the CBD. But during these years, the suburbs exploded, malls were built, and the Big City changed demographics

By 1961, the three regions had evolved into four—with Texas and the Southwest, including southern California, united by a reasonably consistent political culture pursuing its own form of growth, driven by policy systems congruent with their approach. The Pacific West evolved its own path. The South in turn was, by the end of the era, engaged in its own civil war, with a New South contesting for leadership over an Old South wracked by civil rights and race. The “non-southwest” West, growing and prosperous to be sure, struggled with its identity, torn between its ties to the Big City East and its western heritage.

As for the Big City hegemony—that lies below in Chapters 10 and 11.

10. Big Cities: New Deal, war years

Trite to say, the Depression years were tough on our Big Cities. In these awful years would—could—municipal and state governments rise to the occasion? They tried. At its best, it was reactive. Chambers were politically out of step with the Depression and the federal government’s responses to it: they lacked power and capacity to play a serious role in the Depression—they, however, did reassert leadership in the war years. The Depression overwhelmed state/local governments. Resources simply did not exist. Municipal impotence translated into municipal dependence on Washington.

Before we concentrate on the Depression’s ED implications, it is important to keep in mind several background dynamics. Prohibition and crime were in high drama; the Southern Diaspora did not stop. Factories accelerated their suburban exodus. In 11 of 12 northeastern metros, “the number of manufacturing employees in suburbia increased at a faster rate … between 1929 and 1939 than the number of industrial workers within the central city” (Teaford, 1990, p. 24, Table 3).¹ FDR opened the door to significant change in many municipal policy systems by working with unions and accommodating union-supported initiatives in his agenda. By 1940, unions were important actors in several Big City municipal policy systems, having gained entry during these years. Business and chamber reaction was predictable: sharpening a partisan divide, creating a fault line in municipal economic development and a cultural divide between Privatist and Progressive political cultures.

Labor unrest—centered on wages and the open shop—hit several cities especially hard. In 1934, Milwaukee suffered through 107 strikes. Minneapolis was not much better. Toledo and Akron (Ohio) were hit hard by prolonged strikes. The National Guard put down a 1937 strike against Republic Steel. The worst year was 1937, typified by the Flint sit-down strike against General Motors that resulted in GM recognizing the United Automobile Workers (UAW) as the plant’s bargaining agent— the first. By the end of the decade, cities like Detroit, formerly ground zero of the open shop, was recognized by the New York Times as “one of the best organized cities in the nation.”

The news from Flint, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee and elsewhere had given [America’s] heartland a reputation for poor labor relations; in the future industrialists would invest in the Midwest at their own risk … Pressure from the federal government’s National Labor Relations Board combined with strike action by labor … [forced] management to yield to [worker] demands. (Teaford, 1993, pp. 184–5)

If one kept one’s job (and 75 percent did), life, however uncertain, went on. Families shopped for food and for Christmas—spending much less. People bought cars (5.6 million in 1929, 1.4 million in 1932). In some cities, car thefts were more numerous than car sales. Households purchased homes. Decentralization continued during the Depression. Still, the Depression devastated municipal treasuries, dumped unemployed millions on the streets, terminated business investment and drove small businesses into bankruptcy. Banks went under, resuscitated somewhat with New Deal legislation, the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act (GSA) among others; lending was fragile. One might think crisis generates action, but acting requires resources—and believable solutions to identified problems. Mayors left to their own devices ranked pre-Depression style ED lower on their agenda.

BIG CITIES COPE WITH THE DEPRESSION

One way or another most Big Cities concentrated on fighting unemployment and its misery. The Community Chest was the most common initiative. The National Association of Community Chests and Councils selected a week in October 1931 to promote organized drives in 174 cities. Most cities surpassed their goals. Before it was over, 386 cities and towns had joined in raising almost $85 million. Rochester New York tried something different. The city manager (1930) successfully requested a special work relief appropriation from the city council. The original $250,000 appropriation expanded to $800,000 and the next year increased to $1 million. Taking advantage of a newly approved state law, he augmented this with a state work-relief grant. Then Milwaukee’s mayor, Daniel Hoan, addressed Rochester’s chamber, describing the “advantages” of a city without debt. Rochester, worried about its work-relief program, dispatched a committee to tour key cities to determine how they were handling work-relief initiatives. The committee returned with the observation that Rochester was a national work-relief leader; but no evidence existed that work-relief had any material impact on local unemployment and it left the city in considerable debt. Rochester reduced work-relief funding (McKelvey, 1968, pp. 80–81).

Little Rock combined an emergency appropriation of $20,000 in 1931 with $25,000 in private sources to provide emergency jobs. The money was gone within three months. Proper Philadelphians organized a Committee on Unemployment Relief in 1930. They raised nearly $4 million for free food and make work jobs for 14,000 destitute heads of families. By 1931, this ad hoc group evolved into the Bureau of Unemployment Relief within the city’s Public Welfare Department and distributed $3 million in city funds in the form of food, fuel and clothing. The Community Chest campaign raised millions more, but all available money had been tapped and dispensed by June 1932, when organized relief in Philadelphia stopped. (Abbott, 1987, pp. 48–9)

Detroit, then as now, was the poster child of fiscal collapse. Detroit was one of the few large cities that assumed responsibility for paying relief to its unemployed. By 1931, with over 100,000 unemployed, Mayor Frank Murphy (Democrat) pulled together an “unemployment committee” to try to deal with the mess, but all it came up with was potato gardens and soup kitchens. While Detroit’s relief program was relatively small (albeit six times more per capita than the second city, Boston, which offered a relief program), it was among the first cities to edge toward fiscal collapse. In 1932 “Detroit owed $27 million per year to its creditors; its total budget was $76 million, of which only $57 million was actually collectible” (Abbott, 1987, p. 48). Detroit defaulted. Prior to 1934, federal municipal bankruptcy laws were non-existent, but over 2000 municipalities were in default (Florida, California and Texas—all with previous real estate booms—were worst hit). Congress responded with the Municipal Bankruptcy Act of 1934, amended in 1937 (Wilson, 1974, pp. 177–80).

Cities Take Advantage of Federal Programs

Big City mayors, knowing their state governments would not/count not respond, pressed hard for massive federal assistance. Led by Detroit’s mayor, Frank Murphy, Big Cities organized to do battle in Washington DC. Finding existing municipal national associations of little help in resolving Detroit’s unemployment relief crisis, Murphy pressed hard for over two years (1931–33) to establish the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM). Unlike the National Municipal League, which was open to cities of all sizes, the USCM initially restricted its membership to cities exceeding 50,000 in population.

The mayors of big cities believed that their communities had special needs, and unlike most of the leaders of the smaller towns, felt that federal action was needed to cope with their problems, … the USCM attacked the old dogmas of home rule and state’s rights and espoused a cooperative federalism. (Gelfand, 1975, p. 39) While enjoying success in garnering federal public works and Works Progress (later Projects) Administration (WPA) relief funds, the USCM did not enjoy a special relationship with the FDR administration before 1936.

Although he espoused national powers to combat the Depression, Roosevelt remained attached to some of the traditional principles of states’ rights. He examined the subject of federal aid to cities from the angle of constitutional theory, and came to the verdict that since ‘municipalities are the creatures of State Legislatures, primary duty is on the state to see to their solvency … Sharing the [old-style] Progressive’s faith in greater home rule, Roosevelt maintained that ‘the less the Federal Government has to do with running a municipality in this country the better off we are going to be in the days to come. (Gelfand, 1975, p. 55)

The quest for federal dollars usually meant capturing their share of new federal jobs programs for the poor and unemployed. The alphabet soup of such programs included the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration, the Public Works Administration (PWA), the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Aside from the obvious jobs they funded, they also constructed public infrastructure (including beaches, parks, levees, bridges, tunnels, swimming pools, libraries, streets, recreational facilities, arts-related buildings, courthouses and city halls, and miles and miles of sewers). Supposedly, these programs built more than 100,000 public buildings.

In 1924 the Republican presidential plurality was 1.25 million (Abbott, 1987, p. 51). In the Depression, unemployed ethnic and black relief/job recipients voted for FDR and the Democratic Party. The shift had started in 1928 when the Democratic presidential plurality in the nation’s 12 largest cities was 38,000, becoming in 1936 over 3.6 million. During these years, the solid “blue” Big City Democratic voting base was established—it continues to this day. The second, more disputed effect was its alleged displacement of the urban political machine by federal programs and bureaucracy. Up to and through the Depression many, if not most, Big City policy systems enjoyed a significant machine presence. Several well-known boss systems were in operation: Crump, Memphis/Shelby County; Flynn and Tammany; Kansas City’s Pendergast; Boston’s charismatic Mayor Curley; Chicago’s Kelly/Cermak; and Jersey City’s Hague machines are the most well known.

Most of these machines foundered after the end of World War II. The blame was placed on the so-called “last hurrah thesis” which argued that the poor and unemployed no longer needed the favors of the ward boss, and unhinged ethnic electoral support of machines. Critics of the thesis observe that machines changed form after the war, but they have never really disappeared—many persisted for a half-century or more after the New Deal. Critics also argue that except for social security, the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the public works and jobs programs, flowed dollars through states—administered through municipal bureaucracies over which machines maintained influence. Far from destroying machines, it solidified Democratic mayoralbased machines: Cermak, Pendergast and Pittsburgh’s Lawrence machines (Wilson, 1974, pp. 184–7). The simple answer to postwar boss collapse was that they died of old age (Dorsett, 1977, p. 115).

La Guardia

The go-to mayor with access to FDR’s New Deal was New York City’s Fiorello La Guardia (1933–45). Nicknamed the “Little Flower,” La Guardia’s access was more through Eleanor Roosevelt than her husband. FDR ran hot and cold with the mayor, at one point endorsing an opponent. The La Guardia–FDR relationship was complex and constantly in flux. What could one expect from La Guardia, an avowed socialist, registered Republican who won three elections with a “Fusion” Party endorsement?

Harold L. Ickes was correct in his observation that La Guardia was not a team player, but one who wanted to run all over the field with the ball. He simply could not confine himself to working through the states as the administration and the governors had agreed. (Funigiello, 1978, p. 52)

New York was uniquely successful, but even New York City had to fight tooth and nail to obtain funds. Compromise and intensive and persistent effort were required to keep funds from approved programs flowing through FDR’s bureaucracy. In the depression/ wartime environment, municipalities pressed their agenda through whatever opportunities appeared. For example, a broadly defined civilian defense program allowed La Guardia to maneuver himself into the Office of Civilian Defense as its intergovernmental chair. He used that position to bypass state government, establish direct federal–state relationships and press for a variety of agendas—often overlapping with Eleanor Roosevelt’s agenda (Funigiello, 1978, Chap. 2). One reason La Guardia arguably was New York City’s greatest mayor is in part due to his capturing federal funds.

The three La Guardia administrations fit the social reformer/Progressive mould to the tee. Incorruptible, working-class, people-oriented and anti-large business, he harkened back to the turn of the century. La Guardia unified the NYC transit system under municipal control; broke the city’s dependence on bankers; built parks and low-cost public housing; reinstalled a merit-based civil service; reorganized the police force; built airports and highways; and fought tirelessly against the remnants of Tammany Hall.

It was during La Guardia’s tenure that much of Robert Moses’s bridge/highway/ tunnel construction occurred. Previous to La Guardia, Moses developed his famous administrative, fiscal and political independence based on his public authority empire. For the most part, Moses was beyond the control of La Guardia (Moses was a political rival to La Guardia in several elections). During these years Moses regularly took on, and sometimes won, serious battles against no less than the President of the United States, who unwillingly financed a great deal of Moses’s most famous projects.

La Guardia links old-style social reform mayors to a more contemporary age. He is clearly associated with the infrastructure strategy; the airport named after him is justified—it was his idea and he built it. A committed participant in the public housing/slum clearance movement, La Guardia played ball in the Age of Urban Renewal. He retired in 1945 with New York City on the brink of fiscal collapse resulting from, it is alleged, bloated union wages, sprawling public bureaucracies and excessive debt from his outsized infrastructure installation.² In that regard, he followed in the Josiah Quincy tradition.

Depression/War Years Chambers

Nadirs often follow “golden years.” The twenties came as close to the golden years of chamber-style economic development as one could expect. Industrial bureaus, sophisticated marketing and industrial recruitment characterized chambers throughout the nation. Mead in Magicians of Main Street provides numerous examples of chamber involvement in policy areas such as tourism, airport development, labor force training, education and chamber professionalization during these golden years. The national chamber in 1929 claimed a membership of nearly 1600 state and local chambers/boards of trade (Mead, 2014, pp. 231–74).

The Depression cut the legs off chamber-style economic development. When the cities of America needed economic development the most, a voluntary/membershipbased organization was at a decided disadvantage. Likened to finding water in a desert with few oases and many mirages, industrial recruitment went dry. Industrial recruitment yielded frauds and poor-quality leads. With businesses failing right and left, throwing workers on the streets, business leadership held limited appeal among the general population. The obsessive chamber struggle against unions did little to help. Business and chambers opposed outright most New Deal business-related initiatives; FDR was happy to characterize them as the personification of evil. Therefore, with the federal government the only game in town, chambers refused to play.

Chambers were at a loss in how to respond to a crushing depression. There was simply little the chamber could do. Initially, “Buy Local” campaigns, followed by “Buy Anything Now” campaigns, were commonplace (Mead, 2014, pp. 275–8). Failing business translated into serious reductions in membership, catastrophic budgets and then staffing crises. In response, chambers and other local business organizations merged. While some large corporation elites crossed party lines to join in FDR’s New Deal, Main Street did not follow. As FDR moved “to the left” with NIRA, away from the gold standard and austerity, cries of socialism were increasingly heard. The 1936 elections were the high point in business opposition to FDR.

Chambers never gave up, but continuing to find ways to help their communities cope—and some activities—did help. “Entertainment” events, a big deal in a depression, lifted community spirits. The radio reported sports events like boxing matches, baseball spring training, parachuting turkeys (WKRP fans, it really did happen),³ Added to this were Olympics, horse and dog shows, golf and supporting sports stadia. The Washington DC chamber scheduled the first ever Cherry Blossom Festival in 1930, before becoming embroiled in a geisha girl scandal with the Washington Post; the event was rescheduled to 1934. Centennial expositions (Dallas) and even World Fairs (New York) characterized the later years of the Depression. Tourism and convention promotion did not stop in these years. Chambers competed to acquire federal support and monies to expand factories and hire workers. Chambers found new meaning with the war, aggressively lobbying for federal appropriations for shipyards and munitions factories, airports, naval facilities and military bases.

One of the most inspiring examples of positive chamber action was the 1938 Harlem Compact. In that situation, Harlem stores (Kresge, Woolworth and W.T. Grant), staffed overwhelmingly by whites, almost resulted in violent reaction from excluded AfricanAmericans. The Uptown Chamber brokered a deal with the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment (led by 29-year-old Adam Clayton-Powell) so that African-Americans would receive one of every three jobs that opened up (Mead, 2014, p. 308).

Chambers retained their position as the community’s primary multifunction economic development organization during these years; but by that point they were now sharing ground with new organizational actors such as housing authorities, city planning departments and newly rising redevelopment authorities. The needs of the era had turned away from industrial recruitment to physical redevelopment. Physical redevelopment was beyond a chamber’s powers—a public authority was required.

Evolution of Corporation Elites: The Committee for Economic Development

American industrial production was number one on the planet; the manufacturing and transportation gazelles of yesteryear had evolved into corporate behemoths. The structure of American capitalism had become highly “concentrated” or oligarchic. Large corporate elites (our one-percenters) had long abandoned municipal chambers and had led the public scientific management, City Efficient revolution through Municipal Research Bureaus. These elites, following the path of power and politics, gravitated to Washington, to the US Chamber, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), various trade associations, and think tanks and foundations.

Many corporate elites adhered to “old-style” Progressive Movement values and programs. Others—polar opposites—were embittered “Darwinian capitalists.” Onepercenters were never monolithic or united in values or politics. Domhoff (2013) correctly differentiates the political/value spectrum of these corporate elites, noting that several organizations (the US Chamber of Commerce and the NAM, for instance) were “ultra-conservative” and that others, more important at this point to our history, were “corporate moderates.” As he indicated, corporate moderates were not newcomers to politics. Their roots, he alleges, spring from the late nineteenth-century National Civic Federation. Found in earlier years in the Civic Reform Clubs, they represented a longstanding elite element of the business community whose involvement in American government dates to the Constitutional Convention. Domhoff argues that they became involved during the New Deal to prevent the “liberal–labor alliance” (headquartered at the time in the federal National Labor Relations Board and National Resources Planning Board) from taking over planning, and through planning the postwar American economy. Perhaps so, but these corporate moderates had a lot more on their plate than that.

These pre- and postwar “Neo-Liberals” had many a fish to fry, from Bellow Woods monetary reform to adapting to a Keynesian economic system. State and local economic development was on their agenda in these years, but it did not enjoy their highest priority. Loyal Republicans for the most part, they stood solidly behind Hoover in the early years of the Depression. By 1932, with the economy in shatters and an election imminent, some were determined to step up to the plate and take action. Whether more correctly described as the breakpoint for corporate moderates or a metaphor, a group of them broke with both Hoover and US Chamber positions in 1932—the issue was national economic planning.

Led by Gerard Swope, president of General Electric (GE), a group of CEOs proposed national economic planning conducted by an entity composed of national sector trade associations. The chamber followed through, approving a motion calling for a national referendum to modify antitrust laws to allow this entity to limit production. Hoover was thrilled (sarcastic), calling it “the most gigantic proposal of monopoly ever made in history” and the chamber motion “sheer fascism.” The president of the chamber, Henry Harriman (former textile manufacturer, president of the Boston Chamber and at the time president of the New England Power Company) then semi-secretly started (in 1932) conversations with Harry Hopkins and Rexford Tugwell. Taking the oath on March 20, 1933, FDR spoke to the US Chamber on May 4, offering a welcome to join him in policy-making. Harriman and the chamber did, and participated in the formulation of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which the Chamber endorsed. Harriman called NIRA “the Magna Carta of industry and labor” (Collins, 1981, pp. 27–31). The “corporate moderate” wing of the national one-percenters had associated itself with FDR’s New Deal. This wing was to play an important role in the subsequent evolution of American sub-state economic development.

FDR’s informal alliance with the US Chamber, however, barely lasted through the year—and for all practical purposes ended in December 1934–April 1935 when Harriman’s term as president ended. By that point, the NAM had taken over leadership of the anti-New Deal business community. Involved in FDR’s famous “100 days,” the moderate wing had in the meantime informally integrated itself into New Deal policy-making through the 1933 Business Advisory Council (BAC). BAC “progressives” played a significant role in the formulation and passage of the social security legislation; despite periodic conflict, they remained as elite consultants to New Deal economic policy. Besides Harriman, the BAC included CEOs from International Harvester, Standard Oil, General Motors, US Steel, Sears Roebuck, AT&T and DuPont. They were chaired by GE’s Swope—the man who started the insurrection.

Mentored and protected by Secretary of the Treasury Jesse Jones, the BAC moved to establish a formal independent entity through which these moderate to progressive CEOs could play a meaningful role in Washington policy-making. In 1942, they formally incorporated the Committee for Economic Development (CED), which encouraged postwar corporate public involvement through research and planning in conjunction with the US Department of Commerce. Like the municipal research bureaus of yore, the CED was non-partisan and housed a serious and well-respected research arm (with close links to Harvard, Yale and MIT). Indeed, the elevation of research, planning, academia and experts as fundamental to their approach to policy was, and still is, their predominant and defining attribute:

Thus [its first chair] Paul Hoffman held that it was very important that we as a group think of ourselves not as right, left, conservative or radical but as responsible. [The CED] believes that there is a general interest and a truth independent of class interest. (Collins, 1981, pp. 85–6)

The CED further established “nation-wide local committee of business and industrial representatives to study the local postwar economic situation from the standpoint of fitting business and industry into the conditions that will follow the war” (Domhoff, 2013, pp. 35–7). To this end, the CED set up a “field” division that by 1944 organized 3000 local committees, “all of them independent entities that simply drew upon information and guidance provided by the CED (Domhoff, 2013, p. 40). The local committees mobilized local business elites, providing them an agenda for local action. Particularly in western cities, local CED-inspired business leaders, loosely coordinated by CED’s Washington research arm, played an important role in postwar municipal politics. They were instrumental in the 1946 termination of the National Resources Planning Board; amendments to the National Labor Relations Act (which permitted state right to work laws); the Employment Act of 1946; the Marshall Plan; and in 1949 played a behind-the-scenes role in the passage of the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954.

FROM RURAL TO URBAN

What is sometimes so obvious it is seldom mentioned, just automatically incorporated into one’s approach, is the change: a radical change occurred during these years in the character of sub-state economic development. Up to this period, the Big Cities were driving economic development policy and practice. States and certainly the federal government were secondary actors, except in rare instances like gift and loans clauses or transportation infrastructure financing. Federal tariff policy was deeply affected by municipal-level pressures. With the Depression, that municipal-driven character changed, probably forever. To be sure, municipal-level policy actors will continue to play a leading role in American economic policy through the Transition Era (1961). That will be very evident after Chapter 11. It will not be until the 1960s, the Great Society, that the federal (and state) governments will put municipalities “in their place” as “creatures” of higher-level governments.

The Depression is when this radical change begins in earnest. During the twenties, the federal government had become marginally more involved in state/sub-state ED-related matters such as western infrastructure, highways and harbors. Republican presidents, especially Hoover, took the lead in encouraging cities to adopt planning ordinances—and were simpatico with the City Efficient movement. The Depression hit during Hoover’s first year in office—crushing local governments, creating massive service demands, lowering tax revenues and destroying the fiscal capacity of state/substate governments. The federal government seemed the only government able to respond. There was, however, little in the history of American government, prevailing economic theory or the tenets of 1920s’ business conservatism/dual federalism that offered any roadmap for the feds. Stories of Hoover’s well-meaning but hopelessly inadequate reactions are well known. As time went on, conditions worsened and, as the 1932 election drew nearer, the Republican Congress and President tried harder to address the pain.

The result was a surprising set of ED-related initiatives. One initiative is a total shock: the Davis–Bacon Act of 1931, which required “prevailing wages” on federally financed projects. Crafted by New York Republican Congressman Robert Bacon in 1927 (reacting to a Virginia project that hired low-wage Alabaman African-Americans), the legislation had failed 13 times by 1931; but Hoover, under pressure from unions and the Republican Congress, embraced the legislation. The Secretary of Labor set prevailing wage rates/fringe benefits. The legislation’s scope, expanded over the following decades, increasingly overlapping with union-based prevailing wages.

Another initiative, the 1930 President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, called attention to “the sprawl of great cities,” resulting in the formation of another special committee to investigate the “metropolitan community” (Gelfand, 1975, p. 80). That committee hired University of Michigan sociologist Roderick McKenzie, a former student of Robert Park, to prepare a report. McKenzie produced The Metropolitan Community (1933):

[The] “disturbing” introduction of the automobile that had exerted the “most potent force” since 1900 in causing the redistribution of America’s population and the social disorganization of America’s cities. The centrifugal drift of people away from the central city areas … had given rise to a whole host of problems: blight, overloaded public facilities. Insufficient tax resources, haphazard suburban building, to name but a few. (Gelfand, 1975, p. 81)

Hoover’s presidential commission asserted that decentralization was the nation’s chief urban problem, and enumerated its many causes and consequences.

The New Deal Ain’t What You Think It Is

Big Cities found dealing with FDR in his first term a bit of a slog. He faced intense opposition from southern Democrats as well as from Republicans (Katznelson, 2014). FDR himself was a mixed bag of Progressive and Privatist tendencies, surprisingly sensitive to the South and West, but not Big City governments, business or chambers. FDR’s first-term New Deal was neither an urban nor a Big City enterprise—Roosevelt himself was ambivalent to Big Cities and not especially supportive of their economic development. His home and second White House was not located in New York City, but in rural Dutchess County; his second home was Warm Springs Georgia. He was more the Dutch patroon, rooted in an agricultural heritage living in an America which only recently had become majority urban. These internal contradictions and the oftentimes quarrelsome politics of the Democratic Party limited the New Deal’s impact on Big City ED. FDR’s first-term New Deal initiatives disproportionately addressed the Depression’s damage to people—the poor, aged and unemployed, agriculture and rural America—not manufacturing and not cities (Gelfand, 1975).

Rather, Roosevelt was an old-style, 1920-ish Progressive, a believer in home rule and in a federalism where the state, not municipal governments, was the logical partner to federal programs. He wanted as little as possible to do with Big City politics and municipal affairs such as budgets and finances. If anyone was to attempt that fool’s errand of bailing out cities, it should be the states. His was a “marble cake” federalism in which each level of government was fiscally responsible for its delegated powers/ policy areas. FDR’s marble cake federalism sent federal dollars to states which then distributed monies to cities and towns through formulas. Moreover, most New Deal initiatives went to individuals in need, not governments). Accordingly, FDR’s New Deal Programs were “urban”:

only in the sense [they] assisted people who lived in cities; guarantees of collective bargaining for the organized; work relief for the jobless; public housing for the slum resident; judgeships for the immigrant blocs. None of these programs represented a deliberate attempt to remake the cities as the Rural Electrification Administration, the Resettlement Administration, and the Tennessee Valley Authority changed the face of the countryside … Roosevelt … was interested in the city dweller, not the city. (Gelfand, 1975, p. 68)

Roosevelt believed that cities—teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, unable to assist the desperate and volatile unemployed—constituted the greatest threat to the Republic. Accordingly, his first administration emphasized emergency measures designed to help individuals deal with the collapse of the private economy. Wagner-Peyser, an economic development initiative to be sure, was to him an emergency measure meant to get people back to work—fast. While believing the Big Cities represented “progress,” he also advocated a rural-industrial strategy that promised to exchange “speculative living in the city for one of stabilized living in a real home in the country.” Roosevelt’s first “urban” New Deal initiative was the Resettlement Program.

[Since] technological advances now made it possible to enjoy all the attractions of urban life in a bucolic setting, Roosevelt suggested that the government foster the development of rural-industrial communities, uniting subsistence farming with part-time factory employment. He was advocating nothing less than an officially sponsored exodus from the cities … Convinced that the “pendulum has swung too far in the direction of the cities and that a readjustment must take place to restore the economic and sociological balance” he urged a national program of population redistribution to relieve “the overbalance of population in our industrial centers’. (Gelfand, 1975, p. 25)

To this end, Roosevelt inserted a $25 million subsistence homesteads program in his $3.3 billion public works bill of 1933—the National Industrial Recovery Act. That bill was the major exception to Roosevelt’s first-term preference for agriculture and rural areas. NIRA is FDR’s first initiative that commenced the slum clearance, public housing and eventually urban renewal (Lowe, 1967, pp. 22–4). That story discussed in Chapter 11.

In another example, municipalities needed an off-budget fiscal mechanism, such as municipal (revenue) bonds, to finance an augmented public works program. With federal support for municipal revenue bonds, FDR could have forged a direct federal–local relationship to combat the Depression. Harry Hopkins uncovered research by University of Chicago finance professor Simeon Leland that demonstrated that local budget austerity inherent in state constitutional balanced budget requirements operated at counter-purposes to federal-level Keynesian deficit spending. Accordingly, in 1934 Hopkins developed a legislative proposal calling for a “National Municipal Bank” (reminiscent of an Infrastructure Bank), capable of loans to municipalities for public/ private civic improvement projects.

The Conference of Mayors lobbied aggressively for the bank, but pushback from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and Congress was intense. FDR abandoned the issue. In its place, FDR amazingly sent to Congress a Hoover-style, classic liberal, anti-Keynesian proposal to end the tax-exempt status of state and municipal bonding. This, of course, would have sounded the death knell for state and local counter-cyclical infrastructure investment through IRBs.⁴ The measure mercifully failed. In the end, nothing came of the National Municipal Bank, and the tax-exempt status of state and local bonds was preserved.

By 1936, however, a beleaguered Roosevelt—believing he needed votes of Big City residents to win a second term—changed his tune toward urban legislation: “Only deeds … would permit the gentleman farmer from Dutchess County to maintain his urban following … relief monies poured into the cities, accompanied by important patronage posts (Gelfand, 1975, p. 67). Big Cities first aligned with the presidential wing of the Democratic Party during the 1936 election. Federal funds that followed in subsequent FDR administrations were motivated more by elections than a Progressive spirit.

FDR’s New Deal was motivated less from a Progressive community development perspective than an ad hoc mixture of desperation and experimentation, and later a politically expedient alliance with urban residents for votes. As far as the cities went, the New Deal resisted using federal powers and resources at the city level; opposed direct federal–municipal relationships; and did not see the federal government as a Progressive instrument for municipal-level change.

“Our Cities”

Roosevelt, a long-standing advocate of planning, created (July 1933) the National Resources Planning Board (NRB) with his uncle, Frederic Delano, a lifelong leader in the planning movement, as its chair. Before it fell off the national stage in 1943 (enjoying three name changes during the decade), the NRB became the “bully pulpit” for urban and planning advocates, and the personal platform for political scientist Charles E. Merriam.⁵ Merriam was quite the dynamo. He advocated the abolition of states, making cities co-sovereign with the federal government and a force in the Conference of Mayors and the American Municipal Association. By late 1934, Merriam had convinced the NRB to establish a special committee on urbanism. The committee would:

1. inventory urban physical, social and economic conditions;
2. discover emerging trends in urbanization;
3. outline the urban future;
4. develop proposals for remedying deficiencies; and 5. formulate a national urban policy (Gelfand, 1975, pp. 86–7).

On the seventh day, it would rest!

Merriam appointed Louis Brownlow (of Brownlow Commission fame), the president of the American Municipal League, a couple of city planners from Harvard (Charles Eliot and Arthur Comey) and University of Chicago urbanist Louis Wirth (whose committee research was summarized in “Urbanism as a Way of Life”).⁶ The impossible job description took two years to complete; on September 20, 1937 the final report, Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy, was released.⁷ It outlined how the United States had turned the page from a rural agricultural nation to a “nation of cities.”

As long as the United States was principally a rural and agricultural country … it was to be expected that our outlook and policies should have been largely rural. But since the city has come to play such a predominant role in the national existence, it becomes imperative that it acquire a central position in the formulation of national policy. (Gelfand, 1975, pp. 91–2) In essence, it concluded the nation’s agenda was now an urban one. Roosevelt’s ambivalence, if not pushback, to this report suggested, however, in his Preface to Our Cities:

For the first time in our history, the attention of the United States Government has been officially directed to the role of the city in our national economy. … It may be questioned whether the National Government has given the same careful attention to some of the specific and common problems of urban dwellers, as it has to the problems of farmers … and it is the purpose of this report to indicate some of the emerging city problems in which … the National Government may be helpful. … [However] it is not the business of the United States Government to assume responsibility for the solution of purely local problems. Nevertheless, [the federal government] cannot remain indifferent to the common life of American citizens simply because they happen to be found in what we call “cities.” (Gelfand, 1975, pp. 90–91)

A week after the publication of Our Cities, in his speech dedicating the Bonneville Dam, Roosevelt asserted: “Today many people are beginning to realize that there is inherent weakness in cities which become too large for their times and inherent strength in a wider geographical distribution of population.” The statement, it would seem, is a stunning endorsement of suburban decentralization, and a hint that city pathologies are a major reason for population dispersal from cities (Gelfand, 1975, p. 96). If correct, from day one Roosevelt was not on board with Our Cities. No specific federal initiatives followed from the report.

Our Cities was not on the New York Times bestseller list. The report received lukewarm support from urban-related national associations, was scarcely noticed by mayors and business elites, ignored in the practitioner world, and never mentioned in the Congressional Record. Our Cities, however, deeply influenced urban-minded academia. According to Gelfand, Our Cities was “directly responsible for the establishment of a Bureau of Urban Research at Princeton University in the summer of 1941” and “the Princeton unit would serve as a model for later urban study centers” (Gelfand, 1975, p. 93).

Federal Government Assumes Workforce ED Leadership

It is a good bet that most contemporary economic developers do not think of the US Department of Labor (DOL) employment services and unemployment relief program as “economic development.” When most, I suspect, think of workforce, they instinctively think of CETA, JTPA, WIA and vocational and community college programs. The federal programs that are the focus of this section have been in place so long they are not often included in state/sub-state ED. One of the lessons that emerges from this history, however, is that the federal government has a demonstrated long-standing involvement in certain aspects of our state/sub-state workforce strategies. Its involvement is obscured a bit because these programs typically run through state bureaucracies.

They are people-focused, not place-based (reflecting as they should a national perspective). Nevertheless, they can be found in most every jurisdiction, and are the primary resource for unemployed job seekers throughout the nation. Starting around World War I, but most obviously during the New Deal Depression years, the Feds displaced state and municipal public employment exchanges, and carved out a major role in public retraining programs for disabled and unemployed people. As one of the very first New Deal Acts, the 1933 Wagner–Peyser Act carved out public employment exchanges as the preserve of the federal government. These programs are the first of a core of federal programs that through their distinctive intergovernmental nexus provided semi-direct federally funded services to a jurisdiction’s unemployed and those seeking employment.

Ohio, the first public employment exchange, started in 1890; in 1894 Seattle set up the first known municipal-level public employment exchange, followed by New York State in 1897 and Illinois in 1899. By 1900 there were 15 public employment offices (all levels), and by 1912, 64. After the 1913–14 depression, 109 offices existed, 79 managed by states and 30 by municipalities (1915). During World War I, an Employment Service Department was set up within the federal DOL: at the peak of its war-time operations 850 offices were set up, but at war’s end it shut down (Douglas and Director, 1934, pp. 317–42). To the surprise of us all, then, public employment exchanges were a little-noticed state/municipal ED initiative that testifies to the early importance of state/sub-state governments in workforce programs, and the clear and consistent need by government to offer employment assistance to its residents. During the Roaring Twenties, however, the US Employment Service and state employment exchanges were mostly dormant (Becker, 1965, p. 15). That changed, of course, by 1933 when 13 million were unemployed.

The New Deal Wagner–Peyser Act did not set up a federally operated public exchange system, choosing instead to provide grants to states to set up and operate, congruent with federal requirements, their state system of exchanges. The predominant federal requirement was that states must make the service available to all workers and assist all companies in their efforts to find employees. As such, the US Employment Service could piggyback on those states operating a public employment exchange—in 1933 there were 23 states and 120 offices (Adams, 1965, p. 194)—as well as encourage the other states to establish their own. A national public employment system would result. The intention was to leave as much autonomy as feasible to states so as to meet local needs. By 1935, 34 states had set up a public employment exchange. The 1935 Social Security Act included an unemployment insurance program that operated from these employment exchanges. In 1939 the US State Employment Service transferred from the DOL to Social Security. In 1944 the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act expanded services to veterans; established a veterans’ preference in referrals; and set up a veterans’ division within the now-named Bureau of Employment Security.

Public training programs have a longer, albeit sporadic history. Trade education began in Boston’s schools after 1820. The 1917 Smith-Hughes Act established a federal role in vocational training for agriculture, industry and home economics. The US Office for Vocation Rehabilitation started retraining disabled people for employment in the 1920s. The New Deal 1937 Fitzgerald Act set up the federal Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training, and during the war a “Training-within-Industry” section was set up in the (War) Office of Production Management (Somers, 1965, pp. 228–30). Retraining was not the hot button then it is today, but the federal government early on displayed an interest and carved out a niche.

States were less active. Wisconsin started an apprentice program in 1915 operated by its State Industrial Commission. The Industrial Commission “movement,” was a Progressive-era worker health and safety reform. Alice Hamilton,⁸ a doctor volunteering in Jane Adams’s Hull House, was a primary advocate and employee for the first such commission in Illinois.⁹ The Depression prompted a number of state/local retraining initiatives, involving relief recipients, which were temporary, small and poorly funded. (The first known state unemployment/retraining program was established by Pennsylvania only in 1957.)

THE DECENTRALIZATION CRISIS

The last chapter introduced Lewis Mumford. His advocacy within the famous New York City Regional Plan for new garden city-like suburbs resulted in development of several new suburbs, Radburn being the most prominent. Later, in 1938, Mumford published his most important work, The Culture of Cities. Mumford loved cities and regarded urbanity “as man’s greatest work”; but he did not believe the 1940 industrial central city was the best urban form to house humanity. His work attacked the scale, density and human pathologies caused by Big Cities His vision was not very different from that of Wright’s Broadacre City. The problem for Mumford was that his “dinosaur city” was still much beloved. Unanticipated was the inevitable counter-response of the Big Cities and their political and business leadership to “save” their city.

The embedded power of Big Cities does not mean, however, that each view did not produce their visions of the future during the 1930s. These competing visions proved very impactful in the post-World War II era. Through the Depression and the war years, the conversation concerning Big City decline driven by decentralization deepened: decline and decentralization perceived in physical terms—obsolescence, blight, physical decay—with growth perceived as the opposite. All the rest were mere symptoms and derivatives. For Mumford, the Big City was a lost cause; that pessimism, however, was not universally shared. To those who wanted to return the Big City to full vigor, some form of redevelopment was necessary. Both views required an “image,” an ideal visual from which design and planning initiatives could be fashioned. To capture the flavor of each image, we verbally contrast the pro-Big City Le Corbusier and his de facto practitioner ally, Robert Moses, with the suburban new cities proponent Frank Lloyd Wright and his practitioner friend Rexford G. Tugwell and housing advocate Catherine Bauer.

Le Corbusier and Robert Moses

Swiss architect-planner, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known by his pseudonym Le Corbusier, hit intellectual America in the thirties like the 1960s’ British/Beatle’s invasion affected American teenagers—the role of Ed Sullivan in this era, however, performed by Robert Moses. Le Corbusier’s initial image of his future Big City, the Voisin Plan, rested upon “very” high-rise office buildings separated by wide boulevards between each high rise, and surrounded by parks through which crisscrossed multilevel roads and elevated high-speed highways. A large train station whose roof served as the airport was located at the center. Residential districts, also high-rise, adjoined a central park. Each individual city was surrounded by a greenbelt (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 39–50). The shock of clustered skyscrapers and spirit-crushing human density struck observers like a bolt of lightning. It was wonderful. They loved it.

American architecture/planning/housing intelligentsia woke up to “Le Corbu” after his exhibit was included in the 1932 Museum of Modern Art’s “Modern Architecture International Exhibition.” Commencing in New York City, the exhibition tastefully traveled across the Big City Northeast and Midwest—reaching cities like Toledo and Worcester, and even Los Angeles. Divided into two sub-areas, architecture and housing, the exhibition also included European “Modernists” such as Gropius and van der Rohe, as well as American “housers” like Mumford, Bauer, Stein and Henry Wright. European Modernism infused their designs (high-rise, functional and minimalist); these designs later wandered into neighborhood/slum/public housing design.¹⁰ From my perspective, the exhibition could have been entitled “residential housing meets the office skyscraper.” It may have marked the birth of American “density-based planning.”

Le Corbusier dramatically altered/updated his breakout Voisin Plan in 1935 with his most renowned work, La Ville Radieuse/The Radiant City (1964). It was necessary, he muttered, to abolish suburbs and bring nature inside cities. High-rise apartment/office buildings were fewer, but dramatically higher. Thousands would live in each highdensity apartment. Le Corbusier didn’t invent density, but he popularized it and, in short, order became a central element of city planning where it fit remarkably well with its goal of “efficiency.” Density emerged as the Big City’s counter to metropolitan suburbanization.

Le Corbusier’s break with Howard’s Garden City was total, excepting perhaps his massive urban parks. Upon his initial visit to New York City in 1935 (oddly, the first time he had seen a skyscraper), Le Corbusier was unimpressed. Gotham did not fit his image: “The skyscrapers were too small and too close together”; he also did not like zoning setbacks. Embarking on a 20-city lecture series, his ideas were well received by student audiences—unlike the reception they received in the older cities of the Continent. In this respect, he was the Thomas Piketty of his day. Rybczynski suggests there was much of “America” in Le Corbusier’s urban image. The Radiant City seemed to many to be a natural fit with car-dominated central cities—whose CBD skyline is iconically characterized by skyscrapers. Le Corbusier’s separation of uses blended nicely with 1930s’ planning concepts and priorities.

Timing is everything they say, and as far as Le Corbusier and America went, his timing was superb. Robert Moses, a scant four years after Le Corbusier’s American tour, built his version of the Radiant City, the 1939 World’s Fair, in Flushing Meadows outside New York City. Attended by an estimated 44 million visitors, the Fair included an immensely popular General Motors Futurama Pavilion (designed by Norman Bel Geddes). That pavilion incorporated much of the Voisin Plan/Radiant City’s high-rise offices and apartments, elevated highways, wide boulevards—surrounded by suburbs and connected by superhighways. General Motors loved Le Corbusier (something about highways between the skyscrapers). Moses’ World’s Fair conveyed the desired image of the future American central city (Rybczynski, 2010, p. 48).

The power broker didn’t accept Mumford’s argument. Removal of sums were key. The Big City could, and should, redevelop to preserve its hegemonic position over the hinterland: “It is safe to say that almost no city needs to tolerate slums. There are plenty of ways of getting rid of them” (Moses, 1945, p. 64). Moses followed up shortly after with a series of residential projects in New York City (some of which were urban renewal projects): Parkchester, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. Moses-style housing became the national motif for subsequent Big City public housing. High-rise residential units combined with large-scale neighborhood slum clearance provided an answer for a pressing Depression-era crisis: public housing and CBD redevelopment.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright embraced the suburb; he could not imagine how the central city of his day could survive. The cause of its death: obsolescence. The centrality of transportation modes to his suburban vision, called Broadacre City (rail, automobiles, planes and, believe it or not, a personal Jetson-like flying car) bespeak his recognition and belief that the post-industrial urban landscape was caused by decentralizing transportation (and communication) technologies (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 75–6):

People can spread out—they no longer need to live in dense concentrations. Wright did not want to inject nature into dense concentrations; he advocated instead their dispersal people into the countryside. The home of the individual social unit will contain in itself … all the city … plus intimate comfort and free individual choice. (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 67–9) His ideas, the polar opposite of Le Corbusier’s, advocated for a “planned” city composed of a “community of individuals.” Broadacre City provided an acre for each family. Rybczynski suggests the old socialist Henry George influenced Wright; he conceived of Broadacre City as a land redistribution scheme.

Wright’s classic, The Disappearing City (1932), presented Broadacre City, imagining a hypothetical site: 4 square miles of vaguely midwestern topography including farmland, a portion of a river and a section of hillside. Each community/suburb was self-contained, consisting of about 1400 families; each home on a 1-acre lot; each community with its own school, power grid and diversified economic base—with small farms playing a vital role.

There is no functional zoning; instead, schools, civic buildings, factories, a county seat, and an arena are scattered among orchards, vineyards, farms, and recreational spaces. People live in houses on acre lots, as well as apartment towers, and on small farms … Having no center or commercial core, nothing that resembles a traditional downtown. (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 71–2)

His incomplete depiction of a complete suburb arguably gave rise to the concept of subdivision. The glass-roofed roadside markets included in Broadacre City reasonably resemble an enclosed shopping mall. Wright never built a Broadacre City. In its place, he designed the home, the housing around which it rested. Publishing home designs in House and Home and House Beautiful, his concept (the “Usonian”) became Levittown’s “Rambler,” today’s pervasive ranch-style housing.

Wright saw the central city of his day as “disappearing.” It didn’t—although in the 1970s it came darned close. Nevertheless, Wright understood what many Americans wanted. Broadacre City permitted the family-oriented lifestyle and privacy. Mel Scott in his celebrated history of American planning concedes: “Wright’s visionary amalgam of country and town impressed the defenders of the concentrated urban center [our Big Cities] as unrealistic, but both it and the English garden city were probably closer to the heart’s desire of a large number of Americans” (Scott, 1969, p. 336). The thrust of Broadacre seems very Privatist, centered on the individual and his/her family. In fact, Broadacre City reflected a Progressivist community whose rationality was imposed by planners. Broadacre City is not a random, market-driven, uncoordinated phenomenon—it is metropolitan planning at its finest. In its way, Broadacre City reconciled individualism, planning and community better than had any previous conceptual image. That image was embraced by Rexford Tugwell and Catherine Bauer and described below.

Tugwell/Bauer’s New Town “Multiple Nuclei” Alternative

The “New Town” movement was a New Deal initiative that gathered Howard’s garden city, Clarence Stein’s Radburn planned community and now Wright’s Broadacre City, combining all with Mumford’s pessimistic view of Big City viability and FDR’s ambivalent, opportunistic attraction to urban voters.¹¹ New Towns represented a successful alternative to rebuilding the Big City or letting the private sector loose to suburbanize the metropolitan hinterlands. New Towns were nothing less than a real-life effort to create Broadacre City and a planned suburban metropolitan hinterland. If successful, New Towns would have created a poly-nuclear metropolitan area. The architect of this bold initiative was one of the New Deal’s most prominent and powerful leaders, Rexford G. Tugwell.

When the Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act (1935), Roosevelt transferred several of its initiatives, in particular the National Resettlement Administration, to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). The National Resettlement Administration housed the earlier-mentioned program responsible for moving the unemployed out of central cities and into rural areas. FDR appointed Tugwell director of the National Resettlement Administration. Beginning in 1935, Tugwell commenced planning, design and construction of three new towns: Greendale Wisconsin, Greenbelt Maryland and Greenhills Ohio.

His business plan, retold by Jane Jacobs in Death and Life of Great American Cities, was “My idea [was] to just go outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community, and entice people into it. Then go back to the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 310).¹² Tugwell assembled his brain trust, which included leading authorities such as Jacob Crane (president of the American City Planning Institute), Warren Jay Vinton (economist, Resettlement Administration), Frederick Bigger (Pittsburgh) and Henry Wright and Clarence Stein “hisself.” Originally, selecting eight sites—politics, available funds and lawsuits winnowed it to three (Scott, 1969, pp. 338–9). The towns opened in 1937. They are vibrant communities today.

Like Radburn, New Towns unfortunately, did not deliver what it promised. What were supposed to be “low-cost” communities became rather more expensive in their making. The only factor that reduced cost was the “free labor” provided by the PWA. Despite their “garden city” heritage, they were not self-contained garden cities or a Broadacre City by any means. Quite small, attracting only 2100 households at their opening, lacking space for industry, more open to agriculture, workers had to go elsewhere for employment. They were garden-style suburban bedroom communities whose housing prices permitted only middle-class buyers: “There was no place for poor people in ‘Tugwelltown’; just like most of the suburban neighbors, the ‘Greenbelts’ became single class communities … dependent economically, and culturally on their central city (Gelfand, 1975, p. 134).

New Towns never lacked for opponents, critics and name-callers. Called “Rex the Red,” Tugwell and the New Towns movement quickly moved past the “socialist” label, acquiring the full-fledged “communistic” tag. The only friends came from within the planning profession. Congress thought otherwise, and ended the agency in 1938, although late in the war (1944), the department received additional funds for war production employees—the proverbial tempest in a teapot. Tugwell left in 1936. New Towns almost caught a second breath, however, with the passage of the 1949 Housing Act.

Catherine Bauer—a disciple of Mumford, involved in Radburn and author of the classic Modern Housing (1934)—organized labor’s chief lobbyist for low-income housing. An influential writer of the Housing Act of 1937, she tried going through the back door of federal policy-making. She attempted to use Housing Act urban renewal funds for New Town housing as an alternative to Big City slum clearance. Her position on slum clearance was that “exclusive emphasis on slum clearance is as illogical as if the early automobile manufacturers had … buying out the still prosperous carriage makers and razing their factories instead of building automobiles” (Gelfand, 1975, pp. 135–6). For Bauer, the building of war plants in the suburbs, plus anticipated postwar housing, guaranteed an enormous further wave of decentralization.

[Thus, it was] too late, if indeed it was ever possible, to think of saving the old city centers in their congested nineteenth-century form … The shape and quality and efficiency of the urban environment for a generation to come is about to be set. The location and design of the new suburban subdivisions will make, or finally break, our metropolitan regions. (Gelfand, 1975, p. 136)

Within months of the Housing Act’s passage, Bauer made an interesting request to the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA). Citing a Title 1 passage that specified eligible projects could include any “open land necessary for sound community growth which is to be developed for predominantly residential uses,” Bauer wanted federal slum removal funds for undeveloped suburban land, with no blight for new towns or satellite communities (Hoffman, 2000, p. 313). The HHFA declined the honor of using Title 1 urban redevelopment funds to create new towns on city peripheries, saying: “the dog is slum clearance, and the tail is community development” (Foard and Fefferman, 1966, p. 668).

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT TURNS A PAGE

The Depression nailed community developers as it did everybody else. A variety of mostly negative factors took the wind out of the settlement and neighborhood wings. While the hitherto dominant CD wings lost momentum, however, an entirely new approach pioneered around the University of Chicago and its adjacent neighborhoods. This new approach, community mobilization (”organizing”), turned out to be a durable and important new wing for community development. Four factors generated headwinds for CD:

1. Maturation (professionalization) of the settlement and community center wings created a CD schism.
2. The emergence of unions captured the loyalty of CD’s native clientele.
3. Federal and state welfare/workforce/employment programs cream-skimmed hotbutton issue areas away from CD.
4. The character of neighborhood succession fundamentally shifted: ethnics inclined, if possible, to periphery movement and new residents introduced en masse a racial dynamic into the neighborhood-based CD wings—a Second Ghetto was in process.

The 800-lb gorilla, however, was that another wing, the “housers,” uniting with planners and marginalized neighborhood community developers—with a certain measure of access into municipal/federal policy-making—formed a coalition that assumed de facto leadership of the approach (see Chapter 11). Housers and their slum removal, new town suburbs and public housing initiatives took over the spotlight—for almost two generations. If it did not involve housing and slums in some way, it was pushed off to CD’s margins.

Settlement and community center movements had matured. Volunteer settlement workers, replaced by professional social workers operating out of larger bureaucracies, were increasingly viewed by other community developers as “agents of social control”—which was not meant as a compliment. This CD schism helped push social workers into forming their own profession. Social work (case management) professionals worked directly with individuals, separating themselves professionally from the larger and more political ends of CD that pursued larger social goals. Those remaining in non-housing community development, and new adherents attracted to it (this evolution played out over a generation), were concerned with “collections of people,” groups and classes adversely affected by the economy and society. Rather than assist people on a one-by-one basis, CD increasingly focused on two types of “collections of similar people”: (1) those living in a particular place—a low-income, immigrant or racial majority neighborhood; (2) groups with shared needs in housing, family assistance or juvenile delinquency, for example. Community development remained focused on people and neighborhoods—but endeavored to empower groups of individuals through programs, social reform and systemic change.

Moving into these new foci, CD competed with labor unions and traditional ethnic institutions for the attention of their clientele.

The Chicago Area Project

One of the more obvious weaknesses of neighborhood-based community development thus far was its dependence on either Progressive volunteers or “experts/professionals” and the gap between them and neighborhood residents. External “do-gooders” could not compete with indigenous organizations like the Catholic Church, the parochial school (the Bells of St Mary syndrome), the ward boss and newly rising unions: “By far the most troublesome and controversial concept in the history of community-based reform [was community] participation.” The Chicago Area Project (CAP) broke with CD tradition and employed workers from troubled neighborhoods “as a direct challenge to social work professionals, and outside expertise” (O’Connor, 1999a, p. 87).

CAP was the brainchild of Clifford Shaw (Illinois Institute of Juvenile Research) and an old friend, Ernest Burgess (Chicago School of Sociology). At the start (1934), it was an experiment to design a program to prevent juvenile delinquency. Juvenile delinquency “was receiving growing attention, both in its own right and as a proxy for a broad array of social problems … linked to the debilitating effects of poverty and social marginality” (Halpern, 1995, p. 50). Its chief innovation was that it used neighborhood residents as staff and then as project leaders. In addition, instead of competing with local institutions, CAP enlisted their support.

The first of these project/experiments was Chicago’s Southside Russell Square neighborhood. Its direction was provided mostly by a board of affluent residents and a ton of resident volunteers as staff and committee members; and it was financed locally, some funding provided by the local priest who also opened a boys’ club in the church basement. Its chief programmatic tool was “curbside counseling” by former delinquents (actual ex-cons) who had straightened up. It also paid attention to small-scale physical

improvements such as using trashcans rather than dumping in streets and backyards, and shrubbery. Despite being one of the worst juvenile crime-ridden neighborhoods in Chicago, the project was a success (it continues to this day)—and two other neighborhood projects followed (1938). One of these was the Back of the Yards neighborhood, next to the stockyards and Sinclair’s “the Jungle” slaughterhouses, one of Chicago’s worst. Selected to staff the initiative was a University of Chicago graduate student and CAP “curbside counselor, Saul Alinsky.

Back of the Yards: Reveille for Radicals

Back of the Yards was an old, stable, white, 95 percent European Catholic, working stiff Slavs, 4-square mile area in which 95,000 lived. Attractive to union organizers (Congress of Industrial Organizations, CIO) who wanted to unionize its worker residents, Alinsky moved in, watched—and learned from them how to involve the community. In early 1939, he organized the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) and filled it with residents. Allying with Joseph Meegan, the resident director of the neighborhood recreation program, he went door to door to recruit his board and allies. His first major victory brought a local parish priest on board—and the local Catholic bureaucracy joined as well. Although the church distrusted, hated actually, the “communist union organizers” Alinsky included both in his organization.

From 1939 to the end of World War II, Alinsky engaged in project after project of all types and descriptions—the key denominator being the council and residents selected, financed and implemented them. They delivered services, exacted concessions from the city, the machine and from business, and conducted the only known “shit in” at Chicago’s airport (Fisher, 1994, pp. 51–65). Alinsky/Meegan developed five rules or principles:

1. The professional organizer is the catalyst for social change.
2. The primary task is to build a democratic community-based organization open to all members of the community, especially traditional community leaders and institutions.
3. The goal is to win power because the neighborhood organization is the counter to a neighborhood composed of “the powerless and the unorganized.”
4. Any tactics necessary should be used—the end justifies the means—and organizations acquire power by winning victories.
5. Organization must be pragmatic, flexible and non-ideological so that it can support any project the neighborhood council pursues. (Fisher, 1994, pp. 53–4)

Alinsky had greater ambitions, and eventually left to promote community organizing nationwide. He left Meegan (and the priests) in charge. Meegan, a sort of godfather and ward boss, served as executive director for nearly fifty years, retiring in 1982. Said and done, Meegan and his successors grew the BYNC into a prototype neighborhood-based organization (NBO). The BYNC persisted through neighborhood succession (Hispanic mostly) and continues to this day. It is a mature NBO because, as Fisher observed, “there is a complementary relationship between social movements and community organizing. Local organizing oriented to social change can exist without a movement, but it will not thrive for very long. When a movement develops, however, community organizations often ride the wave of mass support” (Fisher, 1994, pp. 53–4).

Alinsky did not become the Che Guevara of American community development, however. Alinsky’s organic, rooted-in-neighborhood concerns organizing was too parochial—often relabeled as “populist”—a bad word in CD land. Alinsky’s approach offered:

[offered] very little critique of the economic system [that] … perpetuates poverty in the neighborhood … Alinsky ultimately possessed a strong faith in liberal capitalism … [and] Alinsky organizing does not question the economic foundation of the existing order or seek to replace the political system that maintains that order; his approach overlooks the possibility that capitalism is not set up to serve the poor and working class and that it is ultimately undemocratic. (Fisher, 1994, p. 64)

His book, possibly the most read book in community development, had its greatest impact in the aftermath of the Great Society. While he may not have “founded” community organizing, and nor was he the first, he was the most visible. What he did was devise the organizational platform, an EDO for social change, social reform and neighborhood development that would arguably become the cutting edge of modern community development—the community development corporation (CDC):

A community-wide reform organization, an umbrella organization that would provide a forum for mobilizing all the discrete constituencies of the community around common priority problems, identified through democratic processes of discussion, deliberation and voting. (Halpern, 1995, p. 54)

The Second Ghetto: A Metaphor for “Turning the Page”

When Arnold R. Hirsch first published Making the Second Ghetto in 1983, he summarized much of the thought that community development had developed to that point; but he also unleashed a torrent of new studies, themes and concepts that channeled community development thought for several decades (Hirsch, 1998). “Making” in that respect served as a platform, a foundation most neighborhood CD approaches incorporated. Hirsch’s Second Ghetto includes the period under discussion in this chapter, but also extends to 1960. The pattern Hirsch outlines, based exclusively on Chicago, has been found to apply in a broad sense; but individual cities (Mohl’s Miami for example) and regional differences (not to mention differences in Hispanic settlement of urban areas) suggest dynamics uncovered by Hirsch are more interesting than the specifics of Chicago—the most segregated city in America in this period.

The book describes many “moving parts” that produced the Second Ghetto. Over the years, the tendency has been to simplify them into the role federal, state and local governments played in Chicago’s postwar segregation. My simplistic take on Hirsch is that he describes how 1930–60 Chicago reacted to the Great Migration. The discussion centers solely on black migration. The First Ghetto, arguably (it has been differently interpreted) is that area in which African-Americans initially resided (pre-1930 or so). Sheer numbers of migrants forced expansion from the First Ghetto into adjoining white neighborhoods, creating the Second Ghetto. The distinction between the two ghettos seems to be time. The resulting succession of neighborhoods was vastly more complex (and insidious) that the old Chicago School literature would suggest. There were many bad guys; the private sector (downtown elites and real estate especially) and willing governmental dupes were the worst. White ethnics and University of Chicago “liberal” elites did not fare well. It seems whoever was in authority, wealthy or the majority population created the Second Ghetto. The core focus of “Making” was how public policy and individual/corporate actions negatively affected African-Americans and created the Second Ghetto.

Hindsight suggests, at its best, that Hirsch depicts a story as it unfolded in an era that has moved on. Written almost a generation after the Great Society, one can see how (anti)urban renewal, its effects and lessons, had become a cornerstone for community development. Decentralization, deindustrialization, suburbanization of poverty, inequality and the amazing durability of “the ghetto”—despite a rather transformative redirection of redistributive public policy—strongly argue that Hirsch’s Second Ghetto was a “snapshot,” a frozen frame, a single chapter of a story that still is unfolding. The image of racial change and neighborhood succession Hirsch drew, however, served as a policy paradigm of what happened over the next very troubled decades. It has since been “replaced” by works such as Thomas Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis first published in 1996 (Sugrue, 2005). Starkly said, and certain to generate controversy, Hirsch’s “Making” serves as metaphor for the evolution of community development during and after the New Deal—especially after World War II.

During those years, while an old-style Progressivist-era community development withered, without fanfare or conscious planning, a new-style community development slowly, almost imperceptibly, emerged—built around the dynamics associated with the Second Ghetto. Centering on blacks, ghettos, inequality, racism, an intense rejection of capitalism and corporate elites, and a distrust of governments that too often served the interests of those private elites, a new-style community development replaced the old-style “preserve the capitalist system, Americanization” of Progressive-era Protestant elites. In the process the Second Ghetto paradigm fostered a sort of CD “spatial fix” which transformed suburbs into the enemy of blacks and central cities which, unless confronted, would result in the enforced segregation of black and poor people into permanent ghettos. A larger CD world view developed. Although this reformulation and generational shift will extend for the next two decades, from this point on I will distinguish between old-style and new-style community development. There was no magic moment that definitively marked this shift and policy transformation; but, arguably, its first visible trace becomes evident in the making of Great Society policy, starting in the middle 1950s.

WAR YEARS AND BIG CITIES

World War II’s production of war-related material may be the most transformative, certainly dramatic driver of American twentieth-century regional change: “The most important urban development program conducted by the federal government during World War II was … recapitalization of American industry for the war effort”

(Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 104). It hugely affected the course, the pace and the nature of American economic development. It is amazing so little has been written about it; it is every bit as critical to American economic development as Stalin’s 1930s’ collectivization and five-year industrialization plans. Yet the process, the methods, the humaneness that differentiates the two amply demonstrate the range of possibilities that underlay governmental “big pushes.” War Production is a federal government big push to create industrial and logistics capacity to produce sufficient material to win the war. Its scale is unbelievable: “Total additions to the US physical capital plant between 1942 and 1944 amounted to $35.5 billion, almost equal to the entire 1939 value of US manufacturing plant” (Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 104). It was a fully conscious redistribution of the productive capacity of the nation into areas less vulnerable to attack or, conversely, better located to fight a Pacific war.

In chapters to follow, detailing war production’s impact on the South and West, it will be easy to reach the conclusion that World War II war production (and subsequent job migration) triggered the real rise of the Sunbelt. There is precious little research/ history that focuses on war production’s impact on the Big Cities. One might assume that the North and/or the Midwest missed the war production boat entirely or that the federal government, for its own insidious purposes, consciously decentralized war production into new geographies formerly without significant manufacturing capacity. The more adventurous might assert that the federal government embarked on a semi-conscious redevelopment program to promote economic development/prosperity in depressed regions of the nation. Our version of reality is more complex. Crisis management is seldom kind to sophisticated plans and good intentions.

“We Saw Our Opportunities and We Took Them”

Were the populous and industrial Big Cities of the nation’s industrial heartland simply “outmuscled” by the South and West in the latter quest to break from perceived colonial status by importing federal war production facilities? The obvious counter is that most military/naval bases/shipyards were already located in the North and on the Atlantic coast. The allied main effort was against Germany. Detroit and “the 1940 auto alley,” the New England textile industry and the East Coast chemical industries locked in place when war production exploded. The problem, however, was that there was never the remotest possibility that sufficient tanks (ships, rifles, planes, etc.) could be produced from existing facilities. The very nature of a world war meant a sizeable number of new production facilities needed to be built and/or expanded. An enormous expansion of our municipal economic bases resulted from war production—with a spectacular increase in workers/residents in an incredibly short period.

No—the North and Midwest were not outmuscled for federal war production facility investment. Growing from a low base, the “rates” of southern and western growth are spectacular; and, in cities like Los Angeles, raw numbers are spectacular as well—raw numbers tell the better story.¹³ The Detroit metro garnered the most war production facility investment, more than $1 billion (1940 dollars)—over seven times that of the Dallas/Fort Worth metro. Only Los Angeles attained sufficient investment in the top four metro areas (highest to lowest, Detroit, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles). With the exception of Los Angeles and sixth-ranking Houston, Big Cities captured 10 of the top 12 spots. Thirteenth-ranked San Francisco/Oakland was the next highest ranked Sunbelt city. Tenth-ranked Boston captured 4.5 times more investment than San Jose. Non-Texan southern state investment came principally in the form of military facilities. As shall be discussed in Chapters 12 and 13, the future growth differential of northern investment was in “traditional industrial production facilities”: Texan in petrochemical and aircraft; and aircraft, ships and weaponry in the Pacific. These figures obscure the federal investment “jump-starting” of the gazelles of the Cold War.

The industrial heartland of America claimed primary advantage and benefit from war contracts: “Michigan was the true arsenal of democracy … With only 4 percent of the nation’s population, Michigan garnered more than 10 percent of defense contracts.” The state capital, Lansing, “manufactured 48 million rounds of ammunition, 140,000 tank cannons and aircraft machine guns … [and] almost 350,000 aircraft engine parts” (Teaford, 1993, p. 186). Detroit, for all its fiscal woes, was king of war production; total employment in metro Detroit more than doubled from 1940 (360,000) to 1943 (867,000). Cleveland, home of the Thompson Aircraft plant and the Fisher Aircraft factory, had over 21,000 workers at these two factories alone. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) claimed that: “Cleveland is one of the nation’s industrial centers which have expanded the most since the beginning of the war.” The War Department touted Rockford Illinois as “the most important city of its size in the country in terms of national defense.” Evanston Indiana produced amphibious landing craft and airplanes, growing its manufacturing sector from 21,000 to over 64,000 workers. Indianapolis manufactured aircraft engines and possessed the largest propeller plant in the nation. In 1942 the city was declared a labor shortage area by the War Department (Teaford, 1993, p. 186; internal citations omitted).

Labor shortages were real; the Southern Diaspora/Great Migration went on steroids. Between 1940 and 1944, the number of African-Americans in the Detroit metro area soared from 170,000 to almost 260,000; within the city, the white population declined by 2 percent and African-Americans increased 41.5 percent. The Ford River Rouge plant employed 15,000 African-Americans alone. The distinction between the two population movements became especially troublesome.

What was distinctive about the Midwest was the magnitude of the white migration from the South during the period … white southern migrants far outnumbered black southern newcomers, creating a population pattern in the cities of the [Midwest] heartland, different from that of the Atlantic seaboard … Thus southern newcomers to midwestern cities were predominantly white, whereas southern migrants to the northeast were predominantly black. (Teaford, 1993, p. 193)

Intra-union solidarity deteriorated and racial conflict intensified. Strikes/shutdowns, anomic violence, sheer racism and riots occurred in many northern/midwestern cities—Detroit (1943) was arguably the worst; Chicago, Tulsa and the Mexican “zoot suit” riots of Los Angeles were terrible indeed.

Industrial Decentralization

Did northern and Midwestern states fight against western and southern industrial decentralization—that is, the federal decision to disperse industrial war-related manufacturing and services production to the South and West for military purposes? The answer is yes!

Eastern and midwestern cities and states were neither morally superior to the contest for martial riches nor asleep at the switch. As early as 1939, Chicago spokesmen had questioned the equity and strategic necessity of aircraft contract distribution. During the war the East and Midwest fought against industrial decentralization. (Lotchin, 1993)

The South/West argued for industrial decentralization to make war production less vulnerable to Nazi attack, a rationale they used until Germany and Japan surrendered. These cities and states understood quite well that they were importing an industrial base at federal expense, which would free them from perceived colonial status. Midwestern/northern states had no illusions that industrial decentralization was seeding future economic competition, and, in the halls of Congress, war production bureaucracies and the White House, “the Frostbelt fought back just as forcefully; throughout the war the controversy over the urban geographic distribution of military spending continued to rend the fabric of national unity” (Lotchin, 1993, pp. 49–50).

William “Bill” Knudsen (Ford’s former senior operations chief, former president of General Motors and chair of FDR’s Office of Production Management/National Defense Advisory Commission) convened a meeting of four automobile component production chiefs in his office in October 1940. Knudsen, the first of the famous “$1 dollar a year men,” asked the question: “Can you make guns—a lot of guns—in a hurry?” In that same month, the Battle of Britain had begun and German bombers were leveling London. Denmark, Norway the Benelux countries and France fell. Japan signed the Axis Pact (and then invaded French Indochina). The Warsaw Ghetto started. The German submarine war wreaked havoc on convoys that month. In addition, the first American selective service draftees (28,000) were selected, while FDR campaigned for his third term, pledging he would keep “our boys out of the war.”

In October 1940 the tools to make the weapons did not exist—no tools, no guns. The tool blueprint designs did not exist. Before actual production of weapons could happen, machine tools that made the guns/parts/ammo, around which assembly lines could be fashioned, still needed design and testing. Assembly lines could be blueprinted, and factories that housed the assembly lines configured to the assembly lines that made the final product. A war contract issued that month for supplies from a new factory required at least 18 months to deliver. Knudsen was in the midst of a spectacular production crisis. Industrial decentralization decisions were made in this atmosphere.

Airplane engines and guns were the most complex and the most needed items—right away. On October 15, Knudsen, speaking at a dinner of the Automobile Manufacturers Association Show at Madison Square Garden, got up in front of these company production managers and dumped a huge pile of blueprints on the table. They were airplane blueprints: “We must build big bombers … We need them soon … You’ve got to help.” Edsel Ford, among others, responded [paraphrased] “Tell us what to do. You’re the boss.” In the following weeks a panel (army and air force Generals Billy Mitchell and Jimmy Doolittle were included) was formed:

to figure out the parts, the necessary tools, flexible hard and soft cast dies. From the panel, the elements/blueprints, tools, assembly line designs of converting the automotive industry over to war production would have to be devised—for construction of only aircraft. Knudsen responded calling this series of plans, designs etc. “the arsenal of democracy.” (Herman, 2012, p. 111)

Hundreds of companies were involved.

Then it all stopped. Walter Reuther and other union leaders were furious; this planning had occurred in secret by corporate operations management. Reuther proposed his own plan in December: a plan that did not require significant industrial decentralization; a plan that could use existing facilities with his newly unionized workforce. The press leaped in with support; Reuther had FDR’s ear. But then reality set in:

The auto union leader didn’t seem to realize that whereas the average automobile consisted of 15,000 separate parts, a twin engine bomber like the B-25 demanded 165,000 parts—plus 150,000 rivets. No existing auto plant, no matter how carefully retooled, was ready to produce so complex a piece of machinery, let alone 500 a day of varying sizes and shapes. (Herman, 2012, p. 117)

Reuther backed down. The Reuther Plan gave way to the Knudsen Plan: using America’s largest corporations, ignoring small business and eventually developing organizational hybrid entities that combined military, corporate and political actors to produce specific products in rushed periods. These entities made the logistical and production decisions for the industrial decentralization program, laying the foundation for the infamous military-industrial complex and iron triangles—and resulting in a regional economic and political shift.

The Knudsen war production nexus was the closest America has come to a national industrial policy.

War Production and Suburbia

Despite “the rise of the sunbelt myth,” Big Cities were not outmuscled by western and southern cities, capturing more than their fair share of war production contracts and facilities. I failed to say, however, where these Big City new facilities were located. For many hegemonic Big Cities the new facilities were mostly built on urban peripheries, suburbs and unincorporated areas where vacant land was available (Lewis, 2004). There was little time to tear down neighborhoods to accommodate factory expansion. One could not disrupt production at an existing factory to accommodate new construction. Moreover, new designs and machine tools created a radically different assembly line that required new physical layouts, more space, higher ceilings and more access to different supply/export chains. Making a tank or a plane required differently configured, flatter and larger facilities adjacent to new rail sidings and ports.

Suburbanization of wartime manufacturing facilities was not a regional phenomenon:

95 percent of San Jose’s wartime manufacturing was suburban; Pittsburgh’s 88 percent was the highest ranked Big City. Los Angeles, unsurprisingly, was 82 percent, and the next ranked Big Cities were Detroit and Boston with 69 percent suburban investment. Denver, on the other hand, was less than 1 percent, and Cleveland’s 15 percent suburbanization was the Big City’s lowest ranked. Chicago, Milwaukee, Houston and Philadelphia had between 25 and 31 percent suburbanization. Baltimore, Buffalo and New York City ranged from 47 to 56 percent suburban (CPA, 1946, p. 40).

The personification of a new war production facility was Ford’s mammoth bomber plant in Willow Run, 30 miles outside of Detroit. With 30 buildings spread over 67 acres, described by Lindberg as “a sort of Grand Canyon of the mechanized world,” at its peak it employed over 42,000 workers, 7000 of which were housed in 15 dormitory buildings adjacent to the complex (Teaford, 1993, p. 187).

McDonnell Aircraft located its massive works far beyond the Saint Louis city limits in suburban Saint Louis County, and suburban Long Island was the site of the greatest airplane factories in the New York City area. The situation was similar in Chicago where only three of the area’s eight major war plants located within the central city. (Teaford, 1990, p. 25)

The automobile, highways and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages were not the only causes of suburban growth in the World War II era.

NOTES

1. Cincinnati, the exception, held up; Baltimore and Detroit lost the most to suburbs.
2. Thomas Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989); Alyn Brodsky, The Great Mayor: Fiorello LaGuardia and the Making of the City of New York (New York: Truman Talley, 2003); and Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York (New York: Norton, 2013).
3. The turkey festival (and parachuting) occurred at the Harrisonville-Rockingham (VA) chamber in 1939–41, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did get involved. The parachute was actually the agreed upon solution to earlier versions in which turkeys were tossed out of planes and people tried to catch them (Mead, 2014, pp. 310–11).
4. Port authority reaction, in particularly the bell-weather New York–New Jersey Port Authority, was intense. See Jameson W. Doig, Empire on the Hudson (New York: Columbia University Press, 200), Chapter 10.
5. Merriam was a founder of public administration, an early pioneer in scientific management and a founder of what would later become the behaviorist movement in political science. He also served as a Chicago City Council member, ran twice for mayor and later founded the Social Science Research Council.
6. Originally published in The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 44, no. 1. (1938), pp. 1–24.
7. Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy: Report of the Urbanism Committee to the National Resources Committee (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1937).
8. Sister of Edith Hamilton, author of the famous tome on Greek mythology.
9. dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/mono-regsafepart06.htm.
10. For instance, the largest of the public housing projects, Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes (1962), “consisted of twenty-eight identical apartment buildings lined up in lockstep precision on a two mile long superblock.”
11. Tugwell remarked in the 1950s that Roosevelt “always did, and always would regard the cities as rather hopeless” (Funigiello, 1978, pp. 254–5).
12. Jacobs did not agree with Tugwell.
13. US Civilian Production Administration, War-Time Manufacturing Plant Expansion, Privately Financed, 1940–1945 (Washington: CPA Industrial Statistics Division, 1946), p. 40: 74 percent of these funds were direct grants and 26 percent accelerated depreciation over five years (Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 310).