Two paths diverge: take one
As the chapter title suggests, with American economic development there are two quite distinguishable paths: “mainstream economic development” and “community development.” It is tempting to think of the former as Privatist and the latter Progressive. That would not be correct, at least as how this history presents it. There are Privatist versions of community development and community development can play the mainstream economic development game if it wants. Still, the reader would not be major league off-track if he/she perceived mainstream economic development as predominantly Privatist in spirit and practice, and community development as predominantly Progressive leaning. Tiptoeing onto both paths are the twin specters of partisanship and ideology—a combined horror which the history collapses into a four-letter word: “politicization.”
The link between these two paths and our two ships (political culture) is both obvious and tenuous. The Policy and Practitioner World actors display a poor sense of the future they portend. They are justifiably rooted in their own contemporary world, not in my twenty-first-century hindsight. So we all must be patient. We start out in this chapter with the community development path which during these years (1880–1910 or so) is a blend of people- and placed-based ED—as it is today. CD’s Progressive roots are showing in its concern for immigrant outcasts and society’s disadvantaged. The “place” is the neighborhood, but citywide CD strategies are also being launched by social reform and socialist mayors. Even in this early period, the persistent fragmentation or diversity of CD strategies is quite evident.
Mainstream ED is next. It is the dominant of the two paths during these years. Mainstream ED has an overarching theme, physical redevelopment, which is believed to be the best strategy to “grow the city” and to bring about economic growth that benefits all segments of the community, as well as induce immigrants to play nicely in the American capitalist sandbox. Physical redevelopment slides over into people-based CD also. Both paths are attempting in their way to include the millions of immigrants. For mainstream ED advocates, their physical redevelopment strategy, the City Beautiful, has the additional benefit of revitalization and refunctioning of the Big City CBD. It marks the first attempt to deal with the expanding Big City periphery.
As background, these decades were the heart and soul of the Progressive Era. They were, of course, also decades characterized by massive waves of immigrants. I might toss World War I into the mix as well. Because it was relatively short as wars go, the effect of the war on the economy, prosperity and labor were transitory, amounting to a head-fake. World War I’s most consequential impacts on this history seem to be after it is over. By war’s end America has hesitantly entered the world arena, replacing Germany as the world’s most industrial economy.
NEW BEGINNINGS: COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Let’s provide some definition to the “community development approach” (CD). The one compelling characteristic that separates community development from “mainstream” economic development is community development focuses on “people”— helping, shaping, empowering, mobilizing and ultimately changing people. CD does not prefer to work with private business, and the well-being of the jurisdictional economic base is far from its prime concern. Mainstream economic development achieves its purposes through business firms and corporations, mostly by affecting the costs of production and providing the infrastructure for economic growth. CD achieves its purposes by helping people where they live: neighborhoods. Focusing on people has (almost) always involved “changing” people—their attitudes, values and behavior: “people growth.” Why people need to change suggests another difference between mainstream and community development—the goals each pursues.
Like mainstream economic development, community development grew from several disparate, semi-related seeds. The CD garden includes lots of different flowers which, over time, have cross-fertilized—blending and blurring in ways that obscure their separate, distinct and independent histories (and purposes). To mix a metaphor, CD compares to Russian Matryoshka nested dolls. Within the outside large doll are a number of smaller dolls. Not all the dolls work well with each other. In this chapter, several versions of community development will appear. The following will be discussed: social welfare strategies; neighborhood-based approaches; citywide models; and African-American community development.
Social Welfare Community Development
To make the point early that CD can be Privatist as well as Progressive, “social welfare CD” developed alongside the first post-Civil War immigrant streams. Not all capitalists took delight at watching immigrants and the desperately poor starve. Philanthropy existed, and any number of efforts to feed and care for the sick, aged and unemployed characterized the Gilded Age. From newspaper campaigns and church soup kitchens, to elite-supported anti-poverty organizations, such as New York City’s Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor, people did what they could. Gilded Age Privatist social welfare community development jelled in reaction to the early 1870s’ initial flood of immigrants and the 1873 Panic (Depression). Perhaps the earliest was the YMCA movement, started in 1864 New York City, offered a gym and upstairs residence. Inspired by Chicago’s Dwight Moody, Ys constructed large, fully equipped, staffed gyms, baths, bowling alleys and residential dormitories in nine of America’s ten largest cities by 1885 (McKelvey, 1963, pp. 147–8).
Remembered as “the Long Depression,” the Panic of 1873 triggered an explosion of relief programs. The above NYC Society for Improving qualified 5000 for relief in 1873; by 1874 it was 24,000. Throughout the decade it averaged in excess of 20,000 families annually. The sheer number of private campaigns, still inadequate relative to the need, invited abuse, inefficiency, duplication and waste. None of these pathologies were well tolerated by Privatists in a Privatist age. The Buffalo Charity Organization Society (COS) offered a model that each city could adopt which addressed, in its fashion, these concerns. The first nationwide movement, the COS brought a characteristic private perspective to community development. Its target was individuals/families “deserving” of support; its purposes were to order capitalism and genuinely to assist the truly desperate.
The primary emphasis of the COS movement was “a scientific approach … the use of investigation, registration, and supervision of applicants … [it] coordinated resources and activities of private philanthropies and establishment of centralized ‘clearinghouses’ or registration bureaus that collected information about individuals and families receiving assistance” (Hansan, 2013, n.p.). Building upon Boston’s original 1876 Social Service Exchange (a clearinghouse), COS went beyond to actual follow up with recipients with a “house-to-house visitation,” an evaluation of its effectiveness, and feeding back the information into a planning process for the next year. Home inspectors were trained, and were later incorporated into the early social worker casework method. A community-level “governing council” composed of representatives from district/ neighborhood councils, contributors and charitable organizations oversaw the program. Each district office had a paid executive and a system of volunteer committees.
The model was taken from the 1869 London COS by an episcopal rector from Buffalo (NY) who, after spending the 1877 summer in attendance, brought it back to Buffalo that fall. By 1882 there were 32 known COS-like organizations in cities whose population totaled 12 percent of the nation (almost 7 million). Expanding consistently across the nation, they formed a National Conference of Charities and Corrections. In 1887 Denver adopted its “federated fundraising” approach, and that further fueled growth of the COS model—a model that adapted to the needs of each community. In 1913 Cleveland expanded the model by organizing a single citywide funding campaign that funneled its proceeds to approved charitable organizations, and enlisted the active participation of business in its implementation as well as funding campaign. The Cleveland innovation is regarded as the first “Community Chest,” which in its turn spread across the nation as well. The Community Chest would continue (through the Depression) into the post-World War II era. In 1961 the Community Chest movement changed its name to United Way—which continues to the present day.
Today “faith-based” CD is a legitimate wing or approach. It has a long tradition, which certainly found expression during these years. Called “social Christianity,” it was personified by Washington Gladden, initially a North Adams MA minister, now acclaimed as its “father.” Deeply concerned with the plight of the working man and urban blight, Gladden stressed it was a Christian’s responsibility to become involved and to redress abuses and poverty. He became a well-known mediator of labor strikes, and worked closely with the civic association movement to popularize that commitment. A plethora of church-based initiatives to counter the various urban problems that beset the immigrant characterized this period (McKelvey, 1963, pp. 160–66). Perhaps the most durable of these nineteenth-century faith-based movements was the Salvation Army, introduced from England in 1880, which established places of respite in nearly every sizeable immigrant slum in America’s Big Cities. Its leaders, Ballington and Maud Booth, by the time they retired in 1896, had founded a second organization, Volunteers of America, with 2000 officers and 25,000 volunteers in 17 rescue missions, 24 lodging homes and 3 farm colonies. The Catholic Church, inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, formed the secret American Protective Association that claimed over 2 million members by 1895 (McKelvey, 1963, p. 164).
Neighborhood-Level Community Development
Several late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Progressive reform movements instinctively gravitated into “neighborhoods.” Immigrant neighborhoods were called “slums” back then—because outsiders felt they lacked social and economic structure. Residents lived in horrible housing in unhealthy, crime-prone areas; working desperate, lowpaying jobs. Boston’s Robert Woods, a leading neighborhood reformer of the period, said the best way “to help integrate poor neighborhoods and their residents into the larger society was to first strengthen these neighborhoods and then try to link them to the outside world” (Halpern, 1995, p. 29). Cities to them were “a cluster of interlacing communities. Each having its own vital ways of expression and action, but all together creating the municipality.” A neighborhood was the only unit of society which included essentially ‘every kind of community need and the resources to meet it’’ neighborhoods were the “microcosm of all social problems” and the “ultimate testing place of all social reforms” (Melvin, 1987, p. 15).
Settlement house movement
Jane Adam’s Chicago Hull House (1889) is the best-known example of this movement, but not the first. The idea developed at London’s East End Toynbee Hall in 1884. Brought to New York City by Stanford Coit in 1886, his Neighborhood Guild was America’s first—he worked with Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side. Graham Taylor (Chicago Commons) and Robert A. Woods (Boston’s South End House) were other notable examples. The movement built “settlement houses” in poor neighborhoods where middle/upper-class volunteers would live, instill middle-class “American” values, alleviate poverty, provide health services, recreation, daycare and education, and serve as role models. The peak of the settlement house movement was “just prior to World War I.” In 1913, 413 settlement houses were in operation in 32 states (Trolander, 1987, pp. 3–4).
The settlement house aimed to bridge understanding between the (upper) middle classes and the inner-city poor. Their nonprofit boards of directors were predominantly affluent Progressives—settlement volunteers, contributors—and boards of directors were outsiders to the immigrant neighborhood. Services provided in settlement houses varied, but the laundry list included: classes in English, civics, cooking, sewing, dressmaking, wood and sheet-metal working, legal aid, employment counseling, laundry facilities, baths, some health care, nurseries for working mothers, recreation and athletic programs, concerts and theatre and even vegetable gardens. In this cacophony settlement houses instinctively recognized that personal change meant providing a vast array of services, facilities and education—since labeled “comprehensiveness.” Comprehensiveness developed into a defining characteristic of this approach to CD.
From the beginning settlement houses were vehicles by which immigrants could be transformed into mainstream middle-class Americans. Thus settlement houses were characterized by Allen Davis (1967) as “spearheads for reform”, not mere apolitical, neighborhood-based service centers. The settlement house reformers intended their model to be nationwide so that the aggregate of their individual success could lead to fundamental social reform. Social reform meant assimilation, and assimilation meant the maintenance of a productive social order and capitalist economy.
To others, however, assimilation meant social control by business elites and Ivy League settlement house volunteers. To neighborhood residents, most of whom retained identification with machine ward politicians and ethnic church, settlement workers were oft-times “useful do-gooders” providing a “safety net.” Writer Jack London, no friend of the settlement movement, said settlement house volunteers “do everything for the poor except get off their back … They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages and try to sell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him” (Bremner, 1964, p. 65). Trolander (1987), more charitably, observed that settlement workers work for, but are not of the neighborhood. While settlement houses had many individual successes, their net impact was in no way transformative.
Contemporary community developers draw much from the settlement house movement. That movement’s chief characteristics included:
+ a focus on “the needs of low income neighborhoods”;
+ the provision of direct and “comprehensive” array of services to residents of those neighborhoods;
+ whose ultimate purpose it was to alleviate the underlying causes of poverty and social problems on a national scale—social reform.
After World War I, settlement house volunteers were replaced by professionally trained social workers (MSW)—generating controversy that the professionalization of social workers changed the nature and direction of settlement houses.
Housing reformers
A second movement, housing reform, starts from the same period as the settlement movement—and in the same city (New York). Jacob Riis, author of the great housing–immigrant tenement reform work How the Other Half Lives (1890), is credited with popularizing housing reform in immigrant neighborhoods. Having acquired a competence on the issue by visiting with sanitary inspectors the tenements of NYC, Riis, an impoverished Danish-born immigrant, first published that title in the 1889 Christmas issue of Scribner’s. To learn how things really were “on the beat” Teddy Roosevelt, as Police Commissioner (1895), walked the districts at night. The man he took with him was Jacob Riis. Riis, who worked at the time for the New York Sun, would write an article on the previous night’s observations and TR, having his policy agenda shaped by his traveling companion, would follow up. The two were life-long friends and allies.
Housing reformers focused on one of two strategies. The first urged the passage of restrictive housing legislation that required tenement owners to fix and maintain their sub-standard housing to minimum standards as prescribed by the law. New housing was required to conform to those minimum standards. The second approach (which continues to this day) sought to create good, safe and suitable housing below its construction cost, if possible (Andrachek, 1979, pp. 159–60). Riis’s great achievement, the landmark 1895 Tenement House Act, followed the first strategy.1 Picked up by others such as reformer Lawrence Veiller (A Model Housing Law, 1914), attacking real estate developers and the slum lords that built and owned these tenements became the primary line of attack by subsequent “housers”: “we must [first] abolish privy vaults before we build model tenements.” Watching this from afar, 13 states and many Big Cities passed laws similar to the later 1901 NYC Tenement Act; only one, Kentucky, was from the South (Andrachek, 1979, pp. 166–7).
The problem was that existing tenement complexes were beyond repair: the “dumbbell” apartment could never be suitably made safe or reasonably livable while immigrants still poured in and housing inspectors were “flexible.” Without zoning and building codes, new housing that met minimum standards did little to solve the immigrant plight, and probably only increased rents. As early as 1909, the NYC Municipal Research Bureau, after conducting a “friendly investigation,” found more than 66,000 violations (Andrachek, 1979, p. 169). Nevertheless, an almost exclusive reliance on restrictive housing legislation continued through the end of World War I (1920). It was only after criticism by the likes of Edith Elmer Wood, starting in 1919, that housers picked up the second approach which has dominated since (Wood, 1919). From that point housing reformers started down a road that led in several directions: to suburbs, master planned communities, public housing and slum clearance, urban renewal and the Great Society. Arguably, this wing of CD, at least in terms of what the reader will encounter in future chapters, had the greatest impact on not only CD but mainstream ED as well.
Riis in the meantime had moved on. He supported a theme espoused by TR that stressed exercise and the outdoor life. In depressed and congested neighborhoods the best place for kids to do this was school playgrounds. Community sports centers followed. By 1902 Riis was advocating each neighborhood utilize its public school in non-educational areas to improve neighborhood quality of life and facilitate personal development (Scott, 1969, p. 72).
The playground/recreation movement
Urban planners, notably John Nolen (and also Olmsted Jr.) joined in. “Playground” advocates thought of the Big City “as a complex of interrelated systems” in which “the arteries of circulation articulated with the larger parks … small playgrounds planned as adjuncts to the schools, the neighborhood parks and larger playgrounds distributed throughout the city” (Scott, 1969, p. 72). The Playground Association of America was formed in 1906. Playground/recreation advocates wanted to affect socialization of late childhood/early teens to reduce pathologies of the industrial city, making possible the healthy and productive development of future urban citizens and families. Playgrounds created a physical place where:
Team play [which] required … tempering of individuality to a common goal. This training socialized the child, making the child receptive to the discipline of the work environment, to an efficiently organized polity, to national patriotism, and to civic idealism … providing an alternative to the depraved, socially centrifugal city. The playground supplied the corrective for bad forms of recreation … [that could nurture] the street gang’s primitive civicism. (Wilson, 1989, pp. 81–2)
Also, in 1907, the St. Louis City Beautiful Plan centered on neighborhoods, proposing each neighborhood possess a cluster of buildings/functions including a school (including a parochial school), library, park and playground, public bath, church, police and fire station, athletic organizations and settlement house—grouped around a neighborhood downtown-like civic center. That opened up a new level of interest—in the school, not just its playground. Progressive neighborhood community developers wanted a natural entity to serve the change function; the school, they reasoned could serve as a neighborhood center and recreation area “to multiply points of contact between neighborhood residents, to foster neighborhood unity, and promote recognition of common interests on the neighborhood and city level (Melvin, 1987, p. 23).
The school/community center movement got a jump-start in 1907 Rochester (NY) by Edward Ward.2 Other cities jumped on the bandwagon; in 1916 the National Community Center Association was formed. Using recreation to draw in neighborhood residents and then attempting to “educate” them on civic affairs and change-issues proved ultimately no more effective than the settlement house. Services, recreation or otherwise, did not change people in ways that led to solving underlying pathologies or to national social reform. By the end of World War I, social reformers looked at yet another model of neighborhood-based social reform—the social unit plan (to be discussed in a later chapter). In the meantime, City Beautiful provided an umbrella under which playground advocates joined forces with the parks (and planning) movements, thus drawing support from wealthy benefactors.
While not without tension, the parks and planners included playgrounds in their plans. Both movements sought to alter the socialization of urban residents. Both accepted the paradigm that physical environment (buildings and so on) could positively affect human behaviors and values useful to preservation of social order. Both accepted the primacy of experts, of planning, and had a preference for efficiency. Accordingly, “The City Beautiful advocated neighborhood playfields and was willing to concede a few acres of larger parks to playgrounds, provided the surrender did not involve the destruction of landscape values” (Wilson, 1989, p. 82).
The Pittsburgh Survey: early comprehensiveness
The Pittsburgh Survey, a major Russell Sage sociological project in cooperation with local Progressive reformers/business leaders, commenced in 1907 under the direction of Paul Underwood Kellogg. Conducted by at least 50 social science researchers, it was first released in Collier’s magazine (1909) and expanded into six books published between 1909 and 1914.3 The survey reflected the activism of these Progressive years, and was from its start intended to produce an agenda for social and economic reform/legislation. The survey demonstrates the instinctual pillar of CD that individual social change must involve change in a number of “policy areas” more or less simultaneously. Different aspects/needs of each individual interrelate, facilitating or inhibiting change. This is the essence behind CD “comprehensiveness” first evidenced in the settlement movement. The project was successful because local reformers were able to work in cooperation with Sage. Politically, Pittsburgh enjoyed a rare interlude from Republican machine politics when Democrat George Guthrie, a lawyer and long-term anti-corruption reformer, was elected mayor in 1906 (to 1909). Guthrie not only allowed the survey, but in 1907 also achieved a highly controversial merger of Allegheny County with the city—the merger was extremely unpopular but successfully withstood a number of legal challenges. Guthrie also introduced water filtration, which considerably reduced typhoid in Pittsburgh.
The survey supports my belief that growth politics involve coping with the externalities of successful growth. In the case of the Pittsburgh Survey, addressing worker conditions, safety and wage/income distribution (among many other issues) was significant. While not immediately apparent, the Pittsburgh Survey was one of the earliest attempts to understand how industrial growth affected people—an early example of workforce- and people-focused ED. This is evident from the concluding comments by its director, Paul Kellogg:
New stock, then, a mixed people, venturesome, country-bred … the potent aftermath of those great changes from household and domestic forms of production to the factory system. As each new peasantry leaves the soil, the history of the industrial revolution is repeated, but the processes are accelerated and the experience of a generation is taken on a jump [all at once] … . In Pittsburgh … Work is organized nationally. The steel center, like the mill town, is not a thing by itself. It is a step in a bigger process managed from without and owned by a multitude of non-resident stockholders … . We have the persistence of small administrative areas and old social institutions, ill-fitted to meet the demands of a great urban and industrial district … . The community and the workshop are at issue. (Kellogg, 1909)
Neighborhood Improvement Associations: bad boys on the block
I have left them to last—the bad boys of community development: neighborhood improvement associations (NIAs). Rightfully, they should have come first; they are considerably older than settlement houses and school community centers. But they draw from values different than Progressive Era reformers. NIAs developed their own set of characteristics, activities and goals. Whether membership was Privatist or Progressive, NIAs were individualist–Privatist leaning.
Fischer (1994, p. 79) cites their goals as “enhancement and protection” that include securing public services, uniform/homogenous development, control taxes, protect property values, “better” schools and quality of life. Their contemporary prodigy includes home owner/condo associations and the variety of neighborhood associations existing across our metropolitan landscape. They are the world of “Privatopia.” Contemporary economic developers use words like NIMBY; while cities like Portland (OR) build their politics and environmentalism around them. Others see in them bastions of racism. Neighborhood improvement associations have turned out to be a “many-splendored thing.”
Partly their perception as the bad boys of community development arises from “who” (and where) they are. They are frequently middle or working class, sometimes affluent—not disadvantaged except in their own mind. Moreover, they tended to form on city peripheries, along streetcar lines, in the early suburbs or unincorporated areas. Where social reform community developers placed great value on external activists/experts as staff and funders, neighborhood improvement associations seldom have staff, raise their own funds and are volunteer-led by residents. While no one has ever accused these associations of being an Athens-like polis, or even a New England town meeting, they are undisputedly neighborhood led and organic.
Like chambers of commerce, NIAs can provide services, particularly infrastructure, that overlap into ED/CD. They can be important to economic development planning, and in some post-Great Society cities they can be thought of as mini-city halls or EDOs. More usually, they function as advocate and interest group—an actor in the ED jurisdictional policy process. In later chapters their role will be to resist neighborhood change and succession; in so doing they battle Progressive community developers who advance/protect the interests of disadvantaged minorities. Probably a good measure of their bad boy image is derived from this struggle; in the minds of many they are bastions of affluence, parochialism and racism—home to Republicans.
Previous to 1920, neighborhood improvement associations were supportive of municipal annexation as the means by which much-desired infrastructure was obtained for the neighborhood. There is some evidence that the first improvement associations formed as early as the 1860s; the more defendable date is after 1880. There are excellent case studies of individual city neighborhood improvement associations after that period.4 NIAs often resisted ethnic political machines, and formed the basis of support for many a businessman mayor and municipal structural reformer. Some, like Chicago’s Woodlawn Improvement Association (formed in 1882), performed services (such as keeping sidewalks free of snow). I have no idea how many there were, but I strongly suspect that in the aggregate they equal, maybe exceed, chambers of commerce. The called themselves different names, and their subsequent evolution followed many, many paths.
Social Reform and Socialist Mayors
Community development, because of its determination to advantage the “common man” (especially the least fortunate of society and, in these years, the immigrant, focused on neighborhoods and were not actively involved in citywide matters—except as they related to the neighborhood agenda. Social reformers may have been marginally less concerned with structural reforms (charter revisions, forms of government, budgets or even civil service), but they were not opposed to them. The social reform focus was on “people,” often protecting them from business, and it was this thread that gave rise to a generation of charismatic and/or ideological reformers with ambitions to help people citywide.
In the Progressive Era the most important people-based reform was reducing fares on streetcars; lowering gas, electric and water bills to urban residents; and, in an age of temperance, stopping Privatist (actually Puritan) businessman mayors from regulating working-class immigrant moral behavior through aggressive police enforcement. To social reform and socialist mayoral candidates, bad working-class behavior resulted from low wages, bad housing, lack of recreation opportunities and the like. One should attack these conditions instead of trying to enforce anti-gambling, drinking and prostitution (Finegold, 1995, pp. 19–22). After 1910 a brand new phenomenon hit selected cities—socialists were elected in numbers to be mayors and city aldermen. Progressive Era municipal socialists were seldom Marxist, mostly Christian social democrat—Henry George or Herbert Bellamystyle socialists. In 1910 Milwaukee, an exception, elected the “socialist boss” Victor Berger to the House of Representatives, the first of six terms; also elected were Emil Seidel as mayor, and 21 of 35 city aldermen. In 1911 George Lunn, a Protestant minister and Christian socialist, was elected mayor of Schenectady (New York). Minneapolis in 1916 elected Thomas van Lear as mayor, and over the next decade socialists won mayoralty elections in Haverhill (Massachusetts), Lackawanna (New York), Flint (Michigan), Granite City (Illinois) and Butte (Montana). Between 1910 and 1920 an estimated 174 socialists were elected mayor in cities ranging from Berkeley California to Eureka Utah (Weinstein, 1969, p. 116, Table 2).
In practice, American urban socialist policy systems proved little different from structural reformers. They acquired the pejorative label of “sewer socialists.” Sewer socialist or not, socialist mayors of this period “clearly focused on improving the lives of urban people rather than reorganizing or restructuring urban government” (Mohl, 1985, p. 127). They eliminated graft and supported the development of administrative capacity and efficiency using accepted scientific management principles. They constructed well-built parks and sewers, and paid for them with conventional bond issuance rather than soak-the-rich taxation. Milwaukee socialists (who included poet Robert Frost as assistant to the mayor) even established a Bureau of Economy and Efficiency (Finegold, 1995, p. 19).
Social reform and socialist mayors advocated policies that addressed the needs of both the average Joe industrial worker/immigrant and the middle class. They embraced a people-oriented ED, deeply uncomfortable with monopoly capitalists, utilities, railroads, trusts—and streetcar franchises. Social reform mayors, however, were not immune to adopting physical redevelopment (the City Beautiful) to enhance their city’s competitiveness and promote civic pride among all classes. They were, in their way, competing to be the top “city on a hill.”
A cornerstone of their agenda that ensured electoral success was their opposition to local monopolies (electric, water/sewer and streetcar utilities/franchises). During these years electric power was coming on line, and social reform Progressives believed that municipal ownership corrected abuses of monopolistic private utility franchises. Municipal public utilities were approved in communities across the nation. Connecticut, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Kansas, California, Oregon and even Texas and Florida were leaders.5 The municipally owned utility presents an almost perfect expression of the Progressive economic development program in that it protected the community from distortions created by private profit. From our perspective, that’s certainly a way to bypass a HEDO.
Henry George’s 1886 campaign for New York City mayor arguably marked the first instance of a social reform mayor in American urban politics. He lost—and that was that. From that point on wealthy, successful businessmen/professionals entered municipal politics and got elected as mayors on a “social reform” platform. There is a pronounced geographic (Great Lakes) flavor to social reform mayors, laced with distinctive population migration trends (Yankee Diaspora and immigrant Germans-Scandinavians).
Examples include Detroit’s Hazen Pingree; nationally renowned Tom Johnson of Cleveland; Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones and Brand Whitlock of Toledo; Edward Dunne of Chicago; and Mark Fagan of Jersey City. Some were one-termers; some stayed around awhile and even got elected to higher office. Others, like NYC’s William Randolph Hearst and Chicago’s Robert Merriam, were “wannabes” who never made it to the mayor’s office. Despite their policy successes social reform mayors could not sustain their working- and middle-class coalitions. Subsequent elections were won by business structural reformers or machines.
Probably the two most famous social reform mayors were Detroit’s Hazen Pingree and Cleveland’s Tom Johnson. Pingree was first on the scene: a wealthy Republican shoe and boot manufacturer, he first won election in 1889 on an anti-municipal corruption platform that stressed opposition to streetcar, telephone, gas and electric utilities. In 1894 he said in a speech:
The most dangerous enemies to good government are not the saloons, the dives, the dens of iniquity and the criminals … [rather most of Detroit’s problems could be] traced to the temptations which are offered to city officials when franchises are sought by wealthy corporations, or contracts are to be let for public works. (Mohl, 1985, p. 123)
The 1893 Panic allowed Pingree to assemble a coalition of working/middle-class and Progressive businessmen that generated sufficient votes for him to be elected three times as mayor and then to go on to the governorship. Once in office, Pingree confronted high unemployment by expanding local welfare and public works programs (building schools, parks and public baths). He developed his “potato patch plan” which turned vacant city-owned lots over to the poor for gardens, and conducted Detroit’s most aggressive annexation period ever. Eventually he won approval for ownership of the municipal light plant. Pingree established his national reputation and spawned a host of future social reform mayors by trying to obtain the three-cent streetcar fare for Detroit’s commuters.
In 1894, to compete with the dominant Citizens Street Railway, Pingree formed a privately owned streetcar—the Detroit Railway Company (DRC)—that charged three cents per ride (not the standard five cents). Laying 60 miles of track, the DRC opened in July 1895. Pingree donned an engineer’s cap and drove the first train up the line. And then his problems began. A new absentee owner from Cleveland bought the Citizens Railway determined to break Pingree’s three-cent fare. The new owner, ironically, had amassed his millions from the invention of (are you ready?) the streetcar fare box. Going to the courts, the new owner was unsuccessful but kept on appealing, saying: “It’s for blood and somebody is going to get skinned and skinned thoroughly … This is a fight for gore, and it will be carried right along to the finish” (Holli, 1973, p. 103). Pingree won the appeal in July 1896.
The absentee owner controlled the only terminal and denied its use to Pingree’s Detroit Railway. The battle in quick order was fought out in the state legislature. Then the Citizen’s Railway owner retired the horses and electrified his line. To pay for this he pushed for a 30-year franchise with a five-cent fare. Pingree vetoed the franchise after the council approved it. A simultaneous battle had been joined pitting the city council against Pingree the mayor. The council imposed the five-cent fare without a franchise extension, and Pingree called for a public boycott. The newspapers supported Pingree, as did thousands of workers. Pingree thundered: “This fight ain’t going to stop until [the Citizens Railway] gets right down on its knees” (Holli, 1973, p. 108).
The Citizens Railway reeled, losing passengers and profits to Pingree’s boycott, which captured national attention. The absentee owner of the Citizens Railway finally capitulated, offering Pingree and the council a proposal for three cents for his fare! The Citizens Railway offer was approved by the council, but allegations of bribery and Pingree’s continued opposition forced the council to reject the Citizens Railway’s proposal. The other Detroit streetcar lines grudgingly reduced their fare to three cents, and the Cleveland owner seemingly was forced to reduce his fare to three cents. With victory in hand Pingree accepted the nomination for governor, won the election and prepared to leave for the state capital—and then the Cleveland absentee owner secretly bought Pingree’s Detroit Railway and raised the three-cent fare to five cents. Getting Pingree out of town and into the governor’s office had been part of the streetcar owner’s secret strategy all along.
Pingree refused to leave, however. For more than a year he held both the governorship and the mayor’s office simultaneously—until the Michigan Supreme Court ousted him from the latter in July 1897.With the merger completed, the five-cent street car fare solidly in place and with a virtual monopoly of key routes, the Citizens Railway had achieved total victory over Pingree. The owner of the Citizens Railway was Tom Johnson, who in two years was to become social reform mayor of Cleveland.
This sad “traction” affair, however, was not over—it continued while Pingree was governor. In 1899 a set of complex negotiations produced the closest thing to Pingree’s hope to establish a privately owned equivalent to a municipally owned streetcar system. It included a citywide three-cent fare and a 48-year lease which neither city residents nor the Michigan Supreme Court liked. The agreement was tossed out. In the meantime Tom Johnson was elected mayor of Cleveland!
The obvious questions emerge from Johnson’s incredibly fierce resistance to Pingree—and two years later his election as a reform mayor of Cleveland who followed social reform and an anti-streetcar/utility path pioneered by Pingree. Melvin Holli, to whom we are indebted for this fascinating story, argues that Johnson had a sincere change of heart but was motivated by sheer competitiveness that compelled Johnson to fight Pingree unremittingly and implement social reforms unrelentingly (Holli, 1973, pp. 120–24). In any case, Tom Johnson followed in Pingree’s footsteps.
A more or less rogue Democrat and a devotee of Henry George (he was buried next to him in New York City), Johnson’s 1901 election to mayor of Cleveland was owed to the city’s native Protestant business vote. The chamber was a significant power in that first administration, particularly in educational policy, pollution control and building public neighborhood baths. Forming a cabinet of experts as department heads (Bemis, Cooley and Howe, for example), Johnson cleaned up Cleveland’s police and criminal justice system; developed a strong parks and recreation program; and, with chamber support, hired Daniel Burnham—thereby initiating a path-breaking City Beautiful initiative that flirted closely with early urban planning (Hines, 1973). His regime was honest, efficient, supporter of the merit system. Johnson obsessively pursued a three-cent streetcar fare for Cleveland, and did all he could to seize control of the city’s private electricity plants. Like Pingree in Detroit, he was stymied in his efforts to control streetcar fares and acquire control of the electricity facility—in his case by forces led by the Ohio Republican state machine.
While called by journalist Lincoln Steffens the “best mayor of the best city,” Johnson left office frustrated, as did most social reform mayors. But both socialist mayors and social reform mayors, however, demonstrated that community development could operate, with reasonable success, at the citywide level. They did so by constructing a “unity” coalition whose critical member was the working class. The critical issues that brought the working class into the coalition in these years were streetcar and anti-business/utility reforms (lower rates) and what today might be labeled “cultural” initiatives to relax anti-liquor regulation and police activity in their neighborhoods. CD at the city level is necessarily vastly more political and electoral than its neighborhood counterpart. Citywide CD’s true precursor, I believe, was the machine whose votes were stolen by the social reform/socialist mayors.
When CD moved to the citywide level a new set of “players” became active—and a different (hostile) relationship with the HEDOs of ED (franchise utilities and streetcars) took over, and vice versa. While citywide CD certainly stressed its people-focused and anti-business approach, a citywide CD administration assumes some responsibility to the jurisdictional economic base—and its coalition partners. Both almost inevitably require some policy dilution from a pure CD neighborhood-level approach. This is more evident with Johnson than Pingree, but both pursued business-led structural reforms discussed in the last chapter. Pingree’s massive annexation was further evidence in that some urban problems transcend different policy systems. In his first administration Johnson was supported by the chamber, admittedly quite Progressive but still more pro-business than any neighborhood-level CD approach. It seems inescapable that a citywide CD administration would overlap into Privatist agenda and programs— but at a potential cost of disrupting a fragile electoral coalition. The potential for conflict with non-CD institutions and levels of government is high (Pingree’s and Johnson’s struggle with the state legislature and judicial rulings, among others).
Pingree pursued a purer CD people-oriented initiative than Johnson who, in practice, was as much structural reformer as social reformer. Johnson’s successor, Norman Baker, was better at the latter. Social reform mayors are widely regarded as characteristic of the Progressive Era; but the most important social reform mayor of all time, Fiorello La Guardia—three-term mayor of New York (1933–45)—will be discussed in a future chapter. A more modern version, Boston’s Kevin White, will also be considered.
Schism in African-American Community Development
African-American economic/community development has its own distinctive path within both mainstream economic development and community development. There are many reasons for this, but the central role played by African-Americans in our economic development history—and their position in American history, society, economics and demographics—warrants this focus. African-Americans can sail on either the Privatist or the Progressivist ship, but the evolution of their political culture appears to have been dramatically shaped by the Great Migration and the experience of Big City ghettos. This first discussion takes us to the first decades of the twentieth century, when a schism within African-American economic development occurred. The outcome of that schism as it played out over the twentieth century has led to our lodging African-American economic development in community development. It didn’t start out there, however.
The “mainstream” economic development path came first, with the writings, thought and organizations created by Booker T. Washington. Washington was America’s most influential black intellectual and leader between 1890 and 1915 (when he died). Washington served as political advisor to both Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. He founded the National Business League, which was the precursor of black chambers of commerce. As “the first national black spokesmen for economic ‘selfdevelopment’ … [he advocated] ‘black capitalism’ [small business] in the belief that whites would accept blacks as equals only after the latter developed experience and expertise in orthodox business practice” (Harrison, 1974, p. 2). Washington’s ultimate goal was to develop an African-American economic development path that ended in the same place ethnic immigrants were moving toward: “assimilation” of blacks into mainstream American economy. This path can be labeled as “integrationist.”
In 1895 Washington negotiated the famous “Atlanta Compromise” calling for individual self-help, a black-relevant version of Horatio Alger that stressed “industry, thrift, intelligence and property” (his words). For him, education and entrepreneurship was a surer (and safer) path for blacks than challenging either Jim Crow laws or seeking political/civil rights. Washington, born a slave, may (or may not) have reflected the 95 percent of American blacks who pre-Great Migration lived in the South. His long-term goal was to facilitate African-American entry into the American economic mainstream. Once lodged in that mainstream African-Americans could eliminate social inequality and attain civil rights.
Washington, in 1901, formally incorporated and assumed the presidency of a newly formed National Negro Business League. The idea for the league originally may have come from W.E.B Du Bois (then teaching at nearby all-Black Atlanta University). At an 1899 conference, Du Bois presented a report on Negro businesses advocating “Negro Business Men’s Leagues … in every town and hamlet” (Mead, 2014, pp. 152–3). Washington may have appropriated Du Bois’s idea, founding the League “to promote the commercial, agricultural, educational and industrial advancement of AfricanAmericans.”6 By 1907, 320 Negro Business Leagues had been formed nationwide (Woodward, 1981, p. 366). These leagues allowed African-American businesses to network with white businesses, and membership included not only African-American businessmen but also professionals, academics and even farmers. They are the forerunner of African-American chambers of commerce.
Washington’s rival was fellow Negro Business League founding board member, W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois, born and raised in Great Barrington Massachusetts, was the first African-American to be awarded a doctorate (Harvard). At this time he taught history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois initially worked within the confines of the Atlanta Compromise until 1905, when he co-led the famous Niagara Movement that demanded political and civil rights first and above all. In 1909 he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to serve as the vehicle for that change. Washington opposed Du Bois, and a bitter and divisive series of actions and exchanges cemented a network of competing organizations offering a different path for African-American political and economic development.
Over the following decades Du Bois developed and promoted his approach to community/economic development, which included black separation, mutual cooperation, workers’ control and economic planning. A near lifelong member of the American Socialist Party, he called his approach “socialism without nationalism,” advocating “Negro cooperative stores [that] would obtain their goods from Negro producers, which would be supplied raw materials from Negro farmers. Intermediate stages of production such as extractive industries and transportation were to be Negro controlled” (Harrison, 1974, p. 2).
As he developed his views on African-American economics, it was evident that Du Bois rejected blending African-American economic activities into the larger mainstream American capitalist economy. Opposed to Washington’s integrationist path, Du Bois was a separatist. Moreover, Du Bois’s path was only marginally capitalist. Rather, he stressed that his approach rested on African-American “communalism” that was instilled in longstanding African and African-American culture. Du Bois’s communalism meant: “Service to family, clan, community, or nation becomes more than ‘the burden of being my brother’s keeper.’ Serving [the community] is motivated not be some abstract code of behavior; rather one serves others to serve oneself” (Harrison, 1974, p. 10). This is not capitalist individualism—or greed for that matter.
Badi Foster later writes that, “Contrary to the thrust of individualism, communalism holds that self-centeredness will not provide a just social order resulting from antagonistic cooperation”—i.e. supply vs. demand, labor vs. owner, etc. Bennett Harrison (citing Charles Hampden-Turner), further asserts: “It has been suggested that blacks tend to reject the ‘ideology of economic individualism’ in the belief that whites in positions of economic and political power explicitly use that ideology ‘to dominate poor people and keep them competitively divide.’” The icing on the communalism cake as political culture is Du Bois himself, who later stated that cooperation “represents a revival of African communalism, a ‘tradition of cooperation in the field of economic endeavor [which] is outstanding in Negro cultures everywhere’” (Harrison, 1974, p. 4, citing Hampden-Turner, 1969, p. 83).7
In the writings and advocacy of these two early intellectual leaders, three important contrasts emerged. First, Du Bois rejected Washington’s assimilation path, instead urging separate, Negro-controlled socialism, not capitalism. Second, Washington stressed individual self-achievement, mastering skills and creating wealth within the capitalist economy; entrepreneurism or black small business formation was his principal strategy. Du Bois, however, argued for blacks to “cooperate,” to work together to develop separately from the colonial white economy. Third, Du Bois stressed that mutual cooperation should bring benefit to the black community as a whole, not just to Washington’s individual entrepreneurs. In effect, Du Bois rejected individual assimilation in favor of a separate community-wide prosperity achieved by cooperative action of its members—separate from that of the outside “white economy.”
Lacking a “place,” Du Bois’s ideas sort of floated over African-American economic development thought—until the Great Migration produced cohesive black communities, lodged in high-poverty, marginalized residential neighborhoods in Big Cities. At that point, the ghetto provided a context, culture and a market for his ideas. I am open to the perspective that, subsequent to the Great Migration—as blacks settled into hostile economic, political and social competition with whites in the Big Cities of the industrial North and Midwest—many blacks living in depressed neighborhoods with unresponsive urban governments evolved culturally from values that had sustained Washington. Leaving the South for Northern climes, it might be argued, created a ghetto community that shared new values and an identity that reinforced both separateness and communalism.
That is not to say, however, that Washington’s individual economic integrationist path had been rejected. Just the opposite. Future African-Americans could choose between an individualist capitalistic and entrepreneurial economic development path and a separatist, communalist, place-based path.
MOVING DOWN THE PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT ROAD: THE CITY BEAUTIFUL
The “City Beautiful” as a movement hit our Big Cities sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. Its roots lie in the nineteenth century, and it stretched into the 1920s. Its most visible consequences were park systems, road networks and a modern central business district with an upgraded governmental presence. The civic center was a common new addition to the downtown. City Beautiful initiatives were inspired by the massive (1860s) Ringstrasse in Vienna and Haussmann’s renovation-modernization of Paris (the mother of all urban renewal projects—60 percent of Paris’s buildings were affected). Paris’s 12 grand tree-lined boulevards, laced with magnificent civic buildings and residences, radiated from the Arc de Triomphe and provided a visual benchmark and a none-too-subtle model for the City Beautiful.
City Beautiful borrowed hugely from continental Europe—for example, Burnham and the Washington DC commission travelled for six weeks across Europe, seizing upon Paris in particular as a model for the layout of our national capital. But not everyone appreciated this foreign influence. Louis Sullivan and his famous protégé Frank Lloyd Wright (founders of the Chicago and Prairie Schools) repudiated City Beautiful’s foreign borrowings. The assumption underlying City Beautiful was that beauty, in the form of Beaux Arts architecture and tree-lined boulevards, inspired city residents to a life of moral and civic virtue.
Underneath its characteristic physical developments, City Beautiful encompassed a raft of professions, movements, personalities and organizations—each drawing from City Beautiful what they could to achieve their ends. History imparts more coherence to the movement than, I think, it deserves. Economic development, loosely attached to several professions/organizations, and lacking self-identity, played a major role in City Beautiful. Chambers again provided much of the political will and muscle that sustained City Beautiful initiatives. Progressive social reform mayors such as Cleveland’s Tom Johnson embraced City Beautiful as one of their signature initiatives—so did Philadelphia machine mayors and Harrisburg business structural reformers.
Economic growth, the assertion of central city dominance over hinterland (an emerging form of urban hierarchical competition) and old standbys, infrastructure and CBD, are central to understanding the City Beautiful movement. Importantly, City Beautiful’s use of ED tools transformed the CBD through something akin to slum clearance or urban renewal; and the governmental capacity that came with the City Efficient allowed municipal departments to take a lead in implementation. City Beautiful was not pure economic development but, unheralded, economic development played a centerpiece role.
In 1909–10, midstream in the City Beautiful period, a counter-movement redefined City Beautiful, altering its purposes such that a new name, the “City Practical,” replaced the older one. The counter-revolution was a struggle among professions, and the City Practical can be construed as a “victory” for physical economic developers. For us the distinction between the City Beautiful first phase and the City Practical is convenient and heuristic. The early “city beautiful” phase was led by the wealthiest of corporate elites, civic associations and Progressive professions (law, landscape/design architecture and humanities/social scientists). These groups were integral members of the famous Parks Movement which played an important role in planning. The catalyst for “City Beautiful” was the romanticism, idealism and media momentum generated by the 1893 Columbian Exposition.
In the City Practical phase engineers, chamber-led structural reformers and municipal government bureaucratic elites gave the boot to the earlier coalition. Cost, efficiency, functionalism and frugality were critical values. Active in both phases was Daniel Burnham, arguably economic development’s (and planning’s) first national celebrity.
Origins of City Beautiful: The Parks Movement
Between 1850 and 1900ish a charismatic and peripatetic Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. initiated, then personified, a nationwide “Parks Movement.”8 Over a half-century Olmsted and his partners constructed parks, lakes, gardens and tree-lined wide-access boulevards in many major cities across the nation.9 For us, the notable feature of the parks movement was less what they did: they built “stuff” and they also produced the first plans. The more interesting question is why? Explaining the “why” sheds light not only on City Beautiful but also on the way of thinking that dominated early planning, social reform, much of our early community development approach and physical economic development until the early 1960s when it was shattered by riots, social disruption and the Great Society—ironically the very things the Parks Movement intended to prevent.
Olmsted focused his attention on the upper and professional classes, not immigrants or even the middle class. His appeal was to the well-to-do who held a stake in society, Big Cities and the “system” (Trachtenberg, 2007, p. 108). He argued that the industrial city’s physical/population growth separated Big City residents from nature, crushing their humanity and lowering morality by burying them in the conformity, depravity, pollution and congestion of its residential districts. People needed someplace to escape to—parks and gardens. A new physical landscape was needed to alleviate this distress which, if left unabated, would surely result in social disorder, violence, crime and poverty, and unions, revolution—and socialism.
The connecting point between Olmsted and the City Beautiful is his early partner, Andrew Jackson Downing (who died at 37 in 1852). Downing, a landscape gardener, connects the Parks Movement to the Civic Improvement Movement—but also to City Beautiful’s early defining purpose, “Beauty.” Beauty inspired the human spirit, motivated change in attitudes, behavior and promoted civic pride. In the nineteenth century, Downing’s beauty inspired City Beautiful’s “other” charismatic leader, Charles Mulford Robinson.
Physically, Olmstead saw the existing industrial city as divided between commercial and residential districts. The park was intended to separate the two (as Central Park attempted), but to at least offer a third place, “a sharp contrast,” where all could seek relief. Parks were an instrument not only of restoring humanity to urban populations but of maintaining order and security as well (Trachtenberg, 2007, pp. 108–9). The rationale for the building of parks included: community well-being; integration of the immigrant population; an antidote to negative public health externalities associated with urban growth; and inequities caused by economic change. To be created parks required government, and thus became a partner in creating moral values and altering negative lifestyle behavior.
They [parks advocates] saw a need to revitalize and restore the balance between urban dwellers and nature, even if at government expense. It was right and just, they argued that the state should regulate and control … [Believing] a civilization of cities would not survive if it was cut off from nature. Nature had the power to uplift the downtrodden and instill the best ideals … Islands of nature had to be inserted into the artificial urban milieu. (Boyer, 1986, pp. 34–5)
The Parks Movement relied on professional experts, and assumed nature could be reshaped through planning and technology. This is the basis underlying “rational planning” that produced landscape designs as well as water distribution systems. As M. Christine Boyer’s Dreaming the Rational City observed, the parks movement’s changing the physical environment required superimposing a new physical environment upon the old dysfunctional one, and that imposition required an “expert” to develop a rationally constructed plan derived from a rationality-based planning process, from which an “organic unity” is constructed (Boyer, 1986, p. 3). Mankind could conquer nature and change human behavior—but that required rationality, experts and plans.
Politically, the muscle behind the Parks Movement was an upper class and professional middle class acting on behalf of the less fortunate. These are hallmarks of the Progressive Era, and are congruent with Progressive economic development. “This image [of the Parks Movement] evokes nothing less than Winthrop’s city upon a hill, a picture of a city-in-the-park as a corporate body joined in secular love and harmony, free from ‘all manner of vile things’” (Trachtenberg, 2007, p. 110).
The Columbian Exposition
If I had to choose one single event or episode over which our history crossed into the modern world, it would be Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition or World’s Fair. The 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition (World’s Fair or “Great White City”) led by Olmsted Sr. and Calvert Vaux fused the Parks Movement, landscape architecture and the Planning Movements into one project—the Exposition. The Exposition also advanced the career of America’s first celebrity ED innovator, Daniel Burnham (its COO). Indeed, the Chicago World’s Fair symbolized nothing less than the rise of the city in American life (Glabb and Brown, 1983, p. 260).
On the eve of the Fair Chicago, as the consequence of its largest annexation ever, had become the nation’s second most populous city and “the undisputed mistress of the West, [whose] civic pride … catapulted them into a contest with New York, Philadelphia and Washington for the privileged of being designated by Congress as a city to hold the proposed exposition” commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America (Scott, 1969, p. 31). The Exposition was intended to serve as a visible symbol “of order and beauty” which would convince other cities to adopt physical redevelopment to remedy the obvious physical decay of the industrial city. A boatload of Big Cities competed for certification by Congress, each city represented by a businessman’s host committee and each supported by its municipal and state governments. Out-promising the other, shameless boosterism and intense lobbying followed—giving credibility to one plausible explanation for Chicago’s nickname, the Windy City.
The businessmen of [Chicago] realistically appraised as “hustlers” by the New York Times matched this outburst of municipal activity by the vigor by which they organized to vanquish all other competitors for the World’s Fair, particularly New York. The Chicago Tribune saw it “not so much as a fight between Chicago and New York as between West and the East.” (Scott, 1969, p. 32)
In its favor, Chicago had developed a park system (1870s) and established a county-wide sewer district that required the city’s 10-foot rise in sea level that prompted construction of a ship canal that would reverse the flow of the Chicago River. Chicago was on a roll and was not about to lose the competition. The head of Chicago’s delegation was Daniel Hudson Burnham.
Burnham, an upstate New York native, had established himself in Chicago as a noted architect and co-founder of a firm which was a nationally known practitioner of the newly emerging Chicago School of architecture. The Chicago School’s signature distinction was the skyscraper. Burnham was later chosen as the Fair’s chief planner and director of the works (its COO). The Exposition was very much “his baby.” Burnham fit design and plan into his perspective (making Louis Sullivan, the father of skyscrapers, an enemy by imposing height limits that precluded skyscrapers) by insisting upon a Paris-like Beaux Arts style. Olmsted physically organized the buildings into three geographies, each representing his earlier described commercial, home and common “park.” Unable to convince city officials to locate significant public buildings on the campus, the Exposition did not include those elements that would later be the core of the City Beautiful.
In the spring of 1893 the Great White City opened: 21 million people attended. The architecture, the unified plan and the canals, as well as the infamous “Little Egypt” (a stripper), ignited the crowds and the imagination of the world. If timing is everything, Burnham timed it right (excepting that it coincided almost exactly with the Panic of 1893). He emerged from the Fair as the nation’s best-known architect, the personification of the Great White City. Virtually every American city wanted to copy the Great White City, and Burnham’s architectural firm profited immensely. Given his natural energy and entrepreneurship, his knack for coining a phrase and impressing an audience, Burnham presided over the next generation’s planning and economic development/city beautiful initiatives.
Burnham became known as the chief figure in the City Beautiful movement, which sought the transformation of the city through the creation of neoclassical civic centers, park systems, tree-lined boulevards and plazas with fountains and statuary. This Chicagoan was the spearhead of a cause spreading throughout the country, and because of him the Windy City captured the attention of Americans entranced by the possibilities of urban planning. (Teaford, 1993, p. 138)
Charles Mulford Robinson
Taking advantage of Burnham’s City Beautiful “awesomeness,” journalist Charles Mulford Robinson injected vitality into the movement, linking it to the Great White City.10 Robinson’s Atlantic Monthly three-part series “Improvement in City Life” enlarged upon civic improvement, insisting that public buildings and infrastructure could reflect beauty, and that a city hall, a public library or tree-lined boulevards and statues/monuments could achieve civic improvement goals and purposes.
When one speaks of the aesthetic side of American cities, one thinks at once of their public buildings; of their parks, statues and boulevards … Robinson took the broadest possible view of what he called civic art and discussed practical ameliorations such as limiting the height of buildings, removing advertising, cleaning streets, planting trees, improving lighting and installing public art … He emphasized that while city governments sometimes took the lead in these improvements, a variety of private organizations such as municipal art societies, park associations and civic clubs, also had roles to play. (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 16–17)
It was Robinson who coined the phrase “City Beautiful” (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 18– 19), and his The Improvement of Towns and Cities (1901) served as the first text on city planning. In Robinson we see the rather subtle coexistence between planning and aspects of economic development.
Thanks to his writing, Robinson became a national figure and was engaged as a planning consultant by a number of cities, including Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Fort Wayne, Denver, Des Moines, Omaha and Honolulu. He was part of the team that designed a “Model City” for the popular 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair; served on planning commissions in Rochester, New York and Columbus Ohio; and was appointed professor of civic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of only two universities in the United States to offer courses in city planning (Harvard was the other). (Rybczynski, 2010, p. 23)
The post-Columbian Exposition City Beautiful, wrapped around parks and tree-lined boulevards chasing something called “beauty,” doesn’t sound very economic development; but the purposes behind beauty and parks were very much economic development. And the movement wasted precious little time moving away from parks and beauty into CBD modernization and rationalization of urban transportation infrastructure. The ultimate, often unarticulated goal of City Beautiful—one that would dominate economic development for the next 60–70 years—was to counter any diffusion of central city power and strengthen the Big City’s hold over its expanding hinterland.
The underlying goals of post-1910 City Beautiful, seen clearly in Burnham’s Chicago Plan, was to make the CBD the capital of the region though development of an enlarged cluster of public buildings, “the civic center”; and, through a rationalized transportation network, to tie the downtown to its most remote peripheries. Eventually the City Beautiful, like many initiatives, “got mugged” by voters upset about high taxes and concerned with other issues. The City Beautiful shifted in response to the City Practical—with a downtown focus and diminished concept of the civic center. Still, implementation of the City Beautiful/Practical continued through the 1920s, and was put to rest only when the Depression knocked at city doors.
Cleveland: City Beautiful as “a City on a Hill”
The most tangible tie with Downing’s romanticism sprang from an 1895 design competition promoted by young Cleveland architects (Cleveland Architectural ClubRobinson). The Club sought to imitate the Columbian Exposition cluster of buildings grouped around a body of water. They believed that mass and scale of grouped government/public buildings (libraries and museums) and monuments would facilitate “the transaction of public affairs” and instill public order and pride (Scott, 1969, p. 43). This so-called “municipal art” approach formalized into Cleveland’s “Group Plan.” The Group Plan anticipated that clustered government buildings would create an urban park-like beauty that awed the spirit to produce hope, civic pride and enhanced productivity.
The Cleveland chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) endorsed the general idea of clustering governmental structures, and the Ritchie-led Cleveland chamber showed interest in the “construction of a new city hall, courthouse, public library and post office around a beautiful park extending from the heart of the downtown area to the lake, all that was needed to impel the city toward its famous ‘Group Plan’ (Scott, 1969, p. 43). This cluster of government and public functions grouped together to centralize the public function in the central business district of a major city is what is meant by a civic center. In the later years of the City Beautiful, the civic center was a multi-function building that unified a number of governmental/civic services/functions under one roof.
Mayor Tom Johnson in 1900 embraced the concept. With urging from the chamber, Burnham (fresh from his Washington plan) was hired to design a massive City Beautiful-style railroad station. With authorization from the state in June 1902, the commission of architects (which included Burnham) was reconstituted (also included was John M. Carrere, chief architect for the 1901 Buffalo World’s Fair). The commission produced a Cleveland version of the Great White City and presented it to the chamber in 1903. The plan, “modeled after the gardens of [Paris’s] Palais Royale,” and the architecture, “derived from classic[al] Rome,” were embraced wholeheartedly by Mayor Johnson. In short order Cleveland became the symbol of the new urban order, celebrated in journals, newspapers and other media for “pioneering a new conception of a municipality,” being “the best-governed city in the nation” and being “fifty years ahead of most cities” (Teaford, 1993, p. 139). But that was not all:
“Grouping public buildings was one way to outwit ‘local rings of real estate interests’, who wanted to scatter public structures in order to ‘divide the benefit of their presence’ among various sections of the city … a tangible municipal reform” (Scott, 1969, p. 63).
With the nation’s media lights shining on Cleveland, a Great Lakes version of a “city on a hill,” the civic center of Cleveland, became the wave of the future and the signature expression of the politics and mission of the social reform mayors across the land.
The civic center was an integral part of the new vision of the municipality that was being tested in Johnson’s Cleveland. Johnson and his followers were fighting what they perceived to be the individualist avarice of streetcar magnates and corrupt councilmen. In their minds the city was not an arena for the no-holds-barred pursuit of wealth, but a community where cooperative spirit would ensure a better life for all people … . The civic center was, then, intended to be a lesson to private developers in the Ohio metropolis … Its mall provided a communal space for civic celebrations and its uniform cornice lines symbolized the rejection of individualism and competition. (Teaford, 1993, p. 62)
But all was never really perfect in Camelot. City Beautiful’s implementation did not go as planned: “The civic center project, the prototype of dozens of others in the first two decades of our century, was also a slum clearance effort” (Scott, 1969, p. 62). Over the next few years much of the 4-acre site was demolished—but some was not. A five-story abandoned factory was left untouched until 1936, years after the mall had opened. After an initial burst—the federal building was completed by 1910, the post office in 1911, the county courthouse in 1912 and city hall in 1916—12 years later the mall abruptly stopped about midway. At the other end of the mall, where the centerpiece massive railroad station was to have been built—nothing. Instead, the station was built five blocks away from the mall, and not in City Beautiful style. In place of the railway station, a quarter-century later (1931) a much-loved municipal stadium was constructed. Not until 1925 was the library built. This was not at all unusual for many a City Beautiful; in too many instances projects never moved off of the architect’s desk. The later criticism of urban renewal as leaving far too many vacant plots also characterized the City Beautiful. A not so hidden underneath grand visions and Beaux Arts structures was a strategy to reconstruct the fragmented, congested downtown cores of the initial industrial city.
City Beautiful era planning, and the City Beautiful civic center advocates, hoped the redevelopment of central city cores would project a powerful central city into its expanding hinterland. Civic pride was intended to serve as a justification of central city economic/political dominance over its ever-expanding suburbs. The key was to redevelop its obsolete and dysfunctional central business district:
[The plan] must serve as a guide for the reconstruction of the congested areas and as an instrument for shaping the development of the sparsely settled outlying territories … a host of measures for revamping the older parts of the city: widening the streets, providing the diagonal thoroughfares, extensively rehabilitating housing, restricting the occupancy and use of private property, rerouting street railways, diverting traffic … removing poles, wires and unsightly advertising. (Scott, 1969, pp. 97–8) The City Beautiful was in fact the first modern experiment in what later would be labeled “urban renewal.” In retrospect, its principal accomplishments were usually restricted to a few boulevards, some Beaux Arts museums and symphony and city halls—and the relocation of new downtown railroad lines and large, Grand Centralstyle stations.
The Chicago Plan
In 1896, at a formal dinner party, Burnham proposed to a group of elite businessmen (including George Pullman, Marshall Field and Philip Armour) a scheme which would evolve over the next decade into a formal plan for the Chicago region. On the July 4, 1909 the Chicago Plan was released; four months later Chicago approved the creation of the development vehicle, the Chicago Plan Commission. Over most of the next two decades some elements, but not others, were put into place—finishing during the 1920s under the tender mercies of Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson.
Burnham’s plan called for redemption of the lakefront from commercial, rail and industrial uses; creation of a highway along the city rim; relocation of railways and development of an internal freight and passenger transportation system; plus street rationalization, a park system in the periphery and, of course, the civic center. Over the next decade, the Navy Pier was built; the lakefront reclaimed from the Illinois Central Railroad; the Lake Front Ordinance (zoning) passed; Grant Park to Jackson Park—site of the 1893 World’s Fair (8 miles) developed for beaches and parks; and by 1930 the residential Gold Coast was in place.
The Plan did not propose to decentralize or fundamentally alter the central business district, or its role in the metropolis, and it did not view urban sprawl as an evil. Indeed the Plan implicitly endorsed the metropolitan perspective and the conviction, widespread at the turn of the century, that continued geographic expansion, if balanced by the encouragement of institutions and physical facilities that emphasized unity and social integration, would provide the metropolis with the economic base, social coherence and political stamina to maintain its vitality. (Miller and Melvin, 1987, pp. 140–41)
As one would expect, Burnham’s plan for his home city included everything we have come to expect from the City Beautiful—and one more! As the above quote indicates, the Chicago Plan was a true metropolitan plan—extending 60 miles into Chicago’s hinterland. In fact, a central tenet was to ensure adequate transportation to and from the central business district so that the CBD became, in effect, the region’s capital, its home base, and its visible and vibrant symbol: “From Kenosha Wisconsin, on the north, to Michigan City, Indiana on the south, Burnham’s plan outlined a regional network of highways, parkways and forest preserves [that connected to the Downtown Loop]” (Teaford, 1993, p. 143). The plan would later be accused by housing advocates and planners of neglecting the poor and ignoring the car. Neither is fair. Burnham believed parks to be his solution for the needs of the urban poor; Henry Ford’s Model T’s first year in production was 1908—when Burnham finished his plan. Despite the obviousness of the car, it was not until the 1920s that communities needed to accommodate it.
Burnham’s plan focused on transportation: the CBD Beaux Arts railroad station, the usual mainstay of most City Beautiful plans, was only the beginning of the Chicago Plan. Incorporating much of the Chicago Commercial Club’s previous recommendations, the plan eliminated most grade crossings in the city and proposed a central clearing and warehousing yard, and linked them to the harbors at the mouths of the Chicago and Calumet rivers. Passenger traffic was removed from the Loop area and distributed to three different rail stations. The plan addressed our longstanding need for a hybrid public/private EDO. Necessary for successful implementation, a major appendix detailed its powers, calling for both city and county development organizations. The location of future public buildings and streets/boulevards, for example, should rest with these bodies; areas for future annexation should rest with these agencies. Despite what it ignored, Burnham’s was the nation’s first comprehensive plan.
In 1909, upon approval of Burnham’s Chicago Plan, the city council authorized reform Mayor Fred Busse to appoint members to the independent Chicago Plan Commission, whose job was to promote and secure implementation of the plan.11 The commission initially lacked key powers that would enable us to assert it was a hybrid EDO. Most of the Chicago Plan-related projects were either turned over to city agencies or built by the private sector. But the commission up to World War II was Chicago’s most prominent EDO.
Using Burnham’s plan for legitimacy, a large number of projects were pushed for and approved by the commission during that period. According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago:
In many respects the three-decade era [until 1942] of the Chicago Plan Commission as originally constituted, was a great success. Moody, Taylor, Wacker and Simpson developed a working relationship with a series of mayors between 1909 and 1931 … [and] were also able to convince voters to fund commission-supported initiatives. Between 1912 and 1931 eighty-six Plan-related bond issues, covering seventeen different projects, with a combined cost of $234 million.12
They were also able to convince the state legislature to increase bond limits for Chicago to accommodate its initiatives.
Transportation-related infrastructure modernization initiatives were a principal focus of the commission in these years. The widening of Twelfth Street (Roosevelt), Michigan Avenue, Ashland, Sheridan and Wacker Drive—in reality, City Beautiful boulevards—exposed how that seemingly neutral concept actually masked serious transportation modernization while obscuring the urban renewal involved. Condemnation, slum and CBD clearance made it work. The resulting Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower (1925) and Magnificent Mile (among others)—not to mention the transformation of the lakefront and waterfront areas, including those of the original Columbian Exposition—were direct consequences of these boulevards. Perhaps its most obvious success, the Beaux Arts Union Station (today’s Amtrak station), was built by the railroads themselves (forming their own composite corporation and hiring Burnham as architect) and opened in 1925. Burnham’s proposed civic center, however, was never built.
Burnham himself was not a product of the Progressive Era: he and the City Beautiful were the last hurrah of the Gilded Age incrementally, and in most cities haphazardly, implemented. At its heart Burnham’s plan was, as Mel Scott asserted, a “businessman’s plan.” It was a creature not only of Burnham but also of the “one percent-led” Chicago business organizations. Researched and written in Burnham’s (and Edward Bennett’s) private office and paid for by business contributions, Burnham’s Chicago City Beautiful was the last gasp of an “essentially aristocratic city, pleasing to the merchant princes who participated in [the Plan’s] conception, but not meeting some of the basic economic and human needs” (Scott, 1969, p. 108). True enough; but Burnham plays a role larger than his life in our history of economic development. As he is often quoted:
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remembering that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that will stagger us. Let your watchword be order, and your beacon, beauty. Think Big.
Kansas City’s Bipolar City Beautiful
This Kansas City case study offers insight into the two styles of City Beautiful as (1) a stroll in the park and (2) conventional downtown modernization—city beautiful and city practical. The study also describes City Beautiful as it plods through a Pendergastmachine/businessman policy system, and demonstrates once again how Dillon’s Law affects local ED policy.
City Beautiful as a “stroll in the park”
Kansas City started down its City Beautiful path in the early 1870s, continuing through the 1890s. The goal was to build a parks and boulevard system à la Olmsted and Central Park. The Kansas City parks initiative, pure and simple, was driven by wealthy elites, notably the owner of the Kansas City Star newspaper, William R. Nelson. For a decade and a half the Star pushed the parks movement week after week:
Nelson’s systematic and resolute crusade for a parks and boulevard system … began in the mid 1880’s. There were three reasons for his crusade. The first was Nelson’s love of beauty … [T]he park and boulevard movement dovetailed nicely with [his] “good roads” transportation campaign. Lastly, Nelson wanted the rough-hewn Kansas City to match his vision of a progressive, stable community, blessed with an active, corruption-free government. (Wilson, 1989, pp. 101–2)
The Star’s campaign “combined repetition and adulation.” In article after article Nelson celebrated the glories and successes of parks in other cities. His campaign added a subtly to the usual simple “bigger and better than you” competitiveness seemingly inherent in our urban hierarchical competition. For Nelson, Kansas City was not only left out of the pleasures and benefits of parks; it was simply deficient in not having what other cities had. Cities to become a great metropolis had to have parks. The chief impediment was the city’s lack of a municipal “capacity” sufficient to build a park system; it needed to create a parks board/commission. That required local legislative action, state authorizing legislation (charter reform) and a local approval referendum. A second problem was that an 1875 charter reform permitted Kansas City to exercise eminent domain; but the only structural vehicle authorized to use that power was the privately controlled Real Estate Board, which concentrated on streets and roads and was populated by civil engineers less enamored with arts and beauty, and more mindful of expense.
Each time another city achieved one or another of these steps, Kansas City readers were sure to hear about it. Chicago (eight years previous to the Columbian Exposition) was the model to be emulated. In the years preceding the Exposition, Chicago and Olmsted created a mighty park system—which Nelson’s city just had to copy. Creating a park board and empowering it with eminent domain were the first steps. For the better part of 15 years proponents of the park board argued its case—and essentially got nowhere. Finally, the logjam broke and state legislation authorized a park board in 1899 in a new charter. But the board had no powers to issue bonds to pay for its proposed park system—and had to convince an independent and uncooperative Real Estate Board to condemn the required property.
The Parks Board was insufficient for its purposes and local legislation pushed hard to remedy this deficiency. With muscle from wealthy elites, it was shortly later approved by the council; but a now hostile Real Estate Board failed to take action, and the city made no funds available for parks condemnation. Wealthy elites could force legislation through, but could not stop foot-dragging. An outraged Parks Board then shot itself in the foot by trying to compel the state to grant it eminent domain. The state Supreme Court found city legislation to be deficient on a technicality and reversed earlier municipal legislation.
Abandoning the Parks Board, a new charter (1891), supported aggressively by the newly formed Kansas City Municipal Improvement Association, established a Parks Commission complete with bond issuance powers. A pro-parks corporate elite was duly appointed to the Parks Commission by the mayor. The president, August Robert Meyer—wealthy, German-educated owner of the Kansas City Consolidated Smelting and Refining Company—took over the lead from Nelson. Utilizing support from the city’s powerful Commercial Club, Meyer pushed the previously uncooperative elements into slow, grudging support of the parks and boulevard system. Joined by the young landscape architect George Edward Kessler (also German-born/educated), the Parks Commission secured a small (21-acre) parcel of land from the Real Estate Board and began to build a park and garden.
This small start was as much frustrating as gratifying; it was not the park and boulevard system found elsewhere. Olmsted, after visiting the city in March 1893, urged, given the almost indifferent support behind the city’s parks movement, only one additional park—which was not well received by the locals. The shock of Chicago’s Great White City hit hard in October 1893. In a report submitted that month Kessler summarized Kansas City park adherents’ commitment to do more:
We are but just beginning to realize that by beautifying our city … we shall create among our people warm attachment to the city, and promote civic pride, thereby supplementing and emphasizing our business advantages and increasing their power to draw business and population. (Wilson, 1989, p. 109 The plan that followed called for three separate large parks connected by wide, tree-lined boulevards. These would, it was believed, lead to new residential neighborhoods that would replace shanties of white and black residential areas in their path. The parks and boulevard movement was drifting into slum removal.
The 1893 plan was endorsed by the Star, the mayor, Kansas City’s political machine (led by James Pendergast) and the Commercial Club. The next problem involved bond issuance. Kansas City was bumping against state debt limits; the choice was between the park system and a new, badly needed water pumping station. The solution was local legislation which created a new form of debt issuance, a certificate, which did not count against the debt ceiling. The victory was short-lived as, like previous local legislation, the state Supreme Court held it violated the city charter.
So back to charter reform went the park movement advocates, and in 1895 they secured yet another charter reform (are you counting the charters?) which not only legitimized the certificates but also finally removed the Department of Public Works’ (the old Real Estate Board) ability to oppose or slow boulevard construction and eminent domain. In its place a citizen improvement association was set up and approved by popular referendum. The Pendergast machine provided votes the wealthy elites could not.
Finally, in 1895, with a powerful structure, the Parks Commission endowed with necessary powers was ready to go. In 1896 a spectacular 1300-acre land donation was manna from heaven. Boulevard construction started—and then the roof, shingle by shingle, fell in:
For almost four years [to 1900] … opponents of the park organized a series of petitions, public meetings, delegations to the council and the park board, court fights, substitutes for Kessler’s Plan, and an attempt to remove Meyer from the Park Commission. (Wilson, 1989, p. 120)
The issue was the expense, the cost to implement the plan. Parks, compared to other projects, were superfluous; a whim of the city’s wealthy. Most of the opposition came from the larger business community—the city’s small business and real estate industry. A Taxpayers’ League formed. Law suits to the state Supreme Court resulted in a series of decisions, starting in 1899 and ending in 1908, that finally upheld the bonding certificate issuance approved 13 years earlier.
While effective opposition was over after 1900, the City Beautiful in Kansas City had badly split the business community. The parks system put in place during these years—including its crowning jewel, the Paseo—was visually impressive, and elicited considerable local support once in place. Nevertheless, after this lengthy and hardfought success, the Kansas City Parks Movement phase of the City Beautiful was fairly well over. The next phase—Union Station, development of the nation’s allegedly first shopping plaza built to accommodate the car (Country Club Plaza) and the rejection of a civic center—moved in an entirely different direction. Why?
Kansas City businessmen, machines/unions and economic development
Nineteenth-century Kansas City’s parks and boulevard/City Beautiful initiatives revealed an immature or transitional municipal policy system under the influence of no sustainable coalition. Wealthy business elites, civic associations and chambers kept the City Beautiful initiative alive through numerous charter reforms, law suits and legislative/referendums, but could not deliver sustained policy implementation. From real estate exchanges, civil engineers and state judicial action inhibiting use of ED tools by two park-related HEDOs dominated the two-decade struggle.
In the mid-1920s Progressive structural reform reared its head—advocated by a resurgent ward boss who, transcending from a city council ward-based machine, had finally forged a county-wide political machine. The Pendergast ward machine represented lower- and working-class Kansas City, drawing considerable patronage from the streetcar franchises in return for machine support. In 1908 the bosses got together to kill the Progressive favorite, the Public Utilities Commission, and Pendergast held off Nelson’s attacks on his patronage-filled Street Railway franchise—in fact voting in 1909 to extend its franchise for 42 years.
Yet Pendergast and Nelson closed ranks behind municipal ownership of the water company and earlier (in 1895), and again in 1906, he supported municipal takeover of the gas company. In 1909 Pendergast supported the relocation of the Kansas City Union (railroad) terminal from his home first ward to a location 4 miles away. The greatest and most consistent gulf between reformer and ward machine was social legislation—in particular, gambling, prostitution and later prohibition. In fact, control of the police was important to machines not just because of jobs/votes, but also because it permitted loose regulation of these activities.
Despite differences, then, machines and business could come together. Nothing better demonstrates this than a 1900 economic development-related event. Advocated as early as 1884 by Nelson and his newspaper as a “requirement for an aspiring metropolis” was a convention center. Nelson lobbied for more than a decade until, with Pendergast’s support, a convention center was authorized. Finally funded and its design chosen on the basis of an architectural competition, the Convention Hall, accommodating 20,000 visitors, opened for business in February 1899. Within weeks it had signed the Democratic Party to hold its 1900 national convention. Then, in April 1900, three months before the convention, the center burned down—completely destroyed.
Within hours of the fire, the convention center’s commission telegraphed the Democratic Party informing them that nothing had changed. The hall would be rebuilt and ready to hold the party convention on time and on budget. The Commercial Club (the corporate franchises, the largest firms in the city) raised the private funds, hired a new architect and lent their engineers and workers (150 men cleared the site). Unions put aside their bitter resistance to private ownership and joined in the effort. One union leader commented:
The rich man wants to make Kansas City a good place to live in, but the poor man must. A man who has capital can go somewhere else … but we can’t afford to move to satisfy our tastes. Convention Hall has been, and is, a bigger thing to the poor man than to the man who has plenty of money. (Brown and Dorsett, 1978, p. 128)
In 90 days the hall was rebuilt and opened for the Democratic Convention that nominated William Jennings Bryan for President. Kansas City had lived with its 1889 charter (the one authorizing the Parks Commission) for 19 years—not because it wanted to, but because it took that long to get another one. By 1901 a laundry list of changes and reforms, including civil service, prompted the formation of the Kansas City Civic League. Affiliated with the National Municipal League, it attracted over 700 members, mostly businessmen and professionals. The resistance to charter reform was, as always, taxes; but many also feared the loss of checks and balances that the existing, more Jeffersonian, policy system contained.
So in 1907, after years of losing referendums, a Republican mayor set up a new commission; added some boards and commissions to the charter; subtracted some controversial ones; and added a limited referendum for franchise approval—and, in a separate ballot, a recall amendment. Most important, it included sections to build a key streetcar viaduct from the machine-controlled north end to the central business district and the industrial areas of the city. If built, workers could get to work and shop cheaper. It also proposed a new massive City Beautiful-style railroad terminal. In the 1908 referendum that followed, Pendergast sat on his hands, and his rival ward boss, Joseph Shannon, supported both the charter reform and recall. Included in the approved 1908 charter reform was creation of the first public welfare commission in the United States. The former passed nearly 3–1 and the recall lost. Buried amid all this policy and structural mélange was the second phase of the City Beautiful.
The structural reforms discussed in the last chapter had, by 1908, not yet been achieved in Kansas City. The city’s unreformed policy system profoundly affected the course of ED policy, making necessary a series of “log-rolling” compromises, ad hoc coalitions, warring business elites, machines and reformer dynamics—all of which operated within a political culture that could only be described as Privatist: fragmented government, cheap/low cost, low taxes and fear of strong government. All became wrapped up, intermingled, in a Dillon’s Law imposed charter reform. Because of this lack of capacity and consensus, there is little second phase City Beautiful to tell of.
Originally included in the charter package was a well-developed civic center proposal—sandwiched between the railroad station and a park system (linked with slum removal)—but it never survived the politics that followed (Wilson, 1989, pp. 201–4). Its signature project, the Union Railway Terminal, only got built because the railway itself built it: where it wanted; designed not by Burnham, who it rejected; and isolated from CBD synergies and transportation access. In most cities City Beautiful sustained itself into World War I, but the war put an end to most urban initiatives. Finishing up already approved projects characterized much of the 1920s’ City Practical.
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER: THE NOBLE EXPERIMENT
On March 30, 1909, at the prestigious Boston City Club, the opening speaker, Edward Filene,13 tasked his audience of 230 of Boston’s wealthiest business, religious and educational elites that: Our city can be immeasurably helped by coordination and planning ahead. We are allowing slum conditions … of overcrowded housing … even in the outskirts [suburbs] … We must tackle this problem … we will bring to Boston … a knowledge of all the best things … done by any other city … combining all the best things in a Plan for Boston. (Heath, 1998; see also Scott, 1969, pp. 110–17)
A later speaker, board member George W. Codman,14 offered further motivation behind the plan for Boston: “We have tried to run the city as a political institution and have made a dismal failure at it. We think now that we want a business administration of our cities with businessmen in command” (Heath, 1998).
Soon labeled “the Noble Experiment,” the process and series of initiatives and events unleashed by Filene that night present a masterful case study of a number of themes discussed in this chapter. The study reveals the complications and the contradictions that characterized policy-making in municipal systems moving into the “modern” era. The plan turned out to be a major-league community development/economic development initiative, led by the chamber and one of history’s illustrious mayors, Honey Fitz (grandfather of JFK who danced and sang “Sweet Adeline” at the latter’s 1946 first congressional victory).
The Boston Plan
And so the Boston Plan for 1915 was announced—the Noble Experiment had begun. The Boston Plan Executive Committee led by Filene included James Storrow (General Motors); the heads of the Boston Chamber and Boston’s Merchants Association; and Louis Brandeis, in seven years a Supreme Court Justice. Eighty of Boston’s best business leaders served on the board of directors. The plan comprised 16 points to be achieved by 1915, including:
+ Structural reforms—expert accounting for the city, reduced government waste and a new charter for Boston.
+ Progressive reform—the best public health department in the nation; comprehensive system of wage-earner and old-age pensions; an increase in the number of branches in the public library; a system of public education “that actually fits the boys and girls of Boston for their life work”; and better working conditions.
+ City Beautiful reforms—music in the famous Boston Park system and an “intelligent system of transportation for the whole state, electric, express, freight and passenger”).
+ Pure economic development initiatives such as “a careful accounting of the human resources of the city to include the skill level of the workers and the executive abilities of industrial leaders”; growth in existing industries; and the introduction of new enterprises.
The Boston Plan was a two-pronged initiative. The first of the prongs began in 1905 with the formation of the Good Government Association (GGA) whose membership totally overlapped the membership of the Boston 1915 Plan.15 The motivation for its establishment was the conviction of one James Michael Curley for fraud in a federal court. The 1905 election of John F. Fitzgerald (“Honey Fitz”) was the last straw for Boston’s GGA, and they spent the whole of Fitz’s first administration initiating law suits, state investigations and newspaper attacks on him and the “Irish machine.” In 1907 they achieved approval by state legislature of the Independent Finance Commission to monitor city finances.
The state Finance Committee prepared a new charter for Boston whose intent was to reduce the power of the ethnic ward-based machine over the city council because the council levied high taxes to support its graft, patronage and capital projects in the neighborhoods. The mayor’s office was strengthened and given a four-year term. The GGA got the charter on the 1909 ballot. On the same ballot was the GGA/Boston Plan’s James Storrow, who ran against Fitz for mayor. His de facto campaign manager was the chair of the Boston Chamber. In an election in which more Bostonians voted than ever before, the charter was passed (52 percent); Storrow lost, but business candidates secured a majority on the city council. Honey Fitz was elected mayor, the first in Boston’s history to serve four years—also the first strong mayor in Boston’s history.
But only in Boston politics could the next event occur. Fitz’s first announcement was to support the Boston 15 Plan.
Honey Fitz as Structural Reformer
Over the next four years, Fitzgerald worked to achieve the 16-point plan. The mayor brought in an expert, Louis Rourke—chief engineer of the recently completed Panama Canal—to be his Commissioner of Public Works. That department resulted from Fitzgerald’s consolidation of the separate streets, water and engineering boards/ commissions. Curley then reorganized the entire system of parks and recreation. Fitzgerald was bringing efficiency and eliminating waste.
The Boston Plan went forward as well. In a conscious imitation of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, they constructed the Boston Exposition: a “graphic display of the living and working city, a display of Boston as a going concern.” The Exposition first opened in the old Copley Square Museum of Fine Arts in 1910. A year later it was moved to a newly constructed Museum of Fine Arts “built on clean City Beautiful lines” on a swamp, tamed and landscaped, overlooking Olmsted’s Back Bay Fens. The new campus was intended to attract “the willing worker on an average wage to bring up his family amid healthful and comfortable surroundings. That they may become useful citizens.” Over 200 exhibits were broken down into three main themes: the Visible City, Educational, and Social and Economic. City planning, parks, streets and boulevards and housing exhibits were displayed in the Visible City. Also included were a model tenement and an actual three-bedroom North End tenement. Also on display was the City Beautiful as depicted for Chicago—and new “moving pictures.” The 1910 Expo targeted the gazelle of is day, the glamorous aircraft industry, complete with actual planes, including a Curtiss; models of the Wright Brothers’ plane; and the winner of Europe’s aircraft race. It was so well attended that a second “aero industry” Expo was held the next year at Harvard Aviation Airport (60,000 attended). That was followed up by a third the next year. Boston was attempting to establish leadership in a promising cutting-edge agglomeration.
Port of Boston Movement
Well “me hearties,” chambers and real estate exchanges were not the only Big City economic developers on the early twentieth-century stage. Ports also figure prominently in our history: we have already discovered that our candidate for the first municipal government EDO is the NYC Department of Docks. During the Progressive Era two new versions of the port authority (Privatist and Progressive) will make their appearance. These newer versions of port authorities are but a continuation of the experiments to create a hybrid structure (HEDO) that integrates public power with private expertise and governance. This experiment will prove successful and durable—in fact, the Progressive port authority structure will be adapted to become the predominant twenty-first-century HEDO.
Coastal and international trading as well as maritime industries (fishing/whaling) were cornerstone agglomerations that built several American cities. Ports served as a home for export trade facilities around which its hinterland, regional, economies depended. The ports/waterfronts of New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston were also early gateways for immigrants. As early as the 1840s transatlantic passenger routes meant ports ventured into tourism. Ports housed naval facilities and forts as well as immigration-processing centers. Port facilities included piers, wharves, channels, customhouses and warehouses; loading and cargo transfer; transportation access; ship repair and dry docks; and people-processing facilities. Before 1900 there were only five public port authorities in the United States: Galveston, San Francisco, New York (Dept. of Docks), Portland OR and New Orleans (Luberoff and Walder, 2000, p. 10).
Nineteenth-century port facilities were privately owned or controlled by monopolies of railroads, power utilities and mining corporations. These old-style Privatist ports were devoid of public powers and were more a vehicle to transfer railroad and marine assets into non-taxable public assets, allowing these monopolists to control logistics and trade infrastructure. By the turn of the century, however, with the Progressive Movement gathering momentum, non-railroad business elites had had it with railroads/ shipping firms’ monopolist-like control of ports. If the Progressive Movement did anything, it checked monopolistic concentrations of power; and, in the case of ports and harbors, a “new-style” port authority was the mechanism.
Progressive municipal administrations stumbled onto a new model of port authority recently approved by the British Parliament in London. The London Port Authority Act of 1908 model relied on a quasi-public/private, semi-independent port authority with mixed governance and substantial public powers (bond issuance; taxing and abatement authority; public ownership/management/lease of property for private use; and eminent domain). This was a radical, indeed revolutionary, innovation in hybrid EDOs. The London model offered the added benefit of “insulat[ing] complex public programs from politics and ineffective management” (Radford, 2013, p. 8). The port authority structure was ideal. It permitted meaningful, and legal, private participation in ED decision-making; sale/leaseback to a port authority so that, private assets could be legally transferred to public ownership and subsequent private management/operation; and public financing for assets publicly owned meant favorable financial terms—and, from the municipality’s perspective, off-budget and off-debt cap limitations for important economic development tax-generating infrastructure. Port authority powers installed long-term core marine and harbor infrastructure/improvements necessary for sustained harbor effectiveness and profitability (such as dredging, piers and long-term planning).
So in Progressive Washington/Oregon, and Boston, municipal and state policy systems retooled and repurposed the port authority to: seize control of the waterfront; overturn its railroad oligopoly; and conduct an aggressive economic development growth strategy based on foreign trade and shipping.
Boston’s port and trade facilities (claiming to be the oldest active port in the Western Hemisphere) were in the 1850s purchased by New York City-owned private companies. Motivated by its rivalry with New York City, and believing the opening of the Panama Canal offered fresh opportunities, in 1911 the Boston Chamber prepared a port authority bill for the Massachusetts state legislature. The intention was to reverse the port’s declining trade which, it was felt, was caused by inefficiencies created by competing railroads. Dredging and investment in key facilities were also included in the bill, as was a large appropriation. The bill demarcated several industrial park-like areas adjacent to the terminals. The legislature increased the appropriation and approved the bill, creating a state-chartered Port of Boston with an appropriation of $9 million. The board of directors appointed by action of the governor and mayor were all chamber directors/members.
The Port’s first achievement was to convince the Hamburg-American Line to include Boston as a port on its transatlantic passenger route. More to our interest, monopolistic access to the Commonwealth Pier by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad was broken when the Port annulled the old contract. The pier was rebuilt to accommodate the Hamburg-American line. A new dry dock was constructed, another pier modernized and some marshy flats reclaimed for potential development (Sturges, 1915, pp. 242–6). To induce Massachusetts manufacturers to ship out of the new port, the chamber produced in 1913 the 265-page Handbook of the Port of Boston.
Boston successfully lured the annual meeting of the International Congress of Chambers of Commerce to the city in 1912, the first time that body had met in the United States. That achievement was the result of a 1911 chamber-organized tour of 75 European cities, in the course of which formal invitations were dropped off in each city. The International Congress arrived with 850 delegates, presenting an opportunity for Mayor “Honey” Fitzgerald to drop in, say hi and leave a city monetary “contribution” to the event—the state had already done so. The chamber followed up in 1913 with a three-month business exchange mission to South America and the West Indies.
Boston Plan Pushes a CD Agenda
Breaking down into committees, Boston Plan business leaders forged ahead with projects such as constructing a Jamaica Pond boathouse and bandstand and starting the Woodbourne housing and settlement house. They brought in the noted playground expert Joseph Lee. A monthly publication, New Boston, commenced; 15 bills were prepared for city and state approval. The housing committee was especially aggressive, and in the first issue of the New Boston it focused on the housing conditions of the North End, West End, Charleston and South Boston. The committee recommended forming a bureau to investigate and enforce housing codes. In January 1911 Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. wrote an amazing article in New Boston—“A Suburban Town Built on Business Principles”—that reflected the status of the housing movement led by the Russell Sage Foundation, calling for Forest Hills-type planned communities in the suburbs of Boston. The first priority of the housing committee was that “overcrowded, unplanned residential districts should not spread out along the newly opened rapid transit lines linking the downtown core with the suburbs of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain” (Heath, 1998).
In 1911 the Boston Plan submitted to the Massachusetts state legislature an initiative calling for the creation of a metropolitan district whose purpose was to provide Boston (and the 40 towns of the metropolitan district) with a city plan developed on “sound moral, industrial and social lines.” The three-member board of directors would issue recommendations for housing, buildings, safety (fire and sanitary) and congestion, and provide reserved land for public use. The proposal was aggressively lobbied by Plan 15 and the new chamber of commerce. The chamber issued a formal report, “Real Boston, the Get Together Spirit among Towns and Cities.” To further support the initiative the chamber created the Real Boston Committee, composed of suburban and city business leaders. The fate of the Real Boston bill, however, was bleak indeed.
The bill couldn’t gather support from any of several state legislative committees. A new bill was crafted to meet objections—but it too got nowhere. A month after submittal the legislative committee formally voted it down. The bill was killed by suburban opposition fueled by suburban unwillingness to be linked in any way with Boston’s Irish machine and crony, high-tax politics. Their ultimate fear was that the metropolitan district was the first step to future annexation. The Massachusetts legislature shortly after passed its own long-range housing program run out of a state housing commission. In 1913, the state housing commission required Massachusetts towns and villages to establish a planning board—which Honey Fitz did in January 1914. But that was it. In January 1914 a new mayor, the aforementioned James Michael Curley, began his first term as mayor of Boston.
Within a year the Boston Plan 15 organization collapsed and disappeared.
NOTES
- Three previous NYC Tenement Housing Acts (1879, 1882 and 1887) is why Riis could follow alongside sanitary inspectors. The most successful restrictive legislation was the later 1901 Act.
- Rochester was not the first school/community center. That honor probably falls to NYC’s People’s Institute founded by Charles Smith in 1897. It quickly collapsed and was reorganized in 1911.
- Topics are: Women and the Trades; Work Accidents and the Law; the Steel Workers; Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town; the Pittsburgh District; and Wage-Earning. Sage followed in 1913 with six other community surveys (Scranton, Atlanta, Topeka, St. Paul and Springfield IL.
- For example Patricia Mooney Melvin, “Before the Neighborhood Organization Revolution: Cincinnati’s Neighborhood Improvement Associations, 1890–1940,” in Robert B. Fairbanks and Patricia Mooney-Melvin (eds), Making Sense of the City: Local Government, Civic Culture, and Community Life in Urban America (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001); Hoffman (1996); John Clayton Thomas, Between Citizen and City (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1986); Robert Fisher and Peter Romanofsky, Community Organization for Urban Social Change (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981).
- As of 2013 an estimated 2000 municipally owned utilities operate in the United States. See Five Star Consultants, Municipal Electric Utilities: Analysis and Case Studies, http://www.fivestarconsultants.com.
- The League, based on “black self-assurance and interracial cooperation,” operated at least until 1923.
http://www.lexisnexis.com/documents/academic/upa_cis/1559_natnegrobusleaguept1.pdf. Charles Hampden-Turner, “Black Power: A Blueprint for Psycho-Social Development,” in Richard Rosenbloom and Robin Marris (eds), Social Innovation in the City; New Enterprises for Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
- Olmsted is a stand-in for a number of exceptional individuals, in particular Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux. Olmsted, a father of landscape architecture, is a pioneer in American urban planning.
- Olmsted and Vaux (later others such as Green) designed, then constructed Central Park (1856–73) and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Vaux designed Elm Park in Worcester MA (1854), said to be the first municipal park as Central Park opened in 1857. Olmsted was the first chair of Yosemite National Park; between 1879 and 1885 he fought to preserve Niagara Falls. Olmsted’s projects included: Buffalo, Riverside Illinois (a planned community), Montreal, Quebec, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, Rochester’s Highland Park, Detroit’s Belle Island, Presque Isle in Marquette, Grand Necklace in Milwaukee, Cherokee park system in Louisville, Forest Park in Springfield MA, Hartford, Wilmington DE, the Biltmore estate in North Carolina, Trenton New Jersey; master plans for UCLA Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Chicago campus; and the landscape of the US Capitol Building—a host of projects associated with/resulting from the Columbian Exposition. He suffered from declining abilities (possibly dementia) in his last decade, dying in 1903.
- Robinson later wrote important works (his classic being Modern Civic Art, 1903). By 1902 civic improvement had been redefined as “the promotion of outdoor art, public beauty, town, village, and neighborhood improvement.” In the same year the Chautauqua Institution prepared “improvement study guides” for association members. At its third convention in 1902, the League created 14 advisory committees, including ones on municipal reform and settlements and sanitation. Billing itself as a “federation of organizations and individuals aiming to promote the higher life of American communities,” the American League spearheaded the spread of civic associations in municipalities across the nation. A 1905 survey revealed nearly 2500 civic associations existed.
- A staggering 328 members were initially appointed, representative of all sectors of Chicago. Its first and permanent chair was Charles Wacker, who served until 1926; its first and most famous managing director was Walter Moody, who served until 1920. He was succeeded by Eugene Taylor, who ran the place until 1942. The commission by that time (1939) had been reorganized, becoming a part of city government. In 1957 it was effectively relocated inside the city’s Planning and Development Department. Presently, among other responsibilities, it reviews proposals for public utility districts (PUDs); and administers the Lakefront Protection Ordinance, Planned Manufacturing Districts, Industrial Corridors and a very aggressive TIF District Program. Today’s commission is very much a hybrid agency.
- Encyclopedia of Chicago, “Implementation,” http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/3000008.html.
- Filene’s,—Boston’s long-lived and prestigious department store—was founded in 1881 by William Filene, a German-Jewish immigrant. Edward, born in 1860 Salem, left Harvard to run the family business (with his brother Abraham Lincoln Filene), and opened his famous “Bargain Basement.” While a staunch proponent of Taylor’s scientific management (treat them like an ox), he instituted a profit-sharing plan: a minimum wage for women: a 40-hour working week; paid vacations and a health clinic; and entered into collective bargaining arbitration with his company union. He also formed a savings and loan association for his employees. Edward was ousted from the Filene’s active management, retaining the title of president. He was a founding member of the newly merged (Ritchie-led) Boston Chamber in 1911, and in the same year the leading proponent behind America’s first Workmen’s Compensation Law (Massachusetts). He regularly corresponded with a diverse assortment of national leaders, including Woodrow Wilson, Mahatma Gandhi and Vladimir Lenin. The Boston Plan (Plan 1915) was his idea.
- Codman’s son Charles was General George Patton’s chief aide during World War II. His part was played in the 1970 movie Patton by Paul Stevens.
- Founding organizations were the Associated Board of Trade, the Chamber of Commerce, the Merchants Association and the Boston Bar Association. Louis Brandeis was a chief founder.
Ron W. Coan 