Dallas
When last we left 1920’s Dallas in Chapter 6 she had established herself as the regional leader in the competition with Ft. Worth. Earlier in this chapter, aggressive chamber-city government partnership seizing upon opportunities arising during the war years had aggressively acquired an aircraft industry of national scale to booster an already diversified economic base.. Politically, Dallas had put in place a commission form of government in 1907 (as had most of Texas, it seems), but after some dissatisfaction during the twenties replaced in with a city manager form in 1930, approving in the process charter reforms that enhanced and upgraded the capacity of its municipal government. In 1930, lacking any oil fields of its own, Dallas businessmen, H. L. Hunt purchased a major East Texas oil field.[1]. The East Texas Oil Field was huge and it spun off local oil services and equipment firms, some machinery, and oil distribution companies. Dallas, in short, had developed a meaningful energy sector.
As we have come to expect charter reform was business-led, and the instrument of that set of initiatives, the Citizens Charter Association, fielded a set of business candidates for the city council. All nine were elected, the city manager hired and Dallas in the Age of Urban Renewal was in place. Times were tough, of course, all over in the Depression—Dallas was no exception. Hard times generated internal conflict and Dallas was looking for an opportunity to bust some urban hierarchy to let off some steam. The 1936 Texas Centennial provided the opening and in true Dallas-style turned a page in Texas history as well. Dallas, for those not from Texas and who did not read Chapter 6, was not even incorporated when Texas became a state in 1836. The city had no real or imagined claim to compete with the likes of San Antonio (the Alamo) or Houston whose namesake won the key battle that secured independence. Suffice it to say, armed with $3.5million, the Chamber went to the state legislature—and the rest, is history. Dallas was designated as the site.
Needing money to fix up the fair grounds to host the events, Dallas business leadership turned to New Deal Washington D. C. and obtained the necessary funds. That was because Dallas possessed a formidable political apparatus in New Deal Washington D.C. Banker R. L. Thornton had led the Centennial campaign and the effort had left him a bit frustrated. He was determined to set up a system and process that worked more efficiently than the Centennial campaign had. So in the best J. R. Ewing tradition, he got his powerful friends together (no doubt at the “Cattleman’s Club”) and created the “Dallas Citizens Council” [2]in 1937. This was meant to be a “vault-like” political-economic development power center which would operate through the Chamber and its selected and financed city council. In terms of the large corporation elites found in Chapters 9-11, this was the Dallas equivalent. That it came together a decade earlier, with no prod from decentralization, and achieved a political/economic dominance never attained up north, bespeaks Texan cities in the Age of Urban Renewal. It was the Dallas Citizens Council that provided much of the muscle and determination that sent the Chamber off to recruit the aircraft firms, and federal war production contracts discussed earlier in this chapter. This is the group that stiffened the spine of Dallas when the North American Aviation complex emptied out at war’s end.
Anyway in Washington, Jesse Jones (from Houston) was FDR’s influential Reconstruction Finance Administration chair. He secured appointment for two Texan board directors on its Defense Plant Corporation (that made decisions/loans to locate privately-owned war production factories the pivotal instrument implementing the industrial decentralization initiative. One of them, Thomas W. Griffiths, hailed from Dallas. With a large and growing Democratic Texas delegation in Congress, the state was well-positioned in DC. In fact, in September 1940, Sam Rayburn[3], the Democratic majority leader became Speaker of the House of Representatives (he held that position whenever Democrats controlled Congress until he died in 1961). He was a wonderful supplement to John Nance Garner[4], FDR’s vice-president—also from Texas. During the New Deal years, Dallas picked up nearly $4 million from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration for the unemployed, secured the only Public Works Administration public housing project in Texas (built on vacant land adjoining the CBD for whites only). In 1937, the Council approved the formation of the Dallas Housing Authority (DHA) to take advantage of the slum removal public housing programs authorized in the Housing Act of 1937. Dallas was ready and willing to participate in the Age of Urban Renewal.
Establishing the DHA and its subsequent slum clearance/public housing activities suggests the outlines of a distinctive regional approach to that policy area. Despite today’s prevailing urban renewal paradigm, northern Big City slum removal/public housing affected both working class ethnic as well as African-American neighborhoods. Not until the early sixties did the “racial” consequences of urban renewal become paramount—and even then the racial segregation confronted was both informal and real estate/ financial in nature. In the South racial segregation was all that—and embedded in law and custom as well. There was no obscuring veneer hiding race dynamics and slum removal/public housing in the South; it was evident from the start of the Age of Urban Renewal. Norfolk’s experience, befuddled as it was with machine/reformer and temporary federal war housing dynamics—but evidenced a strong ambiguity toward federal leadership. Atlanta, with its strong Progressive-like traditions, embraced federal programs but used them to fit, not challenge, existing segregation and when given the chance abandoned public housing for almost two decades in favor of CDB redevelopment. Dallas, as Privatist a stronghold as any in the nation, bought into federal programs, but used them to reinforce already segregated neighborhoods and housing. But in Dallas’s case, it backfired.
The DHA commenced a major slum removal/public housing project almost immediately after its formation. By 1938, DHA had designated its first neighborhood project (Hall-Thomas area) “because this [area] has definitely been established as a negro area, and it is the desire and the intention of the city that it remain one”.[5] As its inaugural slum removal/public housing project, Dallas, its business elites, and the DHA intended 1937 Housing Act funds to maintain segregation—by improving housing and conditions in an African-American neighborhood. With better opportunities available, African-Americans would, it was felt, have less motivation to expand into white neighborhoods. There was a second motivation as well. Harkening back to the 1910 (Kessler) city plan, and reinforced by a well-received 1940 Atlantic Monthly[6] article, perceived rundown African-American slums “as a canker or eating sore” on Dallas. “The rest of our city can no more live and grow and prosper with such a condition, then our body can be well when it has an angry, bleeding, inflamed sore … so will the city … suffer the penalty for bad housing conditions among any large group of its population”.[7]
After two years of law suits, the project started in 1940 with 266 structures demolished and 400 families displaced. The lack of alternative places to go, amid a crushing African-American housing crisis, however, immediately generated pressure on adjacent white neighborhoods. Over the next nine months, intermittent violence, including thirteen bombings against Blacks destabilized neighborhoods and city politics. Demolishing houses to construct future housing involved an inevitable time lag into which pour all the intense frustration and fear that segregation created. That lesson was not lost on Dallas elites; slum removal/public housing was risky and volatile. Moreover, by the time emotions subsided, Dallas was in the midst of war production growth described above, and the need to find housing for those who filled these jobs. By 1942, as noted earlier, federal funding for low-income housing was zeroed out. Slum removal and public housing fell off the policy agenda.
The Dallas Master Plan of 1945, promoted by both the city council and the Dallas Citizens Council, reopened this can of worms. Harland Bartholomew & Associates plan followed the themes of most plans of this era. The thrust of this comprehensive plan was to unify the metropolitan area (especially its suburbs) by connecting its various parts to the center, the CBD. Transportation upgrading and automobile access were paramount initiatives. A rebuild, attractive and modern CBD was the magnet that need to be created. Central city primacy and metropolitan economic growth became linked in this paradigm. The Plan included an aggressive annexation program[8] which when completed by the end of the forties, nearly doubled the land area of Dallas. Housing and neighborhoods, especially African-American neighborhoods were the focus on the Master Plan as well (Report 10). Report 10 urged the development of sound and vibrant neighborhoods, for all residents, reflecting much of the earlier thinking of Clarence Perry (who with Mumford were now metropolitan housers). There is no evidence that Report 10 was meant to be a challenge to segregation, rather, it was meant, as in the past, to reinforce it. Proposals, using FHA financing, followed.
So once again in 1949, the Dallas Chamber, the Citizens Council, the Dallas Homebuilders Association, and the City Council combined, in response to the 1949 Housing Act, to a new burst of public housing—principally for African-Americans—to be used to reinforce existing neighborhood-based segregated housing patterns. The Dallas Citizens Council publically in 1950 urged DHA to construct 1,500 units of public housing for African-Americans within the next year and half.[9] During this period racial violence in areas adjoining minority neighborhoods increased dramatically. Slum removal and public housing construction was intended by the business elites to ameliorate the explosive and violent expansion of minority neighborhoods into white areas. Between 1950 and 1954, DHA completed six projects (4,000 units for African-Americans and 1,500 units for whites). “With the completion of the West Dallas [Project, built on annexed land] in April 1954, the DHA ceased building public housing until the 1970’s.[10] During the 1950’s the tone of Dallas city politics was noticeably changing.
During the 1950’s/1960’s (and after), individual members of the Dallas-based corporate elite, some associated with the Dallas Citizens Council, more than flirted with radical right political movements[11]. Dallas acquired the epithet of “the city of hate” in stark contrast with Atlanta’s tag “too proud to hate”. The assassination of JFK[12], and Oswald, the linkage with Hinckley and his attempt on Reagan’ life stuck to Dallas for decades. Whatever that larger political/ideological motif, for the most part it does not seem to have affected the course Dallas followed during the Age of Urban Renewal. Dallas over the next generation broadly followed the path uncovered in our Atlanta case study. During the Age period, the Dallas Citizens Council, Chamber of Commerce and City Council dominated Dallas politics and economic development. Dallas corporate leadership was much more Privatist than Atlanta’s business elites, but the policy direction of both cities proceeded along the similar lines. These included attaining a competitive position in the national urban hierarchy achieved most by constructing a modern, world-class central business district. In both cases neighborhoods and housing were relatively neglected. Both gave up trying to stop decentralization and made their peace with a polycentric metropolitan area–in Dallas’s case, pursuing a more or less benign laissez-faire policy personified by the 1972 Dallas/Ft Worth Metroplex and the 1974 Dallas-Fort Worth Airport.[13].
The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the thirteen county economic, cultural and tourist hub of north Texas. In 2010, it includes 6.5 million Texans and cites such as Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Irving, Grapevine and Plano. It produces the sixth largest GMP in the United States and tenth in the world and home to four professional sports teams. It is served by the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, the second-largest in the nation. The airport, all 17,000 acres of it, is larger than Manhattan, with an architecture everyone loves to hate. But it allegedly, led to a billion dollar increase in land values and has sprouted all sorts of towns, commercial centers and every bit of economic development an airport is supposed to create[14].
The point of all this seeming advertisement is that the Metroplex may be America’s most successful regional recruitment and promotion initiative—ever. It was created and promoted by an alliance of businesses that formed the “North Texas Commission” back in 1971. The fact that is a “virtual” geography, little more than the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington Combined Statistical Area, gives way to create not only an image to the outside world, but an identity to its inhabitants. The word, a creation of adman Harve Chapman, just caught on and defined a geography so well it continues and prospers a half-century later. Of course, it is a planner’s nightmare (it does have a COG behind it), but frankly it the Metroplex (natives say it should not be called that) is the best example of how central cities and their independent suburban boomburbs can prosper in a polycentric metro area. It is the living refutation that sprawl cannot work.
The fact that Dallas CBD-focused physical redevelopment consciously used no federal urban renewal money has resulted in much comment in later years. Neither did Houston, San Diego, Salt Lake City or Phoenix. Most Sunbelt cities were wary of federal intervention, requirements and mandates. For most of the 1960’s, while the federal government advocated New Frontier and Great Society social and civil rights priorities, federal programs made southerners and businessmen bristle. Nixon revenue-sharing federalism was easier to take and even Dallas tempered its hostility to the federal government during those years. Both Atlanta and Dallas business elites adopted a moderate accommodative posture toward integration and school desegregation. In Dallas the Citizens Council set up the tri-racial Dallas Alliance which proved reasonably successful in navigating Dallas through those turbulent years. The sixties riots missed these cities.
Atlanta’s Mayor Allen found his counterpart in Dallas. Mayor Erik Jonsson, elected for three terms (1964-1971), the former founder and Chair of Texas Instruments, promulgated his “Goals for Dallas”, a systems approach to city governance. “Goals” was probably the closest thing to a comprehensive plan that Dallas had seen since 1945[15], based on systems efficiency and stressing physical not social programs. There was no mistaking “Goals” for the Great Society and it might be fair to offer that the strengths of one were the weaknesses of the other. Housing, especially in minority neighborhoods was in crisis during these years and in Dallas one could find some of the most distressing housing units and neighborhoods the nation could offer.
A leader in the regeneration and the sustenance of the CBD was the1958 formation of the Central Business District Association, which today is Downtown Dallas (after several mergers). Not without its faults and limitations, congestion, open space, aesthetics and parking for instance, the CBD that resulted from a host of commercial and office projects raises the question of how such a vibrant central city CBD can thrive within a sprawled Metroplex metropolitan area. The answer has to be metropolitan-wide growth[16], population and economic, that allowed the CBD to be so successful. If so, the core goal of the Dallas Citizens Council, that growth sufficient to place Dallas among the nation’s largest metro areas, had been achieved.
CBD redevelopment, based entirely on private financing, started in the middle fifties (the 1955 Republic Bank and Adolphus Tower) and, as in Atlanta, continued for two generations. The well-known Dallas Market Center opened in 1957. Atlanta’s Peachtree complex was matched by Dallas’s 1972 Reunion Project. Reunion Project sat on a fifty acre site, involved a luxury hotel. A ten acre public park, a civic center, parking, road and sewer, and was anchored by the 50 story Reunion Tower, and a restored Union Terminal Building. Financed by public and private bonds/mortgages, it opened in 1978[17]. The Dallas Central Library Project, a derivative of Jonsson and “Goals” constructed a research/public library placed Dallas in the “who’s who” of great world libraries. The net result was modern downtown nested in the midst of a growing, sprawling hinterland.
As a final postscript to Dallas and the Age of Urban Renewal concerns the Dallas Citizens Council. This case study has argued that unique organization, and organizations that are associated with its leadership (the Chamber, Dallas Alliance and Central Business District Association) have exerted a formidable impact on Dallas economic development policy-making. As would be expected, the power and role of the Council has generated much controversy. Criticisms ranging from a dictatorship, a benevolent oligarchy, neo-liberal capitalists etc., are frequent. The deficiencies of its business, CBD, growth perspective are noted and considerable. Housing, neighborhoods, social services, anti-unionism, crime and inequality, are well-documented, supported by government statistics—and long-standing. That Dallas has a reputation for honesty and some efficiency may be meager compensation for large corporation noblesse oblige. The Dallas Citizens Council is very much alive while this section is being written. It is still a formal and formidable organization, with staff and membership—it, however, has been taken down a notch or two since the Age of Urban Renewal. In fact, a decline was noted in the election of Wes Wise to replace Jonsson in 1972. The DCA ability to control city council elections has been checked as minorities, neighborhoods, and prosperity possess some means and resources to compete. In that our model of economic development policy-making is quite sensitive to the role of business elites, it is important that we conclude comments with our sense that the Dallas Citizens Council is arguably the most sustained and effective Privatist EDO-related body observed to this point.
[1] When he died he was alleged to have been the world’s richest man. In the meantime, he was a powerful fund-raiser for the Republican Party—a through conservative, three wives, many children—and the image and role model for the famous, J. R. Ewing of “Dallas” TV show fame.
[2] Originally limited to 100 dues-paying members, by invitation only, the Council was nonpartisan, worked behind the scenes, often through the Chamber. It was what it was, but despite the image today was open to social programs, federal funds, held a conventional city efficient mentality. The Council was in no known way Progressive, but was as stereo-typical a business elite as America has seen. Sometimes the Council served as the arbiter between growth and order-which as we shall shortly describe, attempted to provide some benefit to Dallas African-American community in the name of order—not racial justice. The Council dominated municipal elections until the 1970’s.
[3] Rayburn represented Fannin County area, twelve miles from Oklahoma, and 68 miles from Dallas. An earlier resident was the infamous outlaw, John Wesley Hardin, and Joe Morgan, baseball Hall of Fame second baseman who played for nearly every professional baseball team in America, including Cincinnati where I watched him.
[4] Garner enjoyed the vice-presidential experience so well, that when asked to describe it he likened it to “a pitcher of warm spit”. Just thought you wanted to know.
[5] Robert B. Fairbanks, Dallas in the 1940’s, op. cit., p. 144. Fairbanks quotes DHA minutes, November 8, 1938.
[6] David L. Cohn, “Dallas” Atlantic Monthly, October, 1940, pp. 453-60.
[7] Justin F. Kimball, “Our City: A Community Civics”, (Dallas, Kessler Plan Association of Dallas, 1927), p. 199. The Plan produced Dallas’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance
[8] In 1942, Dallas encompassed 42 sq miles; by 1970 it had grown 530% to 266 sq. miles. Fort Worth, however, was less aggressive and decentralization exerted a considerable impact on that city’s CBD, its retail sales falling from 39% (1940) to 11% (1976). Annexation, however, did not stop the development of sizeable independent suburbs such as Arlington and Richardson. Dallas/Fort Worth succumbed to a polycentric metro area as did most Sunbelt cities. Arlington in 1950 had about 7,700 residents—in 1960 nearly 45,000, 1970-90,000 and 1980. 160,000. A boomburb, today more than 365,000, it shall be discussed in a later chapter. Richardson, a more muted version Arlington, was a bit less than1,300 in 1950 and almost 17,000 by 1960.
[9] Robert B. Fairbanks, Dallas in the 1940’s, op. cit., p. 151.
[10] Robert B. Fairbanks, Dallas in the 1940’s, op. cit., pp. 151-152.
[11] At this point we reach a difficult juncture in the story line of our Dallas case study. The Cold War, anti-communism, McCarthyism and then onto John Birch and the Minute Man movements injected a strain of political behavior and opinion that made Dallas into the prototype of extremist politics in the minds of many. The assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald and his assassination by Jack Ruby in Dallas in 1963 cemented that image into place. The last years of the Age of Urban Renewal (1968, 1972) witnessed the rise of George Wallace and the American Independent Party and that injected an overtly racist tone into this image. Even our more narrow concern with economic development policy became tainted to some extent, as right to work legislation in this era touched on this style politics. The rise of the Sunbelt literature (discussed in a later chapter) further confused ideology, partisanship, and even morality into this discussion. Dallas business elites became associated with all this and to a considerable degree Dallas, and Texan economic development have spent the last half century living in the warm glow of being extreme right or radical right policies. Seymour Martin Lipset, the Radical Right (1955 and 1970) and Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964); John Birch Society founded in 1958
[12] The Citizens Council had cosponsored a lunch with Kennedy to counter the hostile treatment he received from the newspapers and TV, as well as outbursts from H. L. Hunt, and Congressman Alger. Council President Jonsson attempted to stop the hostile treatment as well. In subsequent years the Citizens Council distanced itself from the Far Right and its initiatives did not follow its themes.
[13] Two excellent period-based analyses which describe in more detail the specifics are: Martin V. Melosi, “Dallas-Fort Worth: Marketing the Metroplex”, in Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice (Eds). Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth since World War II (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 162-195; William E. Claggett, “Dallas: the Dynamics of Public-Private Cooperation”, in R. Scott Fosler and Renee A. Berger, Public-Private Partnership in American Cities (D. C. Heath and Company, 1982), pp. 163-200.
[14] Rice p. 173.
[15] P. 173 Rice
[16] The Trinity River Corridor (Canal) Project and the Trinity River Authority is yet another grandiose Texan project which has a history dating well over a century. Originally intended to permit the 700 mile plus Trinity River to serve as the central North Texas region’s access to the Gulf of Mexico, making inland Dallas a port city, is more than a one up of the Houston Ship Channel. In the meantime, it is a flood project by the Corps of Engineers, and for Fort Worth is a major initiative in developing the CBD and sustaining its vaunted prosperity and economic meaning into the 21st century. It also hosts recreation sites, trails, nature centers and may be the largest “urban park” in the United States. The massiveness and the duration of this project warrants at least a footnote. During the Age of Urban Renewal, several locks and dams were constructed and in 1955 the state established the Trinity River Authority which continues to this day.
[17] Fosler, pp. 248-258.
Ron W. Coan 