The ‘Wonder Bread’ Years 1945-1960
In this chapter and the next we shall see the events and dynamics which shaped the opening battle lines of a war that will erupt dramatically in the middle 1970’s. This chapter, and Chapter 7 as well will combine and interweave the two streams into what appears to be a titanic regional contest between the North and the South–and economic development will be a centerpiece in that regional-ideological battle. That regional war will in short order become more complex with the maturation of a third region: the West–but that is a tale we will relate in still later chapters.
The events described in these two chapters had not yet crystallized into an open, declared, full-scale war between the two regions. In fact, while North and South were publically feuding, the contenders were not yet focused on each other as its principal opponent. In the North suburbanization and central city blight consumed economic development; in the South, the still, almost desperate effort to break the cycle of economic underdevelopment amid a growing civil rights movement riveted its attention. In hindsight, it is more obvious today that the Northeast-Midwest regional economic and political hegemonic dominance over the nation and its economic life was in its final stages of collapse– a collapse which was to occur in the 1964-1976 period. Undermining the aged, almost one hundred year regional hegemony was the colossal, virtually simultaneous, culmination of at least three separate tsunamis (Great Migrations, Industrial Sector Changes, and a Shift to the Services Sectors) were being felt, but were poorly understood and mislabeled during the 1946-1965 period.
Many astute observers as well as policy activists living in this time period sensed that things were changing and changing badly. Companies were closing, others moving, central city neighborhoods had deteriorated physically, and a whole new geography, the suburbs, were growing hugely. What’s more people were moving around the nation in ways they had always done, but with some very different consequences resulting. A seeming domestic tranquility and comforting political stability contrasted starkly with a globally tense, erupting into an actual war, and confrontation with a new mortal enemy Communism–which through most of this period seemed very much in the ascendancy.
Despite these contrasts and the ominous but still uncertain change, any serious pessimism was crushed, dwarfed into the background, by an incredible national prosperity. These were the wonder bread years of Keynesian economics when unemployment was low, inflation lower and wages were still rising. In many ways this was America’s second “era of good feeling”. But still underneath it all, the words Dylan sang during the tail end of this period haunted the repressed tremors of uncertain futures:
“the times they are changing”, “the wheel’s still at spin”, “for the loser now will be later to win”
Rising at first unobtrusively, from this confusing and conflicted atmosphere state and sub-state economic development would jell as a profession, re-define itself in many communities across the nation, and be catapulted into one of the most prioritized public policy on the national, state, and local policy agendas. In these last years of this era, economic development was to become for the better part of a decade a principal focal point, in many ways the defining issue, the Fort Sumter, in the forthcoming war between the states. If the first civil war was to be fought over slavery and preservation of the union, a second war between the states would be fought over economic development, the role of government, and cultural-social change. The three would be so intermixed at times as to be virtually indistinguishable.
So for a period of time (a generation or slightly more), it will not be surprising that our two ships of economic development will develop a rivalry that will over time transform itself into a collision. Programmatically during the 1946-1965 period there was much going on within economic development. Although each of chapters 6 and 7 will concentrate upon one of the two ships, the content of both chapters will describe how each ship careened in some way into the other. The ships, pushed by currents they could not control and at best only partially understood, constantly meandered into each other’s path or wake–each swerving and reacting in response to the actions of the other ship. The direction of each ship had become hopelessly tied to its perceptions of where the other ship was heading. Neither ship, however, ever recognized that neither ship was consciously setting its own course–that, instead, both ships were reacting to deeper, still unseen, but very much felt currents below them.
And so in this chapter (Chapter 6) we shall introduce the post World War II era to the reader and then we will climb on board the good ship Privatist. While on board we shall outline the events and forces as viewed from the decks of the Privatist. In Chapter 7 we shall see a different set of events and forces from the perspective of the inhabitants of the good ship Progressivist. By the time we get to the end of Chapter 7, it is likely the reader will not recognize the landscape as so much change will have occurred. The America in 1960-1965 in so many crucial ways was no longer the America of 1945.
The Post War-1950 American Economic Development Landscape
It was a different world back then. The 1945-1950 landscape is no mirror of the reader’s present landscape and as usual we ask the reader to emotionally enter into his or her avatar machine and beam down to the world of yester year: Superman, Dobie Gillis, Bonanza and my parent’s favorite–Lawrence Welk (the Lennon Sisters were the Curmudgeon’s first budding love interest). But the Curmudgeon will spare the reader his bout with nostalgia–the reality was that those golden years, as all times, sucked in the actual living of them.
We rely instead on the reminiscences of John McDonald[1] to characterize the opening years of this time period (1950). In 1950 there were only ten cities with major league baseball[2]. The US population was about 151 million. There were over 40 million registered cars but only a handful of “highways”, most of which are today labeled “scenic byways”. Rail dominated industrial logistics but trucks had been gaining share since the 1920’s. Only 10% of the population owned TVs. Seven million jobs (about 13% of the then workforce) worked in agriculture, fifty million worked in nonagricultural employment, of which manufacturing was 30% and services of all kinds was 26%. “The Northeastern portion of the nation dominated the production of goods, and most of that production was located inside the cities of the Northeast.” Street cars, subways and by this time, busses (GM primarily) were commonplace. Many suburbs were already thirty to fifty years old.
These were the “golden years”, the “wonder bread years” of Keynesian economics, Global prosperity emanating from America’s new-found world leadership and the collapse (and subsequent economic miracle) of the post-war European industrial economies pumped up the American economy, providing jobs and opportunities. Inflation was low, income (especially discretionary income) of most white and blue collar workers was still rising (it would stagnate for the next fifty years beginning in 1960), and low unemployment with increased labor force participation by women meant that teen agers had jobs and family prosperity and purchasing allowed many to lead “leave it to beaver” lives (not everybody, of course! But it would be fair to state more folk were caught up in economic growth than perhaps ever before).
But almost all of the large cities of 1950 had begun as ports and transshipment points (and hence were vulnerable to changes in transportation modalities). Transportation modalities were in flux during this period. The cities at that time had been formed mostly in a pre-zoning era and planners and in the 1950’s zoning officials were appalled when they looked out their windows. Manufacturing, as we discussed earlier, had already largely left the CBD area for the central city periphery or for suburbs. Industrial parks were becoming a dime a dozen and were a favorite of private (and southern economic) developers. Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Cleveland held 83% or more of their manufacturing in the central city. Pittsburgh (24%), Boston (38%) and Buffalo (47%) had the least manufacturing in the central city. The last three cities were exceptions in that no other of the seventeen northeastern cities had rates below 60% of manufacturing in the central city. As late as 1950, manufacturing was the central city’s principal economic engine.
The CBD was an office and shopping district and CBDs were dominated by banks and department stores: this was the CBD’s Golden Era (Kate Smith’s “Silver Bells” hailed the CBD’s “city sidewalks” as the embodiment of Christmas[3]). Of the seventeen cities (urban areas) included in McDonald’s Northeast[4], New York, the most populated metropolitan area had 13+ million residents and Columbus (OH), the least populated (500,000). Blacks’ share of the population ranged from 23% of the urban area and 35% of the central city of Washington D.C. to 2% (urban area) and 5% (central city) of Boston. In most of the central cities, blacks constituted about 10-18% of the population.[5]
The South was a different story. The South was not characterized or defined in 1950 by its urban areas. In fact, we should stop a moment and imprint on our minds the lessons of the past chapter. The South was still primarily agricultural and the “North” big city and industrial. While Southern cities did have Progressive regimes, southern cities did not dominate the state legislatures. The economy and the political culture of the South was still rural-small town-Third Tier city in nature. Southern economic development, as described in Chapter 1, therefore originates from rural “cities”, small towns and second/third tier cities.
McDonald includes six southern cities[6] in his description of the period: Dallas-Fort Worth, the largest, with nearly 1 million population (which would have placed it as the 13th most populated city in the Northeast–less populated than Buffalo) with 13% of its central city residents black. Miami was the least populated with about 500,000 (same as Columbus OH) with about 16% of blacks in the central city. Birmingham (40%), Atlanta (37%), New Orleans (32%) and Houston (25%) had the highest percentages of central city residents. The rates of black in these central cities, therefore, were three two to three times higher than cities in the “North”.
McDonald agrees with Wright that while change was occurring, as late as 1950 the southern economy was still perceived as little more than a northern colony:
Industrialization in the South had a late start and was confined to basic industries that relied on southern resources and low-wage labor….industrial employment was highly racially segregated. … Wright argues that the analogy to a colonial economy is apt. This economy of the South up to the 1940’s was based on primary products, low-wage labor and a society based on segregation and denial of basic civil rights to blacks. In Wright’s view the critical economic event [in beginning a change in the southern economy] was the imposition of the national [minimum] wage and labor standards [in FDR’s second administration]… The process of change in the South was hastened by World War II[7]
Manufacturing employment nationwide was 29%, but in Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth it was 21% and 22% respectively. Dallas held 90%+ of its manufacturing in the central city, but Birmingham, the most industrial had the least manufacturing (50%) in the central city. Otherwise, cities nationally had rates on or above 70% in the central city. New Orleans had little manufacturing (16%) and was trade and distribution focused as was Atlanta with only 19% manufacturing. Birmingham had the highest rate of southern manufacturing (26%) but was still below the national average. During the 1940’s, unlike most Northern central cities, three southern urban areas (New Orleans, Birmingham and Atlanta) grew at rates exceeding 20% (24% in New Orleans). Despite its relatively low rates of manufacturing employments, there were pockets of manufacturing expansion in the South in 1950–the South, by no means, had caught up to the North by 1950 although it is true that wage rate disparities between the two regions had narrowed considerably.
The West was also its own story; actually it is several stories wrapped up into one conglomerate-like region. McDonald includes six Western cities in his analysis with Los Angeles (4.7 million) as the most populous (3rd place in the Northeast) and Phoenix the least (332,000) [8]— (36% of the population of the entire West resided in Los Angeles and San Francisco[9]). San Francisco-Oakland had the highest rates of central city black residents (12%) and Los Angeles had 9%. The other western cities were five percent or less.
Manufacturing was considerably below the nationwide average of 29% as no western city, except Los Angeles (25%) had manufacturing rates exceeding 20%. Phoenix had only 9%. But Phoenix had only 40% of manufacturing within its central city, while Seattle, Denver, and San Diego exceeded 90%. Los Angeles (47%) and San Francisco (57%) also exhibited low rates of central city manufacturing employment compared to the Northeast. Even as early as 1950, the Western state economic base and the location of its manufacturing employment in the metropolitan area contrasted with the Northeast and Midwest. The West was not a clone of the East and the South, while industrializing and narrowing wage rate differentials, remained the nation’s poorest region by far. There were subtle hints that an alternative path of urban economic growth (trade and finance as opposed to manufacturing) was emerging both in the South and the West. For the most part, however, these subtleties and distinctions were not apparent or appreciated by the conventional wisdom of the era. Manufacturing was king and the king resided in the central cities of the Northeast and Midwest.
Washington D.C.: The Truman and Eisenhower Years
The Truman Years
Kemp-Garcia-Puerto Rico
President Harry Truman inherited a Presidency in the war’s final days. Victory meant that Truman, without an instruction manual and with a hostile Congress, had to confront making a peace, being a world power, reconstructing international political and financial systems, and over the next few years discovering what it meant to be the leader of the Free World. Somewhat amazingly, in our view, Truman also found some time for domestic policy.
Truman initially proposed and secured passage of the Employment Act of 1946. The act as submitted by Truman to Congress would have set up a workable “Keynesian” economic system which was designed to ensure economic equilibrium. As such, the federal government was reaching to affect the business cycle and the Act, if passed as submitted would have injected the federal government as at least a partial substitution for local economic development and any involvement it might have with direct assistance to private firms. Full employment and avoid recessions through use of various fiscal tools such as tax cuts and spending programs. The full employment provision could have been the pioneering authorization of the federal government to enter into manpower or workforce training.
As expected it encountered opposition, it was attacked as being the Magna Carta of planning, and was gutted to finally consist of forming a Council of Economic Advisors, a State of the Economy Report and little else. No commitment to full employment was approved. This piece of legislation was the highlight[10] of Truman’s first years in office and it clearly demonstrates that by the Congressional elections of 1946, the momentum of the New Deal had been lost.
If there were any doubt the New Deal was over, the 1946 Congressional elections put an end to that. Republicans won majorities in both houses of Congress, the first time since 1928, and they won a majority of governorships as well. When the Republicans returned to Congress they were determined to roll back what they could of the more controversial aspects of the New Deal–in particular, they wanted to break the lock that they felt unions had on much of federal economic policy. So, and this must come as a surprise, the Republicans voted several rounds of tax cuts and passed several meaningful budget cuts which Truman vetoed. The most critical piece of legislation approved in this Congress, which still is inexistence today, is the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
Taft-Hartley did have lasting effects on state and sub-state economic development. The Act reversed the 1935 Wagner Act and specifically ruled as illegal the closed shop which required compulsory membership in a union previous to holding a job. States were also allowed to enact legislation to outlaw the “union shop” which required workers to join a union after being hired. Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley but the veto was overturned by Congress. The passage of this legislation prompted a burst of state approvals of “right to work” laws and to this day, Taft-Hartley permits states to enact or reject such laws as they deem appropriate. We will discuss in more detail the effects of Taft-Hartley and Right to Work legislation later in this chapter, but we will remark that this legislation marks the real beginning of the business climate wars between the states and communities.
After being crushed by Congress and public opinion polls for three years, Truman won unexpectedly the Presidential election of 1948. He returned to office in 1949 with a Fair Deal. He was more successful in this term with Congress and was able to increase the minimum wage (remember how controversial it was with the South), social security benefits, but failed in its attempt to increase aid to farmers, pass civil rights legislation, aid to education and a national health program. The Korean War commenced in Jun 1950 and that was that as far as domestic policy went.
One Truman victory, however, heavily compromised, was the 1949 Housing Act. Like Taft-Hartley we will discuss the effects of the Housing Act later in the chapter. In essence, the Act did facilitate the evolution of redevelopment agencies from pure housing-related slum clearance to slum clearance associated with distressed areas and commercial revitalization, aka urban renewal.
Southern Progressive attempt to use area wide depressed strategy to help the south–see EDA legislative history, p. 2–Bailey-Hays Bill 1945–focus on place not people, rural development, microeconomic, northern opposition, how the CEA responded and new data gathering
TVA (Schulman, p.81 and p. 91)
and Bureau of Reclamation
The Eisenhower Years
The Eisenhower years are primarily consumed with international politics and economics–and the Korean War which ended in 1953. Eisenhower, in our view, consolidated the New Deal with his brand of “moderate Republicanism”. To be sure, budget cuts, tax reductions and a substantial injection of what we call Privatist mentality dominated the federal government. This was the time that Charles Wilson, President of General Motors said at his confirmation hearing to be appointed as Secretary of Defense “What was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa”. As far as Progressives were concerned, the gravy train, the sugar daddy of big city Progressivism had broken down. This was the period of marble cake federalism and was epitomized by the 1953 Submerged Land Act which transferred to the state’s $40 billion of oil-related land owned by the federal government. For various reasons, the TVA was out of favor in this period.
The country endured three recessions during the Eisenhower years and despite budget cuts, the federal deficits increased. The Democrats regained control of Congress in 1954. The federal government probably could no longer be described as activist during the years that followed. Still they were years of considerable change and flux. The Civil Rights Revolution started, at least as far as the media coverage was concerned (i.e. many belief the Revolution began in the 1940’s) and these were the years of Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education (school integration-no more separate but equal). The South reacted to both and Eisenhower cautiously applied the law, essentially on an event by event basis–without trying to polarize the South. Desegregation in the South, however, produced a constant series of sad episodes.
If there were economic development landmark legislation during these years it was the 1956 Interstate Highway Act authorizing $25 billion to construct 41,000 miles of interstate highway and establishing the Highway Trust Fund. States especially were relieved of much of the burden in highway financing and certainly large cities would all be entitled to their own bypass and beltway system. We will, of course, discuss the impact on suburbanization later. The Cold War and the Space Race did impact state and local economic development in subtle indirect ways. Cape Canaveral was built, and Route 128, the Silicon Valley and the Dallas-Fort Worth areas became tech havens due to spending from the federal government for its required gizmos and weaponry. Without conscious intention, the great technological revolution which would transform the nation and the world in the later periods of the twentieth century was being fueled in a big way by the federal defense spending.
Eisenhower Rural Development Program, 1955 (see EDA Legislative History, p. -3-4 and link with area wide depressed area strategy–Privatist perspective versus the Progressive-Senator Douglas approach reflecting Northern approach to southern area-wide redevelopment
The Small Business Administration
In 1953 Congress and the Eisenhower administration approved legislation that created de novo a federal independent agency that has become a cornerstone, a pillar of sub-state economic development: the SBA. First of all a description of where the SBA came from, and what it was originally authorized to do is a good first step. The SBA, while new, did not appear deus ex machina. Perhaps surprisingly, its origins lie in Herbert Hoover’s Depression-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC-1932). The RFC was Hoover’s public lending agency for corporations of all sizes and shapes during his last year in office. FDR embraced the RFC and made it an important, well-led and connected instrument of his New Deal and continued through the post-World War II years as well.
Entry into the Second World War and the conversion of private production to war production raised concerns on the effects the latter would have on small business which would be unable to compete with the industry behemoths favored by the War Production Board. So in 1942 the Congress created the Smaller War Plants Corporation (SWPC) which provided direct loans to smaller manufacturers and entrepreneurs and also encouraged banks to extend financing to such plants. The SWPC also advocated enhanced consideration in defense contracts throughout the federal bureaucracy. The SWPC was terminated at war’s end, but a successor agency, the Small Defense Plants Administration was created upon entry into the Korean War.
When the SWPC was terminated some functions were transferred to the Department of Commerce’s Office of Small Business which offered limited management counseling and education-like services to small business. In 1953, with the end of the Korean War in sight, the newly-elected Eisenhower administration and the Republican Congress wanted to terminate the RFC which was regarded as unnecessary government interference in business-economy (the RFC had also been implicated in allegations of influence peddling under the Truman administration. In addition, the 1949 Hoover Commission on government reorganization advocated an end to direct lending by government because it “invites political and private pressure on even corruption”[11]. Congressional politics and a deference to wide spread and popular support for small business in preference to larger firms, led to Eisenhower and Congress approving legislation which ended the RFC but created the SBA. The SBA was provided a four year authorization.
At inception, SBA was authorized to “aid, counsel, assist and protect … the interests of small business concerns”[12] and to ensure that the SBA would protect small business in the issuance of government contracts. By 1954, the SBA was making direct loans to small business and guaranteeing bank lending to small business. The SBA also made direct loans to small business in the event of natural disasters. In addition, SBA picked up the management counseling and education function formerly entrusted to the Department of Commerce. These services are today regarded as key defining services of SBA. In 1957 subsequent legislation made SBA a permanent independent agency. The SBA’s services are sometimes referred to as the “three C’s: capital, contracting and counseling. By 1999 the SBA issued nearly $14 billion in its direct lending program alone. Since its inception in 1953, the SBA has been an important and growing element in the sub-state economic development finance system. In 2010, the SBA was afforded Cabinet status by President Obama.
The second important insight concerning the SBA is why it was created at all and how does it fit into the two streams of the economic development profession? The SBA has always been somewhat controversial in nature; should government be a direct and indirect lender to business at all and should it isolate, prefer if one wills, a subset of firms–small business over medium and large firms? The normal business interest group nexus have not consistently supported SBA for its sixty year history. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce did not support SBA’s creation and has at key periods advocated its termination; the National Federation of Independent Business (NIFB), while supportive of SBA’s creation, has not been a consistent ally and more often is quite distant in regards to SBA and its programs.
Moreover, from its inception despite its Republican origins, the Republican Party has called for SBA’s elimination. Even the Eisenhower administration cut its funding levels and both the Reagan Administration, the 1996 Contract for America and George W Bush administration included SBA termination in their legislation. Democrats have at times supported and used the SBA but why they do so, given the undoubted conservative and Republican tendencies of small business owners, are a bit of a conundrum. Yet, the SBA survives and, in fact, prospers-even when Republicans are in charge of Washington. Increasingly, over the years more and more lending institutions and firms have turned to the SBA for financing. There is something deeper “going on” than partisanship and business conservative ideology.
Over the next several chapters we will inject further comment and description regarding the evolution of the SBA. It will be obvious that the SBA will enlarge its services and enhance its functions over the next sixty years, but, left out of our commentary, is that periodically, regularly, the SBA will run afoul of charges of political favoritism, occasional mismanagement, even corruption. The Hoover Commission’s observations have not been without merit. Yet again the SBA survives and grows. SBA has become so important to sub-state economic development; indeed one might argue that it is the most important of all federal agencies in sub-state economic development. It is part of the fabric of most state SSS and an ally and partner of many regional, county, municipal and sub-municipal EDOs. We must somehow integrate SBA into our argument and understand better how it relates to our two streams of economic development.
Our sense is that small business taps into the mindset of many Americans and is part of our common and shared traditions. Anti-largeness-business concentration united business Progressives and Social Progressives as well as Anti-Federalists. The small farmer, a small businessman, the yeoman of American politics no doubt overlapped with the use by many Americans of starting a small business and achieving upward economic and social mobility as well as personal achievement and family sustenance. The increasing size and concentration of American industry through the twentieth century no doubt intensified these shared sympathy to preservation of a way of life expressed in small business formation. Some have called this nexus of shared belief and values the “American Creed” or the American “Way of Life”. It is to this informal shared set of cultural values that we believe SBA owes its existence and survivability.
As to Privatism and Progressivism, small business has aspects that appeal to each. For this reason, we sense that small business (and the SBA) occupies a rather unique position in our two streams of economic development–they straddle both streams and hence are situated at the “fault line” between the two. The two streams seem to share a willingness to support small business with government to protect it from larger firms. Both streams seem to embrace services which educate and counsel small business owners and entrepreneurs. It would appear that both streams accept, but occasionally feel uncomfortable with, direct lending to business by government (especially in natural disasters), but are reasonably comfortable with the more indirect lending associated with tools such as guarantee programs. These are the core programs entrusted to SBA in its original legislation. Over the next sixty years, however, subsequent legislation would enhance and augment these core programs and in so doing increase uncomfortability, even resistance to SBA.
Augmentation was not long in coming. In 1958 SBA, in response to legislation introduced by Wright Patman (Texan, Chair of Housing Banking and Commerce committee) and Lyndon Johnson (Texan, Senate Majority Leader and Presidential candidate) acquired responsibility for a new program which extended the financing obligation of the agency. Under the provisions of the Small Business Investment Act, SBA could license a new type of lending corporation, the Small Business Investment Corporation (SBIC) and then finance these corporations through long-term loans or the purchase of their convertible debt which was used as a match for private investment in the SBIC. The SBIC could then make “loans” to small firms–a loan which came very close in function and subordination to equity or venture capital.
The need for this “near equity” financing, a very risky type of “lending”, arose because of the inherent structure of small business itself. Small business in one sense is composed of (1) firms which through scale, maturity and size generated sufficient sales and cash flow to reasonably be expected to pay down a loan, and (2) firms which were young, very small and start up with few sales which could not satisfy a due diligence process that evaluated whether the loan could or would ever be paid back. In the latter case, the small business firm was not “bankable” and therefore needed a different form of investment (equity, venture capital or non loan structure). Up until 1958, SBA could lend only to the first, “bankable” type of small business. The SBIC was designed so fill that gap so to extend SBA into new areas of business investment.
This legislation was controversial and traditional business interest groups opposed the legislation as creating “direct equity ownership of business by government”. An individual SBIC is a privately owned and managed investment fund that are licensed and regulated by the SBA and which can make SBA guaranteed loans in companion with a near equity investment derived from the SBIC’s investment monies. In 2013 there are over 300 SBICs in operation[13] across the nation and these entities had guaranteed nearly $18 billion in obligations. So extensive is the SBIC network it has been referred to as the “fourth banking system” after commercial, investment and mortgage banking.[14] The 1958 SBIC legislation was a significant departure and expansion of SBA’s role in the sub-state economic development financing system. In any case, the various small business programs of the SBA grew throughout the fifties. “Between 1954 and 1960, SBA financial assistance quadrupled, and agency personnel expanded from 550 employees to 2200 employees”[15].
[1] The following statistics and much of the commentary of these paragraphs is that of John F. McDonald. The nostalgia and snide comments are probably the Curmudgeon’s.
[2] Believe it or not we will pick up on this theme of stadiums and economic development. In so doing we will insert such teams and their stadia into the factors from which an urban hierarchy is constructed.
[3] But harbinger’s of unrecognized change as typified by “Miracle of 34th Street” (1947) in which the city apartment dwelling professionals (Macy’s employed) and their child (Natalie Wood) found the home of their dreams, brought to them by Kris Kringle–in the suburbs. In fact the 1700 sq. ft. house still exists (we are told) at 24 Derby Road in Port Washington NY.
[4] In order of size, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Cleveland, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis-St Paul, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Indianapolis, and Columbus.
[5] These statistics can be found in McDonald’s Chapter 1.
[6] In order of size, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Birmingham and Miami as major southern urban areas.
[7] McDonald, op. cit. p. 30.
[8] In order of size, Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland (2.2 million), Seattle (734,000), Denver (564,000), San Diego (557,000). and Phoenix.
[9] McDonald, op. cit. p.41.
[10] The Hill-Burton Act of 1946 did affect grants to hospitals and federal aid to hospitals. In particular, it did forbid discrimination in admittance (no separate but equal facilities) and to a certain extent, in hiring as well. The Federal Airport Act of 1946 also did have some impact on our larger cities such as Boston.
[11] Jonathan J. Bean, Big Government and Affirmative Action: The Scandalous History of the Small Business Administration (Lexington, KY, University of Kentucky Press, 2001) p. 8.
[12] The definition of small business varies by program and usually also varies by industry-type as well. Originally the definition for direct lending was 1000. Today it is 500. Needless to say, there has been concern expressed that the number is too high.
[13] Source SBA website. SBICs have their own professional associations, National Association of Investment Companies and the Small Business Investor Alliance.
[14] Neil Jacoby, a member of Council of Economic Advisers, quoted in Bean, op. cit. p. 18.
[15] Bean, op. cit. p. 19.
Ron W. Coan 