QUO VADIS COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT?
Community development by the 1920s housed a goodly number of individuals, reformers and Policy World theoreticians who were concerned with “people” as people, not as individuals important to a political or economic system. In a period when social commentators, reformers and socialists were advocating for the “people’s interest”, community development in the twenties was arguably at its Progressive Era peak. In particular, linked with the rising planning movement (and their new-found comprehensive plan, zoning, building codes), community developers acquired entry into the municipal Big City policy system. Surprisingly, they found allies in businesses and the professions that also share many of their concerns as well as their love of the plan. While new tensions and social problems appeared during the twenties, the debate within community development was intense, and considerable conceptual innovation, particularly at the neighborhood level, left a lasting impact on CD.
If neighborhoods still remained the core unit of CD, the CD umbrella included those who questioned whether the city neighborhood, indeed the industrial city itself, was a location where the working man and the poor should live. Powerful and influential community developers questioned the viability of the industrial city and proposed to make it a place of work, separating the Privatist jurisdictional economic base from the residence of those who worked. Seizing upon variations of our earlier discussed garden city, a wing of community developers argued during the twenties that suburbs were the way to go. The newly emerging regional planning movement was the vehicle chosen to advance that position—later the federal government would be approached for support. That city/suburb dichotomy affected the “housing reform wing” most particularly: where should worker and immigrant housing be built, what should it look like and who should own it? Housers identified a low-income crisis that the Depression would make a first order priority, and the appearance of decentralization presented the opportunity to use housing and neighborhoods as a CD/ED strategy to maintain Big City viability, if not hegemony, over its hinterland—but we will leave that to Part II.
All these “wings” and approaches and separate groups of community developers demonstrates that, despite its strength in the twenties, CD was fragmented, unified tenuously by its common concern with people—the disadvantaged, low income and working class in particular. In the twenties, the plan, the entry path into policy-making, also tended to be a unifying factor. Otherwise, it was clear during then that CD included several policy groupings, wings we call them, that (despite some overlap in membership) steered community development onto different, sometimes conflicting, paths. Combined with effects of the Great Migration and the future Depression, this did not augur well for an integrated approach to CD. That again will be picked up in Part II.
In this section, our discussion will distinguish between those community developers that focused on neighborhoods and those that were primarily interested in suburbs as the strategy to help and house the working and lower classes.
Neighborhoods and the Chicago School
After initial post-war hyper-immigration (1.2 million in 1920–21), the immigration spigot was mostly turned off mid-decade. The first immigration adjustment in 1921 imposed a national quota system which drastically reduced immigration, the so-called “open door” replaced with a screen door. In 1924 the appropriately titled Immigration Restriction Act reduced immigration to about 300,000 per year for the remainder of the decade. As one door closes, however, another frequently opens. The Southern Diaspora brought an added dimension to Big City post-World War I population growth—racial change.
The Southern Diaspora/Great Migration picked up steam after World War I as an estimated 6 million rural southern migrants moved to cities during the twenties (McKelvey, 1968, pp. 37–9). This decade’s Southern Diaspora did not affect Big Cities uniformly: migrants followed rail line routes, and northern cities not directly connected to salient rail lines attracted fewer southerners (Buffalo, for example). Mostly, industrial cities with expanding employment opportunities (auto) gathered in large numbers; Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh and New York City attracted the most: “Northern cities absorbed during the twenties over 600,000 Negro migrants from the South … By 1930, the nonwhite population of Harlem had reached 164,566, making it the largest community of Negroes in the land” (McKelvey, 1968, p. 39).
Beat-up housing and dilapidated inner-city neighborhoods again welcomed new populations. In 1920 inner-city housing exhibited noticeable deterioration; such housing—overwhelmingly rental, poorly designed, milked by profit-seeking owners— had simply borne the brunt of overuse and overconsumption. Existing residents moved out to move up without any encouragement from new populations. Neighborhood population movements, suburban or otherwise, escalated as good times meant more households could afford better housing. The movements attracted the interest of the Policy World, notably academics from the Chicago School of Sociology (established 1892), which in the second decade of the twentieth century was the nation’s leader in sociology and urban geography.
Robert E. Park personified the Chicago School of Sociology.11 A student of Georg Simmel and John Dewey, a compatriot of William James, a former Harvard professor and journalist, Park had completed a seven-year stint with Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute. Park joined with scholars such as Ernest Burgess (his office mate), Homer Hoyt and Louis Wirth. Their classic The City (1925) revolutionized the neighborhood CD movement. The first Chicago School conceptualized the city as an ecosystem (urban ecological approach) that was characterized by a Darwinian-like competition between social groups over physical space.
This competition for space produced distinctive geographies, neighborhoods, populated by individuals associated with particular social groups (usually ethnic and racial). Class and income differences also fueled neighborhood competition, resulting in a hierarchy of neighborhoods. The hierarchy was characterized by differentials in rental and housing prices. Older, usually cheaper, housing constituted the low end of the housing–neighborhood hierarchy; poorer groups “filtered” into the oldest housing and the wealthy into the newest. Neighborhoods sorted themselves out by class and income.
The city’s neighborhoods “evolved” a pattern of neighborhood succession over time and distance: the furthest out, the periphery, would be the youngest, most expensive housing and the home of the affluent. The most central neighborhoods, the home of the poorest, were the most distressed. Neighborhood succession argued for new housing: destruction of older housing and/or the introduction of additional social, ethnic and racial groups triggered population flows (invasion) from one neighborhood to the next, accelerating deterioration of the poorest into slums.
Chicago housing and neighborhood succession seemed to fit the first or “ethnic” ghetto fairly well. From this perspective movement to the periphery was “good”—it represented economic and social success, and that ethnic immigrants were being “assimilated” into society and the economy. At the time, to the extent it was thought about, African-Americans it was assumed would assimilate in their turn as other immigrants had. That, of course, proved to be faulty thinking; accordingly, in a future chapter we will revisit that issue and discuss “the second ghetto”.
Up to and during the twenties, however, African-Americans were submerged in a sea of ethnic neighborhoods. Except for color:
the first wave of black migration moved as family units, or maintained family ties, and placed heavy emphasis on education as the best means for advancement … By the end of the 1920s, major cities were split between a white and black metropolis divided by a few streets and invisible but real color lines. (Abbott, 1987, pp. 29–30)
The second ghetto was in the process of forming, but its evolution was noticed only by those directly affected by it. During the twenties some settlement houses and recreation centers, for example, segregated their programs—or would not admit blacks at all (Abbott, 1987, p. 31).
Starting in the twenties, and picking up considerable steam in the Depression, ghetto housing rehabilitation became the prime strategy of community development. Social reformers/settlement workers either joined with housing planners or gravitated toward public housing and slum clearance. A few, Mary Simkhovitch for example, remained committed to settlement house style. Daniel Carpenter of the Hudson Guild Neighborhood House in New York City also stuck to early concepts well into the 1950s. The shift away from settlement and “old-style” neighborhood community development is demonstrated in the evolution of Clarence Perry, commonly regarded as the “founder” of the modern neighborhood movement.
Planned Neighborhoods: Clarence Arthur Perry
Initially involved with the 1909 Forest Hills Gardens project, Perry, an employee of Russell Sage, gravitated to the playground–community center–recreation movement. This movement, active through World War I, formed the Community Center Association and attached itself to the Chicago School of Sociology and the American Sociological Society The movement urged public schools to use their playgrounds for general neighborhood residents’ use. Perry moved into the construction of community centers that served a variety of residents’ needs, including neighborhood meetings, adult education and recreation. “Every school house [was to be] a community capital, and every community a little democracy” was its public goal (Gillette Jr., 1983). Perry’s 1910 book, Wider Use of the School Plan, became the movement’s bible, and it was supplemented by pamphlets and monographs. Perry described the community center movement as “an extension of the settlement movement” and perceived neighborhoods and neighborhood facilities as linking individuals/residents to the larger community, improving in the process their overall well-being and creating a more effective democracy (Gillette Jr., 1983, p. 423).
Perry was a planner; he arrived on the scene just as cars made their first appearance. His first concern was that children could not travel to playgrounds safely because of traffic. So he developed ideas on how to design neighborhoods to counter isolation imposed on neighborhoods by wider streets and increased traffic. Using planning designs and concepts, “The Neighborhood Unit: a Scheme for the Arrangement of Family Life Community” was included in the 1929 Regional Plan of New York. His approach became linked in the eyes of many to the Chicago School and neighborhood succession.
Perry’s ideas were compatible with the era’s “physical planning affects behavior paradigm”. The notion that “physical changes in the urban fabric … could improve social life and enhance citizenship” were first found in Charles Horton Cooley’s Social Organization (1909). Cooley argued that the family, play group and neighborhood or community group of elders were the three most important factors in the socialization process: he saw neighborhoods as a nursery for “primary ideals” such as loyalty, truth, service and kindness. Neighborhoods, if planned correctly, could recreate the small town and the virtues associated with small-town living within the Big City:
with its physical demarcation, its planned recreational facilities, its accessible shopping centers, and its convenient circulatory system … would furnish the kind of environment where vigorous health, a rich social life, civic efficiency, and a progressive community consciousness would spontaneously develop and permanently flourish. (Gillette Jr., 1983, pp. 425, 427)
Perry’s image of a neighborhood included neighborhood identity; he defined its ideal size (5000–9000 residents) and fixed the location of services, residences and traffic patterns. For all practical purposes he originated the term “neighborhood unit.” The school was in the center and wide, high-traffic streets with shopping and commercial at its periphery. Residential streets, often curvilinear, flowed away from the major arteries; 10 percent of the neighborhood was dedicated to parks and playgrounds. He advocated forming homeowners’ associations. Seized upon by Clarence Stein, Perry’s ideas were later incorporated into Radburn New Jersey and suburban subdivisions.
Perry fell into disfavor after World War II. At that time social reform advocates such as Jesse Steiner (president of the National Community Center Association) abandoned the neighborhood concept as “obsolete.” Revisionists argued that neighborhoods needed to be homogenous—that Depression-era neighborhoods had become too heterogeneous and too dense to achieve the desired effects. They had become “pseudoneighborhoods.” This issue would later be resolved by accepting neighborhood diversity as replicating America’s diversity—but that reconciliation was 30 years or more in the waiting. Perry eventually returned to favor, embraced by Urban Land in the 1970s and New Urbanism in the 1990s.
Community Development and the Regional Plan of New York
In the course of the twenties a major suburban/central city debate erupted within community development. The debate continued into the 1930s; the issues raised were never resolved, resulting in a more or less permanent schism within CD on whether suburbs were or were not a legitimate alternative to the central city, and the preferred residential location for workers and the middle classes. The crux of the debate, however, focused on the location of manufacturing, the dominant sector of course in Big City jurisdictional economic bases, and the use of zoning to steer manufacturing to the desired location. The debate revolved around the centerpiece of 1920s’ planning, the Regional Plan of New York (RPNY), whose chief protagonists were Lewis Mumford and Russell Sage’s Thomas Adams.
The RPNY debate exposed an important division within CD and the significant overlap between comprehensive planning and economic development; but its lessons extend beyond that. The debate was the first major instance of Big Cities confronting the increasingly obvious decentralization/suburban issue and its implications for the regional metropolitan landscape. The critical role and relationship of Big Cities (central cities) to their suburbs in the shared metropolitan area will arguably be the most controversial, long-lasting and divisive discussion not only in our ED history but also in regional planning, urban governance, politics and economics for the entire twentieth century.
Suburbs are arguably the most important twentieth-century physical transformation in metropolitan America. The RPNY debate was likely the first major instance in which issues were discussed, relationships posited, strategies devised—and actions taken—in America’s leading metropolitan area and economy. From this history’s perspective, the debate ultimately rested on who was to be the leading geography in the new metropolitan order so obviously being formed—metropolitan “power”. The Big City into the 1920s was the unquestioned hegemonic leader of its hinterland economically, politically and even socially. Was that hegemony to continue in a hinterland full of autonomous, independent suburbs? When one debates the location of manufacturing, the core sector in an industrial-era jurisdictional economic base, one certainly establishes the economic hegemony of one geography over another—though it is far from evident that the principals in this debate saw the issue in this manner.
The RPNY debate, being the first, did not frame hegemonic questions in ways that address today’s concerns. The RPNY was a plan, and planning concepts were central not power relationships. Instead the debate involved proxies, the use of zoning as an ED tool, the need to eliminate central city “congestion” to allow modernization of manufacturing, and where to create livable working-class residential areas. In the 1920s, however, they were critical factors. In a section above we concluded our jurisdictional economic base discussion with the pessimistic observation that concerns of the economic base were less central to Big City ED strategies and programs than our concern with the “ticking clock” of the industry/sector profit life-cycle. Modernization of industry was the key concern not being addressed. As working- (and lower-) class residential areas (called neighborhoods in Big Cities) were a defining feature of CD, zoning and comprehensive plans were planner hot buttons of the day.
The issues that divided our protagonists were never bridged; and, frankly, it is not clear what would have changed if they were. The placement of manufacturing and its role in central city or suburb, the separation of residence from one (the former in suburbs and latter in central city), involved larger powerful elements and groups who did not play a major role in the RPNY. What the debate did, however, was discuss actual future realities before they hit. The debate on “congestion” presages that between public housers and business “blight” urban renewal advocates two and three decades later. The question as to whether suburbs had a legitimate role to play in the metro area still lingers.
Lewis Mumford and the Suburbs
While twenty-first-century planning celebrates density as liberating, Lewis Mumford had other ideas. Mumford loved cities and regarded urbanity “as man’s greatest work”; but he did not believe the industrial city was the best urban form to house humanity. His thought, a continuation of Geddes’s garden city, attacked the scale, density and human pathologies he believed were fostered by the Big City. Mumford believed that:
The swollen urban conglomerations of his day [were] “far removed from the sources of life [and were] expanding without purpose [transforming] living forms into frozen metal.” The metropolis destroyed the individual’s identity and self-esteem; only by dispersing the inhabitants into regional clusters would people find communion with their surroundings and each other. Mumford believed that the giant city was just a temporary phenomenon, a product of the nineteenth century’s great population explosion and unprecedented industrial expansion … the accumulated disadvantages of the big cities promised to make them “cemeteries of the dead.” (Gelfand, 1975, pp. 131–6)
For Mumford, central city revitalization was not possible—that urban redevelopment (slum and blight removal) would provide only temporary relief and would chiefly serve the interests of “real estate promoters” (Beauregard, 1993, p. 78). He did not advocate abandoning the central city; instead he envisioned it as a central employment center encased by a ring of residential areas. His vision was not very different from Wright’s Broadacre City and, in fact, departed dramatically from Howard’s garden city. Mumford’s general idea was to abandon the central city as a residential center, leaving it to “house” the economic base of the metropolitan area. Mumford and Clarence Stein joined forces in calling the central city the “city of the dead,” advocating instead building “a series of [well-planned] small scale ‘satellite cities’” (Meyers, 1998, p. 293). Between 1923 and 1929, Mumford was instrumental in creating a paradigm that placed the “regional (central) city” within a metropolitan context (Danielson and Doig, 1982).
Prewar American Progressives, like Mumford, advocated against the central city because to them it had become a Privatist paradise. To Mumford:
Cities were being designed by speculators, planners and engineers with little sensitivity to the nature and function of the community as a whole. Traffic and commerce had become the “presiding deities” of the “sacred city”. [The] … continuous, building up, tearing down, and re-building, with their steady process of congestion … were motivated by the need to provide opportunities for new investment and additional profits. (Beauregard, 1993, p. 78)
Mumford’s solution was metropolitan planning that created planned suburbs built around home and community.
Writing in 1925, Mumford viewed the middle class as being driven from the city by Privatists and the effect of their unrestrained profiteering. In an important (but now ignored) article, “The Fourth Migration” (Mumford, 1925), he outlined “the first migration” described in our second and third chapters. The second led to the rise of the factory towns in the early nineteenth century (internal migration). The third migration, occurring in the early twentieth century, transformed the industrial city into a financial center. The fourth migration, an exodus from cities, is suburbanization. The last migration had been made possible by innovation in communication and transportation technologies (telephone, truck and car, for example). The challenge of the fourth migration was whether to allow it to create new “dinosaur cities” as “destructive and inhumane” as the previous migrations (Stein, 1925).
An alliance of convenience between the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA, founded by Mumford, Clarence Stein and others) and the Russell Sage Foundation (led by Thomas Adams, its director of Plans and Surveys) crystallized. Perry joined this group in 1928. Their agreed-upon agenda/program called for:
a rationally planned and zoned [central] city which segregated residential, commercial, and industrial uses, as well as social classes … would be anchored by a concentrated central business district, connected by expressways to concentric, low-density residential and industrial suburban rings … ordered according to a comprehensive regional plan. (Meyers, 1998, p. 292)
The alliance developed a formal plan for the New York metro region: the ten-volume Regional Plan of New York (RPNY and its Environs) was published in a series from 1929, continuing (at generational intervals) into recent years (Scott, 1969, pp. 221–7). Integral to the RPNY was the development of two suburbs: Radburn and Hackensack New Jersey. The RPNY acknowledged the inevitability of suburbanization, but attempted to structure decentralization to achieve a rational “order” of social and economic relationships between city and suburb. In these years, the Big City-based planning movement embraced purposes deeply economic development in nature. Segregating uses through zoning, industry and manufacturing, for example, meant determining the location of a Big City economic base. The RPNY’s seeming consensus rested upon poorly defined concepts and conflicting purposes. Within it two visions (Mumford’s and Adams’s) of the new metropolitan order competed. The debate that ensued may well have been one of the most important debates on the future of economic development in the twentieth century. The differences were so serious that they couldn’t be bridged, and the two organizations parted ways in 1933. The heritage of this debate, and the failure to devise a bridge across its differences, left open the path to slum clearance, urban renewal and unrestrained postwar suburbanization.
Fracturing of Progressive Economic/Community Development
The issue that fractured this powerful duopoly was whether the central city remained hegemon in the metropolitan order. As explained earlier, Mumford rejected the Privatist central city—as a residence for workers and the middle class. It was not humane, in large measure because “congestion” rendered a satisfying and empowering human existence impossible. He wanted the new metro system to be built around his version of garden city residential suburbs whose inhabitants went to work in the central city (where the manufacturing economic base was located) via a network of highways and other transportation modes that culminated in the commercial center, the CBD. Adams (Russell Sage), however, “sought to rationalize, reinterpret, and reinforce the cultural and economic hegemony of New York City as a regional and national center”. Adams’s general idea was to sustain the central city as “a regional city” surrounded by an interlocking set of small towns and cities that symbiotically enhanced the assets of the others. Mumford wanted “dismemberment of the metropolitan ‘city of the dead in favor of a web of small scale ‘satellite cities.’” Adams, conversely, wanted to decentralize manufacturing/industry to the suburbs and continue the Big City residential function— i.e. contain suburbanization: suburbs would be mini Big Cities in his image (Meyers, 1998, p. 293).
Adams wanted manufacturing in the suburbs so that it could (1) decentralize to allow for modernization, improved logistical access and productivity enhancements; and (2) manufacturing decentralization relieved the Big City of the obligation of being the only location where manufacturing could be located. As some firms left for the suburbs, other firms could seize upon the abandoned land, modernize, install productivity enhancements and upgrade logistical access. Partial decentralization of industry could allow for central city “congestion” to be reduced—allowing for both manufacturing growth and vastly improved Big City residential neighborhoods. Adams and Mumford supported Perry’s neighborhood principles: Adams wanted to reduce Big City congestion enough to permit their application in the Big City. Mumford believed that was impossible; the dinosaur city was already lost to residential uses and instead satellite suburbs (others would later call them “dormitory suburbs’) were the only alternative.
This debate, very much economic development in nature, was obscured by the RPNY’s reliance on zoning as the tool that would segregate land uses and determine where the manufacturing economic base would be located. Less obvious, but even more critical, was the inadequacy of the definition of a key concept, “congestion”, which had become the buzzword of the day but which, in fact, contained two different concepts of what constituted “congested”. One definition was largely social—i.e. people-based— and from it community development would proceed; the other, more orthodox, economic development focused on removing barriers to private firms’ ability to adjust to changes in their profit cycle.12
Mumford’s, satellite suburbs used zoning to stop manufacturing and industry from locating in the suburbs; Adams wanted suburban zoning to allow for manufacturing to relocate to the suburbs—today’s mixed uses. The two plans for Radburn and Hackensack reflect that distinction: the former was Mumford’s and the latter Adams’s. Having battled over two competing visions of the modern metropolitan landscape, they never resolved these differences. Ironically, Mumford’s definition of congestion would support future central city public housing slum removal (which he, in fact, opposed); and Adams’s definition eventually was included in “blight”, the basis for future urban renewal.
The RPNY Continues on Separate Paths
The RPAA/Mumford fell back on the residentially zoned “garden city” and designed suburbs to reflect its principles. They formed a financing corporation, the City Housing Corporation, which between 1924 and 1928 constructed two actual suburban garden cities. The first, Sunnyside New York (1924), was located on a 70-acre tract within Queens (still largely undeveloped at this point). Sunnyside was intended to emphasize affordable working-class housing, but design and financing costs worked the other way. When completed it was probably as, or more, expensive than conventional subdivisions. John Nolen, a former City Beautiful planner, constructed a similar garden city suburb, Mariemont, near Cincinnati cleverly called “A New Town Built to Produce Local Happiness”—a motto that never quite caught on, but was intended to house workers away from the depressing environments of factories. It suffered the same fate as Sunnyside and would end up housing the middle class (Abbott, 1987, p. 41).
The more significant 1928 development at Radburn was intended to be a “town for the motor age”, but its timing was terrible. It got caught up with the 1929 stock market collapse and the Depression. The City Housing Corporation went bankrupt; construction terminated, only later being resumed to house conventional middle-class residents. The net result was that Radburn received unwanted credit for pioneering the “dormitory suburb”—i.e. today’s alleged antecedent of sprawl, with its pedestrian-segregated road system and its infamous “townless highway”, an early example of the parkway. Neither Sunnyside nor Radburn was able to achieve Mumford’s humane metropolis for the working class (Glabb and Brown, 1983, pp. 295–6).
Mumford’s problem was that the “dinosaur city” was much beloved, and evidence for the fourth migration was sketchy until the 1940 census. Also, Mumford did not foresee the inevitable counter-response of Big City political and business leadership to “save” their city. Given the embedded power of Big Cities and the weakness of hinterland suburbia in these years, the Big City was practically guaranteed favored treatment during the 1920s: “much was revealed in the 1930s, when in the wake of the Great Depression.” During the 1930s–1960s, New York City was dominated by city planner Robert Moses, who essentially did what he did, as opposed to following principles of any plan. But the city survived it all, or vice versa.
An uneasy alliance of architects, social workers, housing reformers, labor unions and construction companies launched a campaign to persuade the federal government to provide funds for slum clearance and low income housing. Their spokesmen argued that … public authority could provide decent housing at reasonable rents for low income tenants. (Fogelson, 2001, p. 338)
As for Adams, he had achieved his immediate objective with the publishing of the 1929 Plan. His Hackensack suburb was never developed. The zoning plan included in the RPNY was adopted; and in later years, because it reduced the amount of land earmarked for industry (to allow for manufacturing decentralization), Adams has been blamed for NYC’s later job loss and industry migration. The RPNY has been attacked as having facilitated sprawl. In that both positions in their particular way permitted decentralization, they have been frequently construed as anti-urban, i.e. anti-Big City hegemony.
Wrapping Up CD in the Twenties: CD as a Movement
By this point it is apparent to me that CD was an umbrella for movements. Hovering underneath the CD umbrella were suburb advocates, neighborhood-level reforms, housing reformers, socialists and social workers, and even Privatist faith-based and corporate charity do-gooders—some of whom competed for the membership and the affections of a growing union movement. The term “movement” as used in this history implies a certain level of politicization, even partisanship, that influenced how the wings sought to obtain their goals and pursue their initiatives. There was a pronounced tendency to use government, seek alliances with politicians and, for lack of a better word, proselytize or advocate on behalf of a neighborhood, a community or a sub-group—usually a class-based sub-group in these years. Social change of some sort was a visible component of their strategies, if not the ultimate goal. Community development at the municipal level was absolutely political in nature, with socialist parties and social reform mayors.
This dramatically differentiated community developers from traditional or mainstream economic development. ED tended to avoid politics like the plague. Focusing on infrastructure, companies and the jurisdictional economic base, its adherents typically set apart their political tendencies and worked with whoever to accomplish their purposes. Chambers required their anti-machine members to form civic clubs to secure political victory. They formed non-partisan municipal research bureaus to work with whoever occupied power in municipal government. Structural reformers sought nonpartisan elections and city managers to take politics out of policy and policy implementation. Infrastructure referendums were not inherently political, and chambers could work out some accommodations with machines. Purely Privatist ED was highly individualist; and, while not adverse to influencing or even controlling government so as to better accomplish their goals, they typically kept their distance, dealing with intermediaries, HEDOs and political proxies.
Ron W. Coan 