Dry rot to decay: Big City change in the “Wonder Bread” years, 1945–1960

 

For the first time, Big Cities were no longer growing; several even lost population. Suburbanization prompted unsettling questions about the Big City’s future. From the perspective of many Big City policy-makers, “things” had changed over the last decade or so. Seemingly beset on all sides, Big Cities turned to Washington for help and resources. But Washington, now the leader of the Free World, was divided politically, pulling back from its New Deal/Depression activism. Taking a step back, however, did not mean the feds were returning to “sleep mode.” During the 1950s, the federal government, now under Republican control, restrained its activism and developed programs that reflected its Privatist tendencies—the Small Business Administration (SBA). The page-turning Eisenhower initiative, the 1956 Interstate Commerce Act, as intended, greatly impacted the national urban hierarchy, but also had the unintended (but not unexpected) consequence of digging up Big City neighborhoods—leaving behind a nasty legacy that lingers to this day.

After war’s end, these Big Cities, still very much an economic and political hegemony, confronted floods of suburbanization, accelerating their perceived need for serious slum clearance and CBD revitalization. But something larger was also going on. Big City suburbs now posed a critical mass, were incorporated and were engaged in suburban-building, their equivalent to city-building that developed institutions critical to an operating jurisdictional policy system. As varied as ever, suburbs followed their own policy area priorities, and, if interested in economic development, developed their own distinctive strategies, and even a distinctive approach to ED policy-making. Sadly, too often commentators explain suburbanization from a Big City hegemonic perspective. The evidence that polycentrism is emerging not only in the West but also in Big City hinterlands, therefore, is contested or discounted.

While the “hegemony” never thought of itself as a hegemon, other regions were visibly growing and, especially the South, were not playing “by the usual rules.” More often than ever before northern and midwestern firms were “running away” or being set up in other regions by the federal government. Something had to be done. In the fifties a sort of shadow war with the South erupted over southern “piracy” of New England’s textile manufacturing. The IDB diffusion and selling of the South had seemingly taken its toll on New England’s economic base. At a loss as to how to counter crippling job losses due to plant shutdowns and cut-throat competition from southern mills, New England states struggled to develop an effective response. Economic development became their top priority, but after a decade of trying nothing was working. Taking their complaints about the South and its magic weapon, the IDB, to Congress, New England and northern legislators fought not only the selling of the South but also continued application of federal industrial decentralization, which once again threatened to reward the regional hinterlands at their expense. For the first time the hegemony felt compelled to defend its primacy.

Regional differences and the prospect of future regional change are making themselves felt in ED policy-making and implementation. Amid such diversity and change, growth and decline, this chapter will prepare the reader for the great leap forward in the next chapters. Slums, CBDs and population mobility have captured the attention of Big City planners, politicians, business leaders, the media/Policy World and economic developers; but the time bomb underneath Big City jurisdictional economic bases, like the “Eveready Bunny,” just keeps on ticking. In this chapter, we will continue our metaphor for deindustrialization, the New England textile war, to its conclusion. This chapter discusses change (global, logistic and process innovation) and how it affected not only the economic base but also the structures and practice of our profession/policy area. Onionization, that childishly named concept, reconfigures ED’s structural landscape—revealing in the 1950s what will be a compelling dynamic 50 years in the future.