A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America 9780226290454

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A Nation of Neighborhoods

H I S TO R I C A L S T U D I E S O F U R B A N A M E R I C A Edited by Lila Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda Seligman James R. Grossman, editor emeritus

Also in the series: The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s by Evan Friss A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid by Nancy H. Kwak Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis by Andrew R. Highsmith Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit by Lila Corwin Berman Blood Runs Green: The Murder that Transfi xed Gilded Age Chicago by Gillian O’Brien A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950 by Marta Gutman A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida by N. D. B. Connolly Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth- Century New York by Cindy R. Lobel Crucibles of Black Power: Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington by Jeffrey Helgeson The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950–1972 by Christopher Lowen Agee Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto by Camilo José Vergara

Additional series titles follow index

A Nation of Neighborhoods Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America

BENJAMIN LOOKER

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

B E N J A M I N L O O K E R teaches in the American Studies Department at Saint Louis University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978- 0-226- 07398-9 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978- 0-226-29031-7 (paper) ISBN-13: 978- 0-226-29045- 4 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226290454.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Looker, Benjamin, 1978– author. A nation of neighborhoods : imagining cities, communities, and democracy in postwar America / Benjamin Looker. pages

cm

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-07398-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-22629031-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-29045-4 (ebook) 1. Neighborhoods—United States.

2. United States—Social

conditions—20th century. 3. Cities and towns—United States. I. Title. HT123.L66 2015 307.3′3620973—dc23 2015008524 Special thanks to the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation (www.ezra-jack-keats.org/). Publication of this book has been supported by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents Introduction 1

PA R T I

Neighborhood Visions from Popular Front to Populist Memory

1 2 3 4

Microcosms of Democracy: Depicting the City Neighborhood in Wartime America Communities under Glass: The Neighborhood Unit Plan and Postwar Privatization The Specter of Blight: The Neighborhood under Siege Routes of Escape: Cold War Individualism and Community Ties

PA R T I I

21 51 70 106

The Urban Crisis and the Meanings of City Community

5 6 7

A Place Apart: The “New Ghetto” and the “Old Neighborhood” Brilliant Corners: Representing the Inner City, from Outside and from Within Peaceable Kingdoms: The Great Society Neighborhood in Stories for Children

PA R T I I I

135 165 199

Defining Urban Pluralism in the Age of the Neighborhoods Movement

8

Elementary Republics and Little Platoons: The Neighborhood Self- Government Movement

231

9 10 11

“A Theology of Neighborhood”: Post–Vatican II Catholicism, Ethnic Revival, and City Space Neighborhood Feminisms: Refiguring Gender in the Urban Village Local Spaces and White House Races: Urban Communities and Presidential Politics Epilogue 337 Acknowledgments 341 Notes 345 Index 415

259 290 309

Introduction Neighborhood—the word itself emits a kind of magnetic field that seems to draw nearly every type of politician, intellectual, and cultural worker of the twentieth century into its compass. Exhorting each city block to become a “fighting battalion,” World War II defense propagandists envision the blue- collar urban community as a bastion of democratic living in the struggle against Nazi aggression. Amid the racial violence and urban rebellions of the late 1960s, characters of all colors cheerily stroll into what will become one of the most iconic city neighborhoods in America, television’s Sesame Street. Under the slogan “Power to the Neighborhoods,” gonzo New York mayoral candidate Norman Mailer proposes a future urban world of self-governing local communities, each fashioned along any ideological principle it pleases. On working- class Brooklyn streetscapes, women’s movement activists recount histories of heroic local foremothers as part of their quest to develop a distinctive style of “neighborhood feminism.” Conjuring up romantic images of corner delis and block-party parades, presidential aspirant Ronald Reagan intones into his radio microphone a reverie of the closeknit city enclave as paragon of patriotic virtue. To all these figures, despite their manifest differences, the small-scale urban neighborhood was something more than just a collection of shops and residences, sidewalks and buildings. For each, neighborhood bonds and loyalties—whether as enacted on real-life pavements or as represented in stories, images, speeches, and songs— served as essential touchstones in broader efforts to rei1

INTRODUCTION

magine American political configurations and cultural lifeways. Across the mid- and late twentieth century, these and scores of other urban critics, artists, activists, and commentators toiled continuously to draw connections between the intimate life of the city block and the future of the nation’s political structures and institutions. This book investigates what the concept of “neighborhood” came to mean to Americans who grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces in the years stretching from World War II to the inception of the Reagan era. Across these four decades, divergent notions over the meaning of neighborhood ties and experiences constantly reemerged into American public discourse, often as proxy for fiercely disputed models of civic and communal life. Whether in the imagery of novels and films or the language of political debates and development proposals, idealized renderings of the small-scale city community provided both a rich symbolic vehicle for constructing visions of a wider national body politic and a mechanism for navigating social divisions at the manageable scale of the mundane and quotidian, the stoop and corner. To grasp the full import of those renderings requires one to consider the intricate history of the city neighborhood not just as a physical place, but also as an idea— a powerful and evolving signifier that has played a vital, if often underrecognized, role in US cultural and political contests. As the anecdotes above might hint, that history is significant, in part, because several of the most momentous social struggles of the postwar era played out on the terrain of the imagined neighborhood. Notwithstanding its centrality to public discourse, the idea of neighborhood—much less its physical reality—has never been a settled concept. “Probably no other term,” complained sociologist Roderick McKenzie in 1921, “is used so loosely or with such changing content . . . , and very few concepts are more difficult to define.”1 Indeed, for more than a century, the question of what exactly constitutes a neighborhood has been a major preoccupation among urban social scientists and cultural commentators.2 In his classic 1909 work Social Organization, for example, Charles Horton Cooley located the neighborhood group at the core of “the primary, heart-to-heart life of the people,” while in 1926, progressive educator David Snedden more colloquially defined the term as “those people who live within easy ‘hallooing’ distance.” In the cool and distanced prose of sociologist Scott Greer, writing in 1960, a neighborhood was most accurately understood as simply “a precipitate of interacting households.” By contrast, a 1970s ethnic studies writer such as Andrew Greeley could romantically dub 2

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the neighborhood “an extension of the home, the family, of who and what one is.”3 Yet while academic investigators have spent more than a century devising a succession of provisional definitions, a vast fleet of artists, writers, activists, and cultural producers have used the word as if it were completely transparent—signifying not quantifiable matters of size, population, or prevalence of personal interactions, but rather elaborate territories of the imagination. Though often bearing only the loosest relationship to any specific geographical locale, such symbolic spaces took on lives of their own, along the way offering up models for new ways of living together amid the brick and concrete of the real-life city. If the task of defining these urban meanings has been the province of artists as well as sociologists, writers as well as residents, the process itself has also been a contested one. Belying the apparent innocence and simplicity of the term, disparate visions of the city neighborhood’s prospects and purpose constantly emerged. As this study’s chapters demonstrate, the neighborhood ideal came to occupy a prominent place in the political imaginary of many of the twentieth century’s most consequential social and intellectual movements: the Popular Front and the New Right, Great Society liberalism and secondwave feminism, Cold War anticommunism and the 1960s New Left and counterculture. And just as new definitions were constantly being invented for this space, those ideas took cultural work to sustain and defend: the work of representing, narrating, theorizing, and describing. The pages that follow attempt to interpret that cultural work over a timespan extending from the 1940s home-front era to the early 1980s. And if this period’s opening marked the zenith of the urban industrial age and the consolidation of the New Deal political order, the succeeding forty years would witness the gradual, albeit incomplete, dissolution of both.4 As the 1940s began, many ordinary urbanites shared a deceptive sense that the nation’s cities had entered a moment of relative fi xity, balance, or even stasis. The tumultuous city world that had been forged over the previous half century had been characterized by modernism and Fordism, immigration and industry, skyscrapers and slums, unruly ethnic patchworks and hardening racial boundaries. By the late 1930s, however, new residential building construction had been severely limited by economic depression, while sagging wages had curbed geographic mobility. The waves of overseas immigration that had once lapped onto city shores had been severely curtailed by restrictive legislation during the 1920s, and the Supreme Court’s key integration decisions had yet to be handed down. To working- class 3

INTRODUCTION

white city dwellers especially, the social patterns that governed the industrial city’s densely intricate neighborhood geographies could seem for a moment to be firm, stable, or perhaps even immutable.5 Despite such illusions of constancy, this was in fact a time of transition, with cities poised between the maelstrom that had accompanied the forging of the old urban order and the years of crisis, conflagration, flight, and disinvestment that would distinguish a new urban age. “The solidity of factories and tenements and steeples masked a fundamental impermanence,” Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott explain.6 As this historical evolution unfolded, debates over the fate of the smallscale city neighborhood took on a heightened and particular urgency. During the 1930s, contends historian Zane Miller, a New Deal emphasis on central planning, combined with the Chicago School sociologists’ concentration on urban flux and territorial competition, had led many social commentators to reject the notion of neighborhoods “as real and ‘natural’ social entities and therefore as appropriate building blocks of community.”7 By the early 1940s, however, this ideal for urban living had reemerged with a startling intensity, called back into the forefront of American public discourse as one potential answer to the social disruptions and ideological imperatives of home-front defense mobilization. And across the postwar decades, activists, artists, writers, and everyday citizens would continue to harness the ideals of neighborhood and neighborliness as a way to understand, participate in, and oftentimes resist the startling social transformations overtaking the US city. Alongside trepidations over the social and economic processes that seemed to be gnawing cities apart, this historical timespan was marked also by efforts to sort through several political and cultural problems embedded in the New Deal social order. Two of these, in particular, would powerfully motivate and unsettle several subsequent generations of neighborhood chroniclers. One was a growing disquiet over processes of national centralization and the effects of mass culture. Socially, politically, and culturally, the decades following the New Deal’s inception witnessed a strengthening centripetal current in American society, whether through the development of a rudimentary welfare state, the military-industrial complex, and a federal civil rights apparatus, or through the growth of mass institutions in education, religion, media, and communications.8 These trends left many observers uneasy over the fate of interpersonal forms of urban community and local traditions of self-reliance in an age seemingly defined by increasing bureaucratic anonymity, cultural homogenization, and technocratic cen4

INTRODUCTION

tralization. Second, those same decades would be characterized by a succession of efforts to resolve a fundamental contradiction built into the New Deal project: the clash between its rhetoric of a newly inclusive body politic, offering justice and economic security for all, and the pervasive racial policies that prevented large numbers of Americans from reaping the benefits of this promise.9 As generations of activists battled to overturn those injustices, the political coalition knit together by Franklin Roosevelt would unravel, undone by regional and demographic realignments, white racial backlash, and the rise of an assertive New Right. Appraisals of the city neighborhood’s prospects registered both of these tremors. Indeed, the small communities of the big cities seemed to have the most at stake in such transformations: in the eyes of some, the most to lose; to others, the most to contribute in devising answers to the conflicts and anxieties that those changes produced. On the one hand, to many long-rooted and racially conservative white city dwellers, ongoing processes of nonwhite “invasion” and government “intrusion” could appear to threaten not only individual white neighborhoods and urban ethnic villages but also the very fabric of the nation’s urban communal tapestry.10 On the other hand, to several generations of progressive artists, organizers, and intellectuals, the American city’s promiscuous diversity of tongues and nationalities, colors and creeds, suggested that its unglamorous stoops and alleys might actually operate as laboratories or proving grounds for new, more pluralist models for a national future. Each side eulogized the interactions fostered by such intimate city spaces, yet they engaged in a decades-long struggle over the nature of the relationship between the informal social being of the neighborhood and the formal political life of the nation. The most sustained idealizations of neighborhood as a sociocultural form generally come at moments of perceived crisis, at times when the nation’s social tissue, presumed values, or traditional institutions appear to be facing severe dangers.11 In speaking to such anxieties, whether directly or indirectly, these types of storytelling usually take one of two forms. In the first version, they form part of a declensionist narrative, ratifying perceptions of rupture or contemporary crisis by offering an elegiac glance back at a set of neighborhood values located in a lost or slipping golden age. In a second and more optimistic version, utopian constructions of neighborhood are conjured up to outline a path for overcoming present- day crises, with neighborly virtues held out as a potent antidote to debilitating diseases of the body politic. The meaning of “neighborhood” is alternately constructed with reference 5

INTRODUCTION

either to a past moment that has all but disappeared, or to the possibilities for a vibrant urban and national destiny that might be ushered in through a resurgence in neighborliness and block-level solidarity. Responses to the urban and larger social upheavals of the postwar decades crystallized in both these forms, and it was precisely the tension between the two that came to define each successive iteration of the long-running debate over the city neighborhood’s cultural status. The first approach, perhaps more readily recognized, formulates the “old neighborhood” in a mode of mournful nostalgia, an elegy for worlds either left behind by their inhabitants or fallen into ruins around them. “If there is one thing certain about ‘the organic community,’” remarks the cultural theorist Raymond Williams, “it is that it has always gone.”12 These lost urban Edens of stability, local ties, and authentic social relationships have frequently been summoned up to highlight the brittleness, blandness, or solipsism of a more recent age. And from the 1950s forward, such themes of threat, absence, and desiccated community bonds—“the ideology of community lament,” in sociologist Robert Sampson’s recent phrase— permeate virtually all considerations of the neighborhood ideal.13 As an older urban order slowly crumbled apart, bleak prognoses of neighborhood decline radiated through the national discourse, endlessly rehearsed in the symbolic and representational realms. Of course, no one can deny the tremendous challenges that individual urban neighborhoods faced through the postwar decades: from urban-renewal demolitions, federal highway developments, and mortgage redlining to exploitive blockbusting tactics, municipal fiscal crises, and accelerating urban capital flight. At the same time, commentators regularly pressed contentions about neighborhood dissolution and decay into service as a way to express more generalized anxieties over the social and cultural transformations reshaping the mid- and late twentieth- century United States. By cultural conservatives and political nostalgists, particularly, the structured forms of social intimacy that these spaces fostered were often understood to be under threat from a creeping set of ill- defined, impersonal forces—a company of hobgoblins ranging from declining religious observance to twocareer households, “Me Decade” self-absorption to a permissive, rightsobsessed liberalism. Even as city neighborhoods experienced the malign effects of decades of destructive antiurban policymaking, stories of neighborhood fracture became a crucial strand in a broader and more diffuse discourse over a purported loss of community in America, and this endangered status could be cast as either a cause or yet another 6

INTRODUCTION

symptom of the fragmenting pressures of contemporary life. Whatever the ascribed reason, the environments that earlier in the century had replaced the frontier as an imagined seedbed of democratic vitality now seemed vulnerable to every ill wind that blew across the social landscape. These chronicles of loss, however, butted heads with a competing vision, one in which such city spaces emerged as robust and vital institutions. Indeed, recountings of the traditional city neighborhood’s virtues were not uniformly a melancholy and backward-looking response to postwar social and political changes. In significant measure, in fact, this book is a survey of people who extolled the contemporary local community, trumpeting its tenacity and adaptability while expressing belief that the informal relationships it engendered were uniquely capable of providing solutions to a succession of daunting social and cultural predicaments. While often enlisting older notions of an organic, bounded local social life, commentators in this camp self- consciously sought to refurbish those frameworks to address distinctly contemporary conditions and needs. Such renderings offered an implicit challenge to the longstanding American suburban ideal, that “pervasive fondness for grass and solitude” described by historian Kenneth Jackson.14 They also countered an ascendant sociological tradition— built upon Ferdinand Tönnies’s gemeinschaft/gesellschaft distinction—in which close-knit urban neighborhoods were understood as mere historical remnants.15 In this view, authentic community bonds might be temporarily preserved in the industrial city by clusters of village migrants or foreign-born newcomers, but those ties were doomed to eventual extinction by the atomizing forces of industrial-age modernity.16 However influential these latter two ways of comprehending the modern metropolis, alternative interpretations constantly took the field, proclaiming instead the stubborn health of neighborhood bonds in the city and enumerating their broader social functions. To optimistic progressive writers of the 1940s, for example, the sturdy blue- collar city community served as both the most compelling emblem for a nascent American pluralism and an exemplary space for forging a more just postwar order. For liberal cultural producers of the Great Society era, new kinds of neighborhood stories could offer models of an exhilarating interracial future to residents of segregated black inner cities and insular white suburbs alike. Intellectuals of the 1970s ethnic revival saw an opportunity to remake the United States as a multicultural mosaic by rejuvenating the distinct heritages preserved in local city spaces. Such undertakings were beset with their own contradictions 7

INTRODUCTION

and exclusions, as will be seen ahead. Nevertheless, in these and many other cases the predominant tone is not one of bereavement, but rather of celebration and at least tentative confidence. Local corners, blocks, stoops, and taverns—here these are figured not as icons of a passing order, but rather as essential ground for solving pressing national challenges of the present age.

In each of this book’s chapters, the traditional city neighborhood emerges so insistently as an imaginative site for sorting through broader social questions precisely because it seemed to escape the stark polarities that have dominated much of the theory and literature on the modern city. The city, notes historian Andrew Lees, has long “stood for modernity and the future, whereas tradition and the past were represented by the small town and the countryside.”17 As A Nation of Neighborhoods demonstrates, this hoary dichotomy breaks down in the representation and reality of the neighborhood community. In the city but not entirely of it, it inhabits a third category, one uneasily melding cosmopolitanism and insularity, contemporaneity and tradition. Drawing tight boundaries may have offered inhabitants a reassuring response to the onslaughts and turbulence of twentieth- century urban modernity, but, at the same time, these residential spaces partook fully in the transformations and turmoil of postwar urban life. Thus, the local community could be envisioned as a spot for shielding oneself from the political and ideological commotions of the surrounding city and nation, or instead as a place for developing fresh responses to larger social convulsions through the medium of local interactions and interpersonal relationships. For this reason, many of the urban chroniclers discussed in this work self- consciously look toward the past and the future simultaneously, inventing neighborhood spaces that yoke nostalgic reminiscence to hopeful optimism, particularist patterns to universalist ideals, fondness for familiar ways to a quest for broader engagements. With an eye to these apparently contradictory but actually symbiotic constructions, this book aims to modify the direction of recent work that takes urban dissolution and decay as the singular motif of postwar writings on the American city. “Urban decline lurks behind every postwar story,” argues historian Robert Beauregard, in his landmark study, Voices of Decline.18 Likewise, the “urban intellectuals” at the center of literary scholar Carlo Rotella’s October Cities joined to create “a composite story that renders postindustrial transformation as a kind 8

INTRODUCTION

of urban mythos.”19 In these and numerous other important studies of postwar urban representation and discourse, the voices commenting on the city speak in mournful, pessimistic, and even desperate tones, while struggling to make sense of seemingly irreversible deterioration. But, the present work suggests, there was a counterpoint to that narrative, not least because perceptions of the city neighborhood often differ markedly from feelings toward the city as a whole. Many of the figures who move through this book’s pages speak with hope that the plight of the cities might be reversed and the nation’s potential fulfilled through new and invigorated forms of neighborhood life. Thus, even as American cities appeared to be sinking toward collapse, the neighborhoods within them frequently surfaced as promising locales for a rebirth of community consciousness and an ethic of urban social responsibility. In tracing the genealogy of such ideas, this study advances three main arguments. First, as its title indicates, A Nation of Neighborhoods contends that the figure of the tight-knit city neighborhood has functioned as a central symbolic site for advancing and debating broad theories about national identity and American democratic practice. If the modern nation-state derives, as Benedict Anderson posits, from a shared sense of “community in anonymity,” then this imaginative process was here reinforced by appeals to the local neighborhood as a concrete, graspable microcosm of that larger entity.20 Indeed, a number of the cultural texts considered in this book skip over the city entirely, instead weaving direct connections between the palpable surroundings of the block and abstract conceptions of national citizenship. And such projects could take the path of critique as well as affirmation. In a plethora of campaigns, commentaries, and artistic works, the local neighborhood was offered up as either an expression of uniquely American ideals or an indictment of their flaws. To participants in the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, for example, community improvement drives of the 1950s seemed one available way to stake a claim to citizenship in the face of manifestly discriminatory urban conditions. Or, for the curators of the District of Columbia’s Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, excavating and exhibiting forgotten African American neighborhood histories made plain the injurious erasures at work in standard accounts of the US urban past and present. As activists and cultural producers advanced divergent notions about the meanings embedded in local city spaces and relationships, they created a rhetorical landscape on which to debate the contours, limitations, failures, and possible futures of a national democratic life. Nonetheless, if various urban chroniclers employed the local city 9

INTRODUCTION

neighborhood as a synecdoche for an imagined wider body politic, this process was frequently enacted not on real-life pavements but rather in the realm of stories and songs, paintings and photographs, memoirs and manifestos. A Nation of Neighborhoods, second, asserts that experiences and understandings of neighborhood are mediated by cultural texts and that in them, as much as anywhere, the concept lives and breathes. Much of the existing academic literature tracing evolving theories of neighborhood, by contrast, has remained blind to large swaths of that history by virtue of an exclusive reliance on primary sources drawn from the worlds of urban planning, municipal administration, or academic sociology. Yet the ideas developed within those professional enclaves were in constant dialogue with a much wider array of neighborhood texts. It is through such conversations across the divisions of genre, training, and occupation, in fact, that some of the richest and most revealing propositions about the neighborhood’s social potential have taken shape. This study, therefore, seeks to expand the boundaries of the scholarly discussion on postwar US urban discourse, exploring contests over neighborhood possibilities as they played out through a wide-ranging variety of cultural forms: novels, radio plays, Broadway productions, real- estate theory, ethnographies, children’s television, museum exhibits, works of popular theology, and many others. As a closer look at such texts will indicate, “neighborhood” is about place, but it is not simply a place. Indeed, alongside the more concrete social processes transforming US city neighborhoods of the mid- and late twentieth century, a collection of highly elaborated imaginative and even mythical locales emerged. These disembodied yet sharply realized places oftentimes assumed lives of their own, developing compelling narrative structures and internal logics that sometimes bore only oblique correspondences to the actual social realities they purported to describe. In the process, a generic term that might refer simply to people living in proximity— Greer’s “precipitate of interacting households”— became infused with a host of connotations and associations, and these in turn allowed urbanites one way to take stock of their own residential spaces. At the same time, such representations went on to inform primarily political and social arguments, whether those concerning local interethnic relations, the distribution of municipal decision-making powers, the economic functions of the low-income inner city’s social networks, or the desirability and future of the federal welfare state.21 This continuous process of exchange among genres and disciplines, the empirical

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INTRODUCTION

and the imaginary, offers a reminder of the culturally constructed and contingent nature of seemingly transparent neighborhood meanings. A third contention of A Nation of Neighborhoods concerns competing strands within American liberalism, and specifically the contradictions that arise from a politics of localism. If this book, in part, narrates a series of optimistic visions for a neighborhood- oriented metropolitan and national future, those visions were most often the progeny of progressives and reformers. Though generations of cultural conservatives have written longingly of a bygone era of structured neighborhood life, defined by rigid hierarchies of authority and responsibility, it was liberals who most insistently represented the contemporary city neighborhood, wrestled over its definition, and deliberated its utility in the present age. Preoccupied with the link between the city’s bounded living spaces and the prospects for more expansive forms of citizenship, these urban artists and intellectuals developed a localist discourse that frequently ran counter to the centralizing impulses of the New Dealers and their political descendants. To intercultural education pioneer Rachel Davis DuBois in the early 1940s, for example, the local urban community provided the best possible location for working out a newly pluralistic kind of multiethnic “cultural democracy.” A quarter century later, writer and social psychiatrist Robert Coles could identify the glimmerings of a broader national interracial conciliation in the sporadic day-to- day interactions of urbanites from mutually antagonistic city neighborhoods. In the mid-1970s, founders of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women envisaged the small urban village of faith and heritage as the source for more expansive forms of feminist activism. In these and many other instances, the rooted city neighborhood emerged as a vibrantly modern kind of space, a template for new theories of citizenship rather than a stagnant enclave weighted by the dead hand of tradition. And so, although intellectuals of the left and right have long critiqued the atomizing individualism of modern liberal political theory, the representational politics and urban vocabularies of postwar liberal reformers have often been defined by attempts to construct or conceive of new models for local-scale community life. Yet the endemic divergences between a politics of liberalism and a politics of localism have resulted in odd alliances and unexpected appropriations. In this way, planner Clarence Perry’s neighborhood-unit scheme for metropolitan development could win adulatory reviews from racial liberals and adamant segregationists alike. A neoconservative such as Ed-

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ward Banfield could approvingly cite Ralph Ellison’s forceful defense of Harlem’s block-level ties and loyalties in order to promote inaction and government passivity in the face of urban racial segregation and inequities. And Jane Jacobs could find her ode to the organic local order of the mixed-use neighborhood excerpted by none other than William F. Buckley Jr., in his 1970 anthology of American conservative thought.22 Across the postwar era, partisans continually sought to weld the neighborhood’s positive emotional overtones to starkly contrasting ideological agendas; battles over definition were simultaneously battles over power. In the romantic language of neighborhood communalism, however, the traditional distinctions between left, liberal, and right can sometimes also blur or even crumble—as suggested by the free and easy borrowings across political divides that crop up in the pages ahead.

Moving in broadly chronological fashion, the chapters that follow identify and analyze succeeding versions of these contests over neighborhood meanings, each coming at a moment in which proponents felt compelled to offer new defenses of the small city community’s continuing social relevance and its utility to a broader cultural and political life. Each is an example of crossovers between the representational and social realms, an instance in which the term was up for grabs, both on the ground and in the symbolic sphere. Here, primarily sociological tussles over the neighborhood’s functions constantly spilled over into the worlds of literature, drama, political rhetoric, and popular culture. During the decades stretching from 1940 to 1980, debates over the city neighborhood’s role and potential can be structured into three broad historical arcs, each of which corresponds to one of this book’s three parts. The first part sketches the rise and fall of a Popular Front– inflected neighborhood vision, a progressive communitarian ideal that peaked during the mid-1940s before receding in the face of Cold War fears and repression, the pull to the suburbs, forebodings over creeping urban blight, and a new intellectual and cultural emphasis on individual freedom from constricting historical ties and social conformity. Under the cloud of international conflict, as chapter 1 relates, numerous wartime progressives interpreted the small-scale, working- class city neighborhood as the place where abstract democratic values could become most concrete. The jumble of nationalities and creeds at the heart of the nation’s older cities seemed, in fact, to offer a uniquely American rebuff to the fascist drive for purity. Variations on this theme 12

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played out in the celebratory cadences of the popular press, in the intercultural work of educators such as Rachel Davis DuBois, and in novels, radio dramas, and stage shows by creators such as Sholem Asch, Louis Hazam, Langston Hughes, and Kurt Weill. Following those same ambitions into the world of community planning, chapter 2 explores the wave of midcentury public enthusiasm for the neighborhood-unit plan, a scheme devised by progressive planners earlier in the century. Across the mass media, 1940s admirers lauded the plan’s aim to fortify interpersonal neighborhood ties. But while various advocates predicted that the formula would foster a tolerant, democratic grassroots ethos, by decade’s end sharp debates had arisen over whether the localist consciousness it aimed to encourage might not instead cement existing forms of residential racial exclusion. Within a few years, these conflicted yet intermittently progressive neighborhood aspirations were gradually muscled from the stage. Through the 1950s, powerful real- estate interests inflamed fears of steadily advancing neighborhood blight: a metastasizing “cancer,” in one federal official’s words, that “tears at the very foundations of urban life.”23 As chapter 3 recounts, media depictions proliferated of the city neighborhood as an encampment under siege, a space of fragility rather than tenacity. Working against dominant theories on decay’s causes, African American civic organizations developed numerous grassroots antiblight campaigns, aimed at undermining deeply ingrained white suppositions about the connection between black residency and neighborhood deterioration. Nevertheless, notes chapter 4, as public concerns over urban blight intersected with Cold War trepidations about ideological infection and subversion, narratives of peril and decline worked to submerge the optimistic neighborhood descriptive conventions of the war years. Meanwhile, various 1950s liberals increasingly suspected that neighborhood solidarity— a value once widely extolled—led only to conformism or collectivism, racial chauvinism or narrow forms of groupthink. To figures ranging from the sociologist Morris Janowitz to the television writer Reginald Rose, and from the opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti to the novelist Edwin O’Connor, older ideals of neighborhood unity had now come to seem clannish and constricting. By the early and mid-1960s, as this book’s second part details, a new set of questions had come to preoccupy observers seeking to make sense of the American city’s charged social landscape. Across a multitude of genres, commentators pondered the relevance of traditional neighborhood characteristics of mutual aid, geographical allegiances, 13

INTRODUCTION

and local institution-building to an urban world now seemingly defined chiefly by violence, political alienation, entrenched segregation, and recalcitrant poverty. Tracing this intellectual pursuit in the realm of urban scholarship and criticism, chapter 5 demonstrates the manner in which 1960s liberal academic critics increasingly leaned on older romantic narratives of the white immigrant enclave in order to portray the contemporary black “ghetto” as a place apart— a strategy originally intended to provoke immediate government intervention. The sharp distinctions these interpreters drew between the “old neighborhood” and the “new ghetto,” in turn, regularly relied upon a wholesale erasure of African American neighborhood cultures and loyalties. By contrast, intellectuals such as Albert Murray and Carol Stack sought to incorporate low-income black urban communities into a more traditional and affirming neighborhood story, even as such work itself became an object for attempted appropriation by theorists on the right. Throughout such political and sociological debates, a concern that consumed numerous artists and other cultural producers was how to represent urban environments of physical decay and material deprivation without objectifying or dehumanizing their inhabitants. Chapter  6 surveys three distinct answers to that question, as established in the creative output of the photographer Bruce Davidson, the social documentarian Robert Coles, and the museum director John Kinard. Each indicted the condescending pity typical of middle- class outside investigators. But while Davidson and Coles were visitors looking in, seeking to unearth evidence of neighborhoods and neighborliness in economically troubled inner- city environments, Kinard and his colleagues at Washington’s Anacostia Neighborhood Museum framed African American neighborhood histories as potent tools in contemporary civil rights offensives. Paradoxically, as chapter 7 describes, this same moment also saw the rise of a utopian representational language for local urban spaces, one that materialized most captivatingly in works for children. In the bestselling picture books of Ezra Jack Keats or on the soundstage of television’s Sesame Street, the inner- city neighborhood emerged as a multiracial peaceable kingdom, a Great Society achieved at the block level. Characterized by unresolved visual and narrative tensions between urban realism and idyllic fantasy, such renderings also signaled the contradictions in a Great Society– era reformist vision that sought urban redemption at the local level. For many of these artists and intellectuals, neighborhood ties and community relationships seemed to offer one route toward salvation

14

INTRODUCTION

for the cities and perhaps even a model for surmounting society’s most stubborn injustices. By the early 1970s, though, such ambitions struck many urban observers as naïve. As the book’s third part explains, to a variety of activists intact neighborhoods increasingly appeared as islands of precarious stability in a sea of urban decay and neglect. Against this backdrop arose an energetic grassroots neighborhoods movement, momentarily drawing together a disparate collection of ideologies, intellectuals, and organizers—from New Leftists to libertarians, conservative antimodernists to black nationalists. Out of this unstable coalition came a cacophony of neighborhood languages. Chapter  8 charts the rise of an assertive drive for neighborhood sovereignty and selfgovernment, a program that emanated in part from New Left activist and intellectual circles. Across the decade, programs for a radical devolution of political power attracted counterculturalists, anarchists, and  alternative-technology proponents to the cause—though antistatist conservatives would quickly seek to harness this same language to a free-market political project. If these urban thinkers cast the neighborhood as the natural home for democratic self-rule, participants in the 1970s white- ethnic revival sought to recover the neighborhood’s role as a space that safeguarded unique customs and subcultures. To a growing cadre of Catholic intellectuals, chapter 9 relates, the urban lifeways of the prewar immigrant church offered up a more authentic American Catholicism, one that opened a route forward amid the internecine religious battles besetting the post–Vatican II church. A reinvigoration of the white- ethnic urban village, argued writers and organizers such as Andrew Greeley, Michael Novak, and Geno Baroni, offered the possibility for renewal in a divided church and a vitalizing national pluralism in the face of deadening national homogenization. Despite their invocations of a progressive urban populism, these intellectuals’ attitudes toward the church’s gender progressives and social-justice wing were often characterized by mistrust or antipathy. Other figures inspired by the ethnic revival, however, labored instead to generate a unique brand of neighborhood feminism, casting the intimate blue- collar city community as the best staging ground for initiatives to bolster women’s political empowerment and assertion. As chapter 10 observes, advocates such as Barbara Mikulski, Nancy Siefer, and Jan Peterson characterized their neighborhood work as a challenge to the middle- class individualism of mainstream liberal-feminist lobby groups. The National Congress of Neighborhood Women, founded by Peterson and several Brooklyn

15

INTRODUCTION

allies, aimed to serve as “the ‘theoretical mother’ of an alternative women’s movement,” one that drew its energies from block-level community relationships.24 By the late 1970s, the decade’s proliferation of localist urban visions had become thoroughly enmeshed in national electoral politics, and the book’s third part concludes by examining the neighborhood themes that structured the 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns. As chapter 11 shows, the 1976 contest foregrounded the condition and fate of the aging blue- collar city neighborhood like no presidential race before or since. Here, both major parties responded to a cresting neighborhoods movement by speaking a language of self-sufficiency, community voluntarism, and grassroots civic allegiances. Yet each candidate wielded this rhetoric in a particularistic and tacitly exclusionary fashion. Disregarding warnings even from several of their own strategists, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford came to render the city neighborhood’s core identity primarily through mythologies of European migration, religiosity, familial heritage, and economic self-reliance. This contest helped set the stage for the Ronald Reagan campaign of 1980, in which the conservative former governor would consolidate a New Right vocabulary of urban place while courting discontented white Democrats with his incantation of “Family, Work, Neighborhood, Peace, Freedom.”25

The homages to urban communalism that ran through these two political campaigns were, in a sense, the last gasp of a neighborhood discourse defined by the antinomies and contradictions of an older urban industrial order. Indeed, the key terms for all of these postwar partisans were grounded in patterns set in motion as the age of urban modernity was just coming into being: fears of urban anomie and alienation, conflicts over cultural retention and assimilation, the meanings of sharply racialized geographies, tensions between localism and cosmopolitanism, consternation over the role of centralized institutions in the small corners of American life. However, as the book’s epilogue briefly suggests, by the 1980s this collection of struggles and preoccupations would be partially pushed aside by new cultural anxieties, symptomatic instead of a decentered and exurban, postindustrial and postmodern metropolitan landscape. Nonetheless, as metaphor and emblem for a larger national being and life, the small familiar neighborhood retains a powerful attraction into our present day. During the Inauguration Day festivities in Janu16

INTRODUCTION

ary 2009, for example, the new American president stepped onto stage at the Neighborhood Ball, an event organized in order to include ordinary Washington residents in the evening’s succession of glitzy extravaganzas. “This campaign was organized neighborhood by neighborhood,” said Barack Obama to the crowd of jubilant attendees. “And if you think about it, the word ‘neighborhood’ starts with ‘neighbor’— because it indicates a sense that we as Americans are bound together, that what we have in common is more important than what drives us apart.”26 By a rhetorical sleight of hand, Obama leaped effortlessly from the small residential community to a presumed national whole, from the interpersonal ties that might unite a street or block to the ideals that ostensibly link all of the country’s citizens. This insistence on local relationships as model for a better form of national community—the United States as a nation of neighborhoods—has structured the visions of several generations of urban artists, critics, writers, and activists. But the nature and meaning of that “community” has been a subject for divisions more often than commonalities, for contestation rather than consensus. These are the debates this work surveys. It is through these battles that Americans have sought to make sense of themselves and the city spaces they inhabit.

17

PA RT I

Neighborhood Visions from Popular Front to Populist Memory

ONE

Microcosms of Democracy: Depicting the City Neighborhood in Wartime America In 1943, the left-wing screenwriter Herbert Clyde Lewis dropped by his boyhood neighborhood, Bedford- Stuyvesant in central Brooklyn, following an absence of several decades. After a string of minor successes as a novelist, Lewis had recently moved to Hollywood, where he avidly participated in Popular Front political causes and would later garner recognition as scenario author for films such as the 1947 Yuletide heart-warmer It Happened on Fifth Avenue. During World War II, however, he enlisted in the cadre of journalists all around the country composing essays on the ubiquitous “why-we-fight” theme.1 Lewis’s account of his trip, syndicated in newspapers nationwide, fused commonplace wartime morale-building tactics with an exuberant celebration of the “old neighborhood” as the very basis of the nation’s moral stamina in a time of threat. After describing his hunt for childhood friends and visits to a few fondly remembered shopkeepers, Lewis proceeded to link this little space with the outcome of the war, the resolve of the nation, and the triumph of American ideals of diversity and tolerance over fascism. In this account, the close-packed, aging city neighborhood becomes “the greatest miracle that had ever visited the earth,” a place where “people came from all the 21

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corners of Europe, the Near East and China,” where they “lived side by side, rubbed shoulders in the streets, and—wonder of wonders!— managed to get along.” The robust durability and heterogeneous quality of Lewis’s childhood neighborhood are transformed into emblems of national character and will: this right here is “what we were fighting for . . . a way of life the whole world could adopt and profit by.”2 Lewis’s writing, in some ways so characteristic of boosterish wartime journalism, nonetheless distilled a widely circulating set of ideas about the neighborhood’s role in American political life, employing themes that would color discussions over the remainder of the decade. As the historian Robert Westbrook makes clear, US propagandists typically urged support for the war effort not by calling for loyalty to the state itself but rather by inviting Americans “to discharge a set of essentially private moral obligations,” chiefly those to neighbors and family.3 Onto this appeal to local ties, a disparate collection of home-front artists and commentators welded an optimistic and frequently utopian rhetoric of neighborhood, one that self- consciously—indeed, almost obsessively—worked to connect the intimate, semiprivate realm of the stoop and corner with grand public matters of war and peace, fascism and democracy, ethnic conflict and national pluralism. Constructing neighborhoods of the imagination out of words, images, festivals, and songs, these figures developed a distinctive wartime language of place. That language waxed and waned over the course of the 1940s, as idealized renderings of neighborhood relationships unfolded across a variety of fictional and nonfictional urban texts. Numerous scholars, of course, have tracked concrete home-front experiences in individual urban settings. The focus here, by contrast, is on the cultural output of writers and artists who introduced new ways to describe the city neighborhood’s worth, set forth fresh benchmarks by which ordinary urbanites might interpret their own residential environs, and championed divergent platforms for the role that everyday neighborhood interactions ought to play in the nation’s broader cultural and political spheres. Even as liberal journalists, social critics, and New Deal government propagandists sketched the ideological contours of this invented place, a range of arts workers and cultural producers elaborated their visions. Using a cohesive set of narrative conventions, wartime cultural texts across numerous genres offered up far-reaching propositions about the social potential inherent in the midcentury industrial city’s intimate local settings. In these communalist chronicles, assertions about the neighborhood and the wider body politic are oftentimes tightly conjoined, making it 22

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almost impossible to discern which provided sustenance to the other. Indeed, as an ideological and imaginative construct, the small-scale city neighborhood sat close to the core of wartime understandings of American nationhood and purpose. Whatever the empirical conditions in real-life city districts, many progressive commentators used abstract versions of such places as favorite surrogates for a long checklist of values: solidarity and participation, the melting pot and intergroup fraternity, street-level democracy and the heroism of common people. At a moment of seemingly existential national peril, novelists, dramatists, and composers joined journalists and planners in crafting portraits of the local neighborhood as a template for healthier forms of national community. Variants of this language, in turn, would ripple through legal, planning, and organizing circles—infusing the court battles to overturn racially restrictive housing covenants, featuring in a renewed progressive enthusiasm for Clarence Perry’s neighborhood-unit scheme of community planning, and undergirding grassroots campaigns against neighborhood blight that preceded the mass urban-renewal demolitions of succeeding decades. Nonetheless, if these wartime sentiments permeated much propaganda and social commentary, they found their most compelling expression in artistic forms, ranging from jubilant novels of local solidarity to urban musical pageants, cross- cultural community arts festivals to didactic radio plays. Like their journalistic and academic counterparts, an array of artists, arts activists, and cultural workers understood themselves as participants in a broader debate over what “neighborhood” ought to mean and what part it might play in the creation of a better postwar world. And just as the war effort itself could deceptively seem to have cobbled over some of the structural fault lines cutting through US society, so this construction of the neighborhood as American democracy writ small promulgated an urban story at best provisional and even contradictory in its claims. As is often the case, fictional works strongly registered these tremors as they strained to compress intractable social realities into aesthetic form. Together, such texts participated in a collaborative project of imaginative place-making, one that insistently cast face-to-face urban communities as a moral engine for democratic citizenship, ethnic tolerance, and an eventual global peace. Close examination of a handful of the richest and most elaborate products of that effort, however, reveals some of the ambivalences and inconsistencies embedded within that project. Outlining this discourse’s characteristic elements, the chapter first surveys how wartime patriotism and local urban space intersected 23

CHAPTER ONE

in popular journalism and social criticism. Next, the manner in which several prominent liberal and left-wing novelists, scriptwriters, and activist educators built out this newly conceived space comes into view particularly in their preoccupation with questions of ethnic relations, cultural assimilation, and the national political implications of local forms of interpersonal community. Finally, an account of the creation and critical reception of the 1947 Broadway show Street Scene, one of the decade’s most ambitious artistic sketches of blue- collar neighborhood existence, exposes tensions over the envisaged fate and significance of the working- class, ethnic-accented city community that surfaced as the presumed wartime consensus exhausted itself. All indicate the momentary convergence of propaganda, social science, literary fiction, and performance around a progressive yet conflicted, pervasive yet ultimately fragile, vision for block-level urban life.

Wartime Rhetorics of Neighborhood Revivalism The exigencies of international conflict exerted powerful pressures on the fabric of the nation’s urban neighborhoods. Although the Depression- era collapse of the private housing market and construction industry had dramatically slowed changes to residential built environments, during the early 1940s city populations underwent tremendous upheavals.4 Approximately one-fifth of all Americans made major relocations due to military service or moves to production centers.5 Meanwhile, city residents struggled to cope with disruptions wrought by rationing, unfamiliar regulations, economic tumult, heightened racial and ethnic frictions, and separation from family and longtime neighbors. In a typical expression of trepidation, the Cleveland Federation of Settlements warned in 1942 of “days of confusion, bewilderment and incipient danger for the agglomeration of races and nationalities in the congested areas of our city.”6 During a conflict that was, as William Graebner puts it, “intensely isolating and individualizing,” urbanites learned to accept what Perry Duis calls a “‘substitute culture’ of temporary replacements for artifacts, institutions, and social relationships.”7 But even as ordinary residents developed local strategies to deal with everyday hardships—from victory gardens to alternative childcare arrangements— commentators and artists responded to these constraints by proclaiming the cultural worth and vitality of the closeknit city neighborhood, whose denouement had heretofore suggested an inevitable drift into oblivion. 24

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Taken as a whole, these descriptive practices had at least three defining ingredients. First was a fervently revivalist rhetoric: while critics generally accepted sociological arguments about the decline of community sentiment over preceding decades, they also trumpeted a vigorous contemporary reinvigoration of that spirit. For many observers, this upsurge marked a return of qualities that, though recently forgotten, had characterized a virtuous preindustrial past. Thus, in wartime homages to the city neighborhood, writers constantly relied on the language of Jeffersonian democracy or nineteenth- century labor republicanism, peppering their prose with analogies to New England’s colonial town meetings, to the camaraderie of the frontier west, or to the hardy little institutions that held together sparsely populated rural communities. Describing his city’s 1940 scheme establishing neighborhood councils, for example, a Cincinnati official called it “a movement which is strengthening democracy at its roots, for it is bringing back the old colonial institution, the town meeting.”8 Even as such comparisons reversed a “lost-golden-age” angst of previous years, they also exemplified an approach wherein the city is praised when it is least characteristically urban, at least in the sense that urbanity had traditionally been described: densely populated, fast-paced, volatile, and anonymous. A second ingredient was a pervasive attempt to connect the local with the national and global, even when carried out in somewhat strained cause-and- effect terms. As the neighborhood goes, according to such claims, so goes America. Numerous essayists fi xated on the smallest of neighborhood acts both as key to the war effort and as the sine qua non of American moral superiority over foreign enemies. For national settlement leader John Elliot, isolationist sentiments regarding the war stemmed from citizens’ isolation from their next- door neighbors, and could be combated by cultivating “local community life and face-to-face relations.”9 In a similar vein, a Washington Post essayist opined that “We can’t be a friendly neighbor to nations unless we are friendly neighbors in our own little corner of the country,” insisting that the cordial exchange of victory-garden produce signaled the return of national traits “which have gained for us the trust and confidence of other nations.”10 This casual leap from a neighborly gift of fresh-picked tomatoes to the grand international alliance against fascism captures the essence—and the extravagance— of these narrative habits. Some intellectuals went even further, seeing the efforts to produce local-level neighborliness, if multiplied a thousand times over, as holding the potential to usher in a brotherhood of man in a strife-torn 25

CHAPTER ONE

postwar world. As Eduard Lindeman, the pioneering social work theorist, asked rhetorically in 1944, “Does it seem likely that Democracy can survive and take on new vitality if it is not founded firmly upon small groups of the friendship variety?”11 The fate of the nation and an eventual world peace, it seemed, rested on the everyday actions of millions of individual Americans in thousands of individual neighborhoods. The third element of this language grew out of an official wartime antiracism, wherein liberal cultural and policy elites joined Popular Front calls for Americans to overcome ethnic and racial divisions in favor of a united front against fascist foes abroad.12 As NAACP official Roy Wilkins put it, Adolf Hitler had “jammed our white people into their logically untenable position”: opposition to Nazism, like it or not, entailed public disavowal of that philosophy’s racial-supremacist doctrines— and thus, in rhetoric if not in practice, rejection of discrimination at home.13 Acknowledging this contradiction, pronouncements from officialdom often cast such prejudices as incompatible with a struggle against fascism. Journalists and novelists, government propagandists, and liberal organizations promoted this vision in an outpouring of multiethnic dramas—from military “platoon” stories of Demskys and Romanos and O’Shannons banding together under the stars and stripes, to homilies of home-front communities forging a more inclusive “Americanism.”14 Perhaps most famously, in the 1945 propaganda film The House I Live In, a young Frank Sinatra chides a gang of neighborhood youths for tormenting one boy because of his religion, asking how American fighters could ever defeat Japan if they allowed similar prejudices to divide them.15 Of course, this discourse had deep contradictions. Not only were such pieties often simply ignored— as with the ongoing racial segregation of the armed forces, the continued existence of Jim Crow, the forced dislocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans, or the waves of antiblack hate strikes at war production facilities— but they also countenanced a broad erasure of African Americans from film and other representational media, a maneuver that evaded the explosive question of their inclusion in the body politic. Still, as in Herbert Clyde Lewis’s essay, such rhetoric formed a central element of this wartime neighborhood vision, with the nation’s block-level urban communities frequently cast as the word of social diversity made flesh and contrasted with the aims of fascist foes abroad. Notions of urban neighborhoods as potential small-scale democracies had once been championed by Progressive- era intellectuals such as John Dewey and Mary Parker Follett. Through the 1930s, however, a number of social scientists and commentators had dismissed those 26

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ideas as untenable, believing that such locales had a rapidly diminishing social importance in the lives of metropolitan inhabitants.16 But by 1942, even the renowned sociologist Louis Wirth—who only four years earlier, in his classic essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” had theorized the rise of an impersonal, atomistic urban society—was marveling at a “new birth of community consciousness” in American cities. The Depression, he argued in retrospect, had alongside privations stimulated a “rekindled sensitivity . . . of the inhabitants of every community to the conditions of life and the problems of their neighbors.” And now, he maintained, urbanites who for years had lived side by side as strangers were engaging in social intercourse; under the “unifying influence of the patriotic motive,” civilian defense work was “for the first time making neighbors out of ‘nigh- dwellers.’” Such an upsurge in community solidarity, Wirth felt, held dramatic prospects for the postwar period: it might spark “the building of a more genuine democratic order than we have known since the days of the American frontier.”17 This fervor— so at odds with educator David Snedden’s dire 1926 account of the “sociability starved” denizens of a city without neighborhoods, with sociologist Niles Carpenter’s dismissive 1932 description of the “insignificance of the neighborhood,” or even with Wirth’s own 1938 evaluation— echoed through the popular press.18 In a typical example, a Christian Science Monitor editorial enthused that wartime restrictions on transportation were bringing about “a new appreciation of the importance of the neighborhood,” billing this development as nothing less than a “contemporary folk movement.” A series on community war efforts, running in the Los Angeles Times, explained, “It is a big country we live in.  .  .  . But when we say we live in America, what most of us think about is a community, a neighborhood, a part of the whole America where the houses, the streets and the people are as familiar as your own home.” In similar fashion, the Washington Post brushed aside critics who jeered that the nation’s capital lacked neighborhood pride. “What the country store is to Vermont, the [airraid] warden post had become to Washington,” it claimed. “Where there were no neighborhoods, it had created them.”19 Even the remaining Jeremiahs agreed with many of these premises. For instance, in a bestselling 1941 book, America, New Deal polemicist David Cushman Coyle linked a purported decline in community sentiment at home with looming perils abroad. Under the influence of radio, motion pictures, and the automobile, he claimed, “the neighborhood has dried up”— a process that, in turn, represented a direct threat to national security. “We may lose our freedom and come under the terror of the Na27

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zis,” Coyle insisted, “unless we can give each other the satisfaction of belonging and standing together.”20 Thus, no matter what their take on the issue— either democracy bolstered by an upsurge in neighborliness or, as one magazine headline warned, “Democracy Threatened by Lack of Neighborliness”—few commentators denied the existence of a newly vital link between these small-scale communities and the survival of the nation’s most fundamental political institutions.21 Still, while journalists might describe this spirit as a “contemporary folk movement,” as if it had simply welled up unbidden from some hidden fountainhead of national identity, these ideas were actively promulgated by powerful elites, including the US government, for whom they performed important cultural work in rallying wartime support. In its propaganda, for instance, the federal government’s Office of Civilian Defense highlighted, first, the link between individual neighborhoods and the success of the overarching war effort, and, second, the vital necessity for transcending street-level racial, ethnic, or class divisions in service of national security. This orientation becomes most apparent in a widely distributed series of civilian- defense pamphlets, instructing citizens on the “block plan” for local defense activities. Each took care to stress the importance of the smallest residential units to the largest geopolitical struggles. As one explained, “Overseas they are fighting block by block, from house to house”; hence, in the United States, “Each home must be a fighting squad; each block or neighborhood a fighting battalion.”22 Paradoxically, though, for each neighborhood to become a “fighting battalion” entailed the recovery of a set of distinctly unmartial qualities. Defense bureaucrats took as a given the sociologists’ gloomy thesis that primary groups had been whittled away, especially in urban areas.23 “Many close neighbors in large cities do not even know each other,” one defense handbook complained, and thus “have little inclination to help each other.” To achieve war objectives required reversing this apparent disintegration of community ties. As such, defense publications overflowed with tips on personalized canvassing approaches that might activate “a neighborly spirit of cooperation.” Officials also stressed the “importance of keeping the Block Leader Service democratic in objectives and leadership,” suggesting that, for reasons both philosophical and practical, the smallest units of society must emulate the majoritarian practices of the nation itself. The defense of democracy abroad would presumably be validated by a proliferation of blockgroup election meetings at home.24 Far from seeming a mere technical

28

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matter, one dealing only with orderly distribution of information or efficient execution of scrap drives, the block plan inspired journalists to wax lyrical, emphasizing its role in harnessing the intimacy of an imagined pastoral history to meet the challenges of a chaotic global crisis. “The block plan is a means of putting democracy into practice,” exclaimed one national columnist, describing her own neighbors reclined cozily around a fire, crunching apples and debating questions of war and peace. “It harks back to the New England town meeting where neighbors discussed the issues at stake before deciding the right course of action.”25 In federal officials’ estimation, however, it was a sense of obligation across racial and ethnic lines that would truly bring the plan into “harmony with the democratic principle.” Branding the task of home defense “too huge, too embracing” to be undertaken by “groups banded together by any ties less than that of being Americans,” the government urged block organizations to surmount, or at least suspend, local animosities dividing communities into “factions, sects, cliques, or racial groups.” If block committees were genuinely representative of their local constituents, “the cooperation of industrial, racial, and foreign-born neighborhoods will be found ready and steadfast.”26 Such exhortations from officialdom drifted free from social realities on the ground, either clouding or willfully obscuring the underlying causes of urban ethnic and racial discord in service of a lazily self-satisfied vision of neighborhood unity. Yet this rhetoric was part and parcel of ubiquitous contemporary descriptive conventions, in which such neighborhood spaces were cast as the physical site where national obligations could dilute outdated parochialisms.27 Utopian rhetoric about the small-scale, workaday city community depended in turn on the stature assigned to its most storied protagonist, the “common man.” During the war years, both journalistic and fictional accounts eulogized such figures, whose honest character and uncomplicated aspirations could presumably stand proxy for the nation itself. These “everyman stories,” as historian Judith Smith explains, used working- class and frequently immigrant protagonists to provide “a template for working out the terms of an expanded postwar citizenship.”28 In such narratives, the radical language of Depression- era dissent, with its celebration of a highly politicized working- class identity, could be absorbed and domesticated to fit the ideological needs of the home front and imperatives for postwar reconstruction. These visions of a more democratic, inclusive citizenship were mo-

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bilized most markedly in idealized descriptions of the blue- collar city neighborhood, with everyday, “authentic” neighborhood characters rewritten as the true home-front heroes. Such a disposition emerged both in the types of stories Americans told themselves, and in the ways that critics evaluated the social function of these stories. In one iteration of a persistently recycled storyline, a settlement worker, in a 1942 Survey Graphic essay, described organizing a defense show in Cleveland’s “teeming East End,” whose many Hungarian and Italian residents presumably had “natural emotional barriers” against participation. But while youths scoffed, Chizzie, the cynical proprietor of a local Italian confectionary, lent his efforts wholeheartedly to the show. By setting up his own consumer- education display, Chizzie “unwittingly was instrumental in convincing the ‘hard-boiled guys’ of the neighborhood that the whole home defense show was pretty much all right.” Though he might fulminate against local do-gooders, his un- coerced contribution ensured the festival’s success.29 Furthermore, to many middle- class observers, the mere telling of this brand of neighborhood story lent vitality to the overarching war campaign. For example, the prominent Manhattan psychiatrist Louis Berg, who spent much of his time decrying the “corrupting” effects of radio’s “suppurating serials,” nonetheless discovered a “perfect answer to well known Axis propaganda” in the tenderhearted chronicles of The Goldbergs, a top-rated radio series dramatizing Jewish family life in the Bronx. By presenting a “little world which lives by loving its neighbors,” he insisted, the program served as “a force for decency and the democratic way of life.”30 In such anecdotes, the significance lies not so much in defense shows or “hard-boiled guys,” but rather in the manner in which commentators of all kinds offer up neighborhood relationships as the primary lens through which audiences should bring into focus broader questions of community and national purpose. This sort of nationalist writing represents a quest for legitimacy and authenticity, one effected by sentimentalizing the close-at-hand, the small-scale and everyday— often as stand-ins for the grand abstractions of global war and peace. If democracy were to have meaning in the postwar world, such texts tacitly insist, it would be through its enactment in the spaces where such average people actually lived: not just in the halls of the new United Nations, but also in the streets of Hamtramck and Highlandtown, Woodlawn and Williamsburg. These images of the close and familiar, then, are held out as proxies by which Americans might grapple with anxieties over large-scale issues of ethnicity, urban modernity, and national democratic practice. 30

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The City Neighborhood as “Garden of Nations” Even in such ostensibly factual reports, neighborhood as a symbolic space is often produced through a kind of narrative sleight of hand, whereby purportedly empirical descriptions of everyday local conditions are seamlessly transformed into generalized accounts of an assumed cultural ideal. More self- consciously imaginative renderings, in turn, could adopt the rhetorical strategies of the editorial or the soapbox. During this period, overtly fictional neighborhood stories were frequently intended not only as aesthetic objects but also as instruction manuals for citizens in actual urban districts. Mixing artistic work with social advocacy, cultural producers at once sketched out an idealized version of what “neighborhood” ought to mean and challenged city dwellers to duplicate that ideal on the ground. In the iconic renderings of neighborhood spaces served up by wartime fiction and drama, no issue was as central a preoccupation, and none as fraught with contradictions, as that of ethnicity and interethnic relations. Using descriptions of socially diverse local blocks and streets as their chief narrative building blocks, progressive chroniclers of the urban neighborhood sought to develop an overarching account of a distinctively American pluralism. Their claims marked a break with much of the urban fiction and sociological theory of the preceding two decades. Even as the ethnic literatures of the Depression had frequently emphasized the foreignness, insularity, or proletarian anger of the immigrant neighborhood and shop floor, urban sociologists of the 1920s and 1930s had identified remnants of neighborhood living only in closed, seemingly homogeneous ethnic communities. To Louis Wirth, for example, in his classic 1928 study The Ghetto, Chicago’s insular Jewish enclave represented “as near an approach to communal life as the modern city has to offer.”31 Under this view, where transplanted villagers congregated in the American city, face-to-face intimacies might survive for a time, even as assimilation, anonymous social interactions, and the “invasion” of dissimilar groups chipped away at local solidarities. Texts of the World War II era, though, often reversed that earlier formulation, stressing ethnic cosmopolitanism as the primary basis for neighborhood sentiment. For a number of influential writers addressing ethnic relations—figures such as Sidney Meller, Sholem Asch, Rachel Davis DuBois, and Louis Hazam—the very diversity of the city neighborhood, with its haphazard mix of creeds and nationalities, sup31

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plied the primary nutrients for community and national health. The period from 1920 to 1940, explains historian Matthew Jacobson, witnessed a collapsing of ethnic distinctions among European immigrants and their descendants, as cultural explanations for difference began to replace genetic or biological explanations. This turn, in a seeming paradox, only sharpened the perceived distinctions between African Americans and European Americans, as ethnic whites— albeit gradually and incompletely— consolidated into an undifferentiated mass.32 Though much wartime writing takes pains to stress the multiethnic basis of the new neighborhood spirit, the ethnic cosmopolitanism of the war years was deeply suspicious of particularist solidarities, signaling a powerful ambivalence about neighborhood diversity. When engaging with the role of ethnicity in local life, 1940s neighborhood writers played out a number of options: the replacement of particularist notions of group identity by a self- conscious yet incomplete cosmopolitanism; the substitution of an often sentimental individualist analysis of intergroup relations for a more rigorous structural one; and the outright erasure of ethnic difference posited as cultural necessity. Three clusters of texts put these respective approaches into play. The first is exemplified in a popular group of “looking-backward” tales, historical novels set against the backdrop of World War I and addressing questions of cultural assimilation and neighborhood spaces— works such as Sidney Meller’s Home Is Here and Sholem Asch’s East River.33 In a notable revision, these narratives reformatted older stories of the exotic enclave into tales of a grassroots American pluralism. Second is the vision of “cultural democracy” on the neighborhood level, developed in the early 1940s by intercultural education theorists such as Rachel Davis DuBois, and aimed at harnessing neighborhood cultural traditions to generate a new kind of multiethnic comity. And third is the increasingly dominant move toward acknowledging while simultaneously effacing forms of neighborhood cultural difference. Neatly captured by 1940s commercial artists such as the radio writer Louis Hazam, this sort of vanishing act presaged the impulses guiding the 1950s human-relations approach toward neighborhood-level interactions in the urban North. The manner in which novelists who treat these subjects seek to connect the empirical and the imagined is often exemplary, rather than exhaustive as in the style of their naturalist precursors. Sidney Meller’s prize-winning historical novel Home Is Here, for example, works within but eventually reconfigures the conventions of the urban immigration novel, framing ethnic cosmopolitanism as the basis for community 32

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solidarity. Published in 1941, Home Is Here narrates the experiences of an Italian family living on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill in the 1910s. At the novel’s opening, Alano Dorelli, a migrant worker, has carved out a new life in a pleasant neighborhood, mostly Italian with a sprinkling of Irish, Spanish, and Portuguese residents, that seems to replicate the communal values of his native village in Lombardy. Alano’s wife, Lucia, though, lives a melancholy existence, pining for a return to her homeland. Soon enough, a grasping businessman, Mr. Lynd, begins blasting out a rock quarry that gradually encroaches on the neighborhood, threatening the houses’ foundations and the safety of the children. At first, the quarry project only fuels Lucia’s yearnings to leave. But a sympathetic settlement worker, in an attempt to revoke Lynd’s blasting permit, asks Lucia to testify before a municipal board. Ashamed by her broken English, she attends night school so as better to press the case, and there she is inspired by a young teacher who implores, “If we Americans don’t live up to your ideals or hopes for us, don’t complain. Help us become better. . . . We invite you in as partners to help us improve America.”34 Lucia’s downcast neighbors believe her effort against Lynd is a lost cause and dejectedly decline to participate. However, as the case moves futilely through one bureaucratic channel after another, Lucia becomes ever more convinced that her true home is not just in the United States but right there on Telegraph Hill battling the unjust intrusion. After a violent explosion rocks the neighborhood, Lucia pluckily exhorts her fellow residents: “We must fight him not for ourselves alone but for everybody on this hill.” To remake the neighborhood as its own fighting battalion, though, Lucia must first persuade her neighbors that community solidarity is a force powerful enough to triumph over formidable outside interests. This is no easy task. After she timidly ventures out to make friends at the nearby settlement house, Alano directs sarcastic jibes at his wife’s fantasies of local community: “He drawled, ‘A great American. Once it was our village, now it is the Community [House].’ . . . As she continued sewing she granted, ‘Yes, so it is. People help each other, work together, friends, neighbors.’ ‘Not possible in a city,’ he adjudicated. ‘It is possible, Alano. It is true, right here, a few blocks away.’”35 This terse exchange precisely mirrors contemporary social-scientific debates over whether local community ties are sustainable in the modern metropolis. Here, though, the outcome departs decidedly from the sociological consensus, stressing ethnic heterogeneity rather than particularist insularity as the primary catalyst for urban community33

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formation. In order to create an effective neighborhood, the residents must rid themselves of the archaic forms of social bonds, clannish and superstitious, that they toted with them from their European villages. At Lucia’s urgings, the neighborhood suppresses its parochialism, ethnic feuds, and skepticism toward American democratic rhetoric, and ultimately bankrupts Lynd with a coordinated spate of lawsuits. Though  the struggle pits working- class residents against avaricious capitalists, the neighborhood itself, rather than abstract class loyalties, provides the groundwork for solidarity. In Meller’s rendering, the immigrant characters’ newfound attachment to the United States flows from their attachment to their modest residential environs, and their battle to save the neighborhood emphatically validates the patriotic oratory of the idealistic night-school teacher. While Meller’s protagonists gain confidence only under the tutelage of kindly settlement workers and teachers, other writers found less paternalistic terms with which to convey a similar neighborhood spirit. Significant among them was the renowned novelist and dramatist Sholem Asch, whose acclaimed 1946 novel, East River, addressed the urban community’s social potential using a heightened spiritual register. Though once the most widely read writer of the Yiddish-speaking diaspora, Asch had more recently been knocked from his pedestal after a backlash from the Yiddish literary establishment toward his 1930s “Christological” novels, which had emphasized a kinship between Judaism and Christianity. With the emergence in Europe of what Asch called the “Satanic” powers of Nazism and Stalinism, the writer’s imagination was fired less by the Zionist dream than by his vision for a spiritual alliance and reconciliation between the two religious traditions. Believing this shared destiny could be fully realized only in a pluralistic United States, Asch turned away from the Jewish enclaves of the Lower East Side that had provided the setting for many of his and other Yiddish writers’ earlier works. In East River, which briefly topped the US fiction bestseller lists in English translation, Asch instead adopted a decidedly multiethnic urban quarter in order to foreground assorted immigrant communities painfully working out the terms of their new relationships in the American city.36 Set in the 1910s, the novel portrays life in a dense Manhattan tenement block, in the East Forties, which overflows with first- and secondgeneration Irish, Poles, Germans, and Italians. This intimate New World neighborhood—where residents “knew one another, loved or hated one another, but belonged together”— dramatized the potential for spiritual rapprochement via the place-based virtues of neighborli34

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ness and mutual aid. Here the “sharp tang of gefüllte fish or boiled beef from a Jewish household joined with odors of a stew from an Irish home or the spaghetti and meat balls of an Italian family.” And here, residents gather in a favorite local yard to plant vegetables or flowers from the old country, with the Germans’ potatoes, the Italians’ fig tree, and  the Poles’ nasturtiums blending to form a “literal garden of nations.” The novel’s serene opening vision is but a momentary interlude in the downtrodden working lives of the block’s tenement dwellers. And yet, as literary scholar Dan Miron suggests, this pastoral sequence serves as a “model of potential harmony among people of different national and religious affiliations,” with the subsequent plot development representing “the quest for the realization of this vision.”37 The complex, winding story that follows centers on a struggling grocery store owned by a devout Orthodox Jew, Moshe Wolf Davidowsky. The narration tracks the divergent trajectories of Moshe Wolf’s two sons: Irving, an entrepreneurial striver who becomes a wealthy magnate in the Jewish garment industry; and Nathan, a pensive intellectual, confined to a wheelchair by polio, who develops into an inspiring labor polemicist. Driving the novel are two primary conflicts, one spiritual and the other social, each of which is resolved by drawing on resources indigenous to the neighborhood. The first conflict comes with Irving’s marriage to Mary McCarthy, a young Irish- Catholic neighbor who had befriended the Davidowskys despite the reproaches of her virulently anti-Semitic father. After his son’s marriage to a Catholic, Moshe Wolf refuses to acknowledge Irving, even as Irving and Mary move to a palatial apartment near Riverside Drive and sever their old religious and social ties. But, when her marriage eventually dissolves, Mary shucks off her coldhearted materialism to return “back where she belonged,” where “the small wooden church stood where she had prayed”—and also back “where her real family was; Moshe Wolf’s family.” Taking in his homeless Catholic daughter-in-law and her young child, Moshe Wolf’s fatherly instincts gradually overcome his rigid disapproval of their presence in his dwelling place, and, here, a sort of religious synthesis occurs. Mary’s and Irving’s agnostic experiment in the outside world has failed, but, back in the old East River neighborhood, Mary and her father-in-law achieve a transcendent appreciation of one another’s spiritual commitments, one that trumps any similar accommodation that the secular world can offer.38 The novel’s other central conflict grows out of Irving’s abusive industrial practices. In opposition to his exploitive and deracinated brother, 35

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Nathan uses local cultural resources to meld religious faith and concern for the oppression of workers. After discovering that surrounding apartments have been converted into degrading sweatshops for Irving’s cut-rate piecework, Nathan abandons his law studies at Columbia University, deciding that now, for him, “the neighborhood was the university.” He develops a social vision increasingly indebted to his father’s pious religious devotion: where once he had seen only “the blind fanaticism of the old country,” he now detects “the logic and intelligence of an entire history and civilization.” Shedding his bitter, nihilistic detachment, Nathan appears in his wheelchair to give rousing, socialistinspired speeches at union halls. But here, Nathan preaches views that are “nothing but arch heresy” to the union’s doctrinaire Marxist chieftains: “there can be no social justice without faith in God,” he asserts, and America is not “a temporary haven, until the sun of the revolution rises in Russia. America is our spiritual home.” All are lessons learned in the new “university.”39 The plotlines in both novels abandon the traditional arc of earlier ethnic-ghetto accounts. In works such as Anzia Yezierska’s 1925 novel Bread Givers, for example, protagonists struggle to depart from the stifling, homogeneous enclave into the cosmopolitan, secularized world outside, perhaps returning sentimentally at the end to scoop up a few mementos that will help salve the wounds inflicted by a materialistic, tradition- eroding modern America.40 Likewise, for Louis Wirth in 1928, the urban ghetto’s chief drama was the psychic struggle of the inhabitant who tentatively drifts outside the community’s orbit, and then either scurries back to the protective fold or “metamorphoses into a new being.”41 Whether in literary fiction or sociological monograph, the main polarity is between the religiosity, ethnic identification, and enveloping family life of the Old World neighborhood, and the broadminded, mobile individualism of the New World beyond, with inhabitants struggling to resolve that tension. But war- era narratives such as Home Is Here and East River follow an entirely different strategy. Here, protagonists have no need to synthesize the gesellschaft practices of the surrounding world with the gemeinschaft comforts of the sheltered enclave. Instead, as Asch’s idyllic opening suggests, these local communities already possess all the resources that their inhabitants will need. Even East River’s Irving, when he finally sets foot back in the old neighborhood, repents for his sins, vowing to settle amicably with the garment union and to reconcile with his Roman Catholic wife. In these and similar fictional renderings, the tight-knit ethnic neighborhood— refigured now as a “garden of nations”—no longer represents merely a 36

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remnant of older ways, under siege from modernity and destined for extinction. Rather, it is frequently imagined as the chrysalis for a humane and pluralist national future in the face of totalitarian threats from abroad. Though W. H. Auden might have written in 1940 that “poetry makes nothing happen,” many progressive critics of the day saw immediate practical value in artistic portrayals of neighborhood relationships and values.42 According to the intercultural journal Common Ground, for example, Meller had provided the best available model of “neighborhood groups  .  .  . sinking differences in the American way,” while critic and children’s author Sterling North predicted that Asch’s novel might “help to blow clear the carbon monoxide of race prejudice” from city streets.43 At the same time, a number of liberal thinkers, imagining a similarly functional role for artistic work, turned instead to applied folklore, community arts projects, and local craft traditions as tools for realizing comparable aspirations. Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, vigorously promoted the inclusion of community arts programs in local defense work, despite federal civilian- defense director Fiorello LaGuardia’s ridicule of these seemingly nonessential activities as mere “community singing and basket weaving.”44 In the face of such skepticism, one of the most influential, yet conflicted, efforts in this direction was the Neighborhood-Home Festival, an approach to local intercultural relations developed during the war by Rachel Davis DuBois. A progressive educator and national leader in the 1930s intercultural- education movement, DuBois championed her neighborhood festival as a systematic means for overcoming ground-level animosities by engaging racially and ethnically diverse communities in group discussions, vernacular arts, and ceremonies highlighting local inhabitants’ unique “cultural treasures.”45 Born to a New Jersey farm family in 1892, DuBois was a dedicated Quaker and a staunch pacifist during World War I. After the war, as a schoolteacher in her home state, she had developed her “Woodbury Plan,” a highly controversial curriculum meant to enhance students’ appreciation for the “contributions” of the nation’s multifarious cultural groups.46 Throughout her life, DuBois rejected both the meltingpot imperative and an extreme pluralism that she imagined to be clannish and divisive. Her alternative was a model for intergroup cooperation that she dubbed “cultural democracy,” one melding her idealistic religious impulses with a quasi-scientific apparatus drawn from psychological and sociological literature. This path depended upon Americans making “creative use of cultural differences” rather than ei37

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ther suppressing or fetishizing them, thereby allowing minority groups to overcome feelings of inferiority and exclusion.47 To disseminate her principles nationwide, she founded the influential Service Bureau for Intercultural Education in 1934, though the bureau’s board squeezed her out during the buildup to overseas conflict, intent on downplaying programming that might be seized on by conservative opponents to charge that the group was undermining national unity.48 By this point, however, DuBois had turned away from her work with schoolchildren, now promoting the local neighborhood rather than the classroom as the loom on which the tapestry of cultural democracy would be woven. Her clearest statement of this vision came in 1943 with the publication of a lengthy instructional book, Get Together Americans: Friendly Approaches to Racial and Cultural Conflicts through the Neighborhood-Home Festival. The scheme outlined here involved mustering a diverse set of neighborhood residents to share conversations, folk songs and crafts, seasonal feasts, family histories, and tales of their own holiday customs, thereby fostering respect for other ethnic, racial, and religious traditions and a sense of common humanity. Participants might concoct ceremonies to follow, based around nonsectarian dates such as harvest time or winter solstice, and incorporating dances, poetry, and decorative arts (fig. 1). In this model, neighborly feelings on one hand would be built on difference, with chasms bridged by sharing unique facets of one’s culture, and on the other hand would come about through the dilution of such differences, with particularist solidarities loosened in favor of a cosmopolitan whole. In DuBois’s view there was little difference between the local festival and the international stage, and she constantly toggled between the intimate level of the neighborhood and the vast realm of world affairs. Just as Franklin Roosevelt—with the metaphorical namings of his Good Neighbor Policy and Four Policemen framework— sought to portray international diplomacy as an extension of the local and familiar, so did activists like DuBois imagine each American neighborhood as, in her words, a “microcosm [of] the problem our statesmen call the problem of world unity.” And because the nation’s polyglot urban neighborhoods brought historically separated cultures into intimate daily contact, the development of cultural democracy there seemed to offer the most immediate route toward a broader postwar global fellowship.49 Through the 1940s, DuBois and her associates spread the Neighborhood-Home Festival across the Northeast while vigorously promoting its use in the pages of mass-market periodicals. This new approach was one grounded in the immediate and close-at-hand. American cul38

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Figure 1 Rachel Davis DuBois, far right, participating in a Neighborhood- Home Festival during the late 1940s. (Courtesy Immigration History Research Center Archives, University of Minnesota)

ture was continually evolving, DuBois pronounced, and “each person, each home, each neighborhood has an opportunity to make it richer.” The title of one of her magazine articles—“A Tension Area Becomes a Neighborhood”—hints at her conception of a neighborhood’s essential qualities. The term here had little to do with architecture, boundaries, or key businesses and institutions. Instead, it was a space based almost entirely on sentiment— one that came into being when tensions melted away, with local “antagonism and suspicion” yielding to “appreciation and friendliness.” In urging Americans “to recapture their tradition of neighborliness,” DuBois suggested that somehow the small-town characteristics of another age—reciprocity, goodwill, mutual aid— could be dredged up in order to meet the challenges of the heterogeneous and depersonalizing modern metropolis.50 This enthrallment with bygone neighborhood virtues emanated, in part, from DuBois’s favored model for interpreting racial and ethnic 39

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divisions. She steered decisively away from issues of political power or economic enfranchisement, believing instead that the nation’s “fundamental problem” was one of “personal relationships.”51 Not surprisingly, then, Get Together Americans omits mention of stubborn structural obstacles such as restrictive covenants, employment segregation, housing discrimination, or inequitable municipal services. Empowerment for DuBois was primarily psychological in nature: minority groups learning to discard shame over their cultural differences. Such an orientation extended even to permissible topics at the festival itself. As Arthur Katona, an Ohio sociologist who promoted DuBois’s methods, instructed in Common Ground: “Certainly the Neighborhood Party is not the place or time for discussion of social problems. . . . If someone should begin a serious discourse . . . , a committee leader can gently nip it in the bud.”52 This emphasis on prejudice or chauvinism rather than racism or discrimination drove the festival’s therapeutic design. However, it is precisely within such a “personal-relationships” framework that everyday neighborhood interactions could seem so essential. In this way, DuBois’s scheme represented an uneasy mix of a forwardlooking cosmopolitanism and nostalgia for rural gemeinschaft, an attempt to combine an expansive appreciation for difference with the intense intimacy that, in the consensus of sociologists, occurred only in the small village or insular city enclave. Such a preference for the personal over the structural, the experiential over the theoretical, and indigenous sentiment over imported strategy runs through writings by a variety of wartime intergroup activists. When the liberal Common Council for American Unity hosted a series of “nationalities parties” in New York neighborhoods, for example, it boasted that the program involved “no fancy theories” but rather simply “the experience of knowing first-hand our next door neighbors.”53 Likewise, the Good Neighbor Committee— a national organization of neighborhood leaders supported by Eleanor Roosevelt— dedicated itself to “rebuild[ing] those smaller democracies” by enhancing that “understanding which comes only from personal relationships.”54 Such insistence on the purely interpersonal roots of community discord papered over fundamental economic and political causes of the racial conflicts that were then exploding violently in cities like Detroit and Los Angeles.55 DuBois’s cultural-arts strategy, observes historian Shafali Lal, often hews to an “heirloom conservation approach to racial equity,” reducing culture to the quaint and curious.56 This assessment is borne out, in Get Together Americans, through essentializing accounts of various groups’ “contributions”—the spicy gaiety of Italian life, the songfulness of the 40

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“Negro,” the work ethic of the “old-stock” Americans, and so forth. But DuBois’s vision for a local cultural democracy reveals its fault lines most dramatically when she outlines the Neighborhood-Home Festival’s concluding phase. At the finish came a party, and now, “all traces of antiquarianism, all memories of racial and cultural specialties are abandoned. . . . The group has stepped out of the past. Now it consists of just modern Americans amusing themselves in current style.” It was the very “sharpness of this transition from the past to the present,” DuBois insisted, that was “essential” to the event.57 Here, then, the very identities that the festival was designed to sanction are relegated to a musty past. Ironically, although DuBois abhorred the melting-pot imperative, this passage from “racial and cultural specialties” to a resting place as “just modern Americans” inadvertently emulates the elaborate assimilation dramaturgies of Henry Ford a generation earlier, in which the automaker’s foreign-born workers symbolically shucked off their national garb inside a mock-up of a giant pot. In fact, DuBois’s essentializing descriptions of mothballed cultures, as well as the notion of periodically pulling them out of the trunk for display, all suggest the neighborhood as a sort of museum of ethnic cultures. Each of these instances—whether Meller’s account of local communities surmounting internal divisions to fight powerful outside interests, Asch’s romantic union of creeds emanating from the everyday life of the street corner, or DuBois’s project of a neighborhood-level cultural democracy emerging through shared vernacular arts— puts artistic vision into service as a vehicle for sweeping political assertions about the relationship between the local and the national. And these more rarefied modes of representation quickly extended into commercial imagery, as well. Like their literary counterparts, the mass media often served up the notion that the intimacy of the city neighborhood could smooth the frictions of a diverse nation and give birth to a new kind of Americanism— but only by simultaneously identifying and reducing cultural difference. Already by the mid-1940s, the intercultural education thrust championed by DuBois and like-minded colleagues had begun to give way to strategies known as the “human-relations” approach.58 Whereas the former emphasized distinctiveness and the integration of various cultural strands into a larger whole, the latter aimed to mitigate intergroup divisions by educating residents about their essential sameness. While cultural producers in this camp often co- opted the neighborhood tropes described above, they generally downplayed or diluted the ambitious visions of figures such as Asch and DuBois. Perfectly typify41

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ing this brand of neighborhood narrative is the NBC radio work of the prolific broadcast writer Louis Hazam. The Connecticut-born son of a Lebanese refugee, Hazam had contributed scripts to radio’s celebrated Columbia Workshop before taking the helm of NBC’s series Home Is What You Make It, beginning in 1946. There, as head dramatic and documentary scriptwriter, Hazam churned out dozens of homilies on the theme and problem of democracy, explored through didactic storylines extolling the virtues of home and neighborhood.59 In much of Hazam’s dramatic work, neighborhood experiences are portrayed in language that at first seems to embrace, but eventually veers away from, DuBois’s principles for a local cultural democracy. Consider, for instance, a 1947 episode titled “Story without Accents.” Narrated by the fictional Gwen Taylor, the drama describes how Gwen’s “mind was cleared of the unhealthy cobwebs of prejudice through the understanding and appreciation of her neighbors.” At the opening, postwar housing shortages have forced the middle- class Taylor family to make its home in the undesirable Center Street neighborhood, a district filled with eastern and southern Europeans. As the downcast Gwen narrates, “It was almost more than I could take. It wasn’t just the unpainted houses; it was the people.” From the shawl-clad Mrs. Petrovich, who offers a housewarming gift of sauerkraut while looking “like a picture out of the National Geographic,” to the scruffy Scandinavian workman Pete Balsen, to a former Greek shepherd who keeps a goat in his yard, the neighbors’ exotic appearances and easy familiarity leave Gwen unnerved and standoffish. Gwen’s problem is the very set of neighborly values in which she is now immersed. “It wasn’t a bad neighborhood. It was just that everybody wanted to be your friend,” she laments; “I was New England reared, and in New England we liked our privacy.” But when, in the final act, Gwen suddenly takes ill with appendicitis, the suspiciously foreign neighbors rush her to the hospital, care for her children, and organize a welcome party upon her return. This display of impeccable neighborly virtues spurs Gwen to realize, “If it didn’t begin with us, in our everyday relationships with our Mrs. Petrovichs, Pete Balsens and Mr. Stephanos, it would never take root at all—the one peaceful world we wanted would never be anything but a dream.” The leap from Gwen’s appreciation of Mrs. Petrovich and Pete Balsen on Center Street to mutual understanding in the global arena precisely epitomizes 1940s tropes of neighborhood as surrogate for the world. These sentiments come into focus in a short closing scene, in which Gwen’s husband receives a long-awaited offer of an apartment in a far-off 42

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upscale neighborhood. Now, Gwen will have none of it; she insists that the family “stay here among good friends,” where her children can learn “to be less shy of foreign names and less conscious of accents than I was.” But, wait: Less conscious of foreign accents? Throughout the script, stage directions indicate that Mrs. Petrovich speaks with “no accent,” that Pete Balsen and Mr. Stephano speak with “no accent”—the episode’s very title, after all, is “Story without Accents.” Though the local city community initially seems a space of colorful difference, it emerges finally as merely a milestone along the road to complete cultural absorption, rather than—as DuBois had preached—a space where differences themselves, when properly managed, could give rise to neighborly intimacy. Like many of his contemporaries, Hazam never successfully navigates the conflicting currents pulling toward either neighborhood assimilation or multiplicity as desired ends, a divergence lurking in many of the fictional renderings of neighborhood “feeling” in the 1940s.60 All of these texts, even if faintly, bear the imprint of the class politics of the Depression years. Each seeks to invent an expanded “Americanism” defined by local interactions on working- class city streetscapes. Here, though, ethnic markers substitute for indications of a shared class identity, and the quest for shop-floor solidarity is displaced by visions of a block-level neighborly cohesion.61 Ironically, however, with their fi xation on questions of religious difference, European nationality, and cultural assimilation, such works bypass or ignore the era’s most salient form of urban division: the dramatically hardening racial lines of the 1940s industrial city. Even as various progressive writers promoted neighborhood unity as the most promising route toward a broader intergroup comity, many white city residents were forging a different kind of unity. Not only were opponents of racial integration forming new homeowners’ associations and block clubs at an unprecedented pace, but, as historians Thomas Sugrue, John McGreevy, and others have established, these groups most frequently mobilized against black “invasion” based on a shared whiteness rather than shared European national origins.62 To racial liberals of the 1950s, faced with the violent consequences of that “unity,” the previous decade’s romantic narratives of neighborhood solidarity would seem increasingly naïve.

Mediating Neighborhood Visions in Street Scene Measured against the contradictory depictions of the working- class, ethnic-accented neighborhood that emerged during the war and its im43

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mediate aftermath, the January 1947 Broadway premiere of the musical drama Street Scene stands as more than simply another opening of another show. With its compelling sketch of the pleasures and pains of blue- collar neighborhood life in the industrial metropolis, the production reflected the Popular Front political sensibilities of its co- creators: Elmer Rice, Langston Hughes, and Kurt Weill. At the same time, more visibly than other contemporary works, it embodied the difficulties in depicting the city block as a source of unity rather than division, crosscommunity solidarity rather than particularist insularity. Cultural scholar Michael Denning ascribes the eventual decline of the Popular Front musical-theater tradition partly to its “inability to resolve formally and musically its central antinomy: the relation between African American musics, particularly jazz, and the operatic tradition.”63 Street Scene in its own way exemplified that divergence. In this case, however, those aesthetic dilemmas are linked with incongruities in the representation of urban space. Hovering uncertainly between celebration and social critique, between commercial entertainment and high-art aestheticism, its equivocal stance registered a broader shift in public discourse over the older neighborhood’s place in metropolitan life. Here, the decade’s often-mismatched constructions of neighborhood meanings were placed on display in a uniquely self- conscious fashion, as the creators struggled to merge their own competing visions. Charting out his lyrics for the show, the poet Langston Hughes attempted to balance rival agendas from his two artistic collaborators. Elmer Rice, the distinguished playwright and committed utopian socialist, vehemently insisted that his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1929 play by the same name—the basis for the musical—remain virtually unchanged: a sharp critique of urban working-class deprivation, conveyed via a naturalistic journey through a night and a day in a grim tenement district.64 But Kurt Weill, the modernist German composer who had fled the Nazi regime before taking up American citizenship, aimed to use Rice’s original play much more loosely, as scaffold for an ambitious new “Broadway opera” genre, a hybrid form melding American jazz, folk, and popular styles with compositional practices of European opera. This dispute, though explicitly centered on aesthetics, played out in the staging of the neighborhood itself, contributing to the ambivalent tone of the work as a whole. As a starting place, the musical version retained the gritty setting of the Rice original— a street fronted by a dilapidated apartment house in “a mean quarter of New York”— and

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this dismal scene was “right down my alley,” as Hughes explained in the Chicago Defender, since “I have lived in plenty of tenements myself.”65 But while Hughes cited as model the poverty and gloom of tenement life, his early conceptualization of the show’s streetscape moved in a dramatically different direction. Among voluminous drafts, he composed one short verse that, although eventually set aside, both anticipated and epitomized the show’s more idealistic neighborhood vision. Dubbing the street “the heart of a history book,” the song text festively elaborated on the humble setting as “the whole world in one block, from the corner store to the corner bar.”66 Veering away from the bleakly deterministic landscape of Rice’s 1929 play, Hughes’s early lyrical summation cheerfully foregrounded the street’s blue- collar miscellany of nationalities, races, and creeds—“the whole world in one block”—while setting the small-scale city community at the heart of the nation’s historical narrative. With this spirit, the production seemed to capture some of the antifascist energy of the war years. As Hughes gleefully predicted before a subsequent German staging in Düsseldorf, Street Scene—with its black and Jewish co- creators and its distinctively multicultural setting—would undoubtedly leave “some old Nazis . . . turning over in their graves.”67 The 1947 production took in only disappointing box office receipts: competition from the hit musicals Finian’s Rainbow and Brigadoon chased it from Broadway after a mere 148 bows.68 Nonetheless, Street Scene stands among the most telling and powerful urban “performances” of the decade, one that seemed translatable far beyond its Manhattan setting. For although New York critics narrowly embraced the work as a paean to their own particular city, it functioned in a much more general way as a meditation on urban neighborhood life at midcentury, brimming with little incidents, as a Cincinnati journalist insisted, that “could happen in any large city east of the Mississippi River.”69 The show assembled an outsized cast of sixty actors to evoke the workaday bustle of its polyglot streetscape— a “shabby warren,” as the New York Daily News put it, “into which are crowded the races, the lovers, the haters and the big and little events of city life” (fig. 2).70 In the course of the darkly melodramatic plot, Anna Maurrant, an unhappy housewife, carries on a barely concealed affair with a local bill collector. At the same time, her daughter, Rose, embarks on a star- crossed romance with Sam Kaplan, a poetic Jewish law student from the apartment house. In a sensational conclusion, Anna’s alcoholic, bigoted husband bursts in on her extramarital tryst and shoots his wife and her

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Figure 2 An ensemble number from Street Scene during the show’s 1947 Broadway run. (Vandamm Studio/© The New York Public Library)

lover to death. Notably, however, these carefully interwoven plotlines often feel nearly extraneous; many of the most memorable musical sequences serve instead simply to dramatize the routine life of the street corner. Through Weill’s broad palette of vernacular styles, suggests musicologist Stephen Hinton, the neighborhood “finds an analogue for its ethnic diversity in its musical diversity.”71 Meanwhile, in a staging that pulsed, as one reviewer enthused, with “earthy detail, gay or sad to the ear,” neighbors exchange formulaic complaints over the summer heat, tipsy young lovers jitterbug along the sidewalk, sharp-tongued gossips crane out of windows, and an expectant couple frets over the arrival of their first child.72 Amid a frenetic flow of milkmen and delivery boys, schoolchildren and dog walkers, tramps and bullies, the street is animated by the chatter of time-passing debates in which everyone feels entitled to weigh in: Which nationality’s mothers raise children best? Capitalism or socialism? Did Columbus or Leif Ericson discover America? In fact, this elevation of the everyday was so pronounced as to draw sardonic barbs during the Philadelphia previews. As a local reviewer sarcastically opined, Weill’s orchestration was “grotesquely disproportionate”: one neighbor lady “works up quite a warble because

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she is going to cook a chicken,” while the commonplace ice cream cone serves as topic for “quite a concerted operatic episode.”73 The problem that critics couldn’t quite identify rests in part on the authors’ effort to represent the vitality, solidarity, and agency of urban working- class life without erasing the inhabitants’ dire economic struggles— or, as Weill put it, “to find the inherent poetry in these people and to blend my music with the stark realism of the play.”74 All the while, the outlines of Rice’s original script underlay the fi nished musical, foregrounding the day-to- day lives of an oppressed proletariat excluded from the frothy affluence of the 1920s. In that older version, the neighborhood had seemed primarily a space of misery and monotony: one “as gauntly impersonal as vital statistics,” in a contemporary critic’s words, “merely a place where there are people and births, and marriages and deaths forever in endless succession.”75 After an early run-through, Weill had insisted that “all the political parts of the [1929] script sounded quite outdated  .  .  . and should definitely come out.”76 But the updated version contained its own sort of politics, one expressed through a kind of celebratory realism in which the minor details of working- class neighborhood life are transformed into colorful ornaments on the nation’s democratic tree, offering an uplifting counterpoint to the squalid urban setting. In this way, the 1947 musical demonstrates a remarkably bifurcated sensibility— one apparent both in Weill’s sometimes startling interweaving of sonorous operatic passages with blues and Tin Pan Alley allusions, and also in the competition between Rice’s central plot and the lighthearted grab bag of trivial incidents that surround it. Indeed, two entirely separate dramas seem to emerge: one a tragic, naturalistic urban narrative about adultery, alcoholism, envy, and homicide, all driven by poverty and other environmental factors; the other a festive melting-pot pageant, replete with anthems extolling the camaraderie and pleasures of local sidewalk life. Every scene that points toward an escape from the neighborhood as desired end is juxtaposed with a gesture in the opposite direction. On one hand, Sam’s signature aria, “Lonely House,” laments anonymity and isolation in the big city; Anna sings of the wrenching disappointments of growing up on streets “dark with mis’ry and distress”; and Sam fruitlessly begs Rose to come away with him to “build a house to shelter us / beneath a happier sky.” On the other hand, the trammeled hopes and the dreams of flight in these arias and duets are consistently countered by zestful ensemble numbers that reinforce the communal joys of neighborhood living: proclaiming

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the delights of corner- drugstore meals and ice cream treats (“Hallelujah and Hosanna / when it comes to banana!”); flaunting the frivolity of the children’s street games, in which threadbare local youngsters wickedly parody the pretensions of snooty debutantes and industrial magnates; and expressing shared pride at the “good news and glory” brought home by the block’s recent high-school graduates.77 Throughout, the drama oscillates between intimations of a “happier sky” beyond the shabby neighborhood and affi rmations of the block’s familiar confines as the epitome of contentment. Both 1940s reviewers and present- day scholars, uncomfortable with this apparent incongruity, have consistently privileged one of these aspects over the other. While a New York Post columnist grumbled that only the “bright and delightful” neighborhood ensemble numbers seemed successful, recent academic critics generally take the opposite view.78 For historian Larry Stempel, the Broadway-style “melting-pot episodes” serve mainly as distracting disruptions to the momentum of the main operatic tragedy, while musicologist Ronald Taylor argues that the wide-ranging variety of “street scenes” works to “trivialise the events of the unfurling drama.”79 But, whether or not this dual nature is an artistic flaw, the tensions embedded in the drama encapsulate a broader range of social ambivalences over working- class city life at midcentury. The show’s makeshift construction extends not just to the partial elision of Rice’s depiction of urban labor, but also to the attempt to negotiate competing visions of the working- class tenement neighborhood as either doorway or dead end, nursery or necropolis. These divergent strands left contemporary critics split not only over the work’s aesthetic unity but also over whether the down-at-the-heels setting signified the overall rottenness of American city life or, rather, the miniature beauties and democratic potential inherent in the nation’s neighborhood spaces. A Washington Evening Star reviewer, adopting the first interpretation, saw in Street Scene mainly a “malignance expressed in gossip, the pathetic, ironic games of the children, racial and religious bickerings, and the crushing force of poverty.”80 A far more exuberant reading, however, emerged from liberal intellectuals such as John Lovell Jr., the Howard University literary scholar. “The Stage Teaches Democracy,” declared Lovell in a lavishly illustrated cover story for The Crisis, the NAACP’s flagship publication. In his estimation, the artists had crafted a brilliant example of how “the basic understandings of the American melting pot as a force for democracy are most effectively displayed.” Indeed, their most significant accom-

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plishment, Lovell contended, was a demonstration that “the particular hammer under which all these people live daily molds them into characters a great deal more alike than different. Thus democracy is shown in the fruitful sharing of ordinary, everyday experiences of pleasure, pain, and struggle, which foolish discriminations try to prevent.”81 If democracy, as one wartime home- defense handbook had affirmed, was not just a “form of government” but also a “feeling in the mind and heart,” then artistic summations of that “feeling” such as Street Scene seemed to hold a definite political, as well as aesthetic, significance— one expressed through a rendering of an American urban pluralism grounded in the most local of residential spaces.82 Yet if Lovell sounds oddly sanguine about the “particular hammer” under which the tenement dwellers live, then the dark humor of the final ensemble— a reprise of the opening number, “Ain’t It Awful, the Heat”— complicates his easy optimism. Now, the sensational violence of the past day simply fades from sight as listless neighbors launch anew into their standard complaints over blistering temperatures, conveying “the feeling,” as Hughes instructed the production team, “of all the crowded life of the street carrying on as usual.”83 Performed amid the tumult of postwar reconversion and urban social conflict, Street Scene positions the city neighborhood as the primary source of stability, ultimately structured not by upheaval but by familiar rhythms and cyclic repetitions. Here, however, stability and timelessness can just as easily convey suffocation, numbing monotony, and brutality ignored or forgotten. In this sense, the Street Scene collaboration stood simultaneously as one of the last artistic landmarks of a Popular Front communitarian neighborhood vision, and as harbinger of a new political moment in which the working- class city neighborhood would once again be portrayed as an entrapping and backward-looking space.

“Back Home” was the title of Herbert Clyde Lewis’s 1943 essay documenting his return to his boyhood neighborhood. “It was growing dark as I left,” Lewis narrated in closing. “Men returning from work were entering their houses, and some kids were playing their final game of ball against the curbstone. I could almost hear the distant booming of guns, the desperate commands of soldiers, and the bewildered cries of women and children on the road. But I was not afraid for my old neighborhood. I knew it would withstand the hardest blow of the enemy, and grow stronger in the years to come.”84 The saccharine conclu-

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sion seems designed to reassure, but Lewis’s optimistic declarations of the old neighborhood’s stability and strength failed to anticipate the wrenching urban changes of the decades just ahead. By the mid-1950s, the most prominent chroniclers of the old ethnic neighborhood—from Alfred Kazin to Gertrude Berg to Gian Carlo Menotti—would speak instead in a language of self- doubt and reluctant nostalgia. Meanwhile, notes scholar Lynn Spigel, it was not the city neighborhood, but rather postwar suburban culture, that offered a new discursive framework “through which the family could mediate the contradictory impulses for a private haven on the one hand, and community participation on the other.”85 Artistic depictions of the local urban community such as Street Scene took shape at a time when concepts of the neighborhood’s social functions were in flux, and when the faint outlines of a radically altered postwar city were just coming into view—a “new” place that would be dominated in the popular imagination on the one hand by forecasts of an exhilarating future ushered in by innovative technocratic planning expertise, and on the other by images of cascading blight, suburban exodus, and postindustrial decline. Even as wartime renderings of the local city community promulgated a theory of imagined citizenship—neighborhood as synecdoche for the nation, and interpersonal relationships as the primary vehicle for democratic inclusion—they submerged deeper structural problems of class and race. As upwardly mobile white ethnics and laborers departed the city in the war’s wake, leaving behind increasingly concentrated poverty and mounting urban problems, the discursive cultural cosmopolitanism that had grounded this neighborhood vision was revealed as an insufficient answer to conditions of unequal access to economic and political power.

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Communities under Glass: The Neighborhood Unit Plan and Postwar Privatization “One great task after the war will be the rebuilding of our cities and the creation of new communities,” declared Clarence Stein, the eminent architect and longtime garden- cities proponent, in a May 1944 speech. And for this, he continued, the “basic unit” must be the small, planned residential community, a place “where neighborliness and democracy may flower.” Composing Stein’s audience were leaders of the National Federation of Settlements, assembled in Cleveland for their annual convention, and the architect sought here to persuade his listeners that their own abiding interests in the social dynamics of neighborhood life were powerfully linked to the physical form that the postwar metropolis would take. After sketching a gloomy portrait of dissolving community bonds in the contemporary city, where rampant growth had erased local cohesion, Stein offered the tools of planning and design as instruments uniquely capable of rejuvenating those ties. Imagining replanned communities “bound together by common interests and activities as was the New England Colonial village,” Stein insisted that “the only sound democracy is face-to-face democracy.”1 Across the war years, progressive writers and educators had idealistically touted the city neighborhood as ground51

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work for a more democratic national life. But this primarily social enthusiasm was matched during the 1940s by an upsurge of popular interest in the physical characteristics of neighborhood existence—in the arrangement of streets, houses, and community facilities rather than the unquantifiable interactions of local neighborhood groups. While Herbert Clyde Lewis, Rachel Davis DuBois, Sidney Meller, and others had seen in the densely packed neighborhoods of the old industrial city a potential generator for national unity and cross-group cooperation, a growing collection of journalists, educators, planners, and social scientists debated community planning concepts that, through alterations in the built environment, might stimulate more desirable modes of human interaction. These planning discussions, too, relied on sociological diagnoses of the breakdown of metropolitan community life. Here, though, commentators pointed to solutions rooted primarily in shrewd manipulation of the physical elements rather than in spiritual awakening or interethnic appreciation. The local planning axioms that took hold most powerfully in the 1940s were, by and large, variations on a much older concept: the neighborhood-unit plan, which had been influentially outlined by the progressive planner Clarence Arthur Perry.2 Though Perry’s scheme dated back to the 1920s, the World War II years and their aftermath witnessed a remarkable upsurge in public zeal for the plan’s central guidelines. In exhibitions, magazine features, radio plays, and pamphlet literature, 1940s commentators hailed Perry’s neighborhoodunit principles as a potent method for boosting a seemingly flagging community spirit. This apparent consensus, however, masked a series of conflicts over the plan’s ultimate aims and potential. In seeking to energize and enrich daily metropolitan life, for instance, proponents rejected many of the characteristics that had long defined the modern urban experience: “the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuities in the grasp of a single glance,” to quote Georg Simmel’s famous phrase.3 And though some liberal supporters believed the model could allow for “experiments of an advanced nature” in cross- class and interracial mixing, Perry’s scheme had originally been crafted, in part, to overcome the enervating “incongenialities” of urban racial heterogeneity.4 Thus, even as the plan’s midcentury popularizers constructed a composite story about what made for the “good” neighborhood, the contending claims lodged within that story signaled a larger uneasiness over the proper function of neighborhood attachments in the war’s wake.

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The Neighborhood Unit and the “Rich Associational Life” Though new community planning concepts had won broad approval in specialist circles during the interwar period, by the early 1940s these ideas had begun to attract a more widespread public attention. For many Americans, the first exposure to such proposals came through an exhibit assembled by New York’s Museum of Modern Art: Look at Your Neighborhood, opening in March 1944. Under the influence of MoMA’s Philip Johnson, a champion of European modernism, the museum’s architecture and design department over the preceding decade had become a leading generator for architectural debate in the United States. This display, however, dealt not with the sleek geometrical forms of the International Style, nor with the abstract urban dynamism on view in paintings such as Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, but rather with the seemingly modest guidelines of the neighborhood-unit concept in city planning. Clarence Stein, serving as an outside consultant for the exhibit, predicted that the “city of the future” would be a “city of neighborhoods.”5 And, to advance that dream, MoMA staff and collaborators aimed here to appeal to the “average layman,” hoping to fire the aspirations of ordinary citizens for reshaping their own environments.6 Upon entry, gallery visitors found themselves confronted with a sharp indictment of American towns and cities: these had become “obsolete” and “undemocratic,” the exhibit explained, containing “masses of people yet little real neighborliness.” Fortunately, this malady could be remedied through physical planning focused on the neighborhood level. With photos and graphics, twelve oversized panels illustrated the essential ingredients of a “good neighborhood,” while offering specifications for the retrofitting of older districts and the construction of new ones (fig. 3). Conceived as intact units, these areas would be selfcontained, clearly demarcated communities for 1,000 to 1,500 families, defined by a central cluster of institutions such as a community center and an elementary school. Through streets would be eliminated and, on the edges, strong physical boundaries established. With daily amenities placed close to hand, these districts would restore a “human scale” to living, thereby unleashing a vigorous local esprit de corps. “In such neighborhoods,” audiences learned, “people will want to work together to solve their mutual problems,” and this cooperation would swiftly transform “passive taxpayers into alert citizens conscious of

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Figure 3 Display panel from the 1944 MoMA exhibit Look at Your Neighborhood. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

their responsibilities in a democratic society.” Combining can- do optimism with an occasionally hectoring tone, the exhibit placed the onus for change squarely on the shoulders of its viewers: “planning begins with you, your family, your neighborhood.”7 In New York, interpreters of the exhibit’s significance pointed to physical planning’s vast power to alter day-to- day social relations for the better. At the MoMA preview ceremony, longtime settlement leader Mary Simkhovitch dubbed the neighborhood a “microcosm of the larger world we hope to live in,” while characterizing the display’s design principles as a blow for order and reason against a wider chaos.8 At the same time, curators had targeted a much broader audience. With Look at Your Neighborhood, the museum for the first time had designed an exhibition for mass production and sale to civic bodies around the country— a venture requiring hard-won exemptions from wartime materials rationing.9 Within a year, copies had been purchased or rented by hundreds of institutions across North America. Through presentations by libraries and churches, parent-teacher groups and merchant associations, Look at Your Neighborhood injected the neighborhood-unit principles into debates in regions far removed from the rarefied planning circles of the coastal metropolises.10 From Bangor, Maine, whose 54

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newspaper commended the exhibit’s aim to make cities “a collection of neighborhoods where people may know each other,” to Auburn, California, where a reviewer pronounced that “neighborhoods so planned encourage their citizens to take a real part in community activities,” hometown publications strongly endorsed the thesis that architectural and planning principles had the power to engender new forms of local sociability.11 In its wide-ranging appeal, the project reflected a broader wartime popular fascination with neighborhood planning.12 But despite the patina of newness with which MoMA staffers brushed the show, the approaches it advocated had in fact been formulated many years earlier. Stein, notably, had incorporated a version into his pioneering late-1920s planned community of Radburn, New Jersey; and for this he had leaned heavily on the neighborhood-unit concept prescribed and popularized by his colleague, Clarence Perry, during the interwar years.13 An essential hinge between the settlement movement’s enthusiasm for a public local social life and post–World War II discourses around suburbanization and privacy, Perry’s planning ideas went on to play a significant role in midcentury debates over the neighborhood’s social function. The neighborhood-unit concept, in its earliest iterations, had flowed out of a progressive reaction against the City Beautiful movement’s grandiose monumentalism and its apparent inattention to the dynamics of local community life.14 At the same time, Perry’s own finished product was the work of an intellectual magpie. As planning historians have meticulously chronicled, Perry borrowed design elements from the English garden- city tradition, social commitments left over from the Progressive- era community- center movement, and various early century sociological theories about the primary group’s integrative role in urban life.15 The resulting model first came to wide attention in a 1929 monograph produced as part of the enormous, multivolume Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs. Over the course of the 1920s, the Russell Sage Foundation had underwritten the Regional Plan project to the tune of well over a million dollars, and Perry, a sociologist in the foundation’s recreation department, had been tasked with developing a framework for neighborhood design within a new, rationally planned and regionally oriented metropolitan area.16 Perry’s background made him a natural choice. His passion for neighborhood life had taken flight during earlier research on local community centers of the 1910s, as well as through his informal membership in the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), a loose-knit collection of planners and 55

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intellectuals that, in one historian’s words, “sought to replace the existing centralized and profit- oriented metropolitan society with a decentralized and more socialized one made up of environmentally balanced regions.”17 At first, Perry had expected to conduct a wide-ranging survey. Upon further reflection, he discovered himself so fond of his own neighborhood—Forest Hills Gardens in New York’s Queens borough—that he simply took it as a prototype, deciding to “analyze the factors responsible for its success and reduce them to general principles.”18 A model suburb for commuters, funded by the Sage Foundation, the development had been laid out in 1909 by America’s leading landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Its garden- city ambience, along with the intimate sense of scale and enclosure, supplied inspiration for Perry’s generic framework.19 With his final report in 1929, the product of six years of dedicated thought, Perry delivered comprehensive instructions for retooling older city districts or constructing new neighborhoods, many of them aimed at reproducing the sociability and solidarity of village life.20 Valuing careful order, he deplored the “promiscuousness” of the expanding urban peripheries, where speculation and parcel-byparcel development resulted in indiscriminate clutters of row houses, apartment buildings, and single-family homes. The uniformity imposed through his neighborhood-unit principles, by way of contrast, would allow residents to perceive their neighborhood as “a distinct entity which has its own peculiar qualities and needs.”21 In its basics, the document outlined in more elaborate fashion the recommendations that the MoMA’s Look at Your Neighborhood would gloss fifteen years later. Guidelines fell under six broad categories: size, boundaries, open spaces, institution sites, local shops, and internal street system. Most fundamental, readers learned, was the socially and geographically central place of the elementary school: an ideal neighborhood ought to be designed principally for family life, taking the school as its “mini- capitol.” Under this schema, larger traffic arteries defined the exterior borders, with access to the usually winding internal street network limited to a handful of entrances. Shopping facilities were essential, though Perry carefully confined these to perimeter clusters, while scattering parks throughout (fig. 4). And, crucially, realestate values and ongoing adherence to the plan’s underlying spirit must be actively policed by a residents’ association and restrictive covenants on land use. In his quest to enhance neighborhood identity via physical layout, Perry aimed to make his units self- contained and self-sufficient, with common institutions engendering a psycho56

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Figure 4 “Neighborhood- Unit Principles,” a diagram from Clarence Arthur Perry’s 1929 monograph, “The Neighborhood Unit: A Scheme of Arrangement for the Family- Life Community.” (Courtesy Regional Plan Association)

logical investment by inhabitants. Then, presumably, neighbors would act through their homeowners’ association to remedy local problems rather than skipping to greener pastures at the first sign of decay.22 The Sage-backed Regional Plan drew widespread praise upon its release. Even the distinguished urban critic and RPAA member Lewis Mumford, who savaged the overall scheme as a capitulation to the “prejudices of the existing financial rulers,” generally approved of 57

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the neighborhood-unit contribution.23 Meanwhile, Perry continued to proselytize in subsequent writings and particularly in a 1939 book, Housing for the Machine Age, his most concerted effort to enlist broader public opinion. In his 1929 Regional Plan monograph and his 1939 book alike, Perry sought to convince readers that the “rich associational life” produced through his six design elements would have far-reaching effects in both the political and the social realms.24 With regard to political affairs, the motivation behind the proposals grew nearly as much from the concerns of early century municipal reformers as from those of the newer wave of regional planners. Worrying at length about the effects of urban isolation on the capacity for selfrule, Perry promoted the neighborhood unit as a “moulder of human conduct,” one that could combat the “civic and moral consequences” of urban disorganization. For instance, asked Perry, how could citizens vote intelligently when they must trust campaign literature and newspapers, rather than evaluating candidates based on their hard-won reputations among their neighbors? And how could social-reform causes, such as women’s suffrage, gather momentum when cities were rent by “vertical cleavages,” whereby citizens associated “not with their neighbors but mainly with men of their own calling, their own faith or their own ‘class’”? Under such circumstances, embryonic social movements were easily discredited as mere special-interest campaigns—as “silkstocking,” “capitalist,” or “labor.” A city without neighborhood identification effectively sidelined reform efforts, leaving the venal political machine unchecked and unchallenged. In distinction, Perry pointed to the formation of public opinion in village life. If such rich interpersonal networks could be revived in the metropolis, residents “would obtain experience and knowledge which are vital to a healthy civic and political life.”25 Even more important, though, were the neighborhood’s basic socializing functions. For his 1929 study, Perry had drawn from formative academic texts in social organization, particularly the early century sociology of Charles Horton Cooley, which emphasized the primary group’s importance to psychic well-being and moral order.26 Touching on the theme of urban atomization beloved by interwar sociologists, Perry pointed to city neighborhoods rent by “unbridged chasms,” while lamenting the fate of big- city dwellers who spent their days in “remote offices” and their evenings “in the isolation of their own family circles.”27 Imagining the planned neighborhood unit as a powerful antidote, Perry by the late 1930s was lacing his descriptions ever more thoroughly with tender parables that often took the small village 58

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as their referent. For example, in criticizing congested city districts as “hostile to neighborly life,” Perry fondly conjured up virtually panoptic single-family neighborhoods where residents knew “the day and hour when the new family puts out its wash, how often the postman calls, what time the husband goes to work, how often a fire is built in the front room, who the callers are, the children’s actions while at play, the way they are dressed for school, the hour the family retires,” and so forth. He envisioned central neighborhood squares, functioning as “a visible sign of unity,” where on the Fourth of July “the Flag will be raised, the Declaration of Independence will be recited, and the citizenry urged to patriotic deeds.” And he contentedly ticked off the range of organizations that, given proper physical environs, might spring into life: choral societies and Girl Scout troops, drama companies and men’s clubs, craft circles and homeowners’ associations.28 In Perry’s almost rustic neighborhood vision, even a nod to distinctively urban qualities such as hurly-burly streetscapes, urbane sophistication, or cosmopolitan heterogeneity—long viewed as integral to at least one level of city life—is nowhere to be found. Though Perry died in 1944, over the course of the 1940s and 1950s his core precepts exerted a tremendous influence across the planning professions. To many midcentury planning theorists, the metropolis was best imagined as a kind of organism, with individual neighborhoods functioning as its constitutive cells. Thus, it followed, the larger metropolitan tissue should be built up from these fundamental elements, rather than simply expanding outward or upward in a process of accretion.29 And Perry’s principles—as tweaked, amended, abridged, or appropriated by various of his peers—offered an accessible generic framework for constructing those basic cells. By the mid-1940s, the consensus seemed overwhelming: neighborhood-unit development could spur “friendliness and citizen participation,” suggested MIT planning professor Frederick Adams; it might restore “a quality of life that many small towns have kept but most large ones have lost,” declared planner Tracy Augur; it would position social relations “as creative factors in ordinary living,” asserted Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius.30 Propelling the concept’s ascent was its widespread adoption by major trade journals and standards manuals for architects, planners, health officials, engineers, and mortgage lenders—each conferring an imprimatur of expert backing.31 By 1969, a survey of 250 American planners would show almost 80 percent applying the principles in their work; by the mid-1980s, two planning scholars could declare that it had become so “ubiquitous, both in the United States and abroad,” that it had “no 59

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rivals or even challengers.”32 Lifted from their original context in the 1929 Regional Plan, Perry’s ideas filtered in one shape or another into developments as divergent as the New Deal greenbelt communities and mass-produced suburbs of the Levittown mold.33 In theory, as Perry and likeminded colleagues insisted, such neighborhood units could be grafted into the already developed urban terrain. The scheme was far easier to carry out in peripheral greenfields, however, where new residential tracts were built from scratch. And with the postwar suburban housing boom, an opportunity had finally arrived for developers to put elements of the concept to use on a large-scale basis. Even so, during the 1940s numerous older cities also looked to its principles, seeing there a way to overlay a greater sense of physical order and social cohesion onto their landscapes. In 1945, for example, the Chicago Plan Commission unveiled a proposal to divide the city into 559 neighborhoods, each centering on an elementary school and functioning as a self- contained unit—thereby encouraging residents “to take a more active part in neighborhood and community affairs.” That same year, the Detroit City Plan Commission recommended developing a diffuse network of public-service centers, which would form neighborhood “nuclei for social organization.”34 To various civic leaders, establishing well- defined neighborhood units in urban core areas seemed one viable way to compete with suburbia’s proliferating subdivisions. As New York State housing commissioner Herman Stichman maintained in 1953, New York City could slow suburban flight only by retooling its “disorganized maelstrom” through a comprehensive scheme for “neighborhood living.”35 Undergirding all such exhortations was the belief that, in one contemporary planning analyst’s words, “the neighborhood has all but disappeared in urban America.”36 To the suburban community-builder and the municipal planner alike, then, the neighborhood-unit model functioned as a visible form of urban critique: its manufactured forms of enclosure, legibility, self- containment, and officially designated centers and boundaries pointed up the shortcomings of the midcentury city’s allegedly hostile and alienating social environment. At the core of much of the rhetoric and action was the faith that those most rationalistic of endeavors— scientific management, engineering, technical planning— could be harnessed to generate unquantifiable human essences such as neighborly affection and sympathy. As Perry himself had contended in 1939, while in older districts any buds of community life sprouted only through ceaseless nourishment by tenacious residents, under his scheme “a rich community life will spring up from 60

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deep roots in the physical development plan.” As the 1940s progressed, a strengthening undercurrent of such physical- determinist convictions would run beneath discussions of the concept’s social potential.37

Preachers and Proselytizers In 1948, one heterodox planning critic pointed derisively to “the rising tide of ‘neighborhood’ faddists.”38 The observation was not without foundation. Whether the unit scheme was projected for new or old communities, its tantalizing attraction quickly transformed its elements into popular commonplaces. The passage from the 1930s to the 1940s, however, saw a marked shift in tone among the expanding troop of promoters.39 First, many moved from a narrow focus on winning over policymakers, developers, and design professionals, and now took their case directly to the public. Enthusiasts pitched feature stories to mass-market periodicals such as Better Homes and Gardens and Parents’ Magazine, while providing instructions on how citizens could devise the changes themselves and persuade officials to implement them. Neighborhoodplanning model sets were manufactured for educational use in New York City schoolrooms. Exhibits, radio synopses, and laypersons’ handbooks abounded, bearing names such as “Now Let’s Plan the Neighborhood,” “Let’s Postwar Plan Our Communities,” and “You and Your Neighborhood.” In a more sensational touch, several emphasized the mix of bucolic sanctuary and future- oriented design through diagrams complete with helicopter fields, so fathers of tomorrow could swoop over traffic to catch dinner before it got cold.40 News outlets eagerly reported on the concept, and here, too, it appeared a cure-all for urban anomie. “It seems only yesterday that nearly everybody was trying to escape from the home town and the old lady next door and attain impersonality and freedom in the big city,” observed the Washington Post in 1948. “But now a movement is spreading in this country to recapture some of the values of the old-time nosey and meddlesome, but also friendly and helpful, neighborhood.”41 Second, even as advocates reached for a wider audience, many of them adopted the lofty rhetoric of democratic citizenship and international engagement that had so powerfully infused the popular press’s wartime neighborhood homages. During the 1920s, Perry had relied on an older language of progressive municipal reform, situating his plan as a counterforce to the “selfish political machine.”42 But by the 61

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mid-1940s, a number of proponents preached in a more elevated register, proclaiming the concept’s potential for enhancing appreciation of economic and social diversity while fortifying democracy against its ideological foes. In a 1946 radio script for the public-affairs program Beyond Victory, for example, MIT architecture professor Robert Woods Kennedy predicted that its implementation would elevate life from a dismal “cat and dog fight.” “Education, in our American democracy,” Kennedy declared, “comes from rubbing elbows with all sorts and conditions of people—younger and older than you are, richer and poorer, with a white collar if you wear a blue one and vice versa.” Such casual everyday contact, if encouraged through neighborhood-unit planning, would lay a foundation “on which respect for one’s neighbors and on which political responsibility can be built.”43 Along similar lines, the architect James Dahir, publicizing the scheme for the Russell Sage Foundation, linked neighborhood planning to the fate of the nation’s basic political structures. “The absence of the sense of neighborhood or community in modern life poses a serious problem for the preservation of our American democracy,” he warned in 1947; impersonal economic structures and communications media, by isolating citizens, created “mass men in a mass culture— the raw material for a totalitarian society.” While such anxiety over social segmentation and “massification” mirrored Louis Wirth’s 1938 contentions in “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” for Dahir, reinforcing primary ties through the neighborhood-unit plan was a solution ready to hand. Moreover, the process could prove a compelling demonstration to international onlookers of American ideals in action. “Shall we in America be content,” Dahir demanded, “to allow the claim of our detractors that democracy and chaos are interchangeable terms?”44 Perhaps no popular interpreter, however, offered up a more utopian reading of the planned neighborhood’s progressive possibilities than the radio dramatist Louis Hazam. Intermingling brass-tacks instructions with a near-millennial rhetoric, Hazam cast the concept into fictional form with a didactic 1946 radio play, broadcast on his NBC series, Home Is What You Make It. Opening with a clanging alarm clock in a “typical American home,” the episode follows the tribulations faced by a family in a poorly laid- out residential district—from children too rushed to gulp down breakfast because they live so far from school, to a housewife left scrambling to complete her chores due to inaccessible shopping areas, to a climactic incident of teen knife violence that residents attribute to the lack of a community center. Increasingly exasperated by their burdened existence, the neighbors finally join forces 62

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to replan their community. Whether pressuring local officials or constructing new facilities on their own, the characters work themselves through a virtual checklist of neighborhood-unit principles, along the way securing better- designed streets, new parks, and other amenities. Like the 1944 MoMA exhibit, this imaginary quest was intended as a model for audiences. Cities might be “sprawling giants, each a confusion of movement, sounds and odors,” Hazam’s narrator prodded, but “you can do something about it. You and your neighbors, you know its needs best.” And, as in his “Story without Accents” radio play, Hazam ended here by vaulting from the routine particulars of local affairs to something of larger scope. Because America’s hodgepodge of individual communities, when bundled together into a unitary nation-state, formed a powerful entity on the international stage, therefore “what we think and what we do in our communities soon is reflected in world affairs.” Hence, the very process of replanning a neighborhood, with the cooperation and teamwork thus entailed, could instill virtues such as tolerance and fraternity that would then resound through the global arena. “If we do these things, each of us in neighborhoods all over the nation,” exhorted the narrator in a histrionic closing, “we will be laying a foundation for world fellowship that will spread with the winds to the four corners of the earth.”45 In these various instances, the appeals to class (though not racial) diversity, to neighborly bonds as a sort of firewall against totalitarianism, and to American global responsibilities all placed the campaign firmly in line with the idealistic neighborhood rhetoric of the wartime home front. But support for the concept went well beyond the liberal platitudes of a Robert Woods Kennedy or a Louis Hazam. Other proponents took a much different tack, with stern lectures on social control and real- estate values. When Gordon Whitnall, the venerated Los Angeles planning pioneer, endorsed the neighborhood unit’s advantages in 1941, he cast it as a means for keeping local deviance and value- destroying land uses in check. Envisioning the city as a family, and emphasizing a patriarchal urban order, Whitnall explained that “in cities, as in families, there is ever-present the non- conformist, be he innocent and casual, or be he malicious. For such, it is necessary that we prescribe certain rules in order that there shall be tranquility and compatibility in the household.”46 Similarly, American City, a magazine for municipal administrators, commended elements of the plan by arguing that “we can no longer afford to let the other fellow wreck his home lest in the process he wreck ours also.”47 The biggest question mark, though, hung over the issues of race and 63

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ethnicity, homogeneity versus diversity, that increasingly dominated discussions of the prospects for contemporary neighborhood life. Clarence Perry himself had seemed uncomfortable with the topic of race and residence: across hundreds of pages of neighborhood-unit writings, he most often avoided explicit mention of it. But in a handful of references, Perry disclosed severe doubts that racially mixed districts could attain any appreciable degree of local consciousness or solidarity. The very neighborhood qualities that writers such as Rachel Davis DuBois celebrated, Perry saw as formidable obstacles in his quest to stimulate “the face-to-face social condition.”48 In urging that planned units be kept small, for instance, he declared that large city districts would seldom be “sufficiently homogeneous economically, culturally, and racially to make spontaneous association for local purposes practicable.” And in diagnosing the ailments of the day’s “average residential districts,” Perry maintained that, in these environments, “uncongenialities due to differences in race, religion, and customs” rendered voluntary interactions unlikely.49 In fact, W. E. B. DuBois, in his 1940 memoir, recalled once attempting to purchase a home in the original model for the neighborhood-unit plan— Perry’s beloved Forest Hills Gardens in Queens— and being refused by the Sage Foundation “simply and solely because of my dark skin.”50 Similarly, in Perry’s writings, the assumption seemed clear: by one or another mechanism, the small planned neighborhood would dispense with the hindrances of heterogeneity and racial “uncongeniality.” Thus, even as some 1940s promoters spun out high-flown locutions about “political responsibility,” “American democracy,” and “world fellowship,” the scheme could also be pitched as a vehicle for social control, enhanced profits, or race-based exclusion. So dramatically at odds were the benefits predicted by various supporters that one might easily wonder whether they were talking about the same basic concept at all. Indeed, much of the widespread allure stemmed from this very ambiguity. Because neighborhood-unit development promised so many advantages, 1940s exponents could trumpet any of a half- dozen value orientations supposedly implicit in the process. While in some renderings it offered the prospect of a simpler, friendlier life reminiscent of the village, in others it was stressed as a hard-headed strategy to keep property values aloft. In some iterations, it appeared a scientific and efficient approach to postwar housing needs; in others, it seemed an ideal means for imposing informal modes of social control on big- city residents, with new primary-type networks reducing deviancy, crime, divorce, and other urban ills. To a few, the re- establishment of neigh64

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borly bonds would stimulate interactions among people from different stations in life: the cross- class “rubbing of elbows” envisioned by Robert Woods Kennedy. To other partisans, meanwhile, the emphasis on sharp boundaries, homeowners’ associations, and covenants would guarantee the maintenance of white racial homogeneity. By the late 1940s, then, from one end of the political spectrum to the other, it seemed that everyone could find in the plan the good life as he or she saw it.

“An Instrument for Segregation” Accounts of the approach’s benefits may have differed markedly, but they built from common assumptions. To virtually all 1940s proponents, it appeared obvious that the future of the American metropolis, if not that of the nation itself, depended upon a fortified neighborhood consciousness, one brought into being through carefully calculated design within sharply delimited residential zones. Yet, as cheerleaders in all corners amplified their gusto, a small but vocal handful of skeptics emerged in 1947 and 1948. Unlike analysts who sought only to tinker with the plan’s formulae for population, size, or ingredients, these detractors took aim at its most basic presuppositions, calling into question the desirability of such deliberately structured attachments in a modernizing America. In doing so, they opened up a larger debate over the relationship between the neighborhood and the wider body politic.51 Criticisms fell into two overlapping categories. One camp of opponents pilloried the scheme as sheer romantic nonsense, questioning the implication that the relationships of the small village could be transplanted to metropolitan areas, and arguing that people moved to urban settings precisely to escape this sort of bounded provincialism. Another camp claimed that the neighborhood-unit plan not only subverted the traditional urban qualities of variety and diversity but also, in practice, provided powerful tools for reinforcing residential racial segregation. Though voiced in various forums, these censures came together most publicly at a contentious September 1948 panel discussion in Madison, Wisconsin, organized as the kick- off to a major conference on postwar US housing needs.52 There, two of the plan’s most persistent critics, the sociologist Svend Riemer and the city planner Reginald Isaacs, interrogated not only the concept itself but also the basic usefulness of the close-knit neighborhood as a social form structuring met65

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ropolitan American life. Nearly alone among 1940s intellectuals, these figures suggested that the supposed waning of neighborhood ties was, in fact, a development to be cheered rather than mourned. Riemer, a German-born scholar at the University of Wisconsin, thought the plan disturbingly antiurban, and social scientists’ enthusiasm for its attempt to reinscribe the primary group in the modern metropolis merely a consequence of “the cliché of dogmatic assertions about the evil of city life.” As he noted at the Madison conference, the idea had achieved popularity at precisely the moment when the neighborhood “as a social unit progressively loses its function.” With foreign immigration slowed to a trickle, group consciousness within urban ethnic communities was gradually dissolving, a change that Riemer strongly praised. As neighborhood and local ethnic allegiances evaporated, civic and national citizenship would no longer be “confused . . . by intermediary loyalties to small in-groups.” Thus, movements away from older neighborhood lifestyles, with their spatial compactness and internal social coherence, “must be looked upon as signs of final adjustment to the American way of life.” Seen in this light, encouraging archaic sentiments such as neighborhood loyalty was the height of foolishness. Such a plan would lead only to “cultural stagnation,” luring citizens away from broader civic concerns and back into “the parochial haven of neighborhood affairs.”53 But what of the neighborhood’s function as a means of keeping social disorganization in check, a virtue often cited by neighborhoodunit champions? Riemer had nothing but scorn for the theory that the informal controls of small-town, face-to-face relationships might tamp down big- city ills such as divorce, delinquency, alcoholism, and crime. Elaborating his views two years later, Reimer claimed that the social controls that did exist in the small town sprang not from some benevolent moral system enforced through community opinion, but rather from brute economic pressure. There, he wrote, the “high school principal trembles for his job, the minister’s son is afraid to behave like any other boy lest he endanger his father’s position, and the businessman conforms to local prejudice to retain patronage.” Even if it were desirable to reproduce this kind of coerced conformity in the large metropolis, he insisted, it would prove utterly impossible.54 Riemer’s particular critiques likely stemmed, in some measure, from his own political background. A one-time socialist activist in his native Germany, Riemer had married a Jewish woman before publishing a scathing assessment of Nazism, leaving him little choice but to flee the country upon Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.55 Such experiences 66

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under European fascism may partially explain his discomfort with dichotomies contrasting a virtuous countryside with a degraded cosmopolitan city— a favorite narrative of German Völkism—as well as his eagerness to see ethnic loyalties dissipate into a more expansive notion of citizenship. But other critics of the late 1940s shared some of his views, if not his vehemence. Illinois sociologist Richard Dewey, for example, expressed exasperation that his own discipline’s theories on primary groups were being appropriated in crude and cartoonish forms. Obliquely mocking Perry’s 1939 soliloquy on citizens gathering around the neighborhood flagpole for patriotic orations, Dewey disparaged the plan’s “nostalgia for the rural way of life.”56 Similarly, Louis Wirth lectured a convention hall of architects about the “great advantages” of urban anonymity and heterogeneity— qualities that repelled many of the plan’s supporters—while questioning the widespread assumption “that a neighborhood of similarly situated and like-minded persons is the proper basis for the organization of local life in the urban world.”57 If Riemer and a handful of disciplinary confederates found the plan backward-looking or antiurban, a second set of adversaries cast it as merely a camouflaged mechanism for bolstering racial segregation. Joining Riemer on the Madison panel was the Chicago architect and planner Reginald Isaacs, who would soon take up a Harvard endowed chair in regional planning. Through 1948, Isaacs had set off a minor tempest in professional planning circles when he assailed the neighborhood-unit approach in a barrage of essays, using unblinking titles such as “The ‘Neighborhood Unit’ Is an Instrument for Segregation.”58 As Isaacs sardonically remarked at Madison, the “romantic neighborhood concept” had been advertised as bearing “the responsibility for the survival and advancement of democracy.” In reality, though, the plan’s clear- cut borders and local service areas were merely “gerrymandered boundaries” for keeping neighborhoods exclusively white. The neighborhood was “an excellent device” for promoting racerestrictive covenants, he claimed, and fear of minorities had “substituted for a common denominator of neighborhood consciousness.” Moreover, Isaacs noted, close examination revealed that champions of residential segregation relied on the very same emotions that neighborhood-unit proponents sought to stimulate: nostalgia for a mythic countryside, longing for intimate communal bonds, hopes that a neighborhood’s evolution could be tightly managed, and faith in homeowners’ associations and covenants to prevent property depreciation. But, Isaacs insisted, homeowners’ associations “are part and parcel of the smoke-screen around the real objectives of many neighbor67

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hood proponents,” and race-restrictive covenants “are the end product of these associations.”59 The target for Riemer and Isaacs, then, was not merely the mundane particulars of the plan itself: the specifications for size, layout, and so forth. Instead, these two critics trained their fire on the entire concept of neighborhood attachment and consciousness, deeming those sentiments potentially destructive to democratic practice, either by creating “intermediary loyalties” for insular ethnic “in-groups” or by buttressing racial segregation. Rebuttals swiftly followed, from both the left and the right. Among the liberals who leapt to the plan’s defense was the sociologist Judith T. Shuval, a close friend and associate of progressive housing expert Catherine Bauer. Disputing Isaacs’s grim diagnosis, Shuval contended that planned neighborhood units actually offered “one of the few real opportunities for democratic mixing of classes and racial groups.” Though the concept had been abused by developers and the Federal Housing Administration, the neighborhood unit, she hoped, might eventually work as a “laboratory” where “controlled experiments of an advanced nature” in racial and economic integration could be conducted.60 A defense from the opposite pole came from planner Max Wehrly, of the Urban Land Institute. In a caustic published exchange with Isaacs, Wehrly insisted that the plan responded to “a deep-seated human instinct,” while arguing that any resulting segregation simply mirrored a “demand from large segments of the American public, particularly the family.” He asked, “Aren’t the established residents entitled fully as much to choose their neighbors as are newcomers to the neighborhood?” Alongside this blunt defense of segregationist practices, Wehrly also scoffed at the decadent and elitist few who cringed at the plan’s single-minded focus on the nuclear family, dismissing them as a “rather exceptional group” with a penchant for “anonymity, the night lights, or a suite in a swank hostelry.”61 In this rendering, the cosmopolitan and the local, the city and the neighborhood, are cast as irreconcilable foes, just as Svend Riemer had warned. Still, alongside their contemptuous jabs at one another, Isaacs and Wehrly reached one rather peculiar point of agreement. Both declared that the “heterogeneous neighborhood” was a preposterous fantasy—nothing but a “fanciful theory,” as Wehrly put it. The phrase’s two words, they concurred, had entirely contradictory meanings. For Wehrly, though, heterogeneity was the phrase’s offending term, one signaling ill- conceived schemes for injecting diversity into the local social body. For Isaacs, by contrast, it was the neighborhood itself that 68

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needed to fade away, along with the misguided fi xation on “neighborhood consciousness,” in order to achieve more just living arrangements.62 Thus, despite their conspicuous differences on the matter of racial segregation, the two writers found themselves equally unable to imagine cohesive neighborhoods that would combine heterogeneity of population with shared community identity in a kind of localist e pluribus unum.

If the wartime popular press had adopted a sentimentalized vision of neighborhood social relations, then the 1940s enthusiasm for neighborhood-unit planning signaled a determination to manufacture some of those same redeeming qualities in newly built or refurbished communities. Battles over the concept’s merits, however, brought to the surface a latent cultural ambivalence over the close-knit neighborhood’s postwar role. Speaking at the MoMA shortly after the Look at Your Neighborhood exhibit opening, Clarence Stein had expressed hope that neighborhood- oriented planning would summon into existence “a local patriotism” among residents.63 This striking phrase, with its implicit analogy between neighborhood and nation, suggested that Americans might eventually draw from their residential communities the same sense of collective loyalty and purpose that ostensibly united a country then enmeshed in global war. But, as we have seen, critics would call into question the desirability of such a “local patriotism,” warning of xenophobic and narrow-minded districts whose prejudices would only be reinforced through inward-looking planning and design. Over coming years, many of the plan’s most ardent supporters would prove unable to reckon with the changing racial formations and social geography of the postwar metropolis. Thus, even as their favored principles achieved a partial hegemony in planning and development circles, the scheme itself would cease to be held up as either a panacea for social ills or a physical embodiment of an American democratic ethos. Still, across the 1940s, neighborhood-unit advocates had helped to popularize a highly particular set of standards by which a “good” neighborhood could be defined and recognized. In doing so, they also fed the anxieties over urban blight and decline that would increasingly populate neighborhood narratives of the coming decade.

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The Specter of Blight: The Neighborhood under Siege Near the beginning of his 1939 book, Housing for the Machine Age, Clarence Perry offered a parable about how neighborhood blight can set in. A Mr. and Mrs. Scroggins have finally realized their dream of purchasing a modest new house for their growing family. In short order, though, Mr. and Mrs. Contractor move next door. Mr. Contractor erects a shed and pulls trucks through his lot constantly, while Mrs. Contractor decks out her home in garish colors. Soon enough, an apartment building is constructed nearby, where poorly behaved children shatter windows while their parents keep up an earsplitting racket. Beset on all sides by “vermillion red shutters,” “raucous radios,” and “eyes peering down,” the downcast Scrogginses realize they have lost the “enjoyment of their little kingdom.” The story’s moral is that a home is not an island: the Scrogginses’ beloved house stood just as before, but the community around it had been wrecked by unsuitable neighbors and countless inconsiderate acts.1 Perry was only one among a host of commentators attempting to alert Americans to the possibility that their homes, happiness, and illusions of security could be suddenly destroyed. During the century’s middle decades, neighborhood blight became a topic of obsessive concern across wide swaths of the popular media, policy professions, and academia. As Perry’s story hints, blight itself was a pliable concept: the term could stretch to encompass all manner of local phenomena, from a negligent home70

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owner’s lack of property upkeep to black “intrusion” into an all-white community, from ill-mannered neighbors to the opening of a nearby tavern or movie house. Any of these or a plethora of other developments, if not adequately policed and suppressed, seemed capable of dispatching a stable neighborhood into an irreversible spiral of deterioration. Indeed, harbingers of decay could creep into a community “as slowly and stealthily as a thief in the night,” cautioned federal housing official Albert Cole in 1954.2 And blight did not stay neatly contained in the neighborhoods it afflicted. Rather, as one Milwaukee publication explained in 1957, it “crawls like an octopus across a city, reaching out its tentacles silently and sometimes swiftly to strangle a neighborhood before the busy, preoccupied residents are fully aware of what is happening.”3 While wartime narratives of neighborhood solidarity, and even the 1940s debate over neighborhood-unit planning, frequently brimmed over with hope for the future of the small-scale city community, discussions of neighborhood blight were defined instead by their pessimism. Americans, critics claimed, had been lax in their guardianship of their residential spaces. Points of contagion had been established, ever-greater numbers of neighborhoods were experiencing the sneezes and coughs that signaled the first stages of illness—and, worst, too many urbanites remained oblivious to early symptoms. With campaigns, guidebooks, radio programs, and instructional films, civic leaders and analysts sought to awaken city residents to the threats that might be silently snaking through their beloved communities. “Pulling them all down,” ran the caption of a 1946 cartoon in American City that showed a bedraggled property yanking an entire neighborhood over a cliff (fig. 5). Many such warnings aimed to teach residents how to recognize the earliest signs of blight, so they could attack the illness while it remained curable. As The Nation’s Business, a US Chamber of Commerce magazine, explained in 1956, “Sometime in the past ‘Rooms for Rent’ signs began to appear in neighborhoods that were once fine old residences; stoops began to sag and broken windows were repaired with tar paper. When this begins to happen to a street or neighborhood, blight has begun.”4 The same year, Los Angeles Times readers learned that “the individual community eyesore has an unfortunate habit of spreading into a community of eyesores; when this happens, it is too late, and the whole district slides into the ignominious character of a blighted area.”5 Here, the neighborhood becomes a zone of threat, a place where the smallest change in the streetscape is often a sign of incipient decline. 71

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Figure 5 “Pulling Them All Down,” a cartoon printed in American City magazine in February 1946.

Although local improvement associations had long existed as a means for protecting middle- class property values, and the Progressive era had seen a wave of enthusiasm for municipal housekeeping campaigns, the ubiquity of doom-laden blight rhetoric from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s marks this timespan as distinct. Indeed, a quick scan 72

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of mass-market periodicals of the immediate postwar years can make it appear that the popular anxiety over neighborhood decline was switched on with the suddenness of an electrical current. And everywhere, it seemed, renderings of blight’s advances warned of a very specific type of danger: the risk that the seemingly stable middle- class city neighborhood was teetering on the edge of an urban precipice. In popular historical memory, impressions of 1950s debates over urban blight are often dominated by the more spectacular disruptions wrought by federally funded urban renewal: bulldozers flattening city acres, civic centers or luxury towers rising from the rubble, displaced families scattered to the winds. But contemporary prognosticators also fingered as increasingly vulnerable to blight’s malignancies many middle- class neighborhoods that would never face the wrecking ball, and an army of journalists and experts rushed to advise these communities on techniques for warding off decay. While scholars of urban renewal have tended to bypass 1950s campaigns for neighborhood conservation, focusing instead on large-scale slum clearance, recent investigators such as Jon Teaford, Alexander von Hoffman, and Nicholas Bloom have called attention back to another part of the 1950s urbanrenewal saga: the decade’s proliferation of antiblight campaigns that sought to bolster older neighborhoods rather than bury them.6 As each points out, these drives were typically conflicted in political motivation, unsuccessful in practice, and frequently infused with racially discriminatory purposes—but nonetheless, they worked to expand concerns over urban decay to encompass neighborhoods far from the city slums. Popular and academic renderings of blight’s advances worked in concert to form a persuasive story about the city neighborhood’s postwar destiny, one that would largely displace the celebratory descriptive conventions of the war years. This narrative drew much of its intellectual capital from at least two developments. One was the interwar emergence of a body of real- estate theory that claimed to predict the eventual fate of the nation’s urban neighborhoods, no matter how stable each might appear, based on scientific models of the typical neighborhood life cycle. Another was the intensification of a long-running political debate over how the nation’s urban fabric ought to be renewed, pitting advocates for slum clearance and public housing against residential real- estate interests that promoted neighborhood conservation as a response to decay. Even as the neighborhood life- cycle model offered a specific analytical lens for understanding how decline manifested itself, neighborhood conservation advocates devised practices intended to restore communities to health without drastic government 73

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intervention. By the late 1940s, the language and imagery associated with these efforts would flow through an outpouring of popular representations treating the prospects for urban neighborhood life. However, the rhetoric surrounding blight’s threat was neither uniform nor homogeneous. While some groups deployed alarming accounts of infection and contagion in order to promote business-friendly policymaking, other actors worked to re-mold that rhetoric, crafting a language of citizen- directed neighborhood improvement that addressed issues such as racial exclusion and citizenship. One place where this contrast becomes apparent is in the distinctions between two nationally noted mid-1950s antiblight drives: one organized by the corporatedominated American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods, and the other by the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. Both focused public attention on neighborhood decay. But, as a close look indicates, while the former campaign powerfully ratified dominant midcentury theories on blight’s workings, the latter demonstrated how grassroots urban groups could steer such analyses toward a different set of conclusions.

Urban Blight and the Neighborhood Life Cycle The story of neighborhood blight had a vocabulary, a central metaphor, and a narrative arc, but only when it became disentangled from accounts of other urban maladies did it fully take shape. Discussions of neighborhood blight and of city slums oftentimes unfolded in tandem, and popular accounts frequently blurred the distinctions. In actuality, though, these two concepts differed markedly and had their origins in separate historical moments. On the one hand, consternation over slums has been a central feature of urban commentary practically since the dawn of the city. From Horace and Cicero in antiquity to the Mayhews, Riises, and other social investigators of the Victorian era and on to postwar US reformers such as Michael Harrington and James Baldwin, critics have long decried the human suffering inflicted by slum-like living conditions. But while this line of criticism typically concerns itself with the forgotten denizens of impoverished city districts, the concept of blight, on the other hand, is more recent, more particular, and more malleable. The term has its origins in agriculture: as used by farmers, blight once signaled a parasite of mysterious origins, carried invisibly by unwholesome winds, and, eventually, any withering force of unknown cause. The word first 74

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crept into the urban lexicon during the Progressive era, notes historian Colin Gordon, when reformers fought urban disease with a grab bag of weapons, ranging from zoning to prohibition, city-beautiful planning to anticorruption campaigns. Nonetheless, it retained a vague and shifting meaning, repeatedly reworked to fit the imperatives of a variety of policymakers.7 It was only during the 1930s that the terms “slum” and “blight” acquired definitions substantially distinct from one another, as historian Mark Gelfand has explained. Though laypeople often treated them as synonyms, professionals dealing with urban issues gradually began to use the two to designate qualitative differences between forms of urban ill health. Most important among these variances, Gelfand points out, was that slums, in fact, were generally profitable. Property owners spent little on maintenance while overcrowded buildings produced high rents. Blight, in contrast, was most often used to describe a district that was losing its profitability, whether because of physical deterioration, shifts in land uses, changing demographic compositions, or declining population. While slums remained a preoccupation of social reformers, it was blight that most aroused the concerns of civic, realestate, and business leaders, all of whom fretted over ongoing or potential depreciations in property values.8 Thus, while the term “slum” served to describe a current and somewhat static condition, the act of identifying “blight” in a district was as much a prediction of that area’s future as a statement of social fact in the present. For this reason, blight was both a more specific problem than that of urban slums, and also a much broader one, encompassing far greater swaths of the metropolis than the territory occupied by the slum, the skid row, or the “ghetto.” To a broad assortment of midcentury observers, the inching progress of neighborhood blight was every bit as unnerving as the continued existence of poverty-stricken slums. And as the term itself took on a more specific meaning, urban analysts sought to develop more systematized descriptions of how such decay might manifest itself in any given residential community. In that quest, the development of the neighborhood life- cycle model proved a crucial contribution. This body of theory, observes sociologist Kent Schwirian, became one of classical sociology’s most influential frameworks for explaining neighborhood change: it compellingly transformed a biological metaphor into what seemed to be a scientifically derived prognosis for the nation’s middle-aged and older urban neighborhoods.9 The neighborhood life- cycle model is oftentimes associated with the sociologists Edgar Hoover and Raymond Vernon, whose 1959 book, Anatomy of a Metropo75

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lis, famously outlined five stages through which residential neighborhoods tended to evolve. Beginning with newly constructed subdivisions, neighborhoods typically move next into a transition phase of rising density, Hoover and Vernon contended, followed by a “downgrading” period of conversions to rentals. Next comes the “thinningout” stage, with density dropping due to vacancy, demolition, or the aging of residents. In some cases, districts then enter a fifth phase, renewal, usually brought about by government intervention to replace obsolete housing.10 The progression was not ironclad—neighborhoods could pause or reverse direction— but the analysis suggested that the natural course for residential neighborhoods was a slide toward corrosion and eventual dereliction. The neatness and elegance of Hoover and Vernon’s framework likely contributed to its popularity. However, its central idea—that all neighborhoods eventually drift toward decay—has a long lineage in US urban thought. And while Hoover and Vernon only gestured obliquely toward racial “incursion” and heterogeneity as a component of this cycle, their predecessors had placed race at the center of their analyses. Two of the most prominent early theorists of the neighborhood life- cycle process were Frederick Babcock and Homer Hoyt, both key figures in the interwar formation of real- estate scholarship as a modern academic discipline.11 Their ideas about how neighborhoods evolved over time went on to influence federal underwriting guidelines, which played a central role in shaping the fabric of the postwar city. Embedded in their models was a distinctive story about the fate of the city neighborhood. Though conveyed in the abstract language of appraisal and land economics, their assumptions helped lay the groundwork for popular 1950s understandings of residential blight’s causes and potential cures. The first of these theorists, Frederick Babcock, offered an early contribution with his landmark 1932 appraisal text, The Valuation of Real Estate. A longtime Chicago realtor and a nationally renowned appraisal expert, Babcock had by then taken up a research position at the University of Michigan’s business school.12 In one chapter of his book, Babcock set out to dispel what he called the “very common belief that values rise as the city population increases.” In fact, he pointed out, aspirational members of lower social classes and less privileged ethnic groups constantly seek to relocate to better neighborhoods, even as their very presence in those new communities drags down property values. As this process of infiltration continues through succeeding waves, the “end product is a blighted or slum area.” In most situations, 76

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distinctions between established residents and newcomers are small enough that values sink fairly slowly. The major exception, Babcock insisted, came with the arrival of nonwhites, which causes an immediate and calamitous collapse in property values. Depending on the neighborhood, the descent into decay might take anywhere from twenty to a hundred years, Babcock wrote, but it was “inevitable in all residential districts. Given time, all such areas become decadent districts or slums occupied by the poorest, most incompetent, and least desirable groups in the city. Ragged urchins play on marquetry floors.”13 Babcock’s conception of decay’s inevitability reappeared in more elaborate form several years later, in the writings of the prolific land economist Homer Hoyt. Born in 1895, Hoyt had studied and taught in Kansas, Illinois, and Missouri before settling in Chicago, where he engaged in amateur real- estate investing while completing an economics doctorate. Heavy losses in the real- estate booms and busts of the late 1920s and early 1930s caused him to wonder whether real- estate values, like the broader economy, were cyclical. For his doctoral thesis, he buried himself in old assessor’s records and fire-insurance documents to produce a work, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago, that theorized “recurring cycles in the growth of Chicago in which general moods or similar historical situations are to a certain extent repeated.” On the strength of this research, Hoyt in 1934 began a position as Principal Housing Economist for the Federal Housing Administration. There, he began to devise his sector theory of urban growth by analyzing real-property inventories assembled by the Works Progress Administration.14 This research came together in 1939 in Hoyt’s most influential work, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities, a land- economics classic that would appear in four subsequent editions over the next quarter- century.15 Hoyt’s employer, the FHA, had sponsored the study in order to gain a clearer sense of the risks involved in mortgage lending within various types of neighborhoods. Working with data from 140 urban areas, Hoyt sought to make the nation’s bewildering industrial-age cities legible by proposing a set of scientific laws describing their expansion and development.16 Unlike many of his peers, Hoyt insisted upon analyzing neighborhoods not just in space but also over time, compiling block-level historical data on rent prices, age and condition of buildings, racial demographics, and prevalence of commercial uses. The American city might seem to be a “riddle,” a “chaotic jumble,” or a “terra incognita,” he explained, but statistical analyses revealed certain principles that governed the future of resi77

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dential neighborhoods— principles which, in turn, could guide mortgage lenders and municipal planners.17 Structure and Growth’s most enduring innovation came with its introduction of Hoyt’s sector model for metropolitan development. Previously, analysts had relied on sociologist Ernest Burgess’s classic concentric-zone model, which described the city as a series of rings encircling the central business district, each with distinct populations, usages, and land values. Traveling outward from the downtown, one passed successively through the factory zone, then through a zone of transition between industry and housing, and eventually through residential zones of increasing affluence, from working- class homes to the retreats of wealthy commuters. As social or ethnic groups climbed the economic ladder, one could track their movement outward, even as they were succeeded in their old neighborhoods by incoming populations of lower means and status.18 However, Hoyt decided, this abstract model failed to represent real life in numerous ways. In actuality, urban growth traveled at dissimilar paces in different parts of the metropolis, and a single zone often contained a hodgepodge of activities and social classes. Though basing his theory on Burgess’s model, Hoyt instead found wedge-shaped sectors of development that cut through the various circular zones, stretching toward the periphery in radials.19 Hoyt’s sector theory dealt with movement and migration, with the paths traveled by populations, wealth, and industry as they sliced outward from the urban core. The counterpart to this story of mobility, however, was a story about the evolution of the geographically static neighborhood. Two years earlier, Hoyt had characterized each individual house as “a fi xed spot in a field of moving forces,” and in Structure and Growth he compiled a collection of laws describing how those moving forces buffeted a neighborhood about as new populations flowed into and out of its confines.20 This narrative, like that sketched out in more rudimentary form by Babcock, was one of gradual but inexorable decline. “Forces constantly and steadily at work are causing a deterioration in existing neighborhoods,” wrote Hoyt. New housing construction on the outskirts continually knocked all other neighborhoods down a rung in the metropolitan housing hierarchy. As wealthier urbanites traveled up this housing ladder, a parade of newer groups, each of lower income or social status than the last, replaced them in their old neighborhoods. And during each group’s temporary custody of a neighborhood, the district slid one step further into disrepair and obsolescence. From observing this metropolitan game of musical chairs, Hoyt con78

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tinued, one could formulate a generalized and scientific theory of the neighborhood life cycle, running from “vigorous youth” to blight and dilapidation. At a neighborhood’s zenith, when its freshly built modern homes are filled with young families, the district “has the vitality to fight off the disease of blight.” Its residents retain enough collective self-respect to “strenuously resist the encroachment of inharmonious forces.” Over time, however, families age, children depart, physical decay sets in, and newer housing elsewhere skims off the more affluent residents. All these factors, Hoyt explained, “constantly are lessening the vital powers of the neighborhood.” Inhabitants no longer ward off “inharmonious forces” with their earlier tenacity, allowing commercial uses and lower- class or nonwhite residents to dribble in. Former enclaves of the wealthy suffer the swiftest decline. Since incoming residents cannot maintain such lavish homes, structures are soon chopped into offices, small manufacturing, or rooming houses. And while the middle-income rental range offers somewhat greater durability, working- class areas are hardest hit. In the wake of 1920s restrictions on overseas immigration, Hoyt wrote, the foreign-born newcomers who might once have occupied these areas no longer appeared, leaving them to sink into vacancy or default.21 For early theorists like Babcock and Hoyt, this process wasn’t merely a description of past housing trends, but also a more- or-less immutable set of laws about the fate of every residential neighborhood. Over succeeding years, scholars from numerous disciplines would compose variations on this theme. For example, in his widely used 1949 textbook, Urban Land Economics, economist Richard Ratcliff likened the neighborhood to a family, traveling a path from buoyant youth to decrepitude and desolation.22 In a 1963 textbook, The Valuation of Real Estate, appraisal expert Alfred Ring offered a diagram showing the cycle of growth, maturity, and decline repeating itself as a succession of “lower economic inhabitants” took hold of a neighborhood (fig. 6).23 And for social scientists examining human interactions, this economic process had its corollaries in patterns of sociability. Already in 1939, in their college textbook on American urbanism, sociologist Stuart Queen and geographer Lewis Thomas described a community’s “typical life history” in terms of the waxing and waning of neighborly affections. In the earliest phase, residents “go shopping together, care for each other’s children, and engage in other practices associated with neighboring.” Over time, as rental units, businesses, and “strange ethnic groups” straggle in, such interactions die out—until “personal contacts practically disappear.”24 79

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Figure 6 “Typical Neighborhood Age Pattern,” a diagram from Alfred A. Ring’s 1963 textbook, The Valuation of Real Estate. (Reprinted with permission from OnCourse Learning; James Boykin/Alfred Ring, The Valuation of Real Estate, 4th ed., 1993, Mason, OH)

Thus, by the time Edgar Hoover and Raymond Vernon introduced their five-stage model in 1959, these basic ideas had already washed through urban real- estate theory. Taken together, what this school of analysts did was to create a readily understandable story about the fate of city neighborhoods— one with a cohesive plot arc, a catalogue of visible markers to signal progress along the journey, and a clear delineation of culprits. Though expressed in the arcane prose of real-estate theory and land economics, such propositions constituted a recognizable form of urban narrative, no less so than manifestly imaginative works such as Sholem Asch’s East River or Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes’s Street Scene. Like such fictional texts, these works purported to explain how neighborhoods behaved while describing their prospects for the future. And, eventually, the popular press would translate life- cycle tenets into a breathless journalistic vernacular, offering mass audiences instructions about the potential fate of their own residential spaces. The widespread adoption of these concepts had real-world consequences in at least two ways. First, as scholars such as Henrika Kuklick, Kenneth Jackson, and John Metzger have contended, this body of theory was instrumental in the creation of federal mortgage underwriting policies. It added a scientific sheen to what the Pittsburgh Courier’s Frank Bolden, writing in 1951, would caustically label “the folklore of banking and real estate.” The research upon which the FHA relied as80

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sumed that because certain patterns had held true in the past, they were scientific laws that could be used to predict the future. From there, the anticipation of inevitable neighborhood decline migrated into federal lending guidelines. After becoming the FHA’s chief underwriter, Babcock had a large hand in producing that agency’s underwriting manual, which asserted in 1939 that “older properties in a neighborhood have a tendency to accelerate the transition to lower class occupancy.” And embedded in this expectation was a series of racialized assumptions. Like most of their professional peers, Hoyt and Babcock were preoccupied with racial difference: Hoyt once ranked populations based on their purported influence on property values, with Mexicans at the bottom and African Americans just above. Such theories infused the Residential Security Maps of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. By assessing neighborhoods for loan eligibility based on convictions about the risk attached to advanced building age and residents’ race or ethnicity, federal agencies echoed many of Hoyt’s life- cycle premises. In doing so, they also erected daunting obstacles preventing older, nonwhite, or racially mixed neighborhoods from securing government underwriting, favorable interest rates, or private-sector financing. Here, then, is one place where urban theory became self-fulfilling prophecy.25 Second and significantly, these theories made clear that urban slums weren’t just something that adjacent neighborhoods need worry about. If blighted areas, as Hoyt wrote in 1940, “menace the safety of our entire national structure from within,” then decay’s presumed inevitability meant that every residential community, no matter how distant from the existing slums, had reason to fear for its long-term survival. Under these circumstances, the question of how to preserve “neighborhood morale” became central. The fl ight of affluent residents and the influx of value- destroying land uses and ethnic groups had psychological along with economic consequences, Hoyt maintained. In response, he recommended that cities create their own master plans for residential growth, based on a statistical determination of each neighborhood’s position in its life cycle. Here, areas in mid-lifespan would be left alone for the moment, while somewhat worse- off districts would receive temporary patch-up treatments. The most blighted zones would be razed to make way for subsidized housing and private developments, built loosely in accordance with Clarence Perry’s neighborhood-unit principles. Under such a scheme, Hoyt assured readers, locales with remaining lifespans would find “neighborhood morale  .  .  . fortified by the knowledge that there is a program that will protect them from random racial movements.”26 81

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The prose of Babcock’s and Hoyt’s works—like the assumptions built into federal lending standards—is laden with invocations of inevitability. But if these analyses offered a dour picture of the long-term fate of any given neighborhood, a new set of studies on neighborhood conservation offered a ray of optimism. While not rejecting the biological metaphor for neighborhood decline, they did question its fatalism. Such texts suggested that, far from being an inescapable fate, neighborhood blight could indeed be successfully combated through determined local action by individual homeowners and communities. In doing so, they contributed a crucial amendment to prevalent life- cycle theories. The most widely publicized of these early conservation experiments took place in the late 1930s, in the Waverly district of northeast Baltimore. A pilot program organized by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the Waverly endeavor was intended to prove the “novel tenet” that “scientific neighborhood conservation,” rather than wholesale demolition, could revive a declining community.27 An all-white, workingclass district of about seven thousand residents, Waverly had once been selected for a federal slum- clearance and public-housing venture, though that plan had been quashed by the city’s anti– New Deal mayor.28 Although the district had high homeownership rates, it was showing signs of disrepair and a quickening turnover of residents.29 The government’s 1940 report on the conservation project—Waverly: A Study in Neighborhood Conservation, by HOLC officials Donald McNeal and Arthur Goodwillie— commanded widespread attention in urban real- estate circles. The booklet catalogued the many upkeep steps taken under the plan: property improvements, widened streets, demolition or rehabilitation of dilapidated buildings, tightened zoning, and so forth, along with the establishment of a neighborhood “conservation league” to advocate for the plan. The results, in HOLC’s view, represented a substantial achievement, with home prices rising, resident departures slowing, and mortgage defaults cut in half.30 Most interesting here, however, is the study’s perspective on the causes of neighborhood blight— and, particularly, the manner in which it adjusted concepts drawn from the life- cycle model.31 By insisting that local preventive action could arrest the cycle of decline, the study implicitly contradicted several premises of figures like Homer Hoyt. Hoyt had cast neighborhood blight as the product of largescale trends in metropolitan development, and he frequently referred to the impotence of individual homeowners to halt its ravages.32 By contrast, Waverly framed blight chiefly as a consequence of personal 82

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behavior— beginning with the “neglect of a single property,” which might touch off a chain reaction leading to “a full-blown slum.” And whereas Hoyt focused on structural processes that could only be tamed through citywide master planning, Waverly argued that individual neighborhoods could take matters into their own hands. Decay “begins with one house,” the study explained, “and will halt if and when all home owners concerned, each for his own best interest, determine that blight shall extend no farther.” The main obstacle was a lackadaisical public, which wrongly viewed decay as a “natural but impersonal phenomenon.”33 In this way, Waverly borrowed the notion of a neighborhood life cycle— a structural argument about urban change— and rephrased it in the language of personal responsibility. Dismissing those who saw blight as something “which cannot be controlled but need not be feared,” it elevated individual apathy and fatalism to the top of the list of causes.34 By identifying the infectious nature of a single rundown property, it suggested the role of the smallest and most quotidian of neighborhood acts in determining the health of the metropolis. And in adopting the language of local empowerment through citizen organization, it ratified the efforts of improvement associations around the country as templates for a new field of “scientific neighborhood conservation.” These and similar texts contributed in key ways to an emerging conception of blight’s causes and cures, one which would loom large in popular neighborhood imagery of the postwar years.35 For, despite their differences, Hoyt’s life- cycle ruminations and the federal government’s Waverly have much in common. Both work to direct discussions of urban decay away from social conditions in city slums and toward the undulating property values in midrange residential districts. Moreover, both emphasize the importance of swift and deliberate intervention— whether Hoyt’s multistage demolition and replacement or Waverly’s “scientific conservation”—in order to quarantine the sources of infection that threatened the nation’s city neighborhoods.

Framing Neighborhood Blight in the Political Gallery Such writings should be seen not just as abstract theoretical documents, but also as sallies in a series of clashes among specific economic actors, each promoting different conceptions of the problem’s meaning in order to advance its own interests. If the elaboration of neighbor83

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hood life- cycle theory was one development shaping postwar popular discourse over neighborhood blight, then a second was an ongoing political battle over how the American city ought to be remade and renewed. In seeking to define the nature of the threat, organized lobby groups hoped to control the eventual solutions that would emerge from federal, state, and local governments. Along the way, such partisans worked to refashion the language applied to the city neighborhood. In these contests, neighborhood conservation approaches played a central role. Broadly speaking, their proponents were engaged in a long-running effort to tamp down momentum toward large-scale slum clearance and public housing, which had tentatively taken flight during the New Deal years. Indeed, the Waverly demonstration was only one prominent volley in a struggle that raged from the 1920s through the end of the 1950s. If agreement existed across the political spectrum that blight needed to be combated, the battle lines broke down between, on the one hand, advocates for slum clearance, expanded public housing, and greater direct government intervention, and, on the other, sectors of private industry promoting solutions that would keep government on the sidelines. Backing for the former program emerged from an unwieldy alliance, one that sporadically linked downtown business interests and progressive housing activists. Downtown corporations and commercial developers were eager to reclaim decaying terrain around the central business district for more lucrative private development.36 Meanwhile, progressive lobby groups and labor organizations favoring expanded public housing kept up a drumbeat dramatizing the human tragedy of the slums.37 The two sides both supported slum clearance; they differed on how the vacant land ought to be used. However, during the 1930s, downtown corporate interests signaled their willingness to accept limited construction of subsidized housing as part of a trade- off in which the government would acquire broad swaths of land for redevelopment.38 Across the political fence clustered groups whose economic interests were instead tied to property values in privately built residential neighborhoods. For savings-and-loan associations, modest-sized banks, residential realty brokers, and owners of smaller land parcels, slum clearance threatened to undermine free enterprise, while new central- city housing would only imperil property values in existing communities.39 To each, it was imperative to keep property values high and urban land in private hands. It was from these circles that blight prevention and neighborhood conservation emerged as alternative strategies for halting decay. Initially, many of these efforts were sporadic, local, and un84

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coordinated.40 A more cohesive program, however, emerged from the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), which sought to empower property owners to take on the task of conservation themselves. Beginning in the 1930s, the group lobbied for state-level legislation sanctioning the establishment of neighborhood improvement districts with formal municipal powers. Under NAREB’s proposals, a majority of an area’s property owners, holding a majority of the zone’s assessed worth, would be permitted to establish such a district, which could then submit plans for rezoning, ban commercial uses, levy fees and offer services, and assume ownership of decaying or nonconforming land parcels.41 These early conservation proposals were shot through with a racialized logic. During the 1930s, organizations such as NAREB saw neighborhood conservation as one tool to halt the spread of African American and other purportedly “undesirable” residents into middle-income white areas, especially through the encouragement of local improvement districts and conservation committees—which, presumably, would vigilantly patrol against unwanted “encroachment.” Indeed, though urban analysts would continue to laud the Waverly conservation demonstration up through the 1970s, more recently scholars Marc Weiss and John Metzger have revealed it as a tactic intended to freeze racial boundaries in place, preserving a white working- class bulwark between wealthy enclaves on Baltimore’s near north side and expanding black districts of the central city.42 And, although the Waverly study itself made almost no direct mention of race, its sharp warnings against the “infiltration” of “undesirable residents,” along with its insistence on the benefits of restrictive covenants on land use, conveyed unmistakable allusions to this purpose.43 The competition between these two approaches reached a crescendo during the immediate postwar years. Trade associations for homebuilders and residential real- estate interests campaigned aggressively to keep the federal government out of the business of supplying housing, even as they clamored for expanded subsidies via federal loans and mortgage guarantees. The acute postwar housing shortage, however, created political and public-relations headaches for opponents of more dramatic state intervention. Among the general public, support for slum clearance and middle- class public housing was on the rise.44 From 1947 to 1948, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, backed by real- estate and building lobbies, blocked President Harry Truman’s favored legislation on the issue.45 Truman, in return, spent much of the 1948 presidential contest assailing the GOP for its refusal to pass a 85

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public-housing bill, an issue that he theatrically highlighted by calling Congress into special session in mid- campaign.46 It was a “disgrace to a nation as rich as ours,” fumed the president on the stump, for millions of families to live doubled up in cramped rental units. Taunting his opponents as “errand boys” for the real- estate industry— one of Washington’s “most brazen lobbies”—Truman bemoaned the “lost years of health and happiness” that Republican obstruction had cost the American populace.47 Truman’s surprise election victory earned him enough leverage to produce the compromise of the Housing Act of 1949, landmark legislation that provided federal subsidies for slum clearance and redevelopment, including some public-housing units— albeit far fewer than hoped for by liberals. However, Dwight Eisenhower’s capture of the White House in 1952, after a twenty-year Republican drought, signaled a change in course, to the delight of private building and real- estate interests. To bureaucrats in the Truman administration’s progressive wing, a vigorous public-housing program had seemed “an essential corollary of slum clearance,” in one such official’s words.48 Now, under Washington’s new Republican regime, public-housing authorizations were dramatically scaled back; meanwhile, ideas demonstrated in the Waverly project, more than a decade earlier, were incorporated into the Housing Act of 1954. While best known for turning over greater segments of bulldozed slum- clearance land to nonhousing uses and commercial developments, the act also expanded federal urban-renewal activities to encourage Waverly-style rehabilitation and conservation in inner-ring neighborhoods. Spurred partly by the legislation’s funding requirements, more than 650 municipalities adopted enhanced building and housing codes over the subsequent decade, while dozens of cities established agencies on neighborhood improvement and conservation.49 Throughout these swings of the political pendulum, real- estate and residential builders’ groups pushed ever harder on the rehabilitation and home-improvement approaches as a panacea for urban ills, seeking to prove that residential blight could be successfully combated through private-sector action. Such partisans often made their case by appealing to neighborhood values and heritage— something that would be destroyed, they insinuated, if public-housing advocates had their way. “We want the children to be born in a neighborhood and grow up and live in the neighborhood of their father,” remarked J. C. Nichols, the Kansas City home-building titan, in 1948. If local pride— and, consequently, maintenance work by homeowners—were stimulated, he con86

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tinued, then “we won’t have the public housers coming in and taking over the show.”50 And over the late 1940s and early 1950s, growing numbers of industries perceived a direct stake in this endeavor. For mortgage lenders, an increase in residential property valuations would raise the amounts borrowed by homebuyers, while enthusiasm for upkeep would swell demand for home-improvement loans. Similarly, for home-renovation suppliers, casting community upkeep as an essential inoculation against blight might lift sales of items ranging from shingles and sinks to hammers and house paint. By now, though, the audience had expanded. Whereas conservation proposals before the war had been aimed largely at planning professionals and elected officials, increasingly the intended audience was the general public. Local and national corporate leaders banded together to promote what public-housing advocates dismissed as diversionary “fi x-up, paint-up” campaigns: while urging stricter code enforcement and zoning, organizers also continually exhorted ordinary citizens to unite for local-level action against disrepair and blight (fig. 7). These messages, unlike those of public-housing supporters, focused not on cramped urban slums but rather on the potential for blight in stable middle- class neighborhoods. In all these campaigns, whether explicitly or not, key premises of the neighborhood life- cycle theories developed in preceding decades were translated into accessible versions intended to speak to average middle- class homeowners. Here is where Babcock’s and Hoyt’s prophesies of neighborhood decline met Waverly’s “scientific neighborhood conservation,” all in the form of an elaborate series of public-relations efforts. From today’s vantage point, the assumptions underpinning such drives might seem counterintuitive. It can be difficult nowadays, for instance, to appreciate how absolute the curse of “obsolescence” once appeared, especially given the high value and cachet of refurbished older housing in numerous urban districts. To Hoyt and his peers, though, it was exceedingly obvious that consumers would always favor newer housing over old, a preference that doomed neighborhoods to eventual dereliction. Indeed, neighborhood life- cycle theories would not be effectively disputed until the 1970s, when urban gentrification offered counterevidence on the ground, even as left-leaning social scientists began to emphasize uneven resource allocations by capitalists and the state, rather than the housing preferences of consumers, as the central factor driving neighborhood development and decline.51 Equally odd to contemporary eyes might be the political configurations structuring these debates. “It is ironic by present standards,” notes architectural 87

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Figure 7 A “Clean Up, Fix Up, Paint Up!” roadside billboard outside of Philadelphia, publicizing a 1953 campaign by the Lower Bucks County Chamber of Commerce. (Evening Bulletin photograph collection, Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives, Philadelphia)

scholar Dana Cuff, “that real estate interests were the first to promote rehabilitation of older housing, while progressives were still advocating slum clearance.”52 More recent drives for the preservation of older city neighborhoods are frequently spearheaded by progressives, who cast district wide demolition as a barbarism of avaricious corporate developers and their city-hall enablers. In the immediate postwar period, however, these roles were often reversed, with many conservatives pro88

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moting rehabilitation as a tool to ward off more drastic government intervention. To 1950s conservation proponents, the pursuit of their favored outcomes appeared to entail a two-pronged approach. First, the homebuilding and residential real- estate sectors had to demonstrate to the general public that they took the problem of blight seriously, and that they were working assiduously to battle decay through nongovernmental means. Second, the American populace had to be aroused to action through a broad-based public-relations appeal, all in order to convince policymakers that private-sector exhortations and expertise could show tangible results. To this end, corporate antiblight programs developed lavish outreach campaigns, intended to raise public alarm over encroaching disease and to motivate vigorous responses on the individual and community levels. Across the decade, middle- class city dwellers found themselves bombarded with magazine articles, pamphlets, television and radio messages, and billboard ads, all dramatizing the threats looming over their residential spaces. In these efforts, NAREB took an early lead. In 1952, the association established its Build America Better Committee, part of the realtors’ attempt to overcome “the erroneous but popular notion that they are personally responsible for the existence of slums.”53 To the contrary, protested committee chairman Walter Dayton, blight stemming from property neglect had caused the “loss of untold and uncountable billions of dollars in property depreciation,” all of which hurt realtors as much as anyone.54 While working to burnish NAREB’s image, the committee promoted the elimination of blight through physical improvement and local ordinance enforcement, while lobbying for state legislation to create community conservation commissions.55 By mid-1953, real- estate boards in 154 cities had agreed to adopt the committee’s suggested code- enforcement measures.56 Two years later, the committee adopted the slogan “No Slums by ’60,” and began dispatching teams around the country to convince officials to adopt neighborhood conservation as the main tool in their battles against blight.57 A more publicly visible approach came with Operation Home Improvement, a 1956 campaign that one magazine dubbed “the biggest peacetime promotion ever sponsored jointly by industry and the Federal Government.”58 Taking as its slogan “Fifty-Six: The Year to Fix,” the initiative urged manufacturers and retailers of home-renovation supplies to coordinate their sales appeals into a unified national publicity effort, exhorting property owners to combat blight through extensive repairs to their premises. The US Chamber of Commerce spearheaded 89

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the project, rounding up sponsorships from dozens of trade associations as part of “a common effort to sell better living to American families.”59 With Operation Home Improvement, adding a recreation room, re-shingling a house, or mending a porch became patriotic duty. Meanwhile, coordinators proclaimed, an “enthusiasm based upon profit incentive” would spur avid involvement from local business chieftains.60 As participants unleashed tens of millions in advertising dollars, sponsors eagerly predicted an extra $20 billion in annual sales for homeimprovement goods.61 Through these and numerous similar campaigns, organizers strove to ensure that the solution to neighborhood blight would be rooted “within the framework of our free- enterprise system,” as one antiblight group explained.62 While soliciting industry support for Operation Home Improvement, for instance, the Chamber of Commerce made clear to sponsors that a successful fi x-up drive could head off further direct involvement by the state in housing provision.63 Likewise, NAREB’s popular antiblight booklet, Blueprint for Neighborhood Conservation, detailed how urban decay could be dealt with “swiftly and equitably by our system of free enterprise.”64 At the local level, many analogous organizations cast themselves as alternatives to federal intervention. “No federal funds requested or received!” ran the proud motto of Operation Junkyard, a municipal antiblight program in Pasadena.65 The Philadelphia Clean-up, Paint-up, Fix-up Committee, explaining why local beautification efforts were far preferable to “depersonalized, semi- charitable housing projects,” exclaimed, “How much healthier it is for citizens to get together to plan and work out their own destiny!”66 Here, the language of neighborhood initiative and solidarity was harnessed by interests intent on thwarting any extension of government’s power to compete with private industry in the housing sector.

Competing Neighborhood Narratives in Two Antiblight Drives Groups with such aims were not just the makers of policy proposals; they were also the authors of a persuasive set of urban narratives. With an array of antiblight campaigns, business leaders popularized a specific vocabulary of neighborhood, one that ordinary city dwellers could use to make sense of their own residential spaces. At the same time, these ideas were not monolithic and did not go unchallenged. Oftentimes, urbanites excluded from the corridors of corporate and political power worked to transform the central tenets of this discourse, eschew90

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ing the language of “contagion” and “infection” and instead crafting improvement drives that highlighted concepts such as citizenship, community empowerment, or racial uplift. It makes sense, then, to look more closely at two contrasting mid-1950s antiblight campaigns, which enunciated markedly dissimilar notions about the meanings of neighborhood decay. The first, a large-scale public-relations effort by the business- oriented American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods (ACTION), forcefully reinscribed the decade’s reigning orthodoxies about blight’s threat to residential communities. The second, a project of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, borrowed selectively from the lexicon of ACTION and its peers, but it reshaped this rhetoric in service of different ends. Taken together, these examples indicate not just the power and reach of ascendant postwar antiblight axioms but also the agency exercised by subordinated groups in modifying them. The first of these ventures, the outreach program developed by ACTION, stood as one of the decade’s most wide-reaching public drives for neighborhood conservation. Beginning in 1954, when ACTION launched what the New York Times hailed as “a nation-wide revival” for better neighborhood living, the group spent millions of dollars in a high-powered public-relations blitz, intended to convince citizens of blight’s omnipresent menace and to spur them into preventive action.67 Unlike the commercial sponsors of Operation Home Improvement, who unabashedly crowed to journalists over the increased sales they expected to generate, ACTION pitched its programs using a more idealistic rhetoric of public-spiritedness and community responsibility. While the group’s concrete accomplishments are hard to quantify, its advertising materials both exemplified and intensified mid- decade anxieties over the fate of American residential neighborhoods. The organization emerged from several parallel developments. In December 1953, a blue-ribbon advisory panel on government housing policies, appointed by President Eisenhower, had submitted a report suggesting the need for a “broadly representative national organization to help promote and lead this dynamic program for renewal.”68 At the same time, Life and Fortune magazines had been convening a set of roundtables on US urban problems, assembling prominent figures from business, labor, and academia.69 Spurred by the challenge in the Eisenhower report, several roundtable leaders cast plans to form a nongovernmental group in order to push for urban renewal on private-sector terms.70 Incorporating in April 1954, ACTION’s directors took as their slogan “Good Neighborhoods Are Our Nation’s Strength.”71 With a nod 91

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toward representative inclusiveness, the governing board in its earliest incarnation contained several union leaders, including Walter Reuther, and a handful of African American health and housing experts. Nonetheless, the leadership remained firmly dominated by corporate executives, homebuilders, and real- estate men.72 In the view of the founders, as one explained, the threat of expanding blight would be best addressed “not from the slums on up but from the top of the housing industry on down.”73 Soon enough, this message had garnered public favor from the White House. Many of ACTION’s boosters had staunchly backed Eisenhower in 1952, and two years later the president attended an ACTION kick- off luncheon to commend its promotion of private-sector antiblight initiatives.74 The same rhetoric of local engagement, limited government, and free-market solutions ran through the group’s early appeals to financial contributors. “If private groups and private initiative do not take the lead,” noted one request, the problem of blight would become “an excuse for greatly expanding government ownership and for extending control more deeply into the national life.”75 This rationale raised the ire of at least a few public-housing advocates. Prominent New York housing activist Ira Robbins, for instance, expressed misgivings over ACTION’s motives, threatening to fight the group if it attempted to block public-housing efforts.76 Still, with its influential board members and White House stamp of approval, ACTION “added a prestigious bipartisan endorsement,” in the recollection of one Ford Foundation official, to the turn toward a neighborhood conservation strategy and against expanded public housing.77 The group’s early activities sparked an extraordinary degree of public interest. Magazines and trade journals offered intensive coverage.78 Over the next several years, the organization put on urban-renewal clinics, groomed local affiliates, produced monographs and conferences, and drummed up interest within municipal and national business communities.79 But of all ACTION’s efforts, its public-relations program proved the most prolific. This component was premised on the need to translate technical academic concepts about blight into a language that average citizens could understand and apply at home. “The terms we use are everyday language to us, but Sanskrit to most people,” complained field director David Slipher in a speech in Ann Arbor.80 Properly instructed, however, ordinary city dwellers could become experts at recognizing the telltale signs of blight. To that end, the organization launched a major advertising barrage in the fall of 1955, after securing in excess of $3 million annually in donated airtime and 92

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newspaper space through the Advertising Council.81 The campaign’s reach was considerable: print ads ran more than a thousand times in 1956, placards proliferated in bus shelters and subways, and broadcast announcements reached millions of homes.82 With splashy Madison Avenue techniques, ACTION sought to alert Americans to the threats looming over their neighborhoods, and to convince them that salvation depended not upon federal intervention, but rather upon “organized group activity at the local level.”83 Aiming to “galvanize the interest of the intelligent layman,” ACTION’s materials offered a readily understandable story about the trajectory and fate of the nation’s city neighborhoods, along with the need for ceaseless watchfulness.84 They also lent expert authority to a very specific set of interpretations for mundane, unremarkable features such as weedy lawns, unpainted houses, cracked sidewalks, and mixed-use development. Take, for instance, the group’s first volley of promotions, a set of full-page newspaper ads from August 1955. Each pictures a district of disrepair—tumbledown balconies, peeling paint, overgrown weeds, broken fences— spreading toward the reader’s own community. In the most dramatic example, a silhouette of a giant hand, filled in with images of ramshackle buildings and trash-filled yards, reaches out with thumb and forefinger to pluck up a tiny photograph of a prim residential street (fig. 8). “How far can a slum reach?” asks the large-print headline. Below, text explains that “slums spread, block by block. One house gets run down . . . a few people lose their pride in ‘keeping things up.’ The first thing you know, you could wake up to find a slum not too far from your own neighborhood.”85 In several waves of radio ads, ACTION expanded on these themes. “Have you visited the ‘old neighborhood’ lately?” a typical radio spot asked listeners. “Maybe it’s time you did. Old neighborhoods have a way of becoming bad neighborhoods.  .  .  . And a rundown neighborhood can affect your whole community.”86 Two themes grounded these promotions. First, the ads followed a sort of domino theory of blight, one that eerily mirrored the Cold War containment imperatives guiding US foreign policy. The descent into disrepair of a single lawn, a single porch, a single corner or sidewalk signaled the imminent demise of an entire community. “Everyone knows what a bad apple does,” noted one radio announcement; “it spoils the whole barrel.”87 A lone point of infection could spread “until the whole block and then the whole neighborhood is engulfed.”88 Second, ACTION’s print and broadcast ads urged eternal vigilance as the price of a decent neighborhood. Halting blight’s march required “watchful eyes” and “constant awareness,” the public learned.89 In fact, 93

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Figure 8 An August 1955 full- page newspaper advertisement promoting ACTION. (Courtesy University Archives, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign)

it was precisely because the first signals of danger could seem so commonplace— a radio repair shop in a neighbor’s garage, a widow renting out an extra room, a rusting drainpipe—that residents needed expert advice. These clues might be meaningless to the untrained eye, but with the help of literature from ACTION, residents could see them for 94

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what they truly were. Readers or listeners who wrote in for information could receive an “Urban Renewal Evaluator” kit, allowing them to take a complicated scoring sheet into their own neighborhoods, and to assign their communities ratings ranging from “Excellent” to “Chaos.”90 For solutions, meanwhile, citizens could turn to ACTION’s fanciful instructional film, Man of ACTION, an animated short released in 1955. Over the succeeding year, the award-winning cartoon played in more than five thousand public showings and ran nearly four hundred times on local TV stations—prompting cheers from the home-builders lobby that “the Disney technique is now being used in the war on slums.”91 Backed by a laconic jazz score, Man of ACTION tells the story of “an average sort of fellow who lives in a nice average neighborhood in a nice average town.” At the film’s outset, this ordinary homeowner, stepping out his front door, encounters an otherworldly fiend lurking in the driveway. Smirking beneath his dark cloak, the specter declares that he is one of the devil’s “project supervisors,” in charge of the “Division of Urban Destruction.” He bears with him a detailed schedule for the entire neighborhood’s descent into blight and chaos (fig. 9). But,

Figure 9 Devil’s subordinate, in charge of the Division of Urban Destruction, in ACTION’s 1955 film, Man of ACTION.

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declares this demon, he himself is not the cause of urban decay. “I just check up,” he explains with malevolent glee. “People do all the work.” Indignantly, the homeowner professes his innocence, but the devil’s surrogate merely points a finger at the man’s property and slyly asks, “Did I let that paint peel? Did I crack that step? Did I neglect that rusty drain?” After learning that the entire town is on the demon’s timetable for blight and dereliction, the alarmed homeowner rushes off to warn the city council. At first, these officials are scornfully skeptical. Meanwhile, haughty slumlords in the spectators’ gallery bellow forth their objections: new zoning and code enforcements, after all, will cut into their handsome profits. However, as the town’s most blighted areas begin to fall victim to fires and dangerous building collapses, citizenry and leaders overcome their incredulity. Eventually, they form a citizens’ committee on housing and embark on a thorough program of civic housekeeping and improvement. As the film ends, the townspeople have put the demon of blight on the run. But there are other, less foresighted cities elsewhere. The demon cackles maliciously as he hops a train to the next unsuspecting town.92 In his analysis of Man of ACTION, historian Nicholas Bloom suggests that the film’s key features “are reflected in omissions.” The cartoon, like all of ACTION’s promotional materials, erased factors such as mortgage redlining, highway demolitions, blockbusting, or unmet social-welfare needs. Instead, it interpreted blight as a condition that could be cured through local planning committees, home upkeep and renovation, or community beautification. Furthermore, ACTION’s favored metaphors for neighborhood blight—infection, virus, contagion, or plague— cast urban physical and economic deterioration as phenomena entirely unrelated to questions about the inequitable distribution of metropolitan resources or the agency exercised by politicians and policymakers.93 By the decade’s end, ACTION would recede from the pages of the press, assuming a less visible role as a technical advisory group for planning and civic bodies. Still, for a few critical years in the mid-1950s, the organization served as a dominant voice in the popular discourse on neighborhood health. And throughout, the urban vision it promulgated was one of threat: the decent city neighborhood as an island, ringed by a sea of blight that seemed ever ready to lap up onto its shores and engulf it. The most striking aspect of all these improvement campaigns— whether ACTION, Operation Home Improvement, or Build America Better—was their dogged avoidance of public discussions of race. Most 96

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of ACTION’s promotional literature steered clear of even offhand mention of the topic, a significant silence given that almost every major professional text dealing with the causes of blight listed as a leading culprit the introduction of racially “incongruous” elements to a neighborhood. Still, none of these groups was interested in the firestorm of controversy that would surely follow from making race a central element in a highly visible advertising foray. Rather, organizations like ACTION worked to present their proposals as “non-political, noncontroversial, and non- commercial” in order to maximize their popular appeal.94 Others went so far as to cast such drives as a means for bridging racial divides in service of a broader civic unity. “This cleanup campaign is one in which everyone—men, women, and children of all races and creeds—may participate,” boasted a former head of the national paint-industry association, which sponsored the National Cleanup, Paint-up, Fix-up Bureau.95 “Race relations are happier,” asserted the Philadelphia Clean-up, Paint-up, Fix-up Committee, in neighborhoods that initiated an improvement drive.96 Nevertheless, more disturbing racial ideologies lurked beneath the surface in many of these efforts. By fueling anxieties that every neighborhood was susceptible to sudden, irreparable decay, and by encouraging vigilant attention to each minuscule change in the local landscape, such drives replicated the logic motivating the white homeowners’ associations that militated against integration. Imagery of blight as a contagion, spreading inexorably across the urban landscape, mirrored fearful white perceptions of the “spreading” minority populations of the central city. Even apparently anodyne injunctions to organize cleanup drives could conceal segregationist motives. Historian John McGreevy, for example, describes an Irish priest on Chicago’s South Side who responded to rumors of local black residential “encroachment” with sermons instructing parishioners to “clean up and paint up.” While avoiding any explicit reference to race, McGreevy shows, the sermons employed neighborhood-improvement rhetoric as code for the importance of maintaining racial homogeneity.97 Meanwhile, national campaigns like ACTION remained conspicuously silent on the issue of residential integration. Privately, Walter Reuther’s aides later noted ACTION’s conservatism—“especially with regard to the race problem”— and its unwillingness to endorse government action against race-based discrimination in federally subsidized housing.98 The racial imperatives of drives such as Operation Home Improvement, Build America Better, and ACTION became apparent in their refusal to acknowledge connections between deterioration of the 97

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urban built environment and factors such as housing and mortgage discrimination, racial steering, inequitable municipal services, the legacy of restrictive covenants, or violence against black newcomers to all-white neighborhoods.99 Even as ACTION and similar organizations used the news media as megaphone, the African American press offered alternative interpretations. Sometimes, to be sure, black- owned city newspapers joined their white counterparts in running uncritical glosses of campaigns like Operation Home Improvement, adapted directly from press releases.100 But more often, they challenged commonplace accounts of neighborhood blight— emphasizing, first, that poor urban conditions were not reflections upon inhabitants, and, second, that any victory over physical decay depended upon an end to residential segregation. Pointing to a “filthy, menacing” stretch of Fifth Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, the New York Amsterdam News in 1950 insisted that the area “is by no means representative of our community,” while assailing its negligent real- estate owners. The Chicago Defender explained that “slums are not created by the hopeless people who dwell in them,” likewise laying blame on “absentee ownership which has no social conscience.” In a 1958 “Declaration of Principles” on housing, the Pittsburgh Courier declared that the fate of “current community efforts to remove slums and blight” ultimately rested on the eradication of racial barriers in housing. Furthermore, such publications occasionally expressed outright suspicion over the motives driving the decade’s seemingly innocuous neighborhood cleanup campaigns. “All this is timely and well and good,” allowed the Chicago Defender, with regard to Operation Home Improvement. “However, we hope this will not turn out to be ‘Operation Cover-up’ for laying an elaborate smokescreen over some shady manipulations on the part of many private industries to perpetuate more Jim Crow housing.”101 Notwithstanding the racialist ideas underpinning the conventional wisdom on how blight took hold, during the postwar decades African American civic organizations—women’s clubs, church groups, Urban League chapters, and so forth— crafted their own, parallel antiblight campaigns. In black districts of northern cities, Urban League chapters had long spearheaded projects in neighborhood beautification and rehabilitation. Beginning in Pittsburgh during the late 1910s, then spreading to Chicago, St. Louis, and elsewhere, the Urban League frequently organized networks of block clubs, which developed programs in education, street upkeep, and enhancement of public spaces.102 To the Urban League, these clubs seemed one more tool for fulfilling its 98

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mission of assimilating rural black migrants to middle- class city ways. Such programs expanded after World War II, as northern black populations swelled and anxieties over neighborhood blight intensified.103 This thrust was most active in Chicago, whose Urban League chapter hoped to catalyze what leaders envisioned as a “Block Club Movement.” After investing substantial resources during the mid-1940s, the chapter recruited Alva Maxey as program supervisor in 1950. Within five years, she oversaw a roster of 175 affiliated clubs, nearly quintuple the number when she began, with most based in middle- class or well- established working- class areas.104 As Maxey declared, such groups created “neighborhood cohesion, pride and morale,” while teaching participants to “develop aesthetic tastes with regard to their surroundings.”105 If these clubs were intended to improve living conditions while acculturating freshly arriving residents, proponents felt that they also might help discredit entrenched assumptions about the inevitable link between darker skin and blighted communities. Leaders of the National Urban League, explains historian Touré Reed, believed that much of the anger over black movement into all-white neighborhoods stemmed not primarily from racial dissimilarities, but rather from divergences in class and culture. Under this view, poorer black newcomers from the South—unlike their city-bred counterparts—lacked the training to maintain neighborhoods to adequate standards. Hence, the widespread conviction among whites that blacks dragged down property values represented “the clash of culture far more than the clash of race,” as Lester Granger, National Urban League director, contended in 1945.106 For organizers such as Chicago’s Alva Maxey, then, the block-club movement would demonstrate to outsiders that African American city dwellers were perfectly able to care for their streets and residences. “Much of the attitude of resentment toward Negroes moving into new areas,” she argued, “has stemmed from opinions formed by individuals of the majority group on their casual trips through the Negro slum areas.” These misleading impressions, Maxey hoped, would be disproved by the enhanced living conditions brought about through local voluntarism.107 While scholars have tended to discuss such community-initiated improvement drives separately from top- down national antiblight campaigns, more recently historians such as Sylvia Hood Washington have urged closer analysis of the continuities and disjunctures between these parallel sets of efforts.108 With their explicit disavowals that black urbanites served as an automatic vector for neighborhood blight, these programs operated at cross-purposes with the motivations of wellfunded outfits like ACTION or NAREB’s Build America Better Coun99

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cil. Nonetheless, during the 1950s such campaigns occasionally intersected: corporate leaders saw a chance to burnish their credentials by supporting antiblight drives by African American– led organizations, just as black civic groups saw a new potential to gain funding for their ongoing programs in block-level neighborhood work. Even during such moments of collaboration, however, these local campaigns departed significantly from the understandings of blight promoted by ACTION, NAREB, and similar bodies. One of the most prominent of such efforts was a national neighborhood-improvement contest organized in 1956 and 1957 by the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC).109 Relying on funds from the Sears-Roebuck Foundation and technical advice from ACTION, the NACWC launched a drive in which more than a hundred of its subsidiary local clubs initiated community improvement projects. Despite these sponsorships, the NACWC’s theory of neighborhood blight and rehabilitation differed from the version promulgated by its corporate backers. Upon close examination, the NACWC contest and the work of its local affiliates demonstrate how the standard language of blight could be amended or rewritten by grassroots neighborhood groups. A venerable umbrella body with origins in the clubwomen’s movement of the late nineteenth century, the NACWC, like the Urban League, embraced a middle- class ideology of racial uplift— one exemplified by its longstanding motto, “Lifting as We Climb.” During the Progressive era, the organization had focused part of its energies on municipal-housekeeping drives, urging members that their household battles against dirt and disease ought to be “extended to encompass the city.”110 The NACWC’s antiblight campaign of the 1950s fit neatly with such a history, encouraging African American women to improve their own lot through local civic dedication, thereby bringing credit to “the womanhood of the race.”111 The program took shape under the leadership of Irene McCoy Gaines, association president from 1952 to 1958 and a prominent figure in Chicago’s social-service circles. Frequently, Gaines would speak of her experiences traveling the country by train following her inauguration as president.112 In black neighborhoods of city after city, Gaines recalled, she had found “dilapidated and decadent housing,” all creating “breeding grounds for crime, delinquency and demoralized lives.” The NACWC, she quickly determined, ought to “lend its great strength through its membership to save these homes and communities.”113 That opportunity emerged in the fall of 1955, with a major grant 100

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from the Sears-Roebuck Foundation. Both the Sears department store corporation and its philanthropic foundation had recently initiated a neighborhood conservation program, intended as a vehicle for “extending the company’s public-relations work in the metropolitan areas.”114 By funding community improvement contests as part of this effort, the foundation hoped to stimulate parallel campaigns by local voluntary groups. A Sears allocation of $50,000— somewhat hyperbolically described by the NACWC as the “most significant recognition ever given to a colored women’s organization”— allowed the association leadership to hire full-time contest organizers and to offer $25,000 worth of prize money to affiliated local clubs.115 Meanwhile, ACTION offered technical assistance, arranged NBC television coverage of the contest, and screened Man of ACTION at the NACWC’s July 1956 national convention.116 A patronizing tone characterized both organizations’ involvement. One Sears official, Harry Osgood, lectured NACWC leaders that African Americans needed, foremost, to develop a sense of personal responsibility for their communities. Many who had achieved a measure of economic stability, Osgood complained, took pride in nothing but “expensive automobiles” and “flashy clothes.”117 By funding the contest, the Sears-Roebuck Foundation presumably intended to inculcate values that would transcend such alleged material obsessions. Similarly, ACTION seemed oblivious to the irony of offering Man of ACTION as a model for the NACWC: while the film featured a white male homeowner who demands that his city council take action against blight, the NACWC’s rank-and-file membership would typically have lacked access to such political channels. Nevertheless, the funds allowed the association to set up project areas in the District of Columbia, Alabama, Illinois, California, and Washington State, with 105 local women’s clubs participating. For fifteen months, the neighborhood improvement project consumed the national organization’s energies. Meanwhile, from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh and Kansas City to Baltimore, the local African American press offered enthusiastic coverage.118 Most of the campaigns inspired by the contest were simple cleanup efforts: removing junk from alleyways, beautifying vacant lots, creating community gardens and play spaces.119 But in several instances the contest projects took on a somewhat more combative edge. In Chicago, for instance, one neighborhood group concerned itself with “recalcitrant landlords,” the absentee owners of dilapidated, rodent-infested buildings who “refused to provide decent housing for tenants.” Likewise, in Washington, DC, after sixty-two block leaders canvassed their 101

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neighborhood promoting an anti-litter drive, organizers realized that the residents alone weren’t responsible for bedraggled properties and public spaces. They organized a series of “Neighborhood Gripe Nites,” encouraging neighbors to compile grievances about neglected municipal health and housing issues. In Birmingham, Alabama, which lacked laws providing for garbage removal in certain black sections, clubwomen publicized the need for equitable sanitation codes. The winning entry came from a club in Longview, Washington. There, women of the city’s small black community had called a public meeting to interrogate the mayor as to why their neighborhood’s streets remained unpaved, filling abutting houses with mud and dust. Told that their property-tax assessments were too low to justify paving the streets, the women sold more than a thousand ham and turkey dinners in order to foot the cost themselves.120 In all these cases, clubwomen paired their own upkeep efforts with public avowals that the blame for neighborhood pollution and disrepair belonged with leaders outside the affected neighborhoods. The person most responsible for knitting together these scattered local projects was contest director Ora Stokes Perry. A Virginia native, Perry had long agitated for political enfranchisement on behalf of women and African Americans. In 1912, she had founded the Richmond Neighborhood Association, a powerbase for the city’s black population, before leading the state’s Negro Women’s League of Voters during the 1920s.121 As director of the NACWC’s neighborhoodimprovement effort, Perry crisscrossed the country, rallying clubwomen at luncheons, coffee hours, and community meetings. To Perry’s eye, the organizing that went into the projects was fostering a new self-assurance among individuals and a revitalized solidarity within communities. Participants, she declared, were “discovering our hidden capabilities” and were benefiting from the “shared experiences of working together in groups.” Perry also emphasized the campaign’s role in joining communities across racial lines. In Longview, she explained, “you will find Mexicans, Indians and Negroes united for the one central purpose of building a better community.” Similarly, in Los Angeles, “White and Negro people are learning to live harmoniously in the same neighborhoods striving for the same community goals.”122 This was, to be sure, a middle- class and largely nonconfrontational form of activism. Rather than picketing city halls, attacking discriminatory mortgage lenders, or boycotting retailers with biased hiring practices, the contest’s organizers emphasized prettified streetscapes as a ladder for black advancement. But even as the national organi102

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zation urged participants to “keep the slums from their doors,” its member clubs often went on to spotlight the outside forces responsible for poor living conditions.123 And while none of the projects aggressively challenged black political or economic disenfranchisement, the NACWC and its affiliated clubs did advance a noticeably different theory of neighborhood blight and its cures than that propagated by the corporate- dominated leadership at ACTION, the Chamber of Commerce, or NAREB. First, instead of fueling anxieties over the creeping “menace” and omnipresent threat of blight, the organization aimed to prove African Americans’ fitness for citizenship through neighborhood- centered community initiative. Most importantly, the metaphors of “infection” and “contagion,” so dominant in the decade’s blight-fighting rhetoric, were generally absent from the NACWC’s promotional language. Nor were participants motivated by the concerns that drove ACTION’s leaders: increasing sales of home-repair goods, quashing public housing, or solidifying metropolitan mortgage markets. Indeed, rather than indicting black city residents for neighborhood ills, a number of affiliates publicly identified the discriminatory practices that underpinned deficient residential environments, while casting self-initiated rehabilitation as a way to stake a political claim as a community. Here, the neighborhood offered an important venue in which to present demands for self- determination and recognition. By attending to the ills of the block and street corner, the NACWC worked to make plain the link between citizenship at the local and national levels. Second, in contest brochures and updates, the NACWC repeatedly referred to its clubwomen as “community planners”— a subtle but meaningful assertion of authority, given that the label “planner,” in urban-renewal circles, almost invariably signaled the professional authority and credentials of college- educated white men. By the contest’s end, NACWC officers seemed to doubt the competency of the antiblight establishment even to evaluate the worth of their projects. While the Sears-Roebuck Foundation pressed them to select contest judges from staffers at ACTION, NAREB, and Operation Home Improvement, the NACWC instead assembled a panel drawing on leaders from socialwork circles and the intergroup-relations profession.124 Lacking the financial firepower of organizations such as ACTION, women of the NACWC had relied upon the energies that could be generated through living-room coffee hours, door-to- door canvassing, and local cleanup rallies. These, however, were understood as a potent force for remaking neighborhoods and communities. By demonstrating the efficacy of ac103

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tion by ordinary African American women, Perry declared, such projects could renew “faith in America” among disenchanted residents of segregated black districts.125 The NACWC’s closing exhibition of winning projects, a two- day gala in Washington, DC, was carefully noted in urban-renewal circles and featured laudatory addresses from visitors such as Los Angeles mayor Norris Poulson.126 The reaction to the display, however, suggested contradictions between the clubwomen’s improvement strategies and the conventional theories of neighborhood blight. Devoting a June 1957 editorial to the exhibition, the Washington Post praised the “dramatic changes that have taken place in city slum regions,” all due to African American clubwomen “moving mountains by their own efforts.” But, the Post insisted, the major cause of neighborhood decay was “the creeping trail of slums caused by shifting populations of low middleincome groups” who failed to keep up their new homes, blithely allowing their neighborhoods to tumble into the urban abyss.127 No mention here of the discriminatory trash codes protested by Birmingham clubwomen, the municipal government’s refusal to pave mucky streets in black districts of Longview, the lack of adequate recreation facilities in African American communities of Chicago, or the Neighborhood Gripe Nites in underserved areas of the nation’s capital. Instead, this sort of coverage exuded a condescending sense of surprise: perhaps urban African Americans could, after all, be induced to take better care of their own neighborhoods, thereby staunching the flood of dereliction that spilled out from these districts and threatened to engulf the city. Nonetheless, the campaign indicates the degree to which grassroots groups could adapt the standard narrative of neighborhood blight to their own purposes. Recasting its longstanding mission of uplift and service to align with the language of corporate antiblight crusaders, the NACWC was able to attract support and funding from sources such as ACTION and Sears-Roebuck. At the same time, the “community planners” of its local chapters also bent that rhetoric to fit a different set of goals, working to undermine the very theories about racial difference and slums that were so central to conventional understandings of how blight took root. These participants took a discourse based on principles of contagion and risk and subtly transformed it into one addressing citizenship, racial exclusion, and community empowerment.

Urban social-justice battles of the 1960s would bear the imprint of the preceding decade’s neighborhood antiblight offensives. The profusion 104

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of awareness campaigns, the continual media drumbeat on neighborhood decline, and the millions in advertising dollars expended to highlight blight’s future course— all these worked to redefine the city neighborhood as a place of mounting threat, exacerbating white fear and white flight. Even so, grassroots efforts at community uplift through resident- directed assaults on decay also strengthened neighborhood organizing networks within African American sections of the major metropolises. The latter both presaged and helped to lay the foundation for more aggressive neighborhood-based drives for community equality in the decade to come.

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Routes of Escape: Cold War Individualism and Community Ties During the war years, artists, journalists, and academic investigators had shaken off their gloom about the state of neighborhood ties in urban America, celebrating their vitality and social potential across an array of genres—from Rachel Davis DuBois’s innovative festivals promoting a block-level “cultural democracy” to the optimistic novels of neighborhood solidarity by Sholem Asch, Sidney Meller, and others; and from Louis Wirth’s applause for the resurgent local spirit that made “neighbors out of ‘nighdwellers’” to the communitarian cadences employed by champions of urban planning’s neighborhood-unit concept. Later in the 1940s, this vision retreated before the specter of neighborhood blight. But, whatever the pressures on the material fabric of the US city, the neighborhood as an abstract idea retained its place as a frequently used stand-in for values that progressives associated with the promises of American democratic life. The passage into the early 1950s, however, witnessed a marked change in these rhetorical habits. The chilly winds of the Cold War soon swept the antifascist, multicultural ideologies of the Depression and war years from their place of prominence on the cultural landscape. As the Cold War dawned, relates William Graebner, older “wartime emphases on the group and democracy” haltingly gave way to a new “emphasis on the individual and freedom”—a shift 106

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that rippled through social criticism and artistic representations alike.1 Intellectuals, journalists, and artists gradually jettisoned formulations of the city neighborhood as miniature melting pot or microcosm of democratic inclusion. At the same time, the combination of new urban realities and a new geopolitical order sparked a wide-ranging reevaluation of the role that older neighborhoods, with their primary ties and longstanding group loyalties, might play in an increasingly mobile and consumer- oriented postwar America. To be sure, mainstream commentators still occasionally made the leap between local community life and the wider body politic. “American Neighborhoods Throb with Drama of Democratic Way in Action,” pronounced one national newspaper in 1950.2 But by the Cold War’s onset, this journalistic language had been mostly stripped of its multicultural and grassroots elements, reformatted instead around individualist themes such as home ownership and personal privacy. Rather than accenting questions of local participation and solidarity, neighborhood debates now more frequently worked to gauge the tensions between the group and the individual, between boundaries and freedom, between the pull of home and the urge for going, and between older, inflexible forms of “neighboring” and ostensibly newer and more malleable types of community. The neighborhood street as “the whole world in one block,” in Langston Hughes’s 1946 phrase, would shortly seem not only nostalgic but suffocating. Alongside pervasive concerns over accelerating suburban flight and intensifying urban integration conflicts, two interrelated developments framed late 1940s and 1950s discussions of the social functions of the nation’s city neighborhoods. First, the local neighborhood became one lens that focused and even magnified archetypal Cold War trepidations, particularly the proliferating fear of communist infiltration along with its near cousin, alarm over the prospects for nuclear devastation. Second, new theoretical discussions foregrounded uncertainties about the nature and uses of geographically bounded forms of community in the postwar age, most notably over the residential district’s potential for fostering either individuality or conformity. Thus, while various media outlets warned that even the smallest-scale institutions of American life were vulnerable to ideological infection, prominent social thinkers deliberated the traditional neighborhood’s purpose and value with reference to questions of statism, consumerism, authority, and personal identity. These apprehensions, in turn, worked their way into the wider discourse through an outpouring of stories, images, and texts—ranging from academic treatises to television plays, novels, and 107

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stage dramas. In each case, understandings of the neighborhood’s cultural roles were deeply colored by the intense political and social anxieties now gripping the nation’s consciousness.

Bolsheviks, Bombs, and Blight If centrifugal metropolitan population flows and perceptions of unchecked blight helped to curtail romantic representations of the bluecollar city neighborhood, the onset of the Cold War also worked to unravel interpretations of the city’s block-level interpersonal connections as threads in the nation’s democratic fabric. Notably, the mounting conservative counteroffensive against the social- democratic thrust of the Depression era had concrete effects in the realm of grassroots urban politics, resulting in a sharp decline in progressive communityorganizing work.3 Opponents of public housing and urban racial integration regularly infused their campaigns with virulently anticommunist rhetoric.4 At the same time, high-profile congressional investigations into communism and organized crime interrogated and ultimately stigmatized the broad visibility attained by urban ethnic working- class cultures over the preceding two decades.5 A few 1950s artists with Popular Front roots—perhaps most consistently, the painter Ralph Fasanella— continued to ground a leftist political imaginary in idyllic depictions of working- class neighborhood life.6 But many narrators of this earlier neighborhood vision faced a new indifference or outright reprisals. For instance, Sholem Asch, Herbert Clyde Lewis, and Rachel Davis DuBois all attracted FBI scrutiny for suspected communist or otherwise subversive affiliations.7 And, though Asch had sold the film rights to East River for the appreciable sum of $225,000, MGM abruptly scratched production during Hollywood’s red-scare purge, giving the oblique explanation that “there have been enough pictures dealing with anti-Semitism for the time being.”8 DuBois, meanwhile, was made to answer for her intergroup-relations efforts before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate investigations subcommittee, which claimed evidence of her association with several radical front organizations.9 Historian George Sánchez identifies a related example with the fate of the vibrantly multiracial and multiethnic Boyle Heights district of East Los Angeles. Though lauded in national publications as an “example of democratic progress” and a “U.N. in microcosm,” the neighborhood was already breaking apart by the early 1950s under the paired pressures of urban exodus and anticommunist intimi108

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dation of local leaders and institutions.10 Just as Boyle Heights’s proud multiracialism was quickly erased from popular memory, so too the language of progressive democratic idealism so frequently applied to US urban neighborhoods during the 1940s was partially extinguished over the succeeding decade. As such left-leaning and communitarian visions of the city’s local residential spaces grew more rare, Cold War anxieties perceptibly shaped the ways in which the urban neighborhood was described and depicted. Two seemingly contradictory strains of thought made their way to the surface. In one version, the neighborhood community could be cast as a distinct locus of threat, a porous entry point for toxic antiAmerican ideologies. In another version, neighborhood bonds could instead be interpreted as a potent Cold War weapon, a repository of strength in warding off challenges to the integrity of the body politic. The former approach reflected a diffuse yet powerful concern that virtually any social grouping might become susceptible to unpatriotic political deviancies. Themes of subversion and danger seeped into the rhetoric applied to neighborhood communities and spaces. The tone was set early on at the national level: a 1948 House of Representatives publication on communist strategies sounded the alert about the omnipresent Leninist agents who sought to penetrate all levels of US society, from “the national legislature down to the neighborhood club.”11 Journalistic exposés quickly followed. In a nationally syndicated investigative series, for example, New York Herald-Tribune reporters Fendall Yerxa and Ogden Reid alleged that the “nation’s small, sincere and loyal neighborhood groups”—garden clubs, parent-teacher leagues, church study circles, athletic groups—had become prime targets for communist infiltration. It was particularly by virtue of their trusting, receptive nature that these “cornerstones of American society” were left open to clandestine assault, they explained.12 Indeed, sensational revelations before the House Committee on Un-American Activities focused not just on Hollywood leftists or State Department moles, but also on the sheer ordinariness of day-to- day communist activities— as with a 1956 hearing exposing a “cozy Red meeting” in an average Los Angeles neighborhood, the participants trotting out to the curbside bakery truck for their dessert.13 Perhaps less surprising is J. Edgar Hoover’s communist-under- every-bed rhetoric, later in the decade: “The communist official will probably live in a modest neighborhood. His wife will patronize the corner grocery store, his children attend the local school. If a shoe store or a butcher shop is operated by a Party member, the official will probably get a discount on his purchases.”14 109

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Sinister ideological threats often wore a mundane and ordinary mask, and could lurk in any community. Despite the purported ubiquity of such local risks, it was, in fact, very particular kinds of neighborhoods—those of the timeworn innerring districts of the old industrial city—that found themselves cast most frequently as a potential host for anti-American contagions. Numerous business associations publicized this idea, while scurrying to associate their own preferred approaches to remaking the postwar metropolis with the nation’s battle against totalitarian menace. Alan Brockbank, president of the National Association of Home Builders, explained the connection in 1952. “You cannot whip America from without,” he told a conference of businessmen, “but you can whip her from within by growing a crop of Communists. Since Communists breed in areas of economic distress, . . . we must put on such a fight against blight that we get a new face for America.”15 Or, as Brockbank’s successor put it the next year, “No areas on earth are more completely behind an iron curtain than the slum areas of our modern cities”— an insinuation by analogy of the dangers that might breach this wall.16 In similar style, the American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods justified its corporate antiblight program by arguing that the degraded physical conditions in blighted neighborhoods “make for an unstable body politic, fostering political radicalism and heightening intergroup conflicts.”17 As the implication ran in each, a business- directed assault on urban decay might conveniently also excise potential nests of opposition to free- enterprise values and doctrines. Alongside such Cold War warnings of jeopardy came assertions of the local neighborhood’s role as a stronghold uniquely capable of fortifying US resilience in the face of expansionist Soviet ambitions. Among promoters of this line of thought, the most highly visible was the American Council for the Community (ACC), a network of liberal intellectuals, community leaders, and social workers that had coalesced over the late 1940s with help from John Dewey and Frank P. Graham. To the ACC, the strength of the small-scale community was inescapably linked to postwar global politics.18 “America’s real power has always flown from our community life,” leaders proclaimed early on, and only by replenishing this life could citizens “carry successfully America’s lion’s share in building the peace of the world.”19 By 1951, as international tensions escalated, this language of global engagement had taken on strikingly more militaristic overtones. For the US to succeed as a “bulwark against communist aggression,” the ACC board now insisted, would require the establishment of a state of emergency in 110

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local communities, modeled on wartime defense measures. And yet, in its mobilization efforts, the ACC was immediately confronted by paralyzing reactions of wariness and suspicion. Its stable of local correspondents reported trepidation in neighborhood communities nationwide: both a reluctance by inhabitants to participate in activities addressing “controversial issues” such as intergroup relations, “lest they be ‘classified’ as ‘radicals,’ or ‘subversive’”; and worries that the ACC’s proposed emergency measures would contribute to a panoptic network of block captains operating as police informers.20 The other side of the Cold War coin was a dystopic vision of nuclear obliteration— a specter giving rise to an elaborate “domestic geography of Cold War risks,” in geographer Matthew Farish’s phrase.21 And here, too, much of the rhetorical output fi xated on the densely packed city neighborhood as a peculiar epicenter for national hazard. On one hand, the urban planning profession’s longstanding aspiration for wholesale metropolitan population dispersal “gained new urgency in the atomic age,” recounts architecture scholar Max Page, while acquiring “a patriotic, civil defense element that it hadn’t had before.”22 On the other hand, via a tortuous chain of logic, since the country’s aging inner-ring neighborhoods were particularly susceptible to blight, they also appeared especially vulnerable to damage from an enemy assault— and thereby became a Cold War Achilles’ heel. As Nathaniel Keith, slum- clearance director for the Truman administration, pronounced at a conference of housing officials in 1951, “It is obvious that badly dilapidated, overcrowded slums would be most likely to suffer the worst punishment from air attack. . . . Their clearance, then, will add much to civil defense preparedness.”23 Under this dubious reasoning, the ongoing government destruction of large swaths of the historic city’s heart could double as a route to atomic-age urban salvation. Civil- defense texts extended these principles to the level of the individual house and block. Domesticating the new weaponry’s terrifying potential, government appeals drove home the imperative for cleanliness and order in the residential environment, while explicitly linking the respective disquiets over neighborhood blight and atomic annihilation.24 The most extreme specimen came with the 1954 instructional film The House in the Middle. Produced, tellingly, not just by the Federal Civil Defense Administration but also by the paint industry’s National Clean-up, Paint-up, Fix-up Bureau, the film relates the protective benefits of maintaining a tidy house and neighborhood along with the equally powerful risks of squalor. “In every town, you’ll find houses like this: rundown, neglected,” the narrator explains, as the camera 111

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pans across a working- class series of row houses. “An eyesore, yes. And as you’ll see, much more. A house that is neglected is the house that might be doomed in the atomic age.” The film cuts to experiments on contrasting mock residences at the Nevada nuclear test site: illkempt yards versus carefully groomed lawns; peeling clapboards versus freshly painted exteriors. In each case, far- off atomic detonations rip off dilapidated roofs and turn deteriorating houses into fireballs, even as the meticulously maintained home stands untouched. Urging Americans to “take decisive action”—joining with neighbors for repair jobs, painting, hedge trimming, flower planting—the film closes with a stark alternative: “The dingy house on the left, the dirty and littered house on the right, or the clean white house in the middle? It is your choice. The reward may be survival!”25 If The House in the Middle and associated civil- defense campaigns identified neighborhood decay as a culprit in national unpreparedness, fictional versions sometimes depicted such conditions as a disease that might actually be cured through the atomic arsenals aimed at the nation’s cities. No account more tightly bundles the contemporaneous stories of urban neighborhood decline and Cold War existential peril than Philip Wylie’s brisk-selling 1954 novel, Tomorrow! A social pundit and fiction writer, widely known for his 1942 screed against “momism” in Generation of Vipers, Wylie had worked during the early 1950s as a special consultant to the Federal Civil Defense Administration. Piqued that the government had rejected his extravagant preparedness proposals, Wylie envisioned his new novel as “a sort of Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the atomic age,” aimed at awakening the public to urgent dangers.26 Tomorrow! is a tale of two Midwestern cities, Green Prairie and River City, separated by a river and a state boundary. As chapter titles count down toward a full-bore nuclear exchange between the superpowers, Green Prairie valiantly readies its civil- defense squads. River City’s leaders, believing civil defense to be “just one more Washington-spawned interference with the rights of common man,” mock their earnest neighbors across the river.27 River City receives its comeuppance when a devastating Soviet strike wipes out the centers of both cities, whereupon Green Prairie’s civil- defense volunteers hurtle into action, saving far more civilian lives than their anemic River City counterparts. On its surface, this is a straightforward propaganda novel contrasting the foolish and the farsighted, the grasshopper and the ant. Yet, in only slightly less discernable fashion, the work insists upon the connection between Cold War defense liabilities and blight, and in turn between blight and the city’s aging ethnic neighborhoods. The 112

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difference between Green Prairie and River City lies not only in their disparate degrees of commitment to civil defense but also in the basic health of their respective urban landscapes. Alongside its fantasy of metropolises swept away by mushroom clouds, Tomorrow! conveys a sustained revulsion toward the rundown neighborhoods and ethnic accents of the midcentury industrial city. WASP-ish, hygienic Green Prairie stands in stark contrast to the benighted, smoggy, strike-ridden River City, which is filled with a roll call of apparent atomic-bomb magnets: “slums where colored people lived, and Italians, Greeks, Jews and Poles.” When the bombs eventually descend, one character flatly observes that “Niggertown was right on Ground Zero.” In the attack’s wake, the novel’s projection of urban infection and containment intensifies. Earlier, the straight-shooting, cigar- chomping local newspaper editor, Coley Borden, had worried that “the criminal, the have-not people and the repressed minorities” would go “haywire” during an attack. His fears are realized after the strike, when the nation’s cities “vomit themselves into the countryside” as fleeing urbanites embark on a rampage of murder, looting, rape, and arson.28 Throughout, Tomorrow! gives conspicuous nods to ascendant midcentury academic and journalistic conceptions of neighborhood decline. For instance, Wylie borrows Chicago School sociology’s ecological model of ethnic invasion and succession for his narrator’s description of the deterioration of River City’s inner-ring neighborhoods: once populated by “‘Micks, Wops, Latwicks, Polacks, Hunkies’ and others,” they were now occupied by black inhabitants who had “poured back in town and filled the slummy vacuum left by the economically ascending ‘foreigners.’” Similarly, all the usual suspects in blight’s progression— as identified elsewhere by groups such as ACTION—are present. As River City’s wealthy playboy, Kit Sloan, surveys the district surrounding his mansion, he finds “a run- down neighborhood in which the big houses were compartmented for roomers, or hung with signs denoting piano and voice instruction, furniture repair, spiritualist readings, philately and whatnot, or torn down and replaced by already shabby row houses, which in some instances had yielded again to supermarkets and filling stations.” Likewise, the military officer Charles Conner, assuming the role of urban explorer, strolls through aging black sections of River City and, near once-stately homes, discovers saloons and pawn shops, a street- corner sex trade, and untended children scampering across nighttime pavements.29 River City’s failure at the self-help tasks of civil defense is tacitly linked to its failure at the self-help cures for neighborhood blight. Civil defense and blight-fighting here become nearly 113

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interchangeable terms, together associating urban physical decay with moral slackness and deficient patriotic resolve. However unnerving the novel’s inexorable march toward catastrophe, Wylie ends with an ostensibly uplifting vision of a sylvan national landscape in the “Aftertime.” Postapocalypse Americans have substituted a decentralized “horizontal expansion,” galloping through the countryside, for the crowded, aging urban neighborhoods that had stood before the conflict. The narrator’s jubilation at the destruction of the Soviet Union—“the last great obstacle to freedom had been removed from the human path”—is dwarfed by the elation at the eradication of America’s own blighted cities. In Wylie’s bucolic future, urban decimation “had proved an ultimate blessing by furnishing a brandnew chance to build a world brand-new—and infinitely better.”30 Repelled by urbanism as a way of life, Wylie with Tomorrow! had learned to love the bomb. Still, apart from the fantastical “Aftertime” conceit, this apotheosis of the suburban sounds little different than the following year’s paean to sprawling metropolitan expansion from NAREB chief Herbert Nelson: “Crowded cities produce ant-hill philosophies. The broad acres of our modern city find room for individualism and personal freedom.”31 Whether via Wylie’s imagined mushroom clouds or Nelson’s own recipe for “horizontal expansion,” Americans would find that measure of freedom, it seemed, only by turning their backs on the ant-hill living of the industrial city’s older neighborhood order.

Community Liabilities At the same time but in the more rarefied atmosphere of academia, the neighborhood’s social function reemerged as a topic for intensive scrutiny. Taken together, the recent battle against European fascism, emergent fears over new communist adversaries, and a more generalized anxiety toward mass culture triggered a frenzy of commentary on the relationship between the individual and larger social structures. As historian Kyle Cuordileone relates, “The psychological implications of a mass society, and the difficulty of achieving autonomy . . . , became the single most compelling problem for postwar intellectuals and social critics.”32 In these debates the neighborhood appeared in different guises: sometimes a communal redoubt against the gray face of mass uniformity; at other times a space where the collectivizing pressures of the local threatened to undermine individuality and personal volition. In certain iterations, these arguments were merely an extension of 114

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ongoing antisubversion efforts. The rise of the “alienated mass-man” created new political vulnerabilities, warned Berkeley sociologist Philip Selznik in a 1952 book, The Organizational Weapon, which he styled as an “advanced-training manual for anti-communist forces.” As the neighborhood, family, and local community lost their dominating grip on citizens’ consciousness, opportunities opened for totalitarian dogmas to leak into the nation’s social structures.33 On the opposite coast, Princeton political scientist Gabriel Almond expressed similar apprehensions: his 1954 study The Appeals of Communism identified as one culprit the failure of American young people to have satisfying neighborhood experiences. “Communism may appeal to persons who feel rejected or are rejected by their environments,” Almond declared, citing “Jews who live in unfriendly Gentile neighborhoods” or “children who grow up in families which deviate from the neighborhood patterns.” In a case study of reformed ex- communist “Jerome,” Almond described the young man’s unhappy childhood, in which his stern father had forced him to practice music indoors rather than socialize with neighborhood peers. Rejection by local children, along with compensatory feelings of mental superiority, had left Jerome susceptible to the Young Communist League’s blandishments.34 The endlessly impressionable American citizen, apparently, had to precariously balance personal freedom and individuality against the virtues of community belonging and identification. What were the political ramifications for tipping the scale in either direction? Absorbed by this interplay, various theorists sought out new ways to describe the continuing place of organic neighborhood bonds in a mass- culture society that seemed to have dwindling use for them. The answers that emerged clustered around two distinct and irreconcilable standpoints. On one side stood a set of communitarian antimodernists— intellectuals such as the philosopher Baker Brownell and the sociologist Robert Nisbet—who issued dire predictions about the national political costs of community fragmentation. On the other side were market- oriented social commentators such as the sociologist Morris Janowitz, whose transactional model for community-formation in the metropolis implicitly reinterpreted local ties as a kind of commodity good. Speaking to postwar anxieties over an expanding sense of rootlessness, writers in the former group condemned the migration of authority and allegiance toward ever larger and more anonymous social agglomerations. In The Human Community, a 1950 philosophical study based on citizen- engagement initiatives in Montana, Brownell 115

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denounced a centralizing “world elite” who had repressed citizens’ ageold faith in a local sense of belonging. The “stability of little places” had been displaced by the “fictitious solidarity of more or less massive groups,” he warned—a recipe for a “lethal” civilization given only to violence, war, and destruction.35 If Brownell’s unconcealed animus toward the modern metropolis might make his pastoral vision of community seem merely an overheated case of rural nostalgia, Robert Nisbet’s 1953 work, The Quest for Community, offered a more durable version of such communitarian critiques. A landmark in conservative political thought, the book contended that a gradual emancipation from local “authorities and memberships”— groupings such as neighborhood, guild, parish, and lodge—was paving the road for totalitarianism and enslavement. Human nature, Nisbet wrote, demanded “a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity,” all needs that had traditionally been met through “the primary associations of family, neighborhood, and church.” But such small-scale institutions offered far more than personal or psychological comfort. Because each claimed distinct but limited authority over its members, together they formed a “plurality of ‘private sovereignties’” that worked to “insulate the individual from external political power.”36 Increasingly, though, Nisbet saw local vessels of loyalty and authority being eroded, and for this he blamed not the usual bugbears— technology, industrialization, or urbanization— but rather a “singleminded concentration upon the individual as the sole unit of society and upon the State as the sole source of legitimate power.” A quest for individual liberation from the thicket of parochial dominions—legacy of Enlightenment political theory—left the state as the only remaining authority, ruling over an atomized mass of citizens and constantly arrogating to itself social responsibilities once carried out through local voluntary association. In response, Nisbet proposed a “new philosophy of laissez faire,” one no longer aimed at liberation from kin and community but rather at fostering “conditions within which autonomous groups may prosper.”37 While this antistatist framework construed the local community’s merits using terms such as jurisdiction, belonging, stability, and tradition, another set of analysts moved in the opposite direction, interpreting contemporary neighborhood bonds as the ahistorical product of individual choice, along the way sidelining the gemeinschaft/gesellschaft dichotomy that continued to predominate in the US social sciences. The ACC leaned toward this perspective: by persistently touting the ability of “the trained man” and the “community social engineer” to 116

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restore desiccated neighborly bonds, the group cast community sentiment as a technocratic achievement of the present moment.38 More influentially, Morris Janowitz, in his 1952 study The Community Press in an Urban Setting, adopted a newly individualistic conception of “community” in order to undercut longstanding sociological expectations of the evaporation of urban neighborhood ties. As Janowitz pointed out, these teleological predictions stumbled in explaining why the neighborhood, for many modern city dwellers, did persist as a recognizable part of their day-to- day social existence. The mistake was one of definition: earlier theorists had recognized community only where it operated as a deep-seated and dominant form of shared local consciousness. A more flexible definition was needed. Contemporary neighborhoods, Janowitz suggested, were best understood as “communities of limited liability,” spaces with which residents identify simply to the degree to which they derive demonstrable benefits. Yes, feelings of local identity were real, but they were distinctly limited by “the amount of social and psychological investment they represent.” And, for the dissatisfied inhabitant, departure was no tortured process: “When the community fails to serve his needs, he will withdraw.”39 All the utilitarian neighborhood dweller needed, it seemed, was Jeremy Bentham’s felicific calculus recalibrated for the twentieth century. Paradoxically, this validation of the continued existence of neighborhood identity in the metropolis recoded “community” itself as a personal project, the result of rational free choice by canny, benefitmaximizing urbanites. Such mechanistic midcentury theories, notes historian Zane Miller, posited the neighborhood community as merely “a place in which people chose to live for the purpose of satisfying their personal needs.”40 No more, in this presentist rendition, were community ties primarily an organic outgrowth of shared history, space, or culture. “Community” and “belonging” here more nearly resembled consumer goods: picked out, made use of, and discarded at will. If this definition appeared to correlate quite well with a mobile nation where millions were choosing new homes in the suburbs, then it also aligned neatly with depictions of older working- class urban neighborhoods as spaces where community was the opposite of a choice, a birthright that one did not elect and could not escape. In answer, then, to questions about the neighborhood community’s role in the national life, theorists such as Nisbet and Janowitz offered two quite different formulations: neighborhoods either as one form of “private sovereignty,” vital repositories of authority, history, and continuity capable of resisting statist atomization; or instead as “commu117

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nities of limited liability,” the sum of individual calculations made primarily out of self-interest, and subject to annulment at a moment’s notice. Yet beneath the apparent opposition, both renderings strongly reverberated to characteristic Cold War preoccupations. For Nisbet, neighborhood-level social authority was one fortification against creeping totalitarianism at home, while for Janowitz the freely chosen “social cohesion” of metropolitan community life would ease mobilization of resources for national-security purposes.41 On a more general level, the two shared with many of their intellectual peers a fascination with the tension between social control and personal autonomy in the local environment. As Cold War apprehensions ran more swiftly, the concepts of neighborhood and local community drifted loose from their moorings in the celebratory culture of the World War II years. Considerations of the neighborhood’s political role oscillated between a new set of poles: threat and strength, community tradition and individual selfdetermination. Powerfully shaping such discussions were the decade’s endemic anxieties over a fresh and insidious conformist ethos overtaking American life. Numerous 1950s pundits conjured up a populace reduced to “men in gray flannel suits,” “organization men” stripped of individuality and initiative— all contributing, in analyst William H. Whyte’s sardonic description, to a homegrown American collectivism every bit “as pervading as any ever dreamed of by the reformers, the intellectuals, and the utopian visionaries.”42 According to this widespread critique, notes historian Wilfred McClay, postwar Americans had complacently submitted to “a deification of organizational life, and a social ethic that relinquished personal integrity and authenticity.”43 The disquiet coursed through popular works of fiction and drama. While best remembered as allegories for McCarthyist persecution, pieces such as Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible and Carlisle Floyd’s opera Susannah served also as cautionary tales about the propensity for community opinion to trammel the individual and eradicate difference. Both are set in small towns rather than cities. But portrayals of the urban neighborhood locale registered this theme as well. Whereas a favorite motif of the 1940s home-front period was neighborhood solidarity, cast as a marvelous harmony of purpose in the face of national peril, a key concept a decade later was neighborhood conformity, the potential for repression of selfhood by the larger group. These competing terms— solidarity and conformity— are both ways of characterizing “neighborhood unity.” Yet while this unity had seemed in the former instance to humanize democratic values on an intimate level, in the latter instance 118

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it appeared to squeeze inhabitants’ minds into the narrow mold of locally sanctioned beliefs.44 Of the numerous popular texts that grappled with this tension, two showcased it more plainly than most: social pundit John Keats’s 1956 antisuburban satirical novel, The Crack in the Picture Window, and screenwriter Reginald Rose’s controversial 1954 teleplay for CBS, Thunder on Sycamore Street. Each in a different way engages the potential oppressiveness of neighborhood communalism. While Keats idealizes a bygone urban neighborhood past that gave free rein to the individual, Rose offers a model for resisting the totalizing pressures of the collective in the present moment. In Keats’s rendition, the traditional city neighborhood escapes opprobrium by, in fact, creating a place for individuality and autonomy — a notable recoding from 1940s portrayals of community solidarity. At first glance, The Crack in the Picture Window seems merely to set up the familiar contrast between the alienation and anomie of the new tract-home suburbs and the tightly bonded community of the old urban neighborhood. The main character, Mary Drone, has followed her husband to a mass-produced housing development, Rolling Knolls, far from her beloved former home in “one of the big, three-story family houses on Elm Street” that had “sheltered three generations of a family.” As the Drone family’s new life in suburbia unfolds, however, it turns out that the forsaken city neighborhood had offered a blissful world of individual expression and variety, free from the oppressive forms of community that Mary encounters in Rolling Knolls. Back in the Elm Street neighborhood, “the houses are each different from the other, inhabited by people of differing ages, occupations, dress, manners and beliefs. . . . An Elm Street woman’s social life was apt to carry her to different parts of town, to homes different in detail from her own. Such variety lent richness and perspective to her own life.” Not so in Rolling Knolls, an oppressive community built only on conformity and surveillance: a “vast, communistic, female barracks,” where the spirit was crushed “into the shape of a desiccated persimmon.”45 The surprise here isn’t the insistence on the suffocating nature of suburban social life, by then a journalistic chestnut, but rather the manner in which Keats frames the old city neighborhood as a veritable paradise of anonymity. In Elm Street’s “pre-war heaven,” explains the narrator with praise, “one housewife did not necessarily meet— or even necessarily know— all other housewives on the block. For one thing, the housewives of Elm Street might well have little in common.” In Rolling Knolls, by contrast, the human being as a distinct individual 119

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disappears in tandem with “the obliteration of the individualistic house.”46 In celebrating the urban residential environment as a haven for personal privacy and individual temperament, Keats departed quite decisively from commentators a decade earlier, who had nearly unanimously bemoaned the rise of urban anonymity and its destructive impact on local life. Sociologist Bessie McClenahan, in 1942, had complained that the contemporary urbanite’s chief desire was for a neighbor who “lets me alone and minds his own business”; for Keats in 1956, this quality was what made the old neighborhood worth the nostalgia.47 A similar suspicion of community sentiment anchors Reginald Rose’s 1954 television play Thunder on Sycamore Street, presented on CBS’s prestigious repertory program Studio One. Here, though, the neighborhood is cast as the natural context for debilitating and dangerous social orthodoxies. Rose, who would garner accolades later that year for his juryroom drama Twelve Angry Men, had planned with Thunder to dramatize community strife surrounding an African American family’s move into an all-white neighborhood. Riveted by recent news coverage of racial violence in Cicero, Illinois—there, white housing- development tenants had greeted their new black neighbors with rocks and rioting— Rose aimed to explore the group pressures that could produce such a savage response. Not surprisingly, CBS executives quailed at his outline, fearing especially the prospect of a furious backlash from southern white audiences. To salvage the project, Rose made a crucial change to his script. By transforming the black family into a white ex- convict and his family, Rose hoped to convey the same message in a symbolic rather than literal manner.48 In the version that finally aired, the viewer only gradually learns that families on the fictional Sycamore Street are preparing that night to march to the house of their new neighbors, ex- convict Joe Blake and his family, and to evict them from the neighborhood, by force if necessary. At first, the neighbors seem to have achieved unanimity and solidarity. As one ringleader, Frank Morrison, smugly gloats, “It’s gonna be one hundred per cent. Every family on the block.” But another neighbor—the nervous, indecisive, and henpecked Artie Hayes— hedges, doubting the rightness of the block’s chosen course. First, Frank bullies Artie: “We all agreed. That’s how it is. The majority. Right?” Then Artie’s own wife, afraid of losing her family’s tenuous grasp on local respectability, issues stern marching orders: “We’re going to walk out into the gutter, you and me, the Hayes family, and we’re going to be just like everybody else on Sycamore Street!” When the mob, in the 120

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final scene, delivers its ultimatum, Joe insists that his family will hold its ground, and he is met by a rock to the head. Horrified, the oncespineless Artie marshals a more courageous resolve. Standing next to the blood-spattered ex- con, Artie exclaims, “Throw the next stone at me, neighbors. I live here too!” Now cowed and uncertain, the residents slink away.49 Despite the network’s timidity, enthusiastic audiences recognized the emblematic nature of the Joe Blake character. Sifting through his bulging mailbag, Rose found that various viewers had interpreted Joe as stand-in for “a Negro, a Jew, a Catholic, a Puerto Rican, an exCommunist or fellow traveler, a Japanese or Chinese, a Russian, an anarchist or an avowed atheist.”50 Understood as a broader allegory about social exclusion—applicable to any marginalized group—Thunder seemed now not a meditation on issues of racism and housing, but rather a drama focused wholly on the question of neighborhood conformity. Reviewers, too, adopted this reading. The “glory” of the play, opined a critic for the New York World-Telegram and Sun, was its demonstration that “a man can be ‘different’” and yet be “as decent as the conformists all around him.” To the New York Times, the drama protested “the blind unfeeling credo of conformity that can tear a community apart.”51 The real victims in the play, these critics implied, were just as much the neighborhood’s violent plotters, whose minds were wrapped in the straitjacket of community opinion. Two points are worth noting about this. First, with the substitution of a white ex- convict for an African American family, the specific problem of discrimination in housing is blurred into vaguer questions of individuality, local shibboleths, and group opinion-formation. And, even if one does catch the racial subtext, by sidestepping the structural bases for urban segregation the play renders the defeat of that racism solely as a matter of brave, resolute individuals willing to buck the irrational prejudices of their neighbors. Second, and more relevant here, is the transformation in the imagined social function of the neighborhood, along with the questions posed about the uses and desirability of “neighborhood unity.” Recall, by way of contrast, how problems of neighborhood-level intergroup relations were addressed by various progressives of the 1940s: Rachel Davis DuBois promoted enhanced neighborhood unity as a force that could conquer interracial and interethnic animosities, while Sholem Asch, Sidney Meller, and Louis Hazam sketched neighborhoods that acted as catalysts for affection across religious and ethnic lines. But by 1954, to many liberals, such romantic idealizations of neighborhood community often looked credulous or 121

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starry- eyed. In Thunder, in fact, neighborhood unity—now interpreted not as “solidarity” but as “conformism”— is the problem, one that can only be overcome when a stouthearted individual like Artie is prepared to defy his neighbors. Rose’s portrayal mirrored a larger wariness among racial liberals over the continuing utility of the close-knit neighborhood. For example, in a 1958 proposal for unified metropolitan governments to supplant the proliferation of tiny suburban municipalities, political scientist and future HUD secretary Robert C. Wood pointed to the “exclusiveness, narrowness, provinciality and clannishness” that took hold when neighborhood sentiment was given formal political expression.52 To the integrationist housing expert Charles Abrams, writing in 1955, it was the very attenuation of community bonds in the age of the automobile that provided the perfect rebuff to segregationists who insisted that “Negroes and whites do not mix.” In the present era, neighbors didn’t need to “mix” or to share deep affinities, explained Abrams: “The proper function of the neighbor is to keep his garbage covered, his lawn trim, his children and radio quiet, his house painted, his troubles to himself.”53 The underlying messages here closely traced Svend Riemer’s and Reginald Isaacs’s late-1940s protests against the neighborhood-unit concept in city planning. Rose, Wood, and Abrams—like Riemer and Isaacs before them— challenged their peers’ communitarian rhetoric by casting neighborhood communalism as an inevitable breeding ground for conformist thought, along with its close cousin, racial prejudice. The alternative, for many postwar liberal writers, was to valorize a different set of neighborhood attributes: from Morris Janowitz’s “communities of limited liability” to John Keats’s Elm Street paradise of anonymity and individualism, and from Reginald Rose’s model for defying local groupthink to Charles Abrams’s ideal neighbor who keeps “his troubles to himself.”

The Urge for Going As the valences of “neighborhood unity” shifted from solidarity to conformity, narratives of the individual versus the neighborhood increasingly came to dominate. Most commonly, such accounts conveyed the experiences of postwar Americans working themselves free from the encumbering bonds of familiar urban habitats to pursue the promises of family privacy and modern consumer affluence in newly built suburban environments. Across the 1950s, recounts historian Elaine Tyler 122

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May, “popular culture was filled with stories about young adults who shifted their allegiances from the old ethnic ties to the new nuclear family ideal.”54 Often portrayed through geographic moves, these themes found particular resonance on the big and small screens, where even fictional characters who had been deeply identified with local city spaces were soon bidding longtime neighbors farewell. “After all these years of apartment dwelling, I’m going at long last to live in a house,” pronounced a wistful but contented Molly Goldberg, matriarch of radio and television stalwart The Goldbergs, as her TV family departed the Bronx in 1955 for a de- ethnicized suburban town beyond.55 During commercial television’s infant years of the late 1940s, one reviewer could point to the parade of sitcoms featuring European ethnic city dwellers in order to proclaim that “TV has a UN all its own.”56 Within a half- dozen seasons, however, the networks had begun turning over primetime airwaves to WASP-ish suburban programs extolling the inward-looking nuclear family and the self- contained detached home. These ways of appraising the aging city neighborhood’s destiny— abandonment or erasure, with perhaps some passing nostalgia—may have been the most frequently adopted, but other cultural producers assessed such spaces’ meanings using markedly different approaches. Indeed, while many stories of departure presented the timeworn urban village as a natural if outmoded way station on an unfolding familial or national journey, some prominent fictional works adopted darker tones in order to foreground the psychologically entrapping and prison-like nature of the American city’s long- established enclaves. Rather than emphasizing the ease of cutting traditional ties, such narratives instead figured the old neighborhood’s ostensibly rigid modes of belief as a direct threat to urbanites’ capacity for autonomous civic participation and authentic religious faith in the present moment. These motifs surfaced with especial urgency in two Pulitzer Prize–winning artistic compositions of the era: Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1954 opera The Saint of Bleecker Street and Edwin O’Connor’s 1961 novel The Edge of Sadness. Both pieces should be read as quests for alternatives; in each, the central drama concerns the main character’s agonized attempts to imagine ways of living unshackled from the old block and parish. In turn, the differences between Menotti’s and O’Connor’s plotlines suggest how much the tenor and substance of the debate would alter in a few brief years. The first of these works, Menotti’s Saint of Bleecker Street, deserves consideration precisely because of how drastically it revises only slightly earlier renderings of the industrial city’s immigrant-heavy resi123

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dential locales. The last major stage opera set entirely in an American urban neighborhood, 1947’s Street Scene, had celebrated the democratic potential to be found in the most ordinary of spaces. In distinction, Menotti’s Saint identifies the trappings of the old neighborhood as a throwback, and the community itself as an antimodern space where local history and religious ritual hang as an impenetrable curtain shrouding residents from the broader social universe. But although The Saint reprises a long line of narratives about the culturally stagnant ethnic enclave, it— unlike its prewar predecessors— offers no convincing alternative, no plausible route of escape. The contrast between the two musical productions, and between the critical receptions afforded to each, hints at not only the growing suspicion of the white- ethnic urban village as a social form, but also the rise of a newly individualistic mode for thinking about neighborhood ties, one reflective of Americans’ quest for manufactured communities in the suburbs and epitomized by Janowitz’s theory of the “community of limited liability.” Heralded by the news media as a major cultural event, The Saint’s debut came at the very height of Gian Carlo Menotti’s American popular renown. The Italian-born composer and librettist had migrated to the United States as a teenager in 1927; by the mid-1950s he had established himself as the most widely recognized opera composer then working in the country.57 Because Menotti eschewed modernist experimentalism in favor of the melodic, populist tradition of Giacomo Puccini, the critical establishment sometimes dismissed him as a lightweight. And yet, as one magazine enthused in 1951, audiences nationwide had been swept by a “Menotti Mania.”58 With The Saint—mounted in a Broadway theater rather than an opera house, and restaged for television on CBS and NBC—Menotti offered his most concerted effort to expand the public following for “serious” musical drama.59 Set in “the present,” in the cold-water tenements, family-run eateries, vacant lots, and nearby subway station of Manhattan’s Little Italy, the tragic story enacts the clash between old-world values and a new secular individualism.60 The drama centers on Annina, a sickly young woman believed by inhabitants to be a saint, and her faithless brother, Michele. Each Good Friday, Annina is miraculously transfigured by the appearance of stigmata on her hands. Frequently overcome by heavenly visions, she attracts a following of devout neighbors seeking healing or transcendence. Michele, however, resentfully denounces what seem to him the inhabitants’ primitive superstition and their refusal to engage with the surrounding world. Determined to liberate his sister from the neighbors’ possessive hold, Michele implores her to flee the enclave’s “little 124

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island of defeat” with him.61 When Michele’s girlfriend, Desideria, accuses him of harboring incestuous desires for his sister, the enraged Michele publicly stabs Desideria to death. In a melodramatic finale, Annina takes the veil just as she succumbs to a mysterious fatal illness, with her now-fugitive brother weeping beside her lifeless body. Viewed through a biographical lens, the opera dramatizes a psychological conflict that had long haunted the composer. Though raised Roman Catholic, Menotti had turned away from the church after moving to the United States, and for most of his life, reports one biographer, guilt over those severed ties “would rise to the surface at unexpected moments, plunging the composer into depression.” With The Saint, this internal crisis of faith is self- consciously translated into a drama about urban space: Menotti’s description of himself as an ambivalent “runaway” from the religion of his youth finds its parallel in the atheistic Michele’s traumatic quest for freedom from his neighborhood’s oppressive confines.62 Yet if the work appears at first to recycle commonplace themes from 1910s and 1920s narratives of the immigrant ethnic ghetto, it also departs from this storyline. In this “battle of absolutes,” as one reviewer called it, Michele is unable to negotiate any compromise between the old neighborhood and the impersonal world outside; the “Church-theme,” in composer Marc Blitzstein’s complaint, is left to “walk all over its opponent.”63 Moreover, by implicating the one potentially more cosmopolitan and outward-looking character in a frenzied murder, the drama serves to undermine the validity of his symbolic stature. In several key ways, then, the dichotomies that structure the production modify extant ideas about the social identity of the “old neighborhood,” turning away from the sentimental 1940s vocabulary of the democratic neighborhood melting pot, as well as from its converse, the tale of the protagonist who exits the enclave to become fully “American.” First and most apparent is the opera’s unspoken tension between incompatible depictions of the working- class ethnic neighborhood: as a familiar home to those modest blue- collar city dwellers who during the war years had often been exalted as a personification of national identity; or instead as habitat for a peculiar breed of urban primitives, unable to adapt to the flexible, individualistic forms of “neighboring” required in the contemporary era. Indeed, the opera initially seems to eulogize just the sort of plebian urbanites who had bustled across the stage in Street Scene. “Who knows where God will find His saints?” demands Don Marco, the local priest, while defending his parishioners’ certainty in Annina’s saint125

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hood.64 Despite such affirming gestures, though, critics were most frequently struck by the strange and alien nature of Menotti’s urban locale— casting it as a crucible of “lurid emotions and smoldering temperaments,” peopled by an “overwrought horde” of believers, “inarticulate” denizens who “do not rationalize about the mysterious forces that possess their minds.”65 The composer himself seemed aware of the dissonance. During the show’s run, he had attacked the view that “only exotic subjects from the past are suitable for an opera,” insisting that operatic writers must “interpret the uniquely contemporary life.”66 Ironically, as the drama unfolds, its characters come to feel like nothing if not “exotic subjects from the past”; in the process the production persistently distances its presumably middle- and upper- class audiences from the Bleecker Street inhabitants on stage. Michele’s attempt to dissuade Annina from participating in the annual Feast of San Gennaro procession, for instance, earns him a brutal beating from fanatical young neighbors. Meanwhile, each element of community life is overtly laden with a foreboding symbolism—from the chorus’s recurrent and ominous chanting of the Latin litany, to the residents’ unshakeable belief in Annina’s miraculous powers, to their violent insistence that she act as human totem for the San Gennaro parade. Rather than reveling with onstage neighbors at the comforting pleasures of the corner-store meal, viewers are instead invited to marvel at the almost overwhelming intensity of their religious and ethnic absorption. In a second departure from 1940s descriptive tendencies, this imagined neighborhood stands not as an emblem of some larger social whole, but rather as a tightly sealed ghetto, thoroughly severing its populace from the surrounding metropolitan universe. In fact, this is an urban drama in which the city itself is missing: though the work is set in contemporary Manhattan, the metropolis never intrudes upon the little community. Only two insignificant moments—when a few extras scurry across a subway platform, and when Michele’s photo appears in newspaper reports of his crime— suggest that there even is an outside city. Michele’s incestuous love for Annina mirrors the socially incestuous introversion of the community itself. If the neighborhood of Street Scene represented “the whole world in one block,” then Menotti’s The Saint reverses that formulation: for its inhabitants, one block is the entire world. Ultimately, then, the urban enclave as portrayed here is no steppingstone toward social incorporation, as Chicago School sociologists had postulated several decades earlier, but a shadowy and mystical space, overdetermined by its history and closed to all but its own being. Mid126

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way through the opera, as the San Gennaro procession draws closer, Michele frames his plea for Annina to escape with him with bitter condemnations of the neighborhood’s all- consuming heritage: “Here the blood is darkened by memories, and fears / Medalled with idols, daggered by tears. / Here the young are branded by a relentless past, / Receive its secret signals, / And bear the enslaving mark.” Surprisingly, Annina does not counter with a defense of her devout community. Instead, she too sings of an “elsewhere,” promising to lead her brother “far from the world” to the “City of God.”67 Where secularism inevitably leads one out of the old neighborhood, faith also moves away from confining urban realities into an ineffable realm of transcendence. While showering praise on the musical score, a number of commenters expressed a barely veiled irritation with Menotti’s chosen antinomies: religious fervor versus skepticism, folk emotion versus modern reason, local tradition versus the indifferent outside world. These conflicts, so germane to social critics a generation earlier, appeared by 1954 to have been made irrelevant by inexorable processes of urban modernization and assimilation, along with the predicted disintegration of the American city’s lingering immigrant enclaves. Perhaps for this reason, the plot struck various observers as either played out or absurdly schematic. Dubbing the story “bogus,” for example, director and critic Harold Clurman dismissively concluded that “the religious folk in the play are dreadful people,” and “the boy in opposition a fool.”68 The ticket-buying public, as well, gave a lukewarm response, leading to the show’s closure after four months. And while the composer blamed expensive staging decisions, others faulted the very ethnic and religious topics that drove the plot.69 As one Broadway reporter opined, the drama’s “intensely Catholic associations” had, among non- Catholics, elicited visceral reactions “that ranged from upsetting to repellent.”70 But if Menotti’s thematic dichotomies failed to convince critics, the opera nonetheless resonated to ubiquitous contemporary debates about the tension between bounded communalism and personal autonomy. By refusing to synthesize or conciliate its characters’ opposing worldviews, The Saint effectively consigns to the historical dustbin both the blue- collar ethnic spaces in which its story unfolds and the aggressively secular and individualistic alternative in the person of Michele. Neither, in this rendering, can readily be imagined as viable components of a confidently mobile midcentury America. Audiences, though, might also have found a different dichotomy at work, never overtly stated but always lurking in the wings. Because Menotti omits any gesture toward options beyond the neighbors’ insular religiosity and Mi127

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chele’s destructive nihilism, the drama as a whole implicitly operates as foil for more presumably “modern” forms of neighborhood relationships. Each of the two poles in The Saint contrasts directly with the sort of metropolitan community locale theorized by analysts such as Morris Janowitz, where people pick and choose their communal commitments rather than involuntarily inheriting them. The unresolvable nature of the drama’s conflict suggests, even if unintentionally, the need for new, looser, and more rationalized kinds of neighborly ties in the postwar age. While The Saint, as Menotti remarked, resolutely forswore “an escapist ending or a pat solution,” Edwin O’Connor’s widely admired novel The Edge of Sadness, from seven years on, deployed many of the same counterforces yet offered its readers a compelling vision of departure.71 A popular Book- of-the-Month Club offering, the work is frequently discussed as an elegiac meditation on the cultural costs and rewards of Irish American assimilation and upward mobility.72 This, though, is not a story that arcs inevitably toward bland middle- class suburban comfort. Set in an unidentified New England metropolis, the novel is narrated by a middle-aged Catholic priest, Father Hugh Kennedy, and, like Menotti’s opera, it features a central character suspended between the cocoon-like parish neighborhood and an uncertain future awaiting elsewhere. In The Edge of Sadness, however, turning one’s back on the ethnic urban village is a way of embracing, rather than abjuring, an authentic religious faith. Here, liberation from neighborhood provincialism offers a refreshing freedom to fulfill pressing spiritual and social responsibilities in distressed corners of the declining city. Driving the novel’s plot is an opposition between two starkly dissimilar types of urban locale, each of which holds different possibilities and challenges for the protagonist. Decades ago, Father Hugh had happily begun his career as a curate in his own childhood neighborhood, at the thriving Irish American parish of St. Raymond’s. Eventually, though, a slide into alcoholism had resulted in his banishment for rehabilitation, followed by a reassignment to Old St. Paul’s, a deteriorating cathedral in a “tattered neighborhood” of cheap rooming houses, liquor shops, seedy groceries, and all the classic markers of blightridden decay. Populated mostly by down-and- out drifters, along with a low-income miscellany of Syrians, Greeks, Chinese, and Puerto Ricans, the cheerless district seems merely “a halting place for transients in despair,” and Hugh listlessly performs his duties for a tiny and indifferent congregation. “In a way, it’s like a foreign mission, yet here it is, right in the heart of the city,” he dolefully observes, when describing to his 128

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bishop the area’s “queer isolation.” Early on in the work, this dreary urban anonymity is thrown into sharp relief when Hugh ventures back to his former neighborhood, inducing a flood of reminiscence. His erstwhile St. Raymond’s home may possess “no particular beauty or grace or grandeur of scene,” Hugh muses, but nonetheless it is “a neighborhood, my neighborhood, a compound of sights and smells and sounds that have furnished all my years.”73 Taking these settings as its poles, The Edge of Sadness for much of its length seems to rehearse the quintessential mythos of white- ethnic urban nostalgia: a yearning for an inaccessible world of structured neighborhood life and parish loyalties, imagined against a contemporary backdrop of city decline and social fracture.74 Reviewers who spurned the work as simply “a long-winded tribute to the past,” however, missed another and more significant dimension.75 With the decisive confrontation and personal crisis that dominate its fi nal portion, the novel veers off from this well-trod narrative path. Though Hugh longs to recapture the “sharp sense of belonging” that St. Raymond’s still elicits in him, these sentiments ultimately earn him a withering verbal attack from the church’s current pastor, Hugh’s childhood friend John Carmody. Intellectual and aloof, Father Carmody has come to despise the St. Raymond’s parishioners for their self-absorption and overweening bonhomie, their banal gossip and endless self-pitying complaints. In a savage outburst, Carmody upbraids Hugh for neglecting his own crumbling parish while pining for “a dream, a never-never land.”76 The novel culminates in Carmody’s sudden death, which forces Hugh to decide irrevocably between the solace of the old neighborhood and the demands of his new surroundings. When the bishop offers him Carmody’s now-vacant position at St. Raymond’s, Hugh surprises even himself by rejecting the long- desired homecoming, resolving instead to plunge with fresh dedication into his lonely work in the struggling, polyglot slum district of Old St. Paul’s. By recognizing that his duty is not to his mistily remembered former community but rather to God and the city’s castoffs, O’Connor’s protagonist gains the freedom to live fully in the urban present. “I stood aching with excitement,” Hugh concludes, “for suddenly it seemed to me that something might be ahead which grew out of the past, yes, but was totally different, with its own labors and rewards, that it might be deeper and fuller and more meaningful than anything in the past.” The blighted terrain encircling Old St. Paul’s may not be a symbol for modern urban dynamism, but it becomes a symbol for a modern spiritual dynamism— a realization made possible only through the contrast 129

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to the stultifying social routines of the familiar parish, where Hugh had been merely “a cheerleader in a Roman collar.”77 In this respect, as literary critics have been quick to note, the novel’s resolution dovetails with the outlook of many postwar Catholic liberals who had left their church’s social enclaves, and who urged the institutional leadership to redirect its energies toward emergent urban social-justice issues.78 Yet if The Edge of Sadness conveys a message that the church and nation are now called to a new urban mission, it also participates in broader discussions over the future of the bounded and coherent neighborhood community. As its narrator disentangles his personal vocation from the places that once lent it meaning, O’Connor’s work uncannily anticipates themes from Protestant theologian Harvey Cox’s iconoclastic 1965 bestseller, The Secular City, which urged emancipation from parochial fetters as a route toward a modernized and unhampered spirituality.79 And, like Menotti’s Saint of Bleecker Street and many other roughly contemporaneous pieces, the novel pits urban contingency, anonymity, and individual agency against the lure of local bonds. In such tales, whether it is the “island of defeat” of Menotti’s Little Italy or the “never-never land” of O’Connor’s St. Raymond’s parish, the old neighborhood can be memorialized but no longer inhabited.

Whatever their differences in genre or emphasis, all of the texts described above convey a palpable unease over the place of longestablished neighborhood ties in an age of suburbanization and bureaucratization, Cold War anxieties and loosening local affinities. In each case, the timeworn city neighborhood still stands as a powerful symbol and reference point. Consistently, however, the concept is either reinterpreted through the lens of individual psychology, cordoned off as an alien and entrapping space, or used as a foil for less constraining types of interpersonal relationships. Capturing some of this tone, the federal government’s slum- clearance chief in 1952 had lamented the “psychological handicaps” confronting his agency in the form of neighborhood dwellers who feared or resisted compulsory relocation from their accustomed environments.80 Fiction and drama of the era, too, regularly fi xated on the “psychological handicaps” signaled by an excessive attachment to the old block. If such works look back with nostalgia, then they most often project what literary theorist Svetlana Boym terms a “reflective,” rather than a “restorative,” nostalgia: a longing without any hope or desire for return.81 130

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Surveying recent urban transformations from the vantage point of 1962, the distinguished sociologist Scott Greer contended that democracy in the modern metropolis had now come, above all else, to mean “freedom from restraint” for the individual. Political analysts, he explained, had long embraced a “democratic dogma” that revered local-scale interdependence and participation. But in reality, the stable, densely linked urban subcommunities envisioned by this dogma had become untenable, dissolved by a new residential mobility, institutional dispersion, and contingent commitments to place. Those latter characteristics “are not images most Americans hold of a proper democratic society,” Greer noted; and yet, “for the average man, the contemporary metropolis is a vast improvement over his share in the old city.”82 The terminology employed here, regardless of its empirical accuracy, perfectly crystalizes a key imaginative and rhetorical shift of the early Cold War years, in which an older vocabulary of democratic neighborhood participation and unity had been overwritten by a newer language of individual flight and freedom. As the 1960s progressed, however, the neighborhood template that had guided much of this debate would come to seem inadequate or irrelevant. The mounting public discourse on urban racial disparities and divisions generated new representational problems and possibilities, while propagating a fresh set of images of the neighborhood in crisis.

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The Urban Crisis and the Meanings of City Community

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A Place Apart: The “New Ghetto” and the “Old Neighborhood” In March 1965, Robert Weaver, the respected African American economist and high-ranking federal housing official, spoke at Harvard University in defense of slum clearance and urban renewal. Chastising these programs’ recent critics, Weaver complained that “the greatest romantic illusion in the discussions of slums is not the hope that they will all be cleared in the near future, but the misconception that they are all stable neighborhoods to which the residents have strong ties.” This misguided viewpoint, he explained, stemmed in no small measure from the mythology that had grown up around Boston’s West End, former home to the working- class Italian Americans whose close-knit family life and futile struggles against the wrecking ball had been so compellingly narrated by the sociologist Herbert Gans in his classic 1962 ethnography, The Urban Villagers. The problem, Weaver argued, wasn’t merely an idealized understanding of the West End itself— already an “economic drain” upon its demolition. Far more worrying was this myth’s broadranging application by starry- eyed observers, who extrapolated from an atypical “group of elderly Boston Italians” in order to describe even grim minority-populated ghettos as poor but stable communities beloved by their inhabitants. Such Pollyanna-ish notions, Weaver feared, threatened to derail urban slum clearance entirely. 135

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To be sure, he granted, any slum might contain a small handful who were “strongly attached to their neighborhood.” But, in defense of the program, he noted that fully two-thirds of the residents displaced during federal urban renewal’s first decade had been nonwhites. And because racial minorities lacked the residential mobility of whites, most “lived in a neighborhood not through attachment but because they had no choice.” The mounting angst over the destruction of such districts, therefore, was both frivolous and unwarranted.1 That Weaver would cite displacement’s disproportionate impact on African American urbanites as a point in favor of the program likely struck some as jarring. Such glaring racial disparities, after all, are what earned urban renewal the epithet “Negro removal.” But Weaver’s larger purpose here was to make it clear that the US city’s poor and workingclass black inhabitants were no urban villagers. Like many of his liberal contemporaries, Weaver found it absurd to suggest that African American slum residents, segregated into decaying ghettos, would maintain an abiding affection for their streets and blocks. The writings of urban observers such as Jane Jacobs and Herbert Gans might have spurred a romantic longing for the physically frayed but socially intact urban communities that had once seemed worthy only of extinction. Weaver, however, was certain that this urban myth—a reverie of local shopkeepers and fondly regarded next- door acquaintances—had little to do with social realities in the nation’s sprawling racial ghettos. Embedded in that conclusion was a stark antinomy between two concepts: the “neighborhood” and the “ghetto.” At mid- decade, numerous integrationist intellectuals and policy professionals joined Weaver in insisting that these were diametrically opposing terms, and that commentators who confused them did only a disservice to segregated, low-income black urbanites. Nevertheless, this position was a highly contested one. Throughout much of the academic and popular conversation addressing the decade’s escalating urban crisis, debates over the nature of the relationship between these two terms emerged as a dominant theme. At just the moment when the broader public was reconsidering the virtues of the industrial city’s surviving face-to-face communities, a legion of journalists, social scientists, and critics struggled to determine that story’s relevance in understanding the troubled inner cities. Did longstanding claims about neighborhood virtues and values have any power to cast light on the nation’s “dark ghettos,” whose discontent was daily splashed across the newspaper pages? Could anything resembling a neighborhood be found in the segregated, tumultuous urban cores? As disquiet over racialized urban poverty and violent 136

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conflagrations raced to center stage in US political life, this puzzle became a growing fi xation for urban commentators and analysts. Through the 1960s, new images on television screens—smoldering streetscapes, patrolling national guardsmen, urban deprivation and decay—were matched by new academic theories about the nature of lowincome black urban spaces.2 Presumptions about traditional neighborhood functions and meanings pervaded these discussions, and thereby assumed a fundamental role in broader attempts to make sense of the decade’s urban crisis. Indeed, for a time, notions of the “neighborhood” and the “ghetto” were drawn together into a mutually constitutive relationship. Both terms were invested with contrasting histories, values, and imagery, and each worked to define the other: neighborhood as an image of urban health, ghetto one of urban sickness. Yet it was one particular neighborhood story—that of the European immigrant enclave and latter- day white- ethnic urban village—that offered the ground against which the figure of the contemporary racial ghetto would most commonly be read. This debate unfolded in three overlapping yet distinct phases. First, in the decades leading up to the 1960s, mainstream urban investigators most frequently interpreted black urban population concentrations with an eye to the old white- ethnic enclaves. Making use of what sociologist Robert Blauner dubs the “immigrant analogy” for race, intellectuals placed these spaces within a long- established narrative derived from the European migration experience: arrival in the city, clustering for mutual aid, and a predicted eventual assimilation to native-born white middle- class norms.3 By the late 1950s, however, these certainties had begun to dissipate. In a second phase, integrationist liberal observers strove instead to sever the nation’s urban racial ghettos from this saga, defining them instead as a radically different kind of place, one where older notions of block-level community ties held little explanatory power. To these critics, of whom Weaver was one, it was only by emphasizing the racial ghetto’s very departure from this neighborhood pattern that its plight could be understood and its hardships addressed. That intellectual maneuver, in turn, would provoke an energetic counterreaction, a third phase that began in the mid-1960s. As part of a mounting attack on social pathology theories, a set of left-leaning social scientists and public intellectuals sought to recast the urban racial ghetto using explicit cadences of local community. At a moment when concepts of the “neighborhood” and the “ghetto” seemed sharply incompatible, these critics insistently reframed segregated, economically distressed black urban areas as collections of neighborhood spaces. 137

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While oftentimes offering parallels to the white- ethnic enclave, such accounts now centered not on a presumed trajectory toward wholesale dissolution, but rather on internal richness and place-based neighborhood culture. This evolving relationship indicates the centrality of neighborhood ideals to the broader discourses of the 1960s urban crisis. Yet a narrowed and ethnocentric definition of those ideals most frequently prevailed, with segregated African American city districts continually measured against the yardstick of European immigrant communities and their present- day urban remnants. Throughout, the imagined neighborhood emerged as a crucial terrain for larger contests over race and urban citizenship.

Defining and Redefining the Racial “Ghetto” The term “ghetto” itself has twisted and turned its way through the American lexicon. In different periods, it has been applied to a bewildering variety of places and circumstances, from the Jewish immigrant districts of the late nineteenth century to the “youth ghettos,” “secretarial ghettos,” “gay ghettos,” and “pink- collar ghettos” described by social critics of the 1970s.4 Undoubtedly, though, the most dramatic transformation in the term’s usage came in the two decades following World War II, when the previously distinct notions of the slum and the ghetto coalesced into a single concept, focused on black or brown urban areas and emphasizing their supposedly anonymous, alienating, and nihilistic nature. This new understanding cut sharply against earlier definitions. Sociologists of the interwar period had carefully distinguished between the terms “slum” and “ghetto.” Reviewing the scholarly literature in 1930, sociologist Andrew Lind had noted that these concepts were antitheses: while the slum bred “social instability and flux,” the ghetto was a place that maintained “compelling family and neighborhood organization.”5 As historian Sam Bass Warner Jr. explains, the postwar fusing of the two terms to signify lower- class, primarily black urban districts signaled an ideological shift, one in which new ideas of social mobility, race, and cultural pathology predominated. The symbol of the slum “had been formed without any concept of race,” Warner writes, while “the principal business of the new term ghetto was to fit urban poverty into the American ideology of race.”6 This changing interpretation had a scholarly pedigree, rooted in evolving theories about race, social organization, and urban space. During the first phase of this protean history, a broad range of social 138

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investigators had viewed black urban concentration patterns through the lens of what sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant label the “ethnicity paradigm” for conceptualizing race. Ascending during the interwar period as a competitor to older biologistic theories of racial difference, this paradigm framed race as only one contributing facet of a group’s broader ethnic identity, and it took the European migrant experience as a predictive model for any minority population’s internal dynamics and eventual social incorporation.7 These assumptions, in turn, permeated influential interwar analyses of African American city districts. As scholar Peter Marcuse notes, the urban ecologists of the early Chicago School of sociology—figures such as Louis Wirth, Robert Park, and Ernest Burgess—understood black city ghettos as “simply another example of the natural clustering of ethnic groups in large cities.”8 For example, in his 1928 study The Ghetto, the classic Chicago School statement on urban ethnic ghettos, Wirth had made little distinction between his city’s swelling districts of southern black migrants and its enclaves of European immigrants. In Chicago’s Jewish ghetto, the book’s main subject, Wirth claimed to find “as near an approach to communal life as the modern city has to offer.” However, he declared, similar processes of seclusion had “produced results that hold good, not only for the Jew, but for the Negro, the Chinaman, the immigrant, and a number of other isolated groups in our modern world.” Upon arrival in the city, each group “seems to find its own separate location without the apparent design of any one. Once in the area, each group tends to reproduce the culture to which it was accustomed in its old habitat.”9 If ghettoization in this model was primarily a voluntary phenomenon, it was also a transitory one: a defensive huddling that allowed newcomers to acclimate more gradually to the shocks of the atomizing modern city.10 Indeed, from the 1920s forward, sociology’s modernization theorists had been convinced that all ethnic and racial minority groups would eventually shed their distinguishing characteristics and amalgamate fully into a larger culture.11 While giving scant scrutiny to black urban concentrations specifically, Wirth and many of his disciplinary colleagues saw little reason to believe that the American city’s growing African American residential districts would fail to follow this trajectory. During the postwar years, civil rights intellectuals and liberal social scientists would become increasingly cognizant of the state’s role in maintaining urban segregation. Even so, leading academic researchers generally accepted the supposition that urban ethnic and racial groups tended to evolve along similar paths, leading eventually to 139

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near- complete absorption. If color discrimination had short- circuited the typical processes of dispersal and incorporation forecast by prewar sociologists, then the elimination of that obstacle would finally allow the black ghettos to follow their “natural” path toward dissolution.12 The intellectual terrain would soon undergo a dramatic shift. By the 1950s, various academic analysts had developed severe doubts that this assimilationist model properly served to explain the unfolding plot of race in the contemporary city. To postwar racial liberals, especially, adherence to the older “ghetto” models increasingly seemed a pernicious accommodation to a laissez-faire conservatism that preferred simply to neglect entrenched black urban subjugation.13 Intent on spurring policy elites into action, theorists of this second phase labored to develop explanations that would account for manifest deviations from the seemingly “natural” track of urban group integration. This task appeared particularly urgent as voices on the right condemned African American city dwellers for their purported failure to follow the economically and socially mobile template of European immigrant communities. “A great many Americans are reflecting upon the initiative, ambition, and industry of such law-abiding minorities as the Irish, the Chinese, and the Jews,” claimed conservative essayist James J. Kilpatrick in 1965, “and the hard question is being asked: What’s so different about the Negro?”14 Similarly, in his celebrated Cambridge Union debate against James Baldwin, conservative doyen William F. Buckley Jr. would malign “the failure of the Negro community itself to make certain exertions which were made by other minority groups during the American experience.”15 Across the early and mid-1960s, much of the commentary from racial liberals was aimed at refuting precisely these sorts of invidious comparisons. Now more than ever, it seemed imperative to make plain the stark differences between the present- day racial ghetto and early century European enclaves. Elevating these distinctions into a central theme, liberal discourse on the American city’s racialized geography increasingly insisted that the “new” ghettos, as social and cultural spaces, departed in almost every way from the imagined immigrant ghettos of mutual aid, dense family networks, and localized social organization. One strand of this commentary, quite sensibly, emphasized confinement versus choice, based primarily on skin color: one group was free, as time passed, to disappear into the surrounding white society, while the other was not. “All other slum dwellers, when the bank account permits it, can move out of the slum and vanish altogether from the eye of persecution,” noted James Baldwin in 1960.16 “Because of color,” 140

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observed the Pittsburgh Courier, “the ‘white immigrant’ lives in an open ghetto. The Negro is confined to the closed ghetto.”17 But there was also a cultural model at work, one that went further than such straightforward critiques of legal and social realities. This latter depiction of black urban spaces was rooted in the increasing ubiquity of the culture-of-poverty thesis, which gained broad currency during the early 1960s in the wake of anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s ethnographic work on poor families in Mexico. In distinction from structuralist critics—who blamed poverty on a lack of opportunities resulting from changes in the economy and labor markets—theorists adopting culture-of-poverty models looked instead to the worldviews and social patterns in communities where poverty was most deeply entrenched. Claiming that material hardships were reinforced by a set of psychological and cultural pathologies transmitted between generations, social scientists constructed an image of the poor, in historian Michael Katz’s summary, as “passive, lacking the will and organizational capacity to attack the sources of their exploitation and degradation.” In response, such critics advised that public and private agencies find ways to inculcate in the indigent the assumed cultural traits of the middle class.18 While these theories addressed the purported characteristics of poor populations, rather than specifically those of African American urbanites, they emerged at just the moment when the two categories were becoming tightly fused in the broader public consciousness. Furthermore, the culture-of-poverty thesis dovetailed with a tradition of “damage imagery,” in the phrase of historian Daryl Michael Scott, which racial reformers had long deployed in relation to African Americans in order to demonstrate the culturally and psychologically destructive effects of segregation and discrimination. Although, by the late 1960s, damage imagery in general—and the culture- of-poverty concept in particular—would be attacked as a condescending form of victim-blaming, in earlier years they were the progeny of racial liberals, who relied on them to galvanize public support for strong government intervention to break poverty’s intergenerational cycle.19 These notions about culture infused an outpouring of 1960s publications that sought to distinguish the old ethnic neighborhood from the contemporary inner- city ghettos. Undoubtedly, the text that most definitively exemplified this orientation was The Other America, the best-known work of the prolific socialist intellectual Michael Harrington. A runaway popular success following its 1962 publication, the title quickly became obligatory reading in Washington’s Democratic policy circles. With this book, Harrington meant to convey two central 141

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points: first, that notwithstanding all the sunny recent chatter about affluence and abundance, poverty still existed in the United States, even as it had become invisible to most Americans; and, second, that poverty itself was a culture, one inhabited by a collection of “internal exiles” who were “immunized from progress.”20 Though its geographic reach spanned from rural Appalachia to the hearts of the major cities, the book turned these arguments toward issues of race and urban space in a widely discussed chapter entitled “Old Slums, New Slums.” This segment painted a romantic portrait of yesteryear’s lively immigrant enclaves, all as foil to the gruesome slums of the present. The key distinction, Harrington explained, was the “culture of aspiration,” a quality that had infused the older slums, yet was entirely absent from current urban poverty zones. In the past, the urban slum had been “a melting pot, a way station, a goad to talent.” Tenderly and nostalgically Harrington returned to the powerful feeling of group membership—that “vital community life” and “lusty richness of existence”—which had defined the older enclaves. For the European migrants and their children, “neighborhoods were dense and the housing inadequate, yet the people were not defeated by their environment.” Even today, he suggested, those qualities lingered on among the immigrants’ descendants. Recalling his own move, in the early 1950s, into a Jewish neighborhood on New York’s Lower East Side, Harrington described his bemusement at the local gossip networks that had instantly informed shopkeepers of his precise address. The contrast with the new poor could not be starker. Here, Harrington detected a breakdown in the very essence of neighborhood existence: the sense of belonging. The new poor “do not belong to anybody or anything,” Harrington lamented, whether old-world ethnic cultures, union locals, or fraternal groups. Populated by downtrodden blacks and Puerto Ricans, hapless rural migrants, and a handful of elderly white ethnics who had failed to escape, the new slum was “the creator of people who are lost to themselves and to society.”21 With this set of distinctions, Harrington wanted to impress upon readers the irrelevance of the old assimilation narrative to the contemporary urban poor. No more, he suggested, could middle- class Americans rest in sanguine confidence that “natural” processes of outward migration and upward mobility would eventually lift the nation’s slum inhabitants into the comfortable mainstream. No longer could they imagine that communal affections and local social ties somehow sustained people through the grinding experience of urban poverty. In adopting this tack, Harrington worked to sever the contemporary 142

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slums from a deeply ingrained cultural narrative about the being and function of the nation’s working- class white urban neighborhoods. In this debate, the older ethnic enclaves were situated as the very prototype of neighborhood health; thus, nostalgic memories of their family ties, feelings of belonging, and local institutional networks offered the primary point of reference in diagnosing the social sickness of the new urban slums. This particular dichotomy became a pervasive motif for liberal urban commentary, suggesting the stubborn purchase that the European immigrant assimilation model retained on the public imagination. In 1962, for instance, the economist Charles Stokes divided urban poverty zones into “slums of hope” and “slums of despair,” while lamenting that the first variety was scarcely to be found among US racial minority groups.22 The “older ghettos,” observed demographers George and Eunice Grier several years later, “never lacked the critical elements of hope.”23 There was a “fundamental difference between the Negro ghetto and earlier European immigrant ghettos,” open-housing advocates told District of Columbia officials in 1962, one that rendered the former type “much more explosive and frightening than the immigrant ghettos of yesterday.”24 Labor scholar Louis Ferman and his collaborators diagnosed in those spaces “a level of resentment and hostility that has little parallel to earlier types of ghettoes.”25 In each case, commentators explicitly rejected any correspondence between the older immigrant population clusters and contemporary black centralcity areas. At the heart of the European immigrant neighborhood mythology —whether chronicled in postwar fiction, memoir, film, or historical scholarship— sat the familiar plot of mutual aid, self-initiated uplift, and reciprocal family allegiances, all of which, in the most common tellings, had supported residents through brutal poverty and later propelled them toward middle- class stability. Thus, to numerous racial liberals of the early and mid-1960s, any suggestion that economically disempowered black urbanites ought to rely on similar strategies seemed to suggest an antistatist philosophy of nonintervention and a pernicious denial of the special burdens imposed by color prejudice. Yet this brand of denial increasingly ran through self-help proposals put forward by outside experts. It is evident, for instance, in the work of the prominent Wisconsin sociologist Marshall Clinard, who experimented during the mid-1960s with various community development strategies in cities of the United States and India, hoping to foster a new self-image among slum inhabitants. Such a transformation was es143

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pecially necessary, Clinard insisted, for the “average American Negro slum dweller,” who “insists that the ‘white world’ deal with his problems” and makes “few efforts, except through protest movements, to do things for himself.” In Clinard’s estimation, segregated black city dwellers ought to turn their energies inward, toward neighborhood projects such as cooperative maintenance of their dwellings, local sanitation and antivandalism initiatives, and the establishment of informal credit unions and libraries. Only through such “self-initiated changes in the norms and values of the Negro slum areas,” he believed, could inhabitants improve outsiders’ images of their communities.26 Soon enough, such rhetoric of local uplift through self-initiated improvement—which had infused the antiblight work of the Urban League and similar groups during the 1950s and before—had come to seem an unacceptable, and even counterproductive, response to discriminatory urban conditions. Psychologist Kenneth Clark, in his 1965 work Dark Ghetto, characterized community cleanup drives in segregated neighborhoods as nothing less than “an apology for oppression.” Relating one Harlem woman’s attempt to foster local pride by organizing a street-sweeping project, Clark argued that the effort implied “that dirt reflects defects in the inhabitants” rather than inadequate municipal services.27 These campaigns, concurred civil rights intellectual Bayard Rustin, merely accepted “one more of the white man’s stereotypes about the Negro.”28 Conversely, some adamant 1960s segregationists would take up the antiblight movement’s “clean-up, fi x-up” rhetoric of personal responsibility in order to frame urban decay as a glaring indictment of black city residents. One of the decade’s most prominent citizens- council organizers, Kent Steffgen, argued that the very concept of an oppressive black ghetto was a “Communist-inspired myth,” for nothing stopped “an industrious man from painting his home, cleaning sidewalks and alleys, and making the area sparkle.”29 Though far more extreme in his rhetoric, Steffgen relied on some of the same ideas that underpinned Clinard’s prescriptions: namely, that the fate of each citizen’s community rested in his or her own hands, that there were no broader webs of complicity for neighborhood decay. Whatever its source, this sort of neighborhood-improvement talk drew increasingly strenuous objections from much of the political left. Indeed, to many early 1960s liberals and socialists, any suggestion that politically and economically disenfranchised black city residents were primarily responsible for their own uplift was anathema. A roundtable dialogue, published in the socialist quarterly Dissent in 1964, illustrates the extent to which this conviction had gained sway among 144

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progressive intellectuals. Here, Harrington and several like-minded thinkers considered whether immigrant Jewish traditions of self-help and neighborhood institution building might prove transformative for the racial ghetto’s present- day inhabitants. Alone among the discussants, Irving Howe tentatively entertained the parallel. Pointing to the astounding “internal richness” that had sustained poverty-stricken Jewish ghettos, Howe mused that the contemporary black leadership might similarly “work within its own community” to cultivate morale and values at the neighborhood level. To the other participants, however, this line of thought smacked of capitulation. “I want Negroes to get out of the ghetto, not to be helped within it,” declared Tom Kahn, head of the League for Industrial Democracy. For Bayard Rustin, it was only through “the struggle to destroy the ghetto” that an intractable “ghetto psychology” might be eliminated. Harrington, likewise, urgently warned against seeking “a repetition of the forms of the Jewish or other immigrant experiences” in contemporary urban poverty areas.30 Over this span, then, the black ghetto reemerged into intellectual discourse as a startlingly new form—no longer cast as an analogue of any previous type of neighborhood concentration pattern, but rather as an entity qualitatively different than anything seen before. In turn, as commentators insistently drew such spatial contrasts in cultural or even psychological terms, evolving forms of academic and journalistic analysis would depict black and white residential districts as radically divergent spaces, hermetically sealed off from other another both materially and imaginatively.

The Erasure of Black Urban Cultures The recourse to cultural explanations for the differences between “old” and “new” ghettos obscured a broader set of structural relationships. On one hand, such accounts typically relied on a bootstrap narrative that took white- ethnic communities as the sole authors of their own social advancement, while ignoring the panoply of racially exclusionary New Deal and Fair Deal government programs— social insurance, public works, union protections, the GI Bill, federal mortgage insurance, and others—which had operated as an economic escalator for European immigrants and their descendants. On the other hand, these same accounts often remained blind to the true scale and reach of the postwar urban policies that worked to fi x African American popula145

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tions in place, from urban renewal and public-housing placement to freeway location decisions and federal underwriting discrimination.31 With these factors set aside, and presumed cultural differences placed front and center, the white immigrant story became the normative “neighborhood” story, and the African American urban experience something very different indeed. But while numerous liberal critics employed theories about culture as a way to pry loose the contemporary racial ghetto from older ethnic enclave narratives, other commentators went a step further, dismissing almost entirely the possibility for meaningful neighborhood attachments in economically subjugated black city districts of the 1960s. This presumption was a consequence, in part, of deeply ingrained sociological views on African American culture— a phenomenon that many mainstream social scientists had difficulties even perceiving.32 For over a century, notes historian Lawrence Levine, academic investigators had “depicted African-Americans as the one group that had lost its entire indigenous culture.”33 Intellectuals such as E. Franklin Frazier and Gunnar Myrdal were quite sure that no authentic cultural traditions had survived the Atlantic passage and centuries of slavery. “Probably never before in history,” Frazier famously wrote, “has a people been so nearly completely stripped of its social heritage.”34 From here, it was only a short leap to see anything resembling a recognizable contemporary black culture as merely, in Myrdal’s 1944 description, “a distorted development” of the dominant white culture, one whose “characteristic traits are mainly forms of social pathologies.”35 These premises retained such longstanding influence that, as late as 1970, the radical sociologist Robert Blauner could still with apparent plausibility title an essay “Black Culture: Myth or Reality?”36 As a general thesis, this idea was fought out in a range of academic works dealing with the long-range psychological and familial effects of slavery and Jim Crow.37 But it also had specific applications to the contemporary black metropolis. Peering through this lens, outside critics found it almost impossible to see the local forms of culture, spatial loyalties, and institution building that characterized individual African American residential districts. Whereas, in the 1920s, Robert Park had defined the immigrant ethnic ghetto as the space where a group could “maintain its own cultural tradition untouched and unspotted from the world,” early 1960s portrayals of the black ghetto claimed the opposite, and a wave of influential works drove home this point.38 “There are no traditions of the ‘old country’ that bind Harlem as a Ghetto,” Harrington had confidently asserted in The Other America, 146

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noting the absence of “a language and a common memory from overseas.”39 Other intellectuals cited this alleged deficit as a major impediment to group progress. “In the character of their communal life, the Negroes and Puerto Ricans are farthest removed from the experiences of earlier groups,” pronounced the distinguished immigration historian Oscar Handlin, diagnosing among those populations a dire need for “communal institutions, under responsible leadership that will give order and purpose to their lives.”40 Most famously, in the enormously popular 1963 work Beyond the Melting Pot, sociologist Nathan Glazer asked of black city dwellers: “Without a special language and culture, and without the historical experiences that create an élan and a morale, what is there to lead them to build a life, to patronize their own?”41 Such evaluations often incorporated what can seem an almost willful blindness. For instance, just two pages after Harrington’s insistence on the black metropolis’s lack of shared traditions, his book offers a lengthy account of the soul foods popular in Harlem, and, only three pages earlier, a description of black Atlanta’s evening porch-sitting rituals and reference to the vibrant honky-tonk bars of Chicago’s South Side.42 Nonetheless, as music journalist Nat Hentoff irately noted, the Beyond the Melting Pot thesis of African American urban districts with “no values and culture to guard” went virtually uncontested in the early avalanche of praise from white reviewers.43 Within a few years, reporters and researchers would rely on such conjectures as partial explanation for the tumult sweeping the urban cores. Unsurprisingly, simplistic assumptions about the irredeemable nature of segregated, economically impoverished city areas pervaded the news media. Declaring it outrageous that citizens were kept “cooped up in garbage-strewn slums, debased and degraded to the level of subhumans,” the Saturday Evening Post insisted that the ghetto’s “only order is that of an animal in a cage.”44 But more sophisticated accounts also adopted theories of internal impairments and cultural deficits. In a bestselling book covering the Watts uprising, for example, journalist Robert Conot explained that precolonial African societies had put high value on “familial and communal loyalties.” Because the enslaved African had been “beheaded from his culture,” however, present- day inhabitants of Watts and similar districts had only the traditions of “slavery, repression, and turmoil” as cultural guideposts.45 Likewise, sociologist Robert Forman argued that, while European migrants and white “hillbillies” had replicated their old town and kinship clusters in new metropolitan settings, slavery had shattered similar affi nities among African Americans. Thus, black newcomers had settled the cit147

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ies without regard for previous ties—thereby depriving themselves of the communal neighborhood foundations that bolstered other subordinated urban groups.46 Nearly as strongly, this perspective ran through a fresh wave of historical scholarship reexamining the early formation of northern urban racial ghettos. One forerunner in this enterprise was Allan Spear, author of the landmark 1967 book, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920. In this work, cannily marketed by the publisher with explicit reference to 1960s urban uprisings, Spear aimed to give readers the historical backstory to the “warped personalities, thwarted ambitions, and unbearable frustrations that the ghetto has produced.” In an important departure from the Chicago School’s interwar ethnographers, Spear emphasized the “impervious wall of hostility and discrimination” that had prevented turn- of-the- century black Chicagoans from joining the city’s white- dominated institutions. But, in doing so, his work largely discounted the significance or existence of place-based forms of black urban culture. “Unlike the Irish, Poles, Jews, or Italians, Negroes banded together not to enjoy a common linguistic, cultural, and religious tradition, but because a systematic pattern of discrimination left them no alternative,” Spear wrote. “Negroes were tied together less by a common cultural heritage than by a common set of grievances.”47 Paradoxically, the goal of all this work was to indict white America for creating such oppressively confining spaces. Spear, for example, sought to provide a much-needed corrective to theories that earlycentury urban racial segregation had primarily been voluntary or “natural.” In fact, however, one of the effects was to write black urbanites entirely out of American narratives of the “old neighborhood”—a story emphasizing that space’s longstanding communal ties, common traditions or folkways, feelings of belonging, mutual aid and collective responsibilities, and local institutions that instilled shared values and goals. Because so many scholars imagined that urban African Americans lacked a unique culture, few academic analysts suggested that such residents, except in the most unusual of circumstances, might develop emotional attachments to particular streets, blocks, and communities. Thus, even amid a growing 1960s attentiveness toward white- ethnic neighborhood sentiments, many integrationist policy intellectuals promoted wholesale dispersal of black population concentrations as the only route to a just society. Likewise, in their calls for thoroughgoing integration, a profusion of critics insisted that the

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urban ghettos be destroyed, obliterated, eradicated, razed, rooted out. And these terms were not solely metaphors for toppling invisible social walls. “Whatever money is now being earmarked to improve this, or any other ghetto, might as well be burnt,” James Baldwin had written in 1960, as he surveyed anew the “fetid block” of his Harlem childhood. “A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.”48 To outside commentators who lacked Baldwin’s nuanced knowledge of black urban history and cultural transmission, such phrases seemed merely to ratify a widespread belief that, in the sentimental and popularly accepted use of the term, low-income areas of the black metropolis had no neighborhoods. Oddly, these assumptions about African American city spaces marked a rare point of agreement between many liberal proponents of strong state-sponsored integration measures and budding neoconservatives who were becoming increasingly leery of such aims. The writings of critics such as George and Eunice Grier and Sterling Tucker, on the one hand, and Nathan Glazer, on the other, illustrate this curious convergence. Though miles apart in their prescriptions for the American city, all reinforced a dichotomy between a predominantly white city structured into clearly identifiable neighborhoods and a black city in which such local bonds were nonexistent or inconsequential. One the one side, in a manner typical of mid- decade liberal analyses of the “ghetto” problem, George and Eunice Grier, in their 1966 book Equality and Beyond, fervently crusaded for strong government action against urban segregation. A husband-and-wife team of demographers and housing activists, the Griers insisted that any war on poverty worthy of the name must offer African Americans escape from “the psychological burden imposed by confinement within ghetto walls.” In their brief against housing segregation, the Griers also pointed to the plight of those white middle-aged and elderly city residents with deep “emotional attachments” to their neighborhoods. One consequence of black confinement, they explained, was the dramatic demographic turnover that could suddenly ripple through these all-white communities, and thereby “tear apart the social fabric of a neighborhood.” Quite rightly, the Griers saw that decades of segregationist practices had laid the groundwork for hugely profitable blockbusting and rapid white exodus. Yet the contrast in their writing between descriptions of the black “ghetto,” on the one hand, and white “neighborhoods,” on the other, is revealing. While mournfully recounting the psychological costs imposed upon those whites forced to abandon the “ties of familiarity and

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friendship built up over many years,” the Griers implied that black urbanites, virtually without exception, wanted nothing more than to shake the local dust off their feet as quickly as possible.49 Different in tone, but similar in intent, was a proposal by Sterling Tucker, longtime head of the Urban League’s Washington, DC, chapter, and a coordinator for the Poor People’s Campaign. In a 1968 book, Beyond the Burning, Tucker demanded radical action to destroy the simmering urban ghetto. Only drastic urban-planning “surgery,” he believed, could eliminate the environments that left young black men “acting out street- corner dramas in uncontrolled rage, convulsed by spasms of self-hatred.” After advocating an aggressive set of government measures for racially rebalancing the nation’s populace, Tucker paused to consider those residents who might resist being resettled. “They need comfort—they want to feel wanted,” he allowed. “In the ghetto they have friends. A few of their numbers care.” But in the end, Tucker insisted, such inhabitants resembled football players who tentatively hung back from the line of scrimmage rather than muscling into the opponent’s territory. Whatever their affections for their present environs, the ghetto’s denizens finally must choose to “penetrate the wall and face the uncertainties.”50 Even as many integrationist reformers surmised that black urbanites had little sense of distinctive place-based cultures, several nascent neoconservative critics argued that overreaching black leaders now sought the disintegration of all other subcultures and communities as well. Nathan Glazer articulated such a viewpoint most forcefully, contending in a noted 1964 Commentary article that African Americans were presently mounting a “radical challenge” to the very notion of “group distinctiveness.” With this challenge, Glazer warned, came dire threats to the cherished solidarities of neighborhood, community, and local ethnic groupings. Other newcomers to the city, whether Jewish or Catholic, had never demanded that established groups be entirely disbanded, he contended. They knew too well that their own survival as an intact subculture required that every other such group be allowed some measure of separate community life. But civil rights figures of the present moment, Glazer continued, had no intention of following these longaccepted conventions. They aimed, instead, at a total eradication of the complex cosmos of subcommunities that structured the metropolitan universe, seeing “nothing of value in the Negro group whose preservation requires separate institutions, residential concentration, or a ban on intermarriage.” Thus, the “force of present- day Negro demands is that the sub- community, because it either protects privileges or creates 150

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inequality, has no right to exist.” By disregarding the ways in which individuals are imbricated in specific communities, neighborhoods, and traditions, Glazer believed, this position was wildly out of touch with basic human needs.51 The most obvious irony, of course, is that Glazer made this case just as African American assertions of group distinctiveness and collective identity were poised to spring into the broader national consciousness via the Black Arts and Black Power movements. And Glazer’s notion that African Americans had no urban communal attachments would also have come as a shock to generations of residents from, say, Chicago’s Bronzeville or Washington’s Shaw districts. Equally, it disregarded the localist strains in a long tradition of black urban literary production: as critic and novelist Toni Morrison has observed, African American writers’ fondness for the city has most often been “for the village within it: the neighborhoods and the population of those neighborhoods.”52 Most striking here, though, is the degree to which all of these partisans—left and right—converged around a particular viewpoint on African Americans and urban places.53 At first glance, the contentions of staunchly integrationist liberals like the Griers and Tucker and incipient neoconservatives such as Glazer might seem to sit at opposite poles. While the former writers insisted on comprehensive integration through state-sponsored population redistribution, the latter complained that the city’s intricate geographic tapestry of separate subcultures might unravel in the face of sweeping new black demands. Yet each was convinced that neighborhood loyalties and place-based attachments held little import for urban African Americans. Whether manifested in the Griers’ tender descriptions of close-knit white “neighborhoods” and offhand dismissal of local ties in black “ghettos,” or in Glazer’s claim that black civil rights leaders aimed to wipe the city slate clean of all existing subcommunities, neither side gave much credence to the idea that African American city dwellers might relate to their local spaces with affections or aspirations in any way comparable to those of the stolid white homeowners or the Jewish and Catholic subgroups of the American city.

Locating the Neighborhood in the “Ghetto” If a single document could reframe these debates, the intensely controversial US Labor Department report on the state of the black family 151

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was it. Titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and leaked to the press in summer 1965, the document was quickly dubbed the Moynihan Report, after its author, the policy intellectual and assistant labor secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan. An immediate flashpoint in urban and civil rights political contests, the text at once drew together various widely circulating premises about black cultural flaws, and it jolted many liberals and radicals into an awareness of the conservative potential for damage imagery. In turn, the fierce reaction touched off by the report, and by the broader intellectual trends crystallized within it, would push many of the document’s opponents toward a dramatic reassessment of the reigning representational conventions for the social fabric of black inner- city communities. Like many of the era’s liberal investigators, Moynihan sought to elucidate black urban social problems using contentions about local cultural norms. In his report’s best-remembered phrase, Moynihan diagnosed a “tangle of pathology” afflicting African American families and communities. While white American families, he argued, had “achieved a high degree of stability,” in segregated black city communities the “fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated.” Complaining of high birth rates, rampant fatherlessness, and a destructive “matriarchal structure,” Moynihan pressed for coordinated federal policies to bring “stability” to black families. But although the report dealt primarily with family structure, it was also an argument about neighborhoods and communities. White children might sometimes lack fathers in the home, Moynihan wrote, but they, at least, “perceive all about them the pattern of men working.” European immigrants might have suffered poverty, but their communities had been “characterized by unusually strong family bonds” that aided rapid social progress. The alienation of black young people, Moynihan claimed, went beyond the pathologies of individual families. In the urban ghettos of today, black youths had “probably less personal contact with the white world than any generation in the history of the Negro American.”54 Moynihan’s contentions about cultural isolation and social fracturing indicated just how radically the idea of the “ghetto” had been recast in public and social-scientific discourse. The old European ethnic ghetto had been understood as humanely parochial— a place “where life, though puny in scale, is rich and deep and warm,” as Louis Wirth put it in 1928.55 By contrast, for intellectuals considering the postwar black ghettos, family instability and a lack of sustaining traditions made life there “casual, precarious, and fragmentary,” in sociologist 152

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E.  Franklin Frazier’s description.56 Pervasive anonymity had engendered an “individual abdication of responsibility,” insisted psychologist Derek Roemer.57 “Here,” lamented federal housing official George Nesbitt, “the abundance of disorder leaves little room for trustful, satisfying associations.”58 As many of Moynihan’s opponents swiftly pointed out, the 1965 report blamed slavery and past discrimination for this supposedly flawed culture, but it swept aside the deleterious effects of contemporary racism, asserting that the “present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world.” In the news media, however, Moynihan’s conclusions on the “deep-seated structural distortions” in black American life functioned as convenient explanatory sound bites. Released just prior to Los Angeles’s Watts uprising, the report struck many commentators as a federally endorsed hypothesis on the causes of urban civil disorders.59 “Study Traces Negro Riots to Inferior Home,” explained a Chicago Tribune headline. The “weakness” of the black family, Newsweek proposed, had been “brought to ugly maturity in the vacant days and violent nights of the black slums.”60 In the wake of the Moynihan Report and the Watts upheaval, political conservatives gradually appropriated culture-of-poverty theories for their own purposes, dropping that concept’s original emphasis on economics to focus entirely on allegedly defective cultures.61 By 1970, for instance, the neoconservative policy scholar Edward Banfield was insisting that cultural characteristics caused poverty, rather than the other way around. “The lower- class individual lives in the slum and sees little or no reason to complain,” Banfield added. “Features that make the slum repellent to others actually please him.”62 And soon enough, the theorists insisting on the radical, even irreconcilable, cultural differences between black and white urban residential areas were speaking in increasingly essentialist cadences. In a sweeping taxonomy, Richard Gambino, a founder of the Italian American Studies movement, would assert in 1974 that black Americans—unlike the “neighborhood builders” of Italian American communities—“identify with each other and not with their physical surroundings,” a predilection attributable to ancestral patterns forged in the plains of precolonial West Africa and the cotton fields of the US South.63 Nathan Glazer, in a 1975 anti-affirmative-action tract, would contrast black city districts of crime and disordered family life with the “neighborhoodcentered, family- centered, job- centered life” of America’s white- ethnic communities— a difference that “cannot be wished away.”64 Immediately upon its release, the Moynihan Report kicked up a fu153

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ror among civil rights leaders and a small but significant body of leftleaning academic researchers. Its conclusions represented “a massive academic cop- out for the white conscience,” fumed James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality.65 More broadly, the reaction called to public attention a backlash against culture- of-poverty theorizing that had been quietly building for several years. As Michael Katz and other scholars have explained, black activists and allied intellectuals on the left saw social scientists who, however much they claimed to sympathize with the poor, remained complicit with an oppressive status quo. By painting poor people as passive and their cultures as defective, Katz notes, such theories seemed to point toward behavioral modifications for society’s most disenfranchised citizens rather than real action against entrenched social barriers.66 Out of this climate, a new breed of more radical humanities and social-science scholars launched projects intended to repudiate the notion that “racism and poverty are the sources of much of what has been called Afro-American culture [or] black ghetto culture,” in anthropologist John Szwed’s derisive 1970 summary of the academic conventional wisdom.67 For a range of investigators— sociologists Andrew Billingsley, Joyce Ladner, and Robert Hill, linguists William Labov and J. L. Dillard, ethnomusicologist Charles Keil, folklorist Roger Abrahams, historian Herbert Gutman, and others—these cultural explanations for black political and economic subjugation were just as flawed as the old biologistic theories of an innate racial hierarchy. Both seemed fi xated on black “deficiencies.” In a fresh wave of ethnographic and historical studies, emerging across the late 1960s and early 1970s, investigators insisted on the existence and worth of distinct African American cultures and communities, phenomena that couldn’t be adequately understood when white middle- class values were taken as normative.68 As part of this thrust, academic critics issued a variety of rejoinders to the Moynihan Report’s family appraisals— attributing black and white familial differences to economic class rather than race, framing black family patterns as ethnohistorical survivals from a more communal African past, or pointing out the durable and adaptable kinship ties that had persisted from the days of slavery.69 As represented in such texts, African American subjects were more often defined not by passivity or unmitigated victimhood, but instead by their day-to- day agency in shaping their local communities. The primary location for much of this new work was in urban districts.70 And, significantly, one of the major lines of rebuttal against Moynihan’s family thesis focused on the strengths of the black neigh154

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borhood. During the early 1960s, white liberal and leftist intellectuals had habitually defined the black “ghetto” in explicit contrast to the mythology of local self-help and communalism that suffused the European immigrant neighborhood narrative. Dissident critics and analysts, however, increasingly began to “discover” islands of small-scale social organization in what had once struck mainstream researchers as merely a choppy sea of anomie and isolation. Such areas did indeed contain cohesive neighborhoods, many investigators now insisted, communal spaces that nurtured unique forms of culture and made possible an existence under oppressive conditions. Whether consciously or not, such critics worked to incorporate lower-income African American urbanites into an old and established story about the functions of the city neighborhood. Much of this work repositioned inner- city black communities as containing just those characteristics— cultural retention, communal identity, mutual aid, local institution building—that had long been ascribed to the white immigrant enclaves and their lingering remnants. Radical sociologist Robert Blauner, in 1970, went so far as to reverse Harrington’s evaluation of the rich cultures of the “old” slum and the cultural vacuum of the “new” slum. Because the surrounding white society had impeded African American integration, Blauner suggested, today’s urban ghettos fostered “the flowering of a distinctive ethnicity,” in contrast to the old white- ethnic quarters, which had been mere “way-stations in the process of acculturation.”71 In this revision, block-level African American communities evinced many qualities that America’s white middle classes ought to admire and even emulate. As the social and literary critic Albert Murray argued in 1967, the easygoing neighborliness of Harlem—where corners and steps “always hum and buzz with people in familiar contact”— offered a telling contrast with the “antiseptic neighborhoods” and rootless lifestyles of Manhattan’s affluent white residents.72 Two years later, Murray urged investigators to recognize that “the actual family of many contemporary Negroes, like that of plantation slaves, is the neighborhood.” Parental duties, he pointed out, “have always been shared by neighborhood uncles and aunts of whom sometimes none are blood relatives.”73 Tracing Murray’s steps, a growing collection of social scientists would similarly highlight such urban kinship networks and communal orientations, along the way reframing the vast and supposedly undifferentiated racial ghetto as a collection of local neighborhoods. Moreover, in a crucial though often-missed subtheme, such investigators’ writings frequently, if implicitly, sought to reinterpret the black inner 155

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city’s residents as urban villagers. Three influential observers who adopted this approach early on, albeit in markedly differing fashions, were the social psychologist Frank Riessman, the anthropologist Carol Stack, and the novelist and critic Ralph Ellison. While Riessman and Stack pointed to African American urban neighborhood ties in order to undercut Moynihan’s thesis about family breakdown, Ellison emphasized the role of historically black city districts as repositories of myth and cultural transmission. And although Ellison was himself hostile to academic sociology, he became one of the most influential “antipathologists” in his defense of black vernacular culture and his insistence on that culture’s historical synergy with a surrounding American culture.74 In varied ways, these three figures’ interventions indicate a larger intellectual turn toward neighborhood imagery as one potential riposte to the Moynihan Report’s negative diagnoses. At the time of the Moynihan Report’s release, Frank Riessman had been busily promoting a set of community- oriented schemes for urban change. Under his “New Careers” antipoverty strategy, federal and municipal agencies would have employed residents of low-income neighborhoods as “‘indigenous’ nonprofessionals,” who would tackle local social-service tasks while bringing “the subjectivity of a neighbor” into the stultifying social-work bureaucracies.75 It was thus as an advocate for poor neighborhoods’ inherent strengths that Riessman issued his vehement critique of Moynihan’s findings. “The Negro has responded to his oppressive conditions by many powerful coping endeavors,” Riessman argued in 1966, each a way of “fighting the system, protecting himself, providing self-help and even joy.” Take the case of black urban life, he urged. Here, resilience could be found not only in the formal structures of the civil rights movement, but also in the “informal system and traditions” that governed everyday community existence. “Storefront churches, the extended family, the use of the street as a playground, the block party, the mutual help of siblings, the informal know-how and self-help of the neighborhood, the use of peer learning”— all forcefully illustrated such enduring strength. In fact, Riessman suggested, the larger American culture could “benefit enormously from incorporation of some of these traditions.”76 While Riessman’s essay is titled “In Defense of the Negro Family,” the actual piece says very little about family structure as such. Instead, the author is most eloquent and energized when describing neighborhood ties and traditions. To consider Moynihan’s statistics on illegitimacy or single motherhood apart from the frequently supportive surrounding community, Riessman maintained, was dangerously myopic. 156

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And in Riessman’s wake, numerous scholars fleshed out this idea, finding vibrant neighborhood networks among the African American urban poor. Among the most influential was Carol Stack, a young white anthropologist from the University of Illinois at Urbana. Since the mid-1960s, Stack had been investigating the lives of black migrants from the rural South, and in 1968 she began an in- depth study of a low-income African American community— a place she labeled “The Flats”—located in an unnamed Midwestern city. A parent herself, Stack brought her young son along into the study area and developed close friendships with several local mothers. In her published fi ndings, culminating in the 1974 book All Our Kin, Stack insisted that the health of economically struggling black families could not be evaluated without considering the local interpersonal networks within which they were enmeshed.77 One of the bestselling works of postwar US social science, All Our Kin delivered a frontal assault to analysts who saw only tangles of pathology and social disorganization in black city districts.78 In a book that one historian dubs “the first sustained scholarly response to the Moynihan Report,” Stack described highly organized familial systems that, while not generally conforming to the idealized middle- class nuclear pattern, were eminently functional and strong.79 While running errands with her subjects, lending possessions back and forth, and sharing babysitting duties, Stack reported, “I became poignantly aware of the alliances of individuals trading and exchanging goods, resources, and the care of children.” These observations led Stack to apply the term “fictive kinship”—long used among cultural anthropologists for familial links extending beyond those of blood or adoption—to the matrix of ties and obligations connecting households in The Flats. In doing so, she suggested a broadened notion of family, encompassing distant relatives, neighbors, and friends, and embodying a unique local “folk system of parental rights and duties.” In chapters with titles such as “Swapping,” “Personal Kindreds,” and “Domestic Networks,” Stack revealed a community crisscrossed with invisible strands of mutual commitments and care, all of which allowed economically precarious households to manage the upbringing of local children. Mainstream social scientists, with their obstinate fi xation on paternal presence or absence in the home, had obscured a broader set of community relations. Residents of The Flats, Stack emphasized, “are immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they can count on.”80 For her affirming chronicle of family structures in The Flats, Carol Stack earned high marks in the African American press. “Black Fam157

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ily Ties Strong,” pronounced the Chicago Defender, citing Stack’s conclusions as evidence.81 Over time, All Our Kin would prove equally important to feminist scholars, chiefly by virtue of its challenge to the notion—firmly reinforced by Moynihan—that the patriarchal nuclear family represented the best or only standard.82 Though she hadn’t fully recognized it during her fieldwork, Stack subsequently reminisced, she had been “learning what I later came to realize were feminist strategies for surviving as a single parent within networks of friends and extended kin.”83 With regard to feminist scholarship, one of All Our Kin’s signal contributions was its argument for difference: an insistence that individual cultural communities often develop unique forms of family structure, each potentially “healthy” and “functional.”84 But, as a narrative of urban life, the book defied conventional scholarly wisdom by making an argument for sameness. While never explicitly stating this theme, All Our Kin recast low-income African American urban communities within a longstanding narrative about the city neighborhood’s function, one from which they had been exiled over the preceding two decades of social-scientific discourse. Indeed, Stack’s key descriptive phrases—“the rhythm of exchange,” “interdependence and cooperation,” a “life style built upon exchange and reciprocity”— strikingly resembled the language so often applied to the bygone immigrant ghetto and the latter- day white urban village.85 Moreover, when repudiating the Moynihan Report’s conclusions on disordered black urban family life, Stack implicitly echoed many 1960s arguments against federal urban renewal’s destruction of the material fabric of neighborhoods such as Gans’s West End in Boston. Thus, if critics ranging from Harrington on the left to Glazer on the right had endeavored to excise black inner- city life from received notions of the close-knit neighborhood enclave, then All Our Kin at least partially restored it to that interpretive lineage. Alone among reviewers, one British scholar noted the parallel. “What Whyte, Gans and Suttles have done for lower class Italians, Carol Stack is trying to do for the urban blacks,” proposed sociologist David Boswell.86 Over succeeding decades, this correspondence would become more clear, as historians of European immigrant communities began to cite Stack’s insights. For researchers such as Ardis Cameron and Judith Smith, Stack’s account of fictive-kinship networks in The Flats offered analytical tools for examining historical phenomena within the working- class white neighborhoods of early century mill towns or industrial metropolises: the obligations to watch out for neighbors, the grandmothers who patrolled 158

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their blocks and reprimanded rowdy children, the rituals of interfamilial borrowing and care.87 As several critics have noted, however, a set of hidden racial assumptions burrowed through much of this social-scientific work. Too often, charged a reviewer for the Journal of Black Studies in 1977, the new wave of urban ethnographies framed “universal adaptations to poverty” as embodiments of some “culturally unique” essence of African American culture.88 More recently, historian Robin D. G. Kelley has leveled a similar indictment. In their quest for pure and “authentic” expressions of black culture, he contends, many of the period’s left-leaning investigators single-mindedly sought out inner- city subcommunities of the unemployed and indigent. They then translated specific behaviors among those populations into sweeping arguments about the nature of black culture as a whole. Such work often reframed urban African American culture as an elaborate collection of coping approaches—“strategies for survival,” in sociologist Lee Rainwater’s phrase— developed almost wholly in response to material deprivation and white oppression. Though these studies were aimed at discrediting conservatives who decried lower- and working- class black social lifeways as self- destructive and perverse, the end result was often a constricting and monolithic view of African American culture— one that, ironically, resembled older renderings of black culture as merely an incidental byproduct of white external pressures.89 Even as a new cadre of left-leaning social scientists sought to document characteristic forms of neighborhood social organization within economically struggling black city areas, others reached for a more transcendent language and historical sweep to advance a corollary case. Throughout his 1960s urban commentary, Ralph Ellison exemplified such an approach. The writer had long distrusted sociology for its tendency to squeeze a wide range of human experience into reductive categories; likewise, his criticisms of literary naturalism—and, most famously, his censure of Richard Wright’s Native Son—had indicted that genre’s scientism and determinism for dangerously narrowing perspectives on black consciousness and individuality.90 Across the decade, Ellison made public his frustration with the pathologizing portrayals of African American city areas that, he sardonically noted, “certain white intellectuals are broadcasting like a zoo full of parrots.” When it came to places such as Harlem, these depictions missed out on a complexity of experience that evaded the gaze of statisticians and theorizers. An observer such as Harrington might dub Harlem “stunted and sick,” but Ellison pointed to an ineffable “something else” in the community— a 159

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human spirit “which makes for our endurance and our promise.”91 In fact, the very notion that Harlem was a ghetto, the writer protested in a 1965 interview, was “one of the most damaging misuses of a concept that has ever come about in the United States.” By postulating an unbridgeable gulf between these urban locales and the surrounding nation, the term denied black culture’s deep historical entwinement with all currents of American life.92 Ellison’s most widely disseminated elaboration of this position came, perhaps, not in his published writings, but rather in public testimony before a US Senate subcommittee examining aspects of the urban crisis. Conducted in August 1966 under the gavel of Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff, these hearings attracted strong newsmedia notice for the array of voices brought together—from the social psychiatrist Robert Coles to the writer Claude Brown, author of the bestselling Manchild in the Promised Land. To news reporters, Ellison’s cool, self-possessed testimony offered a perfect counterweight to that of Brown, who heatedly described Harlem as an unending nightmare of violence and degradation.93 In widely reprinted remarks, Ellison tenaciously rebutted the notion that low-income black residential areas were self- evidently ripe for the bulldozer. At one point, Senator Ribicoff pressed the writer on whether Harlem inhabitants saw their communities “as a prison.” Without a doubt, Ellison responded, black Harlemites resented the legal barriers and threats of violence that impeded their movement into other parts of the city. Nevertheless, it was “a misunderstanding to assume that Negroes want to break out of Harlem. They want to transform the Harlems of their country. These places are precious to them. These places are where they have dreamed, where they have lived, where they have loved, where they have worked out life as they could.” Such urban communities were not merely decaying slums: each functioned as “a form of historical and social memory.” Glib assumptions, then, that black residents of economically distressed city districts hoped to see their streets and blocks razed to the ground couldn’t more mistaken. “I can’t imagine some of these people wanting to get away from a given block or wanting to get away from a church,” Ellison continued from the witness chair. They wanted these “to remain as a base, just as people in their sections want their old blocks to remain as home base.” Here, Ellison made two important points. On one level, his testimony stressed Harlem’s role as a great central repository of African American culture, a “place where the body of Negro myth and legend thrives.” With this reminder, he sought to steer the discussion away 160

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from tiresome debates over lower-class “pathologies” or makeshift coping strategies. Equally noteworthy, though, was his shift in scale: after opening with panoramic reflections on the vast black metropolis, Ellison then zoomed in on the more intimate spaces that inspired such steadfast loyalties. Particularly, in his comparison of black Harlemites to those other “people in their sections” who stubbornly treasured the old block, he subtly but shrewdly aligned black city dwellers with a familiar neighborhood narrative—presumably that of the nation’s white urban villagers, whose neighborhood affections, by 1966, would have been at least somewhat legible to his listeners. In this respect, at least, African Americans of the inner city were no different than any other long-rooted urban dweller. Their reluctance to abandon the old block was both an instinctual and a universal emotion. “I think it is just that simple,” Ellison explained; “It is a human reaction.” Thus, even while pointing out the distinctive nature of historically black city districts, Ellison sought to convince a skeptical panel that these spaces did indeed contain discernible neighborhoods and beloved blocks—features that might strike some chord of recognition among a broader public.94 All of these critics, in one way or another, identified a complex neighborhood order where other investigators had seen only social disintegration. In that sense, they joined a line of 1960s urban commentators who sought to restore an appreciation of the intricate patterns that governed urban existence. In the seeming disorder of mixed-use neighborhoods, Jane Jacobs had found an elaborate social and economic ecosystem; within the apparent blight of an aging Italian district, Herbert Gans had unearthed rich forms of community life. Likewise, Blauner, Murray, Riessman, Stack, Ellison, and others discerned in the black inner cities a coherent set of neighborhood loyalties, mutual aid, and extended domestic networks. And by the late 1960s, these views were circulating with increasing regularity. Testifying before Ribicoff’s subcommittee four months after Ellison, Gans shared his suspicions that African Americans displaced by urban renewal “suffer even more than whites,” particularly from the loss of “the informal therapy that neighbors provide each other.”95 Even with stringent open- occupancy laws, argued James Farmer in 1969, many black inner- city inhabitants would remain in place “because it is home,” because “they played and ran and were chased and bled and lived in those streets.”96 Soon, a number of liberal Jewish and Catholic commentators, sympathetic to black civil rights struggles, would postulate a historical kinship between the white immigrants’ descendants and contemporary urban African Americans, one that might foster coalitions among all 161

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the children of the nation’s many “ghettos.” Writing in 1969 in a black Bay Area weekly, San Francisco rabbi Roger Hest described a “fellowship of the ghetto” shared by America’s blacks and Jews, while predicting “the blossoming of a rich, Black ghetto culture where once the family oriented, warm synagogue culture flourished for the Jews.”97 Similarly, by the early 1970s, numerous readers and textbooks on urban life were insistently pairing white immigrant and black experiences of place in the American city. Thus, a 1970 collection entitled The Ghetto Reader could combine selections from Henry Roth and Langston Hughes, Sholem Asch and Malcolm X, Alfred Kazin and James Brown. The editor of a 1972 anthology, A Gathering of Ghetto Writers, maintained that “immigrants and Blacks do share a common heritage. It is, for most of them, the experience of the ghetto.” The compilers of a 1973 collection, The Enduring Ghetto, described the ghetto as “the residence of friends and family— paesani, landsleit, and soul brothers and sisters.”98 Here, structural differences fade into a wash of similarity, each group passing through a threadbare yet close-knit neighborhood enclave experience, with the white immigrant story, once again, tacitly offered as a teleological narrative that black Americans would inevitably replicate. To another group of reformers, however, these arguments seemed dangerous and counterproductive. Some integrationist liberals feared that an emphasis on the cultural strengths and neighborhood ties of low-income black inner cities would lead to strategies aimed at “gilding the ghetto” rather than destroying it, to cynical policies of benign neglect, or to a return to laissez-faire predictions of “natural” upward mobility and social incorporation. Such work seemed to dilute the urgency of the moment. Yet once again, the participants in these debates cannot be easily situated along a neat ideological continuum. While liberal commentators had originally set the 1960s “ghetto” apart from the old immigrant neighborhoods in order to make a case for strong government intervention, emergent arguments from the left about the place-based connections and cultural virtues of black inner- city neighborhoods were themselves subject to appropriation and rearticulation by conservatives. Indeed, critics and social scientists who clung to pathology theories often argued that these more positive depictions had undercut the momentum for urban change, thereby playing into the hands of reactionaries. Two of the most vehement were Henry Etzkowitz and Gerald Schaflander, a pair of white Boston sociologists who in 1968 had established a community cooperative store in Brooklyn’s heavily

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African American Bedford-Stuyvesant area. Within their discipline, Etzkowitz and Schaflander were radicals: in one manifesto, they lambasted the model of “objective” and disinterested scholarship, urging their colleagues to take a direct hand in forming institutions that could heal “the sickness of the ghetto.”99 Among Bedford-Stuyvesant’s residents, however, the two sociologists found nothing but “nihilism, hopelessness, rootlessness, and all the symptoms of social disintegration.” Reporting on these experiences in a 1969 book, Ghetto Crisis, Etzkowitz and Schaflander assailed the recent tendency to emphasize the virtues and resilience of lower- class black urban communities. “Sociologists, civil rights organizations, and churches are doing Negroes in the ghetto a real disservice when they eulogize ghetto ‘life style,’” they declared. “It is our own belief that there are practically no plusses in Negro ghetto culture.” Those left-wing scholars and organizers who “find a false romance in the ghetto” were merely expressing their own disaffection from middle- class life and, at the same time, serving to “legitimate the status quo.”100 Undoubtedly, Etzkowitz and Schaflander’s critique was framed in elitist and deeply paternalistic terms. Activist sociologists must provide firm leadership, they insisted, because “there is no guarantee that . . . black voices necessarily speak with truth or clarity on the nature of their own appalling condition.”101 But, alongside this condescension, they did grasp the danger that figures on the right could seize onto such affirming portrayals for their own purposes. In fact, for a group of neoconservative thinkers, defenses of black neighborhood loyalties and community cohesion—as articulated by Ellison, Stack, and others—only validated their case that racial liberals and the Left had entirely exaggerated the hurdles posed by white discrimination. Chief among them was Edward Banfield, the Harvard government professor whose 1970 book, The Unheavenly City, denied the existence of an urban crisis and attributed city maladies to an unhelpable hardcore of “present- oriented” lower- class denizens. In dismissing racism as a driving force in urban life, Banfield, rather astonishingly, quoted directly and approvingly from Ralph Ellison’s 1966 Senate testimony. “These places are precious to them,” Ellison had noted of the residents of Harlem and similar districts. For Banfield, such remarks neatly placed black urbanites into a long line of ethnic city groups that had dwelt in “selfimposed isolation” for generations. Inhabitants of all-black neighborhoods were fundamentally no different than Gans’s Italian American urban villagers, who remained clustered because they “liked being near

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friends and neighbors.” In fact, Banfield wrote, the insistence upon calling such districts “segregated” or “ghettoes” merely “encourages the Negro to define all his troubles in racial terms.”102

Over subsequent decades, the neoconservative right would increasingly deploy such interpretations, using them to construct an ostensibly color-blind account of race and group progress in which white discrimination and privilege were rendered invisible.103 But precisely because this trope eventually became a fi xture on the right, it can be easy to lose sight of how various racial progressives of the late 1960s and 1970s adopted a similar language of neighborhood ties in order to refute pathologizing depictions of African American urban community and family life. Across the early and mid-1960s, mainstream liberal analysts had, with seeming relentlessness, defi ned the black inner cities against nostalgically drawn portraits of neighborhood spaces and functions. This analytical move, by decade’s end, had generated a strong counter- discourse, even as partisans on both the left and the right wrestled to lay hold of these new representations for their own purposes. Nonetheless, most of these arguments, explicitly or implicitly, worked to reinvent the nation’s urban history around narratives of European migration and settlement, with the white-ethnic urban village almost invariably framed as the prototype for nourishing forms of neighborhood life. Throughout, the concept of the “ghetto” summoned up a contradictory set of visions: a zone of pathology, anonymity, and alienation; a place where coping mechanisms created new forms of families and mutual aid; a storehouse for culture, myth, and memory. Each of these versions relied, whether as foil or as model, on specific assumptions about the nature and value of local neighborhood relationships. Just as strongly, these competing political and social-scientific constructions ran through much of the era’s artistic work and popular culture, with the neighborhood debates described above setting the stage for fresh visual and narrative renderings of the meaning of inner-city spaces in an age of urban crisis.

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Brilliant Corners: Representing the Inner City, from Outside and from Within “What you call a ghetto, I call my home,” the photographer Bruce Davidson recounted being told by an East Harlem tenant, upon his arrival there for a project in 1966.1 The comment neatly captures a key representational tension of the period: inner- city space as frightening slum or as native soil; the snap impressions of outsiders versus the local knowledge of inhabitants. Davidson was only one of a growing number of 1960s artists and documentarians who embraced the neighborhood ideal as a useful conceptual tool for reorienting the nation’s understandings of the city areas hardest hit by economic poverty and physical decay. A long tradition of urban writing had sought to elicit middle- class sympathy by demonstrating the low-income inner city’s supposed degradation and lack of neighborly interactions, a theme that intensified as the 1960s progressed. But the decade’s skirmish over neighborhood meanings was not confined to the realm of scholarly monograph or human-interest journalism. It also unfolded across a much broader range of genres—photography, literary reportage, museum exhibitions, and the like—many of which cultivated new theories about the vitality of neighborhood connections against the hard ground of urban impoverishment, vio165

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lence, and disenfranchisement. So, even as academics and policy experts tussled over the relationship between the concepts of “ghetto” and “neighborhood,” a fresh cadre of cultural producers urged a reassessment of the place-based attachments of the nation’s inner cities. Such an impulse ran through Davidson’s photography, and also through the works of figures such as the writer and social psychiatrist Robert Coles and the museum director John Kinard. Like the ethnographic contributions of Carol Stack, their work advocated an understanding of struggling urban districts as collections of neighborhoods, as spaces of rootedness, family, and friendship. Their methodological tools and intended audiences, however, were far different. In his photographic documentation of a block in East Harlem, for example, Davidson used the camera to suggest that neighborliness and community in the inner city ought to be understood not as something natural or instinctive, but rather as an achievement, maintained through the conscious everyday acts of each participant. Musing on Boston’s fraught city landscape in his highly personal works of literary nonfiction, Robert Coles emphasized the centrality of local havens— alleys, porches, streets, and shops—while pointing to the intermittent moments of human contact between fenced- off urban subcommunities as perhaps the only route toward national reconciliation and redemption. As part of his labors establishing the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, DC, John Kinard organized innovative projects in community self-representation, seeking to catalyze a knowledge of local history as one way to bolster contemporary struggles for urban equity. Each in a different way, Davidson, Coles, and Kinard confronted an essential and paradoxical question that loomed over a multitude of 1960s representations of urban life: how can areas of overwhelming material devastation be portrayed without monochromatically depicting their residents as people without hope or future? And, the converse: how can the vitality, struggle, and creative institution building of such communities be foregrounded while not overlooking the evisceration of their resources or romanticizing the economic suffering of their inhabitants? In addressing this crux, all three engaged in a quest, in Coles’s words, to absorb “the spirit of a street, a block, a section of a city.”2 Working from the inside out, their approaches began in localized narrative and storytelling, seeking to transform neighborhood experiences into a broader kind of public history. At the same time, they faced perplexing questions of authenticity and ethics in engaging with the communities on whose behalf they hoped to speak. Each claimed to be innocent of theoretical motives and embedded in the quotidian 166

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world of lives and places. Nevertheless, the resulting works, like those of the social scientists with whom these creators oftentimes contrasted themselves, contained their own politics of representation, giving rise to fresh hypotheses about the function of neighborhood ties within a socially charged American urban milieu.

Capturing the Neighborhood in East Harlem During the late 1960s, Bruce Davidson joined a growing collection of cultural producers striving to craft a different representational language for the crumbling blocks and buildings that defined the nation’s inner cities in the minds of many middle- class onlookers. From fall 1966 to summer 1968, he visited a single East Harlem street almost daily, taking thousands of pictures in an effort to capture this small community’s spirit and struggles. The final products— solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian Institution, and a 1970 book entitled East 100th Street—would endure as his most noted body of work, establishing him in the front ranks of American photography. The striking collection of images was both an aesthetic and a social statement. Though the project focused on a tightly circumscribed patch of Manhattan, it implicitly raised questions about the elements that define any neighborhood. Along the way, Davidson sought to establish a relationship of empathy and identification, rather than pity or distance, between local inhabitants and his eventual viewers. Nonetheless, several critics would quickly accuse him of betraying his subjects. In both their content and their formal attributes, the photographs reveal a maker grappling with his own potentially compromised position as an outsider and visitor— and seeking to answer that ethical dilemma by deploying a visual vocabulary grounded in local spaces and human networks. Davidson’s lengthy engagement with this particular place came as a culmination of his parallel interests in urban subcultures and in the civil rights movement, each of which had developed as he grew discontented with his work as a commercial photographer. Born in 1933, Davidson had been raised in a working- class Jewish family, in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. By the late 1950s, after photographic studies in college, he was supporting himself in New York through commercial shoots and fashion commissions. Eventually, though, these assignments left him feeling aimless and bored. As a teenager, Davidson had practiced his craft at Chicago’s bustling Maxwell Street markets, and 167

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now he was drawn to the hidden byways and subcommunities of the city, from the “teeming vitality” of the Lower East Side to the vigor of Brooklyn youth culture.3 His first breakthrough as an art photographer came with an exploration of just such a place. In “Brooklyn Gang,” a 1959 series published in Esquire with text from Norman Mailer, Davidson illuminated the insouciant energy of a white youth gang known as the Jokers, as its members sauntered along boardwalks and flaunted fresh tattoos.4 Two years later, however, Davidson received an assignment that spurred a different sense of commitment. Sent by the New York Times to accompany the Freedom Riders on the second of their harrowing journeys through the segregated South, Davidson suddenly felt a “strong conflict,” as he recounted, “between the emptiness of my fashion work and the violence and trust I had witnessed in the South.” Davidson returned to the South regularly over the next four years, documenting protests, arrests, and landmark marches of the black freedom struggle.5 Alongside these images of the dramatic and spectacular, Davidson also captured a quieter side of the movement, training his camera on the everyday lives of local African American families and individuals affected by the upheavals. The resultant images of care and mutual support in black communities, notes art historian Deborah Willis, offered a view that was “rarely represented in the era’s photographic coverage.”6 Davidson’s next major project, East 100th Street, would meld his longstanding interest in urban subcommunities with his recent attention to American racial injustices. Here, though, Davidson elevated the secondary strain in his civil rights photography into the dominant theme, turning entirely from the stirring events dominating newspaper headlines in order to emphasize the patterns and relationships of day-to- day local existence. Commuting between Manhattan and Westchester County during the 1950s, Davidson had often gazed out his train window toward East Harlem’s tenement rooftops, musing on the lives playing out below. Years later, a friend alerted him to a specific block in the district, one that journalists had dubbed the city’s worst: East 100th Street, between First and Second Avenues.7 Once home to Italian and Jewish immigrant populations, the block during the postwar decades had seen its numbers swell with low-income African American and Puerto Rican migrants to the city. By the early 1960s, negative media publicity over wretched local living conditions had snowballed, leading politicians and reporters to seize upon this particular block as a convenient symbol of all that was wrong with urban America. Grandees such as 168

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US attorney general Robert Kennedy, Oregon governor Mark Hatfield, and Connecticut senator Thomas Dodd paid visits to investigate conditions. Meanwhile, an NBC television documentary, a book by journalist Woody Klein, and a stream of newspaper features had all highlighted the block’s poor housing, overcrowding, gangs, and crime.8 Each exuded liberal anguish, seeking to shame the nation for its complicity in local misery. However, these accounts almost uniformly presented local inhabitants as passive and pathological. Most prominent in this regard was the prolific photojournalist Gertrude Samuels, who visited the street in 1962 for the New York Times magazine. Shocked by what she saw, Samuels described for her readers “ill-lit hallways which stank of urine,” children playing with “decaying garbage in fi lthy lots,” ubiquitous family dysfunction, and vacant- eyed junkies slumped on sidewalks. Finding only hopelessness, she expressed skepticism over attempts to mend the area. “In losing their own dignity,” Samuels wrote of the inhabitants, “they cannot respect the dignity of others.”9 While Samuels mentioned the renewal plans of municipal experts, she almost completely overlooked the grassroots organizing then energizing the community. Facilitating much of the activism were Norman and Margaret Eddy, a husband-and-wife team of white Congregationalist ministers who had served at a local storefront church, the East Harlem Protestant Parish, since the late 1940s. By the early 1960s, local neighbors and tenants had formed the Metro North Citizens’ Committee, eventually choosing Norman Eddy as chairperson. Relying on both theatrical protest tactics and local voluntarism, the committee’s resident organizers worked to improve the neighborhood while pressuring delinquent landlords and indifferent social welfare agencies.10 When Davidson arrived in 1966, Eddy stipulated that, before beginning his photography, Davidson must first attend a meeting of the neighborhood organization, in order to ask local participants’ permission to carry out his work in the area. Although suspicious of Davidson’s motives, neighbors warily granted approval.11 “Like the TV repairman or organ grinder, I appeared and became part of the street life,” Davidson later recounted.12 At first glance, the images he produced might recall the documentary tradition of urban photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. Of the 122 black-and-white photos in the published version of East 100th Street, a number seem to speak silently of the degradation of the street and its inhabitants: alleys overflowing with trash, crumbling building exteriors, water- damaged walls, and bleak, forbidding lobbies. Young men brandish knives or exhibit scars on their foreheads and 169

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torsos, offering visual evidence of local violence. Derelicts slump in doorframes and doze on filthy beds (fig. 10). One of Davidson’s peers, the photographer Harvey Lloyd, saw these images as “metaphors of the stinking pit we cast our fellow humans into.”13 Yet it quickly becomes obvious that Davidson has a far different agenda and a more complex relationship with his subjects. For, even as the pictures testify to material deprivation, Davidson focuses most intently on restoring a sense of neighborhood to his viewers’ perceptions of this oft-maligned space. In doing so, he strives to evade both the objectifying stance of much of the documentary tradition and the sentimental pity of contemporary liberal photojournalism. The project works to accomplish this in at least two ways. First is Davidson’s long-term engagement with a single block. A photojournalist interested only in pricking the conscience of an affluent audience

Figure 10 Untitled photograph from Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street. (Reprinted by permission of Magnum Photos)

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might have ranged about the city, capturing the most visually shocking scenes of dilapidation from a variety of rundown neighborhoods. In contrast, Davidson’s two-year devotion to a single 750-foot stretch of urban terrain imbued his work with impressions of the routine, the everyday, the unique sense of community that, as he later commented, is “one of the gifts of blocks.”14 Over his time in the neighborhood, Davidson reported giving away several thousand prints to residents. Oftentimes, neighbors would ask him to take photos of leaky roofs, prowling rats, or broken heaters, for use as visual ammunition in battles against negligent landlords. In this sense, Davidson might be thought of as an “advocacy photographer,” one who—like the idealistic professionals of the 1960s advocacy-planning movement—invited disempowered urbanites to channel his specialized skills in order to engage in the broader political arena. But Davidson’s work on behalf of residents was just as often personal and familial: assisting one neighbor with his wedding pictures, reproducing for another a treasured print of his grandfather’s army battalion, offering families perhaps the only professional sitting they had ever had.15 Second is the photographic technique, which differed markedly from that of documentarians who sought urban authenticity through surprise snaps and spontaneous street scenes. “I am not a street-shooter,” Davidson later insisted.16 Putting aside his usual 35-millimeter instrument, he instead adopted the view camera, which as a student he had resisted learning due to its bulky, unwieldy nature.17 Typically used with a tripod, and requiring the operator to focus from beneath a dark cloth or hood, the cumbersome device might seem an odd choice for urban street photography, rendering candid views virtually impossible. Those very limitations, however, worked in tandem with Davidson’s artistic and social aims. Rather than being an “unobserved observer,” he later explained, “I wanted to be with my subjects face to face and for them to collaborate in making the picture.”18 In keeping with this goal, he typically asked subjects to invent their own poses, often waiting for many minutes while they arranged themselves and the objects around them.19 As scholar Miles Orvell notes, in seeking to give his subjects a measure of power over the representations burned into the film, Davidson relinquished “the usual privilege of the photographer, to shoot and run.”20 In both of these ways, Davidson’s approach suggests that an authentic view of a neighborhood cannot be captured through fly-by-night visits, candid shots, or unforeseen exposés. Rather, it emerges in the thoughtful, deliberate self-presentation of inhabitants who collaborate in the exercise— a process that demands that the outside observer ac171

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knowledge his or her presence and participation in the scene. To know a block, a community, or a neighborhood, in other words, requires one to take seriously how people choose to stage their spaces and social relationships for others. This notion struck some commentators as counterintuitive. By producing images that were “obviously posed,” opined two academic reviewers, Davidson had undermined the sociological usefulness of his endeavor.21 These critics were right that the photographs sometimes have a formal, stiff, even artificial feel. What they missed was how this very quality contributed to a vision of the neighborhood as a conscious creation rather than an inadvertent social reflex, a hard-won accomplishment rather than something instinctive or intrinsic—a story instead of merely a problem. If Davidson’s artistic approach revolved around providing subjects some degree of control over the resultant works, the images themselves frequently take as a theme the residents’ struggle to exercise control over particular local spaces. Several, for instance, focus on the task of making a home. In contrast to the physical disorder shown in outdoor alleyways, a number of interior scenes stress domestic tidiness and order, framing these as both a process and an achievement. An older woman, wearing her maid’s uniform from work, scrubs her own kitchen floor with vigor and thoroughness, while a middle-aged man holds a broom and surveys his outside walkway with satisfaction (fig. 11). Likewise, though the walls are often stained or peeling, many of the living rooms are fastidiously maintained and decorated, with slipcovers protecting furniture and pictures of saints or family members adorning the walls. And the manner in which several subjects surround themselves with personal possessions, carefully arranged for the camera, suggests the display of treasured objects as an important means of projecting selfhood. In one image, for example, a shirtless man proudly poses in his living room, seated behind a conga drum, with his record albums propped upright so that their titles are visible to the camera. In another, an infant has been placed alone on a sofa surrounded by a sea of animal statuettes. The photos of trash-filled alleys outside might indicate that these gestures at domestic order and self- definition are tragically futile; as art historian Erina Duganne contends, Davidson “never successfully detaches the black subjects of his pictures from the actual poverty and decrepit conditions” of the neighborhood.22 Read another way, though, the images of dilapidation work to point up the deliberateness of residents’ efforts to carve out order in small slices of the city, thereby highlighting the emotional attachments between people and the most local of spaces. 172

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Figure 11 Untitled photograph from Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street. (Reprinted by permission of Magnum Photos)

Images of family life extend this theme from the physical to the social. More than a quarter of the book version’s photos present family relationships of some variety. Frequently, they emphasize the careful ordering of domestic affections and arrangements. Interestingly, many resemble traditional family portraits, with children attired in Sunday best, families posed in well-kept living rooms, or parents and offspring arranged by height on street corners (fig. 12). A handful of these 173

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Figure 12 Untitled photograph from Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street. (Reprinted by permission of Magnum Photos)

photos—the formal family portraiture, the street views of older women in their church-going finery— seem to recall James Van Der Zee’s idealized images of Harlem’s aspirational black middle class. Meanwhile, in more casual scenes, intimate gestures between parents and children, older couples, or young men and women spill out into the alcoves and stoops and rooftops, suggesting the networks of affection that crisscross the block (fig. 13). 174

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While a number of reviewers complained that the family groupings induced “feelings of monotony and repetition,” this very repetition, along with the formality of many of the sittings, works as visual rejoinder to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s description of disordered family life in the black city cores.23 A few stand in direct contrast to Moynihan’s thesis on absent African American fathers— as with photos of young men dandling infants, or in the pride of fatherhood displayed by an older man with an arm slung fondly across his grown son’s shoulders. Other images, however, suggest a more expansive definition of family, one woven into the surrounding community and composed of multiple generations. Constancy and continuity are the theme when three generations of African American women pose together at a supper table, while a picture of Latino/a residents playing musical instruments in an apartment kitchen makes it impossible to distinguish among nuclear relations, extended family, and local neighbors and friends. Gertrude Samuels, in decrying the lifestyles of inhabitants, had enumerated the “responsibilities that they don’t shoulder—toward their community, their homes and their children.”24 In Davidson’s portrayal, by contrast,

Figure 13 Untitled photograph from Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street. (Reprinted by permission of Magnum Photos)

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family emerges as the central human element that binds and defines the community. What narrative frame can encompass both the photos of rats, trash, and decay and those of well-kept interiors and ordered family life? How do the empty plots of rubble fit in with the vibrant community life viewers are shown elsewhere, a busy and sociable world of bodegas and churches, of jukeboxes, lunch counters, kite-flying, and street games? To sociologist Howard Becker, East 100th Street seemed merely to convey the message, “Look how noble these people are in the face of their suffering”— a sentiment he belittled for its lack of complexity.25 But Becker gets it only half right; such a paternalistic conferral of “nobility” is not quite what Davidson either pursues or achieves. Rather, his photos seek to bring into fuller view the diversity of relationship and experience compressed into a single tiny community. At the same time, the ambiguity of the collection, when taken as a whole, presses a kind of ambivalence on the work’s intended public. Ought far- off audiences, upon witnessing such evidence of poverty, to feel outrage toward the affluent society that permits these material privations? Should they momentarily envy a local existence seemingly built around personal relationships rather than consumer goods and individual status-seeking? Davidson raises but does not answer these questions. In his short preface, the book’s only text, he concludes instead by describing his own feelings toward the community. “I entered a life style,” he writes, “and, like the people who live on the block, I love and hate it and I keep going back.”26 As in Sholem Asch’s novel East River—where the neighbors “loved or hated one another, but belonged together”— Davidson sees neighborhood belongingness as a sentiment that subsumes both emotions.27

City Havens and Urban Reconciliation Whatever its virtues, the East 110th Street of Davidson’s photographs has a kind of insular, almost claustrophobic, quality to it. The commuter traffic whipping past on the FDR Drive in several images only emphasizes the block’s isolation from the rest of the city and nation. The writings of Robert Coles, the noted social essayist and psychiatrist, foreground many of the same interpretive forces, similarly situating neighborhood experience as key to making sense of the contemporary urban predicament. In Coles’s brand of reportage, vast political dramas become intimate; they assume a human scale and unfold close to home. 176

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But in contrast to Davidson’s tight focus on a single block, Coles’s urban nonfiction ranges across the whole of the metropolis, from leafy suburban boulevards to central- city housing projects. And whereas East 100th Street offers little evidence of contact with the wider world, Coles takes as his very theme the fleeting moments of interpersonal connection between the divided subcommunities of the American city. These everyday local interactions across neighborhood boundaries, he implies, contained the potential for healing the open wounds of the nation’s racial divisions. Like Davidson’s, Coles’s way of understanding the neighborhood’s role in debates over metropolitan inequities grew out of earlier work. Coles, however, had become attuned to the nation’s ugly racial legacy only relatively late in life. Born in 1929 to a prosperous patrician Boston family, Coles had attended Harvard College and Columbia medical school before being drafted into the military as a doctor. In 1958, while serving at an Air Force hospital in Mississippi, Coles realized how sheltered his prior experiences had been. In a personally transformative moment, Coles witnessed a group of white men assaulting a black woman on a beach near Biloxi; later, to his revulsion, he overheard policemen in his emergency room joking about the incident. Newly sensitized to a culture of white-supremacist racial violence, Coles quickly found his interest piqued by media accounts of ongoing school-integration clashes in New Orleans and Jackson. These battles formed the basis for his first major project in social documentation. Cultivating longterm relationships with dozens of informants—parents and teachers, courageous black schoolchildren and unrepentant Klansmen— Coles struggled to understand “what happens to people in the midst of such social changes.” Over time, he became not just an observer but also a participant, volunteering for CORE and the SCLC and helping to train northern youths for Mississippi Freedom Summer.28 The results of Coles’s southern school investigations appeared in 1967, to great acclaim, as Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear. Rather than staking out positions on public policy, the volume merely asked readers to listen: to hear the voices of people whose lives were undergoing dramatic upheavals. Crafting detailed, sympathetic portraits of his subjects, and using their own words to fill the bulk of his book, Coles asserted the ability of children to survive and thrive under tremendous historical stresses. Over the next decade, Coles added four companion volumes. Boiling down hundreds of interviews into interlocking character sketches, Coles examined the challenges faced by young people in specific population groups, while stressing themes 177

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such as the resiliency of children and unexpected moments of empathy across social barriers. Soon, Coles’s prolific output had established him as a highly visible intellectual: America’s “most influential living psychiatrist,” Time magazine pronounced.29 By the mid-1960s, Coles’s attention, like Davidson’s, had shifted from southern civil rights battles to the confrontations unfolding in the urban north. Disheartened by the divisions and incipient racial nationalism roiling the southern movement, Coles returned to Massachusetts and began examining Boston’s own school-integration disputes. Eventually, his investigation expanded to encompass the anxieties percolating through the entire metropolis, centering on the mostly black Roxbury section but reaching out to include white working- class Hyde Park and Roslindale, local suburban towns, and city districts of white Appalachian migrants. In all, he spent five years visiting twenty Boston families on a weekly basis, while also spindling out along their social networks to interview their neighbors, teachers, storekeepers, and friends.30 With his resulting work, the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1971 book The South Goes North, Coles sought to complicate one- dimensional understandings of the urban crisis. Drawing on the words and lives of a multitude of city dwellers, the book insisted that urban conflicts were not a matter of black and white, good and evil; instead, they ought to be viewed through the lens of families and communities trying to make lives for themselves while wrestling, each in its own way, with the painful consequences of the nation’s racial history. Across its nearly seven hundred pages, The South Goes North traverses wide swaths of the metropolis, from suburban schoolrooms to central- city storefronts. Still, this is above all a neighborhood book. “They come to the city streets,” Coles opens, describing the myriad paths from rural south to urban north. And, going forward, the work grounds large-scale themes of migration and mobility in individual city dwellers’ lived experiences of rootedness and continuity. The urbanites Coles profiles at length are presented in contrast to those he dubs “The Wanderers”: migrants who arrive in the North and drift from block to block, city to city—fleeing creditors, landlords, or the law. Against the shock of the new, the clamor and confusion of the northern urban cores, the local neighborhood for Coles emerges as stand-in for a calmer rural past. “The street she lives on,” he writes of one African American migrant woman, “is her backyard and front yard; it is the woods and the plantation and the county seat and the long road that leads to it.” In the commercial hubbub of another block—with its hair salons and

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funeral parlors, pawnbrokers and record shops— Coles finds the “people and places which offer a haven of sorts, if ever so temporary.”31 This emphasis on urban havens, on the quest for psychic solace in tiny crevices of the city, drives many of the book’s constituent sketches. A blue- collar community’s white mothers take defensive pride in their modest tree-lined streets, while the city’s African American residents carve out spaces of sanctuary from city dangers and deprivations. For one nine-year- old black child, a favorite alleyway offers a snug home base, safe from the perils of the major thoroughfares; while for his white Appalachian counterpart, the family’s ramshackle porch is a refuge, a place where he can imagine the city’s jagged skyline into a lush and wondrous forest.32 Throughout, the book works at an intensely domestic scale. Rarely do we encounter the large institutions of the metropolis—banks, hospitals, municipal bureaus, museums—and, when we do, they are described from the standpoint of people who fi nd them faceless and menacing. The city, Coles seems to say, is not just a collection of buildings or institutions; it is also a vast web of biographies, memories, and relationships. As major social transformations play out in living rooms and back lots, the city emerges here not as a unified entity, but rather as an archipelago of tiny and distinct communities. For Coles, an early critic of the Moynihan Report, this presentation of the black inner city as a collection of neighborhoods countered contemporary trends in journalism and social science.33 The pleasures there were genuine, not merely dismal coping strategies. But in The South Goes North this same language of neighborhood and rootedness is just as frequently used to express the pain and anxiety of the American urban predicament. A resident of a rundown white neighborhood complains to Coles, “There’s no glamour in white slums, only Negro ones,” while an African American teenager defiantly notes his pleasure at meeting friends “right in front of our building and not over in some lousy, rotten white neighborhood.” If Coles renders the city primarily as a sea of small communities, those very spaces are often presented as antagonistic and isolated, unable to appreciate the legitimate aspirations of other such communities. All the city’s inhabitants, he writes, “feel themselves now suffering from rather than profiting from all that has gone before them.”34 As the sketches unfold, readers are shown that the intimate neighborhood spaces that are so central to psychic wellbeing have come to function also as emotional bunkers, locking Coles’s informants into relationships of mistrust and resentment. By design, there is no overarching argument that The South Goes

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North seeks to impress upon its readers—except, perhaps, a plea to appreciate the human complexities that transcend the ken of totalizing social theories. Indeed, the book’s emphasis on local experience and biography is a consequence of Coles’s unequivocal scorn for ideology and system. In a 1972 interview, he testily dismissed the “technicians” of academic institutions, whose jargon-laden generalizations stood up poorly next to the keen human insights of his heroes, social observers Alexis de Tocqueville and James Agee. “I don’t believe in methodologies,” Coles said. “I don’t believe in theory. I just believe in narrative, describing and writing what I see.”35 With the seemingly endless spools of narrative that make up The South Goes North, Coles hoped to counter the rigidly pathologizing representations of inner- city childhood conveyed by psychiatric journals, newspapers, and august liberal opinion-leaders.36 This privileging of narrative as a form of urban knowledge, however, is itself a kind of theory. And although Coles refuses to offer an explicit thesis, a certain concept of neighborhood emerges from his book’s patterns and rhythms. Interested less in grand structural solutions than in the prospect for communication across social chasms, Coles focuses on the growth that occurs when people traverse the geographical boundaries between the city’s segmented communities. These are the few moments of hope that materialize in what is a generally pessimistic book. Though never stated outright, this neighborhood theory can be distilled from a formula Coles uses to construct many of his biographical sketches. First, what seems like a stock character is introduced: an angry black teen, a bigoted Irish cop, a condescending welfare caseworker. The dialogue at fi rst appears to confirm the reader’s preconceptions about this figure’s motivations, but Coles will then introduce a twist: his informant reveals a doubt, a flash of sympathy, a moment of profound self-awareness, which demands that readers reconsider their stereotypes of all the citizens who fill that social role. A white garbage collector, for example, disdains the black city residents whose refuse he hauls away each day. Dumbfounded, however, when inquisitive local children express an interest in his menial work, the man suddenly perceives his own racial privilege in holding a secure municipal job. Likewise, a black storeowner, bristling at slights from nearby white merchants, emphatically opposes their presence in his neighborhood. But, musing on his own past, he goes on to acknowledge his debt to the Jewish shopkeeper who once took him on as an apprentice.37 Crucially, these redemptive insights typically come at moments when the city’s isolated subworlds briefly intersect. These sorts of inter180

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personal encounters, for Coles, generate forms of knowledge far more meaningful than the arid propositions of academic treatises or humanrelations manuals. The white firefighter who plucks African American children from tenement blazes, the black city child bussed to a suburban school, the African American maid who travels to a white employer’s house: through their journeys outside their own communities, they all inch their way, haltingly and uncertainly, toward provisional resolutions to the nation’s entrenched historical divisions. For this reason, Coles urges readers to move past the usual distinctions between the realm of national politics and the more humble interactions of the local neighborhood. It is close to home—“on streets and alleys, in backyards and playgrounds”—that children learn habits of empathy or brutality. “There,” he writes, “we as parents and teachers, and they as future citizens, come to terms with one another more decisively than we may care to realize.”38 In Coles’s most optimistic moments, the modest values of neighborhood, community, and friendship are imagined as a chrysalis for a more humane form of national politics. Surprisingly, Coles denied the same affirming qualities in Bruce Davidson’s photographs, criticizing East 100th Street for presenting East Harlem as a “bleak, deteriorating, even squalid world.”39 But these two men’s ways of seeing the city had much in common. Whereas many of the era’s outside visitors agitated for change by mobilizing middleclass pity, Davidson and Coles instead sought to highlight the everyday neighborhood patterns that evaded the eyes of paternalistic reformers. With their localist orientations, East 100th Street and The South Goes North each attempted to reconfigure notions of inner- city life around ordinariness rather than tumult, community rather than alienation. Indeed, both projects are, in some ways, efforts to render impoverished central- city districts as something more familiar to middle- class readers and viewers.40 “So many people in New York,” Davidson told a Swiss magazine, “think of the ghetto as some other place, way uptown. Some other place we must never have the bad fortune of going to.” In response, he ran down a list of the quotidian and routine activities— pets, music, greetings, decorations—that infused daily life in East Harlem.41 In similar fashion, Coles sought to recalibrate conventional ideas about inner- city alienation. There was indeed a “rage” among black urbanites, he claimed, but this emotion was not the militant anger and psychological torment so influentially hypothesized by psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobb in their 1968 book, Black Rage. Rather, it was the astonished indignation of ordinary people when told that their neighborhoods were “some awful blight upon mankind.” “They 181

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call this a ghetto. Can you beat that?” one workman tells Coles with amazement. Likewise, a nurse in Roxbury feels as if she is “reading science fiction” when she comes across magazine accounts of her community.42 With their invocations of normality and routine, these texts labor to elicit a sense of recognition among distant and more affluent audiences. As these works traveled from darkroom or writing desk into the wider public discourse, reviewers took from them wildly contradictory messages about the health of the nation’s cities. Noting this lack of consensus, one perceptive journalist claimed that Coles’s writings functioned as a “Rorschach test” for the reader—an observation that might equally be applied to Davidson’s images.43 The nature and diversity of critical response suggest just how central issues of representation had become to larger debates over social justice and the urban predicament. In such discussions, two questions tended to predominate: how ought economically troubled inner- city neighborhoods to be portrayed, and how ought such works to apportion blame? Two critics addressed the first question in dueling reviews of Davidson’s images, published side-by-side in the New York Times. Both castigated the work, but, notably, their condemnations came from opposite poles. On one side was Phil Dante, a Puerto Rican photographer who would later cofound En Foco, an influential New York photography collective. For his part, Dante harshly attacked Davidson for wielding his camera as “a cruel weapon.” The images of rats, urine stains, filthy beds, and trash-filled lots, he argued, offered only “a grim, brooding comment on the nightmare existence of the ghetto inhabitant.” However, even as Dante upbraided Davidson for this “preoccupation with  the vile,” A. D. Coleman, the pioneering photography critic, censured the images instead for their unwarranted obsession with urban beauty. The  project had failed in its social purpose by transforming “a truth which is not beautiful into an art which is.” A truly useful form of urban photography, Coleman asserted, would promote political change by offering “images so ghastly that none of us will be able to eat or sleep or go to museums until we know that such conditions no longer exist.”44 If criticism of Davidson’s project revolved around the relationship of art to urban suffering, the response to Coles’s work turned on the question of blame. Who was responsible for the dire conditions of innercity America? For sociologists Henry Etzkowitz and Gerald Schaflander, Coles’s writings served only to absolve inhabitants for their unhealthful, antisocial lifestyles.45 In contrast, Commentary essayist Joseph Epstein lamented that Coles, through his exasperating fi xation on the 182

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paradoxes of narrative, had inadvertently offered “amnesty” to middleclass readers for their own passive complicity in urban poverty.46 To Davidson’s detractors, then, East 100th Street had betrayed its subjects, whether by omitting their spiritual triumph over urban squalor or by translating repulsive conditions into an exquisite art. And to Coles’s detractors, the frequently affirming neighborhood sketches of The South Goes North delayed urban salvation by failing to indict the racial ghetto’s creators, be they deviant local residents or an indifferent middle class. In both cases, the critical scuffles surrounding these works reveal a deep ambivalence over the proper function of imagemaking and narrative in an age of urban crisis. That commentators could see in the same portraits such different sorts of communities suggests the ideological instability of such urban depictions, along with the degree to which the era’s volatile racial politics shaped the encoding and decoding processes.47 That observers demanded from these works such varying goals indicates the importance ascribed to urban representational texts as an arena for social contests over race, citizenship, and the meaning of city spaces. Where most of these reviewers converged, however, was in their belief that Coles and Davidson, as visitors and aliens, could never really understand or truthfully present the communities they had chosen to study. Pointing to the inevitable paradox of photographic documentation, Susan Sontag in 1973 would write, “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves.”48 One danger of image-making, the aphorism suggests, is the illusion of objective truth that such representations frequently convey, along with the disparate power relations inescapably embedded in the production process. And nowhere during the late 1960s was this predicament more charged than in outsiders’ renderings—whether visual or textual—of inner- city spaces and inhabitants. Indeed, an anxiety radiates through Davidson’s and Coles’s work over the ethical perils of their authorial positions, manifested most clearly in the eagerness of each to present himself as a conduit for neighborhood voices rather than as an evaluator or judge.49 In one sense, these constructions of everyday neighborhood lives functioned as a political intervention, an attempted rebuttal to more pathologizing depictions. But Davidson’s and Coles’s visions are, in the end, strangely quiescent. Perhaps unwittingly, their works serve also to depoliticize the neighborhood, focusing on such an intimate and domestic level that larger systems of power and oppression become virtually invisible. These projects have mostly jettisoned the optimistic 183

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hopes for social change that infused Davidson’s earlier civil rights photos and Coles’s writings on southern school integration. Whatever hope emerges now comes from their subjects’ ability to carve out meaningful moments of community close to home. If this is a triumph, however, it is also the only triumph that local denizens are depicted as able to secure. Seldom do we gain a sense that the inhabitants are actively engaged in combating socioeconomic subordination; rarely do we glimpse residents acting to change the broader world that surrounds their isolated neighborhoods. Even though the communities Davidson and Coles portray were launching aggressive organizing campaigns, the subjects in these works remain oddly passive, exercising agency to shape their social existence only in the realm of the living room and the front stoop.50 Ironically, this apparent resignation is partly a consequence of the works’ neighborhood frame of reference. Whereas previous outside visitors typically fi xated on the unstable and transitory aspects of innercity life, Davidson and Coles self- consciously foregrounded stability and permanence. Thus, instead of social volatility, fleeting relationships, and spectacular disruptions, we are shown abiding friendships, secure refuges, and cyclical rhythms. Such a focus on the constant and enduring, though, occludes moments of rupture, times when inhabitants work to upend the existing social order. In East 100th Street and The South Goes North, social problems feel static and immutable: one learns that inhabitants aren’t defeated by local conditions, but one gets little sense that these conditions can ever be altered. These depictions emerged at a time when both critics and residents were emphatically rejecting such a stance as a legitimate position from which to represent black- and Latino/a-populated city neighborhoods. Indeed, Davidson and Coles conducted their work within a wider context of invasion by a drove of professional knowledge workers. As Robin D. G. Kelley relates, the 1960s had seen “a veritable army of anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, and social psychologists set up camp in America’s ghettos.”51 This intruding presence did not go unremarked among African American social commentators. As Ebony journalist Simeon Booker mordantly observed in 1964, “Authors and script-writers long have profited from stories of the ghetto; sociologists have won recognition from accounts of the human deterioration.”52 As the decade wore on, African American media outlets reacted with increasing exasperation over the way in which the black inner cities had, as the East St. Louis Monitor put it, become “a guinea pig for rich white school boys and the professoriate.”53 “Among the many trials and tribu184

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lations black Americans have to bear,” charged the San Francisco SunReporter in 1969, “are the armies of researchers who periodically invade the ghetto to ‘study’ how black people live.”54 With the reflexivity of their texts, visitors such as Davidson and Coles strove to overcome the approaches of supercilious social scientists. Nonetheless, their attempts to represent and give voice to such urban communities were inherently problematic and contradictory.

Making Use of Neighborhood History at Anacostia Even as liberal white chroniclers and image-makers sought to discover in the battered city cores some form of neighborhood existence, African American urban communities were launching powerful grassroots projects intended to harness neighborhood heritages and loyalties as a force in present- day struggles. Despite some surface similarities, these invocations of local belongingness offered a marked contrast to the renderings of outside documentarians. While works such as East 100th Street and The South Goes North commonly framed such relationships as spiritual compensation for political powerlessness, local-level cultural activists often instead drew on neighborhood imagery to promote a reordering of social priorities and hierarchies. For this reason, it’s worthwhile to explore one of the most resonant of these efforts—the neighborhood museum movement—in order to discern its conception of the neighborhood’s potential in larger campaigns for urban equity. Like visitors such as Davidson and Coles, this movement’s progenitors foregrounded community bonds rather than social disintegration. Here, though, that representational language was pressed into service as an activist intervention. In November 1969, more than two hundred museum leaders, philanthropic officials, and community activists from around the country gathered in Brooklyn for a seminar.55 Their topic was the emergence of the neighborhood museum, an innovation then spreading through US central cities. Distinct from the elite museum of the downtown, the neighborhood museum was a local community institution—one that, depending on one’s political outlook, either offered benevolent outside enlightenment to benighted city ghettos, or promised to spur grassroots social change by validating a community’s indigenous history and culture. At the seminar, controversy ruled the day. Black and Puerto Rican activists issued strongly worded directives to the white museum workers in attendance, calling for the dissemination of mu185

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seum collections into the inner city, more pluralistic programming, and community control over art objects.56 But even as these attendees questioned the mission of the elite civic museum, several from their ranks also articulated a distinctive theory of the African American city neighborhood. Topper Carew, an architect and cultural activist from Washington, DC, expressed it best. Funding for neighborhood museums was not a gift to be bestowed by white- dominated museum administrations. In fact, Carew insisted, black neighborhoods had long functioned as “museums” in their own right. “Community museums,” he explained, “have always existed in the black community, on street corners, in backyards, on stoops. It’s just that it’s a living museum.” Assailing white attendees for the materialistic values rampant in their own communities, Carew argued that discontented white youths “need something as vital as we have in our community.”57 For Carew, then, the neighborhood museum was important not as a vehicle for imparting “culture” to the inner cities, but rather as a focal point for a community’s existing energies, traditions, and aspirations. As in the work of many liberal urban documentarians, the depiction of local black communities as “a living museum” offered a rebuff to theorists who saw merely alienation and apathy. Nevertheless, this conception ultimately diverged from the approach of outsiders such as Davidson and Coles. To Carew and like-minded cultural activists, neighborhood bonds and traditions were a matter- of-fact part of life in the inner city, not something to be painstakingly unearthed by sympathetic visitors. The task was rather to build on these sentiments, using neighborhood cultural materials to mobilize for social change. Goals such as these implicitly and intermittently infused a vast range of community organizing efforts, from rent strikes to welfarerights campaigns, political street theater to the urban mural movement.58 However, because of their explicit concern with questions of local representation, the new wave of neighborhood museums undertook this project in a uniquely self- conscious manner. By the end of the 1970s, notes historian Edward Alexander, the nation had “at least one hundred ethnic minority neighborhood museums or art centers”—most in inner cities and using converted storefronts, warehouses, or industrial buildings.59 Seeing themselves as “agents of empowerment,” historian Spencer Crew remarks, such institutions “sought to involve community members in the retelling and codifying of their own history.”60 In doing so, they grappled with questions of what “neighborhood” and “community” ought to mean in an urban

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environment characterized by calamitous disinvestment and deeply embedded racial inequalities. These new institutions appeared as the result of two broad arguments: one about the shortcomings of the nation’s elite civic museums, and another about the nature and strengths of inner- city minoritypopulated communities. In the first case, discontent over the practices of established museums had steadily mounted over the course of the 1960s. Such institutions, critics charged, had turned their backs on entire populations—both through a vastly disproportionate focus on European and Euro-American history and art, and through a neartotal lack of engagement with nonwhite and economically marginalized residents in their home cities. By decade’s end, such indictments were regularly bubbling into public view. The neighborhood museum, against this backdrop, emerged as both a critique and a counter-model, designed as everything that the established downtown museum was not. It would be guided by the community rather than controlled by elites, responsive to immediate concerns rather than mired in dusty esoterica, affirming of local histories rather than replicating existing cultural hierarchies. Along with this critique, though, came a second argument, albeit one expressed less explicitly. This claim related to defi nitions of the urban community. In the face of academic and media institutions that systematically ignored or trivialized black urban histories, the cultural workers who established such venues insisted upon the worth of local traditions, practices, and experiences. They demanded that these be explored and memorialized, thereby fostering a richer sense of what particular urban places had meant to past and present inhabitants. Indeed, while many of these inner-city institutions focused broadly on the African American and Pan-African experiences, others concentrated more intensively on their local settings. In the world of historic preservation, for instance, activists took inspiration from a project in central Brooklyn. There, beginning in 1968, the Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford-Stuyvesant History had unearthed the history of the community of free blacks who had established the since-forgotten Weeksville neighborhood during the 1830s.61 Likewise, in Washington’s Adams-Morgan district, Topper Carew’s New Thing Art and Architecture Center sought to “give people courage and ability to reconstruct their neighborhood” by putting the tools of planning, architecture, and art into the hands of residents.62 To bring new public prominence to the “living museum” of the

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neighborhood required a fresh set of institutions—ones that took seriously the local cultures and attachments of the inner cities. At the same seminar in which Carew articulated his theory, another museum activist, John Kinard of Washington, DC, described the neighborhood museum as a place where “the desires and the feelings of the people in the community can erupt in exhibitions.”63 Kinard’s vision of such institutions as focal point for neighborhood energies emerged from his recent work establishing the most prominent example: the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum. Directed by Kinard and funded as an experimental outreach venture of the Smithsonian Institution, the Anacostia center became a “worldwide model,” explains art scholar Edmund Barry Gaither, by virtue of the ways in which it “enfranchised a community of people and enabled them to talk about their lives.”64 Though it was supported by the Smithsonian, staff and community volunteers quickly took the project in directions that its patrons had never anticipated. Situated at the nexus of grassroots civil rights efforts and institutional liberal reform initiatives, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum cultivated a unique vision of the role of neighborhood sentiments in a context of widespread economic evisceration. The idea for such a project originated not with the Anacostia community itself, but rather with the Smithsonian Institution’s iconoclastic new secretary, S. Dillon Ripley. After assuming the leadership post in 1964, the ornithologist and administrator had set about upending many of the institution’s staid customs and byways. Whether proposing camel races on the National Mall, wafting custom- designed odors through exhibition rooms, or sending a baby orangutan to Capitol Hill to charm Senate benefactors, Ripley approached the task of attracting new audiences and funding streams with a decidedly theatrical flair.65 By the mid-1960s, however, the Smithsonian Institution—which lacked a single African American curator and had never mounted a large-scale exhibit on a black American theme—could seem hopelessly removed from the sociopolitical changes sweeping the nation.66 Worrying over an urban crisis that “snarls at us from shattered shopfronts,” Ripley dabbled with several ideas for bridging the gulf between the treasure house of the elite museum and distressed city neighborhoods beyond its walls.67 In one aborted stab at this problem, Ripley and his deputies concocted plans for creating a realistic slum environment inside one of their museums, which would presumably acquaint blinkered middleclass visitors with inner- city travails. Staff scoured the District for a “typical” tenement apartment that they could disassemble and move,

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while drafting designs for an authentic ambience incorporating chilly temperatures, live rats, and “Smellovision” slum odors.68 Although Ripley’s scheme to bring the slum into the museum never reached fruition, the secretary more doggedly pursued a plan to take the museum into the slum. Dismayed by the number of low-income Washingtonians who had never set foot in the National Mall’s vast storehouses of knowledge, Ripley began mulling ideas for attracting the city’s poorest residents—those who seldom left their neighborhoods, who lacked bus fare for museum trips, or who felt unwelcome visiting a “vast monumental marble palace.” If samplings of the institution’s holdings could be dispatched to inner- city storefront venues, he told a conference of museum colleagues in 1966, residents would feel encouraged to come and go “as normally and naturally as they patronize a supermarket.” Thus acclimatized, these visitors might then go on to explore more traditional museums. To this end, the Smithsonian leadership cast plans to open a “neighborhood museum” in a poor or working- class Washington district. The central guideline, Ripley recounted, “was that the area must have stability, not be too full of transients or migratory unemployed. Preferably we wanted a block that contained a laundromat, that symbol of daytime neighborhood involvement.”69 The Greater Anacostia People’s Corporation, a neighborhood organization in Washington’s Anacostia district, petitioned aggressively—and ultimately successfully—to win the experimental museum for its community.70 Located in southeast Washington, across the Anacostia River from the city’s imposing monuments and white- collar office complexes, the district was an economically struggling area of approximately one hundred thousand inhabitants, exemplifying many of the ills of postwar urban development. The Suitland Parkway, built in the early 1940s, had sliced through Anacostia communities, razing many single-family homes. Meanwhile, over the preceding twenty years, the area had undergone rapid racial turnover. As white flight accelerated, highway construction and urban-renewal projects elsewhere in the capital had driven large numbers of displaced, mainly African American citizens to Anacostia, where the city had constructed a disproportionate number of its public-housing projects. While Anacostia’s residents were 83 percent white in 1950, by 1967 two-thirds were African American—the most dramatic demographic transformation anywhere in Washington. With half of the inhabitants under age twenty, and many living below the poverty line, underfunded public services strained to cope.71

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Figure 14 The disused Carver Theater, soon to be converted into the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, DC. (Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image 92-1790)

To head up its project, the Smithsonian turned not to a seasoned museum professional, but rather to John Kinard, a thirty-year- old Anacostia community activist and minister. Born in the capital and raised in Anacostia, Kinard had spent the early 1960s participating in Operation Crossroads Africa, a cultural- exchange program, by spearheading self-help infrastructure projects in Zambia, Ethiopia, Uganda, and elsewhere. Returning to southeast Washington in 1965, Kinard then worked with local war-on-poverty agencies while holding an associate pastorship at a city church.72 After accepting the Anacostia museum directorship, Kinard and his small staff marshaled volunteers from the community and labored to retrofit an abandoned cinema house, the old Carver Theater, situated on a drab block of storefronts not far from some of Washington’s biggest public-housing projects (fig. 14).73 The Anacostia Neighborhood Museum finally opened, to great fanfare, in September 1967. Greeting an opening-night crowd of four thousand was a miscellany of artifacts from the Smithsonian’s flagship collections. Catering particularly to children, the displays included natural-history artifacts, a miniature live zoo, a skeleton that patrons 190

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could disassemble, a theater with closed- circuit TV, a reproduction of an 1890s Anacostia general store, and eventually a replica of the Mercury space capsule. Soon enough, the institution came to function as a community center, hosting lectures and Kwanzaa celebrations, music and dance concerts, and meetings by neighborhood organizations (fig. 15). Over its first year, the museum drew more than fifty thousand visitors, and by 1972 its staff had swelled to twenty.74 The press marked the museum’s inception with a flurry of feature stories. Time singled it out as a leader among those experimental community projects dedicated to “opening eyes in the ghettos.”75 However, its path would soon depart from the outreach strategy envisioned by the Smithsonian. For Dillon Ripley, the neighborhood museum had been conceived primarily as a cultural sampler, a less-intimidating appetizer that might eventually induce poor- off residents to taste the sumptuous entrées at the established downtown museums. Anacostia’s initial exhibits, therefore, relied mainly on artifacts trucked in from the main Smithsonian collections. In marked distinction, Kinard’s staff and neighborhood volunteers crafted an alternative vision for the museum—one focused less on offering enrichment to culturally “deprived” local populations than on excavating Anacostia’s forgotten histories and sharing them with the wider city.76 When developing the

Figure 15 Local children working on craft and drama projects at the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum. (Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image 92-3568)

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Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, Smithsonian administrators had understood the term “neighborhood” to indicate a particular location and clientele; for Kinard and his colleagues, it came to refer instead to their institution’s subject and source. As the Smithsonian turned over planning to the community, which helped direct the project through a neighborhood advisory council and open public meetings, the museum’s emphasis quickly shifted toward a more energetic engagement with local heritage, black history and culture, and contemporary community struggles. Guided by the advisory council, curators developed exhibits dealing with topics such as Anacostia history, African decorative and performing arts, black participation in the American Revolutionary War, jazz and civil rights histories, and the social and economic challenges faced by contemporary African Americans. One show featured art created by prison inmates at northern Virginia’s Lorton Reformatory; another recounted the life of the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had made his home in Anacostia from 1877 until his 1895 death. With a donated bus serving as a mobile display unit, staffers brought versions of their exhibits to street corners and community meetings.77 Furthermore, the museum’s very presence in the neighborhood, Kinard claimed in 1969, had sparked greater participation in ongoing campaigns around housing equity and economic empowerment.78 As the Smithsonian’s imported artifacts faded in importance, the museum crafted a widening set of programs intended as a form of dialogue with residents’ pasts and present. Within the field of museum studies, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum is often held up as an emblem of a broader paradigm shift— one in which US museums gradually recognized the need to become more responsive to their surrounding communities and to incorporate working- class, women’s, and minority experiences into their programming. Scholars such as Edmund Barry Gaither and Edward Alexander interpret the Anacostia project, along with several of its peers, as a catalyst for a redefinition of the museum’s basic role in modern American society. But, at the same time, the Anacostia museum served to promote an alternative theory of inner- city neighborhood life. Indeed, for Kinard the museum offered a visible rejoinder to culture- of-poverty arguments about social conditions in low-income urban areas. “At a casual glance, you would say the inner- city community is ratty and roachy,” Kinard told a visiting journalist. “The people are defeated, you say. There’s no culture. But there is culture in the inner city. And the neighborhood museum amplifies it and brings it out in the open.”79 The design of Anacostia’s exhibits frequently suggested that a pre192

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existing neighborhood consciousness could be bolstered through an ever- deepening knowledge of the community’s history and culture. In this, Kinard and his colleagues echoed a number of other contemporary intellectuals: Albert Murray, who insisted that long-rooted African American neighborhoods often functioned as a form of extended family; Ralph Ellison, who maintained that black urban spaces inspired block-level loyalties just as strongly as their white counterparts; Topper Carew, who declared that African American city communities were themselves a kind of “living museum.” If the emphasis for Bruce Davidson and Robert Coles was stability and normality, for Kinard neighborhood energy and actualization were the bywords. The meaning of Kinard’s remark that the neighborhood museum “amplifies” a community’s culture becomes more clear in light of two of Anacostia’s early exhibits: The Rat: Man’s Invited Affliction in 1969, and The Evolution of a Community in 1972. Each sought in its own way to dramatize the community’s past and to convey its current needs. Inspiration for the former exhibit came from the plaintive stories of neighborhood children, many of whom had been terrorized by the multitude of rats that infested local apartments. Upon entry, museum visitors were confronted with graphic displays on the community’s rodent problem, children’s skits depicting daily existence in rat-ridden housing projects, and, as capstone, a display case filled with live rats scurrying about in a mock-up of a rubbish-strewn backyard. With The Rat, Anacostia curators not only documented an inescapable part of Anacostia life; they also indicted the municipal officials and absentee landlords whose neglect allowed the rodent population to flourish. Capturing national attention, the display toured to other museums and was featured on ABC television’s Discovery program. Meanwhile, local enthusiasm, as Kinard and a colleague later wrote, forcefully demonstrated to staff members the necessity of “relevance to present- day problems that affect the quality of life here and now in Anacostia.”80 With its galvanizing effect, The Rat convinced museum workers that the community itself should be the focus of their work. By the following year, the museum had established a new arm, the Center for Anacostia Studies, to carry out in- depth research on the area’s history and challenges. Garnering financial support from the Carnegie Corporation, the center worked to recover the area’s past through oral histories, archival research, education, and historic preservation. As with the museum itself, one goal here was to combat the overwhelmingly negative impression of Anacostia held by most Washington policymakers and journalists.81 During the late 1960s, the Washington press routinely 193

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denigrated Anacostia as a “festering” district of “hard- core ghetto problems,” a “blue- collar purgatory for blacks,” a crime hotspot liable to riot at a moment’s notice.82 This image, in Kinard’s view, had helped turn the area into a “dumping ground for everything the city doesn’t want.”83 At the same time, the center hoped to convince local residents of their own neighborhood’s worth. By unearthing the experiences of inhabitants from earlier decades, Kinard explained, organizers aimed to “arouse some feeling of identification with their lives”—thus encouraging contemporary residents to “move with more understanding” toward answers to the community’s current predicaments.84 Through the 1970s, the Center for Anacostia Studies amassed an impressive body of achievements, ranging from lavishly illustrated historical publications to campaigns for landmark preservation. Its earliest and most noted success, however, came in 1972, with a two-part exhibit entitled The Evolution of a Community. By highlighting the various communities that had called Anacostia home, the project indicted historical accounts that “did not take fully into account either the presence, the role, or the contributions of all who had peopled this region,” as research director Louise Daniel Hutchinson explained.85 Though the exhibit narrated the area’s history and present- day condition—from the Nacotchtank Indian settlement of the early seventeenth century to the urban problems accumulating over recent decades—it focused most closely on one particular slice of that story: Anacostia’s African American community of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Delving into local historical documents, researchers excavated the community’s rich past as a site where former slaves and their descendants had built new lives in the wake of emancipation. Old Anacostia had once existed as two segregated communities: Uniontown, developed for whites in 1854 and protected by restrictive covenants; and Barry’s Farm, a 375-acre site acquired by the Freedmen’s Bureau during the Civil War’s aftermath. Partitioned into small plots, the land of Barry’s Farm had been leased or sold to black migrants, who arrived in Washington in large numbers through the postbellum decades. The inhabitants of this small, semirural community built houses on their plots, and, in response to exclusion from Uniontown’s white civic and business establishments, they developed their own network of stores, streets, and institutions.86 Although this history of institution building had once been a source of local pride, Hutchinson remarked, it had been forgotten in recent years as residents turned toward more immediate needs.87 With the Evolution exhibit, then, the Anacostia museum sought to recover the 194

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dreams of freedom and self-sufficiency that had once infused the community. Here, staff members proclaimed, visitors would be able “to feel the history of Anacostia, to walk through it, to hear it, to see it, and to participate in it.” To that end, staff and volunteers canvassed the community, rifling through family photo albums and borrowing dusty heirlooms from residents’ attics and trunks. Along with student volunteers from Howard University, they conducted oral histories with eighty-five current and former neighbors, eliciting memories of childhoods spent in old Anacostia—its schools, civic leaders, entertainments, and workplaces. As centerpiece, the exhibit incorporated a remarkable full-size mock-up of an early century street corner, a crossroad that had once been home to the most important institutions of Barry’s Farm. Reproductions of old building façades and interiors allowed museum guests to inspect a small church; the parlor of a modest 1920s home; one of the community’s all-black elementary schools; and Douglass Hall, a building that had functioned as black Anacostia’s social and commercial hub. As visitors entered each replica, tape machines played back older Anacostians’ remembrances of struggles to keep families fed and clothed, of their delight in trolley rides on summer Sunday afternoons, and of the role of the precinct’s three black policemen in keeping watch over rambunctious children.88 Beyond the attraction of rediscovering old streetscapes and stories, the Evolution exhibit made two broader statements. First, by highlighting the dignity and institution building of a community of workingclass African Americans in the half century following the Civil War, it offered a marked contrast to the presentism and sensationalism that characterized media accounts of slum conditions in Anacostia. In this view, the fragile neighborhood that these past inhabitants had established was an accomplishment in its own right, one as significant as the national events memorialized by the grand statuary of the central capital across the river. Along the way, the museum honored elderly residents who were asked to contribute their memories and their keepsakes. As one visitor remarked on a comment card: “I feel it is a good start for the black community. Someplace where our children can take pride in their heritage and understand it, appreciate it.”89 Second, the exhibit suggested that this neighborhood heritage was intimately connected with struggles of the present, even if most contemporary residents weren’t descended from old Anacostia’s early community of freed people. The museum’s program manager, Larry Erskine Thomas, characterized the exhibit’s purpose with reference to the precepts of the Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU), the 195

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Pan-Africanist group established in 1964 by Malcolm X. “History is a people’s memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the lower animals,” Thomas wrote, quoting from the OAAU’s founding document. “Armed with the knowledge of the past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle.” However, while the OAAU manifesto had referred primarily to the recapture of a forgotten African past—a culture “destroyed when we were forcibly brought to America”—Thomas reformatted those words to fit a more recent neighborhood past in Anacostia.90 Knowledge of this local history would foster a stronger sense of community identity, which in turn might stimulate pride and activism in the present moment. Battles over geography, Edward Said has observed, are always also “about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”91 And here, the concept of neighborhood seemed to offer a symbolic language and set of resources for urgent civil rights offensives. Such an outlook differed radically from that of reformers—both white and black—who sought to elicit outside help by demonstrating only the indignities and deprivations of segregated, physically fraying city districts. With their detailed excavations of the local past, participants drew on historical evidence to demonstrate that black Anacostians were perfectly capable of constructing a stable, functioning neighborhood, even under the hardships of discrimination and material inequities. At the same time, a follow-up exhibition interpreted the community’s present- day troubles by pointing to the broader metropolitan political economy—emphasizing, for instance, the flight of employment to the suburbs, or the malign effects of real- estate speculation.92 Both through the historical recovery of Barry’s Farm, and through their active involvement with the museum as a contemporary neighborhood institution, Anacostia participants forcefully refuted conceptions of the black inner city as a space of atomization and apathy. And just as many black-nationalist urban organizers had demanded community control in the political and economic spheres, the Anacostia museum asserted a right to community control over neighborhood representation and historical narrative. Years later, Kinard would describe the early relationship between community and museum as “both symbiotic and catalytic”—with the museum simultaneously enriched by the neighborhood’s heritage, and enlisting that heritage in struggles for social change.93 And, for a time, the institution continued to deepen its relationship with the surrounding community. However, as historian Portia James notes, the museum’s mission always contained a pull between two perceived respon196

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sibilities: one to the neighborhood itself, and the other to a broader African American audience. Because the nation’s established museums so often excluded black history and culture, Kinard saw a duty to fill this gap at Anacostia. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the institution gradually shifted its attention toward a less local visitor base and a more wide-ranging examination of African American and African diasporic experiences. Meanwhile, it became increasingly professionalized, moving away from the freewheeling ethos of earlier years. In 1987, the museum would move to a secluded site in Fort Stanton Park, removing the word “neighborhood” from its title entirely.94 Still, for a few years, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum had generated a powerful form of local representational politics, one that was replicated by other grassroots institutions around the nation. While Dillon Ripley had originally hoped that elite museums could expand their audiences by adopting the neighborly flavor of the laundromat and corner grocery, Kinard and his colleagues instead focused on crafting a usable neighborhood past in order to energize present- day selfawareness and struggle. With its efforts to “retrieve, examine, interpret, and present the history” of black Anacostians, claimed Louise Daniel Hutchinson in 1977, the museum sought to instill what Martin Luther King Jr. often referred to as “a sense of somebodiness.”95 Writing in 1985, Kinard urged similar institutions to recognize local history as a tool for “the restoration of a sense of place among their residents.”96 A “sense of somebodiness,” a “sense of place”—these short phrases encapsulate the Anacostia museum’s theory of the role of neighborhood history and institution building in the contemporary lives of inhabitants.

As neighborhood interpreters and storytellers, Davidson, Coles, and Kinard shared much in motive and purpose. Each aimed to displace liberal hand-wringing and conservative condemnation with a nuanced take on the struggles and accomplishments of everyday local existence. And in seeking to capture a truer sense of the contours of inner-city experience, these three figures all presented their work as a closer approach to some kind of “reality,” one too frequently obscured by the popular media. Even the act of holding the mirror up to life, however, catches the world in a distorting glass, in this case transforming social environments into aesthetic objects. And, in this regard, Davidson’s and Coles’s intentions might be described as primarily mimetic, where Kinard’s were pragmatic, a difference that finally lies in their respec197

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tive audiences.97 For Davidson and Coles, the intended audience was largely those outside the neighborhood, those who would never visit the locales they depicted, an audience for whom their individual subjects might perhaps be made visible or audible above the ruckus of popular clichés about criminality or passive victimhood. Kinard’s intended audience, in contrast, was precisely the residents whose lives and forebears’ lives were bodied forth in each exhibit. To Kinard and his colleagues, the inhabitants of Anacostia deserved to look into something other than the funhouse mirror that outside evaluators had held up before them. For a time, the Anacostia museum provided that looking glass. With their divergent approaches, these three chroniclers ultimately reveal the conflicted, yet central, role of neighborhood concepts in making sense of the era’s embattled city cores.

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Peaceable Kingdoms: The Great Society Neighborhood in Stories for Children Stories and images created for children are often good indicators of the broader culture’s anxieties and aspirations.1 First, these works are places where adults most vividly display their own fantasies for the future, the better world they hope their children will someday inherit. And, second, they are teaching texts, crafted by grown-ups to instruct young people on desired values and modes of behavior for the present. If the difficult balance between gritty urban realism and quotidian neighborhood normality attempted by Bruce Davidson, Robert Coles, and the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum offered one kind of story about the meaning of community in the city, another prominent set of 1960s cultural producers crafted a different sort of neighborhood narrative, one in which present- day realities were effortlessly transformed into a more affirming urban future. Even as Davidson and Coles sought to discover islands of neighborliness amid grim tenements and alleyways, a contemporaneous group of texts—many of them aimed at children—instead presented romanticized city communities of the imagination, in which violence and animosity simply disappear from view. Indeed, the period running from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s saw a fresh upsurge in optimistic and even 199

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exuberant renderings of urban neighborhood life. Paradoxically, these depictions came just as the nation’s cities appeared to be spiraling toward disaster, emerging against the tumultuous backdrop of intensifying middle- class flight, violent urban uprisings, ongoing urban-renewal destruction, and deepening metropolitan class and racial segregation. Popular urban discourse had meanwhile been overtaken, as civil rights veteran Eleanor Holmes Norton lamented, by a “doomsday psychology”: a rampant “stereotype of older cities as places in eminent disarray.”2 In this climate, the local city neighborhood became a screen upon which racial liberals could project anxious hopes for a tolerant, pluralistic society—not just through federal policy innovations but also through stories, songs, and images. Across the Great Society years and beyond, numerous artists crafted influential urban visions that, rather than ignoring or demeaning the beleaguered inner- city neighborhood, cast it as a potential oasis of interracial harmony, a liberal utopia that might be realized by the next generation, if not today. Such impulses found their strongest expression in cultural products designed for young people. These creations functioned as primers to a world of cooperation at the block level, inculcating their juvenile audiences with contemporary integrationist understandings of how racial difference ought to be negotiated. This brand of didactic, multiracial, and utopian urban landscape took shape most powerfully in the 1960s works of Ezra Jack Keats, the widely lauded children’s writer and illustrator, and in the television program Sesame Street, developed by the educators and media professionals of the Children’s Television Workshop, led by Joan Ganz Cooney. Both offered a hopeful view of local urban community life, portraying a kind of peaceable kingdom where class and racial divisions, though still acknowledged, begin to fade away. These sorts of neighborhood texts represented one manifestation of what might be dubbed a Great Society aesthetic sensibility, a translation into the expressive realm of the confl icted political motives driving the decade’s liberal reform agenda. On the policy front, of course, the Great Society brand of progressive change reached its height in the mid-1960s, with the Johnson administration’s signature initiatives in civil rights, antipoverty programming, social insurance, arts and education, and ecology. But, as political historian Douglas Rossinow contends, the nearly two decades stretching from the Montgomery bus boycott to the reformist congressional legislation of the early 1970s should be understood as “the Great Society era of American liberalism.”3 And emerging in tandem with this political arc, a host of representational texts replicated the impulses motivating the war-on-poverty thrust. In 200

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fact, it makes sense to think of the Great Society not just as a collection of government policy portfolios, but also more broadly as a cultural style and mode of discourse, an organizing logic for narratives crafted by middle- class reformers in order to sort through startling social upheavals. Just as a New Deal political temperament had infused countless Depression- era works of visual art and expression, so too did the ambitions associated with Great Society liberalism shape aesthetic production across the 1960s. In their attempts to demonstrate what a “Great Society” might eventually look like, the stories and images associated with this cultural style relied on several assumptions. First, these kinds of texts generally played out in definitively urban settings, while populating those spaces with a calculatedly multiethnic mix of people—a recognition of diversity that simultaneously elided racial division. Second, suffused with hope that government and good will could heal social wounds, they frequently offered narratives of urbanites working to overcome prejudice and material want while not moving “up and out,” along the way sanitizing or tightly managing conflict in order to make their points. And third, while striving to accommodate underrepresented voices, such works also typically eschewed rigorous structural analysis of power relations in favor of narratives about individual human relationships and growth. What needed to be renewed, in other words, wasn’t just the urban fabric but also the hearts of those within it. In these ways, such texts both engaged with and contained, acknowledged and muted, the activist assertions arising from the era’s urban grassroots. The focus here on local spaces is neither surprising nor accidental. While the Johnson years are often cited as the pinnacle of liberalism’s centralizing instincts, the cadences of localism and community reverberated through the oratory of the era’s reformers and politicians, conveying both an anxiety over these qualities’ presumed disappearance and an optimism over their promise as a tool for social uplift.4 In Lyndon Johnson’s May 1964 speech inaugurating his Great Society agenda, for example, it was the loss of “time honored values of community with neighbors” that exacerbated urban problems.5 Four years later, Robert Kennedy charged that Americans had learned to interact “as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community.”6 But, for the self- confident architects of the federal war on poverty, the interpersonal relationships of the small urban community offered a potential counterweight to harsh racism on the one hand, and to the vigorous challenges mounted by black nationalist organizing on the other. The local city neighborhood became a crossroads where concerns over 201

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urban decay and racial strife could be met with demonstrations of the effects of new programs and ideals on individual lives and spaces. If the Great Society embodied a vision of an elevated and more noble national culture, this future world was most often rendered for children in terms of new modes of neighborhood interactions. Ezra Jack Keats and Cooney’s Children’s Television Workshop both constructed a kind of Great Society environ, where neighborliness and tolerance transcend hatred and poverty. From the Caldecott Award–winning The Snowy Day, which featured one of the first African American protagonists in a modern children’s book marketed to whites, to the gritty tenement scenes of Goggles!, Keats’s works captured a new hopefulness for a pluralist Great Society in the cities. Meanwhile, Sesame Street, making its debut in November 1969, offered the most striking version of this particular neighborhood story, while becoming a ubiquitous popculture phenomenon. By focusing on the inner- city neighborhood as the locus of possibility—“the inner city as America, rather than as the ‘other America,’” in historian Julia Mickenberg’s words—these constructions sharply departed from the antiurban dispositions of both the suburban television drama and the dystopic ghetto genre of fiction and film.7 With their idealized portrayals of local city places, such products both reflected and contributed to the “gradualist, postmillennial vision of continual reform” that, as Douglas Rossinow notes, characterized the worldview of Great Society liberals.8 Neighborhood texts of this type charted new ways for imagining urban space. It seemed too that these visions held potential not just for the children of the urban poor, whose identities would presumably be validated, but also for suburban whites, whose prison house of stunted homogeneity would putatively be opened. “White communities are growing up in virtually complete isolation from Negroes,” a 1967 report from the US Commission on Civil Rights gloomily announced.9 And for many moderate civil rights intellectuals, it wasn’t solely African Americans who suffered from this entrenched separation. Psychologist Kenneth Clark, for one, decried “the human costs of the segregated affluent suburb too often corroded by its artificial isolation,” while the Urban League’s Whitney Young lamented that the unfortunate youngsters of all-white communities were “deprived of the diversity of experience which only a neighborhood composed of people from different backgrounds can bring.”10 To such observers, neighborhood diversity was crucial not only as a matter of justice, but also as a kind of informal therapy for whites exhibiting the damaging disorder of race prejudice.11 202

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In this context, cultural producers of all kinds—television writers, illustrators, authors, actors— sensed that new sorts of neighborhood stories had a role to play in changing the realities of strife-torn central cities and smugly provincial suburbs alike. Yet those same creators were increasingly divided over whether a useful neighborhood “story” would be one of pungent verisimilitude or harmonious aspiration—whether, in short, these fictional neighborhoods ought to serve as an arena for conflict or as an emblem of the better world envisioned by Great Society reformers. Furthermore, according to various critics on the left, such models for a placid urban tomorrow disregarded the structural roots of poverty and discrimination while breezily universalizing the particularities of inner- city existence. For this reason, the disputes surrounding Keats’s construction of neighborhood pluralism or the contested blueprint of Sesame Street’s imagined community are among the period’s most revealing, as partisans used these works as springboards for broader debates over the nature of the new urban world then coming into being.

Rewriting the “Old Neighborhood” with Ezra Jack Keats If neighborhood scenes and narratives offered a compelling aesthetic vehicle for 1960s liberal reform impulses, few artists better embodied the central characteristics and contradictions of this genre than Ezra Jack Keats. Raised in 1920s and ’30s Brooklyn, Keats would go on establish himself as one of the century’s most prominent children’s authors and illustrators, in no small part by virtue of his eye- catchingly vibrant cityscape paintings. Until the 1960s, remarks literary scholar Brian Alderson, few notable picture books had dealt with urban children’s experiences, and Keats became the first American children’s illustrator to undertake “a consistent portrayal of the heartlands of city life and the children who dwell there.”12 Although by the decade’s end many children’s writers would take up the city themes and multiracial imagery of Keats’s works, he remains an influential example of the Great Society cultural style at work in a perhaps unexpected corner of the literary world. Over the course of a dozen popularly successful picture books, Keats developed a dynamic neighborhood world that simultaneously reflected the crumbling physical terrain of the present- day city and offered an optimistic vision of racial harmony rooted in the place-based experiences of childhood life. In shaping this fictional space, Keats had to confront key aesthetic 203

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tensions that ran through numerous neighborhood texts created by the era’s racial liberals, not least the apparent conflicts between physical decay and human dignity, and between particularity of setting and universality of message. At the same time, on a more personal level, he struggled to connect his own adolescent experiences of Depressionera Brooklyn to the landscape of the contemporary urban crisis. As an artist, this path took him from the brooding, politicized social realism that characterized his 1930s painted works to a new form of celebratory realism that found not despair, but delight, in the rough corners of the city. In these ways, his picture books function as works of translation: even as Keats adapted older notions of the industrial city’s pleasures and perils into the socially charged urban context of the 1960s, he rewrote his earlier class- oriented political leftism into an integrationist and universalistic politics of race. “It’s my own childhood that I recall in my books,” Keats explained in 1970.13 The son of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, Keats had been born as Jacob Ezra Katz in 1916, and he was raised in the East New York section of Brooklyn. His family was plagued by constant marital discord and perpetual economic anxieties. Throughout his childhood, Keats recalled, the household was “leaden with defeat.”14 However, Keats’s subsequent work would be profoundly conditioned by the Brooklyn neighborhood culture in which he was steeped as a boy. In unpublished autobiographical writings that consumed the last years of his life, Keats recalled a local world defined by immigration, economic privation, and ethnic identification. Keats’s block was both an insular place—the phone booth at the corner candy store was “the street’s contact to the outside world”—and a node in a diasporic network of migration and memory, where “friends were part of the old town, and the old country.”15 Dominating Keats’s retrospective neighborhood writings are memories of the leftist street politics that flourished in the wake of the 1929 economic crash. East New York was “a shambles in the depths of the Depression,” wrote Keats, and he repeatedly recounted his humiliation when shopkeepers would berate him for his family’s weeks of unpaid bills. Alongside these “indignities,” however, lingered sounds and images of the working- class dissent that rippled through the community: revolutionary propagandists taking to the pavements on summer evenings, communist youth organizers defiantly hoisting evicted families’ furniture back into their apartments, and police billy clubs ricocheting off the heads of dissidents. As a “dedicated, bewildered fellow traveler,” the teenaged Keats had perceived this all with wonderment. “Feelings 204

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inside me, which I had only dimly perceived, stirred and burst into flames,” he later wrote. “What a world of old wrongs to be righted. What battles and comradeship lay ahead.”16 During high school, Keats registered this milieu through pencil sketches and murky, somber oil works of destitute men crouched over meager outdoor fires, breadlines snaking along the waterfront, and hobbled vagrants painfully hauling themselves up from under the docks. Drawn to these scenes by a strong “identification with the underdog,” Keats remembered himself as one of “the legion of artists who believed we could save the world by painting the injustices of society. . . . I wanted the common man to see his own value.”17 In 1934, one such work—an oil painting entitled Shantytown (fig. 16)—won a national award sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, earning Keats a scholarship to the Art Students’ League, and for several years he worked as a mural assistant with the New Deal’s Federal Art Project.18 Gradually, though, Keats grew wary of his formative political allegiances, feeling that Brooklyn’s young socialist and communist factions were misguided, naïve, and arrogant. His belief in rallying society’s outcasts,

Figure 16 Ezra Jack Keats’s 1934 painting Shantytown. (Reproduced with special permission from the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation)

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Keats eventually decided, “was the worst despotism in the world,” while his leftist comrades’ “hope for perfectibility” was merely a “sterile imposition.”19 Keats would not again have full control over his artistic labor until the 1960s. After leaving the Federal Art Project in 1940, he mixed periods of unemployment with jobs inking comic-book panels and teaching for an art correspondence school, before serving as a wartime art instructor for the army. Following the war, Keats gradually settled into a career based mostly on illustrations for other authors’ books.20 But if his 1930s works had been one way of responding to city poverty and mobilizations for social justice, Keats’s 1960s works would answer in a markedly different fashion to a similar set of conditions. Abandoning his critical Popular Front leftism, which had foregrounded urban economic disenfranchisement, Keats gradually adopted an aspirational integrationist liberalism, one whose aesthetic hallmark was a vision for local-scale interracial harmony. It was only at the age of forty-six, with the 1962 publication of The Snowy Day—the first book he executed entirely alone—that Keats saw his career as a picture-book maker truly commence. Inspired by his childhood frolics after freshly fallen snow had “transformed the city,” Keats crafted a simple story of a young boy named Peter and his winter adventures in his neighborhood. The book won the prestigious Caldecott Medal, partly for its innovative collage technique incorporating eclectic assortments of patterned papers, linens, pastel paints, and rubber stamps.21 However, observers were most impressed by Keats’s unorthodox decision to portray Peter as African American. This choice represented a striking departure from the conventions governing the children’s book market. “Textbook Town” was the term coined in 1954, by education researcher Abraham Tannenbaum, to describe the invariably white, suburban, auto- oriented neighborhoods that populated the nation’s grammar-school readers.22 And through the early 1960s, noted one analysis, fewer than 1 percent of newly published picture books contained stories depicting contemporary black Americans.23 For years, Keats had been troubled by this omission, resolving that his first solo publication would feature an African American protagonist who was “in the book on his own, not through the benevolence of white children or anyone else.”24 In offering an alternative, as one reviewer put it, to the “slow and searing humiliations” that exclusively white school primers had inflicted upon generations of African American readers, Keats earned accolades from both civil rights leaders and educators.25 Literary lu206

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minaries such as Langston Hughes offered commendations, while a white Ohio schoolteacher—in a typical, if patronizing, expression of gratitude—related that the book had “caused one of my emotionally insecure Negro boys to exclaim with awe.”26 The resounding success of The Snowy Day secured Keats’s position as a leading figure in the children’s book world. Over the ensuing decade, he would complete six further works featuring Peter and his growing circle of neighborhood friends. Along the way, however, the artist’s preoccupations shifted dramatically, particularly in his approach to urban representation. Although The Snowy Day and its immediate successors had taken a vaguely urban-seeming locale as their setting— discernible through background features such as lamp posts, traffic lights, and brick walls—the city environment in those works often feels incidental or peripheral. By the late 1960s, though, Keats was filling his books with images that insistently emphasized the tattered landscape of the contemporary inner city. With a stream of urban works—A Letter to Amy (1968), Goggles! (1969), Hi, Cat! (1970), Pet Show! (1972), and others—he created an oeuvre defined by its “continuous embroilment in city children’s affairs,” as Brian Alderson notes.27 Rendered in brilliant acrylic paints and collages, graffiti coats the buildings of Peter’s neighborhood, tenements loom over streetscapes, and discarded junk fills vacant lots. All these elements combine to convey a sense of a battered yet vibrant community, one that could not differ more from “textbook town.” Despite the charming simplicity of the plots—mailing a birthdayparty invitation, putting on a magic show, pursuing a missing cat— critics by the late 1960s increasingly cited Keats as a leader among those authors who, as the Boston Globe put it, had “removed the protective margin, and dare to show some hard truths.”28 It was Keats’s Goggles! (1969) that marked a full immersion in the gritty surroundings of the central- city neighborhood. While in earlier works the local landscape had been a realm of unadulterated delights, this book saw Keats reaching back to the social-realist impulses that he had explored and then renounced as a young man. Reviewers were struck by the “dilapidated neighborhood setting,” Keats’s newly “dark and sinister” illustrations, the “menace” of the surroundings.29 In the panoramic opening illustration, for instance, Peter and his younger friend Archie play in an abandoned lot heaped with rotting doors, discarded bed frames, and old tires (fig. 17). When Peter discovers a cast- off pair of motorcycle goggles, a group of older bullies, intent on stealing this treasure, shoves him to the ground. The two boys spend much of the book flee207

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Figure 17 Illustration for Ezra Jack Keats’s 1969 book Goggles! (Reproduced with special permission from the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation)

ing across treacherous urban terrain. The book’s occasionally baleful imagery and the characters’ encounter with what one reviewer called “the power-structure that exists in every urban neighborhood” hinted at the threat, decay, and possibility for sudden violence in city life.30 With the street scenes of Goggles! and similar contemporaneous works, Keats had found a way to merge elements of his earlier social realism— one attuned to urban hardship and hazard—with the bright pageantry expected of a children’s book. Indeed, the meticulous attention lavished on the collage work for the peeling walls, littered pavements, and omnipresent graffiti indicates the importance of the physical landscape to Keats’s urban vision. Overstuffed garbage bins, their contents constructed from bits of torn newsprint, constantly peek into the edges of the pictures. Meanwhile, using smudged paint clumps, colored pencils, and applied scraps of newspaper, Keats transforms the building walls into graffiti-spangled canvases for the neighborhood’s inhabitants. Most stunning are the wide-angle views of city skylines, in which thick globs of paint are smeared into streaky dusk skies, all hanging over buildings topped by anarchic forests of wash lines, antennas, and chimneys. This crazy quilt of urban bric-a-brac suggests a neighborhood vibrantly alive, pulsing with urban energy. At the same time, Keats’s characters insistently emphasize to readers the visual and demographic diversity of the contemporary city. Children of all ages hang out on the block, from lollipop- clutching tykes to baseballcapped teens (fig. 18). Peter’s friends are black, Latino/a, and white; they don applejack hats or dashikis or horn-rimmed glasses; they confront neighborhood bullies and try to impress one another on street 208

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corners. Defined by the public spaces of the block and the multihued faces of its inhabitants, Keats’s late-1960s scenes reflect a Great Society cultural impulse played out on local stoops and pavements. Though these fictive spaces were, on the surface, colorfully optimistic, an increasingly ominous strain crept through Keats’s work as the decade progressed. At least three defining antinomies came to organize the visual language; while these project an underlying ambivalence over city life, they also lend the neighborhood portrayals their distinctive flavor and force. First is the complex interplay between the neighborhood’s physical fabric and its human inhabitants. On one hand, the imagery suggests the chaotic and contingent nature of neighborhood life, the sense that there is a larger, unpredictable social world always pressing in around the local confines. Yet, on the other hand, the illustrations insist upon the redeeming qualities of the inner city, as characters themselves translate uglier aspects of the streetscape into something rich and strange. Throughout, in fact, the surroundings indicate that the characters are the makers rather than victims of their environment. Every surface, it seems, has been inscribed by multiple hands, from the ubiquitous sidewalk chalkings to the graffiti, composed of fading layers of smiling stick figures, heart shapes, and tic-tac-toe games (fig. 19). In this sense, the community’s children are presented as participants in “writing” their own neighborhood. It was this integration of urban deterioration and aesthetic beauty, environmental neglect and community agency, that most intrigued and perplexed critics. Second is the pull between the books’ uncomplicated neighborhood

Figure 18 Illustration for Ezra Jack Keats’s 1972 book Pet Show! (Reproduced with special permission from the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation)

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Figure 19 Detail of page panel for Ezra Jack Keats’s 1968 book A Letter to Amy. (Reproduced with special permission from the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation)

stories and the accompanying paintings, which display an overpoweringly urban, and often threatening, realm beyond. In fact, the city in Keats’s work often feels distinct from the neighborhood within it. For instance, toward the end of Goggles!, Peter and Archie flee from the bullies as the city rises menacingly behind them, its smokestacks covering the sky in a dark haze while red-lit tenement windows glow like malevolent eyes (fig. 20). Only on the final page have they arrived safely on their own stoop, laughing and playing as younger children sketch on the sidewalk with chalk. Whether beautiful or sinister, the city as a whole is often displayed as a force that can’t be entirely grasped or comprehended. The neighborhood, by contrast, is a comforting space, an oasis in the perilous metropolis where pleasures and anxieties are manageable and close to home. A third feature defining Keats’s works is a quest for community amid urban isolation. Indeed, Keats’s portrayal of enduring community in the battered city seems an attempt both to incorporate and to transcend his own neighborhood history. Keats was “fairly obsessed by his own past,” one biographer relates, and his plots and characters often drew on particular neighbors and incidents from his Brooklyn boyhood: eccentric tenants, local bullies, names and faces of family and 210

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friends.31 But Keats’s attitude toward the city was not one of uncomplicated adoration, and his later autobiographical writings suggest, too, a Dickensian attraction of repulsion. In one sequence, for instance, he describes his “morbid attraction to the Bowery,” a place he would go to explore the “rank and fetid flop houses,” the “garbage-strewn streets where human flotsam, washed up against dirty buildings, were  .  .  . lying prostrate in surrender.”32 In his books of the late 1960s, Keats doesn’t entirely erase these squalid byways; rather, he transposes them to a different key. In Depression- era East New York, Keats once commented, “the hope was a theory, the reality was pain”— and it was this grim reality that he had depicted in his early social-realist paintings of urban life.33 By the 1960s, though, Keats had discovered hope within the inner city’s forbidding realities, fashioning a better version of his own 1930s neighborhood world by setting scenes of communal delight against a familiar backdrop of deprivation and decay. Such expressions of the bounded neighborhood as island of urban stability had deep roots in 1940s and 1950s narrative conventions— from broadcast dramas like The Goldbergs and Mama to novels and memoirs such as Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City. That concept, however, was reformatted

Figure 20 Detail of page panel for Keats’s Goggles! (Reproduced with special permission from the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation)

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by 1960s artists such as Keats: from placid ethnic enclave to polyglot, multiracial utopia, and from nostalgic reminiscence to imagined urban future. Here, the pastoral immigrant ghetto of a Kazin or a Gertrude Berg was refurbished as a vibrantly contemporary space, using a tone that was not yearning or mournful but, at least tentatively, filled with forward-looking confidence. If Keats’s urban works represent the creation of a community that he had found only intermittently in poverty-stricken East New York, they also functioned as a form of dialogue with the shifting racial politics of 1960s America. And over time, the particularism of Keats’s urban settings came into sharp tension with his own more universalistic understanding of the meanings of neighborhood experience. The joys of community found in the day-to- day life of the block, Keats seemed to believe, represented a shared human longing, one that transcended racial difference. It was, perhaps, a self- critical reaction against the didacticism of his own 1930s works that led him to reject overtly politicized readings of his 1960s works. While believing that his inclusive streetscapes might offer minority children “a sense of belonging,” Keats constantly insisted that his books were not intended as lessons in integration or social change. The works included black characters “just because they exist,” he maintained in 1963. A decade later, he told a Milwaukee audience that he preferred not to “emphasize the race thing,” seeing Peter “first of all as a child.”34 Consonant with this outlook, press reviewers typically praised the author for detailing the “universal experience of boyhood,” for his “calm universalizing of the particular,” for avoiding “problems peculiar to any socio- economic group.”35 Indeed, the apparent poverty of Peter’s neighborhood never intrudes on the stories themselves. And here, characters might happen to be black or Latino/a, but this factor never shapes the plot. As the decade progressed, this universalism struck some as out of step with contemporary political needs and requisites. Already in 1965, critic Nancy Larrick had reproached Keats’s books for failing to use the word “Negro” in their texts.36 And in the years that followed, Keats’s apparent understanding of the inner- city neighborhood as a site for common ground, rather than as a staging area for group autonomy or identity, increasingly irritated members of a new generation of African American critics and authors then coming to prominence. By 1970, a growing number of children’s writers— June Jordan, John Steptoe, Mildred Pitts Walter, Julius Lester, Nikki Giovanni, Lucille Clifton, Eloise Greenfield, and others—were producing books that explicitly foregrounded black urban struggles, proudly highlighted African roots, and 212

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assertively incorporated Black English dialogue.37 “Almost gone now is the ‘black’ child who is really a white child in disguise!” proclaimed children’s author Sharon Bell Mathis, a persistent Keats critic, in 1972.38 As black-nationalist commitments gained a toehold in the children’s publishing industry, various commentators argued that Keats’s books had erased both economic injustices and cultural distinctiveness while transforming the urban landscape into an exotic and alien space. The Council on Interracial Books for Children, an advocacy group founded in 1965, condemned Keats for diverting attention from black writers dealing with city settings.39 Likewise, at the inaugural conference of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, held in Chicago in 1972, participating children’s authors issued “scathing denunciations of the media’s support for Ezra Jack Keats,” and of a white- dominated publishing industry “reaping the profits from the surge in Black awareness.”40 Others instead attacked the substance of Keats’s work, suggesting that his imagined neighborhood world was a condescending liberal fantasy, one that depoliticized such spaces and effaced new assertions of identity. The harshest evaluation came from Ray Anthony Shepard, a young Boston-area black studies professor. Keats’s recent books, Shepard charged in 1971, fed both the detached fascination and maudlin sympathy with which liberal white onlookers tended to view black urban neighborhoods. In a facile attempt to capture the troubles roiling the inner city, works such as A Letter to Amy and Goggles! had transformed Peter’s neighborhood into “a ‘ghetto’ as seen by an outsider,” populated by happy “natives” along with the few white kids “whose parents hadn’t escaped.” The illustrations, Shepard concluded, “show Peter’s world as if seen from inside a locked car with windows rolled up tight. Every illustration shouts, ‘Look, see, we’re in a ghetto.’” In this critique, even as the African American characters’ racial background remained irrelevant to the narration, the settings demanded pity with their obsessive emphasis on inner- city corrosion. “Thus is created another generation of liberals,” scoffed Shepard.41 Such criticisms stung Keats deeply, rendering him unable to work for a time.42 And, insofar as the political moment seemed to call for a children’s literature that would help black young people “to know better their own strength and power to bring about change,” as author Rae Alexander-Minter demanded in 1970, Keats’s gentle multiracial neighborhood stories indeed diverged from the imperatives of the day.43 But, however the works might be assessed by this yardstick, critics such as Shepard overlooked Keats’s understanding of himself as a participant in—rather than an outside observer of—the ongoing drama 213

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of the American city, linked both to the immigrant generations of European Jews who had fled pogroms and poverty to settle the dense metropolises of the New World, and to the black and Latino/a newcomers who now struggled to carve out meaning in the same neighborhood spaces. “I know that what the children of poverty have to say can, if heard, make some mark on this world,” Keats declared in 1974, making explicit this connection. “I know, because I and other members of my generation were children of poverty who had a chance to speak.”44 In this sense, Keats’s images were not, as Shepard had it, the view through the skittish suburbanite’s tightly rolled car window. Rather than mourning the passing of the European immigrant ghetto of his youth, Keats used words and images to extend a metaphorical welcome to a new generation of urban children, pointing out the unlikely neighborhood pleasures that he himself had discovered in an unpromising childhood environment. Long before Rae Alexander-Minter’s programmatic call for greater political relevance in children’s books, Keats had described his own philosophy of urban representation. That outlook is summarized in the title of his 1963 Saturday Review article, “The Right to Be Real.” If a group is always portrayed as “improbably perfect,” Keats asserted, “we are denying a people’s right to deal with reality and assume the very responsibilities for which they struggle.”45 The essay had been written in an earlier moment, in response to timorous middle- class critics discomfited by his increasingly stark urban settings. Yet through the decade Keats continually returned to this notion of “realness,” one found not in the “sterile impositions” of his Depression- era social realism, nor in didactic contemporary storylines on race, integration, and struggle. Instead, in Keats’s Great Society– era work, this urban authenticity was projected through the everyday, routine moments of wonder, community, and delight that unfolded on local corners and steps. Through such stories, Keats labored to create a thread of commonality that could tie together his own experiences in a tattered patch of 1920s immigrant Brooklyn with the pulsing, multiracial landscape of the 1960s American city.

Managing Race on Television’s Sesame Street Although Keats’s books drew widespread praise and criticism throughout the literary world, the era’s most sustained effort to shape children’s perceptions through neighborhood representation undoubtedly 214

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came with the 1969 TV premiere of Sesame Street. Over the course of the 1970s, the program became “a major symbol of racial, ethnic, and gender tolerance,” notes historian Robert Morrow.46 Scholars continue to credit its formative influence on the field of multicultural education, while a few pundits on the right still decry its early seasons as propaganda “legitimizing urban liberal lifestyles.”47 With their casting choices and iconic set design, the show’s producers offered up a cheerfully integrated yet unapologetically urban neighborhood community (fig. 21). But though the program self- consciously referenced the American inner city’s frayed physical landscape, it also conjured forth a neighborhood space where reformist elites could see their hopes embodied while sheared of the harshest inequities of urban life. Here, the brooding, foreboding imagery that increasingly characterized Ezra Jack Keats’s imagined city is absent. Yet even as producers evoked a compelling vision for a tranquil block-level pluralism, they struggled to harmonize discordant notions of the urban neighborhood’s functions. The experimental venture developed out of a climate of reformist ferment in educational, government, and philanthropic circles. The driving force behind the series was Joan Ganz Cooney, a white television producer who had migrated from Phoenix to New York in 1953, at age twenty-four (fig. 22). By the mid-1960s, she had joined the news team at the nonprofit educational pioneer WNDT, where she produced two well-regarded documentaries on urban poverty.48 Impressed by her work, a Carnegie Corporation grants supervisor in 1966 proposed to her the concept of an educational program designed specifically for preschool-aged children from economically struggling urban communities. Over the next six months, Cooney developed a feasibility study, and her newly formed Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) eventually garnered $8 million in start-up grants from private foundations and federal agencies.49 For many early participants, using the arts as a spur to social change was no foreign idea. Will Lee, the Brooklyn-born actor cast as the show’s crusty storeowner, Mr. Hooper, had spent the 1930s involved in radical experimental theater companies, working alongside Elia Kazan and Paul Robeson before being blacklisted in the late 1940s.50 Producer and writer Matt Robinson began his television career by penning a dramatization of a slave revolt for the CBS Repertoire Workshop.51 And actor Roscoe Orman, who joined the cast several years later, had trained in pioneering and highly political Black Arts drama collectives.52 Likewise, for Cooney, the CTW represented an effort to ameliorate social conditions she had first investigated in her poverty documentaries. At 215

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Figure 21 Cast members of Sesame Street, gathered on set in fall 1970. (Photo by Charlotte Brooks, Look, Sept. 22, 1970/Courtesy Charlotte Brooks)

the same time, her motivation stemmed from an undiluted disdain for commercial television, a medium that had “taught our children soaps and trash” rather than “human rights and human dignity.”53 Crafted as a deliberate urban intervention, Sesame Street from the start embodied a curious combination of social program and social representation, designed to educate and uplift inner- city audiences even as 216

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it depicted them. While the show would eventually become a childhood touchstone for almost every American born after the mid-1960s, for a briefer moment it was, more specifically, a nearly unavoidable part of daily life in the northern city cores. Because most public agencies were too stretched to help with promotion, the CTW developed a parallel apparatus, spending approximately $650,000 of its original budget on a massive inner- city publicity blitz. Leaflets plastered shop windows, radio spots cajoled soul-station listeners, and roving sound trucks blared announcements. Local coordinators established viewing centers in housing projects and storefronts, church basements and libraries.54 Along the way, the program galvanized support from mainline civil rights organizations. Whitney Young directed Urban League branches to induce “parents and children who dwell in the ghetto to see it”; the NAACP touted its virtues in The Crisis; and the National Council of Negro Women distributed pamphlets on street corners and walking tours.55 Buoyed by widespread public curiosity, the series made its premiere in November 1969 to an outpouring of positive press. Within three months, six million youngsters were regular viewers.56 Meanwhile, the program quickly became “virtually an institution with ghetto children,” in the words of one independent viewership survey.57 In television- owning households in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, 90 percent of preschool-aged children tuned in during 1970; in selected districts of inner- city Chicago, viewing reached 97 percent by 1973.58 In survey responses, parents in such areas spoke warmly of the show’s “poverty background,” its “mixed racial” make-up, and the presence of “black people children can identify with.”59 Indeed, if Sesame Street swiftly “became a symbol of the war on pov-

Figure 22 Joan Ganz Cooney on the Sesame Street set in fall 1969. (Photo by Charlotte Brooks, Look, Nov. 18, 1969/Courtesy Charlotte Brooks)

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erty,” as one scholar suggests, this was not only because of its role as social program—the “electronic Head Start” for low-income toddlers— but also because the fictional neighborhood locale itself seemed to exemplify the hopes of Great Society reformers.60 Yet this setting remained in doubt until the last minute. In planning seminars, recalled executive producer David Connell, the idea of using an urban street corner had initially been rejected in favor of a “setless, formatless show that didn’t have a home base.”61 However, one question bedeviling producers was how to aim for the widest possible audience while also closing the achievement gap between middle- class and poor, white and minority, suburban and urban. These goals seemed irreconcilable. If the program were made available to all youngsters regardless of socioeconomic status, might it not actually reinforce educational disparities? A partial solution, it appeared, might be to create a show that—through its characters, setting, and style— spoke especially to inner- city poor children and their experiences, thereby encouraging them to watch.62 As CTW writer Jon Stone told a reporter in May 1970, “It seemed to me that a street in an urban run- down area would give the children we were most interested in reaching a neighborhood to identify with. It would be depressing in color scheme, as these streets are, but totally and happily integrated— a street in which the people who live [there] take tremendous pride.”63 To early observers, the creators and set designers had succeeded brilliantly. Reviewers were particularly taken with the verisimilitude of the set. On a block that was “ghetto gray, stooped, barking with traffic horns,” as Look magazine put it, scuffed pavements fronted the steps of a dingy old brownstone. Clotheslines stretched across airshafts and battered garbage cans lined the street. Fire escapes descended from buildings while peeling, discarded doors cordoned off a vacant nearby plot. Furthermore, this physical setting was quite clearly a poor neighborhood— a mock-up on a West Manhattan soundstage of a block that “might be in East Harlem,” as Dr. Benjamin Spock surmised.64 When the BBC refused to air the program in Britain, partly because it was “too middle- class,” Cooney tartly responded that no one else had mustered “the courage to set a children’s program on an urban street in a poor neighborhood instead of in a Never, Never Land, a treasure house, a classroom or a suburban neighborhood.”65 More complex than the question of place, however, is one relating to time. In crafting this fictional neighborhood, the creators merged elements of present, future, and past in a curious and unstable combination. In fact, rather than joining late-1960s critics in asking where the 218

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show might be set— East Harlem? Brooklyn Heights?—it makes more sense to ask when it is set. The answer here is not entirely obvious. On its surface, the program seemed to offer a refreshingly contemporary portrayal of the postmigration city in the age of soul. But, through its universalism and elision of urban conflict, it also introduced a utopian fantasy of what a future America might look like once the demons of racial division had been exorcised. Finally, the show relied too upon a nostalgic reminiscence of the past, depicting a traditional blue-collar New York residential community at a moment when working- class neighborhoods were becoming increasingly unstable in a city hemorrhaging jobs and residents. Much of the show’s representational work is directed at synthesizing the conflicting references to these three distinct time frames, and it is in these efforts that the program’s larger ideological disposition comes into clearest focus. This three-pronged approach began with the distinctly contemporary. If Sesame Street, as scholar Joel Spring remarks, created for the first time a “mass culture among preschool children,” then that mass culture was based around unmistakably modern urban imagery and sounds.66 Historian David Serlin points out the abundance of 1970s children’s TV shows that “self- consciously utilized soul music and iconography rooted in a northern, urban, inner- city aesthetic.”67 Indeed, programs like Sesame Street strove to form a conduit of urban expressive styles into a suburbanizing America. This sensibility included puppeteer Jim Henson’s penchant for Muppet skits playing off street wise city hipsters against uptight white-bread squares; or the Workshop’s “black” Muppets, like the frenetic rhymester Roosevelt Franklin, that were briefly and controversially added to the cast.68 It is apparent too in the Workshop’s attempts to emulate African American urban language patterns. Even as numerous white parents mailed in objections, Matt Robinson—the first actor cast as Gordon, the show’s primary host— declared that he would not “correct” children’s speech on the air, because this would signal to the viewer that “his mother’s wrong, his neighbors are wrong, his whole environment is wrong.”69 Meanwhile, in their search for material that “reflects black cultural life styles,” producers brought onto the street popular entertainers such as Stevie Wonder, Lou Rawls, Lena Horne, Flip Wilson, and Bill Cosby.70 Occasionally, the show associated itself with more radical icons. During a live tour stop on Chicago’s South Side, for example, the cast took the stage alongside the Soul Saint, Operation Breadbasket’s black, antimaterialistic alternative to Santa Claus.71 Even as the program aimed for an up-to-the-minute depiction of a 219

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vibrantly contemporary urban culture, it also turned its eyes toward the future, suggesting that the mere presentation of harmonious neighborhood scenes might model new, more desirable forms of local interaction. Indeed, the Sesame Street neighborhood often seemed calculated, as a conservative Boston columnist sardonically wrote, “to inculcate the Golden Rule, the Beatitudes and the Civil Rights Act of 1964” through the television screen.72 Reporters hailed an early study finding “more positive attitudes toward children of other races” among regular viewers, while extolling the show’s gutsy demonstration of “blacks and whites living together in harmony.”73 Similar sentiments appeared in the mainstream black press: the Chicago Defender, for one, pointed to the program’s appearance on fifty-nine southern TV stations as a glimmer of hope for racial reconciliation.74 The acclamation seemed to embody a collective wish: if people of different backgrounds could only be brought into contact— even if via the airwaves—then perhaps the nation could overcome recent racial acrimony. No wonder, then, that segregationists so keenly resented the program’s influence. In one well-publicized example, Mississippi’s educational television commission briefly prohibited public stations from airing the show due to its multiracial cast.75 Yet, however divergent the responses from racial liberals and conservatives, they all quite forcefully seconded the creators’ assumptions about the cultural potency of televised representations of city neighborhoods. Still, a curious bifurcation ran though the journalistic raptures. When discussing the show’s effects on black children, cheerleaders pointed almost exclusively to its success in teaching letters, numbers, shapes, and colors. But when detailing its effects on middle- class white children, commentators instead waxed lyrical on the program’s ability to foster interracial understanding. As Temple communications professor Norman Felsenthal pronounced in 1974, the urban setting was “not so obtrusive as to discourage the middle- class child” from viewing; meanwhile, the inclusion of two white residents “proved by example that whites and blacks could live harmoniously in the same neighborhood”— a lesson surely directed not at African American children of Bedford-Stuyvesant or South Chicago, but rather at the white preschooler of the suburbs.76 So perhaps this fictional neighborhood— bustling with multihued children who “come right off a UNESCO poster,” in the New Republic’s phrase— could act as a kind of salve for white American liberals’ smarting racial conscience.77 Indeed, argues media scholar Laurie Ouellette, the program “enabled middle- class whites to embrace the troubles of the multicultural 220

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inner city from a mediated distance.”78 While Ouellette’s point is that the show allowed affluent supporters of public television to feel they were taking part in mending far- off central cities, the setting itself appears carefully calibrated to mediate between these distinct demographic groups. In fact, as time passed, the Workshop often seemed unsure of whether the Sesame Street neighborhood was meant to represent a specific kind of community, urban and poor, or whether it should instead be a sort of “Every Neighborhood,” a local stand-in for an imagined national future of harmony and goodwill. Cooney, for instance, later referred to the televised neighborhood not as a reflection of the inner city but rather as “a microcosm of contemporary society.”79 In a similar vein, puppeteer Jim Henson quipped, “The only kids who can identify along racial lines with the Muppets have to be either green or orange.”80 This universalism occasionally troubled even CTW insiders. In one memo, Cooney fretted that “we have been criticized by some Blacks as being ‘more Westchester than Watts.’”81 The program itself, though, refused both of these identities, instead translating the innercity landscape into a place where Great Society liberals could see their own ideals played out at the block level. Buried beneath these competing orientations toward a hard- edged urban present and a serene postcrisis future, however, was a third temporal reference. In less explicit fashion, the program also relied on neighborhood constructions that looked to the past. The suburban children who formed a large slice of the audience were shown just the kind of dense, pedestrian- oriented space that might have been familiar to their pre- exodus parents: hotdog stands, fruit vendors, street games, the stoop and corner. This, though, was a vision of that space “before” the urban crisis: a stable community where neighbors knew one another, hollered greetings from window to sidewalk, and participated in a thriving local economy of proprietor-run shops. Furthermore, in a nostalgic and conservative move, the CTW sought to confront contemporary urban ills by rewriting the identity of the inner- city neighborhood around notions of work and masculine authority. A strong preoccupation with representations of work is apparent not only in Sesame Street’s frequent shop scenes, or with the clearly delineated occupations of the four original human characters (two teachers, a storekeeper, and a housewife-turned-nurse), but also in one of the show’s most oft-performed songs, “The People in Your Neighborhood.” Here, viewers are introduced not to specific residents but rather to a generic array of local workers: baker, bus driver, dentist, grocer, policeman. The musical skit places blue- collar manual jobs side-by-side with 221

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middle- class professional occupations, and it explicitly foregrounds the daily labor that these workers perform for the community. “I’ll work and work the whole day through / To get your letters safe to you,” promises the postman, while “The trash collector works each day / He’ll always take your trash away.”82 On one level, the song might be seen as a sort of juvenile version of “Ballad for Americans,” the programmatic 1939 anthem of working- class dignity, in which a similar roll call of occupations pays tribute to “the ‘etceteras’ and the ‘and so forths’ that do the work.”83 But, on another level, this uncomplicated vision of cheerful daily labor in a full- employment economy contrasted markedly with the opportunities available in the most highly targeted viewing communities, where unemployment ran rampant. If work and employment were early fi xations, so too was a traditionalist view of gender relations. Early on, this neighborhood was a noticeably masculinized space. In keeping with the Moynihan Report’s contested conclusions about a scarcity of reliable male role-model figures in black urban communities, the Workshop self- consciously sought to depict a neighborhood guided by a firm, reassuring African American man. The character of Gordon filled this role, acting as the program’s principal voice of authority. By contrast, Gordon’s wife, Susan, initially did not work outside the domestic setting, instead serving as “the great dispenser of milk and cookies,” in the words of the role’s actor, Loretta Long.84 Cooney explained this decision by pointing to the “overfeminized world” of “disadvantaged minorities.”85 The program, she said, aimed to counter the negative effects of absent fathers and male unemployment by featuring “a black male who works and is strong and who is the force in the Sesame Street community.”86 As remedy, then, for a pathologically matriarchal inner city, the show would offer a nostalgic vision of a neighborhood in which leadership issued primarily from employed, authoritative men, and in which women stayed home to support those men. For this, the Workshop quickly came under fire from the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other activists who charged that the show presented a world in which women’s roles were limited to those of “teacher, simp, and mother.”87 From the Workshop’s standpoint, activists clamoring for more empowering representations of women were selfishly elevating a white, middle- class agenda over the needs of black inner cities starved for assertive male leadership. The show was funded, after all, “with particular emphasis on the inner city poor,” wrote Cooney, in a peeved letter to NOW president Wilma Scott Heide. “Naturally, then, their needs come first.”88 While one 222

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white NOW officer dubbed this outlook a “sharp slap in the face of our black sisters,” Cooney herself expressed surprise when black women joined in the denunciations.89 With regard to a female African American viewer who wrote in to protest that Susan’s kitchen was presented as the “natural domain for her life,” Cooney remarked, “While this woman is a raving Women’s Lib lady, it is also interesting to note she is also black.”90 In all these ways, Sesame Street gestured toward nostalgic fictions of an earlier historical moment. In the face of dilapidation, this neighborhood would emphasize cleanliness. In response to unemployment, it would highlight work. Where there was “over-feminization,” it would accentuate masculine leadership. Although executive producer David Connell later described the setting as an attempt “to go very realistic,” writers and producers instead frequently aimed at countering conditions in the contemporary city cores with gauzy images of an ostensibly more stable, comforting urban past.91 The tensions between these three representational registers—referencing either a pulsating urban present, a harmonious national future, or a reassuringly ordered neighborhood past—reflected larger uncertainties over the CTW’s relationship with establishment institutions and values. On the one hand, the creators understood their project as an iconoclastic experiment, one intended to subvert the profit- oriented principles of commercial television, to defy the education profession’s snobbish disdain for mass media, and to overturn derogatory approaches to urban representation. On the other hand, as an initiative deeply enmeshed with large philanthropic and government agencies, the program expressed elite reformers’ hopes for a better urban future while shying away from overtly confrontational portrayals of grassroots solidarity and action. In this sense, the show replicated an ongoing uneasiness among middle- class Great Society liberals over how to engage with and depict minority-populated inner- city areas. In interviews, Cooney occasionally acknowledged this tension. Displaying “gentle things, black-and-white-together things, may be bourgeois,” she confessed to one columnist, but the Workshop had to acknowledge the general public’s “commitment to a lot that’s in the existing value system.”92 According to more radical voices, though, it was precisely this value system that needed to be dismantled—a task requiring more than simply a healthy dollop of Cooney’s “black-and-white-together things.” And Sesame Street, by virtue of its extraordinary popularity, appeared to offer a bully pulpit for change, if only it would seize the opportunity. After a brief but euphoric honeymoon, detractors began to material223

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ize. The earliest ones assailed the show not for its approach to urban representation but rather for its educational style: the frenetic pace, the flashy ad techniques, a pedagogical approach that seemed in thrall to behaviorist methods. However, within a year, debates also bubbled to the surface over the construction of the fictional neighborhood setting. For, while the show’s location answered some questions, it raised others. What kinds of lessons ought this neighborhood to convey? What sorts of models should it offer for action in real-life communities? Even as Cooney proclaimed the creators’ courage in selecting a scruffy innercity backdrop, others saw a timid retreat from a brand of urban realism that could teach audiences about the structural roots of poverty and discrimination, along with tactics for combating them. In fact, these questions had troubled Workshop planners even before the fi rst air date. In August 1969, three weeks after a disappointing test run in Philadelphia, the CTW had gathered its academic advisors in Boston for emergency consultations. There, two Harvard psychiatrists criticized the pilot episodes for their failure to emphasize community empowerment. Chester Pierce, founding chair of the Black Psychiatrists of America, insisted that the “ghetto” ought instead to be shown as “a vital, vibrant place” where the child can “control his own environment.” Likewise, Leon Eisenberg, an early Head Start evaluator, disparaged the street set for looking “awfully pretty” and the plots for lacking relevance to real-life problems. Urging the adoption of plotlines such as a rent strike, Eisenberg argued that the on-screen neighborhood must be “a place where real children deal with real problems” and learn that “there is something you can do to change the kind of life you have.”93 Addressing a subset of this problem, Workshop leaders also faced perplexing decisions on whether to engage with, or smooth over, the ethnic and economic hostilities that rippled through the nation’s inner cities. When crafting the Mr. Hooper character, for example, writers skirted nervously around the edges of one such tension: that between inner- city black residents and white storeowners, many of them Jewish, who did not live in the communities they served. Though Hooper ended up as an apron- clad elderly white shopkeeper, gruff but kindly, writers had originally envisioned him as an absentee business owner and a “malevolent guy.” Presumably, this incarnation would have provided opportunities for exploring the theme of community control emphasized by Pierce and Eisenberg. But planners expressed last-minute anxieties that such a figure might be perceived as an exploitive Jewish shopkeeper, perhaps fueling anti-Semitism by tracing real-life ethnic 224

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frictions too closely. As Eisenberg warned, if an “evil person” appeared on the program— especially one coded as black or Jewish—the Workshop would undoubtedly be accused of “making a political decision” to disparage an entire group.94 In the end, writers did establish Hooper as Jewish, while omitting all overtones of absenteeism and exploitation. Still, the larger questions raised in these predebut meetings were never fully resolved, and the fault lines are visible in the Workshop’s efforts to bridge competing impulses toward sweetness and grittiness, easy harmony and daunting challenges. An early writers’ manual suggested one sequence on rat extermination, and another in which neighbors might respond to a broken furnace with tenant organizing.95 But the show eventually steered away from this course. Academic advisor Gerald Lesser later explained the choice to avoid too great an urban realism. “If a child lives in a city ghetto, what do we gain in using television to depict its harsh realities?” he asked rhetorically.96 Thus, even as vestiges of a more activist orientation did survive, the confrontational plotlines suggested by Eisenberg and others seldom made it onto the screen. One first-season episode neatly captures this ambivalence. In an April 1970 commemoration of the first Earth Day, writers crafted a plot in which the street’s residents find their block mysteriously strewn with trash and blanketed in putrid smog. Together, they conduct a community cleanup. Then they discover the source of the pollution: Oscar the Grouch, the misanthropic trashcan- dwelling Muppet, has tossed the contents of his can onto the street to clear space for a smoke-belching factory inside. The episode ends with the residents convincing Oscar to put an end to the pollution, lest, as Susan sings, he make “a Glop Glop Grungy Glub Garden / Where the playground used to be.”97 In offering a template for neighborly cooperation in the face of local degradation, the episode functioned as more than a mere anti-litter public service announcement. And yet, even as residents demonstrate the efficacy of organized community action, they—unlike real-life urban environmental campaigners— don’t need to confront powerful outside adversaries. In persuading a fellow resident to shut down his factory, they instead demonstrate the virtues of informal social control. Here, and in numerous early episodes, Sesame Street gestured toward inner- city hardships but dealt with these only in the most allegorical of fashions. Critics further to the left cast this as a missed opportunity. Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, a Head Start cofounder, lambasted the series for presenting an environment that held “no conflicts, no difficulties, nor, for that matter, any obligations or visible attachments.”98 225

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But most perplexing for the creators, given their stated mission, were mounting censures over the show’s politics of race and representation. To a small but growing circle of skeptics, it was becoming plain, as a 1973 Black World article would contend, that no such television initiative “devised by the oppressor can do anything other than serve his interests.”99 Though such critiques appeared in various forums, the commentator who publicized this discontent most widely was Linda Francke, a white former Newsweek editor and women’s movement activist. In a scathing 1971 feature article for New York Magazine, Francke interviewed a handful of Harlem educators and organizers and concluded that, despite the “nearly universal acclaim,” Sesame Street “looks quite different to black eyes.” One woman told Francke that the show, in offering an urban “fairyland” without alcoholics or drug addicts, was unreal and nonsensical. Meanwhile, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a Harlem daycare director and an associate of Gloria Steinem, expressed her outrage that the CTW “can have $7 million, using poor people to get it, and not putting out what’s necessary for changing these same people’s lives.” Several of Francke’s interviewees understood Oscar the Grouch, in particular, as a derogatory symbol for low-income black city denizens. “That cat who lives in the garbage can,” said Hughes, “should be out demonstrating and turning over every institution . . . to get out of it.”100 These and other detractors were hostile to elaborate fantasies of harmony and equality, at a time when conditions in inner- city neighborhoods seemed to proclaim the opposite. A truly useful neighborhood story, critics felt, would go beyond a cheery portrayal of the nation’s diversity. It would dramatize the ordeals of discrimination and poverty and identify their structural roots. Like their counterparts among federal antipoverty planners, CTW leaders maintained an equivocal stance toward such goals. Similarly, the resulting television product echoed many of the tensions that had run through the design of the Community Action program and other highly touted war-on-poverty initiatives: those between the objectives of assimilation and empowerment, between pathology perspectives and systemic critiques, between political containment and community autonomy as envisioned ends.101 And just as Great Society liberalism had attracted mounting challenges from its left, so too did the artists and cultural producers whose works embodied some of that ideology’s central impulses and aspirations. For this reason, the program continues today to divide academic scholars. Did the early setting, as David Serlin suggests, embody “a rad-

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ical vision of a proactive, pluralistic neighborhood,” or was it rather a timid sugar- coating of harsh urban realities, as Joel Spring contends? Did it boldly express, in Jennifer Mandel’s words, the “principles of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s beloved community,” or was it instead, as Laurie Ouellette argues, just another paternalistic attempt to “rescue” poor preschoolers from the supposed cultural flaws of their environment?102 None of these characterizations is wrong: it was, in fact, these simultaneous yet contradictory objectives that defined the show’s brand of imaginative placemaking. Those aesthetic conflicts, in turn, reflected an unresolved pull between two social ambitions that the Great Society’s racial liberals claimed to hold dear. One was the desire for racial justice, the establishment of a society in which men and women would never again face economic or social penalties based on skin color. Another was the quest for racial harmony, the creation of an America in which resentments would evaporate, leaving individuals to form new relationships in trust and fellowship. These two aims may occasionally have been aligned, but certainly not always or necessarily. Yet, in the face of reallife disjunctures between the two, Great Society– era creative narratives often took it as their core mission to present a world in which they were one and the same. It was in the realm of the local, on the pavements of the small-scale neighborhood, that fictional texts could most easily seek to meld these two distinct visions.

As the 1960s dawned, liberal reformers had been galvanized by the prospect for a new urban order. This exhilarating world would be founded upon the “alternative of harmonious, desegregated local life,” one that would leave US cities “renewed in freedom,” declared the prominent human-relations expert Dennis Clark in 1962.103 As did participants in the realms of electoral politics and street-level activism, a range of cultural producers took up this call. The creative output of figures such as Keats and Cooney stood not only as an attempt to heal the wounds inflicted by entrenched inner- city injustices, but also as a quest to usher in more pluralistic forms of local community. Just as the Johnson administration could dub its Head Start program “not a kindergarten, but a ‘communigarten,’” so too did these creators understand their own work as part of an effort to foster a new spirit of neighborliness among the children of the nation’s racially fractured metropolises.104 The resulting products offer a glimpse into a world that, except in the

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dreams of their makers and audiences, never came into being. Yet that same vision captured the imagination of a generation of parents, teachers, and children in the face of seemingly intractable urban crisis. Almost at once, the complications in this venture had jumped to the fore. In 1970, education researcher David Gast would point to multiethnic children’s stories as potential agents of “culture therapy” for social inequities. However, he shrewdly noted, their authors faced an imposing challenge: that of crafting narratives that could unite “cultural ideals” with “manifest cultural reality.”105 This knotty problem not only confronted creators such as Keats and the CTW; it also came to define their work. As they toggled between gentle, self- esteembuilding messages and harder- edged imagery drawn from the terrain of the contemporary city cores, each struggled to imagine a kind of neighborhood that would simultaneously reflect the urban present and open the windows to a sunnier urban future. If the neighborhood stories of Great Society liberals would always be characterized by this tension, such works nonetheless contributed powerfully to contemporary ideologies about the neighborhood’s potential in a troubled American social landscape.

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Defining Urban Pluralism in the Age of the Neighborhoods Movement

EIGHT

Elementary Republics and Little Platoons: The Neighborhood SelfGovernment Movement “Power to the Neighborhoods!” With this slogan, the writer Norman Mailer launched his quixotic 1969 campaign for New York City mayor. Entering the Democratic primary as a self- described “left-conservative,” Mailer, along with his running mate, the pugnacious columnist Jimmy Breslin, proposed an alternative municipal world to voters. The best-remembered of Mailer’s eccentric plans— making New York City the fifty-first US state—was actually devised in service of a scheme for radical neighborhood autonomy. In Mailer’s future State of New York City, every neighborhood would be free to become its own independent hamlet, township, village, or city, and to “constitute itself upon any principle, whether spiritual, emotional, economical, ideological or idealistic.” The options were limitless. Black Power for Harlem. An Integration City for liberals. Even neighborhoods of ethnic or religious exclusion for determined segregationists willing to pay a hefty fee for the privilege. Lifestyles and modes of social organization would multiply into a cornucopia of diversity, with empowered neighborhoods offering a space for overcoming a rampant “alienation from the self.”1 Though the press laughed off the irreverent campaign as the prank of an outlandish egotist, it nonetheless ad231

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vertised in flamboyant style the emergence of a vigorous push for neighborhood-level autonomy and self-governance, one that would coalesce over the succeeding decade. By the mid-1970s, with the apparent failure of the Great Society agenda, devastating urban disinvestment, and rampant post-Vietnam and post-Watergate distrust in national government, close-knit city neighborhoods increasingly came to seem not a catalyst for a broader urban redemption but rather the sole redeemable scrap amid the surrounding detritus. In response, burgeoning networks of critics and organizers sought to draw political control closer to home, whether via the tepid reformism of “little city halls” or the strident anarchism of projects like Karl Hess’s Washington Free Community. Some saw such devolution of power as merely a superficial way to reorder municipal bureaucracies. But in its more radical guises this diffuse social movement adopted a sweeping and sometimes utopian vision of the local neighborhood as incubator for authentic relationships and direct democracy in an age fragmented by a stultifying bureaucratic anonymity. In their drive for local self-rule, neighborhood governance partisans formed one distinct wing of a much larger 1970s activist phenomenon: the nationwide grassroots mobilizations most commonly known as the neighborhoods movement. The label served to describe a loose-linked and ideologically diverse agglomeration of community groups, local organizers, and allied intellectuals, all rallying under the banner of neighborhood empowerment and integrity. Whether attacking bank redlining and freeway demolitions, seeking to reanimate place-based ethnic traditions, confronting city halls over zoning and service issues, or obstructing large-scale corporate developers, advocates grounded their appeals in the unique characteristics of block-level urban life. As the movement’s most perceptive academic analyst, Suleiman Osman, explains, “Where New Deal liberalism celebrated large institutions, comprehensive planning, social science, and cooperation between big government and big business, 1970s ‘neighborhoodism’ valorized smallness, intimacy, voluntarism, subjectivity, and privacy.”2 This enchantment with the local made for unlikely bedfellows. United by a disdain for the centralizing, homogenizing tendencies of postwar corporate liberalism, participants ranged from blue- collar white ethnics to black-nationalist organizers, well-heeled gentrifiers to alternativetechnology evangelists, New Left theorists to radical libertarians and communitarian anarchists. The 1970s neighborhoods movement is notable not only for the activist energies it generated but also for the extraordinary variety of 232

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ways in which its assorted affiliates conceptualized the city neighborhood’s core meaning and function. Two of those many distinct neighborhood visions are explored in the present and following chapters: here, the program developed by a group of radical political decentralists, many shaped by the New Left, who aimed to reinvent the nation as an assemblage of miniature neighborhood-level polities; and in the next chapter, the agenda adopted by Roman Catholic thinkers who saw in the grassroots faith of the ethnic urban village a route toward a reenergized church and city. Despite their manifest differences, proponents in each case raised powerful questions about the relationship between the daily life of the street corner and grand, abstract matters of American democracy and cultural pluralism. The work of the neighborhood self-government advocates profiled here confounded static definitions of Left and Right. Taking inspiration either from Jeffersonian ideals of decentralized authority or from contemporary theories of participatory democracy and anticolonial struggle, participants reworked received ideas of the neighborhood as merely a space of friendly mutual regard, casting these spaces instead as the most elemental building blocks of the nation’s political life. The alliances they fashioned were inherently unstable, however, and the ideas underpinning this thrust for neighborhood-level democratic rule would eventually contribute both to the rhetoric of the emergent New Right and to the formation of a dissident, localist urban counterculture. That evolution becomes particularly apparent when traced through the intersecting stories of two leading theorists and campaigners: Milton Kotler and Karl Hess. While both had strong New Left intellectual affiliations, the ideological paths they followed would eventually diverge, as the alluring rhetoric of neighborhood empowerment was appropriated by actors from across the political spectrum.

The New Left and Neighborhood Government Through the 1960s, the air in American cities had grown thick with calls for localization of authority and decision-making. Exasperated by top- down urban-renewal disruptions and declining city services, citizen groups sought to roll back the centralized, professionalized governance structures that were the legacy of Progressive- era municipal reform. Meanwhile, federal antipoverty planners, with the experimental Community Action program, had offered but not delivered on promises for local political self- determination among the poor. And “com233

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munity control” had increasingly become the watchword for an urban civil rights movement turning its back on integration as an overriding goal. Whether as window dressing or reluctant concession, dozens of big- city administrations countered with schemes for limited neighborhood participation in policy development and service delivery.3 These unfurling battles over urban decentralization captivated numerous intellectuals of the New Left, the radical democratic social movement closely aligned with the campus revolts and antiwar agitation. And nowhere on the left were such ideas debated with greater vigor than at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). A busy hub for New Left political theory and activism, the Washington-based think tank had been founded in 1963 by Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, two disaffected federal security officials. Dismayed by the bellicose defense posture and domestic “technocratic progressivism” of the Kennedy administration, the young bureaucrats had quit their jobs in order to foster more iconoclastic policy approaches. Over the next decade, their organization assembled a stable of high-profile intellectuals, including Christopher Jencks, Arthur Waskow, Staughton Lynd, Paul Goodman, and Paul Jacobs.4 Unlike traditional think tanks of the period, which pursued a “value-free” objectivity, the IPS maintained what Raskin later called an “open- door policy toward movements,” and especially toward the left flank of the black freedom movement in the US South.5 Later on, the IPS’s reputation as a hothouse for antiwar thought and activism drew the ire of the Johnson and Nixon administrations. To the FBI’s Washington field office, the organization represented “the heart, brains and driving force behind the New Left movement,” and the Bureau deployed more than sixty informants in a six-year operation against the IPS.6 Among the Institute’s intellectuals was a large cadre exploring issues of community empowerment, decentralized grassroots democracy, and avenues for local cooperative life. And this philosophical inclination— a “laissez-faire turned left and existentialist,” in one critic’s words—unfolded not just in the realm of scholarship but also through social action.7 Resident fellows were encouraged, as a 1966 IPS pamphlet explained, to test their theories by “experimenting with ‘social inventions’—that is, practical projects that try to deal with an important social difficulty,” thus allowing “a new understanding of social change.”8 As part of this mission, the think tank founded a range of neighborhood institutions in Washington, including a music center, a school, several co- ops, and a radical bookstore, as well as numerous spin- off centers and institutes.9 234

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The ideas generated at the IPS reflected a growing New Left enthusiasm for the neighborhood scale, as its intellectuals blurred the lines dividing theory from practice. The ideological evolutions and “social inventions” of two of its resident fellows, in particular, dramatize a story that played out in scores of locations across the country. Milton Kotler and Karl Hess, among the decade’s best-known proponents of neighborhood autonomy and self-government, galvanized activists in support of their visions, wrote central texts for the larger neighborhoods movement, and created structures to test their concepts in real-life communities. In doing so, they helped to give shape and intellectual coherence to the movement’s radical decentralist wing. The first of these thinkers, Milton Kotler, had joined the IPS early on, as one of its six original fellows (fig. 23). Through the 1960s, Kotler wrote prolifically on neighborhood political empowerment. His most noted intervention came in 1969, with the publication of the book Neighborhood Government, a manifesto outlining a bracing program for local-level sovereignty. Hannah Arendt, an IPS ally, commended it to her acolytes, while Karl Hess called it potentially “the most important revolutionary book of the century.”10 In fact, Kotler’s work in-

Figure 23

Milton Kotler, mid-1960s. (Courtesy Milton Kotler)

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sisted, a revolution was already underway, but one that differed from the “earthshaking” national upheavals inhabiting the daydreams of campus radicals. From the recent proliferation of middle- class block clubs to the rise of black urban militias, the neighborhood had “sprung from its quiet niche in the metropolis to surprise us with its claim for liberty.” The New Left, Kotler declared, must now “accept the neighborhood as the source of revolutionary power, and local liberty as its modest cause.”11 This unorthodox analysis came as the culmination of a half decade of ground-level organizing. Raised in a Jewish family in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, Kotler had formed a close friendship with Marcus Raskin during the early 1950s, when both were undergraduates at the University of Chicago. After Kotler fi nished his graduate studies in political science, Raskin persuaded him to join the newly founded IPS in Washington. This move plunged Kotler, then a centrist liberal, into a world of radical politics and activism. Through the IPS, he attended key conventions of the Students for a Democratic Society; organized in Mississippi for the Delta Ministry civil rights project of the National Council of Churches; and spearheaded efforts to establish an experimental college program at California’s San Quentin State Prison. While captivated by the goal of participatory democracy that motivated all these endeavors, Kotler eventually concluded that, without formal structures for extending the principle into workaday city neighborhoods, it would remain merely a platitude mouthed by middle- class idealists.12 His first attempt to develop such structures came through his next IPS “social invention”: laboring alongside the Lutheran minister Leopold Bernhard to found the East Central Citizens Organization (ECCO) in Columbus, Ohio.13 Kotler had first met Bernhard in 1965, at Chicago’s Urban Training Center for Christian Mission; two years later, the pastor asked Kotler for help in developing an experiment in direct community control by residents in his church’s vicinity.14 For Bernhard, such a project seemed an extension of his long history battling social injustices. In the 1930s, as a young seminarian in Germany, Bernhard had publicly opposed the Nazi regime before fleeing the country, experiences that were later fictionalized in a popular 1942 novel, Until That Day.15 By 1960, Bernhard had taken up the pastorship of Columbus’s First English Lutheran Church, an old wealthy congregation in what had become an economically struggling and predominantly African American neighborhood.16 As some longtime members clamored for First English to quit the city entirely, Bernhard instead urged his flock to become “deeply, radically involved in the world’s misery.”17 236

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Together, as one means to that end, Kotler and Bernhard launched ECCO as the nation’s first not-for-profit neighborhood corporation, a venture that soon won substantial funding from the federal government’s Office of Economic Opportunity.18 For their executive director, local organizers recruited Ivanhoe Donaldson, a veteran field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. But although ECCO eventually ran programs in health, job training, and housing, its primary purpose was to function as a neighborhood government, controlled by a deliberative assembly run along town-meeting lines and open to all. By providing genuine power, Bernhard argued, ECCO would help economically marginalized residents overcome their “alienation from the democratic process.”19 The project captured national attention in publications ranging from the New Republic to Playboy, while garnering enthusiastic praise from Senator Robert Kennedy.20 Meanwhile, Kotler and Bernhard went on to organize similar institutions in Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere. At its core, this model of organizing assumed that the decade’s rumbling urban discontent was caused not so much by material deprivation but rather by the “insult” of outside rule. Testifying before a US Senate subcommittee in 1967, Kotler likened recent uprisings in the black inner cities to the eighteenth- century American colonists’ struggle to overturn the dominion of the British crown.21 Both were endeavors to shake off the rule of distant potentates in favor of autonomy and direct local democracy. The landmark Kerner Commission Report, the following year, would tentatively gesture in this direction, fingering attenuated neighborhood political representation as one contributor to civil disorders.22 Still, as a reading of the contemporary urban predicament, Kotler’s thesis found itself well outside the ambit of mainstream liberal thought. The nuances of Kotler’s devolutionary vision can be better grasped when comparing his Neighborhood Government to another widely noted 1969 intervention in American governance studies: Theodore Lowi’s The End of Liberalism, the most prominent political-science text arguing against such decentralizing impulses. With this work, Lowi famously warned of a simmering “crisis in public authority,” one produced by a pernicious new ideology of governance. “Interest-group liberalism,” as Lowi termed it, understood democratic decision-making only in terms of claims by organized blocs, be they manufacturers on the right or antipoverty advocates on the left. The resultant government-bybargaining, an elevation of process over policy, had subverted abstract ideals of justice and the common good. And nowhere was this prob237

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lem more dire than in the great metropolises, where power was increasingly fragmented among a dizzying assortment of community boards, administrative authorities, suburban governments, and service agencies. Carved into “rigid technocratized domains,” the US city, Lowi lamented, now stood as a collection of “islands of functional power before which the modern mayor stands impoverished.”23 In this view, decentralization of authority—far from being a potential cure for the urban crisis—was a main culprit. Indeed, Lowi suggested putting an end to the corporate city entirely, and along with it the “fiction of local citizenship.” But the delegations of power that Lowi derided as “the gift of sovereignty to private satrapies” seemed rather, to Kotler, an avenue for granting every citizen meaningful control over his or her own life and community.24 Pressing this case in Neighborhood Government and related writings, Kotler drew in equal measure from Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a nation of self-governing “ward republics” and from recent New Left enthusiasms for participatory democracy and anti-imperial revolt. Here, he cast the city itself as an empire—with the downtown as powerful metropole, subordinating the neighborhood provinces to its will. In fact, Kotler argued, many older neighborhoods had once been selfgoverning towns, suburbs, villages, or hamlets. Though plundering downtowns had progressively annexed them through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these neighborhoods still retained the ghostly memory of bygone days of local liberty. The task for each neighborhood today, then, was to “free the territory from downtown power,” a process that started with winning control of local public institutions. If successful, these neighborhood “ward republics,” controlled by participatory assemblies, would then gain the power to exercise eminent domain, establish a local economy, control prices and rents, legislate on community welfare, and eventually even to decide collectively on national matters of war and peace.25 This neighborhood vision left behind the sentimental language of ethnic tradition or neighborly intimacy, adopting instead a hardedged definition that took power, colonialism, and struggle as its key terms. Mocking the romantic conception of neighborhoods as primarily “units of good feeling in the madness of metropolitan life,” Kotler declared that neighborhoods were, first and foremost, the basic units of political life— and, thus, an ideal staging ground for overthrowing the “imperial dominion” of downtown rulers. While saving his most vehement scorn for the insipid decentralization schemes of liberal reformers, with their “little city halls” and local advisory boards, he also 238

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critiqued the Left for its blindness to new imperatives. Radical reconfiguration of the social system would occur only when struggles for power were built on territorial claims, rather than solidarities of class or race. In fact, the goals of economic equality and small-scale political liberty were in direct conflict with one another, Kotler contended. Thus, the Left had to choose between two possible futures: either “social change or political revolution”; either “social engineering or political freedom.”26 With its talk of revolution and radicalism, Neighborhood Government at first seemed to inhabit the political fringes. But soon enough, these ideas found several champions among the Washington political establishment—particularly two Republican moderates, senators Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Charles Mathias of Maryland. Each had become alarmed over the growth of the military-industrial complex, the Great Society– era expansion of government, and the unfurling revelations of the Watergate scandal. Already in 1972, Hatfield had canvassed members of the Republican Platform Committee, urging that neighborhood self-government become integral to party policy. “Modern society and big government treat people like numbers,” his plea stated. “Neighborhoods are the only place where you can have a name.” On a more practical level, he predicted, such policies could make “significant inroads into the Democratic coalition”—especially among students, minorities, and “the alienated voter.”27 Rebuffed at first, Hatfield the next year introduced a bill, crafted with help from Kotler, entitled the Neighborhood Government Act of 1973—a proposal he called “the cornerstone of my whole domestic philosophy.” Among its features, the complex legislation would have allowed taxpayers to divert up to 80 percent of their federal income-tax payments to recognized neighborhood organizations, which would operate in emulation of the “old New England town hall.”28 Ostracized by some Republicans for his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, Hatfield made little headway, and his breaks with the rightward- drifting GOP on other issues led many fellow party members to dismiss him as a crank.29 To the conservative columnist George Will, for example, such proposals seemed a “ludicrous” outburst of “senatorial silliness,” a set of “exotic and irrelevant cures” for nonexistent problems.30 But Hatfield soon found a few congressional allies. By December 1973, his Senate colleague, Charles Mathias, was responding to the ongoing Watergate disclosures with grim warnings that the US might soon “become an authoritarian state” if it did not radically devolve power into the hands of its individual neighborhoods.31 239

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Ironically, at just the moment when decentralists were attacking allegedly indifferent city halls and federal agencies, municipal leaders were finding themselves increasingly helpless in the face of suburban flight, job loss, and plummeting tax revenues. Among mainstream liberal scholars and activists, meanwhile, the rising tide of demands for neighborhood self- determination touched off fierce disputes, in large part because such schemes appeared indifferent toward national problems of unequal access to resources. Historian Thomas Bender, for instance, warned of the dangers of “sentimental writing about community control,” while urbanist Sam Bass Warner Jr. insisted that beleaguered city neighborhoods now needed “democratic national and regional planning” rather than increased autonomy.32 Likewise, in Jack Newfield and Jeff Greenfield’s influential 1972 book, A Populist Manifesto, the authors expressed an ambivalence common within the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. Though cautiously endorsing the concept, they predicted that, because it “does not alter wealth or re-allocate funds,” such a movement could become merely “a faddish cul de sac” for true progressives— or, far more ominously, a mechanism in many locales for “racism by democratic choice.”33

“An Ethnic Walden Pond” Even as figures on the left debated the plans of intellectuals like Kotler, such devolutionary proposals generated a buzz among libertarians and small-government conservatives. After his book received a recommendation in the newsletter Libertarian Forum, Kotler was even invited to discuss his ideas with state cabinet members for California governor Ronald Reagan. (The group was taken aback, Kotler later recounted, when they learned of his background in Mississippi civil rights work and his ambitions for inner- city empowerment.)34 But it was among counterculturalists and communitarian anarchists that the neighborhood autonomy idea, in its most undiluted variants, garnered the greatest visible enthusiasm. Here, what Mailer had envisioned as a “hip coalition of left and right” seemed possible, as the revolt against the Cold War– era corporate-liberal consensus expanded on either side of the political spectrum.35 In this context, Kotler’s Neighborhood Government served as a formative political text for another IPS fellow, Karl Hess, who came to epitomize the curious crossovers between Old Right antistatism and the New Left’s hostility toward institutional authority. Hess’s protean political career gave him a major platform in the na240

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tional media, and he used this prominence to promote a striking vision for the significance of face-to-face neighborhood relationships. Hess’s personal and ideological metamorphoses across the 1960s and 1970s bear recounting, because they closely mirror several of the broader (and odder) political convergences characterizing the era’s drive for neighborhood self-rule. The son of a prosperous businessman, Hess had been born in 1923 and raised in Washington, DC. When his parents split shortly after his birth, Hess’s mother refused alimony and worked as a switchboard operator, making them “full-time poor people,” as Hess recalled.36 A voracious reader, Hess quickly grew bored with formal education, and he dropped out of school at age fifteen to pursue his own studies. Despite a teenage flirtation with the Socialist Party, which seemed to oppose the cultural elitism that the threadbare young Hess so keenly resented, he eventually gravitated toward the political right, lured by the Republican Party’s rhetoric of individualism and its opposition to the New Deal edifice. For Hess, this loathing of state liberalism would be an enduring leitmotif, taking him first to the far right, then to the New Left, and finally to anarchism and libertarianism.37 From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, Hess worked as a journalist, political consultant, Republican speechwriter, and American Enterprise Institute staffer. Meanwhile, with redbaiting attacks on his liberal opponents, Hess threw himself with gusto into what he later called “the big hysteria” of Cold War anticommunism. By 1964, Hess had reached the pinnacle of his influence, serving as head speechwriter for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. As Goldwater’s trusty “Shakespeare,” he penned the senator’s unyielding GOP convention speech, borrowing from historian Harry Jaffa the famous lines of rebuke to Republican moderates: “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”38 But, following Goldwater’s crushing loss, Hess was denied any sort of patronage position, even jobs operating elevators in congressional office buildings. “No Republican of any stripe would shelter a man so closely tied to Goldwater and defeat,” pronounced journalist Theodore White.39 In the election’s wake, Hess began a wide-reaching reassessment of his political philosophy. In a 1975 autobiography, Dear America, he recounted a series of events that led him on the path from right-wing operative to antiestablishment anarchist. First, he bought a motorcycle, thoroughly scandalizing his prim suburban neighbors. Then, taking up welding in order to repair his damaged bikes, he learned from fellow metalworkers that ordinary people could direct their own labor with241

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out need for bosses or workplace hierarchies. Finally, facing an exhaustive IRS audit— Johnson-administration payback, he believed, for his support of Goldwater— Hess grew so enraged that he refused to continue paying taxes. Slapped with a 100 percent lien on future earnings, Hess could no longer own any property beyond basic tools and clothes. As his conventional suburban marriage disintegrated, he moved to a houseboat, owned by a new romantic companion, on Washington’s Anacostia River. By the late 1960s, Hess found himself “racing headlong into hippiedom,” with rock music, motorcycles, and marijuana as his new accoutrements.40 Along with these lifestyle changes, Hess underwent a very public political reorientation. After joining SDS and the Industrial Workers of the World, he took on writing tasks for the Black Panthers and was arrested at an antiwar demonstration in the US Senate chamber. But it was also a new set of intellectual companions that helped Hess work out a fresh philosophy. At the Institute for Policy Studies, Raskin and Barnet invited Hess to run a seminar highlighting the Goldwater campaign’s decentralist politics, and shortly later Hess became an IPS fellow. There, alongside traditional liberals and socialists, he found intellectuals who preached against “the very notion of people giving up power to institutions.” Most importantly, from intensively studying Kotler’s IPS experiments in Columbus and elsewhere, he gained an increasing certainty that the small-scale neighborhood was the best and proper home for direct democracy.41 By 1969, the daily press was trumpeting Hess’s move from sharp business suits to beard and beads with headlines such as “Goldwater’s Ghost Now Haunts New Left.”42 Among Hess’s erstwhile conservative allies, a number joined the National Review’s Frank Meyer in accusing him of a “libertine” libertarianism, a position of “puerile sympathy with the rampaging mobs of campus and ghetto.”43 But despite reports of a wholesale conversion, Hess adamantly stressed the continuities in his philosophy. It was here, among the New Left, that one could find a true extremism in defense of liberty. In fact, there was a strong kinship, he insisted, between the Old Right of isolationism, antistatism, and individualism, and the New Left of antimilitarism, participatory democracy, and personal liberation. Seen this way, Hess’s newfound anarchism was merely the logical consequence of the impulses that had initially attracted him to Goldwater’s crusade. (“I don’t know anybody who would make a better Weatherman,” he puckishly remarked of the Arizona senator.) For these reasons, Hess saw the faint outlines of a new coalition taking shape—from independent farmers and crafts242

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people to disillusioned Vietnam veterans, campus dissidents to hardnosed right-wing individualists— uniting all who resented the bureaucratic tentacles of the state and corporation.44 This anarchist vision soon morphed into a distinctive politics of place. Yearning for a new kind of community life, Hess relocated in 1971 from his Anacostia houseboat to the Adams-Morgan district in northwest Washington, where four decades earlier he had spent his boyhood. It was with this move, Hess later explained, that he finally discovered “the pleasures of neighborhood life, the treasures of cooperative living, and the measure of human meaning.” For Hess, though, this existence was no Candide-like withdrawal from philosophical warfare in order to cultivate his garden in peace. The collaborative projects and authentic relationships that were possible in the nation’s intimate neighborhood spaces, he believed, offered the most radical challenge to the soulless world of centralization and bureaucratization.45 In Adams-Morgan, Hess joined a squad of like-minded allies determined to create models for a new cooperative life. In fact, the transformations taking place in Adams-Morgan had begun long before Hess arrived. First, mirroring demographic shifts elsewhere in the city, the area’s population base had changed from a fifth to more than half African American between 1940 and 1970.46 Middle- class whites departed and property values dropped. Then, through the mid- and late 1960s, the district had witnessed an influx of young white counterculturalists and student-movement radicals.47 Identifying themselves initially as the Washington Free Community, participants developed a loose network of communal living spaces, co- ops, newsletters, and workerowned businesses.48 Soon, the presence of several IPS-funded projects accelerated this trend. Along with IPS fellow David J. Morris, Hess and his local associates set out to reconstruct their new neighborhood around principles of autonomy and self-sufficiency— sometimes working by themselves, and on other occasions in uneasy partnership with long- established inhabitants. In this pursuit, two innovations stood out. One was the district’s creation of a self-proclaimed neighborhood government, the AdamsMorgan Organization (AMO), formed along the lines Milton Kotler had theorized. The project had its seeds in a late-1960s effort by an interracial group of residents, led by cultural activist Topper Carew and IPS employee Marie Nahikian, to unite disparate local organizing projects under the umbrella of a community council. Encouraged by their successes, several dozen participants in 1970 began working out a structure for a formal governing assembly, a federation of the five 243

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smaller districts that made up Adams-Morgan. Early on, the counterculture community—including Hess—participated avidly. The AMO’s major breakthrough, Hess noted, was simply to declare itself a government rather than pleading with municipal authorities, and to govern through participatory town meetings rather than through abstract representative structures. Meanwhile, existing local clubs and activist circles were invited to affiliate themselves with the AMO; using its name, they carried out ventures ranging from video production to affordable-housing advocacy to the operation of an “anti-profit” food store. Involvement eventually swelled to several thousand inhabitants, with the town meetings providing Hess “the most exciting political experiences” of his life.49 The second innovation went beyond the governance principles prescribed in Kotler’s work. It involved the establishment of institutions promoting local alternative technologies, all in an effort to make the neighborhood economically self-reliant. In this, participants embraced the gospel of the decade’s broader “appropriate technology” movement, a grassroots quest for simpler, human-scale technologies, emphasizing community relationships and ecological sensitivity over monumental engineering feats.50 To that end, Hess in 1973 formed an IPS-sponsored workshop called Community Technology— an attempt to “demystify technology” and use it as a tool for independence. Its projects reflected the theories of E. F. Schumacher, the British economist who emerged as a guru in the United States in the wake of his 1973 book, Small Is Beautiful. Drawing on Schumacher’s concept of an “intermediate technology,” Hess and his collaborators aimed to develop an accessible kind of science both created and used within the community. In this way, as the magazine Science explained of their mission, “the people themselves, not some functionary in Detroit, can determine its impact on the neighborhood.” With rooftop vegetable gardens and trout farms in warehouse tanks, local newsletters and weekly open meetings, the group sought to educate residents on how to uncouple their neighborhood from the surrounding metropolitan and national economies.51 Along similar lines, the next year the IPS’s David J. Morris, with two cofounders, established the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) in Adams-Morgan. Morris had been inspired by his study of the socialistled Popular Unity government in Chile. After traveling to Chile under IPS auspices in 1971, he wrote a book expressing optimism that the administration headed by Salvador Allende would offer meaningful decentralization, in order to allow “the masses a sense of power over their own lives.”52 Once back in the States, Morris saw the ILSR as a means to 244

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foster “politically independent, economically self-sustaining, and ecologically sound urban communities.” Through experiments with hydroponic gardens, waste composting, and do-it-yourself solar energy, the ILSR strove to persuade local onlookers that “they don’t have to just sit back and passively accept decision after decision from above,” as Morris told Mother Earth News in 1975.53 Each of these inventions was conceived as a demonstration project, intended to spur similar ventures elsewhere. Belying stereotypes of a reflexively antiurban 1970s environmental movement, small circles of appropriate-technology enthusiasts in city neighborhoods around the country would fuse a countercultural, ecologically oriented ethos with an unabashedly pro-urban sensibility.54 As one such group in Chicago declared, “The key to neighborhood technology is not changing neighborhoods to fit technology but developing technologies that go with the natural flow of neighborhoods.”55 Soon enough, as well, the Adams-Morgan experiments had acquired admirers even on the right. The archconservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick had once tartly opined that Hess should “tuck his shirt-tail in, climb off the houseboat, and come back to the real world.” But by 1974, after debating Hess at several colleges, Kilpatrick was fondly, if bemusedly, praising his sparring partner as a “Henry Thoreau of Columbia Road,” who had transformed his neighborhood into “an ethnic Walden Pond.”56 This “ethnic Walden Pond” came to serve as the chief inspiration for the widely read 1975 book Neighborhood Power. A collaboration between David Morris and Karl Hess, the work soon joined Kotler’s Neighborhood Government as one of the main programmatic statements of the neighborhood movement’s radical decentralist wing. A combination manifesto and do-it-yourself manual, the book probably received its most extensive use as a guide for creating local food co- ops, community newsletters, informal daycare centers, and neighborhood mechanisms for handling zoning and governance. Along the way, though, it linked various strands of neighborhood thinking from the preceding two decades—implicitly echoing Jane Jacobs on the organic nature of neighborhood activity, conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet on the pent-up desire for community in an overcentralized society, and Milton Kotler on the democratic assembly as the essence of neighborhood life. While drawing on all these intellectuals, Neighborhood Power offered a brief for a localist communitarian anarchism as solution to American urban decline. The opening chapter summoned up images of the neighborhood of sentiment and childhood memory: a space that represented “human 245

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reality” over “political theory.” Contrasted with the ills of present- day urban existence— corruption, alienation, “civic weariness”—was an atonce nostalgic and forward-looking sketch of a life in which “all human activity could be brought back together so that work, play, love, life, politics, science, and art could be a shared experience.” This kind of project, Morris and Hess argued, offered challenges both to modern liberalism, with its affection for central planning and technocratic efficiency, and to modern conservatism, with its defense of sharp class distinctions and corporate perquisites. To build a world grounded in neighborhood spaces and relationships, local people fi rst needed to begin thinking of themselves as citizens of their neighborhoods, not merely residents, and to act accordingly.57 To illustrate the form such a society might take, Morris and Hess closed by sketching a day in the life of a fictional community in the District of Columbia. Their story is set sometime in the future, after a major depression and famine have decimated the nation’s cities. But unlike the mid-1970s crop of apocalyptic survivalism handbooks, this is no fantasy of hyper-individualism, violent conflict over resources, or fearful retreat to the countryside. Rather, as residents go about their daily business, they ruefully recall the bad old days before the economic crash— a time of transience, isolation, and selfishness. Postcrisis necessity had been the midwife for a marvelous cooperative self-reliance. During the famine years, neighbors had dug up nonessential streets and filled them with produce gardens, even as cowed city administrators dithered. Soon, participatory assemblies came to govern the neighborhood entirely unfettered by outside bureaucrats, while residents developed rooftop wind turbines, local greenhouses, and a “global inter-neighborhood TV network” in order to swap innovations with far- off counterparts. Now, kindness and creativity flourish. Every person has found “a productive place in the community—to feed it, provide its material needs, delight it, decorate it, enrich it in some way.”58 However alluring the book’s imagined future, Neighborhood Power feels strangely quiescent compared with the urban struggles of the preceding decade. As the authors freely admitted, their manual emphasized “reconstruction” over “defense,” collective ownership of new facilities over confrontations with local developers or landlords. Most notably, the work is remarkably silent on issues of race and power in the contemporary city. In one of the few oblique references to urban racial politics, Morris and Hess dismissed the potential for local “isolationism and prejudice,” sanguinely predicting that, “as neighborhoods gain a sense of self- confidence and self-awareness, they will become 246

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much more outward- oriented. . . . Checkpoint- Charlies on a neighborhood’s borders seem unlikely.”59 With this nonchalant optimism, the book sidelined a set of political claims that would eventually erupt at the movement’s heart.

A National Coalition for Local Rule Though it spoke broadly of the possibilities for neighborhood transformation in any locale, Neighborhood Power was a book deeply colored by the specific experiences of recently arrived Adams-Morgan activists. One of the work’s major themes, in fact, was how incoming residents from the “alternative community” might develop shared goals with long-rooted inhabitants— always a matter of friction in AdamsMorgan.60 Ironically, though, the year of Neighborhood Power’s publication also marked the beginning of the end for the Adams-Morgan experiments. Massive real- estate speculation more than doubled average sales prices in parts of the area between the early and mid-1970s. Escalating costs drove many renters out, and wealthier newcomers typically joined traditional block clubs rather than the AMO. Attendance at community meetings dropped sharply after 1975. “Maybe we should never have swept the streets or created a community government,” lamented AMO cofounder Marie Nahikian, “because the people who worked so hard for that won’t be able to live here.” Indeed, several AMO leaders and outside observers noted that the white countercultural residents who participated in the organization’s early phases were themselves the opening thrust of an accelerating process of gentrification and displacement.61 That same year, though, saw the creation of a nationwide coalition promoting the same principles on which the original Adams-Morgan assembly had been based. In 1971, Milton Kotler’s old Columbus ally, the Reverend Leopold Bernhard, had taken a new parish job in Washington, and the two of them immediately reunited to form a fresh spinoff from the IPS, the Institute for Neighborhood Studies, as incubator for their ideas.62 By 1975, they had initiated plans to create a national federation of community organizations dedicated to local self-rule. Assisted by AMO leaders, Kotler that May convened the inaugural meeting of his new Alliance for Neighborhood Government (ANG), with representatives of forty neighborhood organizations from six Eastern cities in attendance. There, neighbors from the Sto-Rox district near Pittsburgh spoke for many in describing the “heart” of their move247

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ment as “the essential belief in the right to freedom.” In a keynote address, Senator Hatfield compared the contemporary US political landscape to the dystopic world of Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle, a realm of suffocating bureaucracy and robotic obedience to authority. Like the colonial- era revolutionists, Hatfield urged delegates, Americans must “break the chains that bind us,” returning authority to bodies such as “the town meeting, the voluntary organizations, the PTA, the neighborhood association.”63 Envisioning empowered neighborhood assemblies as a combination of New England town meeting and New Left activist cadre, early ANG leaders sought to overturn urban managerial liberalism in favor of neighborhood-level liberty. By the next year, the Alliance had developed its signature statement, a “Neighborhood Bill of Responsibilities and Rights.” In a bicentennial-year mirroring of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, delegates from 130 neighborhoods in twenty-seven Northeastern and Midwestern cities gathered in Philadelphia to endorse the manifesto, which demanded for urbanites the right to “govern themselves democratically and justly” at the neighborhood level.64 The document seemed to signal a strong unity of purpose. Still, ANG members were never of a single mind on what neighborhood autonomy ought to mean in practice. Early on, in fact, the vision encapsulated by the very name of the Alliance for Neighborhood Government caused uncertainty. At the founding conference, participants had split over whether the slogan “neighborhood power” should denote outright self-governance or merely enhanced powers to advise city halls and deliver services. Pointing to the AMO experience as example, several speakers claimed that true local government could provide a means for white middle- class newcomers to establish a foothold, dislodge the poor, and undermine racial diversity.65 Additionally, while many such activists were antisuburban in temperament— deploring, for instance, the exclusionary social models that they saw operating in outlying developments—the urban landscape of quasi-independent neighborhoods that their leaders envisioned could look strikingly similar to the fragmented, patchwork- quilt municipal patterns that predominated in suburban governance. These contentious questions remained unresolved, but by late 1976, the ANG had realized that many neighborhood activists, while ready for aggressive action on issues like redlining and substandard services, were not yet fully inclined to join in more radical calls for local autonomy. That fall, it started the National Association of Neighborhoods (NAN) as its education arm. The latter 248

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organization— originally intended to appeal to “neighborhood organizations which may not be prepared, at this point, to identify with neighborhood government”— quickly replaced the ANG altogether.66 Notwithstanding the uncertainties over ultimate aims, the ANG/ NAN swiftly grew, expanding from 85 member organizations in 1976 to almost 230 in 1979, with a heavy majority hailing from large and medium-sized cities of the industrial Midwest, New England, and the mid-Atlantic region.67 Courted by Jimmy Carter during the 1976 election season, the NAN was soon able to enlist high-profile speakers such as Monsignor Geno Baroni, congresswomen Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, and Carter aides Midge Costanza, Marcy Kaptur, and Sarah Weddington.68 Meanwhile, the group forged especially close ties with the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, a Brooklyn-based vehicle for a working- class, urban-accented brand of feminist activism. The organization hosted several early NAN conferences, and eventually one of its founders, Sally Martino Fisher, won the NAN presidency as part of her mission to “bridge the gap between the women’s movement and the neighborhood movement.”69 In Capitol Hill corridors and in cities across the country, the NAN and its local affiliates fought against destructive freeway projects, indifferent city halls, redlining, displacement, and other urban ills. In most of these campaigns, the NAN agenda for neighborhood self-rule came through not in grand visions for sweeping political reconfigurations, but instead in pleas for individual neighborhoods simply to be heard on matters of immediate concern. For Kotler and his cadre of coalition leaders, however, two issues proved particularly tricky. First was the degree to which demands for community control came increasingly to be seen as an agenda of blue- collar whites seeking to exclude people of color from their local schools and neighborhoods. In the shadow of sometimes-violent clashes over integration busing, the term “community control” held markedly different valences than it did only a half- decade earlier, when it had served as a powerful mobilizing device for black-nationalist organizing work in the central cities. “One must shudder,” Theodore Lowi declared in this vein, “at the prospect of neighborhood governments in poor districts succumbing to control by brownshirts.”70 As Kotler later recalled, several of his left-wing IPS colleagues soon feared that the NAN itself might become a “fascist grassroots organization.”71 Similarly, to mainline civil rights leaders, it seemed troublingly suspicious that white urbanites had taken up the cause of local autonomy just as African Americans were beginning to win citywide municipal offices in appreciable numbers. By 1978, 249

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NAACP chief Benjamin Hooks was worrying that the very word “neighborhood” had come to stand exclusively for white city districts. Thus, when neighborhood advocates eventually convinced the Carter administration to appoint a National Commission on Neighborhoods, even the body’s name elicited apprehension. As Hooks explained, “In this period of media-propagated code words, we are concerned that ‘neighborhoods’ not signal ‘white,’ while ‘urban,’ ‘inner- city’ or ‘ghetto’ signal Black—thus effectively excluding the racial minorities from ‘neighborhood’ programs altogether.”72 To Kotler, such a turn was galling. During the mid-1960s, after all, he had promoted neighborhood self-government as a tool for empowering African American inner- city residents, and he had worked diligently to retail his version of the concept to the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.73 In a 1968 interview, he had also predicted that white neighborhoods, if allowed some measure of local control, “would become less vicious, less frightened of the black community.”74 Kotler and Bernhard did harbor intermittent concerns over “the potential evil of neighborhood control”; in 1972, they briefly suspended their consulting work with neighborhood organizations after observing busing-related violence in Prince Georges County, Maryland.75 However, they eventually concluded that it was exclusion from “authentic participation” that held the greater danger. If blocked from exercising political authority even in their own neighborhoods, the two men wrote in 1977, “the masses can generate their own purpose which may be as ugly as Nazism.”76 A resolution offered at the founding ANG conference had stressed that neighborhoods must guard against “oppressive, irresponsible and conservative structures, even if they are based in democratic decisions of indigenous neighborhood people.”77 Nonetheless, former NAN legislative chair Conrad Weiler recalls that mainline civil rights groups “were extremely suspicious, and at best we only had a truce.”78 Kotler, for his part, came to blame activists of the decade’s white- ethnic revival for “playing with fire” through their “reckless” focus on ethnic heritage as the basis for neighborhood solidarity.79 Meanwhile, closer to the ground, NAN leaders sometimes had to engage in a complex balancing act. In Weiler’s own Philadelphia neighborhood of Queen Village, for instance, the affection of many longtime white residents for the city’s mayor— Frank Rizzo, a populist racial conservative— cut against the NAN’s progressive and interracial national aspirations. As Weiler remembers, he “agonized” over how to channel local organizing in a direction that would advance the NAN’s more inclusive goals. 250

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“We didn’t emphasize all the things we were doing with NAN when we were wearing our local hat,” Weiler explains. “I certainly wasn’t going to get anywhere by reaming out Rizzo.” The legacy of racial frictions over community control—from New York’s Ocean Hill– Brownsville dispute to busing battles in Boston and elsewhere—hung over the topic of neighborhood government, engendering misgivings on all sides.80 A second question that perplexed NAN leaders was the degree to which they should cooperate with the broader left- oriented, and increasingly transnational, political goals of the IPS, which had functioned as an early incubator for their own organization. Early on, these IPS roots had led the NAN to develop the beginnings of an internationalist neighborhood vision. Indeed, the group’s occasional stabs at neighborhood cooperation across national boundaries distinguished it from its peers. The NAN was particularly enthusiastic about Italy’s 1976 legislation establishing legal standing for neighborhood councils, a move intended to create “schools of democracy” and empower marginalized groups.81 At one point, the city of Florence invited the NAN to convene a gathering of European neighborhood organizations, and approximately fifty NAN leaders conducted workshops with community activists from across the continent.82 During the early 1970s, the IPS had directed its attentions to the political situation in Chile, where Salvador Allende’s socialist-led Popular Unity coalition had recently taken power. After the right-wing coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973, the IPS worked closely with Chilean allies of the deposed Allende government, including former minister Orlando Letelier, who was chosen to head the IPS-founded Transnational Institute.83 When Letelier and an IPS colleague were assassinated by agents of the Chilean secret police in Washington in 1976, it galvanized participants across all the IPS spin- off projects, including those involved in neighborhood work. In Neighborhood Power, published the previous year, David Morris had bemoaned the fact that US neighborhoods did not try to assist their Chilean counterparts before the rightist coup.84 Shortly later, Kotler’s IPS colleagues began pressing him to use the NAN as a platform for supporting Chilean dissidents.85 At its 1976 national meeting in Brooklyn, the NAN took up the issue, giving a neighborhood inflection to international human-rights concerns. There, at Kotler’s invitation, Chilean exiles detailed the Pinochet regime’s repression of local-level urban democratic groups. NAN support for independent neighborhood councils abroad, Kotler told delegates, would refute the charges of parochialism that were frequently lobbed at US neighborhood activists. The NAN’s human-rights task 251

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force approved resolutions stating that “neighborhood self-government is a fundamental vehicle for human rights,” and declaring it the duty of all neighborhoods to “defend democratic neighborhood organizations throughout the world.”86 But seven months later, at a national convention in Pittsburgh, leaders appeared to have overplayed their hand. The plenary session voted down tougher resolutions calling for local affiliates to lobby the US government in support of Chilean political prisoners. Meanwhile, in perhaps an implicit rebuke to the leadership, several session organizers urged participants not to neglect their roots in everyday “rats-and-trash” issues.87 Reading his organization’s mood, Kotler soon distanced himself from the IPS’s international agenda; as he later related, he flatly refused an IPS request for the NAN to send a goodwill delegation to communist Cuba.88 Nonetheless, the debate highlighted the potential for disconnection between the movement’s leaders and theorists, on the one hand, and its volunteer local participants on the other.

Fracturing of a Movement Through organizing and writing, experimenting and inventing, the clusters of neighborhood theorists in Adams-Morgan, at the Institute for Policy Studies, and across the NAN membership had developed a rich, if often contradictory, body of localist thought. Whether posited as a staging ground for “anticolonial” struggle against downtown powers, a haven for more authentic relationships, a bucolic site for self-sufficiency, or a potential actor in international human-rights campaigns, the city neighborhood had emerged as emblem and imagined locale for a multitude of far-reaching political claims. These grand visions, in turn, were layered—sometimes uncomfortably or incongruously—atop ongoing everyday organizing work in real-life urban communities. The ideological confluences that united these thinkers, however, would prove fleeting. In retrospect, several events of 1979 might be read as a symbolic endpoint for the intellectual and institutional networks that constituted this sector of the broader neighborhoods movement. Ten years after Hess’s conversion to the New Left and the release of Kotler’s Neighborhood Government, participants seem to have exhausted their energies. In truth, it had always been an unstable coalition, peopled by activists with vastly divergent motivations. And while leaders hoped to rise above traditional political affiliations, the “hip 252

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coalition of the left and right” that Mailer had once envisioned eventually ruptured, with the idealized language of neighborhood control put to sharply differing purposes by groups with diametrically opposing political sensibilities. Two stories from that year indicate how the movement’s ideological fault lines eventually diffused its momentum. The first concerns the breakup of the collection of institutions in Adams-Morgan, and Hess’s retrospective analysis of that collapse. Beneath the surface of Hess’s decentralist vision lived a stubborn disregard for the urban political claims of the Great Society’s civil rights wing. For a decade, he had impatiently dismissed liberal qualms that fully sovereign neighborhoods might seek to exclude racial minorities as merely the quibbles of elitists.89 Furthermore, he insisted, true neighborhood self-rule would finally make black communities “something more than just a niggertown appended to the white establishment’s turf.”90 But Hess was forced to confront these urban racial dynamics more fully when his “ethnic Walden Pond” began to disintegrate. In 1975’s Dear America, Hess had narrated the Adams-Morgan story with a sense of exhilaration. Four years later, however, he appended a much different ending. Having decamped in 1976 for the West Virginia countryside, Hess began to look back on his Adams-Morgan experiments with bitterness. His old aspirations for the neighborhood, he reflected in a 1979 book, Community Technology, “seemed now very romantic and very wrong.”91 Why, he wondered, had neighbors at the assemblies not plunged more eagerly into developing the co- ops, the rooftop gardens, or the warehouse fish farm? Why had they not more enthusiastically adopted his vision for self-sufficiency and selfdetermination? To explain this lackluster support, he reinterpreted the Adams-Morgan experience through the lens of the Moynihan Report, pointing now to an insidious culture of dependency among African American inhabitants. “Are blacks particularly disabled when it comes to seeking alternatives to welfare programs?” Hess asked. The account that followed answered decidedly in the affirmative. In this retelling, enthusiastic young whites had taken up Community Technology’s “skill- and production- centered activities,” thus demonstrating “solidly middleclass values out of a primarily European culture.” Their black neighbors, in contrast, had refused to assume responsibility for community hardships. And, even in areas where the AMO did take action, Hess condemned its black majority for seeking “power in, not power to change, the system.” Instead of pursuing economic self-reliance, for example, the assembly had appealed to philanthropic grant-makers. Rather than 253

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pooling money to buy up neighborhood properties, it had focused on reining in landlord abuses. Black political demands, Hess decided, now consisted only of being “given something rather than seeking the chance to do something.” By the chapter’s end, Hess had gone on to invoke nearly every distinguishing stereotype of the culture- of-poverty narrative: “parents opiated by a welfare existence”; undisciplined children raised on “TV snacks, beer, and dope”; a “habitual dependence on unearned incomes”; residents unable to create “families that would absorb their energies and deserve their loyalties.”92 Apparently, liberal largesse mixed with black social pathologies had destroyed any chance for a self-reliant local life. This negative portrait of Adams-Morgan as a listless community, acquiescent to the status quo, erases the extraordinarily active role that the AMO did play across the 1970s. To be sure, it hadn’t followed the radical blueprint for self-sufficiency sketched out in Neighborhood Power, but it did wage aggressive campaigns against redlining, landlord misconduct, real- estate speculation, and gentrification. Activists, for example, adopted theatrical tactics to dramatize lending disparities between well- off and poorer neighborhoods, in one instance symbolically “redlining the rich” by painting crimson stripes around “For Sale” signs in wealthy Washington districts. Or, when a savings and loan planned to open a local branch, the AMO successfully demanded that a community board be empowered to review its lending for discriminatory patterns. The group lobbied vigorously for a municipal antispeculation tax and picketed showings of high- end rehabbed townhouses. As affiliated tenant groups worked to stop displacement of poorer residents, some of the most militant AMO activists posted stern warnings that affluent white pioneers were unwelcome.93 Hess’s account, then, raises the question of what neighborhood selfgovernment might mean if residents aren’t free to make their own choices—including the decision to combat exploitive landlords rather than buying out their properties, or to lobby for jobs programs rather than tending makeshift fish farms. Two apparently irreconcilable approaches butted heads: an idyllic vision for total neighborhood selfsufficiency, and the use of civil rights and protest tactics to promote a more equitable division of civic resources. It seemed that no rapprochement was possible. Ultimately, Hess’s reassessment only dramatized the unstable relationship of neighborhood self-reliance advocates with the hard facts of entrenched metropolitan inequalities. This evaluation drew a searing condemnation from Hess’s former collaborator, David J. Morris, who charged that Hess had narcissisti254

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cally placed his own backyard tinkering projects at the center of the neighborhood’s story.94 But even as Hess’s neighborhood vision veered off into a conservative racial critique, the NAN moved in the opposite direction. The diverse philosophical strands present in the organization—libertarian antistatism, white-ethnic revival, progressive socialjustice organizing—had heretofore coexisted relatively peacefully under the banner of neighborhood empowerment. However, tensions did exist, and these came to a head in 1979. While the organization had once stood self- consciously outside the liberal political umbrella, it now stepped inside, moving away from the founding vision of local sovereignty in favor of a more expansive conception of central government’s proper role. Ironically, 1979 marked both a high-water point for the NAN and the beginning of its demise. That spring, the NAN had launched its most ambitious program, the Neighborhood Platform Campaign, intended to express the united interests of US neighborhoods in advance of the 1980 US elections. Spearheading the effort was Dick Simpson, a former independent Chicago alderman who had cut his political teeth organizing for Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential bid.95 After a flurry of fundraising and new staff hires, the federation organized almost fifty regional conventions, in every corner of the continental United States, at which local people could express hopes and demands for their communities.96 In a culminating national meeting, held in Louisville in November 1979, more than four hundred delegates debated two thousand regional resolutions, eventually producing a far-reaching manifesto billed as “a common interest statement from the neighborhood people.”97 As Simpson declared afterward, neighborhood advocates “will support any candidates who support our National Neighborhood Platform.”98 Intended as a bold proclamation from the grassroots, the NAN’s neighborhood platform promised to serve as a center of gravity for a diverse and increasingly unwieldy alliance. Originally, leaders had predicted a platform that would “transcend the usual liberal- conservative distinctions.”99 The document ultimately adopted in Louisville, however, shows just how much the NAN’s emphases had changed over its four years of existence. Neighborhood sovereignty, though still a goal, had receded from its central position. The statement instead incorporated a checklist of traditional left-Democratic policy items, all envisioning a substantially increased mission for state and federal government: round-the- clock daycare centers, full- employment legislation, a guaranteed annual income, robust affirmative-action guidelines, a hotels tax to fund community arts, a 255

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ban on nonrecyclable beverage containers, ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, legal amnesty for undocumented immigrants, complete government-funded access to contraception and abortion, and so forth.100 With its vision of a significant role for the state in reshaping local environments, this document departed quite notably from the Neighborhood Bill of Responsibilities and Rights that the group had approved just over three years earlier. At the same time, several of the new planks were anathema to the NAN’s sizable blue- collar Catholic constituency, while strong antidisplacement resolutions— calling, for instance, for a nationwide rent freeze—provoked quizzical reactions from some middle- class delegates.101 As tensions erupted in Louisville between advocates for an autonomous future and one of material equity, between a local agenda and a national one, the organization’s longtime leadership was challenged by a new, more avowedly left-wing faction, led by activists from the Chicago reform-politics community. At the helm were former SDS member Walter “Slim” Coleman, founder of Chicago’s hard-hitting Heart of Uptown Coalition, and the Reverend Charles Koen, organizer of black nationalist–led liberation struggles in Cairo, Illinois.102 Meanwhile, dissident delegates— especially organizers of an insurgent NAN Black Caucus— bristled against the “little circle of academics” that allegedly controlled the NAN.103 After Koen narrowly unseated the incumbent president, Sally Martino Fisher, the new leadership increasingly downplayed neighborhood self-government in favor of a more recognizably progressive redistributive national program, inspired by their years organizing out of the Alinsky social action tradition and the black nationalist movement. They backed Senator Edward Kennedy’s challenge to President Carter in the 1980 Democratic primaries, a rebuke to the older leaders’ embrace of Carter.104 Over the next several years, all the NAN founders, including Kotler, filtered out of the organization, even as a declining grant economy and the Republican capture of the White House combined to undermine the NAN as an effective national force. (In a strange epilogue, during the early 1980s the desiccated organization would transform yet again, emerging from bitter internal battles as a fervent supporter of the Reagan administration, and especially its Enterprise Zones concept.)105 As these intertwining stories suggest, the ideological diversity that initially facilitated the movement’s growth had ultimately contributed to its splintering. Still, during the height of its influence, the coalition had achieved some concrete victories. NAN activists worked with

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white- ethnic lobby groups to convince the Census Bureau to aggregate neighborhood data. Across the late 1970s, they carved out a leading role in raising the issues of gentrification and displacement, while contributing to the successful campaign for the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.106 What’s more, by the mid-1980s many cities had developed formal mechanisms for neighborhood participation in municipal decision-making.107 Yet even though such innovations lived on, they did so in forms disconnected from the political seedbed that originally lent them coherence. In their advisory role, municipal neighborhood councils never fulfilled the hopes expressed in manifestos such as Kotler’s Neighborhood Government or Morris and Hess’s Neighborhood Power. Likewise, notes historian Carroll Pursell, the appropriate-technology movement found itself increasingly marginalized by the mid-1980s, as corporate agriculture, private utilities, and large construction firms reasserted their power in Washington.108 Finally, the burgeoning New Right would eventually attempt to fold the language of neighborhood empowerment and authenticity into its broader antistatist appeal. In 1975, for instance, Ronald Reagan called for an “end to giantism, for a return to the human scale,” and his 1980 presidential campaign would promote federal spending reductions and targeted tax cuts as the most effective avenue for “unleashing neighborhood self-help initiatives under the control of neighborhood residents.”109

Three Brookings Institution scholars have retrospectively dubbed the 1970s efforts to “institutionalize citizen participation” a failure, due in part to the unwillingness of elites to create meaningful avenues for involvement.110 Already by December 1980, political scientist John Goering could observe that the neighborhoods movement as a whole had become nearly dormant at the national level.111 Furthermore, as analyst Robert Nelson suggests, the 1970s campaigns for neighborhood autonomy were eventually subsumed into a private neighborhoods movement. While 1970s activists demanded public-sector powers for their neighborhoods, the true success of neighborhood government came, perhaps, with the huge growth of private community associations, a form of private-sector collective ownership directed by developers. From 1970 to 1999, approximately one-third of new US housing units were built as part of a private community association. Making their inroads in newly developed areas, particularly across the Sunbelt, these associations presented a partial countermodel to the traditional gover-

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nance patterns of older metropolitan areas.112 At the same time, they signaled a dramatic privatizing of the goals that had galvanized numerous activists of the 1970s. “We lost,” Kotler wrote in 2005.113 The neighborhood self-government movement, he felt, had ended as a protector of property values and nothing more.114 Hatfield’s neighborhood legislation, Hess’s “ethnic Walden Pond,” the ANG’s localist bill of rights—none had a terribly realistic chance of succeeding, at least in the near term. Each, however, conveyed a powerful conviction that the block-level city community offered a remaining repository of strength in the embattled cities of the age. Versions of this notion would weave through the urban narratives of the New Right. But before its ultimate disintegration, the movement also spawned any number of grassroots affiliates that did survive, and that proved more committed to an inclusive approach. In Chicago, NAN veterans helped elect Harold Washington mayor. In Pittsburgh and Baltimore, they monitored large banks for redlining. In Brooklyn, they allied with white- ethnic, African American, and Puerto Rican women to run a neighborhood college program. The 1970s dream of a nation of sovereign neighborhoods may have been flawed, but their communities were still worth fighting for.

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“A Theology of Neighborhood”: Post–Vatican II Catholicism, Ethnic Revival, and City Space “More and more, lately, the distinctive qualities of our cities and their close-knit ethnic neighborhoods are disappearing,” CBS news anchor Harry Reasoner told viewers on a night in September 1970. The segment that followed—an exploration of a surviving such community, Cleveland’s Little Italy district— offered a soothing conclusion to a broadcast detailing deadly military exchanges in Vietnam, a bomb explosion at the Charles Manson trial building, and the Philadelphia opening of the Black Panther– sponsored Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention. Reporting from Cleveland, correspondent Bill Plante adopted an ethnographic tone to guide audiences through a celebration of the Feast of the Assumption. Capturing choral masses, street processions, food, and dancing, the camera conveyed visual evidence of the neighbors’ “very special ties to family and church.” Here, in a struggling and shrinking Catholic ethnic neighborhood, Plante wistfully mused, one could detect “a sense of identity and of belonging, of knowing just who you are and where you fit into the larger scheme of things. Very comfortable, and very difficult to find now in America.”1 259

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During the preceding few years, accounts like this had begun to proliferate. As in Plante’s report, virtually every iteration coupled intimations of national loss and cultural rootlessness with paeans to the fading but still vital ethnic and religious ties that animated small corners of urban America. Over the coming decade, such chronicles would flow through countless films and novels, historical studies and organizing tracts, festivals and exhibitions. Like the contemporaneous campaigns for neighborhood autonomy and local participatory democracy, this descriptive tendency fi xed itself in the broader discourse as a powerful and pervasive way of narrating the urban neighborhood’s significance. Here, however, observers and activists foregrounded the bonds of faith and ethnic custom as the primary foundation for neighborhood life. Figured as both a place of origins and a refuge from a blandly standardized US social landscape, the city communities derived from the old European migration saga were suddenly thrust into a new cultural prominence, just as the urban material and social order that had produced those spaces was inexorably slipping away. At first blush, this brand of storytelling might seem a mere nostalgic reflex, an inchoate yearning for worlds nearly passed. But the idealization of the white- ethnic neighborhood functioned as more than gauzy reminiscence, instead taking on a distinct political import. As growing numbers of intellectuals, organizers, and cultural activists welded together concepts of ethnicity and neighborhood in new ways, they rewrote the nation’s urban past and present around white-ethnic experiences of place in the city. Across the 1970s, romantic invocations of roots, identity, and heritage would offer an increasingly appealing—yet equally contentious— avenue for making claims on the neighborhood’s behalf. These impulses can be chased down many paths, and neighborhood activists deployed such language in a bewildering diversity of projects. One very specific entrée into this phenomenon, however, lies in the vehement debates over ethnic urban identity that preoccupied sectors of the US Catholic church during the 1970s. As a social location for thought and activism, this proved an extraordinarily fertile ground for the production of new theories about the city neighborhood’s value. In the wake of Vatican II, numerous intellectuals and organizers with close ties to the church—Andrew Greeley, Michael Novak, Geno Baroni, Barbara Mikulski, Paul Asciolla, Victoria Mongiardo, William McCready, and others—highlighted the Catholic urban village as the American church’s primary font of selfhood and distinctiveness, and pointed to its decline as the principal cause behind the church’s 260

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simmering identity crisis. At the same time, such critics insisted, the communal values still found in longstanding ethnic enclaves offered answers not only to the specifically religious conflicts engulfing the church but also to the nation’s cascading urban problems. Two historical developments framed and oriented this set of claims. The first was the intense cultural and religious tumult that accompanied the dissolution of the long- established American Catholic subculture—the “Catholic ghetto,” in the term of art favored by midcentury church liberals. The word “ghetto,” in this special sense, indicated more than just a slice of city terrain. It referred to a constellation of religious institutions that had multiplied exponentially in the wake of World War I: colleges, parochial schools, sodalities, professional groups, social-service agencies, and the like. Even so, the Catholic city neighborhood sat at the core of this galaxy, a locus of faith for a sprawling subculture. To the immigrant church— built from successive waves of Irish, German, Italian, Polish, and Slavic migrations lasting through the 1920s—the local parish had been a formative institution, its clubs and societies infusing religious sensibilities into the daily life of the urban village.2 For several generations of Catholics, the working- class neighborhoods forged in the urban industrial age had produced an ethno-religious experience that, as historian Robert Orsi explains, was “thoroughly articulated to place.”3 By the late 1960s, however, Catholics would find themselves in a drastically transformed world. Over the previous two decades, this well-bounded subculture had been chipped away by an array of forces, from suburbanization, upward economic mobility, and battles over neighborhood integration to the religious upheavals of Vatican II, emptying urban parochial schools, and polarizing internal clashes over gender and sexuality. With the old Catholic ghetto breaking apart, a chorus of observers questioned the future of a church unmoored from its traditional institutions and verities. Paradoxically, it was this very cultural trauma that provided the impetus for a fresh assessment of the neighborhood’s social function. Against narratives of fracture and internal weakness, a widening circle of critics pointed to the place-based ethos of ethnic Catholicism as a route toward social salvation. In this revision, the Catholic urban experience contained strengths that persisted into the present, a congeries of local lifeways that could be harnessed in order to haul both the church and the nation’s cities out of the gully of crisis and decay. These assertions, in turn, powerfully intersected with the broader currents of the 1970s white- ethnic revival, a cultural and political de261

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velopment that served as a second point of orientation for Catholic neighborhood theorists. A diffuse identity movement with strongest salience among those of eastern and southern European descent, the ethnic revival spurred growing numbers of white Americans to rediscover, proclaim, or invent their immigrant roots in new kinds of ways. In popular culture, this revivalist impulse took myriad forms—from foodways to film, from “roots trips” to the sudden vogue for amateur genealogy. To many, though, ethnic pasts were bound up most intimately with particular urban histories and spaces: a half-remembered world of jam-packed enclaves, corner houses of worship, the blurring of kin and neighbors into a cohesive local community. Oftentimes, this process of cultural recovery played out in the memorialization of bygone city communities: witness the Lower East Side’s transformation into a dominant narrative axis for the American Jewish experience, a space connecting arrivals from distant shtetls and departures for suburban ranches.4 Within Catholic intellectual circles, however, the growing fascination with European immigrant heritage unfolded with equal energy in efforts to champion urban ethnic neighborhoods of the present. Some sought to annex the entire concept of neighborhood to a particular ethnic and religious history. “American Catholics invented the neighborhood, that incredible mixture of the precinct and the parish,” asserted Father Andrew Greeley in a 1977 speech.5 Others worked to develop “a theology of place, of neighborhood,” one attuned to the intangible relationship between religious faith and particular city spaces.6 With such commitments, ethnic Catholic advocates and writers established themselves as a distinct and influential wing of the decade’s wide-ranging neighborhoods movement. And yet the localist body of thought soldered together by these thinkers was always a heterogeneous composite, containing competing progressive and conservative strains. Along one vein ran visions of vibrantly pluralistic future cityscapes and empowered working- class cultures, all as potential foundation for cross-racial alliances against disinvestment and antiurban policymaking. In a different, rightward-tilting variant, adherents idealized an ordered neighborhood past rooted in a pre– civil rights age, while fi xing blame for that world’s demise on the liberal political victories and racial-justice efforts of the 1960s.7 These contrasting inclinations produced strikingly different stories about neighborhood meanings, but the raw materials for each could be mined from the same narrative bedrock of ethnic belongingness, faith, and heritage.

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Debating Urban Identity in the Shadow of Vatican II This conflicted language of identity and place would resonate through the secular political culture. It was ineluctably shaped, however, by an earlier and more specifically religious set of debates: those surrounding the American church’s bumpy midcentury journey from parochial separatism to triumphalist assimilation to internal crisis. To grasp the contours of 1970s Catholic claims over the neighborhood’s status, therefore, requires a brief excursion across a somewhat longer arc of American Catholic history, and particularly into the powerful cultural anxieties generated by the church’s postwar evolution. If a single tension can be said to define the US Catholic experience, contends the historian Charles Morris, it is that over assimilation, or over the proper extent and nature of the church’s engagement with the surrounding culture. For much of the twentieth century, the American institutional church had maintained what Morris calls a “prickly apartness,” distancing itself from the currents of modernity and secular US institutions.8 The postwar years, however, had witnessed a conspicuous upsurge of doubt over the utility of the self- enclosed religious and cultural domain that had been painstakingly constructed over preceding decades. In 1955, John Tracy Ellis, the distinguished Catholic University historian, famously helped set the terms of this debate. Catholic social and intellectual progress in the United States, Ellis charged, had been stunted by a “self-imposed ghetto mentality,” by a “pervading spirit of separatism.” Negative consequences ranged from an underrepresentation among the nation’s political elites to the lackluster caliber of Catholic colleges and intellectual life. While initially setting off a wave of controversy, Ellis’s “ghetto thesis” both encapsulated and shaped the concerns of a wide range of 1950s intellectuals. Seeking to erase images of parochialism, younger church liberals urged their compatriots to dive unreluctantly into the central currents of American life, rather than cloistering themselves in a realm of devotional piety and insular institutions.9 Paradoxically, this intellectual preoccupation with Catholic “ghettoism” took hold at a time in which the American Catholic subculture was already quickly dissolving. As the century progressed, the church had edged from the margins toward the very center of the nation’s political and cultural life, a phenomenon that gathered momentum in the 1940s and 1950s. The twin processes of suburbanization and rising

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affluence contributed to the steady dismantling of the symbolic walls that surrounded Catholics and their institutions. Following extensive World War II military participation and GI Bill aid, US Catholics had vaulted toward middle- class stability, achieving a rough parity with white Protestants in median income by the late 1950s. And at midcentury, across a range of popular and intellectual culture, Americanism and Catholicism were increasingly portrayed as not only compatible but complementary.10 The ascension of a Catholic to the US presidency in 1961 and Pope John XXIII’s opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962 seemed to indicate the culmination of this journey. Beginning a process of aggiornamento, or bringing the church up to date, Vatican II tilted the institutional church’s emphases from an absorption with the afterlife to the struggle for social justice in the temporal sphere. With its openness to ecumenism, embrace of vernacular liturgies, and determination to read the “signs of the times” from the surrounding world, the council appeared to ratify American liberals’ assimilative optimism.11 Influential writings of the early and mid-1960s frequently translated this spirit into narratives about urban space. The conclusion to Edwin O’Connor’s 1961 novel, The Edge of Sadness, perfectly anticipated such sentiments: O’Connor’s protagonist priest finally turns his back on the fondly remembered Irish American parish of his youth in order to embrace a “deeper and fuller and more meaningful” calling in a racially diverse and economically struggling urban neighborhood.12 Likewise, in the autobiographical sketches contained in Daniel Callahan’s landmark 1965 collection, Generation of the Third Eye, young Catholic intellectuals wrote of their own challenging but ultimately exhilarating emergence from the religious ghetto. Those Catholics who abandoned the local parish culture were undergoing a birthing process into the “real American society,” suggested contributor Donald Costello, exchanging a “warm, liquid existence” for the “complex light, temperature, and noise” outside.13 For American liberals, Vatican II seemed a powerful impetus for extending the energies of progressive change into a range of urban settings. By the late 1960s, however, this triumphal optimism had almost entirely dissipated. An interrelated set of upheavals coincided to produce a sense of tumult among Catholic leaders and parishioners. In opening the doors to change, Vatican II had bolstered and galvanized internal reformers, setting the stage for fierce ideological disputes over issues ranging from liturgy to sexuality to social activism. And this new conflict over behavior and ethics seemed to match a crisis in the broader 264

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culture. As religion writer Peter Steinfels observes, even as the countercultural, student, and antiwar movements threatened to undermine the patriotic sensibilities and conservative mores that Catholic leaders had assiduously sought to impress upon successive generations of parishioners, radical political activism by leftist clergy, youth, and lay groups now suggested a sharp rift between Catholicism and “Americanism.” To traditionalists, it seemed that the foundations of their faith and culture were suddenly under assault both within and without the church.14 At the same moment, all the symbols of the parish-based subculture appeared to be crumbling. Under pressure from suburban flight and urban-renewal demolition, city parishes shrank and parochial schools dwindled. Some bishops closed or consolidated the old national parishes, once founded to retain the loyalty of non-English-speaking immigrants.15 As vernacular-language liturgies replaced the Latin Tridentine mass, critics complained that Catholic distinctiveness was being eroded. “Singers and dancers appeared,” recounted Catholic scholar David O’Brien in 1972, “and guitars, brass ensembles and bongo drums sounded forth from beneath dusty organs in neo- Gothic churches.”16 The most divisive issues by far, however, centered on matters of race. During the mid- and late 1960s, as black city populations swelled and the civil rights movement turned northward, conflicts over neighborhood and parochial-school integration cascaded through heavily Catholic districts of the northern cities. Figures such as Monsignor Daniel Cantwell, a white Chicago integration activist, would insist that it was the diverse and innovative parish that conveyed a “sign of God’s saving love to all.” But to many whites, racially homogeneous neighborhoods had long seemed a bulwark of religious identity and parish stability. A split opened between racially progressive clergy—those who joined in demonstrations or integration drives— and parishioners incensed that religious leaders would undermine neighborhood homogeneity.17 Throughout this turbulence, notes historian Joseph Casino, “every new development, even the most mundane, seemed to add to the sense of crisis.”18 One in ten priests left the ministry between 1966 and 1972, including a large contingent of younger liberal clerics frustrated by their bishops’ sluggishness in putting the Vatican II reforms into practice. Among the laity, the rate of departures doubled over the same period, and the proportion of Catholics consistently attending mass plunged from 70 to 50 percent.19 “If [the Church] had stayed within its ghetto it would have survived for a time,” suggested Michael Harrington, a former Catholic and self- described “pious apostate,” in 1973. 265

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“But the moment that John, with that miraculous faith of his, propelled it into inhospitable regions, the end came rushing on.”20 This turmoil brought into relief the connections between parish life, ethnic identification, and neighborhood health. Within the US Catholic church, a growing network of white- ethnic activists and intellectuals responded with two critiques. One was a repudiation of the assimilationism of the postwar decades. In this view, the Catholic leadership had been a willing accomplice in what one cadre of Italian American activists dubbed the “cultural genocide” of the melting pot.21 If ethnicity, as religious scholar Martin Marty wrote in 1972, was “the skeleton of religion in America”— both a supporting framework and a shameful secret—then Catholic ethnic activists aimed to bring that skeleton out of the closet, to celebrate and reanimate the values of the immigrant church and its constituent cultural communities.22 The second, related, point was an adamant insistence upon the reciprocal relationship between religious faith and particular urban spaces. As Martin Hernady, a Toledo priest and neighborhood leader, warned in 1974, “If the Church loses its credibility in the neighborhood, then the neighborhood dies and vice versa.”23 In the age of the immigrant church, this link may have seemed self- evident. However, as ties loosened between American Catholicism and its erstwhile city strongholds, Catholic neighborhood advocates had for the first time to develop a self- conscious language of urban community, an explicit set of terms with which to defend localist values in the present moment. Beginning in the early 1960s, as historian John McGreevy relates, two Catholic “moral languages” competed for supremacy in the church: one “an older, highly structured communalism,” and the other “a new attempt to build a ‘community without walls.’” While liberal reformers drew on an individualist, rights-based language to push for a fresh inclusivity and sense of racial justice, local parishioners often questioned a church hierarchy that seemed determined to discard long-rooted Catholic neighborhoods, venerated ethnic parishes, and beloved devotional traditions.24 Increasingly, notes scholar William Dinges, clashes between these two moral systems took on a rhetoric of class struggle, with opponents of progressive reforms framing intrachurch struggles as a conflict between loyal parish folk of the ethnic community and a set of dictatorial elitists who had thoroughly infiltrated the church’s professional ranks.25 In this view, the “Catholic Revolution” was the misbegotten project of an “elite middle,” as the conservative Catholic historian James Hitchcock contended in 1971, a cabal of reformers who were “wholly unable to appreciate, or even to tolerate, the folk 266

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religion of their fellow Catholics.”26 Using much the same language, philosopher Frederick Wilhelmsen charged that the “educated prigs” of the church’s ascendant liberal wing were “ashamed of their parents and of the somewhat scrubby priests who ministered to their needs as children.”27 As these battle lines took shape, the ethnic Catholic neighborhood quickly came to serve as a central symbol for partisans of all persuasions. In one corner, commentators lined up to wave farewell to the Catholic urban village as a useful social form. Some did so with bittersweet nostalgia. Garry Wills, for instance, in his widely admired 1972 essay “Memories of a Catholic Boyhood,” would tenderly evoke the “fibry cocoon of rites and custom” that had enveloped the Michigan parish community of his youth. Ultimately, though, his account was one of insularity and parochialism leading to inevitable collapse.28 Less ambivalently, many Catholic liberals and leftists celebrated the passing of this older urban order, casting such localist allegiances as a roadblock to progress. “Secure people who have a choice do not deliberately live within ghetto walls,” admonished Catholic journalist John Cogley.29 Likewise, James Colaianni, a radical lay theologian and former Ramparts editor, saw the decline of the urban parish structure as an overdue escape from a stultifying provincialism. “Ghettoism suffocates,” he fervidly proclaimed in 1968. “Catholics as Catholics should gather together to celebrate the liturgy, and for little else.” In Colaianni’s estimation, a refreshing liberation was at hand, as advances in urban communications and transportation exploded parish-based geographic loyalties.30 These and similar evaluations riled white- ethnic advocates of the early 1970s, spurring them to defend the ethnic neighborhood as an embattled religious subculture, under fire from all sides. “May Processions to the Virgin Mary don’t turn on the turtle-necked, pepsi generation clergy,” protested Baltimore councilwoman and neighborhood organizer Barbara Mikulski, pointing out the discontent among dutiful white ethnics whose “favorite devotions” were “cavalierly dismissed.”31 But for many writers, it was the neighborhood’s very resistance to change, both social and religious, that represented its most compelling feature. In such accounts, the ethnic parish and community offered a welcome refuge from the disconcerting social upheavals sweeping through the church and nation. In a mixed-up world “where dotty nuns and deranged priests marry, denounce their country and mirthfully flaunt the law,” as former Nixon speechwriter Bill Gavin put it in 1975, the Catholic urban village seemed to stand as bulwark 267

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for an older set of values.32 Activist Giulio Miranda, for one, described his beloved Queens neighborhood of Ozone Park as a place of spiritual solace, one that sustained “a Catholicism happily unaltered by Father Berrigan and the dissident clergy.”33 In an authentic neighborhood, Father Andrew Greeley concurred, there is no nagging pressure to sign political petitions, no scorn for women who choose to be housewives, no obligation to mouth voguish ideological maxims.34 However, despite this resentment at clerical iconoclasm and liturgical novelties, Catholic urban thinkers swept up in the ethnic revival were not necessarily hidebound religious conservatives, bent on rolling back the spiritual reforms of the 1960s. In fact, elements of the social-justice principles outlined by Vatican II and subsequent papal pronouncements seemed to offer intellectual resources for Catholic partisans of the ethnic neighborhood. For one, Vatican II had modified the church’s longstanding prioritization of uniformity over particularism, the global over the local. In places, council documents adopted a more pluralistic language, proclaiming every person’s inherent “right to culture” and highlighting the role of “inculturation,” or the adaptation of the Christian message to local contexts and traditions.35 Pope John  XXIII had also placed renewed emphasis on the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity, a decentralizing principle that decisions should be taken at the lowest possible level, thereby fostering grassroots participation.36 And of special appeal to activist ethnic intellectuals were themes from Pope Paul VI’s 1971 apostolic letter, “A Call to Action,” which lamented the “new loneliness” of the contemporary metropolis. In city streets and communities, the pontiff declared, “new modes of neighborliness” must be created, so that the atomized urban dweller might “develop the needs of his personality.”37 To a number of early 1970s urban Catholic writers and organizers, these calls for inculturation, subsidiarity, and an invigorated neighborliness seemed to ratify the unspoken values underpinning ethnic neighborhood life. The goal for adherents, then, was to translate such ideals into the American urban context, drawing from the heritage of the immigrant church in order to forge a distinctively Catholic interpretation of the small-scale city community in the present moment. This loose-knit enterprise had two overlapping but distinct arenas of activity: one primarily intellectual and the other activist in nature. Two leading voices among the white- ethnic movement’s theorists were Michael Novak and Andrew Greeley, each of whom provided key early texts while attempting to codify a neighborhood theory attentive to the particularistic, turf- conscious sensibilities of Catholic city life. On 268

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the activist side, Monsignor Geno Baroni emerged from the civil rights milieu of the early 1960s. By late decade, however, he had begun spearheading organizing projects intended to address the anxieties of Catholic white- ethnic communities of the American metropolis. For all these figures, such neighborhood spaces offered both religious and social answers to burning questions of ghettoism and assimilation, ethnicity and faith, community and urban health. At stake in this defense of the city neighborhood, declared Baroni, was “the very essence of Church life and her institutional presence in the cities today.”38

Distilling a “Catholic Social Theory” Though their eventual prescriptions for a Catholic urban future were to differ markedly, Michael Novak and Andrew Greeley worked from a similar starting place. On one hand, each dedicated himself to rebutting a range of secular and theological voices that proclaimed the close-knit ethnic neighborhood a relic of a bygone age. On the other, both were spurred into a closer engagement with the contemporary cityscape out of their growing unease with a new liberal political consensus, one that allegedly had nothing but scorn for the working- class white communities that had once been the urban heart of the New Deal coalition. Indeed, the first task for Catholic chroniclers of ethnicity was making such neighborhoods visible at a moment in which they appeared mere historical castoffs. “Like archaeological remnants of some dead culture,” Michael Harrington had written of the old enclaves in The Other America, “they are being buried under the new metropolis.”39 By the early 1970s, numerous works of popular nonfiction predicted the imminent “demise of geography” from human experience. “We are breeding a new race of nomads,” proclaimed Alvin Toffler, the bestselling futurologist, in his 1970 book, Future Shock.40 Meanwhile, in cutting- edge Protestant theological circles of the 1960s, influential urban thinkers had often lauded the collapse of particularistic local ties, seeing in their demise a new metropolitan ethos of freedom and broadranging interconnectedness. “Churches that identify with local areas become exclusive and antimetropolitan,” pronounced Gibson Winter, a prominent Episcopalian ethicist, in 1961.41 Four years later, Harvey Cox, the radical American Baptist theologian, would famously praise the anonymous, mobile, and secular character of modern city life as a welcome “deliverance from the Law.” In offering liberation from the 269

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“cloying bondages of preurban society,” declared Cox in his landmark work The Secular City, the protean new technopolis more fully reflected “the terror and the delight of human freedom” that he found at the heart of the gospel message.42 Second, by the early 1970s, new ethnic advocates like Novak and Greeley were launching a vigorous offensive against those liberals and leftists who, to their minds, spoke with privileged condescension of the supporting pillars of the old white working- class neighborhoods, from the ethnic parish and trade union to the urban Democratic establishment and city patronage politics. Such figures felt stung by haughty paragons of liberalism such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who pronounced blue- collar whites to be “the most emotional and primitive champions of conservatism.”43 By fashionable New Journalists like Hunter S. Thompson, who ridiculed the old-line Democratic Party of big labor and urban machines as a “gang of senile leeches” controlled by “Old Guard, Boss-style hacks.”44 By highbrow newspapers such as the New York Times, whose editorial board disapprovingly warned of a resurgence in the “immigrant-borne virus of ethnic politics.”45 And even by a writer like Chicago columnist Mike Royko, a neighborhood man himself, whose searing 1971 biography of Richard Daley painted the mayor’s working- class Bridgeport community as xenophobic and paranoid.46 As Michael Novak charged in a 1973 speech, most political elites “think the neighborhood is racist, fascist, piggish, and if they go back to the neighborhood, you know it’s to try to sell reform or George McGovern.”47 Ironically, it was partly Novak’s own failed attempt at selling “reform or George McGovern” that inspired his 1972 book, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, a chief programmatic statement of the white- ethnic revival. Once an eloquent liberal, known for his zeal for the modernization agendas of the Kennedy administration and the Second Vatican Council, Novak had swung sharply to the left as the 1960s progressed, serving as faculty counselor to Stanford University antiwar groups and denouncing the United States as a “militarist, racist, and counterrevolutionary” society.48 However, it was Novak’s work on Democratic political campaigns of the 1960s and early 1970s that would help to spark his new ethnic pursuits. Though he despised Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, he was left uneasy by an apparent middle- class liberal contempt directed toward those candidates’ blue- collar Catholic supporters. From media figures and political analysts, Novak detected an unspoken “anti- Catholic bias,” an impression he found confirmed during his own employment as speechwriter for Sargent Shriver. In 270

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1970 and again in 1972, as Shriver labored to salvage the hemorrhaging white- ethnic vote for the Democrats, Novak toured a number of working- class neighborhoods across the urban North. Not only did white- ethnic enclaves still exist, Novak decided, but their residents were primarily traditional New Deal Democrats, not the stubborn reactionaries reviled by McGovernite partisans.49 As his sympathies for these communities increased, he developed a growing revulsion toward the self- dramatizing, accusatory style of privileged student leftists and antiwar protesters. At the same time, notes historian Patrick Allitt, Novak began to interpret his own Slavic heritage as the hidden source of his longstanding discomfort with Protestant and Jewish cultures.50 With The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, Novak later explained, he made it his ambition to call “into political and cultural self- consciousness” the ethnic working people whom the nation’s Anglo-Saxon establishment allegedly despised as tacky, reactionary, or thuggish.51 Underpinning the book’s claims is a vision of the nation as a mélange of distinct cultural subgroups, all kept in check by a dominant and domineering Anglo-Protestant “superculture.”52 In cultural style, this ascendant establishment differed radically from the diverse local worlds inhabited by ethnic Catholics, Jews, and Eastern Orthodox. Yet the WASP ruling class, Novak contended, had imposed upon the rest of America an “invisible religion” that demanded constant allegiance. Offspring of Enlightenment rationalism, this religion had as its central terms individualism and mobility, professionalization and specialization, reform and universalism— all values that cut against the local, particularistic experiences that white- ethnic communities cherished most.53 In a barrage of essentializing anecdotes, Novak contrasted vital ethnic cultures with the atomized, insipid intellectual and managerial classes. A WASP sits through a traffic jam in silent frustration while an Italian exudes waves of cathartic emotion. An overly assimilated ethnic New Yorker attends a routine business meeting instead of rushing to his father’s deathbed. The reassuring aroma of furniture polish wafts through ethnic homes; the Italians rejoice in their food and families; the Poles of the industrial North are rendered “sullen” and “nearly speechless” by their alienation.54 From “Americanization” programs of the past to the destruction of their beloved neighborhood habitats in the present, ethnics had suffered mightily under the entrenched cultural regime, Novak charged. Nonetheless, outside the bureaucracies, a tremendously vital diversity lived on in America, especially among the ethnics whom he dubbed 271

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the “network people.” Despite the individualist bent of the national invisible religion, only a small elite—“the mobile ones, the swinging atoms”—truly had no neighborhood. Most Americans, in fact, were deeply rooted among friends, relatives, and particular places. To the “network people,” Novak claimed, the neighborhood was far more than a patch of real estate; their very being was bound up in local landmarks, neighbors, timeworn customs and byways. “It is not that the network people are attached to such things,” Novak declared. “They are such things.” This earthy, unpretentious neighborhood culture, for Novak, was both opposite to and antidote for the real threat to American society: “homogenization, a coercive sameness, a dreary standardization.”55 The dichotomies sketched out in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics— subcultures versus the superculture, network people versus the mobile elite— contributed to a new symbolic language for urban politics. Over the succeeding decade, the white- ethnic movement’s scholars and activists would frequently present cities as polarized between these two competing ethics, while casting the fate of aging neighborhoods as dependent upon that struggle’s outcome. Detroit scholar Otto Feinstein, for instance, indicted public schools for training children “not to depend on the support of the family or neighborhood,” thereby fueling intergenerational conflict.56 For Newark native Richard Krickus, a reformist, professionalized “New Machine” had usurped the role that the personalized, turf- conscious “Old Machine” had once played in urban politics, thus transferring power from the ground level upward.57 Similarly, Barbara Mikulski illustrated the sterility of contemporary urban planning in ethnic terms by noting its failure to “leave room for a boccie ball” in neighborhood redevelopment schemes. “Those guys wouldn’t even know what a boccie ball is,” she said of modish city planners. “They probably think it’s a new rock band.”58 Critics have often characterized Novak’s writings as doggedly antiutopian.59 This is a misreading. To the contrary, in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, Novak offered an intensely utopian vision for a future world based in the elemental neighborhood values that he ascribed to the “network people” of ethnic America. Here, Novak called for a “revolution in consciousness,” a “shattering of the monoculture,” a “turn toward the organic networks of communal life.” Sketching the contours of the society such a revolution might produce, Novak listed the many functions that, over the past century, had been removed from the neighborhood in the name of efficiency: shopping, eating, schooling, birth, illness, death. What if these activities could be reclaimed 272

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from the managers and technocrats by local communities? In Novak’s imagined world, neighborhood schools would be run by parents and friends. The sick would be treated in local clinics. The elderly would die with dignity at home. A new and better feminist movement would unite the most progressive and the most conservative women in order to seize “control of life back from the hands of experts.”60 In this and subsequent works, Novak’s favored register was a romantic antimodernism, one pulsing with admiration for what Novak called the “pagan quality” of eastern and southern European Catholicism: “lusty, natural, enchanted with the earth.”61 This quasi-mystical approach to Catholic identity soon drew challenges, however— and not only from Novak’s former allies on the left, but also from within Catholic ethnic studies circles. For one, notes historian Eugene McCarraher, while Novak did emphasize the Catholicism of white ethnics, he gradually came to see this religious factor “more as a constitutive element of ethnic identity than as an identity in its own right.”62 For another, to detractors such as Andrew Greeley, Novak had thoroughly exoticized urban ethnic communities, painting them as seething with an almost primeval resentment, radicalism, and anger.63 The “phony liberals” had enshrined Novak as chief ethnic spokesperson, Greeley charged, precisely because his descriptions conveniently reinforced their clichés about intolerant, small-minded white- ethnic neighborhoods. Ethnic militancy was merely a “fiction of the liberal imagination,” Greeley maintained. Catholic ethnics didn’t feel particularly oppressed: despite lingering bigotry at the highest occupational levels, they had achieved social and economic success in America.64 Over the course of the 1970s, Novak would drift rightward, eventually giving full-throated support to Ronald Reagan while establishing himself as a prominent neoconservative commentator. Indeed, in retrospect, Novak’s evocations of an organic neighborhood life can seem but an elaborate attempt to mediate between his fading leftist class politics and his incipient social conservatism. Greeley, by contrast, never abandoned his fealty to the New Deal Democratic tradition, despite his abiding distaste for the New Left. His voluminous neighborhood writings— crafted over a prolific career as a priest, columnist, theologian, sociologist, and novelist—framed the Catholic urban village not as an antimodern and oppositional space, coursing with primal energies and authentic emotions, but rather as an eminently sensible approach to modern living. Far more than Novak’s, Greeley’s output functioned as an explicit form of religious critique. Much of its interest, in fact, derives from the ways in which Greeley enlists the neigh273

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borhood as a figure for working through his growing estrangement from the institutional church. This project becomes more intelligible when viewed in light of the author’s own intellectual evolution. A controversialist within the church, Greeley frequently attracted attention for his condemnations of both US Catholicism’s radical social-justice wing and a religious hierarchy that he dubbed “morally, intellectually and religiously bankrupt.”65 The grandson of Irish immigrants, Greeley had been born in 1928 and raised in an inner-ring Chicago suburb. While serving at a middle- class parish in the Beverly Hills neighborhood, he earned a sociology doctorate at the University of Chicago, before taking up a fulltime position at the university’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC), designing and analyzing large-scale surveys. There, Greeley produced a steady stream of works on issues ranging from Catholic education to American political coalitions.66 As the 1960s wore on, these projects placed him near the center of the church’s internecine disputes. His conclusions frequently bumped up against cherished maxims of both the Left and the Right. Early on, for example, he controversially attacked the “ghetto” thesis, upbraiding liberal church intellectuals for their self-pitying “pose of alienation” toward the supposedly benighted Catholic multitudes.67 Later, he would vex the hierarchy by reporting the intense sense of betrayal that Pope Paul VI’s restrictive 1968 birth- control encyclical had generated among ordinary parishioners.68 At the close of Vatican II, Greeley had optimistically predicted that the church was on the cusp of its “greatest epoch.”69 But, within a few years, his investigations began to convince him that the US church was ripping itself apart. As Greeley gloomily concluded in a 1972 article entitled “The End of American Catholicism?,” the impressive loyalty generated by the immigrant church had all but disappeared, and Catholic leaders themselves bore responsibility.70 Already by the mid-1960s, though, Greeley had developed a fascination with ethnicity. What had seemed a basic element of daily life in Chicago had become entirely invisible to academia and church authorities, he felt. When the Ford Foundation offered funding to establish an ethnic studies center, Greeley jumped at the opportunity: the Center for the Study of American Pluralism was founded as a NORC subunit, under Greeley’s direction, in 1971.71 That same year, Greeley released one of the white- ethnic revival’s key early texts: Why Can’t They Be Like Us? There was a cruel irony, he contended here, in the continued pressures felt by white ethnics to assimilate, even as black and Latino/a 274

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populations were assertively proclaiming their group distinctiveness. Still, insisted Greeley, it was impossible to understand American Catholicism without reference to ethnic cultures and backgrounds: “The overwhelming majority of the Catholic population still has one foot in the world of the immigrant ghetto.”72 This shift into ethnic studies allowed Greeley to sidestep battles that consumed the church through the 1970s. After Vatican II pushed aside so many conventions and certitudes, he later wrote, some Catholics had sought out new structures of meaning in liberation theology and radical social activism, while others fought a rearguard action against implementation of the conciliar reforms. But, in doing so, both sides had turned away from what was best and most authentic in the US Catholic tradition. As disputes raged over issues such as female and married priests, gay rights, birth control, racial justice, and antimilitarism, the institutional church was becoming ever more irrelevant to its masses of everyday parishioners. Suffering from a “profound disillusionment” with his survey research for the church, Greeley decided that “by studying ethnicity one could study American Catholic life and say the hell with the hierarchy.” With this approach, he aimed to highlight instead “the religion of experience, symbol and story”— a faith, he now insisted, that was rooted in the “social ethic of the neighborhood.”73 In fact, for Greeley, the neighborhood offered a handy metaphor for understanding the increasingly bifurcated nature of American Catholicism. In contrast to prevailing images of a church rent between liberal and conservative, radical and reactionary, Greeley insisted that the real conflict was that between the “neighborhood” and the “downtown.” In this model, the “neighborhood” represented “the church of the grass roots, the church on the periphery,” while the “downtown” represented the church of officialdom and hierarchy, the bishops and papacy, and the “ideologues of both the left and the right.” After the end of Vatican II and the disputed 1968 contraception encyclical, these two churches had floated irreconcilably apart. Whether it was rigidly conservative dictates on sexuality or guilt-inducing resolutions on redistributive justice, the neighborhood church no longer accepted the downtown church’s pronouncements on major questions of personal and social ethics. “Downtown of the right or the left has nothing more to say to the neighborhoods,” Greeley declared. “People in the neighborhoods have discovered that there are many different ways of being Catholic besides the ‘official’ way.”74 It was as a partisan, then, for the “neighborhood” church that Greeley framed his work on ethnicity. Over the course of the 1970s, his 275

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NORC research team amassed mountains of survey data on the topic, publishing summaries that seemed to contradict an ingrained popular image of white ethnics as hawkish, bigoted, and predominantly bluecollar, and of ethnic subcultures themselves as the dying gasp of an antiquated past. In fact, Greeley’s team contended, European ethnics were not particularly “alienated” from the mainstream, and they were neither more racially prejudiced nor more supportive of the Vietnam War than were white Americans in general. Moreover, ethnic Catholics had reached the national average in education, professional standing, and household earnings, with some subsets markedly exceeding it.75 Yes, they were different than other Americans, Greeley argued, but what made them different was a distinctively Catholic form of “nonideological localism”: a communal ethic centered on the neighborhood.76 In a stream of mid-1970s works—The Communal Catholic, Neighborhood, No Bigger Than Necessary, and others—Greeley summarized a decade’s worth of criticism, directed largely at a Catholic intelligentsia that either condemned neighborhood attachments as “abysmally particularistic and regressive” or sanguinely proclaimed that “the age of the neighborhood is over.” Particularism—that gritty affection for turf, neighborhood, and custom—was vastly preferable to the “bland, empty, dull universalism” of haranguing church intellectuals, he proclaimed. Though the cacophony from avant-garde theologians or reactionary bishops threatened to drown it out, a grassroots faith lived on in the neighborhoods of urban America, serving as the church’s one remaining source of vitality.77 In the end, Greeley maintained, Catholics had a responsibility to defend this neighborhood ethic, not only to renew a troubled church but also to offer alternatives to city dwellers of all creeds. If elite policymakers failed to give neighborhood claims their proper due, he maintained, it was partly because no Catholic social analyst had spoken persuasively enough about them. However, by examining ethno-religious experience at the street level, a cohesive “Catholic social theory” could be uncovered, distinct from Catholic theology or ecclesiology. In the lives of the parish priest embedded in his community, the precinct captain keeping close tabs on voters’ needs, or the local union chieftain dispensing everyday favors, one could discern a “well-integrated ideological system,” based on an intuitive embrace of the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity. This instinctive preference for “the informal, the particular, the local,” Greeley suggested, offered a religious counterpart to E. F. Schumacher’s oft- quoted dictum that “small is beautiful.”78 Despite their sharp differences, both Novak and Greeley repurposed 276

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the broad concept of neighborhood to stand in for a very specific set of social relationships forged in the urban-industrial crucible: the immigrant church, the parish community, the ethnic village, the Roosevelt coalition. While insisting on the continuing relevance of those formations, their writings are notable, too, for what they neglect to address: the deep contradictions embedded in that older neighborhood order. Suppressed in such accounts are the internal cultural forces—the urge for going, the imperatives of economic mobility, the conflicted sentiments toward the city—that had helped, as much as any outside adversary, to break apart the rooted ethnic village. As literary scholar Carlo Rotella points out, a wily ironist such as the Chicago columnist Mike Royko would rely on just this contradiction to undercut the multiplying panegyrics to the prewar working- class neighborhood. This had been a world, Royko slyly wrote in 1971, inhabited by people who “stayed in their own neighborhood, loving it, enjoying the closeness, the friendliness, the familiarity, and trying to save enough money to get out.”79 As Royko recognized, the predilections of many inhabitants themselves had buttressed the powerful economic incentives to abandon the old neighborhood. Paradoxically, it was many of the same forces that had worked to unmake older neighborhood cultures that gave 1970s ethnic revival writings their peculiar cultural allure. Suburbanization, mass culture, white- ethnic social incorporation, rising affluence: the new metropolitan landscape created by those factors, Rotella explains, “inspired nostalgia for a nearly lost tradition of ethnic authenticity, the sacred ground of which was the opposite of the suburb—the old neighborhood.”80 This is why, in the output of figures like Novak and Greeley, the neighborhood becomes as much a political and religious trope as a physical place. Uniquely, that figure offered a rhetorical terrain on which to grapple with the wide-ranging cultural consequences of an older urban order’s ongoing dissolution.

New Catholic Networks for Neighborhood Advocacy With their exaltations of the “network people” and the localist “Catholic social ethic,” Novak and Greeley worked to distill and popularize a distinctive vocabulary for neighborhood lifeways. It was the priest Geno Baroni, though, who took the lead in promoting those principles on the ground. The white- ethnic cause, he announced at a 1970 conference, was “wonderfully parallel to where blacks were a few years 277

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ago—my hunch is that this is going to move faster.”81 Seeking to marshal church resources toward a reinvigoration of ethnic Catholic neighborhood spaces, Baroni framed his efforts as a legitimate and necessary counterpart to the civil rights and Black Power movements. Baroni was certainly not alone in drawing such highly suspect analogies: a “posture of competition through emulation,” notes anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo, characterized the white- ethnic revival’s relationship to its black freedom movement precursors.82 In Baroni’s case, however, it also indicated something more specific about his own political journey. Unlike Greeley’s or Novak’s, his early career had been defined not by debates within academia, but rather by direct participation in the 1960s civil rights and antipoverty struggles. The Pennsylvania-born son of an Italian immigrant coal miner, Baroni had moved to the nation’s capital in 1960, assigned to the Washington archdiocese’s preeminent African American church, St. Augustine’s. Taking keen interest in his new neighborhood’s problems—poverty, high rents, drugs, crime—he soon concluded that the city itself was “run like a plantation.” With support from his racially progressive archbishop, Patrick O’Boyle, Baroni hurled himself into campaigns for urban social justice: opening a community center in a disused convent, developing archdiocesan low-income housing programs, and joining demonstrations against punitive federal rules for welfare recipients. He also participated in several of the decade’s landmark civil rights actions, including the historic Selma marches of 1965. As an activist and archdiocesan urban-affairs representative, Baroni quickly acquired a national profile. Meanwhile, the local Black Power organizer Chuck Stone dubbed him one of the city’s “few relevant white men.”83 “I had high hopes in the early 1960s,” Baroni later recalled, describing his jubilance at the Catholic church’s growing commitment to racial equality and antipoverty work.84 His career, though, took a sharp turn in 1968. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., days of civil disorder devastated his struggling neighborhood. Baroni was overwhelmed by dismay, one biographer reports, and he sank into depression. His labors battling violence and anger seemed to have accomplished nothing.85 Yet as racial polarization in his adopted city mounted, Baroni started to reevaluate the causes of the urban crisis. “I began to react when my friends were called hard hats, dumdums, pigs,” he remarked. “I wasn’t comfortable with the liberals and those in the media who ridiculed these people. . . . They were putting down my own family!”86 At the same time, recent stirrings of an invigorated pride by European ethnics, Baroni began to believe, signaled a “quiet 278

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revolution of consciousness,” one that portended a more pluralistic and humane future for American urban life.87 As a nationally visible leader in Catholic urban-affairs circles, Baroni already had a prominent platform from which to convey his modified message. With their April 1968 statement on the “national race crisis” in American cities, the US bishops had established an urban-issues task force, and Baroni was hired as program director.88 Using this position to convene several widely noted conferences of white-ethnic leaders, Baroni soon attracted notice as a “chief strategist for the nascent ethnic movement,” in Newsweek’s description.89 His new way of thinking became evident in the US Catholic Conference’s Labor Day Statement of 1970, a document Baroni coauthored with the respected labor activist Monsignor George Higgins. One of the first church proclamations to postulate an ethnic dimension to recent urban upheavals, the statement charged that the Catholic establishment, by viewing social divisions only in black and white, had invited “disastrous results” in its urban work. Accusing Americans of scapegoating loyal white- ethnic communities for racial turmoil, Baroni and Higgins implored church leaders to provide economic and cultural forms of assistance for the “largely Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in our cities.”90 Through a multitude of new organizational vehicles, Baroni himself quickly set about this task, all the while anchoring his philosophy in a profoundly localist worldview. “People don’t live in cities. They live in neighborhoods,” he often insisted. “Neighborhoods are the building blocks of cities.”91 His most sustained intervention came with the 1970 inception of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs (NCUEA), one of the decade’s leading networks for community organizing and national lobbying on neighborhood issues, created with support from the US Catholic Conference and the Ford Foundation. To NCUEA leaders, ethnic-based neighborhood organizations could help address an urban economic crisis that, by corroding the material fabric of white workingclass districts, fueled political alienation and short-circuited any potential for interracial alliances. Focusing particularly on Catholic-heavy areas of the urban Midwest and Northeast, the body launched a miscellany of programs: funding existing neighborhood groups and establishing new ones, producing organizing handbooks and treatises on neighborhood living, lending seasoned activists to local campaigns, and seeking to identify “convergent issues” on which white-ethnic groups could forge coalitions with their African American and Latino/a counterparts.92 These activities soon earned Baroni a reputation as a “pesky gad279

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fly,” in the New York Times’s phrase, to the American city’s redlining financial institutions and freeway-planning bureaucrats.93 In this, Baroni and his allies joined scores of other urban organizers doing similar work. More striking, though, is the increasingly central role that narratives about culture came to play in their diagnoses of the nation’s urban ills. In this analysis, the most troubling issues confronting the city’s white Catholic working and lower-middle classes weren’t economic or political in nature; rather, they were cultural and religious.94 Yes, Baroni granted, Catholic white- ethnic neighborhoods did face snowballing economic challenges, ranging from lending disparities and decrepit public services to job flight and rising property taxes— all of which called for vigorous organizing against the mortgage industry, avaricious real- estate interests, and insensitive public officials. That set of hardships, however, had come just as the cultural and religious resources that would have allowed for an effective response were evaporating. And for this predicament, he fi xed blame squarely on the Catholic church’s religious leadership. During the great postwar cultural assimilation, the church had “left the ghetto in American cultural and political life,” abandoning its ethnic urban parishioners while funneling its resources to the suburbs. Back in the cities, the religious changes of the 1960s had only weakened “the traditional bonds that held these neighborhoods together”: Catholicism’s “cultic quality” had been lost; prized liturgical practices were consigned to the dustbin; the church no longer offered a “self- enclosed universe.”95 Thus, just when working- class ethnic parishes were encountering a jarring “encroachment of hitherto alien values,” Baroni argued, they could no longer rely on the supportive scaffolding of older folkways and religious networks. Nonetheless, he insisted, the forms of identity embedded in particular urban spaces offered tools for ameliorating this condition. It was now necessary “to reintegrate the sacerdotal and civic life of the old working- class neighborhoods.” With these links reestablished, Catholic ethnic urbanites would become more secure in their own identities, even as the American city became home to a flowering of neighborhood-level diversity.96 The task, then, was to reanimate the localist values under fire from what Novak had identified as the rationalist “superculture.” And while this battle played out in campaigns over lending practices, freeway projects, and redevelopment, it was also waged in the realm of symbols and definitions, representation and meaning. Indeed, for figures like Baroni, Novak, and Mikulski, ethnic culture was not merely a set of gaudy ornaments, hanging off the branches of the urban community’s 280

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everyday social life. Instead, it provided powerful weapons in the struggle for neighborhood empowerment. Detroit ethnic studies scholar Thaddeus Radzialowski neatly summarized this case in an article written for the NCUEA. During the 1960s, he explained, neighborhood groups had discovered that they had to obtain influence within the municipal power structure in order to survive. But, during the succeeding decade, they had also grasped that empowerment required “controlling the language of power.” Officials and planners had their own language, one that was “antithetical to the community, family, church and neighborhood.” However, neighborhood residents were becoming increasingly cognizant of their own unique local languages. “Songs, dances, customs, and history,” insisted Radzialowski, offered “shared meanings and values that allowed people to act together.” Thus, the main challenge for neighborhood advocates was to “capture the cultural sphere,” to force “the downtown world to see the universe in the same terms as the neighborhood does.”97 Baroni’s NCUEA was not the creator of this new neighborhood militancy. Nonetheless, as a clearing house and intellectual hub, the organization worked to provide narrative coherence to local efforts scattered across the nation. And as this thrust gathered momentum, it generated fresh ranks of folk heroes, defined by their self- conscious reliance on ethnic symbols to galvanize campaigns for neighborhood survival. Many of these champions were scrappy, aggressive parish priests, men who faced down bulldozers or battled municipal bureaucracies to a standstill. In cultural style, such figures couldn’t differ more from either the avuncular Hollywood clerics of the assimilationist 1950s or crusading 1960s leftists of the Daniel Berrigan mold. Two prototypical examples were Fathers Sal Polizzi of St. Louis and Martin Hernady of Toledo, both of whom ascended to leadership positions in Baroni’s expanding network of institutions. Each man’s efforts exemplified the forms of neighborhood consciousness that NCUEA founders hoped to rouse on a national scale. As pastor of the St. Ambrose parish in St. Louis’s blue-collar Hill neighborhood, Sal Polizzi had acquired a local reputation as the city’s “guerrilla priest.” The Hill had long been populated almost entirely by descendants of the city’s early Italian immigrants. But, by the mid1960s, a series of expressway schemes, corporate polluters, and unwanted commercial developments had thrown the community’s fate into question. With the old ways of life under threat, Polizzi mobilized his parish to action. When the city’s beleaguered mayor implored the pugnacious priest to keep his nose out of such temporal affairs, Polizzi 281

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shot back, “If the blacks can march, so can we.” As victories piled up, rehabilitation work and local cohesion increased. The Hill’s biggest challenge came in 1971, when residents learned that a new freeway would bisect the neighborhood. “They’re going to have to put me under with a bulldozer before I give up the fight,” Polizzi vowed to one reporter. With help from former Cardinals baseball catcher Joe Garagiola, who had grown up in the Hill, residents took their case to Washington and won a long- denied pedestrian overpass to link the community’s two segments. Bells at St. Ambrose rang out in celebration. The battle, Polizzi wrote, was “not a fight for brick and mortar,” but rather “a struggle to make other people aware of their rights.”98 What Polizzi did with the Italians of the Hill, Martin Hernady sought to accomplish for the Hungarians of east Toledo’s working-class Birmingham neighborhood. Hernady’s vision, he frequently insisted, was “a community where people can walk to church,” where “people know each other on a first-name basis.” Through the 1970s, he worked to cultivate such a community while serving at Toledo’s Church of St. Stephen King of Hungary. In 1974, Hernady successfully organized residents against the closure of a local branch library and, shortly thereafter, in opposition to a planned expressway feeder. These battles infused the neighborhood with a renewed pride in its national heritage, with participants adopting “Hungary Power” as their slogan. And alongside this political work came a surge of interest in a dying local tradition, a Hungarian nativity folk pageant that had been performed through Birmingham’s streets, homes, and taverns since the late nineteenth century. Soon, the National Endowment for the Arts funded a documentary film about the play, and Hernady’s activism elevated him to prominence in the national neighborhoods movement. “I speak for the people of the neighborhoods,” he proclaimed in 1977, those urbanites who steadfastly remained in “the place of their heritage, the place of their roots.”99 Stories such as these became the common currency of a movement, providing fodder for a plethora of newsletters and pamphlets. Combative and assertive, figures like Polizzi and Hernady melded contemporary protest tactics with potent symbols of religious and community heritage. And, over the decade, news reports overflowed with accounts of analogous exploits: Italians and Poles blocking traffic on the Brooklyn- Queens expressway to halt the demolition of their homes; Polish organizers on Buffalo’s East Side highlighting polka music as a potential tool for rallying their neighborhoods; Hamtramck activists persuading their school board to ground history lessons in the urban immigrant experience.100 Meanwhile, images of the hardnosed 282

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city priest struggling to save his community eventually spun through various short-lived television incarnations—from the Norman Lear sitcom In the Beginning (1978), in which a crusty Irish cleric operates a storefront mission, to Hell Town (1985), starring Robert Blake as an excon-turned-priest in crime-plagued East Los Angeles.101 Through the NCUEA and other groups, Baroni’s network of affiliates focused on existing urban communities. However, Baroni also felt that the neighborhood had lessons to offer for those who had long since left its confines. With the postwar decline in ethnic self-affiliation, he lamented, many Catholics were experiencing a full-fledged identity crisis.102 Those fears took on particular urgency in light of a dramatic decline in religious observance among the young. In fact, a number of observers pointed out that the American church, in its post–Vatican II incarnation, had jettisoned many of its distinctly Catholic lifeways and modes of worship at just the moment in which a youth generation, influenced by the counterculture, was seeking out new and more intense experiences of community. As sociologist Robert Bellah remarked in 1976, “The Catholic church finally decided to recognize the value of the modern world just when American young people were beginning to find it valueless.”103 Historian James Hitchcock, in 1971, complained of a similar contradiction: even as the secular Left had begun to extol urban ethnic enclaves as oases of warmth and authenticity, he charged, Catholicism’s liberal intellectuals still strove to escape the ghetto.104 If young people swept up in the counterculture sought an escape from a suburban world of “blanched, bloodless, cardboard automatons,” as San Francisco Diggers founder Emmett Grogan phrased it in 1972, then Baroni’s fellow believers contended that the grassroots faith of the urban village could fill this gap.105 “The kids walking the streets of Georgetown are really looking for the Hill,” Baroni remarked of Washington’s hippies, during a visit to Father Sal Polizzi’s St. Louis neighborhood.106 The communal textures of ethnic neighborhood Catholicism seemed to offer a potent alternative, embodying that “richer life of the senses, the instincts, the memory” which, in Michael Novak’s estimation, was the ultimate object of the countercultural quest.107 By the mid-1970s, the NCUEA’s offshoot organization for parish priests was claiming that those youths with “beads, beards, turbans or shaved heads, lost in transcendental meditation or a Hare Krishna chant” were seeking out qualities once found in the Catholic church. In this view, the soul-nourishing properties of reinvigorated neighborhood cultures could recapture for the church the loyalties of a generation drifting from its spiritual moorings.108 283

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In all these arenas, NCUEA affiliates imagined fortified neighborhood relationships as key to a reenergized church and an invigorated American city. At the same time, such approaches sparked deep suspicions and disagreements— both from others engaged in similar work, and also from substantial portions of the civil rights community. In the former case, NCUEA leaders repeatedly tangled with their counterparts at the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which had launched its own ethnicity-based organizing projects as part of an urban “depolarization” strategy, meant to blunt antiliberal backlash among blue- collar whites. To Baroni and his allies, such initiatives violated principles of community control and self- determination. For a “non- Catholic group to study, research, train, or explain” Catholic neighborhood dwellers, he angrily told AJC official Irving Levine, smacked of “intellectual elitism.”109 Far more significant, however, were tensions over racial justice and civil rights. The decade’s broader white- ethnic identity movement had generated a profound and justified unease among progressives concerned that recent progress in the realms of integration and individual rights might be rolled back. As skeptics accurately noted, central to the revivalist impulse—in both its leftward- and rightward-leaning variants—was a narrative of white-ethnic racial innocence: a denial of culpability in or benefit from the existence of US racial hierarchies, oftentimes accompanied by avowals that recent ameliorative measures had unfairly burdened ethnics.110 The post-1960s “romanticization of ethnicity,” observes historian Linda Kerber, was “energized in part as a backlash against black people’s claims for equity and for power.”111 Though ostensibly aimed at redefining the nation as a pluralistic mosaic of coequal cultures, the new ethnic upsurge struck many 1970s critics as an avenue for chipping away at government social-welfare programs and established civil rights measures. As Richard Sennett put it, the idealization of ethnic communalism had become “an ideological weapon to fight reforms like racial integration”; for Ralph Ellison, it was a dangerous form of “blood magic and blood thinking”; to Orlando Patterson, it represented a reactionary “affirmation of the virtues of segregated living.”112 And, indeed, lobby groups such as Michael Novak’s new Ethnic Millions Political Action Committee (EMPAC) quickly beat a path to the political right. Dedicating itself to “a politics of family and neighborhood,” EMPAC at its 1974 founding had proclaimed a determination to usher in a new era of progressive urban populism and to foster alliances with African American and Latino/a community groups. However, No284

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vak’s organization spent little energy attacking the powerful economic interests that threatened urban neighborhoods, instead focusing its fire on “the quota system,” “reverse discrimination,” a “politics that praises only militants,” and the unjust favors granted to “‘legitimate’ minorities.”113 Meanwhile, campaigns by Baroni’s allies were sometimes appropriated even by unreconstructed segregationists. In a crassly misleading commentary, for instance, the conservative radio broadcaster Paul Harvey seized on Father Polizzi’s freeway battle in St. Louis as evidence that the legal push for racial integration “collides with human nature.” By fighting for its physical integrity, Harvey contended, Polizzi’s neighborhood of “superb pasta, Catholic persuasion and family fidelity” had demonstrated that “Americans of whatever ethnic origin prefer to segregate themselves.”114 In this context, Baroni’s commitments alienated many of his 1960s civil rights associates. Early on, Robert C. Chapman, a black official with the National Council of Churches, accused the US Catholic Conference of working to sustain the “sagging morale of the ‘America-LoveIt- Or-Leave-It’ crowd of near fascists.”115 Baroni had already broken with his Washington circle of activist clerics by declining to endorse their dissent to the pope’s anti-birth- control edict; by the early 1970s, he would recount, his white- ethnic focus left his liberal colleagues “hostile and more than cynical.” Across the decade, he faced charges that he was undermining his own 1960s civil rights legacy.116 Continually, Baroni affirmed his dedication to a cross-racial politics of neighborhood coalition-building, intended as a competitor to white urban racial resentments. Ultimately, though, the arc of his career traced an intractable dilemma: how to square his vision of a city of neighborhoods each defined chiefly by its own ethnic integrity, cohesion, and identity with the integrationist, open-housing ideals espoused by progressives in a post– civil rights urban age.

Rival Catholic Futures in Detroit If Vatican II opened a period of upheaval in the American Catholic church, this tumult in many ways peaked with the church’s landmark Call to Action assembly, held in Detroit in October 1976. Inspired by Pope Paul VI’s apostolic letter of the same name, the gathering was the capstone of a two-year project, set in motion by the US bishops as a way to commemorate the nation’s bicentennial while sparking more active parishioner involvement. Focusing on “justice issues,” the Call 285

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to Action preparatory process signaled the first sustained attempt to democratize church governance. Unexpectedly, events on the Detroit convention floor would provide a short-lived triumph for the church’s left-leaning dissidents, a turn which focused and intensified rifts in the postconciliar US church.117 Throughout, neighborhood activists strained to push their claims toward the heart of the deliberations, making the assembly a useful place to look in assessing the reach of their localist religious agenda. By the start of the conference preparations, white- ethnic advocates such as Michael Novak and Geno Baroni had accumulated a great deal of influence within the church’s formal power structure. To leaders at the NCUEA and affiliated groups, the national churchwide consultation process promised by Call to Action offered a singular opportunity to reorient the religious leadership toward ethnic pluralism and neighborhood survival.118 Early on, Novak took the lead. One member of the bishops’ bicentennial committee had proposed a program modeled after the 1968 Medellín conference in Colombia, at which the Latin American bishops had adopted themes from the emergent liberationtheology movement. Novak, also a committee member, intervened. The Call to Action agenda, he argued, should focus not on social issues, but rather on “social organisms” such as family, neighborhood, and ethnic group, and the agenda ought to bubble up from the parish level rather than being prescribed from above. These suggestions won out.119 In its final form, the process included intensive parish discussions of laypeople’s priorities—“the old town-meeting concept in the church,” as one bishop proclaimed— along with seven “justice hearings” around the country, where experts and ordinary people would testify on how the church might combat social inequities.120 Taken together, these deliberations would offer guideposts to the Detroit conference delegates as they crafted final recommendations to the hierarchy about the church’s future direction. All through the nationwide consultations, the NCUEA energetically worked to keep neighborhood and ethnic issues at the fore. Early on, the group circulated a discussion paper asking whether there might be “a theology of place, of neighborhood, implicit in the role of the Church in the world.”121 This question infused the local parish dialogues. Working under Monsignor Jack Egan of Chicago, Geno Baroni played a central role in organizing these meetings, at which Catholic laypeople around the country deliberated on eight preselected “justice themes.”122 With neighborhood as one of these topics, the NCUEA prepared parish study materials on the city community’s role in Catho286

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lic life. These discussion guides promoted a populist interpretation of the American church as an entity defined by its most lowly parishioners, and especially those European migrants who had crammed into the early century city. Local neighborhood spaces had once helped newcomers acclimate to an “alien, rapacious urban life,” parishioners learned, and even today they served as central institutions for “transmitting moral and cultural values.” More recently, though, ethnic communities had been forced to shoulder “an undue share of the burden” imposed by civil rights remedies. The study handbook ominously concluded that the decline of older Catholic neighborhoods would mean the destruction of ethnic pluralism in the United States.123 More than eight hundred thousand Catholics participated in the local meetings; on parishioners’ feedback sheets, neighborhood issues topped the list of suggested church priorities. Meanwhile, neighborhood writers and activists used one of the bishops’ seven justice hearings to drive home these points, assembling in Newark to testify about the church’s alleged insensitivity to its ethnic parishioners’ urban traditions and struggles.124 At the culminating convocation, 1,340 lay delegates, clergy, and church professionals filed into Detroit’s Cobo Hall to vote on scores of resolutions dealing with the church’s future. Baroni and his colleagues hoped that the momentum from the parish-level preparatory process would set the stage for a powerful statement on ethnic pluralism and neighborhood life. Their agenda, however, had to compete for oxygen with those from many other church advocacy groups. Progressive reformers dominated the convention votes, approving liberalizing planks on issues ranging from contraception, women’s ordination, divorce, and homosexuality to nuclear disarmament, affirmative action, and Third World anticolonial struggles. These debates grabbed the lion’s share of attention. Even so, white- ethnic advocates did succeed in shepherding through strong declarations on the church’s role in the neighborhood. Liturgies ought to be transformed into “celebrations of community life,” delegates resolved, and the parish must serve as “rallying point” for community- organizing projects. Dioceses should seek out ethnic liturgical materials and support their ethnic national parishes, while the church as a whole must reject the melting-pot creed and affirm the neighborhood as a “valid concept for urban and rural living.”125 The degree to which this localist focus could be folded into a document crafted primarily by the church’s liberal social-justice wing demonstrates the headway that Catholic neighborhood advocates had 287

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made. If the Call to Action statement outlined a bold and progressive vision of Catholicism’s future in the United States, then the urban neighborhood was here understood as a central component of that future, rather than merely a remnant of an inward-looking religious past. Ultimately, though, the bicentennial program showed above all the deepening split in the post–Vatican II American church. For one, the activist resolutions on sexuality and gender equity greatly overshadowed the other declarations, and drew a swift and condemnatory response from the US bishops. Conference chairman John Dearden, Detroit’s progressive archbishop, soon lamented that unsympathetic conservative observers had seized on the assembly’s “somewhat sensational features” to the exclusion of the resolutions on parish, family, and neighborhood. Humiliated in front of their Vatican superiors, the US bishops quickly reasserted control, dismissing some contentious resolutions and slow-walking others through a Byzantine committee structure.126 And while Baroni later boasted of his organization’s role in highlighting neighborhood concerns, several of his allies dubbed the conference a disaster. In Detroit, Polish American delegates had loudly complained that they were underrepresented, and few who identified as white ethnics had been among the voting body. Chicago’s Monsignor Menceslaus Madaj, head of the Polish American Historical Association, bitterly claimed to have discovered at the convention that “the Poles in the US are hated very much by various ethnics in this country, especially the Hispanic Americans.” Andrew Greeley, meanwhile, dismissed the gathering as a misfeasance by “kooks, crazies, flakes, militants, lesbians, homosexuals, ex-priests, incompetents, castrating witches, would-be messiahs, sickies, and other assorted malcontents.” To Greeley and others, the conference demonstrated a disturbing departure from an older model of Catholic social activism— coalitionminded, attuned to local contexts, rooted in labor traditions—in favor of a new breed of uncompromising radical ideologues.127 Under these circumstances, it seemed, their particular brand of neighborhood Catholicism could never get its due.

This mixed evaluation reveals the degree to which ethnic neighborhood concerns sat both inside and outside the reformist thrust of the church’s post–Vatican II activist wing. With their new organizational infrastructure and evolving language of urban community, church neighborhood advocates of the 1970s partially succeeded in challeng288

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ing 1960s images of white- ethnic Catholic communities as implacable foes of their black and Latino/a neighbors. In their place, figures such as Baroni offered a vision—never more than fleetingly realized— of a new kind of urban coalitional politics, one that might unite workingclass white Catholics with neighboring communities of color under the banner of neighborhood preservation and identity. Furthermore, as the  Call to Action resolutions show, Baroni and his faction managed, for a brief moment, to propel their claims into the broader stream of the Catholic progressive movement. However, Catholic intellectuals of the white- ethnic revival, by virtue of their failure to come fully to terms with the assertions of the church’s gender progressives and civil rights contingent, would hold only a marginal place in the battles that defined the US church in the 1980s and beyond. Though this neighborhood vocabulary floated away from the center of Catholic religious debate, it nevertheless filtered through the era’s broader urban discourse. With ethnic neighborhood sustenance and cultural rejuvenation as their stated goal, activists and writers had cultivated a populist rhetoric that uneasily intermingled conservative and progressive strands, nostalgic and forward-looking aspirations. This conflicted body of thought, in turn, would contribute a volatile localist language to the national political contests of the subsequent decade.

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Neighborhood Feminisms: Refiguring Gender in the Urban Village Early in 1979, a Brooklyn women’s movement activist named Jan Peterson wrote to Sarah Weddington, special assistant for women’s affairs in the Carter White House. Weddington had made her name as the winning lawyer in the landmark Roe v. Wade case, and President Carter had more recently tasked her with ensuring the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.1 According to Peterson, however, that goal was imperiled because women in blue- collar city neighborhoods—those who remained “rooted in the family and community”— had not been brought into the proratification coalition as valued partners. Moreover, Peterson told Weddington, the press portrayed such women only when they took the “right-wing side” on issues like the ERA. And this myopia, in turn, signaled a more general blindness toward working- class women’s integral neighborhood roles: “Sadly, women who are working to improve their communities are all but invisible as far as the media and government policy are concerned.”2 Peterson was one of a growing network of feminist thinkers who had taken it as their mission to make that neighborhood work visible and valued. In doing so, she and her allies frequently drew upon the neighborhood discourses that had emerged from the 1970s white- ethnic intellectual and activist movement, while mobilizing 290

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them toward markedly different ends. On the one hand, many of the decade’s leading white- ethnic neighborhood advocates maintained a strong nostalgic investment in structured social roles and stable community hierarchies. In this, they often aligned with the social conservatives to whom second-wave feminism, in scholar Rebecca Klatch’s summary, represented a threatening “extension of Big Government at the expense of the traditional authority of the church, the neighborhood, and the family.”3 On the other hand, a different circle of writers and organizers with ties to the 1970s white- ethnic revival— Peterson, Barbara Mikulski, Nancy Seifer, Kathleen McCourt, Terry Haywoode, and others—labored instead to theorize a distinctive form of “neighborhood feminism,” one that drew its strength and identity from the textures of the blue- collar enclave and city parish. As sociologist Benita Roth explains, “feminist protest in the 1960s and 1970s was shaped into feminist movements, plural”— discrete activist and intellectual groupings that were “largely organized along racial/ethnic lines.”4 One of those many “separate roads to feminism” unfolded through the neighborhood- oriented visions developed by this loose collection of urban feminist activists and analysts galvanized by the white- ethnic revival. By placing everyday neighborhood relationships at the center of their social agenda, these figures followed in the footsteps of female African American and Latina grassroots leaders of the 1960s, who had melded dedication to local communities with gender-based political assertions in a plethora of activist interventions, from housing agitation to tenant organizing to welfare-rights campaigns. At the same time, sharing a dismay over the seeming rootlessness of postwar metropolitan life, contributors framed their projects as a communalist competitor to the individualist, rights- oriented ethos of many middle- class- dominated women’s movement organizations. An examination of the claims advanced by these organizers and writers illuminates the importance of neighborhood imagery and ideals to sectors of 1970s feminist discourse. Understanding their own work as both a critique and a countermodel, participants adopted an imaginative politics of urban representation, interpreting the interpersonal connections found in the waning industrial city’s ethnic urban villages as a potential seedbed for working- class women’s empowerment. Just as powerfully, such efforts demonstrate how idealized renderings of the old city neighborhood could be molded and refashioned by social movements across the political and cultural spectrum. As envisioned here, the everyday life of the city block emerged as an inescapably po291

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litical terrain, an essential sphere for the reproduction or contestation of gendered social hierarchies.

Ethnic Revival and Feminist Ferment If white- ethnic revivalists often portrayed their work as a revolt against contemporary liberalism’s atomizing individualism, similar cadences echoed too through the halls of second-wave feminism. And in few places did this interchange occur with more vigor than in conversations over urban communal histories and futures. Fusing themes from the ethnic revival and the women’s movement, various urban chroniclers strove to identify or invent a brand of feminist discourse that took neighborhood spaces and legacies as its central terms. At first glance, such a project might seem to cut against the grain of the early second-wave impulse. For white feminist writers of the 1960s, urban communal and ethnic heritages were oftentimes cast as something to revolt against: lifeways anchored in patriarchal customs, stifling enclaves, and daily domination sanctioned by the authority of tradition. Indeed, feminist critics frequently prized narratives of women breaking free from such strictures, whether to compete as liberated equals in the atomistic modern world or to create new forms of community in sisterhood and women’s institutions. But by the 1970s, as historian Matthew Jacobson recounts, white second-wave feminism was inflected with the accents of the ethnic revival in several ways. Some participants arrived at a deeper awareness of women’s subordinated status through a process of analogy, finding illuminating parallels between their own position and those who had experienced ethnic slights or exclusions. Others sought to recover an oft-neglected ethnic women’s history—replete with its own pantheon of heroic foremothers providing visions of struggle that could be mobilized in the present. And still others strove to reconstruct patriarchal ethnic and religious traditions around women’s voices and authority, thus claiming an equal and honored place within that heritage.5 In this intellectual climate, the experiences of local community life and urban ethnic rootedness could be imagined as resources rather than as impediments. Still, given the assumed cultural conservatism of the old working- class and lower-middle- class white city enclaves, these were the last places most 1970s urban analysts would have expected a vibrant feminist sentiment to take hold. Such a vision, moreover, was complicated by several trends of the decade. For one, mainstream 292

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US renderings of European ethnic authenticity, notes anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo, depended in large measure on a conservative, “Madonna-like” idealization of the traditional ethnic woman as dutiful mother and homemaker— despite (or perhaps as backlash against) the record levels at which married, working- class women were then joining the waged labor force.6 Second, widespread media images of blue-collar ethnic communities as uniformly parochial and reactionary “may have helped to contain feminism,” sociologist Judith Stacey argues, “by estranging middle- class women from working- class women.”7 Third, as the historian Mary Ryan recognized in 1979, while connections with “informal social networks of local and neighborhood women” could bolster national-level women’s movement organizations, the New Right was adeptly mustering adherents through just such neighborhood networks.8 Though these factors seemed to dampen feminist possibilities,  an impetus toward a white- ethnic urban feminism bubbled up from leaders and sympathetic analysts within the decade’s neighborhoods movement.9 As in Jan Peterson’s protest to Sarah Weddington, some advocates insisted that local urban traditions and affections had been ignored or dismissed by women’s rights activists from more economically privileged and geographically mobile backgrounds. Others suggested that the national objectives of the mainstream women’s movement were imperiled because of the lack of alliances extending into working- class city enclaves. The early career of Barbara Mikulski, the future US senator, offers an especially revealing illustration of this intellectual trend. Deeply involved in the neighborhoods movement, Mikulski emerged as an influential political voice partly through her attempts to mediate between the values promoted by major liberal feminist groups and those championed by her colleagues in the white- ethnic movement. And, like many of her peers, Mikulski initially arrived at this position not through formal involvement with women’s movement establishments, but instead through urban organizing work. The great-granddaughter of Polish immigrants, Mikulski had grown up in East Baltimore’s Highlandtown district, a historically Polish and Italian area where her parents operated a grocery and her grandmother a locally beloved bakery. Her formative political experiences had come in the late 1960s, when, as a young social worker, she led efforts to rally the community in a long-running battle against a highway slated to slice through the nearby Fells Point district. As the confrontation with the city intensified, Mikulski’s own group—primarily Polish American—joined forces 293

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with an organization of African American city residents whose homes also faced obliteration. Mobilizing together as MAD—Movement Against Destruction— campaigners eventually defeated Baltimore’s political establishment and quashed the highway plan, a startling victory that soon helped loft Mikulski onto the city council.10 From her beginnings in block-level activism, Mikulski quickly achieved stardom in the circles of the white- ethnic movement. This fame had its origins in a fiery address at a June 1970 urban-affairs conference, organized by Geno Baroni at Washington’s Catholic University. Near the gathering’s end, Mikulski electrified participants by engaging in an impromptu debate with Maine senator Edmund Muskie over the utility of the melting-pot ideal, with Mikulski insisting that the United States was instead a “sizzling cauldron for the ethnic American who feels that he has been politically courted and legally extorted by both government and private enterprise.” These urbanites had been “tricked” by crafty politicians into directing their anger at African Americans, she said, calling for cross-racial organization-building that would target the centers of urban power.11 After the statement was printed in national newspapers, Democratic candidates solicited endorsements, television programs issued invitations, and Newsweek eventually dubbed her “Queen of the Ethnics.”12 She used this newfound prominence to indict an imperious technocratic liberalism, a governing philosophy that allegedly failed to grasp the blue- collar white urbanite’s affection for timeworn corners of the city. “The one place where he felt the master of his fate and had status was in his own neighborhood,” declared Mikulski. “Now even that security is being threatened. . . . When he goes to City Hall to make his problems known, he is either put off, put down or put out.”13 As in the writings of Michael Novak, these early proclamations of grievance were framed in decidedly masculinist terms, unreflectively assigning precedence to issues of a fraying male sense of self-worth in the face of economic precarities. Within just a few years, however, Mikulski had become increasingly attuned to gender injustices in American life. The Washington Post subsequently noted her early 1970s emergence as “one of the few politicians with genuine [white] ethnic roots and sympathy with the antiwar and feminist forces in the Democratic Party”; more patronizingly, Baltimore Magazine recalled her penchant for “angry jeremiads on women’s rights.”14 Yet even as Mikulski staunchly associated herself with reformist women’s movement causes, she took it as her mission to bridge a gulf she identified between the agendas of many middle- class feminist organizations and the aspira294

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tions of working- class women in her native Highlandtown and similar districts. As a motif and reference point, the neighborhood figured heavily in this intramovement critique. In a series of speeches, the councilwoman contended that elements of the decade’s feminist rhetoric, whether in its liberal or radical variants, too often evinced a middle-class indifference or hostility toward the local experiences that her own female constituents prized most. “A lot of women in Catholic, European ethnic neighborhoods are increasingly confused about our roles and values,” Mikulski said. “As we struggle through our confusion, we don’t like being ‘put down’ for not having ‘the single truth.’”15 In fact, she maintained in another address, the paradoxes embedded within the European immigrant experience closely mirrored those confronting many working- class Catholic city women in the present. Just as immigrant communities had obediently followed dominant imperatives to “Americanize,” only to have their 1960s descendants ridiculed as flagwaving “super-patriots,” so white- ethnic women of bygone years had sought to create opportunities for their daughters to escape backbreaking menial labor, only to see them scorned in the 1970s for cherishing hard-won domestic roles as housewives and mothers. Reformist demands for equal pay and improved material conditions were welcome and necessary, Mikulski agreed. But talk of upending prevailing gender roles or reconfiguring family structures had provoked unease among many women in the neighborhoods where she worked and politicked. Sounding the decade’s refrain of ethnic pluralism, Mikulski urged her feminist allies “to take a look at our cultural diversity and to respect the different feelings that we have. . . . Then I think we can begin to move toward sisterhood.”16 In such pronouncements, several impulses ran together. With their distaste for critical analyses of the gender roles and family patterns that predominated in neighborhoods like her own, Mikulski’s public statements revealed a culturally conservative strand: particularly, a hesitance to grapple with the ways in which indigenous neighborhood traditions could themselves work to sustain gender inequities. Nonetheless, the councilwoman maintained, this very “cultural diversity”—including the submerged histories of European immigrant foremothers and their female descendants—offered progressive resources for women’s battles of the present. “We and our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers were the women of the sweatshops. The women who died in the Triangle Shirt-waist fire,” Mikulski told her listeners. Furthermore, the traditional ethnic family, she insisted, had served as 295

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a potent “symbol of survival” for immigrant women: “No matter what king, kaiser or czar marched through your country, somehow or other that family would hold you together.”17 Read this way, the endurance and agency to be found in white- ethnic women’s workplace and family histories provided a legacy of strength that could be yoked to campaigns for neighborhood sustainability in the cities of the 1970s. Mikulski’s speeches and advocacy gestured toward fresh interpretations of the city enclave’s potential. Others, too, would build from the same foundation, linking expressions of estrangement from the individualist strains of contemporary liberal feminism with a view of place-based city roots as essential to broader drives for working- class women’s empowerment. As the decade progressed, this vision of a white- ethnic neighborhood feminism— one grounded in the communal and close-to-hand—followed at least two paths. The first was a new politics of representation, emerging in both academia and the political arena. Intent on reversing patriarchal conceptions of the old neighborhood’s past and present, participants crafted portrayals that highlighted women’s community labor while exploring intersections between immigrant histories, persistent urban interpersonal ties, and swelling neighborhood activism. The second path took shape through inventive projects in block-level institution building, as campaigners sought to use local city allegiances as catalysts for newly politicized forms of gender consciousness. In the former pursuit, the writer and political worker Nancy Seifer took on a pioneering role, attempting to illuminate these confluences with several influential publication projects. A one-time Peace Corps volunteer, raised in comfortably affluent Jewish communities of Long Island and Chicago, Seifer had initially responded to the social upheavals of the 1960s with an optimistic New Frontier–style liberalism— an outlook “as predictable as the sunrise,” in her later appraisal. However, after she began a job in the administration of New York mayor John Lindsay, two experiences unsettled her middle- class idealism: first, a close-up observation of the city’s May 1970 hard-hat riots against antiwar protesters; and, second, a pervasive sexism in the mayor’s office. The first episode, with its violent display of blue-collar alienation, left Seifer’s bourgeois worldview “shattered in a flash of new insight.” Investigating the discontent, she began attending community meetings in fraternal halls and church basements, discovering “a whole world out there that nobody at City Hall knew anything about.” Her subsequent efforts to develop city outreach programs to disgruntled whiteethnic neighborhoods culminated in the establishment of a munici296

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pal Office of Ethnic Affairs. Too often, though, Seifer’s proposals were brushed aside by domineering male colleagues. Infused with a “new feminist consciousness,” she resigned her job to join the American Jewish Committee’s National Project on Ethnic America. There, she set out to explore the intersection between surging second-wave feminist activism and daily life in blue- collar ethnic neighborhoods.18 In her most noted AJC intervention, the widely circulated 1973 booklet Absent from the Majority, Seifer considered how working- class white city women were grappling with urban economic decline and changing gender and family roles. Her research subjects, Seifer claimed, generally saw little personal stake in combating sexism in the upper ranks of business or academia, and were suspicious toward perceived threats to the workplace status of men they frequently relied on as breadwinners. Still, while a superficial glance might suggest that feminist imperatives had failed to gain traction in such communities, Seifer insisted that the decade’s waves of neighborhood organizing contained a hidden emancipatory potential. As disinvestment corroded blue- collar city precincts, she pointed out, “it was the women who became the troops of the new white- ethnic organizations. . . . Housewives who a few years ago never dreamed they would take part in any kind of demonstration, have recently blocked expressways during rush hour traffic, picketed the homes of city officials, and protested the destruction and neglect of their neighborhoods.” True, this sort of activism was rarely framed as feminist work. But, Seifer contended, each time a woman returns home from such ventures, “she is changing the balance of power in her marriage in the most fundamental way, often without realizing it.”19 Along with its explicit propositions about ground-level mobilizing, Seifer’s publication offered up implicit theories about the political function of neighborhood spaces. Strikingly, it situated the nation’s aging city neighborhoods as a unique foundation for an upsurge in local women’s political assertiveness, both public and domestic. As Seifer described it, this attitude was as much a product of 1970s urban economic deterioration and longstanding community affections as of second-wave feminist awakenings. Nonetheless, she suggested, by inspiring inhabitants to question the status quo, these neighborhood campaigns posed potent threats to the patriarchal conventions governing family and community life. Just as revealing, however, is the manner in which Seifer modified this thesis over subsequent years. In Absent from the Majority, she had leaned heavily on a much earlier sociological study— Lee Rainwater’s 1959 monograph Workingman’s Wife—that painted its working- class 297

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white female subjects as docile and intellectually provincial.20 At the time, Seifer had uncritically accepted this portrait, using it to accentuate a new self-assurance that she detected arising in the interim. The popular press, too, adopted this reading; hence, a 1974 newspaper profile on the “Emerging Blue- Collar Woman” could comment, “Where once she was quiet and let her man do the talking, now she is becoming a loud and insistent voice.”21 But for her 1976 book Nobody Speaks for Me!, Seifer conducted lengthy oral histories with ten working- class women— Irish and German, African American and Jewish, Chicana and Italian—all former housewives and all community activists. Through learning about these women’s decades-long battles to combat exploitive blockbusting practices or to establish local childcare networks and cultural centers, Seifer realized that this phenomenon was not of recent vintage. Her interviewees’ current work was the outgrowth of many years of ethnic and gendered experiences in their communities, and it joined in a long, if unremarked, tradition of blocklevel activism by neighborhood women. For this reason, Seifer decided, local ethnic and neighborhood cultures were not necessarily an obstacle to gender equality; rather, they were often central to activism and could contribute resources to wider feminist endeavors. Among these grassroots organizers, she perceived a distinctly neighborhoodoriented “spirit of communalism.” And, she concluded, “the future of the Women’s Movement in America” depended on “our ability to relate communalism to feminist goals.”22 On Seifer’s heels, a variety of feminist academics sought to rework prevailing ideas about gender’s role in blue- collar neighborhood life, foregrounding women’s instrumental position in shaping local cultures and initiatives. For example, in her 1977 study of white women on Chicago’s Southwest Side, an area long infamous for violent reactions against racial integration, sociologist Kathleen McCourt contended that the women most active in new neighborhood organizations were redirecting local discontent over neighborhood decline away from African American newcomers and toward real- estate interests, municipal officials, school boards, and banks. By intervening forcefully in the urban public sphere, they were also reconfiguring domestic relationships, just as Seifer had predicted. As one of McCourt’s interviewees said of her husband, “Now he has to adjust to a new reality.”23 Meanwhile, the noted feminist scholar Jessie Bernard saw in these same neighborhood campaigns a fitting illustration of her theory of a distinctive women’s realm, defined by “blood-and-soil” characteristics such as duty, kin, tradition, and locale. The recent waves of blue- collar neighborhood ac298

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tivism, she suggested in her 1981 work, The Female World, should be understood as a “battle to protect female ‘turf,’” an attempt by participants to “hang on to the Gemeinschaft nature of their female world” through confrontations in the male-dominated gesellschaft beyond.24 Alongside these new urban accounts came critical rereadings of older ones. In a variation on Seifer’s and McCourt’s themes, other investigators challenged the gender politics implicit in leading scholarly representations of such neighborhoods. In academic circles, impressions of ethnic blue- collar residential districts had been strongly conditioned by a small clutch of esteemed ethnographic studies—Street Corner Society, The Urban Villagers, The Social Order of the Slum, and others—that formed the core of undergraduate reading lists and attracted notice in the popular press. By the mid-1970s, critics were pointing out that this work had been built largely on the neighborhood interactions of men. In a groundbreaking 1975 essay, “The ‘Thereness’ of Women,” sociologist Lyn Lofland compared the role of women in such research chronicles to that of domestic servants in British manor-house mystery novels. These servants are always necessarily “there”—bearing drink trays, stumbling across corpses, sitting through interrogations—but are rarely relevant to the plot’s central thrust. Likewise, Lofland contended, in classic urban ethnographies, women’s day-to- day activities too often served merely as backdrop to the main neighborhood stories being told.25 For Lofland, this pattern of omission wasn’t solely a function of male researchers’ individual biases. It stemmed as well from the very manner in which “community” had long been defined. Since its 1920s Chicago School heyday, urban sociology had been preoccupied with discovering spatially bounded forms of community, or, alternatively, with diagnosing its absence, a condition dubbed social “disorganization.” Accordingly, ethnographers had sought out places where tightly contained clusters of primary relationships seemed to them most likely to be found—particularly working- class white- ethnic neighborhoods. In those settings, Lofland explained, women tended to interact in the informal “private sectors of the neighborhood,” while researchers were led by their community models to focus exclusively on more formal “extrafamilial, transhousehold, interinstitutional networks.” Thus, she argued, “A circle is drawn. What goes on within that circle is avidly recorded. What goes on outside is largely ignored.” By overemphasizing particular settings as spaces for community formation—bars and political clubhouses, for example, but not beauty parlors, children’s parks, or local shop counters—researchers had remained oblivious to 299

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those spaces where “women are substantially more than ‘simply present.’” Women’s activities were seldom deemed central to local cohesion—“part of the scene, but not part of the action,” as two subsequent scholars put it—leading Lofland to condemn the “restrictive power of the community model.”26 Whether theorizing previously ignored “female worlds,” exposing the masculinist exclusions in sociological models of community, or spotlighting the feminist potential in grassroots urban organizing, Seifer, McCourt, Bernard, Lofland, and other like-minded investigators proposed new frameworks for understanding and representing neighborhood relationships. Soon enough, in the world of literature, novels such as Helen Barolini’s Umbertina (1979) and Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish (1980) would similarly recast the traditionally male- dominated saga of the European immigrant community and its postwar fate, emphasizing the strong matriarchs who had sustained those neighborhoods and chronicling their female descendants’ attempts to unearth and reconnect with that heritage.27 In academic monograph and literary fiction alike, a growing collection of 1970s writers insisted that the social being of older neighborhood spaces be reenvisioned with primary reference to women’s voices and struggles.

“We Have Been the Organizers”: The National Congress of Neighborhood Women With their focus on indomitable immigrant foremothers and contemporary local heroines, figures such as Mikulski and Seifer sketched the outlines of a recognizable style of neighborhood feminism, a phenomenon defined by its emphasis on homegrown spatial allegiances and women’s local social agency. Still, in Mikulski’s and Seifer’s descriptions, this advocacy was most often an unconscious sort of feminism, one that undergirded women’s community endeavors while never being named as such. At the same moment, however, various neighborhood organizations were striving to place gender analysis front and center in their work. Of the many groups with this goal, few more self- consciously fused the languages of the 1970s women’s and neighborhood movements than the National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW), an activist alliance founded in Brooklyn in 1974 by Jan Peterson and several partners. For Peterson, the NCNW offered the potential to become “the ‘theoretical mother’ of an alternative women’s movement emerging in 300

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America”— a movement that distinguished itself from the advocacy work of socially and geographically mobile professionals by virtue of its organic connection to local city spaces and cultures.28 Echoing Mikulski’s homage to the women of sweatshop and factory, Peterson powerfully underscored her own female allies’ unacknowledged roles as pillars of hard-pressed city communities. “We have been the organizers of block associations, tenant patrols, day care centers, and senior citizen housing while, at the same time, we nourish and support our families,” she wrote.29 As the historian Estelle Freedman points out, “The invisibility of women’s labor lies at the heart of feminist critiques of work and family.”30 In Peterson’s judgment, not only did these invisible forms of neighborhood labor deserve recognition, but they also indicated local women’s capacity for driving dramatic transformations in urban political structures. The NCNW’s early years are noteworthy, in part, because they demonstrate the dynamic intellectual cross-fertilizations emerging  in much of the decade’s neighborhood thought. The group’s origins came through a set of organizing projects spearheaded by Peterson in northern Brooklyn. A small-town transplant from a working- class white Wisconsin family, Peterson had moved to New York in the late 1960s, shortly after college, and had immediately dived into civil rights and feminist work. Upon arrival, she eagerly volunteered for the Harlem chapter of CORE.31 Additionally, alongside participants such as Susan Brownmiller and Diane Crothers she spent several years with West Village–1, a consciousness-raising group near the helm of the New York Radical Feminists organization.32 Soon enough, though, CORE’s black-nationalist leadership had barred white members, instructing them to agitate for social change from within their “own” communities instead.33 Moved by this injunction, Peterson took a position heading a federal jobs-training program for Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Greenpoint districts. Blue- collar and traditionally Italian and Polish, the neighborhoods she found were in dire condition. Once home to a strong manufacturing economy, the area now suffered from characteristic ills of postwar urban disinvestment: job flight, decaying infrastructure, inferior public services, and homes demolished by the city at the behest of land-hungry corporations. Meanwhile, racist resentments against nearby black and Hispanic residents simmered among numerous white inhabitants, and Peterson detected in the district a “plantation mentality,” whereby outside powerbrokers dominated community institutions and decision-making.34 Surveying local problems and resources, Peterson’s attention quickly 301

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gravitated to neighborhood gender dynamics, a focus likely shaped by her continued involvement in Manhattan feminist intellectual circles. To Peterson’s mind, the fraying social fabric of WilliamsburgGreenpoint derived much of its remaining cohesiveness from the dayto- day contributions of local women, who ran dozens of establishments ranging from parish groups to parent-teacher organizations to block clubs. Area men, however, consistently undervalued this work, preferring to see women as submissive housekeepers. Guided by these observations, Peterson concluded that women were uniquely positioned to lead the attack on surrounding problems, not least because of their ability to marshal dense networks of neighbors and multigenerational families. To that end, she collected a small assortment of neighborhood allies—initially mostly Italian American, along with a handful of Latina and African American participants—to form a working- class women’s activist brigade.35 Based in an improvised headquarters at the back of a shoe-repair store, the informal band announced itself as the Ethnic Neighborhood Action Center. In short order, they had forced the local antipoverty agency to place more low-income residents onto its board, and they successfully campaigned for a new community center for neighborhood children and seniors. Participants subsequently recalled the intense opposition such forays stirred up. Decried by their foes as lesbians or communists, members endured public harassment and bullying phone calls. Some hostile white neighbors spread rumors that the organizers were bent on destroying homogeneous blocks by encouraging residential integration. As Peterson later told an interviewer, “The Italian political leaders, the men, and other people in the community were very threatened by this because they were used to controlling the neighborhood. All of a sudden there was this whole new group moving into public space.”36 Capturing attention well beyond the neighborhood’s confi nes, these early projects provided the impetus for the creation of a broadbased multicity federation. Enlisting help from Nancy Seifer, Barbara Mikulski, Chicago antiredlining crusader Gale Cincotta, and others, Peterson assembled a series of conferences for female politicians and urban researchers, held in Washington in 1973 through 1975. Many of the local Brooklyn activists attended. And although Geno Baroni of the NCUEA sponsored these meetings as part of his white- ethnic strategy for city uplift, the discussants soon forcefully asserted their autonomy from Baroni’s institution. Buoyed by the cross- city networking, they unveiled blueprints for the National Congress of Neighborhood 302

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Women— a national umbrella group dedicated, as Peterson later said, to seeking community change and gender equality “not by leaving our neighborhoods but by moving forward with them.”37 There are several ways of taking stock of the organization’s significance. One is by charting the flagship Brooklyn chapter’s range of social interventions over the mid- and late 1970s. With spacious new headquarters above a Williamsburg quilt factory, Peterson’s group developed a vigorous agenda. Leaders there secured federal job-training grants to hire more than twenty local women onto the Brooklyn staff; within two years the NCNW counted a racially diverse collection of twenty- eight affiliate organizations across the country. In New York City alone, its accomplishments came to include the establishment of a senior citizens’ center and credit union; campaigns for tenants’ rights, affordable housing, daycare facilities, and a clamp- down on bank redlining; leadership training initiatives for low-income women; and the founding of one of the state’s first domestic violence shelters.38 “Edith Bunkers crossed with Wonder Womans,” Ms. magazine soon enthused of the participants, mixing adulation with a trace of unintended condescension.39 Another way of surveying the group’s early history, however, is to consider how it conceptualized a feminist practice rooted in the particularities of the neighborhood environment. For example, urban scholar Tamar Carroll has shown how a shared critical awareness of the damaging local effects of 1970s government austerity helped the Brooklyn chapter transition from a predominantly white initial membership into one with growing African American and Latina participation, including long-running alliances with largely black tenant groups in nearby public housing. Meanwhile, Carroll notes, internal antiracism programming encouraged white members to “move beyond parochial identities” and the group’s constituents to imagine “a new, broadened community.”40 As gender historian Anne Enke suggests, second-wave feminism “took shape as a popular movement around the limitations and possibilities of local geographies.”41 While Enke’s comment refers to the rise of grassroots 1970s institutions such as feminist bookstores, coffeehouses, and health clinics, the observation equally well captures the centrality of neighborhood relationships and resources to the NCNW’s vision for local change. In this, a frequent starting place came with members’ efforts to differentiate their local work from the priorities of mainstream liberalfeminist lobby groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW). Indeed, while describing their activism as a progressive alter303

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native, NCNW participants often asserted that things of value in their lives had been brushed aside by more affluent women’s activists. One thirty-three-year- old member told a visiting journalist that “the women’s movement puts down” immigrants and housewives—“the women who have always worked.” An older member, pointing to the importance of kin networks to economic survival, insisted, “You can’t agitate women without considering the men. It’s destructive to the family.” A third commented, “NOW assumes that what women want is wrong. Maybe what most women want are not the goals of NOW.”42 For NCNW leaders, these sentiments suggested the need for a different sort of organizing model. The “original feminist analysis,” Peterson contended, emphasized casting off the shackles of older family and community structures; the NCNW, in contrast, addressed itself to constituents “who see their families and neighborhoods as fundamentally part of who they are.”43 Blanket indictments such as Peterson’s could obscure the vast range and nuance at work in 1970s feminist thought. Undoubtedly, though, NOW and kindred organizations faced recurrent charges that they focused narrowly on the experiences of economically secure white women.44 For the NCNW’s Williamsburg- Greenpoint participants, such ambivalences didn’t necessarily mean that second-wave critiques of domestic and familial oppressions had no local resonance. In 1980, Betty Friedan narrated the story of one member who, after joining the NCNW, had assertively renegotiated her marriage along more equitable lines, citing it as evidence for her claim that “American men are at the edge of a tidal wave of change.”45 Still, the group developed a political language noticeably dissimilar to that of most liberal-feminist organizations. As political scientist Martha Ackelsberg discerns, NCNW organizing relied on a language of “needs” rather than one of “rights,” thus helping members both to “perceive commonalities between their needs and those of others” and to “locate themselves and their community within a broader political- economic context.”46 Likewise, instead of placing at the forefront of its agenda issues on which members disagreed— abortion rights, say, or the ERA—the group concentrated on augmenting the local institutions and values that members shared, centered on a belief in “the strong role of women in neighborhoods,” as an oversized poster at the NCNW office proclaimed.47 Running beneath such projects were several unspoken assertions about how the local neighborhood should be envisioned. First, the Brooklyn chapter’s approach involved imagining the city neighborhood as what two urban scholars have termed a “community-household”: 304

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a space where inhabitants extend domestic habits of connection and care outward through the block, district, and wider political sphere in order to promote change.48 This often prompted a maternalist stance to organizing: for instance, obstructing traffic with infant carriages to demand a light at a treacherous intersection.49 But, second and significantly, leaders here—in sharp distinction from many of the ethnic revival’s major theoreticians— cast neighborhood traditions as a flexible and eminently adaptable resource. Rather than seeing local customs as static and monolithic, activists instead envisioned them as a storehouse of materials available for creative refashioning in order to foster fresh patterns of self- consciousness and community in the present. For instance, reworking traditions of the church social or block party, the NCNW’s annual community award dinners paid tribute to, and demanded recognition for, the neglected labor of local women such as nuns, Girl Scout leaders, and housing activists. “Each woman is a contribution to the neighborhood,” executive director Christine Noschese explained, “and honoring them is an important way of empowering women.”50 Likewise, newsletters interspersed treasured family recipes and housework tips with information on urban organizing and women’s political participation—tacitly troubling the assumed boundaries between the domestic and public spheres.51 Or, in keeping with a philosophy of local control, the NCNW began addressing incidents of male spousal violence by organizing delegations of local men to confront the offender as a group. While departing from practices advocated by the battered women’s movement, the approach indicated both an awareness of the legal system’s frequent indifference toward domestic abuse and a determination to marshal the moral weight of neighborhood disapprobation against the culprit.52 And when the organization navigated the potentially contentious issue of the inclusion of openly lesbian participants— a matter that had sharply divided NOW a half- decade earlier—heterosexual members generally framed their responses with invocations of neighborhood traditions of acceptance. As one member lightheartedly told a reporter, “The gay issue isn’t an issue here. At Polish and Italian parties, the women have always danced with each other.”53 Such an outlook— coming at a moment when an ethnic-revival leader like Michael Novak was denouncing gay rights as symbol of a “decadent society”— suggested the group’s belief that older neighborhood lifeways could be reimagined as malleable components of a more inclusive local politics.54 Throughout, the rhetoric and action signaled a purposeful effort to blend commitments to neighborhood continuity and metamorphosis, 305

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tradition and openness. And of the NCNW’s initiatives, none better illustrated this outlook than the organization’s most noted innovation: the development of a grassroots, neighborhood-based women’s college program. Launched in 1975 with backing from a community college in Queens, the NCNW’s College for Neighborhood Women allowed area inhabitants, many older and lacking high-school diplomas, to work toward tuition-free degrees from near their homes.55 At the outset, leaders announced their ambition that “individuals participating in the program will bring their skills and training back into the neighborhood, thus enriching their community.” Sixty local women formed the inaugural cohort.56 Thoroughly incorporating its future students into the curricular planning, the college later served as model for women’s institutions in Philadelphia, San Diego, and elsewhere.57 In key respects, the establishment differed from traditional highereducation environments. A basic distinction came with its rejection of the hierarchical instructional styles, competition- driven imperatives, and elitist ambience of many college settings. Prevailing instead were commitments to egalitarianism and empowerment—informally symbolized, as Ms. magazine reported, by a “flying squad of sisterly support that mobilizes at the drop of discouragement.”58 But if the fledgling college embraced many principles of what would become known as feminist pedagogy, its most striking aspect was its intensive focus on specific neighborhood histories and narratives— a deliberate counterpoint to what one academic leader, Terry Haywoode, called the “false universalism” at work in certain quarters of the women’s movement.59 The orientation-program reading list hinted at the intended synthesis, pairing Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.60 With this ethos, originators aimed to overcome perceived obstacles to broadening the base for feminist self-identification. When the socialist-feminist Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, four years earlier, had started its own “liberation school,” activists there expressed frustration over their difficulties in recruiting people “who feel excluded by the women’s movement as a whole, such as poor and working class women.”61 Cognizant of this potential disconnect, Brooklyn staff molded many of their subject approaches around the contours of daily life in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. “Their real world is their neighborhood, defined not just geographically but also by a sense of history,” Haywoode and program colleague Laura Scanlon subsequently wrote of early participants. “Women are the carriers of this neighborhood culture, passing it on through generations.”62 And though some students described initial 306

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feelings of guilt that their attendance might clash with domestic and familial responsibilities, coursework made clear that pursuing new educational opportunities didn’t mean turning one’s back on established networks.63 Government classes, for instance, investigated the role of churches and block clubs as possible power bases for progressive action, while writing courses encouraged compositions grounded in local and family influences. Crafting essays with titles such as “My Italian Grandmother, Theresa” and “My Russian Mother-in-Law,” participants in the first cohort explored the lives of an older generation of Brooklyn women: those who had labored in factories and textile mills, struggled to raise large families, or taken part in earlycentury industrial strikes.64 This work of recovery— a quest for usable neighborhood pasts—highlighted the ways in which working- class and ethnic women’s history could stimulate political transformations in city districts of the present. By seeking to weave divergent philosophical threads into a single tapestry, all of these ventures functioned as projects in neighborhood theory and representation. And as time passed, the sensibilities underpinning such work would be felt in the wider political realm. By 1977, for instance, NOW sought to shed its bourgeois public image by selecting as its president Eleanor Cutri Smeal, who described herself in press interviews as a working- class, Italian American housewife.65 Smeal’s localist orientation and populist reputation found shape in her platform for an increasingly decentralized membership structure, drawing more consistently from working- class communities and those without college backgrounds.66 Sounding similar notes, Barbara Mikulski in 1986 would parlay her own narrative of urban rootedness into a successful US Senate run, making her the first woman to win a Maryland statewide race. Even as her Republican opponent, former Reagan aide Linda Chavez, attacked Mikulski as an unpatriotic radical feminist and resorted to gay-baiting innuendo, Mikulski prevailed by casting herself as the state’s “Aunt Barb,” focusing on her East Baltimore neighborhood upbringing and her parents’ local grocery store.67 Meanwhile, in Brooklyn and elsewhere, the NCNW rapidly expanded its constituencies. Moving away from its origins as a whiteethnic- dominated organization, the group thoroughly committed itself to a multicultural and intersectional approach linking urban political struggles by American Indian women, African Americans, Latinas, Asian Americans, and working- class whites.68 The growing diversity of the NCNW traced one path that the 1970s ethnic revival would follow, as that movement’s more progressive components fed into the expand307

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ing multiculturalism that characterized sectors of the 1980s and 1990s left.69 As Eleanor Holmes Norton, a founder of the National Black Feminist Organization, explained at the New Women’s Coalition Conference in 1974: “It has been traditional in this country to universalize and generalize. But sometimes we must first focus on our own particular selves in order that we may then know how much alike we really are.”70 For feminist workers such as Peterson and her widening circle of NCNW allies, those “particular selves” would always and inescapably be defined by the physical geography and human networks of the local city neighborhood.

During the settling gloom of 1970s urban economic downswings, a few city observers had identified in the surging women’s movement a force that could help arrest decline. In 1976, former HUD secretary Robert C. Wood pointed to second-wave feminism as a promising counterweight to urban “turmoil and discontent,” because of its “pursuit of peace” and “capacity for celebration.”71 With this, Wood seemed to have had in mind primarily the advocacy programs of middle- class professional women. The observation was borne out, however, through the emergence of a neighborhood- oriented feminist discourse percolating up from blue- collar city streetscapes. By placing the language of neighborhood allegiances at the center of their projects, writers and activists such as Mikulski, Seifer, and the NCNW’s founders followed in a long and ongoing tradition of women-led community organizing by working- class Latina and African American city dwellers. Synthesizing critiques of urban gender inequities with a defense of neighborhood custom and cohesion, their work both foregrounded the local-level consequences of antiurban policymaking and brought to light women’s integral role in sustaining tight-knit city communities. As the NCNW’s increasingly coalition-minded approach suggests, this evolving brand of neighborhood feminism offered one potential building block in the decade’s broader efforts for progressive urban social change. Nonetheless, such political uses of neighborhood ideas faced a strong competitor in the form of a surging New Right. In the realm of electoral politics, a reinvigorated neighborhood rhetoric from conservatives would swell into a noisy chorus as the 1970s drew to a close.

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Local Spaces and White House Races: Urban Communities and Presidential Politics Competing theories about the neighborhood’s social function ricocheted through the national political discourse of the 1970s. This phenomenon can be witnessed with especial clarity in the presidential election contests of 1976 and 1980. In both campaigns, the combination of an emboldened, assertive neighborhoods movement and a surging ethnic revivalist sentiment thrust the fate of local city communities and relationships into the electoral foreground in unprecedented fashion. With advertisements, speeches, and carefully devised campaign trips, Democrats and Republicans vied throughout to associate themselves with the imagined values of intimate urban spaces. To be sure, the forms of cultural production that emerge from modern presidential campaigns are frequently predictable and routine: stock catchphrases, setpiece events designed by rote, timeworn accolades to a succession of narrowly conceived voting blocs. Still, as intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers observes, the speeches of presidents— and, one might add, those of aspirants to the office—“cannot help mapping an inchoate theory of society and politics”; they “set into circulation mental pictures of society and its field of obligations.”1 In just such a way, candidates in these two races employed neighbor309

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hood motifs as a way to articulate broader standpoints about government’s proper role, to frame divergent arguments about cultural identities and the duties of citizenship, and to speak to the anxieties of highly coveted subsets of the electorate. Viewed from one angle, this sharp turn to the local was simply the latest installment in a long-running disagreement over the primacy of national or local forms of community. In American political history, such disputes run back to the early republic. But for much of the twentieth century, notes historian Wilfred McClay, visions of a grand national-level community had been “a staple of progressive and liberal political rhetoric.”2 Pointing to the New Deal era, Robert Reich similarly contends, “Franklin Roosevelt’s boldest innovation had been designating the nation as a community.”3 Under this consolidating framework, progressive New Dealers and their successors crafted narratives of an America in which responsibility for the welfare of fellow citizens stretched beyond the bounds of family, village, neighborhood, or state—an overarching community transcending sectional, local, and sectarian allegiances. Best encapsulating that viewpoint, perhaps, was Lyndon Johnson’s call for a country “divided neither by class nor by section nor by color, knowing no South or North, no East or West, but just one great America.”4 But after 1968, explains communications scholar Ronald Lee, such invocations faded from national campaign politics, as provincialism increasingly became a quality to celebrate rather than to overcome. In Johnson’s wake, successful seekers of the presidency have most often appealed instead to localist community ideals, whether embodied in personal origin stories or in legends of virtuous provincial outsiders confronting a corrupted Washington.5 The 1976 election would bring this master narrative to the fore. In the shadow of Watergate, Jimmy Carter crafted “a discourse that linked virtue and progressivism in a tale shaped by the small town myth,” Lee argues.6 And in the hands of both Carter and his opponent, Gerald Ford, such tales of local rectitude and parochial merit quickly intersected with the neighborhood mythologies of the urban North. Across the fall, noted one veteran reporter, both candidates reverentially proclaimed “the glories of reviving neighborhood communities.”7 Yet the two contenders came to define the city neighborhood’s identity in a decidedly constricted and particularistic fashion. While adopting a rhetoric of decentralization, communal ties, and self-reliance, the Carter and Ford camps tenaciously sought to link their respective domestic philosophies to the bootstrap neighborhood stories of whiteethnic urbanites. In doing so, the candidates together helped lay the 310

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groundwork for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 offensive. Throughout the 1980 campaign, the conservative insurgent cannily wrapped his hard-edged antistatist message in well-worn romantic imagery of the “old neighborhood,” wooing disaffected blue- collar whites by trumpeting the virtues of neighborhood integrity as an alternative to state intervention.

Courting the “Neighborhood People” One of Jimmy Carter’s best-remembered stumbles of the 1976 presidential campaign came in early April, in the midst of the Democratic primary race. As the candidate toured Indiana, reporters inundated him with questions over a startlingly inflammatory remark he had made to the New York Daily News four days earlier. Condemning government actions to “artificially inject another racial group” into a neighborhood, Carter had offhandedly suggested that he saw “nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained.” When pressed in Indianapolis to elaborate, Carter insisted that he held “nothing against a community that’s made up of people who are Polish, Czechoslovakians, French Canadians, or blacks who are trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination on the part of people.”8 As astonished journalists continued their interrogation over the day’s remaining events, the visibly irritated candidate only hardened his rhetoric, appending phrases about “alien groups,” racial “intrusion,” and the harmful consequences of a “diametrically opposite kind of family” being placed into a community.9 For several days, the issue dominated headlines, threatening to terminate the candidacy that the former Georgia governor had spent sixteen long months cultivating. Only after a deluge of criticism from civil rights leaders did Carter finally offer an apology. His words had been “ill- chosen,” he explained. He deplored racial discrimination and should have said “ethnic character or ethnic heritage” rather than “ethnic purity.” Skeptical party rivals accused Carter of cynically appealing to George Wallace’s racially conservative supporters in anticipation of the upcoming Pennsylvania and Michigan primaries.10 But, whether the statement was a calculated exercise in dog-whistle politics or merely a ham-fisted semantic blunder, it foreshadowed the central role that neighborhood rhetoric would play through the rest of the campaign. Ethnic purity or ethnic character? Neighborhood homogeneity or cultural retention? Was there a difference? What did it mean in policy terms? Unfolding in a vague and slippery code language, these debates 311

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reflected a powerful national discord over the essence and future of older urban neighborhoods. Indeed, “neighborhood,” as a malleable yet emotionally resonant signifier, would play much the same role in this race as ritual invocations of the American family would do in campaigns of the next two decades. Yet in actual fact, neither candidate was particularly well equipped for a contest emphasizing the place-based subcultures of the nation’s older metropolises. The incumbent president, with his background in Dutch- Calvinist western Michigan, and his Democratic challenger, who had emerged from the evangelical milieu of smalltown Georgia, had little prior experience with the industrial city’s cultural landscapes and byways.11 As a Catholic News Service journalist predicted that summer, the Episcopalian and Baptist opponents were “likely to fight for the evangelical vote out of strength and for the ethnic vote out of weakness.”12 Still, though the contest turned on a number of issues—from Watergate to inflation to Ford’s prodigious veto record—it also echoed and amplified key themes from the broader neighborhoods discourse of the mid-1970s. Three features in particular structured this interplay of neighborhood imagery and political stratagem. First was an effort to respond to a diffuse public angst over a perceived erosion of community bonds in the post-1960s United States.13 Politicians from both parties eschewed overarching visions of the nation itself as a community writ large, instead celebrating the United States as an entity defined by its multitude of discrete cultural enclaves and subcommunities. The old neighborhood and the small town here operated as symbols of stability in contrast with recent national upheavals, and as emblems of decency in distinction from the degraded state of Watergate- era politics. Second was a virtual erasure of explicit mention of race from treatments of urban neighborhood prospects and character. In the wake of Carter’s ethnicpurity controversy, race was nowhere and it was everywhere in the contest, for even as the topic largely vanished from the candidates’ public discourse, it continued to shape and determine their discussions of city neighborhood life. In a battle that the Wall Street Journal dubbed “a kind of crash course in the lore of ethnic America,” both sides implicitly enshrined the close-knit Euro-American urban village as the model neighborhood.14 Ratifying mythic images of such communities as an ideal type from which the basic concept of “neighborhood” could be defined, each then derived a political language of self-help and voluntaristic uplift from the popular narratives associated with these spaces. And, third, these particular formulations of neighborhood identity 312

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quickly became entangled with an array of other issues, ranging from the role of government to Cold War geopolitics to the fate of the American family. To make sense of this heightened neighborhoods appeal, as well as its distinctive narrative features, requires a brief look at some of the dramatic coalitional realignments that shook American party politics over the 1960s and 1970s. No source better captures contemporary understandings of those shifts than Kevin Phillips’s 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, a primer for converting simmering white racial animosities into Republican electoral gains. In a work hailed by Newsweek as “the political Bible of the Nixon era,” the young Republican strategist had offered up sweeping predictions of how transformations in the nation’s economic, cultural, and demographic make-up would restructure the political landscape.15 To Phillips, the most significant political phenomenon of recent years was not the band of intellectual and student idealists that had lifted the campaigns of Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy, but instead a brewing “populist revolt of the American masses,” who sought to throw off the “caste, policies and taxation of the mandarins of Establishment liberalism.” Casual reviewers focused most heavily on the regional aspect of this revolt. The Democratic civil rights alliance between African Americans and northern white liberals, Phillips concluded, would ensure the GOP an enduring new base among racially conservative whites of the once solidly Democratic South. But an important subtheme of Phillips’s work dealt with traditional white working- or lower-middle- class Democrats of the urban North, many of them Catholics of Italian, Irish, and Eastern European ancestry. Above all other demographic groups, Phillips contended, urban Catholics occupied a “socio- economic ‘combat zone’” engendered by rapid civil rights advances. As the “frontiers of the restless black ghetto” closed in on aging white neighborhoods, their blue- collar residents endured social ailments ranging from mushrooming taxes and crime to dismantled neighborhood schooling to the permissiveness of fashionable policing theories. Hints of a conservative national voting backlash among urban Catholics had already surfaced by the early 1960s, Phillips noted. And while electoral patterns in most “arch- Catholic wards” of the Northeast barely shifted from 1960 to 1964, the otherwise hapless Barry Goldwater had surprisingly improved the GOP’s performance in certain deeply established ethnic hubs—the neighborhoods “where delicatessens stocked Guinness, oatmeal and soda-bread” or “mozzarella, pasta and olive oil.” Similar tendencies could be discerned 313

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across the urban Midwest. To Phillips, the trend was clear and inexorable. A transformed Republican Party would emerge, newly able to compete for the “Scranton miners and Boston bartenders” of the old Roosevelt coalition. Meanwhile, a desiccated Democratic Party would linger on as haven for blacks, Jews, elite reformers, and New England Yankees—in other words, all the groups “against whom Northeastern Catholics have traditionally aligned themselves.”16 While in office, Richard Nixon had systematically pursued this goal through combative polarization tactics that two political analysts have dubbed “the nationalization of the southern strategy.”17 But this second element of Phillips’s formula for Republican ascendancy took on a different sort of prominence in 1976. In an apparent paradox, it was Carter’s background in the small-town South that calibrated this election so decidedly toward northern neighborhood themes. With their Georgian Baptist opponent expected to dominate in the southeastern and border states, Republicans had few Electoral College votes to gain from the southern strategy that Nixon had twice deployed to such advantage. Consequently, even for campaign trips deep below the MasonDixon line, Ford strategists took northern white urban and suburban voters as their principal audience. Ahead of a September swing through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, for instance, top advisors cautioned the president to steer clear of any hint that he was “kowtowing . . . to perceived Southern prejudices. If your supporters in Philadelphia find you stressing very conservative Southern themes, they could easily be alienated.”18 Still, though Carter might hold the favorite-son advantage in the South, both parties well knew that a Democrat had not claimed the presidency without approaching two-thirds of the Catholic vote since the advent of the New Deal years.19 And as early as April’s Pennsylvania primary, Republican pollsters had detected Carter’s deep vulnerabilities among northern urban Catholics.20 For the incumbent, as for his opponent, it seemed increasingly clear that a key portion of the election would be fought out on the turf of the industrial Northeast and Midwest, and particularly among the subset of blue- collar white city dwellers whose loyalties were newly up for grabs. The question, though, was how to capture their allegiances. The neighborhood strategies from each party emerged initially as a way to compensate for other perceived weaknesses with this voting demographic: for Ford, in the realm of foreign policy; and for Carter, on the terrain of domestic social and religious issues. On the one side, Republicans during the 1950s had based their white- ethnic appeals almost exclusively on a strident anticommunism. Starting in 1969, however, 314

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the party had established a proliferation of “nationalities-and-heritage” outreach vehicles in a bid to capitalize on an apparent blue- collar ethnic alienation from Democratic Party liberalism.21 But Ford, remarks political commentator E. J. Dionne, “utterly lacked Nixon’s love for the social-issue jugular.”22 And in 1976, he faced additional obstacles. The uproar over Ford’s “Poland gaffe” in the second presidential debate— the nations of Eastern Europe, the president had bafflingly insisted, did not live under Soviet domination—was only the most public manifestation of a long-simmering discontent. Many of the old-line nationalities federations for Americans of Eastern European lineage persistently charged that the administration’s détente policies, most controversially symbolized by Ford’s signing of the Helsinki Accords, had undermined the freedom quest of their brethren in the “captive nations” of the communist eastern bloc.23 What’s more, for a number of white- ethnic grassroots activists, there was a figurative and emotional link between neighborhood struggles at home and anticommunist battles overseas. In Philadelphia’s Grays Ferry neighborhood, for example, leaders characterized their mission using explicit Cold War parallels, declaring in 1973 that they had “adopted the Kennedy Doctrine of defending any friend and defeating any foe of our Community since that is the only way we see of saving it.”24 Several years later, one Detroit organizer would compare his own Poletown district’s fight against municipal bulldozers to the brave resistance of Poland’s dissidents in the face of Soviet tanks.25 If Ford’s Cold Warrior bona fides engendered skepticism among many ethnic Catholic leaders, then Carter, on the other side, faced a similar distrust, only one fueled here by his Southern Baptist background and his stances on specific social issues. While one Ford aide promised Newsweek that the “cultural combativeness between Baptists and Catholics will be exploited,” in fact what became known as Carter’s “Catholic problem” was something of a paradox.26 In temperament, Georgia’s former governor could seem too pious, too evangelical, or somehow reminiscent of a southern legacy of populist antiCatholicism. But in his policy positions, the church hierarchy and orthodox lay leaders deemed Carter distastefully solicitous toward his party’s liberal wing. With his opposition to federal aid for parochial schools, for instance, Carter vexed Catholic education supporters. And though he frowned on court-imposed desegregation busing, the Democratic platform accepted it as a “judicial tool of the last resort.” Most widely discussed was the roiling controversy over abortion rights. A recent survey had found only 11 percent of Catholics in favor of a blan315

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ket national prohibition. Nonetheless, Carter’s unwillingness to support a constitutional amendment permitting state-level abortion bans earned him sustained wrath from the church bishops and from a growing Catholic antiabortion movement.27 Both candidates, then, saw an opportunity to play to their opponents’ perceived weaknesses by engaging a specific urban voting bloc coming partially unmoored from longstanding party affiliations. And, across various strategy sessions, a focus on the status and fate of the local city neighborhood emerged as a potential lever that could effectively move them. For Republicans, this recipe was largely concocted in the offices of William Baroody Jr., a Washington political operative whose father had built the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) into a powerful conservative think tank. Under Ford, Baroody directed the White House liaison program for voluntary and ethnic organizations, and he eventually brought in Myron Kuropas, an ethnic historian active in national Ukrainian American organizations, as his deputy for ethnic affairs. During his time in the White House, and subsequently during his own AEI presidency, Baroody used quasi-religious cadences of community and neighborhood in order to promote a voluntarist, small-government philosophy. As he told a Seattle University commencement audience in June 1976, an expanding state had progressively usurped the role of the nation’s “value-generating institutions.” Private arrangements such as neighborhood, family, church, and fraternal society had been “profanized” while the state had been “sanctified,” leading to a pernicious sense of public alienation. And yet, in this respect, soaring post-Watergate distrust in government might actually signal imminent salvation. Just as Vatican II had shifted the Catholic church’s emphasis from hierarchy toward community, Baroody assured his listeners, new political currents in the United States would diminish state bureaucracy so that the private sector’s organic “value-generating institutions” could thrive.28 These goals, to Baroody and Kuropas, offered the basis for a promising new sort of Republican apologetics, one in which the ascendant conservative rhetoric of rugged individualism would take backseat to invocations of communal structures and place-based loyalties. Already by early May, though, Baroody was bluntly warning the president that his election bid had badly swerved off the rails. Nevertheless, the otherwise pessimistic Baroody saw a potential opening with white urban labor and ethnic voters, one that might be exploited by drawing on

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the notions of voluntarism and local control that resonated so strongly with the decade’s burgeoning neighborhoods movement.29 A widening swath of party strategists, in fact, had begun to push forward similar views. Ripon Forum, a moderate-wing GOP magazine, would retrospectively summarize the thinking on why neighborhood revitalization could be a winning Republican issue. First, many of the decade’s loudest and most visible neighborhood advocacy groups contained large contingents of working- class and lower-middle- class white ethnics—who, in distinction from African American urbanites, had recently shown some receptiveness to Republican solicitations. Second, Ripon Forum noted, these organizations frequently identified unresponsive municipal governments, mostly helmed by Democrats, as their chief adversaries. Third, blame for the ill effects of postwar urban renewal could easily, if misleadingly, be laid entirely at the feet of federal-level Democrats, thus casting the Democratic Party in the role of historic villain in a multidecade saga of bulldozer- driven decline. Fourth and most significantly, the core themes of the contemporary neighborhoods movement—local initiative, family, community self- determination, devolution of power— often sounded uncannily akin to the favored catchphrases of antigovernment conservatives.30 Indeed, Ronald Reagan’s early successes against Ford in the 1976 Republican primaries rested on just such a decentralist message, as he called for a “government closer at hand, not far away in the hands of a self-anointed elite.”31 Perhaps, then, a neighborhood- oriented campaign might allow a chief executive such as Ford, symbol of a sullied Watergate- era establishment, to reinvent himself as an outsider. As a starting place, Baroody and Kuropas assembled a major early May symposium for scores of neighborhood leaders and ethnic studies intellectuals. Billed as the White House Conference on Ethnicity and Neighborhood Revitalization, the gathering featured several highprofile Democrats involved in ethnic neighborhood advocacy, most notably Michael Novak and Monsignor Geno Baroni. As Baroody calculated, not only might such events lend Ford much-needed credibility among grassroots neighborhood activists, but they could also steal the thunder from Senate Democrats, who were soon to hold hearings on a bill to create a National Commission on Neighborhoods.32 Addressing his guests in the Rose Garden, the president blamed overgrown government as a leading culprit in the decay of “a sense of neighborhood, a sense of belonging, of cultural identification.”33 The conference organizers couldn’t have been more pleased when Baroni, in his keynote

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speech, hit many of the same notes. “We have transferred so much responsibility to the central government . . . ,” Baroni complained, “that these basic communities are drying up.” If Americans continued to “turn to government as the source of community,” he darkly warned, the nation could drift “close to totalitarianism.” Elated participants cheered Baroni’s alternative vision: a “participatory pluralism,” and federal policymaking that supported “our rich variety of ethnic differences and their life blood, our urban neighborhoods.”34 Beneath the applause, the conference’s implicit conflation of European ethnic roots and authentic neighborhood ties elicited anxieties and wariness. At the assembly itself, participants gave a chilly reception to an African American HUD official when she voiced concerns that the term “neighborhood revitalization” might sometimes be used as “a code for lessening the basic rights of some Americans.”35 Meanwhile, senior White House aides worried that the conference could trigger an incident similar to Carter’s ethnic-purity faux pas. They discarded Kuropas’s draft talking points for the president, which closely traced Carter’s contentious comments by attacking “federally ordained mathematical formulas” that “indiscriminately push people” into ethnically identified neighborhoods.36 They also overruled Baroody’s adamant pleas for “full press coverage,” fearing that “the press corps may use this event to stir up the ethnic-purity issue again.”37 Still, the conference caught the eye of at least a portion of its intended audience. “The White House has discovered ethnics,” proclaimed a Catholic News Service synopsis, running in parish and ethnic newspapers nationwide.38 By early July, Kuropas was cautiously rejoicing at Ford’s improved prospects among white- ethnic voters— achieved, as he wrote, through “focusing (albeit with little fanfare) on the neighborhoods.”39 Despite some sputtering attempts, the president’s division-wracked domestic policy team never managed to assemble a concrete neighborhoods agenda to retail on the stump.40 On the public campaign side, however, neighborhood references appeared in almost inverse proportion to their near absence from policy pronouncements. As the summer progressed, advisors created a special outreach unit, assigned “to reach ethnics and Catholics as often as possible” with messages linking Ford’s backing for a muscular national defense, his opposition to busing and abortion, and the party’s commitment to neighborhood revitalization.41 By the fall, Republican schedulers had their Democratic counterparts moaning that the president was busy “kissing babies and tossing watermelons in Italian and Polish neighborhoods” while their own candidate struggled to defuse the bishops’ abortion attacks.42 In 318

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print and radio ads, meanwhile, the Ford team declared that residents of “the many neighborhoods of America tend to see things in a very simple, practical, common-sense way.” And because the president grasped “the meaning and importance of neighborhoods,” he would work “against big government and for local control.”43 Reflecting this same ideology, the platform adopted at the GOP’s Kansas City convention named “the family, the neighborhood and the private volunteer sector” as the institutions most capable of reviving urban America.44 Throughout, tributes to human-scale, local relationships functioned as justification for policies of reined-in social welfare investment and urban “benign neglect.”

The “Big World” versus the Neighborhood As the convention season approached, Carter staffers had become increasingly desperate to shore up their candidate’s standing among urban Catholics. Over the summer months, despite enormous leads over either of his potential Republican opponents, Carter suffered an avalanche of negative coverage in the white- ethnic and Catholic press. “The Democratic Party doesn’t want Catholics,” fumed the editor of St. Louis’s archdiocesan newspaper, in a typical expression of discontent.45 By early fall, most of Carter’s thirty-three-point postconvention lead had evaporated. Moreover, a mid-September NBC poll found the two tickets running even among Catholics— a potential disaster for a Democrat— and others showed Ford holding sizable overall leads in key urban-industrial states like Illinois.46 While some critics focused their attacks on contentious religious issues, others instead questioned Democratic commitments to economically precarious ethnic neighborhoods. As the Polish American Am-Pol Eagle warned in late July, Carter must “make urban neighborhood preservation an important issue” if he were to “dispel the feeling that he is insensitive to the problems of the urban ethnic.”47 No other writer expressed these complaints with greater vehemence than Andrew Greeley and Michael Novak, both nationally syndicated columnists. Each let loose a torrent of exasperation with Carter’s purported indifference to the neighborhood concerns of blue- collar city Catholics. “I’m tired of being a Democrat,” Greeley flatly announced. The Carter nomination, he believed, was merely the second act in an ongoing attempt by the party’s New Politics wing to excommunicate urban Catholics entirely. Liberal powerbrokers had once courted col319

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lege students in hopes of erasing their need for ethnic Catholic votes, Greeley argued, and they now rallied behind Carter as ploy to replace Catholics with evangelical Protestants in the Democratic electoral coalition.48 Novak went further, calling for a full-scale defection. The current party, he declared, was consumed by warfare between two camps: the ethnic, neighborhood- oriented “Family Democrats,” and the jetsetting, snidely secular “Know-Everythings.” Despite Carter’s evangelical religiosity, Novak cast the ex-governor’s nomination as a triumph for a Rolling Stone–reading cabal determined to dissolve America’s local “religious familial cultures” out of a quest for an all-powerful state.49 Commentaries such as these strongly shaped the Carter organization’s interpretation of the soft polling numbers. Alarmed by mounting media coverage of Carter’s “Catholic problem,” campaign aides began in the convention’s wake to prepare for an intensive neighborhoodbased appeal. First, in late August, came the establishment of a new Urban Ethnic Desk, staffed by strategists tasked with mitigating Democratic weaknesses in blue- collar white city precincts. Leery of overt political entanglements, Geno Baroni turned down an offer to head the operation, but he dispatched one of his NCUEA deputies, a religious sister named Victoria Mongiardo, to Atlanta for the task.50 Dubbed “Carter’s ethnic flying nun” by one press- corps skeptic, Mongiardo brought to the job a personal biography almost perfectly emblematic of the ethnic revival’s political wing.51 Her value system, she noted, was one forged by shared rituals of song, fellowship, and food in her childhood community, a “ghetto of Italians” in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In 1955, however, her family’s block had been demolished for a municipal construction project, leaving Mongiardo with a lasting sense of injustice. In subsequent years, Mongiardo developed initiatives in civil rights, voter education, and labor rights in Mobile, Alabama— often in defiance of the local diocese. But her more recent work for Baroni’s organization had fueled her eagerness to win “cultural justice” for urbanites like her own family members.52 Upon arrival at the Carter headquarters, Mongiardo quickly sought to exorcise the ghost of George McGovern’s party legacy. Dismissing the past two Democratic presidential campaigns for revolving around “students, life style, women’s liberation,” and a peace movement that “made fun of ethnics’ patriotism,” she pressed her superiors for an outreach program concentrated on white- ethnic urban lifeways.53 Stung by the reaction to his “ethnic purity” remarks back in April, Carter at first hesitated. Campaign policy director Stu Eizenstat wrote to reassure Carter that he could indeed discuss “preserving neighbor320

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hoods without any implication of racial overtones.”54 Likewise, urbanaffairs staffer Tom Tatum advised that “we are all aware of the ‘shoals’ around phrases like ‘ethnic purity.’ Therefore, we need to use concepts like ‘neighborhood,’ ‘community,’ and ‘family’ to front this dialogue.”55 Along similar lines, a lengthy postconvention strategy memo, reviewed by Carter, argued that the Democrats were dangerously confusing Catholic religious issues— abortion, parochial-school aid, and the like—with urban ethnic issues. The “fundamental problem,” the memo warned, “is not one of religion.” Although much of the “overlooked and frustrated” urban ethnic population “happens to be Catholic,” the Democrats “have got to discipline themselves to think in terms of neighborhood and community.”56 Increasingly focused on mending the fraying New Deal coalition, Carter in his convention speech had summoned up historic images of a party built from Pennsylvania coal mines and stolid heartland homesteads, Lower East Side sweatshops and arid southern farms.57 And his kickoff to the general- election campaign was a symbolic attempt to rejuvenate this sprawling alliance. After opening with a Labor Day address at Franklin Roosevelt’s old haven of Warm Springs, Georgia, Carter rushed north for an extended barnstorm tour through blue- collar neighborhoods of the urban Northeast and Midwest. In what journalist David Broder dubbed a new “neighborhoods strategy,” intended to “bypass the bishops and reach the parishioners directly,” Carter took to the hustings in settings like Cleveland’s Slovenian center, Milwaukee’s Serb Hall, and Baltimore’s Polish-Italian Highlandtown district.58 At first, the trip seemed only to dramatize an unsettling ambivalence among traditionally Democratic Catholic constituencies. At airports and hotels, rowdy antiabortion protesters dogged the Democrat’s steps, and Philadelphia’s conservative archbishop wrong-footed the candidate by blocking a planned event at a city parish church. Still, Carter scored a desperately coveted photo opportunity on Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill. Encircled by nuns and Catholic schoolchildren, the candidate marveled at the community’s quotient of “Polish power,” lauded the significance of time-tested neighborhood traditions, and earned a kiss on each cheek from the revered local priest (fig. 24).59 By the fall, districts such as these had become the contest’s “priority territory,” reported the Associated Press.60 And for Carter’s September cities tour, Democratic advisors concluded that the biggest challenge was simply the perception of a vast cultural gulf between rural candidate and urban voters, between evangelical Protestantism and ethnic Catholicism, between the customs of the small southern town and 321

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those of the dense city neighborhood.61 In explicit response to this disjuncture, aides crafted a centerpiece neighborhoods address, planned for Brooklyn College, that foregrounded basic similarities between the nominee’s own background in Plains, Georgia, and the local cultures of the industrial urban north. Subsequently, the campaign team worked diligently to have the prepared address reprinted in as many community and ethnic newsletters as possible, as a kind of neighborhoods manifesto for the Carter candidacy. On the policy front, the speech offered little beyond a few predictable nods toward urban homesteading programs, antiredlining legislation, and local consultation on highway placement. Its purpose, though, was symbolic rather than substantive, an attempt to assure dubious listeners that Carter appreciated the fine-grained differences that made local urban places unique in the hearts of their inhabitants. “I don’t come from Americus, or Vienna, or Cordele. I come from Plains,” Carter opened; likewise, his Brooklyn audience came “from Flatbush— and not Sunnyside or Bay Ridge or Brooklyn Heights.” Still, despite this local distinctiveness, these small communities shared certain values that transcended differences of region or creed. In Flatbush as in Plains, “People know each other. They look after each other’s children. The local policeman is somebody’s cousin, and he has a name. You recognize your neighbors and you know the butcher where you shop. There’s a place of worship on one corner and perhaps a club or restaurant on the next.” But in each case, Carter hinted, those who understood the value of such ties had been trampled by the interest brokers, cultural homogenizers, and vast bureaucracies of the larger realm beyond. What the nation needed most was a renewed recognition that neighborhoods were not, as some might have it, merely “sections of the city, bricks and mortar, plots of land.” Rather, Carter insisted, they were “extensions of our families”—the very “fiber that holds our society together.”62 Strikingly, this carefully crafted homily avoided any gesture toward urban racial disparities or divisions. In claiming kinship with Flatbush’s residents, Carter instead echoed the thinking of white- ethnic advocates such as Greeley, who had recently argued that the nation’s most “critical division” was one based not on race, class, or sex, but rather one separating the cosmopolitan and the local—“the big world” and “the neighborhood.”63 As a man from the close-knit community of Plains, Carter implied, he too was a “local,” and thus a leader who would readily defend urban neighborhood traditions against big-world hostility or indifference. And here, Carter embraced many of the same small-government commitments as his opponent, promising an ad322

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ministration that “knows its limits” and pointing to informal neighborhood bonds of affection, religion, and family as the best tools for urban revitalization.64 The Georgia peanut farmer, it seemed, had learned at least one dialect of the neighborhood movement’s distinctive language.65 But if this particular campaign excursion, as a Village Voice columnist wearily observed, was meant to demonstrate that Carter was “neither an alien nor one of them big-spending liberals,” then Republicans would quickly employ the same localist cadences to hang both labels around his neck.66 With his homages to close-knit city places, Carter had sought to distance himself from negative popular impressions of the Great Society’s activist policy initiatives. His opponents, in turn, adopted similar rhetorical devices in order to associate the Democrat with the alleged disruptions brought on by recent liberal urban interventions. One of Ford’s most effective surrogates in white- ethnic communities was New Mexico senator Pete Domenici, an Albuquerque-born son of immigrant Italians. Three days after Ford’s Eastern Europe debate stumble, in a pugilistic address before Cleveland’s Federation of ItalianAmerican Societies, Domenici sought to swivel the spotlight to issues closer to home. Carter “talks about neighborhoods,” the lawmaker noted with disdain, “but I don’t think he knows what really makes them tick.” While, for the Democrat, neighborhoods were “laboratory specimens” to be manipulated under a federal microscope, traditional conservatives knew what made for a decent neighborhood. Domenici offered an inventory: start with some “good families” and “hardworking shopkeepers,” then add “about six good churches, each with a steeple higher than the next,” throw in “a couple of good schools and a lot of pride, and you’ve got a neighborhood.” This way of living, the senator insisted, may not “fit the social planners’ idea of a perfect community.” Still, “whatever may be wrong with it, the people who live there can work it out.”67 At first glance unexceptionable, Domenici’s list of attributes took on a sharper- edged meaning in the period’s charged atmosphere of white flight, busing clashes, tax revolts, and resistance to scattered-site public housing. Some White House advisors, such as communications director David Gergen, recommended downplaying the “fluffy” neighborhoods talk in favor of the “hard material” of foreign policy.68 But, nudged along by others, Ford pressed more insistently on the themes of ethnicity and neighborhood— and ever closer to the line Carter had crossed with his ethnic-purity remarks— as the campaign sped toward its conclusion. Addressing throngs of supporters clutching “Rizzo Forever” plac323

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ards at South Philadelphia’s Italian Market, Ford declared his resolve to defend “the kind of neighborhoods that you and your forefathers have built”— complete “with your own shops, with your own schools, with your own churches” (fig. 25). In Ohio he lauded Clevelanders who tutored next- door teens or shoveled snow for elderly neighbors rather than relying on “some government office or agency.” In St. Louis, the president recounted the wholesome upbringing that his friend Joe Garagiola, the former baseball catcher, had received among the self-reliant Italians of Father Sal Polizzi’s Hill neighborhood. And at an orthodox Brooklyn yeshiva, he praised ethnic communities as “the lifeblood of America today,” while linking his support for Israel with a vow to fight the “terrorism” of crime “in our own streets and neighborhoods.”69 In each case, Ford melded references to small government, voluntary initiative, community control of institutions, and veneration for local heritage into a bellicose conservative testimonial to big- city neighborhood lifeways. Though election- eve polls showed a near dead heat, the Democratic ticket finally escaped with a slender 2 percent margin in the popular vote. Still, as E. J. Dionne has commented, there was a “patched-

Figure 24 Jimmy Carter at Our Lady of Sacred Heart School in Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill neighborhood, September 8, 1976. “Everything the government does ought to be designed to keep families together and to protect our neighborhoods,” Carter declared. (Photo by Thomas J. O’Halloran/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC- U9-33279-12A)

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Figure 25 Gerald Ford tours Philadelphia’s Italian Market, September 24, 1976. “We must retain the kind of neighborhoods that you and your forefathers have built,” insisted the president. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library)

together quality to the Carter coalition, a sense that it was a gadget that could work only once before falling apart.”70 Indeed, the victory seemed a last hurrah for a New Deal alliance being torn asunder by antiliberal backlash, Sunbelt growth patterns, incipient culture wars, and the maturation of a highly mobilized New Right. Notably, Carter was reliant upon a near sweep of the deep South and border states—an “aberration,” in one historian’s words, “composed of one part Watergate and one part regional chauvinism.”71 And while exit polls showed Democrats securing 54 percent of Catholic voters, Ford markedly surpassed Nixon’s 1968 tally with this demographic. In urban-heavy northern states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, Carter snuck by with precarious triumphs bolstered by strong black turnout and thin but crucial advantages among white swing voters in bluecollar city precincts. Meanwhile, several urban-industrial states that were traditionally critical to Democratic fortunes— Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, and Michigan— swung into the Republican column.72 This is not to claim that the outcome hinged, in some measurable way, on the candidates’ competing articulations of neighborhood themes. The point, rather, is that the election’s distinguishing regional and demographic contours—the cleavages in party coalitions, the voter groups most intensively pursued, the beliefs about how best to target 325

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them—pushed to the fore a highly specific sort of neighborhoods discourse. From Carter’s “ethnic purity” to Novak’s “religious familial cultures,” from Baroody’s “value-generating institutions” to Domenici’s “six good churches, each with a steeple higher than the next,” the language that circulated through the contest tilted the very definition of neighborhood toward a particular kind of space, one characterized implicitly by its whiteness and its connection to the European immigrant saga. If this rhetoric offered candidates an attractive avenue for expressing concern over urban decay, it also allowed them to do so while avoiding a forthright engagement with issues of metropolitan racial inequities or disenfranchisement. Such a focus was not inevitable. Quite clearly, many different groups of urban Americans—including African American and Latino/a city dwellers—were just as troubled about the fates of their aging neighborhoods. A few voices within each camp made arguments along these lines, imploring their respective candidates to broaden the neighborhoods discussion to address more diverse constituencies. Libertarian activist and Republican strategist John McClaughry, for instance, cautioned the Ford White House against suggesting that neighborhood worries were solely the province of urban whites. “We cannot afford to let ‘neighborhoods’ become a code word for racism,” he warned, urging that the theme be used to reach out not just to white ethnics, but also to “blacks, Spanish-speaking, . . . Appalachians, and just plain Americans.”73 A group of prominent Italian American Democrats offered much the same advice to Carter’s running mate, Minnesota senator Walter Mondale. While politicians such as Nixon and Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo had profited by pitting lower-middle- class white ethnics against urban African Americans, they insisted, this strategy might be neutralized by seeking to connect both demographics around neighborhood issues of shared concern: urban-renewal destruction, bank redlining, highway construction, and others.74 In the end, this advice was mostly ignored—for one, because the parties’ neighborhood strategies were always devised specifically to secure white, urban, largely Catholic votes, and also because those approaches were intended to mask other perceived weaknesses with this particular constituency. (Such solicitude for local heritage had never gotten in the way, civil rights figure Vernon Jordan acerbically noted, “when urban-renewal developers destroyed the ethnic character of center- city black neighborhoods to build luxury housing for whites.”75) True, neither candidate regularly enlisted explicitly divisive rhetoric of the sort favored by Richard Nixon. But by failing to create a language 326

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of neighborhood that would cross community lines, the campaign entreaties consistently pointed toward particularistic, exclusive, and nostalgic definitions of the ideal city community. Absent from the political discourse were older visions of the neighborhood as a multiethnic microcosm of democracy, as imagined by progressives of the World War II era, or as a potential peaceable kingdom of interracial pluralism, as sketched out by idealistic cultural producers of the Great Society period. Unacknowledged were the uses of neighborhood history as a spur to civil rights reform, which the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum and kindred institutions had so compellingly demonstrated, or the forms of neighborhood consciousness then galvanizing various workingclass feminist projects. Instead, both parties leaned heavily on visions of the neighborhood’s basic purpose as defined by mythic images of close-knit, European- ethnic communities of faith, self-sufficiency, traditional authority, patriotism, and heritage.

A New Right Vocabulary of Place In 1976, Democrats had relied on these constructions as part of a quest to patch together an unraveling New Deal coalition. In doing so, they helped to solidify and disseminate a political language of place that the Right would adroitly deploy against them. If the localist rhetoric of 1976 had conveyed a constricted sense of neighborhood meanings, this was in large measure because it had been developed with an eye toward a specific and narrowly targeted swing demographic. To emerging New Right strategists, by contrast, that same vocabulary could be placed at the center of a much more all- encompassing narrative: not simply a local story about one or another plucky ethnic group and its cherished urban traditions, but, rather, neighborhood as an expansive metaphor for a set of broadly shared American values under assault by an arrogant clique of planners and elites.76 In 1980, the neighborhood appeals that had drifted through the previous campaign would be dusted off and reworked by the Reagan campaign in service of free-market doctrines and a socially conservative national agenda. During the intervening four years, President Carter’s actions at fi rst impressed veteran leaders of the neighborhoods movement. The administration brought respected neighborhood organizers into policy positions, created grant programs for local voluntary organizations, and appointed a National Commission on Neighborhoods to prepare policy advice.77 By 1978, Geno Baroni’s successor at the NCUEA, Robert 327

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Corletta, would glowingly deem Carter the first modern president to recognize “the necessity of involving neighborhood people in the decisions that affect the quality of life in their communities.”78 In the end, though, most of these initiatives came to little. The much-vaunted direct grants to neighborhood groups amounted only to tens of millions of dollars, a small fraction of the sums once spent on the Johnson- era Community Action and Model Cities programs. Few of the neighborhood commission’s recommendations were ever adopted, and the process itself opened up divisions between advocates for neighborhood “stabilization” approaches and critics who warned that such efforts would merely offer all-white communities new tools for fending off integration.79 As various scholars now contend, the Carter administration’s embrace of governmental devolution, along with its reliance on private-sector neighborhood groups, in many ways simply anticipated the 1980s Republican-led retreat from a vigorous federal role in confronting urban problems.80 Through their years of political exile, meanwhile, conservative intellectuals and strategists expended a great deal of energy on honing the neighborhoods rhetoric that the Ford campaign had tentatively and sometimes awkwardly embraced. Particularly, they focused on developing more elegant ways to retail small-government policy ideas using narratives of community and rootedness rather than invocations of self-interested individualism. Consistently, these stories cast in the role of chief antagonist a powerful “New Class”—an interlocking elite of knowledge workers who, as neoconservative sociologist Peter Berger asserted, were “emancipated from neighborhood ties” and held “a strong vested interest” in an oppressive and enervating welfare state.81 One crucial location for this undertaking was the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank that former Ford aide William Baroody Jr. soon came to lead. In fall 1976, the organization had begun a wide-ranging research and advocacy project entitled Mediating Structures and Public Policy, the brainchild of Peter Berger and his neoconservative writing partner, Lutheran cleric Richard John Neuhaus. With the initiative’s signature manifesto, the 1977 booklet To Empower People, Neuhaus and Berger helped to assemble a specific neighborhoods vocabulary amenable for adoption by New Right electoral strategists. Elaborating on ideas advanced in the 1950s by Robert Nisbet, the duo focused here on the vital role played by the nation’s “mediating institutions”: neighborhood, family, church, and voluntary association. As Berger and Neuhaus posited, by providing a

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middle ground between the realm of the purely personal and society’s vast and anonymous “megastructures,” these organic private-sector arrangements offered ordinary people power and participation in a way that the distant state could never do. Securing a true American pluralism, their text declared, required that policymakers “take seriously the structures, values, and habits by which people order their lives in neighborhoods.”82 Most remarkable about this document is the manner in which it appropriates long- circulating ideas about neighborhood functions from liberal and New Left theorists and repackages them into a conservative antistatist set of policy recommendations. For instance, approvingly quoting from Milton Kotler, the writers pressed for neighborhood government and federal retreat in the realms of health- care provision, education, and housing regulation. Or, obliquely referencing Jane Jacobs, they urged that neighborhood safety be entrusted to “the woman who runs the local candy store, the people who walk their dogs, or the old people who sit on park benches.” Yet the booklet’s case for selfdetermination and organic local order is deployed not just against what Jacobs had once labeled the “pseudoscience of city planning,” but also against what its authors cast as contemporary liberalism’s insatiable appetite for wealth redistribution and its misguided elevation of individual rights over community moral codes. Similarly, Berger and Neuhaus enlisted the language of cultural pluralism in order to condemn the alleged profligacy of recent antidiscrimination rulings: “Discrimination is the essence of particularism and particularism is the essence of pluralism,” they wrote.83 In To Empower People, then, a proposed rollback of various 1960sera progressive accomplishments is phrased not using a familiar binary opposition between individual liberty and an expansionist state, but rather by framing the state as competitor to the organic neighborhood structures that foster community pluralism and health. Soon enough, this brand of communitarian-tinged conservatism had percolated through the strategy infrastructure on the political right. Over at the Republican National Committee, for instance, public-affairs director Michael Baroody established the policy journal Commonsense in 1978, hoping to use it to nudge his party in just such a direction. In the inaugural issue, Michael Novak advised Republicans to let go of “alienating” talk about “the individual, free enterprise, the private sector,” in favor of “humbler realities: families, neighborhoods, voluntary citizen effectiveness.” Key phrases from Commonsense and To Empower People

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would run through the party’s 1980 platform.84 And no political operation was more attuned to this ideological current than the one coalescing around conservative standard-bearer Ronald Reagan. As historian Sean Wilentz suggests, the “mythic core of Reaganism” resided in its seemingly paradoxical amalgamation of individualistic and communitarian themes. One rhetorical thread extolled the unbridled and self-reliant individual, from the lone cowboy of lore to the risk-taking contemporary entrepreneur. A second thread, meanwhile, communicated a powerful “mystique of home,” conveyed through romantic stories of belongingness and fellowship in frontier pioneer communities or small Midwestern towns.85 And, when speaking in this latter mode, Reagan over time had begun to reach for an increasingly urban set of references, sampling often from the stock phrases of the decade’s neighborhoods movement. In this, two political wordsmiths proved especially important: John McClaughry and Bill Gavin. Both wrote intermittently for the former governor through the late 1970s; in 1980, they would serve together as speechwriters at his northern Virginia campaign headquarters. Convinced that such localist refrains would buttress a rigorously conservative ideological message, McClaughry and Gavin brought to the Reagan team distinct but complementary varieties of neighborhood thought. On the one hand, John McClaughry—a self-styled “Jeffersonian Republican”—maintained a longstanding passion for decentralized, localscale political institutions.86 A chief architect of Richard Nixon’s 1968 “black capitalism” proposals, McClaughry had spent the 1970s in the Vermont countryside—living in a log cabin he built himself, founding a libertarian research institute, and participating avidly in the state’s town-meeting governance traditions. Devoted to the small-is-beautiful philosophies of E. F. Schumacher, McClaughry dreamed of an America of radically localized decision-making, a “human-scale” society defined by its independent farmers, small businesses, and consumer cooperatives.87 Upon joining the Reagan campaign, he promptly sent the candidate copies of Mother Earth News, the countercultural magazine on appropriate technology and back-to-the-land lifestyles. “Note the Reagan themes: self reliance, independence, etc.,” McClaughry instructed. “There is much gold to be mined by reaching out to people who read this stuff.”88 A similar antipathy to centralization and state power guided his thinking about urban affairs. With a proper Republican program for neighborhood empowerment, he told top Reagan strategists, the party could kneecap municipal Democratic administrations and “lay the groundwork for a political revolution in the cities.”89 330

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If McClaughry’s vision represented a kind of Republican translation of the neighborhood movement’s political decentralism, Bill Gavin’s neighborhood interests emerged instead from his abiding preoccupation with wresting the Catholic blue- collar vote from the Democrats. The former Nixon speechwriter, in a 1975 book entitled Street Corner Conservative, had pronounced that “my conservatism is rooted, so to speak, in concrete. It is a conservatism of city neighborhoods.” In his boyhood Jersey City, Gavin recounted, “neighborhood was more a concept than a place”: it was reverence for the local parochial school, pride in wise-guy street smarts, whiling away time on the sidewalks, enclosed networks of family and friends. Through the 1970s, Gavin enjoined his party compatriots to celebrate those city lifeways, rather than relying on the “mahogany Republican prose” of the country club and corporate boardroom. To Gavin, the working- class Catholic Democrats among whom he had been raised were, without knowing it, true conservatives at heart, despite their allegiances to the party of Roosevelt. And what they now wanted, above all else, was “something liberals and liberalism are not willing or able to give them. They want to be left alone.”90 These two ways of imagining the city neighborhood’s social being— McClaughry’s emphasis on “human-scale” political life and Gavin’s accent on blue- collar ethnic rootedness—provided the Reagan camp with a storehouse of resonant phrases and anecdotes. They first emerged with consistency in the former governor’s syndicated radio commentaries of the late 1970s, approximately fifty of which were penned by McClaughry.91 “The neighborhood scale is a human scale,” Reagan said in one, “a place where the real spirit of a community can develop. . . . It is the home of the fraternal lodge, the church, the deli, the corner pub, the street festival, the Fourth of July celebration.” Sounding notes from the Jane Jacobs songbook, he extolled the “eyes on the street” and “mixture of generations and functions” that characterized healthy city communities. In this rendition, however, such cultural assets had been undermined by decades of pernicious state interventions, from highway construction to zoning codes, integration busing to federal mortgage insurance.92 Fixing block-level urban problems, Reagan insisted in another radio address, didn’t require government participation or public resources: “The people of the neighborhoods, given a chance to exercise their own ingenuity and talents, can preserve a neighborhood’s unique characteristics and save a city as they do it.”93 On the 1980 campaign trail, these motifs appeared with frequency. And by midsummer, they had been absorbed into a new, unofficial 331

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motto for Reagan’s remade Republican Party, a project in which Gavin had a large hand. Disdainful of typical election-year dabbling in ethnic symbols, Gavin had promised his campaign superiors a white- ethnic outreach operation based in “values, ideas, convictions as well as goulash and clog-shoe dancing.”94 Such overtures, he thought, were best expressed in simple, open- ended words gesturing toward roots and aspirations. Two years earlier, as centerpiece for the former governor’s stump speeches, he had devised a five-word “litany,” meant to summon up for listeners an American “community of shared values”: “Family, Work, Neighborhood, Peace, Freedom.”95 By the time of the 1980 Republican convention, observed one journalist, this heavily poll-tested slogan had become virtually a “mantra” for the party—an incantation “printed on the platform, repeated by speaker after speaker, even hoisted on banners.”96 The litany, Gavin later explained, “was the very essence of the Reagan blue- collar strategy,” adopted in hopes that each voter would “bring to the five words whatever beliefs he or she had.”97 The neighborhood may have gotten prime real estate in the Reaganite values litany, but the campaign gave little evidence of an interest in neighborhood- oriented policy. Through the fall, McClaughry pressed and pleaded with higher-ups to combine specific policy ideas with a tentpole neighborhoods address that he could package up for his enormous mailing list of community organizations.98 Under his own pet proposal, chunks of federal direct aid to cities would be transformed into personal “neighborhood improvement vouchers,” which individual residents could allocate to whatever local service project they pleased, whether run by churches, city agencies, fraternal groups, or block clubs.99 The concept failed to spark much interest among distracted upper-level strategists. This style of neighborhood empowerment, wrote a frustrated McClaughry, “is a profoundly Republican and Reaganesque idea and it is, frankly, a tragedy that we have never been able to exploit it effectively.”100 Nonetheless, the neighborhood theme, in two ways, figured centrally in the construction of the overarching campaign narrative. Its first role was specific and concrete. It offered an expedient means for raising socially explosive wedge issues, keyed toward the anxieties of the bloc of northern white Democrats—working class or lower-middle class, ethnic, often Catholic—whose support had been so fiercely contested in recent elections. Winning defectors here, the voters later known as Reagan Democrats, was critical to the GOP’s 1980 realignment ambitions.101 As an early internal campaign outline asserted, Democrats had “intensively cultivated the Black, Hispanic and special 332

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interest constituencies,” thereby enhancing Republican prospects for “whittling away one of the Democratic Party’s weakest components— the ethnic American.”102 In this electoral context, seemingly neutral testimonials to wholesome, family- oriented neighborhoods could easily be put to use as a shrewd signaling device—a vaguer, sunnier, and less obviously raceladen accompaniment to polarizing racial code words such as “quotas,” “welfare,” “reverse racism,” “forced busing,” and the like.103 Indeed, across the political right, sentimental catalogues of neighborhood virtues had become a favorite starting point for stories of white disenfranchisement in the post– civil rights era. As North Carolina senator Jesse Helms put it, northern urban- ethnic communities were “model neighborhoods, clean, safe, law-abiding, church-going and patriotic”; their inhabitants, meanwhile, were “treated like second- class citizens” due to autocratic civil rights remedies.104 Those same dutiful Americans, a Reagan campaign release contended, possessed “a sense of community manifested in neighborhoods all across the United States,” yet they were “displaced by affirmative action quotas, and their neighborhoods have been uprooted by government ‘renewal’ programs.”105 Implicit throughout was a contrast with the black inner cities, something that was especially emphasized during Reagan’s only major public foray into urban-policy debates. When the Republican traveled to the impoverished South Bronx in August to condemn Carter’s urban failures, an indignant crowd of mostly African American protesters shouted their disapproval.106 To Reagan strategists, the incensed candidate’s stormy exchange with inner- city demonstrators neatly reinforced their desired public image. “South Bronx ‘confrontation’ sent ‘conservative’ message,” reported Richard Wirthlin and Jim Brady in their “favorables” write-up, while the day’s events “reached white, suburbanite ticket-splitter.”107 Yet along with this specific, targeted, and place-based usage, the neighborhood concept played another role, and here it became far more abstract. In this second version, neighborhood was untethered from tangible notions of place, functioning instead as a metaphor for remapping the reach and extent of obligations among citizens. As Robert Reich proposes, the longstanding progressive vision of the nation itself as community was powerfully challenged by Reagan’s vision of the United States as an archipelago of intimate and tightly enclosed local communities. This latter way of understanding the country, however, also placed the duty of caring for fellow citizens squarely and exclusively in that local realm. “The idea of community as neighborhood 333

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offered a way of enjoying the sentiment of benevolence without the burden of acting on it,” Reich suggests. “Since responsibility ended at the borders of one’s neighborhood . . . , the apparent requirements of charity could be exhausted at small cost.”108 Epitomized by the word’s inclusion in the “values litany,” this intention was signaled also through GOP campaign ads lauding traditions of “neighbor helping neighbor,” promising “community control over local communities,” or promoting the administration of assistance for the needy “at the local neighborhood level.”109 Under this view, federal spending cutbacks and a shrunken welfare state would encourage citizens to rediscover their habits of local voluntarism. Americans would then help others, as they had once done, “out of the goodness of our hearts and a sense of community pride and neighborliness,” in Reagan’s words from a year later.110 Here, the imagined neighborhood is enlisted as part of a project of disaggregation and privatization: unraveling the webs of mutual responsibility that the New Deal and Great Society had once sought to weave among socially and geographically distant citizens.

During the mid-1970s, the grassroots neighborhoods movement had been at its zenith, and the 1976 election had combined a politics of neighborhood symbolism with at least a modicum of policy substance. By 1980, however, the symbolic had come to dominate. Indeed, Reagan’s skillful manipulation of neighborhood symbols prompted Harry Boyte, the democratic-socialist organizer and scholar, to declare in astonishment, “From the campaign rhetoric, one might have wondered whether Ronald Reagan had spent recent years involved in some neighborhood renewal project or seeking to get the local savings and loan to give more loans to the community.”111 But while Reagan the campaigner had relied upon communitarian articulations of local ties and responsibilities, Reagan the chief executive governed in the mold of a rigid economic conservative.112 Early on in the new administration, Carter’s embryonic neighborhood grant programs were eliminated. Far more significantly, from 1980 to 1987 federal direct-aid spending for urban areas declined by 47 percent, even as city residents endured dramatic cutbacks in low-income housing support, public welfare assistance, and other categories of social expenditure.113 The decade, notes one historian, witnessed a thoroughgoing “federal disengagement from urban America.”114 Meanwhile, conservative intellectuals and campaign professionals had welded together a new set of key concepts— 334

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mediating institutions, the human scale, street- corner conservatives, the local community’s “New Class” opponents, the five-word “litany” of American values—to produce a New Right political vocabulary of place.115 In 1977, the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, in his book Ethnic Chauvinism, expressed dismay at the range of liberal scholars and politicians then calling for an end to “big government” due to a “blind, personal commitment to the virtues of the ethnic neighborhood community.”116 While correct in identifying this trend, Patterson himself took the two concepts as absolute antitheses: one could either maintain an allegiance to the goals of social justice, equality, and individual liberty that were at least intermittently promoted by the 1960s- era activist state, or one could instead abandon those liberal and universalistic ideals in favor of a parochial, illusory, and backward-looking embrace of the organic local community. What Patterson missed was a long tradition of progressive localism, one which had cast the neighborhood community as the best vehicle for advancing precisely those ideals in the wider nation and world. By the late 1970s, however, the prospects for such a synthesis had waned as national-level Democrats ceded the language of neighborhood to the right. Party leaders had failed to enunciate compellingly enough a different vision of those spaces’ importance: one insisting upon openness along with boundedness, equality along with tradition, broader-ranging responsibilities along with loyalties close to home. The allure of the sharply bounded communal neighborhood as haven from outside intrusion had, at least temporarily, swept competing visions from the national political stage.

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Epilogue Each of the debates over neighborhood meanings that fill this book ought to be understood as an attempt to address key contradictions thrown up by the twentieth- century industrial city. Indeed, if the language and disputes described in the foregoing chapters appear sometimes to be recycled across decades, it is because these instances are all are aimed at resolving an ongoing set of tensions and anxieties that defined the metropolis of modernity and modernism, immigration and industry, centralized wealth and centrifugal population movements. The constant endeavor to envision face-to-face forms of community amid apparent urban atomization; the insistent tug- of-war over whether neighborhoods ought either to facilitate cultural assimilation or to shelter distinct heritages; the successive efforts to overcome the urban racial paradoxes at the heart of the New Deal; the attempts to invent a 1960s multiracialism and a 1970s feminism that were consonant with the ethos of the intimate urban village; the ongoing battles over central government’s reach into local city communities and relationships— each of these represents a response to an urban order that, by 1980, was already quickly slipping away. In all of these cases, urban artists, intellectuals, and activists fastened onto the neighborhood as a kind of terrain where the contradictions of that older city order could be worked out— either on real-life streets or in neighborhoods as written, painted, imagined, and described. And there is a reason why the concept of neighborhood, in particular, has been so often enlisted in efforts to resolve 337

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this set of tensions. To most of the figures who inhabit this book, the close-knit city neighborhood was a place that escaped the rigid dichotomies governing so much of twentieth- century urban thought: those between the premodern village and the modernist city, between suffocating kinship networks and existential loneliness, between oppressive traditionalism and self-absorbed individualism, between folk parochialism and mass homogenization, between the isolating mass-produced suburb and the alienating city core. In offering a discursive location between each of these opposing poles— a place in the metropolitan maelstrom but not entirely of it, both a product of urban modernity and an alternative to it—the city neighborhood and the relationships it fostered presented one potential realm for working out new and creative solutions to the pressing problems raised by twentieth- century American urbanism. That, in the end, is why each of the visions described in this book seems to look backward and forward at the same moment. The city neighborhood, as an idea and an ideal, offered an unparalleled figurative space for attempts to unify these two time orientations. Here, nostalgia for a bygone age of local loyalties and boundedness could be harnessed to fresh aspirations for an exhilarating urban and national future. Thus, Rachel Davis DuBois could craft a model for global interethnic comity by encouraging storytelling and seasonal ceremonies among small groups of neighbors. John Kinard and his museum colleagues could seek to nourish pressing racial-justice struggles by recovering the history of old Anacostia’s turn- of-the-century community of working- class African Americans. Ezra Jack Keats could devise a Great Society urban realism for children by enlisting memories of his hardscrabble Brooklyn boyhood. Milton Kotler could promote a radical reshaping of metropolitan power relations by extolling the neighborly give-and-take of the old New England town meeting. Jan Peterson and her allies could foster a vibrant form of urban feminism by honoring the unsung dedication of neighborhood nuns and Girl Scout leaders. And, finally, Ronald Reagan could wrap his eponymous free-market revolution in romantic images of the corner deli and the community parade. With the coming of a postindustrial urban age and a postmodern representational era, however, the underlying urban anxieties that gave rise to this conflicting yet overlapping collection of visions began to recede from center stage. This is not in the least to say that concerns over matters such as urban social justice, racial integration and exclusion, community integrity, or civic social fragmentation somehow disappeared. To the contrary, ground-level battles over these issues often 338

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actually intensified during the 1980s and 1990s. However, the central representational debates—the competition in the world of symbols and narratives over the neighborhood’s significance as a generic category— shifted in a marked and qualitative fashion. The acceleration of metropolitan sprawl, postindustrial economic dislocations, and city gentrification realigned arguments over the neighborhood’s function and purpose around questions of authenticity and artifice.1 New cultural trepidations over a purported loss of community and “sense of place” in the United States now emanated not from longstanding concerns over the atomization and anonymity of the relentlessly modern big city, but rather from the suspicion that an increasingly exurban nation had created a throwaway “geography of nowhere,” where a selfabsorbed and technologically besotted populace was left no choice but to bowl alone.2 In this context, the local city neighborhood was no longer enlisted primarily as a contrast to the sleepy rural village, or to the chaotic downtown of towering skyscrapers, or to the racial “ghetto” or the enervating mass-produced postwar suburb. Instead, it was frequently pressed into service as one remaining place of physical legibility and social cohesiveness in a fractured metropolitan landscape that planner Melvin Webber, already by 1964, had famously dubbed the “nonplace urban realm.”3 New antidotes emerged, each intended to fortify or restore the neighborhood as a cultural form. Examples range from remembrances of neighborhoods past in elaborately nostalgic public history programs to slick neighborhood “branding” strategies by municipal governments, and from tourist- oriented historic refurbishments to the design directives and public evangelism of the New Urbanists. Despite their differences, these and other phenomena signaled a diffuse commodification of the very idea of neighborhood. If lived experience no longer fostered organic community, perhaps Americans could reconnect with, or invent, a submerged urban-communal heritage, drawing on its iconography to establish some kind of tenuous continuity with that past—and thus a renewed “sense of place” in the present. Whether restoring historic streetscapes, battling for protective ordinances, concocting and selling local “character,” or reworking bygone neighborhood environments through museum exhibitions, participants frequently relied on an instrumentalist conception of history in hopes that bounded, identifiable neighborhoods could be somehow imposed onto the urban landscape, or even willed back into existence. Thus, they both protested against, and were often complicit in, a postindustrial redefinition of the city neighborhood as craft, confection, pastiche, or artifice. 339

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These more recent efforts echo the disquiets of a newer postindustrial metropolitan age just as surely as the projects described in the preceding pages reverberated to the dissonances of an older urban industrial order. Nonetheless, while emerging in different guises, assertions of the old neighborhood’s cultural centrality appear and reappear and reappear again. And, however unlikely, the hope persists that the country’s most intractable social problems might somehow or someday be overcome in the realm of local spaces and personal relationships. This dream is embodied in both the ideal and the illusion of the United States as a nation of neighborhoods.

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Acknowledgments It’s a privilege to express gratitude to the many mentors, colleagues, benefactors, and other individuals who made possible the completion of this monograph. In the study’s original phase, Michael Denning and Matthew Frye Jacobson contributed immensely as American Studies mentors and guides. All through the manuscript’s development and before, Michael provided an inspiring model as a teacher and scholar. While fostering this project, he far exceeded any reasonable expectation with his discerning critical readings of drafts and penetrating discussions of perplexing research issues. Along the way, he taught me to see the fun in knotty writing challenges, while constantly reminding me by example of why I first aspired to be in this line of work. Meanwhile, Matt gave consistently insightful suggestions, as well as much-needed assurances that the project would indeed get done, and that solutions to baffling problems would crop up when I least expected them. The final product owes much to his personal and intellectual generosity. Also considerate with their guidance and interest during this project’s early stages were Jean- Christophe Agnew, John Mack Faragher, John Szwed, and other academic mentors. On the administrative side, Victorine Shepard and Jean Cherniavsky offered expert counsel and friendly motivation. For their struggle to create a better climate in which to teach and write, I’m indebted to the indefatigable union members of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization of UNITE-HERE. At Yale University, program peers regularly provided inspiration and 341

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encouragement; my thanks here especially to Brenda Carter, Amanda Ciafone, Daniel Gilbert, Paul Grant- Costa, Sarah Haley, Mandi Isaacs Jackson, Miriam Posner, Shana Redmond, Mary Reynolds, and Charlie Veric. The study benefited enormously from the long-running support given by Marc LeBlanc, as he and I forged along parallel paths on Egyptology and American Studies projects. With great hospitality, Ian Cornelius, Ellen Ketels, Shana Redmond, and my uncle and aunt, David and Beverly Looker, provided much-appreciated lodging for several research trips. At various points during revisions, numerous academic colleagues generously offered highly perceptive remarks on draft versions; for this, I owe large debts to Heidi Ardizzone, Julia Foulkes, Margaret Garb, Emily Lutenski, Matthew Mancini, Carlo Rotella, Robert Sampson, and Conevery Bolton Valencˇius. Daniel Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Angela Miller, Cindy Ott, Carlo Rotella, Amanda Seligman, and Susanne Wiedemann also gave perspicacious advice at several key junctures. And from start to finish, Amanda Izzo and Mark Looker offered countless draft commentaries and innumerable smart suggestions that improved the final product incalculably. Along the way, I received essential guidance on themes and primary texts from many valued colleagues and friends: among others, Amanda Ciafone, Jesse Gant, Daniel Gilbert, Jeffrey Glover, Brian Greening, Gerald Liu, Angela Miller, Eric Rosenstock, Matthew Seybold, and Sue Taylor. During revision work, several graduate research assistants at Saint Louis University helpfully contributed; my appreciation here goes to Brandy Boyd, Madeleine Brink, Melissa Ford, Cicely Hunter, Adam Kloppe, Michael McCollum, Jessie Roth, Anna Schmidt, Karen Smyth, and Maurice Tracy. Responsibility for the manuscript’s failings and flaws, of course, is mine alone. For their financial contributions toward research travel, I gratefully acknowledge the Gerald R. Ford Foundation; the Yale Alumni Club of Philadelphia, especially Charlotte Phelps; the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, particularly Deborah Pope; the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame; the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, particularly David Klaassen; and the College of Arts and Sciences of Saint Louis University, especially Donna LaVoie. With tremendous graciousness, Marc Fasanella allowed use of his father’s artwork as cover image. For generous publication subvention and image- cost assistance, I’m obliged to Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund. At Saint Louis University, appreciation is due also to Michele Oesch of the Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations, who helped procure necessary 342

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outside funding; and to Terri Foster, American Studies administrative secretary, for assistance with financial matters. Earlier versions of chapter 1 and several paragraphs from the introduction and chapter 4 were published as “Microcosms of Democracy: Imagining the City Neighborhood in World War II–Era America,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 2 (2010): 351–78. An earlier version of chapter 8 was published as “Visions of Autonomy: The New Left and the Neighborhood Government Movement of the 1970s,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 3 (2012): 577–98. Permission to print revised versions here is gratefully acknowledged. At the University of Chicago Press, the two successive editors for the project—Robert Devens and Timothy Mennel— distinguished themselves by their acuity, thoughtfulness, and superb professionalism. My sincere thanks to both, as well as to editorial associates Russell Damian and Nora Devlin for their expert help with numerous issues, to Carol McGillivray and Robert McCarthy for their attentive work on the copyediting process, and to series editor Becky Nicolaides for her various contributions to the book series. Here at Saint Louis University, I’ve been fortunate to inhabit a department characterized by its warmth, supportiveness, and lively intellectual interchange. For their friendship, and for the many ways in which they fostered and aided this work, my gratitude goes to my American Studies department colleagues over the years: Heidi Ardizzone, Emily Lutenski, Matthew Mancini, Katherine Moran, Cindy Ott, Jonathan Smith, and Susanne Wiedemann. My biggest debts are personal ones. Throughout this process, my parents, Karri Looker and Mark Looker, and my sister, Anna Looker, have been unstinting with their love and encouragement. Meanwhile, Amanda Izzo, as friend and partner, has made recent years rewarding, meaningful, and worthwhile beyond what I ever might have anticipated. Though I’m wholly unable to thank them adequately, I hope the four of them see a small measure of their care reflected back here.

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Notes K E Y TO A B B R E V I AT I O N S I N N OT E S

Chicago History Museum Research Center, Chicago, IL CHM-IMG: Irene McCoy Gaines Papers Columbia University Libraries, Columbia Center for Oral History, New York, NY CUCC- CTWP: Children’s Television Workshop Project Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, NY CUL- CSP: Clarence Stein Papers Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, KS DDE- GDM: Gerald D. Morgan Records (Pre-Acc.) DDE-JML: James M. Lambie Jr. Records DDE-JSB: John S. Bragdon Records DDE-WHCF: White House Central Files– Official File Federal Bureau of Investigation files FBI- SUBJ: Subject files acquired via author’s Freedom of Information Act requests Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, MI GFL-PFC: President Ford Committee Records GFL-PHF: Presidential Handwriting File GFL-PTRO: Paul Theis and Robert Orben Files GFL-RBC: Richard B. Cheney Files GFL- SGM: Stephen G. McConahey Files GFL-WBF: William J. Baroody Jr. Files GFL-WBP: William J. Baroody Jr. Papers Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA HSP-EMPAC: Ethnic Millions Political Action Committee (EMPAC!) Records

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NOTES

HSP-NCU: National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs Project Records Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO HST-DSM: Dillon S. Myer Papers HST-NSK: Nathaniel S. Keith Papers Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, GA JCL- CMC: Carter/Mondale 1976 Campaign Collection JCL-NCN: National Commission on Neighborhoods Records JCL- OEA: White House Office of Ethnic Affairs Files Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, Wentz Library, Gettysburg, PA LTS-LWB: Leopold W. Bernhard Papers The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, NY MOMA- CEF: Curatorial Exhibition Files MOMA-DCE: Department of Circulating Exhibitions Records National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs Records NAC-REC: Williams, Lillian Serece, and Randolph Boehm, eds. Records of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1895–1992. Part 1. Microfilm, 41 reels. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1993–94. Philadelphia City Archives, Department of Records, Philadelphia, PA PCA-FLR: Frank L. Rizzo Papers Princeton University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton, NJ PUL-RSC: Radio Scripts Collection Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY RAC-RBF: Rockefeller Brothers Fund Archives, Record Group 3 Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA RRL-RPC: Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC SIA-AED: Anacostia Museum, Education Department, Records (RU-390) SIA-AOD: Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, Office of the Director, Records (RU-265) St. Louis University Libraries, Archives and Manuscripts, St. Louis, MO SLU-INAN: Interviews on the National Association of Neighborhoods (NAN) Syracuse University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse, NY SUL- GBP: Gertrude Berg Papers Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives, Philadelphia, PA TUL-WC: Whitman Council Records (Acc. 523) University of California, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA UCB- CBW: Catherine Bauer Wurster Papers University of Chicago, University Archives, Chicago, IL UCH-LWP: Louis Wirth Papers University of Illinois at Chicago, University Archives, Chicago, IL UIC-DSP: Dick Simpson Papers University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, University Archives, Urbana, IL

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 2–3

UIUC-ACA: Advertising Council Archives, Series 13.2.207: Historical File University of Maryland, Library of American Broadcasting, College Park, MD UMDL-LJH: Louis J. Hazam Papers UMDL-WSC: William Schaden Collection University of Maryland, National Public Broadcasting Archives, College Park, MD UMDN- CTW: Children’s Television Workshop Collection University of Minnesota, Children’s Literature Research Center, Minneapolis, MN UMNC- SBM: Sharon Bell Mathis Collection University of Minnesota, Social Welfare History Archives, Minneapolis, MN UMNS-NFS: National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers Records UMNS-PC: Pamphlet Collection University of Notre Dame, University Archives, Notre Dame, IN UND-BRN: Geno Baroni Papers UND-NUE: National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs General Records University of Southern Mississippi, De Grummond Children’s Literature Collection, Hattiesburg, MS USM-EJK: Ezra Jack Keats Papers Vanderbilt University Libraries, Nashville, TN VTNA: Vanderbilt Television News Archive Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI WHS-IPS: Institute for Policy Studies Records Women and Social Movements database WSM-NCNW: Primary documents compiled electronically in Tamar Carroll, “How Did Working- Class Feminists Meet the Challenges of Working across Differences? The National Congress of Neighborhood Women, 1974–2006,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, eds., Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 10, no. 4 (2006). Wayne State University, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Detroit, MI WSU-WPR: Walter P. Reuther Papers Yale University, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, New Haven, CT YUB-LHP: Langston Hughes Papers Yale University, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, New Haven, CT YUG-KWP: Kurt Weill/Lotte Lenya Papers INTRODUCTION

1. 2. 3.

R. D. McKenzie, “The Neighborhood: A Study of Local Life in the City of Columbus, Ohio,” American Journal of Sociology 27 (1921): 344– 45. Robert J. Sampson, “The Place of Context: A Theory and Strategy for Criminology’s Hard Problems,” Criminology 51 (2013): 6. Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Scribner, 1909), 25; David Snedden, “Neighborhoods and Neighbor-

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liness,” Social Forces 5 (1926): 231; Scott Greer, “The Social Structure and Political Process of Suburbia,” American Sociological Review 25 (1960): 518; Greeley quoted in John Hamer, “Neighborhood Control,” Editorial Research Reports 2 (1975): 789. 4. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 5. On illusions of stability and timelessness within white Catholic urban communities during this period, see John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth- Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 79. This narrative is one reason why white- ethnic nostalgists most often celebrate the 1940s and 1950s as a neighborhood golden age; see Suleiman Osman, “The Decade of the Neighborhood,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 118. Michael Johns identifies similar midcentury themes of neighborhood “continuity and coherence,” in Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 47– 48. On this myth’s conservative political orientation, see Carlo Rotella, October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 336n28; Robert A. Orsi, “Crossing the City Line,” in Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, ed. Robert A. Orsi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 32– 33. 6. Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, introduction to Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization, ed. Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 2003), 5. 7. Zane L. Miller, “The Role and Concept of Neighborhood in American Cities,” in Community Organization for Urban Social Change, ed. Robert Fisher and Peter Romanofsky (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981), 16–17. 8. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), 464. 9. Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 8. Among scores of works exploring this dynamic, one might consult Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth- Century America (New York: Norton, 2005); Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Michael K. Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 29–96; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 58–72. 10. Hence the neighborhood politics of “defensive localism,” as defi ned in Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 210–11.

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11. See Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post- coloniality (New York: Routledge, 2000), 26. 12. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958), 259. 13. Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 44– 46. 14. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 296. 15. A detailed critique of this tradition is Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978), 15– 43. Among social historians, note David Garrioch and Mark Peel, the large majority of works on urban neighborhoods hinge on this same division between “tradition” and “modernity,” while consistently presenting neighborhoods as fragile entities that gradually succumb to an array of modernizing forces. Garrioch and Peel, “The Social History of Urban Neighborhoods,” Journal of Urban History 32 (2006): 664– 65. 16. So, e.g., to Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd in 1937, a chief urban challenge was the “weakening of personal identification with neighborhood and community ties,” while the federal government’s National Resources Committee could claim that same year that urbanites were “liv[ing] in a social void.” Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), 188n81; National Resources Committee, Urbanism Committee, Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1937), 57. 17. Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985), 305– 6. 18. Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 4. 19. Rotella, October Cities, 3, 5, 8. 20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 40. 21. For insightful remarks on the relationship between cultural texts and policymaking, see Melani McAlister, “A Cultural History of the War without End,” Journal of American History 89 (2002): 441. 22. Jane Jacobs, “The City: Some Myths about Diversity” [1961], in American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century, ed. William F. Buckley Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 338– 54. 23. James W. Follin (commissioner, US Urban Renewal Administration), “Urban Renewal Comes of Age,” speech, Rotary Club of Philadelphia, Feb. 29, 1956, 5, DDE-JSB, box 84/“Urban Renewal.” 24. Jan Peterson quoted in Patricia McCormack, “Neighborhood Women Are Uniting,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 26, 1981. 25. Reagan quoted in Leslie Bennetts, “Conservatives Join on Social Concerns,” New York Times, July 30, 1980.

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26. Obama remarks transcribed from Campbell Brown: No Bias, No Bull, CNN/ US television, Jan. 20, 2009. CHAPTER ONE

1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

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“H. C. Lewis, Novelist, Writer of Scenarios,” New York Times, Oct. 19, 1950. On Lewis’s political views and activities: Ralph Ellison, “Anti-war Novel,” New Masses, June 18, 1940, 29– 30; and FBI- SUBJ: “Lewis, Herbert Clyde.” Herbert Clyde Lewis, “Back Home,” Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1943. Robert B. Westbrook, Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 28. See also George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 46. Richard K. Green and Susan M. Wachter, “The American Mortgage in Historical and International Context,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (2005): 96; Roger Biles, The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945–2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 3. John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front (Chicago: Dee, 1996), 69–71. Cleveland Federation of Settlements, “Program to Meet the War Situation,” May 1942, UMNS-NFS, box 206/123. William Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 5– 6; Perry R. Duis, “No Time for Privacy: World War II and Chicago’s Families,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, ed. Lewis A. Ehrenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 32. Lester H. Robb, “Small Towns in Large Cities,” American City, June 1940, 80. John L. Elliot, “What Will Unite Americans?,” speech, New York Society for Ethical Culture, Oct. 12, 1941, 3, UMNS-NFS, box 201/67. Katherine Barrett Poser, “Victory Garden Plan Now Shows Results,” Washington Post, June 28, 1942. Eduard C. Lindeman, “Democracy and the Friendship Pattern,” Adult Education Journal 3, no. 1 (1944): 22–23. On the “broad reach of the official liberal, and civic nationalist, culture” during the war, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 187–96. Wilkins quoted in Cary McWilliams, “What We Did about Racial Minorities,” in While You Were Gone: A Report on Wartime Life in the United States, ed. Jack Goodman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 94. Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 139– 41, 206. Mervyn LeRoy, dir., The House I Live In, dist. RKO Radio Pictures, 1945.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 27–30

16. Douglas Yates, Neighborhood Democracy: The Politics and Impacts of Decentralization (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1973), 17–18; Miller, “Role and Concept,” 16–17. 17. Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938): 1–24; Louis Wirth, “The New Birth of Community Consciousness,” in Community Life in a Democracy, ed. Florence C. Bingham (Chicago: National Congress of Parents and Teachers, 1942), 11–12, 20. 18. Snedden, “Neighborhoods,” 236; Niles Carpenter, The Sociology of City Life (New York: Longmans, Green, 1932), 241. 19. “New Appreciation of Neighborhood,” Christian Science Monitor, July 24, 1943; Pence James, “Neighbors in Action,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 12, 1943; Christine Sadler, “Defense Activities Bring out Neighborhood Spirit,” Washington Post, Apr. 12, 1942. 20. David Cushman Coyle, America (Washington, DC: National Home Library Foundation, 1941), 79– 84. 21. “Democracy Threatened by Lack of Neighborliness,” Science News Letter, Feb. 28, 1942, 133. 22. US Office of Civilian Defense, Now That You Are a Block Leader (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), n.p. 23. On such wartime fears among New Deal officials, see Philip J. Funigiello, The Challenge to Urban Liberalism: Federal- City Relations during World War II (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), esp. 57– 62, 122–24, 157– 62. 24. US Office of Civilian Defense, The Neighborhood in Action (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 25–27; US Office of Civilian Defense, The Block Plan of Organization for Civilian War Services (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942), 4– 5. 25. A.M.Y., “Block Meetings: Neighbors in a Democracy,” Christian Science Monitor, Apr. 3, 1943. 26. US Office of Civilian Defense, Neighborhood in Action, 6, 13; US Office of Civilian Defense, Civilian War Services: An Operating Guide for Local Defense Councils (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 1. 27. See Funigiello, Challenge to Urban Liberalism, 157. 28. Judith E. Smith, Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 3. 29. Geneva Mathiasen, “Window Show,” Survey Graphic, Aug. 1942, 359– 61. On the mystique of shared home-front sacrifice, see Mark H. Leff, “The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II,” Journal of American History 77 (1991): 1296– 318. 30. Berg quoted in “Suppurating Serials,” Time, Mar. 23, 1942, 44; Louis Berg, “Entertainment Programs and Wartime Morale: Radio’s Ten Best Morale Building Programs,” pamphlet, Jan. 18, 1943, SUL- GBP 2, box 1/“Goldbergs”; Louis Berg to Gertrude Berg, Feb. 15, 1943, SUL- GBP 1, box 5/

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31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

352

scrapbook. Psychiatrist Louis Berg should not be confused with Lewis Berg, husband of the show’s writer and star, Gertrude Berg. Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 290. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 110–13. The “looking-backward” phrase is adapted from Smith, Visions of Belonging, 37. Sidney Meller, Home Is Here (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 198. The novel won Meller his second Phelan Literary Award. Ibid., 224, 340. Dan Miron, “God Bless America: Of and around Sholem Asch’s East River,” in Sholem Asch Reconsidered, ed. Nanette Stahl (New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2004), 149– 50, 186– 89. Sholem Asch, East River: A Novel, trans. A. H. Gross (New York: Putnam, 1946), 5, 16, 24; Miron, “God Bless America,” 191–92. Asch, East River, 297, 351, 353. Ibid., 299, 304, 307, 340, 403. Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers: A Novel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1925). Wirth, Ghetto, 290. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” [1940], in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), 197. “America Is Becoming,” Common Ground 2, no. 1 (1941): 119; Sterling North, “East River Is Strong Medicine,” Washington Post, Oct. 27, 1946. Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17–18. See also Funigiello, Challenge to Urban Liberalism, 39–79. Rachel Davis DuBois, Get Together Americans: Friendly Approaches to Racial and Cultural Conflicts through the Neighborhood-Home Festival (New York: Harper, 1943), 57. O. L. Davis Jr., “Rachel Davis DuBois: Intercultural Education Pioneer,” in “Bending the Future to Their Will”: Civic Women, Social Education, and Democracy, ed. Margaret Smith Crocco and O. L. Davis Jr. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 169– 84. Shafali Lal, “1930s Multiculturalism: Rachel Davis DuBois and the Bureau for Intercultural Education,” Radical Teacher, no. 69 (2004): 18–22; DuBois, Get Together Americans, 4, 6–7, 12–13. On intellectual currents shaping DuBois’s ideas, see Diana Selig, Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Nicholas V. Montalto, A History of the Intercultural Education Movement, 1924–1941 (New York: Garland, 1982), 218– 67. DuBois, Get Together Americans, xii, 3, 13, 86. On Roosevelt’s neighborhood metaphors for foreign policy, see Richard A. Melanson, American

N OT E S TO PAG E S 3 8 – 43

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

Foreign Policy since the Vietnam War: The Search for Consensus from Nixon to Clinton, 3rd ed. (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2000), 156; Amy Spellacy, “Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor: Geography, Globalism, and Pan-Americanism during the 1940s,” American Studies 47, no. 2 (2006): 40. DuBois, Get Together Americans, xi, 11; Rachel Davis DuBois and Marjorie Barstow Greenbie, “Try a Neighborhood Party,” Parents’ Magazine, Sept. 1943, 28–29, 81; Rachel Davis DuBois, “A Tension Area Becomes a Neighborhood,” Journal of the National Education Association 38 (1949): 114–15, emphasis added. DuBois, Get Together Americans, 2. Arthur Katona, “Start the Semester with a Neighborhood Party,” Common Ground 7, no. 2 (1947): 89–90. Rosalie Slocum, “What’s Cooking in Your Neighbor’s Pot?,” Common Ground 4, no. 3 (1944): 79– 81. Good Neighbor Committee, bylaws, 1940, UMNS-NFS, box 201/67. A sampling of the extensive literature on such wartime urban racial violence might include Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Dominic J. Capeci Jr. and Martha Wilkerson, Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991); Dominic J. Capeci Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977); Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 69–95. Lal, “1930s Multiculturalism,” 21. DuBois, Get Together Americans, 57– 62, 79. Montalto, Intercultural Education, 270–76; Cherry A. McGee Banks, Improving Multicultural Education: Lessons from the Intergroup Education Movement (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2005), 129– 40. Louis Hazam, oral history with Daniel Luczak, Apr. 23, 1976, transcript, UMDL-LJH. Hazam’s early scripts align with work described in Judith E. Smith, “Radio’s ‘Cultural Front,’ 1938–1948,” in Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Routledge, 2002), 209–30. Louis Hazam, “Story without Accents,” episode script for Home Is What You Make It, NBC radio, May 17, 1947, LAB-WSC. In quoted passages, suspension points have been silently removed. On divergences in workplace and residential working- class identification, see Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 17–19. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 211–14; McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 109–10; Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 186– 87, 195–98.

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63. Denning, Cultural Front, 319. 64. Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 2:114. For Rice’s retrospective account, see his Minority Report: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 236– 65, 411–13. 65. Kurt Weill, Langston Hughes, and Elmer Rice, Street Scene: An American Opera (Based on Elmer Rice’s Play), piano/vocal score (New York: Chappell, 1948), 5; Langston Hughes, “Street Scene,” Chicago Defender, Dec. 21, 1946. 66. Langston Hughes, misc. Street Scene composition scraps, n.d. 1946, YUB-LHP, box 357/5742. 67. Langston Hughes, press-release draft, n.d. 1955, YUB-LHP, box 357/5746. 68. Jürgen Schebera, Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life, trans. Caroline Murphy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 319. 69. John P. Rhodes, “Street Scene: A Show to Be Remembered,” Cincinnati Enquirer, n.d. 1950, YUG-KWP, box 88/63. 70. John Chapman, “Musical Street Scene a Splendid and Courageous Sidewalk Opera,” New York Daily News, Jan. 10, 1947, YUG-KWP, box 88/61. 71. Stephen Hinton, Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 369, emphasis removed. 72. William Hawkins, “Street Scene Has Opera Touch,” publication unknown, Mar. 22, 1947, YUG-KWP, box 88/61. 73. Linton Martin, “Street Scene, Musical, in Premiere at Shubert,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 17, 1946. 74. Weill quoted in Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, 2:108. 75. Critic John Anderson quoted in John Mason Brown, “Saying It with Music,” Saturday Review, Feb. 1, 1947, 24. 76. Weill to Langston Hughes, May 15, 1946, YUB-LHP, box 168/3081. On Weill’s proposed changes, see Foster Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway (New York: Knopf, 2002), 259. 77. Weill, Hughes, and Rice, Street Scene, 44– 59, 71–91, 99–112, 115–19, 178– 93, 212–25. 78. Richard Watts Jr., “A Lone Voice on Street Scene,” New York Post, Jan. 25, 1947. Likewise, Brown, “Saying It with Music,” 24–26; Elinor Hughes, “Street Scene Becomes an Opera with Striking Results,” Boston Herald, May 4, 1947. 79. Larry Stempel, “Street Scene and the Enigma of Broadway Opera,” in A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill, ed. Kim H. Kowalke (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 333; Ronald Taylor, Kurt Weill: Composer in a Divided World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 299– 300. 80. Jay Carmody, “Street Scene Now Set to Music,” Washington Evening Star, Mar. 8, 1947. 81. John Lovell Jr., “Singing in the Streets,” The Crisis, June 1947, 172–74, 188. 82. Council for Democracy, Defense on Main Street: A Guidebook for Local Activities for Defense and Democracy (n.p.: Council for Democracy, 1941), 18, emphasis added.

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83. Hughes to producers, memorandum, Dec. 21, 1946, YUB-LHP, box 357/5745. 84. Lewis, “Back Home.” 85. Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 32. CHAPTER T WO

1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

Clarence Stein, “Neighborhood Communities as the Basis of Democracy,” speech, Cleveland, May 19, 1944, 1– 5, CUL- CSP, box 6/7. Donald Leslie Johnson, “Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit,” Planning Perspectives 17 (2000): 227– 45, argues that the concept was devised by William Drummond and subsequently “appropriated” by Perry. This chapter focuses on Perry because most 1940s commentators debated the plan primarily with reference to his works. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 410. Judith Tannenbaum, “The Neighborhood: A Socio-Psychological Analysis,” Land Economics 24 (1948): 368. Clarence S. Stein, “The City of the Future: A City of Neighborhoods,” American City, Nov. 1945, 123–25. On Stein’s advisory role, “Look at Your Neighborhood,” School and Society, Apr. 22, 1944, 278. Elodie Courter, circular for Look at Your Neighborhood, Feb. 21, 1944, MOMA-DCE, II.1.72.2. Look at Your Neighborhood display, MOMA- CEF, exh. 256. Simkhovitch remarks in “Prominent Speakers at Preview of Neighborhood Planning Exhibition,” MoMA press release, Mar. 1944, MOMA-DCE, II.1.72.2. See also “Post-war Neighborhoods,” New York Herald-Tribune, Apr. 4, 1944. Alice Otis to John Denson, Nov. 26, 1943, MOMA-DCE, II.1.72.2. The MoMA had circulated exhibitions since the 1930s, but had not previously mass-produced sale copies. Elodie Courter to Mel Scott, Feb. 19, 1945; rental schedule for Look at Your Neighborhood; both MOMA-DCE, II.1.72.2. “Look at Your Neighborhood Display in Public Library,” Bangor (ME) Daily News, June 24–25, 1944; “Town Planning to Be Shown Here by Museum of Modern Art,” Auburn (CA) Bulletin, Mar. 23, 1944; both MOMA-DCE, II.1.72.2. See Andrew M. Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), esp. 22. Daniel Schaffer, Garden Cities for America: The Radburn Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 157– 59. William M. Rohe, “From Local to Global: One Hundred Years of Neighborhood Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association 75 (2009): 212.

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15. Howard Gillette Jr., “The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning: From the Progressive Era to the 1949 Housing Act,” Journal of Urban History 9 (1983): 422– 33; Christopher Silver, “Neighborhood Planning in Historical Perspective,” Journal of the American Planning Association 51 (1985): 162–70. 16. David A. Johnson, Planning the Great Metropolis: The 1929 Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs (London: Spon, 1996), 1–2; Clarence Arthur Perry, Housing for the Machine Age (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1939), 205–9. 17. Gillette, “Evolution of Neighborhood Planning,” 422; quotation from Carl Sussman, introduction to Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America, ed. Carl Sussman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 1–2. 18. Perry, Housing, 205–9. 19. Susan L. Klaus, A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and the Plan for Forest Hills Gardens (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 7, 147, 150– 51. 20. Clarence Arthur Perry, “The Neighborhood Unit: A Scheme of Arrangement for the Family-Life Community,” in Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs, vol. 7 (New York: Committee on Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 1929). 21. Perry, Housing, 76, 87– 88. 22. Perry, “Neighborhood Unit,” 34– 35. 23. Roy Lubove, Community Planning in the 1920s: The Contribution of the Regional Planning Association of America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), 115; Lewis Mumford, “The Plan of New York” [1932], in Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration, 244, 255. 24. Perry, Housing, 56, 76. 25. Perry, “Neighborhood Unit,” 123–26, 128–29. 26. Cooley, Social Organization, esp. 23– 31; Nicholas N. Patricios, “The Neighborhood Concept: A Retrospective of Physical Design and Social Interaction,” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 19 (2002): 72. 27. Perry, “Neighborhood Unit,” 123, 126–28. 28. Perry, Housing, 20–21, 65, 213, 219. 29. See, e.g., Harold MacLean Lewis, Planning the Modern City (New York: Wiley, 1949), 2:2– 4, which pairs Eliel Saarinen’s “organism” metaphor with Perry’s guidelines. 30. Frederick J. Adams, “Panel I: The Neighborhood Concept in Theory and Application,” Land Economics 25 (1949): 69; Tracy B. Augur, “Objectives of Neighborhood Planning,” Architectural Forum, Apr. 1944, 79; Walter Gropius, Rebuilding Our Communities (Chicago: Theobald, 1945), 53. 31. Tridib Banerjee and William C. Baer, Beyond the Neighborhood Unit: Residential Environments and Public Policy (New York: Plenum, 1984), 24–25; Jason S. Brody, “Constructing Professional Knowledge: The Neighborhood

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32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Unit Concept in the Community Builders Handbook” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, 2009), 81–111. Larry Lloyd Lawhon, “The Neighborhood Unit: Physical Design or Physical Determinism?,” Journal of Planning History 8 (2009): 133n63; Banerjee and Baer, Beyond the Neighborhood Unit, 24. Cathy D. Knepper, Greenbelt, Maryland: A Living Legacy of the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 15–16; Banerjee and Baer, Beyond the Neighborhood Unit, 27. “To Make Our Big Cities Friendly Groups of Well-Planned Neighborhoods,” American City, Feb. 1946, 79– 80; James Dahir, The Neighborhood Unit Plan: Its Spread and Acceptance (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1947), 59; Scott Bagby, “Redesigning Old Neighborhoods to Compete with New Ones,” American City, Mar. 1949, 114. Stichman quoted in “City Urged to Act on Suburban Shift,” New York Times, Feb. 11, 1953. W. Russell Tylor, “The Neighbourhood Unit Principle in Town Planning,” Town Planning Review 18 (1939): 183. Perry, Housing, 214. On allegations over “determinism,” see Lawhon, “Neighborhood Unit,” 111– 36. Reginald Isaacs, “Are Urban Neighborhoods Possible?,” Journal of Housing 5 (1948): 180. A different view of this shift is Maurice Broady, “Social Theory in Architectural Design,” Arena 81 (1966): 150– 51. Elizabeth Boldt, “Students Study Neighborhood Planning with This Unique Model,” American City, Jan. 1950, 133; “Now Let’s Plan the Neighborhood,” Better Homes and Gardens, Jan. 1946, 22; Louis Hazam, “Let’s Postwar Plan Our Communities,” episode script for Home Is What You Make It, NBC radio, Apr. 27, 1946, UMDL-LJH, box 1/25; Oscar Stonorov and Louis I. Kahn, You and Your Neighborhood: A Primer for Neighborhood Planning (New York: Revere Copper and Brass, 1944). Though Perry was not always cited in such works, his guidelines were clearly an important influence. Malvina Lindsay, “Little Towns in Big Towns,” Washington Post, Oct. 21, 1948. Perry, “Neighborhood Unit,” 125. Robert W. Kennedy, “Planning Neighborhoods,” radio script for Beyond Victory, World Wide Broadcasting Foundation, n.d. 1946, 3, PUL-RSC, box 25. Dahir, Neighborhood Unit Plan, 7– 8. Hazam, “Let’s Postwar Plan Our Communities.” In quoted passages, suspension points have been silently removed. Whitnall quoted in “New Patterns for Old Cities,” American City, Dec. 1941, 57. “Neighborhood Planning and Maintenance,” American City, Feb. 1946, 93.

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48. Perry, Housing, 215. 49. Perry, “Neighborhood Unit,” 55; Perry, Housing, 213–14. “‘Self- contained’ was Perry’s code word for social homogeneity,” observes Silver, “Neighborhood Planning,” 166. 50. W. E. B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 185– 86. 51. A brief early overview of criticisms is Catherine Bauer, “Social Questions in Housing and Community Planning,” Journal of Social Issues 7 (1951): 26–27. 52. For panel papers, Adams, “Panel I,” 67– 88. For news coverage, Lindsay, “Little Towns”; “Microcosms, You Can Expect Housing Answer in 25 Years,” Milwaukee Journal, Sept. 3, 1948. 53. Riemer remarks in Adams, “Panel I,” 69–71. 54. Svend Riemer, “Hidden Dimensions of Neighborhood Planning,” Land Economics 26 (1950): 198. 55. Ivan Light, “Svend Henry Riemer, Sociology: Los Angeles,” University of California: In Memoriam, Sept. 1978, 145– 46. 56. Richard Dewey, “The Neighborhood, Urban Ecology, and City Planners,” American Sociological Review 15 (1950): 502–7. 57. Louis Wirth, “Sociological Factors in Urban Design,” lecture, American Institute of Architects convention, Salt Lake City, June 25, 1948, UCH-LWP, box 53/9. 58. Dewey, “Neighborhood,” 504; Reginald Isaacs, “The ‘Neighborhood Unit’ Is an Instrument for Segregation,” Journal of Housing 5 (1948): 215–19. 59. Isaacs remarks in Adams, “Panel I,” 73, 76–78. 60. Tannenbaum, “Neighborhood,” 368– 69. The author has used the name Judith T. Shuval for all her subsequent academic writings; in the body text the latter name is used for clarity. On the Bauer connection: Shuval, personal communication to author, July 2, 2006. 61. Max S. Wehrly, “Comment on the Neighborhood Theory,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 14, no. 4 (1948): 32– 33. 62. Ibid., 33–34; Reginald Isaacs, “The Neighborhood Theory: An Analysis of Its Adequacy,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 14, no. 2 (1948): 19. 63. Clarence Stein, “The Tale of Two Cities,” lecture, New York City, May 24, 1944, 4, CUL- CSP, box 6/7. CHAPTER THREE

1. 2. 3. 4.

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Perry, Housing, 16–17. Albert Cole, speech, Kansas City, Aug. 9, 1954, 13, DDE-WHCF, box 166/“HHFA–1954 (2).” D. Reid Ross, “ACTION Marshals Big Industry to Fight Slums,” Torch (Milwaukee Advertising Club), n.d. 1957, RAC-RBF, box 8/61. William A. Ulman, “Owners Will Spend $15,000,000,000 on Homes,” Nation’s Business, May 1956, 110.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 71–77

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

“Progress in Home Improvements,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 9, 1956. Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 32–33; Alexander von Hoffman, “The Lost History of Urban Renewal,” Journal of Urbanism 1 (2008): 281– 301; Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America’s Salesman of the Businessman’s Utopia (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2004), 43– 46, 61–72, 81– 89. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “blight”; Colin Gordon, “Blighting the Way: Urban Renewal, Economic Development, and the Elusive Definition of Blight,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 31 (2004): 306–9. Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 107–9. See also Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 347– 50. Kent P. Schwirian, “Models of Neighborhood Change,” Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983): 89–92. See also Carolyn Teich Adams, The Politics of Capital Investment: The Case of Philadelphia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 3– 4. On the related but distinct concept of “fi ltering,” see Richard Harris, “‘Ragged Urchins Play on Marquetry Floors’: The Discourse of Filtering Is Reconstructed, 1920s–1950s,” Housing Policy Debate 22 (2012): 463– 82. Edgar M. Hoover and Raymond Vernon, Anatomy of a Metropolis: The Changing Distribution of People and Jobs within the New York Metropolitan Region (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 190–207. Norman G. Miller Jr. and Sergey Markosyan, “The Academic Roots and Evolution of Real Estate Appraisal,” Appraisal Journal 71 (2003): 174. Also Jeffrey M. Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth- Century American Middle Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 105–7, 143; Robert Beauregard, “More than Sector Theory: Homer Hoyt’s Contributions to Planning Knowledge,” Journal of Planning History 6 (2007): 248–71. Miller and Markosyan, “Academic Roots,” 176. Frederick M. Babcock, The Valuation of Real Estate (New York: McGrawHill, 1932), 88–92. Homer Hoyt, preface to According to Hoyt: Fifty Years of Homer Hoyt, by Homer Hoyt (Washington, DC: Homer Hoyt Institute, 1966), n.p.; Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago: The Relationship of the Growth of Chicago to the Rise in Its Land Values, 1830–1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 5. Henrika Kuklick, “Chicago Sociology and Urban Planning Policy: Sociological Theory as Occupational Ideology,” Theory and Society 9 (1980): 832; Homer Hoyt, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939).

359

N OT E S TO PAG E S 77– 82

16. Nicholas R. Fyfe and Judith T. Kenny, eds., The Urban Geography Reader (New York: Routledge, 2005), 28; Kuklick, “Chicago Sociology,” 830– 33. 17. Hoyt, Structure and Growth, 3, 28, 47, 81. 18. Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” in The City, ed. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 47– 62. 19. Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 39– 41; Elaine Lewinnek, “Mapping Chicago, Imagining Metropolises: Reconsidering the Zonal Model of Urban Growth,” Journal of Urban History 36 (2010): 210–11; Hoyt, Structure and Growth, 117–19. 20. Homer Hoyt, “City Growth and Mortgage Risk (Chicago)” [1937], in Hoyt, According to Hoyt, 588. 21. Hoyt, Structure and Growth, 120–22. 22. Richard U. Ratcliff, Urban Land Economics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), 102. 23. Alfred A. Ring, The Valuation of Real Estate (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1963), 67. See also, e.g., Arthur A. May, “Appraising the Home,” Appraisal Journal 19, no. 1 (1951): 21. A layperson’s translation might be Max Lerner, America as a Civilization: Life and Thought in the United States Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 166. 24. Stuart Alfred Queen and Lewis Francis Thomas, The City: A Study of Urbanism in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 307– 8. 25. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 198–99; Kuklick, “Chicago Sociology,” 830– 33, 836; Frank Bolden, “People in Ghettos,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 15, 1951; Jennifer S. Light, “Nationality and Neighborhood Risk at the Origins of FHA Underwriting,” Journal of Urban History 36 (2010): 640, 642; FHA manual quoted in Jim Rooney, Organizing the South Bronx (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 49; John T. Metzger, “Planned Abandonment: The Neighborhood Life- Cycle Theory and National Urban Policy,” Housing Policy Debate 11 (2000): 8. 26. Homer Hoyt, “Urban Decentralization” [1940], Homer Hoyt, “A Practical Plan for Rebuilding the Existing Homes of a City” [1943], and Homer Hoyt and Leonard C. Smith, “The Valuation of Land in Urban Blighted Areas” [1942], all in Hoyt, According to Hoyt, 205, 210–12, 457, 599– 602. 27. “Slum Prevention,” Time, Oct. 10, 1938, 65; Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), Waverly: A Study in Neighborhood Conservation (Washington, DC: Federal Home Loan Bank Board, 1940), 54– 55. 28. Jo Ann E. Argersinger, Toward a New Deal in Baltimore: People and Government in the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 94–97. 29. FHLBB, Waverly, 14, 31; M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 253– 54. 30. Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, 253– 54; Teaford, Rough Road to Renaissance, 33; Marc A. Weiss and John T. Metzger, “The American Real Estate

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31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Industry and the Origins of Neighborhood Conservation,” in Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference on American Planning History, comp. Laurence C. Gerckens (Hilliard, OH: Society for American City and Regional Planning History, 1994), 762. For life- cycle language, FHLBB, Waverly, 3. See also Metzger, “Planned Abandonment,” 10–11. E.g., Hoyt and Smith, “Valuation of Land,” 457. Nonetheless, Hoyt did praise the study: see Homer Hoyt, review of Waverly, by FHLBB, American Journal of Sociology 47 (1942): 787– 88. FHLBB, Waverly, viii, 5. Ibid., viii. Robert E. Lang similarly argues that life- cycle concepts “fi ltered into the popular culture,” in “Did Neighborhood Life- Cycle Theory Cause Urban Decline?,” Housing Policy Debate 11 (2000): 4. Weiss and Metzger, “Real Estate Industry,” 754. Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 216. Weiss and Metzger, “Real Estate Industry,” 755. On these shifting coalitions, see also Fogelson, Downtown, 319–20, 342– 46, 373–77; Richard M. Flanagan, “The Housing Act of 1954: The Sea Change in National Urban Policy,” Urban Affairs Review 33 (1997): 265– 86. Weiss and Metzger, “Real Estate Industry,” 754– 55. E.g., on 1930s Philadelphia efforts along these lines, Pearl Janet Davies, Real Estate in American History (Washington, DC: Public Affairs, 1958), 226–27. Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, 252– 53. Weiss and Metzger, “Real Estate Industry,” 760– 63. FHLBB, Waverly, 31, 53, 66. Cuff, Provisional City, 220–21. On fractures within the pro-public-housing coalition, consult D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 15– 34, esp. 16. Richard O. Davies, Housing Reform during the Truman Administration (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 46– 47, 64– 68, 78– 86. Irwin Ross, The Loneliest Campaign: The Truman Victory of 1948 (New York: New American Library, 1968), 136– 39. Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1948 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964), 722–23, 915–16. Dillon S. Myer, “The Promise of Public Housing,” speech, New York City, Nov. 20, 1947, 12, HST-DSM, box 1/“1947 PHA speeches (1).” Hunt, Blueprint, 129– 30; Iwan W. Morgan, Eisenhower versus “The Spenders”: The Eisenhower Administration, the Democrats, and the Budget, 1953– 60 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 65; James Thomas Keane, Fritz B. Burns and the Development of Los Angeles: The Biography of a Community Developer and

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50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

362

Philanthropist (Los Angeles: Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles, 2001), 182– 83; Roger S. Ahlbrandt Jr. and Paul C. Brophy, Neighborhood Revitalization: Theory and Practice (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1975), 40. See Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 271–73, on the “instrumental” role of white racial fears in the legislation’s support for conservation. Nichols quoted in National Association of Home Builders, Home Builders Manual for Land Development (Washington, DC: National Association of Home Builders, 1950), 147– 48. Adams, Politics of Capital Investment, 4– 5; Sampson, Great American City, 40– 41. Cuff, Provisional City, 222. NAREB quoted in Keane, Fritz B. Burns, 181. Dayton quoted in “City Blight Considered No. 1 Problem,” Washington Post, Nov. 9, 1957. “Realtors Stress Municipal Needs,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 1952; “Realtors Enlarge Clean-up Program,” New York Times, May 23, 1953. Cuff, Provisional City, 222. Paul Herron, “Nation’s Realtors Reaffirm Pledge to Rid Country of Slums by 1960,” Washington Post, Nov. 8, 1955. Stanley Frank, “Beware of Home-Repair Racketeers,” Saturday Evening Post, July 21, 1956, 17. John R. Doscher (Operation Home Improvement director), testimony in US Senate, Housing Amendments of 1956: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, 84th Cong., 2nd sess., Mar. 20–21, 26–29, 1956 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956), 387. Operation Home Improvement Newsletter, Dec. 28, 1955, DDE- GDM, box 14/“HHFA 2.” Charles Gotthart, “20 Billions in Home Improvements Forecast,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 19, 1956. American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods (ACTION), “Request for Support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund,” Apr. 1955, RAC-RBF, box 8/60. Thomas W. Ennis, “Anti-slum Drive Spreading in U.S.,” New York Times, June 17, 1956. National Association of Real Estate Boards, Blueprint for Neighborhood Conservation: A Program for Large-Scale Elimination of Slums, Blight, and Unfit Housing Conditions, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: National Association of Real Estate Boards, 1956), 3. On popularity, “Slum Book a ‘Best Seller,’” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 27, 1956. “Pasadena Clearing Slums without Aid,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 16, 1952. Philadelphia Clean-up, Paint-up, Fix-up Committee, untitled brochure, 1959, 5, PCA-FLR, box A3410/“Phila. More Beautiful.” “Crusade against Slums,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 1955.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 91– 93

68. President’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies, Recommendations on Government Housing Policies and Programs (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1953), 2. 69. David C. Slipher, “Citizen Motivation and Participation,” in Housing Improvement: Lectures Presented at the Inservice Training Course (Ann Arbor: School of Public Health, University of Michigan, 1955), 89. 70. On ACTION’S formation, see Bloom, Merchant of Illusion, 43, 81– 82; G. William Domhoff, Who Really Rules? New Haven and Community Power Reexamined (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1978), 41; Gelfand, Nation of Cities, 280. 71. ACTION, “Publications and Program Materials,” Fall 1956, RAC-RBF, box 8/61. 72. ACTION, “Request for Support”; Yorke Allen Jr., summary of Paul Ylvisaker interview, Mar. 31, 1959, RAC-RBF, box 8/63; Bloom, Merchant of Illusion, 81– 82. 73. Roy Larsen, “Better America Council,” speech, n.d. 1954, DDE-JML, box 19/“ACTION 1955.” 74. Alan Rabinowitz, Urban Land Economics and Land Use in America: The Transformation of Cities in the Twentieth Century (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2004), 142; Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960), 1051– 52. 75. ACTION, “Request for Support.” 76. Yorke Allen Jr., summary of Ira Robbins interview, May 23, 1955, RAC-RBF, box 8/60. 77. Louis Winnick (former Ford Foundation official) quoted in Rabinowitz, Urban Land Economics, 143. 78. Richard Loken to Arthur Dana, Nov. 11, 1955, RAC-RBF, box 8/60; “Nation-Wide Citizens Rallied to Urban Renewal by ACTION,” Journal of Housing 13 (1956): 240– 41. 79. Bloom, Merchant of Illusion, 44, 88; Yorke Allen Jr., summary of James E. Lash interview, Jan. 19, 1959, RAC-RBF, box 8/63; Rabinowitz, Urban Land Economics, 143. 80. Slipher, “Citizen Motivation,” 90. 81. Loken to Dana. 82. ACTION, “Monthly Activity Report to the Board of Directors,” Dec. 4, 1956, RAC-RBF, box 8/60; Rabinowitz, Urban Land Economics, 143. 83. ACTION, “Request for Support.” 84. ACTION, “Design and Policy Alternatives for Future Urban Living,” report, n.d., 18–19, UCB- CBW, carton 4/“ACTION.” 85. ACTION, “How Far Can a Slum Reach?,” print ad, Aug. 1955, UIUC-ACA, oversize box 138, fi le 737 (new). These ads sometimes mentioned slum clearance, but only due to Ad Council insistence. 86. ACTION, “1-minute spot #1,” radio script, Nov. 1957, UIUC-ACA, fi le 833.

363

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87. ACTION, “1-minute spot #1,” radio script, Apr. 1957, UIUC-ACA, fi le 840. 88. ACTION, “Why ACTION,” brochure, 2nd ed., Oct. 1, 1955, UCB- CBW, carton 4/“ACTION.” 89. ACTION, “1-minute spot #2,” radio script, Apr. 1958, UIUC-ACA, fi le 851; ACTION, “10-second spot #1,” radio script, Nov. 1957, UIUC-ACA, fi le 833. 90. “The ACTION Urban Renewal Evaluator,” 1957, RAC-RBF, box 8/62. 91. ACTION, “Monthly Activity Report”; “ACTION Film Available Free,” NAHB Correlator, Apr. 1956, 134. 92. ACTION, Man of ACTION, 1955, Prelinger Archives, accessed Feb. 28, 2009, https://archive.org/details/ ManofAct1955. 93. Bloom, Merchant of Illusion, 86– 89. 94. Slipher, “Citizen Motivation,” 89. 95. Ernest T. Trigg, Fifty-Five Colorful Years: The Story of Paint in America (Stonington, CT: Pequot, 1954), 176. 96. Philadelphia Clean-up, Paint-up, Fix-up Committee, untitled brochure, 5. 97. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 94–96. 98. William Oliver to Irving Bluestone, memorandum, Sept. 25, 1962, WSU-WPR, box 469/12. 99. See Teaford, Rough Road to Renaissance, 11. 100. E.g., “Campaign on to Save U.S. Neighborhoods from Blight,” Atlanta Daily World, June 25, 1956. 101. “A Hint to Fulton St. Property Owners,” New York Amsterdam News, July 8, 1950; “Vested Interest in Slums,” Chicago Defender, Mar. 7, 1959; “Declaration of Principles,” Pittsburgh Courier, Mar. 22, 1958; “Operation Home Improvement,” Chicago Defender, Jan. 28, 1956. 102. Amanda I. Seligman, “Community Organizing,” in Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration, ed. Steven A. Reich (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006), 1:210; John T. Clark, “When the Negro Resident Organizes,” Opportunity, June 1934, 168–71; Priscilla A. Dowden-White, Groping toward Democracy: African American Social Welfare Reform in St. Louis, 1910–1949 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011), 200– 42; Sylvia Hood Washington, “Mrs. Block Beautiful: African American Women and the Birth of the Urban Conservation Movement, Chicago, Illinois, 1917– 1954,” Environmental Justice 1 (2008): 13–23. 103. E.g., on Detroit, Njeru Wa Murage, “Organizational History of the Detroit Urban League, 1916– 60” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1993), 447; Megan Taylor Schockley, “We, Too, Are Americans”: African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940–54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 166– 67. 104. Jeffrey Helgeson, “Striving in Black Chicago: Migration, Work, and the Politics of Neighborhood Change, 1935–1965” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2008), 357– 68. 105. Alva B. Maxey, “The Block Club Movement in Chicago,” Phylon Quarterly 18 (1957): 129– 31.

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106. Touré F. Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 171–72, 188– 89, Granger quoted on 189. 107. Helgeson, “Striving,” 361– 62; Maxey, “Block Club Movement,” 130. 108. E.g., Sylvia Hood Washington’s Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865–1954 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 158–92, examines the Chicago Urban League’s postwar blockbeautiful campaigns alongside the inception of Chicago’s Neighborhood Conservation Commission. 109. Other NACWC contest overviews are Anne Meis Knupper, The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 111–12; Elizabeth D. Blum, “The Gunfighters of Northwood Manor: How History Debunks Myths of the Environmental Justice Movement,” in Energy Metropolis: An Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast, ed. Martin V. Melosi and Joseph A. Pratt (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 227–29. 110. National Association Notes, 1917, quoted in Elizabeth D. Blum, “Women, Environmental Rationale, and Activism during the Progressive Era,” in To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History, ed. Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 86. 111. NACWC press release, Dec. 5, 1956, NAC-REC, reel 19:f746. 112. “President’s Convention Report,” NACWC convention minutes, 1956, 33, NAC-REC, reel 4:f218. On Gaines’s background, Charles Harris Wesley, The History of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs: A Legacy of Service (Washington, DC: National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1984), 125–29. 113. Gaines to NACWC membership, n.d. 1956, NAC-REC, reel 19:f705. 114. “Sears, Roebuck Joins Urban Renewal Drive as ‘Corporate Citizen,’” Journal of Housing 13 (1956): 242. 115. NACWC, National Notes Bulletin, Winter 1956, NAC-REC, reel 25:f526; NACWC, “Community Project Contest to Improve Homes and Neighborhoods,” brochure, 1956, NAC-REC, reel 19:f754. 116. Jane Spaulding to Irene McCoy Gaines, May 2, 1956, NAC-REC, reel 19:f708; Jane Spaulding, “Report of the Project Director to the 30th Biennial Convention, NACWC,” July 31, 1956, 8–9, CHM-IMG, box 5/2. 117. Osgood paraphrased in Marion Jackson, notes from conference with Harry Osgood, Nov. 21, 1956, NAC-REC, reel 19:f737. 118. Alice Myers Winther, “Dinners, Then Sidewalks, Then Prizes,” Christian Science Monitor, June 27, 1957; NACWC, National Notes Bulletin, Summer 1957, NAC-REC, reel 25:f543; Ora Stokes Perry to contestants, Feb. 26, 1957, NAC-REC, reel 19:f772. 119. NACWC press release, NAC-REC, reel 19:f746. See also Blum, “Gunfighters,” 228.

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 102– 8

120. NACWC, National Notes Bulletin, Summer 1957, NAC-REC, reel 25:f543– 45; Winther, “Dinners”; “4 Negro Clubs Cited for Slum Projects,” New York Times, June 1, 1957; Perry to contestants, NAC-REC, reel 19:f769–70. For other projects, consult NACWC annual report to National Council of Women, Oct. 16, 1957, CHM-IMG, box 5/5. 121. Sandra Gioia Treadway, “Stokes, Ora Brown,” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1993), 2:1118–19. 122. Perry to contestants, NAC-REC, reel 19:f769–70. 123. NACWC, National Notes Bulletin, Summer 1957, NAC-REC, reel 25:f544. 124. For proposed judges, Harry Osgood to Irene McCoy Gaines, Feb. 15, 1957, CHM-IMG, box 5/4; for chosen judges, Christine Sadler to Irene McCoy Gaines, May 20, 1957, CHM-IMG, box 5/2. 125. Perry to contestants, NAC-REC, reel 19:f769–70. 126. NACWC exhibition schedule, Washington, DC, May 31– June 1, 1957, NAC-REC, reel 18:f45. 127. “Halting the Slum March,” Washington Post, June 4, 1957. CHAPTER FOUR

1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

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Graebner, Age of Doubt, 9. W. Clifford Harvey, “American Neighborhoods Throb with Drama of Democratic Way in Action,” Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 10, 1950. Robert Fisher, Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Twayne, 1994), 70. See, e.g., Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 225–26; Don Parson, Making A Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Denning, Cultural Front, 257; Lee Bernstein, The Greatest Menace: Organized Crime in Cold War America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 10–11, 56. Paul S. D’Ambrosio, Ralph Fasanella’s America (Cooperstown: New York State Historical Association, 2001), 14, 67– 68. FBI- SUBJ: “Asch, Sholem”; “Lewis, Herbert Clyde”; “Service Bureau for Intercultural Education.” Hedda Hopper, “Looking at Hollywood,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 22, 1946; MGM quoted in A. H. Weiler, “By Way of Report,” New York Times, Feb. 1, 1948. Perhaps not coincidentally, the FBI took pains to acquire a copy of East River the month it topped the bestseller list. Edward Scheidt (Special Agent in Charge, New York) to FBI director, Nov. 20, 1946, FBI- SUBJ: “Asch, Sholem.” Rachel Davis DuBois with Corann Okorodudu, All This and Something More: Adventures in Intercultural Education (Bryn Mawr, PA: Dorrance, 1984), 155– 66.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 10 9 – 12

10. George J. Sánchez, “‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’: Creating Multiracialism on the Eastside during the 1950s,” American Quarterly 56 (2004): 633– 61. 11. US House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee No. 5, The Strategy and Tactics of World Communism (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948), 36. 12. Fendall Yerxa and Ogden R. Reid, “The Threat of Red Sabotage: Infiltration of Church and Community Groups Ordered,” New York Herald-Tribune, Dec. 6, 1950. On such fears more generally, Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 143. 13. “House Committee Told of Cozy Red Meeting,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 20, 1956. 14. J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (New York: Holt, 1958), 149. 15. Alan E. Brockbank, “Rehabilitation of Blighted Areas,” in Business Action for Better Cities: A Complete Report on the Businessmen’s Conference on Urban Problems, Portland, Oregon, June 23 and 24, 1952 (Washington, DC: US Chamber of Commerce, 1952), 165. 16. Emanuel Spiegel remark in National Association of Home Builders, A New Face for America: A Program of Action Planned to Stop Slums and Rebuild Our Cities (Washington, DC: National Association of Home Builders, 1953), n.p. 17. ACTION, “Request for Support.” See also ACTION, “Time for ACTION,” brochure, 1955, UCB- CBW, carton 4/“ACTION.” 18. Fisher, Let the People Decide, 73. 19. American Council for the Community (ACC), membership solicitation, n.d., UMNS-PC. 20. ACC, “Conference on Community Mobilization: Conference Resource Book,” 1951, pp. B1, B5, C1–2, E2, E6, UMNS-PC. 21. Matthew Farish, The Contours of America’s Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 236. 22. Max Page, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 123. Also Michael Quinn Dudley, “Sprawl as Strategy: City Planners Face the Bomb,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 21 (2001): 52– 63. 23. Nathaniel S. Keith, speech, New York City, May 11, 1951, HST-NSK, box 4/“Scrapbook File (2).” 24. On nuclear “domestication,” see, e.g., McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 74–75. 25. National Clean-up, Paint-up, Fix-up Bureau, with the Federal Civil Defense Administration, The House in the Middle, 1954, Prelinger Archives, accessed Sept. 5, 2007, https://archive.org/details/ Houseint1954.

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26. Truman Frederick Keefer, Philip Wylie (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 109, 124– 25; Philip Wylie, “How Government Helped Wylie Write a New Novel,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 6, 1953. 27. Philip Wylie, Tomorrow! (New York: Rinehart, 1954), 47. For literary context, see Carl Abbott, “The Light on the Horizon: Imagining the Death of American Cities,” Journal of Urban History 32 (2006): 175–96. 28. Wylie, Tomorrow!, 84, 120, 295, 342. 29. Ibid., 94, 152, 175. 30. Ibid., 354, 356, 366– 67. On Tomorrow!’s politics of race, see Paul Williams, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Postapocalyptic Worlds (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 112–15. 31. Herb Nelson, “Urban Revolution,” Realtor’s Headlines, May 16, 1955. 32. K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), 98–99. 33. Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952), 16, 283– 85. 34. Gabriel A. Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 249, 279, 285. 35. Baker Brownell, The Human Community: Its Philosophy and Practice for a Time of Crisis (New York: Harper, 1950), 20, 198, 289. 36. Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 49, 74, 202, 265. 37. Ibid., 265, 278. 38. ACC, “The Training of Community Counselors,” conference report, 1949, 1, 11, UMNS-PC. 39. Morris Janowitz, The Community Press in an Urban Setting (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 208, 222–24. An influential restatement is Scott Greer, The Emerging City: Myth and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1962), 97–99, 107– 37. 40. Miller, “Role and Concept,” 18–20. 41. Janowitz, Community Press, 232. 42. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 5. 43. Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 234. 44. On similar dichotomies, see Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 186– 87, 247. 45. John Keats, The Crack in the Picture Window (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1956), 49– 50, 61– 63. 46. Ibid., 61– 63. 47. Bessie Averne McClenahan, “Social Causes of Decline of Neighborhoods,” Social Forces 20 (1942): 471.

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48. Reginald Rose, “Author’s Commentary on Thunder on Sycamore Street,” in Six Television Plays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 105–7. On the Cicero riot, Biles, Fate of Cities, 37. 49. Reginald Rose, “Thunder on Sycamore Street,” in Rose, Six Television Plays, 59–104. 50. Rose, “Author’s Commentary,” 108. 51. Harriet Van Horne, “A Timely Comeback for Morality Plays,” New York World-Telegram and Sun, Mar. 19, 1954; Jack Gould, “Television in Review,” New York Times, Mar. 19, 1954. 52. Robert C. Wood, Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 275. 53. Charles Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing (New York: Harper, 1955), 266– 67. 54. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 25. 55. Gertrude Berg, television script for Molly (final-season title for The Goldbergs), broadcast date Mar. 1, 1955, SUL- GBP 4, box 46. On the series, see Donald Weber, Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to “The Goldbergs” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 126– 55. 56. “Good-Will Families,” Telecast, Dec. 1949, SUL- GBP, box 55. An influential analysis of these programs’ social functions is George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 39–75. 57. Donald L. Hixon, Gian Carlo Menotti: A Bio-bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000), 1–18; Ken Wlaschin, Gian Carlo Menotti on Screen: Opera, Dance and Choral Works on Film, Television and Video (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 111. 58. John Gruen, Menotti: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 116–17; “Menotti Mania,” Opera News, Oct. 29, 1951, 18–19. 59. “Menotti Dossier,” Vogue, Mar. 1955, 143– 45; Val Adams, “NBC to Telecast Broadway Shows,” New York Times, Mar. 22, 1955; Gian Carlo Menotti, “Missionary Author: Menotti Tries to Lure Audiences to Opera,” New York Times, Mar. 6, 1955. 60. Gian Carlo Menotti, The Saint of Bleecker Street: Libretto (New York: Schirmer, 1954), 3. On Menotti’s Little Italy visits, see Life International, Nine Who Chose America (New York: Dutton, 1959), 102– 3. 61. Menotti, Saint, 35. 62. Gruen, Menotti, 119, 124, Menotti quoted on 122. 63. Walter F. Kerr, “Theatre: Menotti Takes Charge,” New York Herald-Tribune, Jan. 2, 1955; Marc Blitzstein, “The Saint of Bleecker Street,” Music Library Association Notes, June 1956, 522. 64. Menotti, Saint, 14.

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65. John Beaufort, “New Menotti, Barrie Again and Drapers,” Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 31, 1954; “A Saint Sings in Menotti’s Best,” Life, Feb. 14, 1955, 62; Brooks Atkinson, “Bleecker Street,” New York Times, Jan. 2, 1955. 66. Gian Carlo Menotti, “Notes on Opera as ‘Basic Theatre,’” New York Times Magazine, Jan. 2, 1955, 11, 23. 67. Menotti, Saint, 23. 68. Harold Clurman, “Theater,” Nation, Jan. 22, 1955, 83– 84. For similar reviewer critiques of characterization, consult Lyndal Grieb, The Operas of Gian Carlo Menotti, 1937–1972: A Selective Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1974), 101–9, 121, 131– 32, 135, 174–75. 69. Wlaschin, Gian Carlo Menotti, 111; Gruen, Menotti, 123. 70. Marya Mannes, “Broadway Speculations,” Reporter, Apr. 7, 1955, 39– 41. 71. Menotti, “Missionary Author.” 72. On this framing, see David Dillon, “Priests and Politicians: The Fiction of Edwin O’Connor,” Critique 16 (1974): 108; Richard A. Betts, “The ‘Blackness of Life’: The Function of Edwin O’Connor’s Comedy,” MELUS 8 (1981): 16. 73. Edwin O’Connor, The Edge of Sadness (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 13, 39, 157, 178. 74. A succinct critical summary of this mythology is Orsi, “Crossing the City Line,” 32– 33. 75. Reviewer John McCudden quoted in Hugh Rank, “O’Connor’s Image of the Priest,” New England Quarterly 41 (1968): 5. 76. O’Connor, Edge of Sadness, 399, 419. 77. Ibid., 135, 458. 78. Rank, “O’Connor’s Image,” 14. 79. Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 38– 49. 80. Nathaniel S. Keith, speech, Boston, Oct. 7, 1952, 1, HST-NSK, box 4/“Scrapbook File 1.” 81. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii, 41– 50. 82. Greer, Emerging City, 97–98, 106, 208. CHAPTER FIVE

1. 2. 3.

370

Robert C. Weaver, Dilemmas of Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 57– 60. Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 2nd ed., 127– 49. Bob Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 2. See also Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10, 20–23, 48.

N O T E S T O P A G E S 13 8 – 4 1

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

John Lofland, “The Youth Ghetto: A Perspective on the ‘Cities of Youth’ around Our Large Universities,” Journal of Higher Education 39 (1968): 121– 43; Mary Kathleen Benét, The Secretarial Ghetto (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973); “Gay Ghettos: A Search for Male Communities,” Human Behavior, Sept. 1978, 41; Gloria Steinem, “The Rise of the Pink Collar Ghetto,” Ms., Mar. 1977, 51– 52. Andrew W. Lind, “The Ghetto and the Slum,” Social Forces 9 (1930): 206–7. Sam Bass Warner Jr., “Slums and Skyscrapers: Urban Images, Symbols, and Ideology,” in Cities of the Mind: Images and Themes of the City in the Social Sciences, ed. Lloyd Rodwin and Robert M. Hollister (New York: Plenum, 1984), 185–90. An older account is Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors, 76–77. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 2nd ed., 14–16, 20. Peter Marcuse, “The Shifting Meaning of the Black Ghetto in the United States,” in Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space, ed. Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 112. Wirth, Ghetto, 10, 283, 290. Frederick W. Boal, “Immigration and Ethnicity in the Urban Milieu,” in EthniCity: Geographic Perspectives on Ethnic Change in Modern Cities, ed. Curtis C. Roseman, Hans Dieter Laux, and Gunter Thieme (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 287. James B. McKee, Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure of a Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 339. Marcuse, “Shifting Meaning,” 111–12, 122, 125. On the “increasingly conservative overtones” assumed by assimilation theory in the 1950s, see Joe William Trotter Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 271. Kilpatrick quoted in Robert Conot, Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness (New York: Bantam, 1967), 426. Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley, VHS (New York: National Educational Television and Radio Center, 1965). Buckley approvingly attributes this argument to Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963). James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” Esquire, July 1960, 73. “The Negro Is Not an Immigrant,” New Pittsburgh Courier, May 8, 1965. Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 16–17, 22. Eileen Boris, “Contested Rights: The Great Society between Work and Home,” in The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism, ed. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,

371

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20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

372

2005), 119; Daryl Michael Scott, “The Politics of Pathology: The Ideological Origins of the Moynihan Controversy,” Journal of Policy History 8 (1996): 82– 85, 89. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 179, 191; Maurice Isserman, The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 195, 209, see also 215–16. Harrington, Other America, 10–11, 141– 47. Charles J. Stokes, “A Theory of Slums,” Land Economics 38 (1962): 189–90, 194–95. George and Eunice Grier, Equality and Beyond: Housing Segregation and the Goals of the Great Society (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1966), 49. District of Columbia Commissioners, A Proposed Anti- discrimination Housing Ordinance for the District of Columbia: Summary of Hearings before the Board of Commissioners (Washington, DC: Government of the District of Columbia, 1963), 15. Louis A. Ferman, Joyce L. Kornbluh, and J. A. Miller, eds., Negroes and Jobs: A Book of Readings (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 2. Marshall B. Clinard, Slums and Community Development: Experiments in Self-Help (New York: Free Press, 1966), 60, 301, 311–12. Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 55– 56. Bayard Rustin, “Why Don’t Negroes . . .” [1966], in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 425. Kent H. Steffgen, The Bondage of the Free (Berkeley, CA: Vanguard, 1966), 26–27. “The Negro Movement: Where Shall It Go Now?,” Dissent 11 (1964): 293–95. Scores of works explore these policies’ racialized nature; for a tiny handful, see Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White; Linda Faye Williams, The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 184–92; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto; Kathleen J. Frydl, The GI Bill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 222– 62. To these factors, one should add urban deindustrialization; see, e.g., Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 125– 52, esp. 143. McKee, Sociology and the Race Problem, 342– 43. Lawrence W. Levine, foreword to By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife, by John Michael Vlach (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1991), ix. Frazier quoted in Hanes Walton Jr., Invisible Politics: Black Political Behavior (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 24. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944), 2:928–29.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 14 6 – 51

36. Robert Blauner, “Black Culture: Myth or Reality?,” in Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Norman E. Whitten Jr. and John F. Szwed (New York: Free Press, 1970), 347– 64. 37. On such debates among historians, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 480– 89. 38. Park quoted in Lind, “Ghetto and the Slum,” 206. 39. Harrington, Other America, 65. 40. Oscar Handlin, The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 105, 119. 41. Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 33. The quotation appears in a chapter written solely by Glazer. 42. Harrington, Other America, 61– 62, 67. 43. Nat Hentoff, “The Other Side of the Blues,” in Anger, and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 76; Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 53. Andrew Billingsley, Black Families in White America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1968), 37, dubbed this “the prevailing view among liberal intellectuals who study the Negro experience from the outside.” 44. “The Ghetto: Can Anything Be Done?,” Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 6, 1968, 74; “The Cry of the Ghetto,” Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 26, 1967, 80. 45. Conot, Rivers of Blood, 438– 41. 46. Robert E. Forman, Black Ghettos, White Ghettos and Slums (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 6. Also see Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 33. 47. Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), x, 228–29. On marketing, Allan H. Spear, Crossing the Barriers: The Autobiography of Allan H. Spear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 139– 41. Similar antinomies ran through the 1960s–70s wave of “ghettoization” histories; one 1970s critique of the commonplace “ghetto/neighborhood” dichotomy is Vincent P. Franklin, “Ghetto on Their Minds: Afro-American Historiography and the City,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 1 (1977): 111–19. Related and other critiques of the “ghetto synthesis” body of historical scholarship are offered in Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 2nd ed., 273–77, and Alison Isenberg, “Transcending Ghetto Boundaries,” in ibid., 327– 37. 48. Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue,” 72, 76. 49. Grier and Grier, Equality and Beyond, 36, 49. 50. Sterling Tucker, Beyond the Burning: Life and Death of the Ghetto (New York: Association, 1968), 104, 123–25, 134– 37. 51. Nathan Glazer, “Negroes and Jews: The New Challenge to Pluralism,” Commentary 38, no. 6 (1964): 29– 34. See also Oscar Handlin, Fire-Bell in the Night: The Crisis in Civil Rights (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 57– 58. Ralph Ellison attacks Glazer’s thesis in “Transcript of the American Acad-

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52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

374

emy Conference on the Negro American, May 14–15, 1965,” Daedalus 95 (1966): 408. Toni Morrison, “City Limits, Village Values: Concepts of the Neighborhood in Black Fiction,” in Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature, ed. Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 37. The “‘dark ghetto’ trope,” notes sociologist Sharon Zukin, contributed to a “monolithic image of black neighborhoods” that, by the 1970s, was shared by white liberals and conservatives alike. Zukin, “The Spike Lee Effect: Reimagining the Ghetto for Cultural Consumption,” in The Ghetto: Contemporary Global Issues and Controversies, ed. Ray Hutchison and Bruce D. Haynes (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2012), 142. US Department of Labor, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), preface (n.p.), 5, 29, 35, 44, 48. Sampson, Great American City, 98, also adopts a neighborhoodoriented reading of Moynihan. Wirth, Ghetto, 290. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 636. Roemer remark in Charles O. Jones and Layne D. Hoppe, eds., Urban Crisis in America: The Remarkable Ribicoff Hearings (Washington, DC: Washington National Press, 1969), 74. Nesbitt remark in National Committee against Discrimination in Housing, How to Break up the Racial Ghetto (New York: National Committee against Discrimination in Housing, 1965), 9. US Department of Labor, Negro Family, 47; Rainwater and Yancey, Moynihan Report, 192. “Study Traces Negro Riots to Inferior Home,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 26, 1965; “New Crisis: The Negro Family,” Newsweek, Aug. 9, 1965, 32. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5– 6; Scott, “Politics of Pathology,” 91–92, 98–99. Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 62– 63. Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 303– 5, 311–13. Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 188– 89, 192. James Farmer, “The Controversial Moynihan Report,” New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 18, 1965. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 5– 6; Scott, “Politics of Pathology,” 100–1; Katz, Undeserving Poor, 37. John Szwed, introduction to reprint of Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults in the Urban North, by Arthur Huff Fauset (1944; repr.,

N O T E S T O PA G E S 15 4 – 5 8

68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), vi, and quoted in Walton, Invisible Politics, 23. McKee, Sociology and the Race Problem, 344; Walton, Invisible Politics, 24– 25; Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 161– 63, 181. Maxine Baca Zinn, “Family, Race, and Poverty in the Eighties,” in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, 2nd ed., ed. Barrie Thorne with Marilyn Yalom (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 73. See also William W. Dressler, Stress and Adaptation in the Context of Culture: Depression in a Southern Black Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 46– 52. Walton, Invisible Politics, 25. Blauner, “Black Culture,” 353. Al Murray, “Image and Likeness in Harlem,” Urban Review 2, no. 2 (1967): 13. Albert Murray, “The Omni-Americans,” Urban Review 3, no. 6 (1969): 44. The term “anti-pathologist” is from Scott, Contempt and Pity, 166– 69. Frank Riessman, “The Revolution in Social Work: The New Nonprofessional,” Trans- action 2, no. 1 (1964): 12–17; Frank Riessman, Strategies against Poverty (New York: Random House, 1969), 22. Frank Riessman, “In Defense of the Negro Family,” Dissent 13 (1966): 141– 44. Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Carol B. Stack, “Writing Ethnography: Feminist Critical Practice,” Frontiers 13, no. 3 (1993): 77–78, 84. On sales, Herbert J. Gans, “Best- Sellers by American Sociologists: An Exploratory Study,” in Required Reading: Sociology’s Most Influential Books, ed. Dan Clawson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 24–25. Stephen Lassonde, “Family and Demography in Postwar America: A Hazard of New Fortunes?,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. JeanChristophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 7. On Stack’s implicit “dialogue” with Moynihan, see Mitchell Duneier, “On the Legacy of Elliot Liebow and Carol Stack: Context-Driven Fieldwork and the Need for Continuous Ethnography,” Focus 25, no. 1 (2007): 33– 38. Stack, All Our Kin, 28, 46, 59, 93. “Black Family Ties Strong,” Chicago Defender, Feb. 27, 1974. Lassonde, “Family and Demography,” 7. Stack, “Writing Ethnography,” 80. However, Stack, All Our Kin, 127, did deem “the ability to form a nuclear family pattern” a “necessary requirement for ascent from poverty.” Ibid., 40, 44, 125. David Boswell, review of All Our Kin, by Carol B. Stack, Man, new series 10 (1975): 161.

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87. Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 109, 198n81; Judith E. Smith, “The Transformation of Family and Community Culture in Immigrant Neighborhoods, 1900–1940,” in The New England Working Class and the New Labor History, ed. Herbert G. Gutman and Donald H. Bell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 159, 177n1. 88. Jacqueline S. Mithun, review of All Our Kin, by Carol B. Stack, Journal of Black Studies 8 (1977): 119. 89. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 19–22, 25, 35; Lee Rainwater, “Crucible of Identity: The Negro Lower- Class Family,” Daedalus 95 (1966): 206. 90. Thomas Hill Schaub, American Fiction in the Cold War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 100–1. 91. Steve Cannon, Lennox Raphael, and James Thompson, “A Very Stern Discipline: An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, ed. Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 110; Harrington, Other America, 64. 92. Richard Kostelanetz, “An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” in Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 92–93. For similar remarks, see Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1970), 75–76. 93. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2007), 427–28. On Brown’s testimony, see also Rotella, October Cities, 271–72. 94. Ralph Ellison, oral testimony in US Senate, Federal Role in Urban Affairs: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, 89th Cong., 2nd sess., Aug. 29– 30, 1966 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), 5:1155, 1158– 59. 95. Gans testimony excerpted in Jones and Hoppe, Urban Crisis, 124. 96. James Farmer, “Keynote Address,” in Life Insurance Companies and Urban Affairs: A Conference (New York: Institute of Life Insurance, 1969), 8–9. 97. Roger Hest, “Fellowship of the Ghetto,” San Francisco Sun-Reporter, May 3, 1969. 98. David P. Demarest and Lois S. Lamdin, eds., The Ghetto Reader (New York: Random House, 1970); Wayne Charles Miller, ed., A Gathering of Ghetto Writers: Irish, Italian, Jewish, Black and Puerto Rican (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 7; David R. Goldfield and James B. Lane, eds., The Enduring Ghetto: Sources and Readings (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1973), 2. 99. Henry Etzkowitz and Gerald M. Schaflander, “A Manifesto for Sociologists: Institution Formation; A New Sociology,” Social Problems 15 (1968): 399, 408. 100. Henry Etzkowitz and Gerald M. Schaflander, Ghetto Crisis: Riots or Reconciliation? (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 11, 14–15, 17. A contemporary

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rebuttal is Andrew Billingsley, “Family Functioning in the Low-Income Black Community,” Social Casework 50 (1969): 563–72. 101. Etzkowitz and Schaflander, “Manifesto,” 403. 102. Banfield, Unheavenly City, 79– 81, 87. 103. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 2nd ed., 14, 20, 70. CHAPTER SIX

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Bruce Davidson, East 100th Street, 1st ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), preface (n.p.) Robert Coles, The South Goes North (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 34. Bruce Davidson, Bruce Davidson Photographs (New York: Agrinde, 1978), 7–9. Norman Mailer, “Brooklyn Minority Report,” phot. Bruce Davidson, Esquire, June 1960, 129– 37. On this series, see Patricia Vettel Tom, “Bad Boys: Bruce Davidson’s Gang Photographs and Outlaw Masculinity,” Art Journal 56, no. 2 (1997): 69–74. Davidson, Bruce Davidson Photographs, 11–12. Deborah Willis, introduction to Time of Change: Bruce Davidson; Civil Rights Photographs 1961–1965, by Bruce Davidson (Los Angeles: St. Ann’s, 2002), n.p. Bruce Davidson, East 100th Street, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: St. Ann’s, 2003), 161. When the New York Times deemed the block the city’s worst, local politicians and clergy rallied against the coverage. “Story on 100th Street Scored at Rally,” New York Times, July 31, 1960. Woody Klein, Let in the Sun (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 15–18. Gertrude Samuels, “A Walk along ‘The Worst Block,’” New York Times Magazine, Sept. 30, 1962, 18, 82– 83. “Large Delegation from Harlem Will See Eddy Ordained,” Hartford Courant, May 27, 1951; Maggie Bellows, “How One Slum Is Making a Fight for the Better Life,” Chicago Defender, Dec. 3, 1966. On the parish, see Ross W. Sanderson, The Church Serves the Changing City (New York: Harper, 1955), 190–231; Bruce Kenrick, Come out the Wilderness: The Story of East Harlem Protestant Parish (New York: Harper, 1962). Tom Vanderbilt, “The Picture Man,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 2003; Davidson, East 100th Street, 2nd ed., 161. Davidson, Bruce Davidson Photographs, 13. Harvey Lloyd, letter to the editor, New York Times, Nov. 8, 1970. Davidson quoted in Vanderbilt, “Picture Man.” Davidson, Bruce Davidson Photographs, 13; Mildred Feliciano, foreword to Davidson, East 100th Street, 2nd ed., 4. Davidson quoted in Alberta Gnugnoli, “Bruce Davidson: My Philosophy,” British Journal of Photography 132, no. 6502 (1985): 306. Glenn Rand and Richard Zakia, Teaching Photography: Tools for the Imaging Educator (Burlington, MA: Focal, 2006), 53.

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18. Davidson, East 100th Street, 2nd ed., 162. 19. Joseph Lelyveld, “East Harlem Block Sits for a ‘Family Portrait,’” New York Times, Sept. 25, 1970. On Davidson’s technique, see also Hilton Kramer, “Photos Transform Experience into Art,” New York Times, Sept. 25, 1970; Davidson, Bruce Davidson Photographs, 12–13; Michael Edelson, “Bruce Davidson: East 100th Street,” Popular Photography, Oct. 1971, 110–17, 176. 20. Miles Orvell, American Photography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 130. 21. Mae C. Johnson and James R. Murray, “The Eye of the Intruder,” A.V. Communication Review 19 (1971): 347– 48. See also Edelson, “Bruce Davidson,” 176. 22. Erina Duganne, The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), 172. 23. Johnson and Murray, “Eye of the Intruder,” 348. Cf. Davidson’s localized approach to that of Gerald Moore, “The Ghetto Block,” Life, Mar. 8, 1968, 66– 80. 24. Samuels, “Walk,” 83. 25. Howard S. Becker, “Photography and Sociology,” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 1, no. 1 (1974): 12. 26. Davidson, East 100th Street, 1st ed., preface (n.p.). 27. Asch, East River, 24. 28. Bruce A. Ronda, Intellect and Spirit: The Life and Work of Robert Coles (New York: Continuum, 1989), 21, 114; Robert Coles, Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), vii, 3– 8. 29. Ronda, Intellect and Spirit, 121; “Breaking the American Stereotypes,” Time, Feb. 14, 1972, 36. 30. Ronda, Intellect and Spirit, 120; Coles, South Goes North, 30– 34, 46– 48. 31. Coles, South Goes North, 3, 5, 11–12, 131– 32. 32. Ibid., 288, 542, 566– 67. 33. For Coles on the Moynihan Report, see Robert Coles, “The Cart or the Horse?,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 17, 1965. 34. Coles, South Goes North, 72, 224, 270. 35. Coles quoted in Phyllis Malamud, “Robert Coles and ‘Social Psychiatry,’” Washington Post, Jan. 9, 1972. 36. Coles, South Goes North, 586, see also 631. 37. Ibid., 189–97, 262– 66. 38. Ibid., 580. 39. Robert Coles, A Robert Coles Omnibus (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 19. 40. See Coles, South Goes North, 592. 41. Davidson quoted in Barney Simon, “East 100th Street, New York: Interview with Bruce Davidson,” du Magazine, Mar. 1969, repr. in Davidson, East 100th Street, 2nd ed., 157.

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42. Coles, South Goes North, 197–98, 201, 204, 206. 43. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “What Is Robert Coles Saying?,” New York Times, Feb. 18, 1972. 44. Philip Dante, “‘But Where Is Our Soul,’” and A. D. Coleman, “What Does It Imply?,” both New York Times, Oct. 11, 1970. 45. Etzkowitz and Schaflander, Ghetto Crisis, 16. Though the authors wrote before Coles’s book publication, excerpts from Coles’s eventual volume had already appeared in print. 46. Joseph Epstein, “Dr. Coles among the Poor,” Commentary, Aug. 1972, 62– 63. 47. The reference is to Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128– 38. 48. Susan Sontag, “Photography,” New York Review of Books, Oct. 18, 1973, 61. 49. See, e.g., Coles’s methodological note in South Goes North, 38; and Davidson’s explanation, in Bruce Davidson Photographs, 13, for his refusal to provide East 100th Street interpretive captions. 50. For similar remarks on Coles, see Ronda, Intellect and Spirit, 179. 51. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!, 20. 52. Simeon Booker, Black Man’s America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 175. 53. East St. Louis Monitor quoted in Dennis R. Judd and Robert E. Mendelson, The Politics of Urban Planning: The East St. Louis Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 112–13. 54. “Black Communities Studied Again,” San Francisco Sun-Reporter, June 28, 1969. 55. Emily Dennis Harvey and Bernard Friedberg, eds., A Museum for the People: A Report of Proceedings at the Seminar on Neighborhood Museums (New York: Arno, 1971), viii. 56. Edward P. Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums (Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1979), 227; Grace Glueck, “The Future Is Not What It Used to Be,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 1969. 57. Carew remarks in Harvey and Friedberg, Museum for the People, 34– 35. 58. See, e.g., Peniel E. Joseph, ed., Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 59. Alexander, Museums in Motion, 225–26. 60. Spencer R. Crew, “African Americans, History and Museums: Preserving African American History in the Public Arena,” in Making Histories in Museums, ed. Gaynor Kavanagh (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 83. 61. Moira G. Simpson, Making Representations: Museums in the Post- colonial Era (New York: Routledge, 1996), 101. 62. Carew quoted in Keith Morrison, Art in Washington and Its Afro-American Presence: 1940–1970 (Washington, DC: Washington Project for the Arts, 1985), 65. 63. Kinard quoted in Glueck, “Future.”

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64. Edmund Barry Gaither, “‘Hey! That’s Mine’: Thoughts on Pluralism and American Museums,” in Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift, ed. Gail Anderson (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004), 114. 65. James Conaway, The Smithsonian: 150 Years of Adventure, Discovery, and Wonder (New York: Knopf, 1995), 340, 356. 66. Zora Martin-Felton and Gail S. Love, A Different Drummer: John Kinard and the Anacostia Museum, 1967–1989 (Washington, DC: Anacostia Museum, 1993), 22–23. 67. Dillon Ripley, The Sacred Grove: Essays on Museums (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 105. 68. “Slum to Be Moved into Smithsonian,” New York Times, Jan. 4, 1967; “‘Smellovision’ Enhances Visit to Smithsonian,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 30, 1967. 69. Ripley, Sacred Grove, 105– 6; Ripley “supermarket” quote from Benjamin Forgey, “Heritage Home,” Washington Post, May 16, 1987. 70. Martin-Felton and Love, Different Drummer, 18. 71. Louise Daniel Hutchinson, The Anacostia Story: 1608–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1977), xii, 138; Martin-Felton and Love, Different Drummer, 18; Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, “Additions to Introduction,” slideshow text, 1972, SIA-AOD, box 4/1. 72. Alexander, Museums in Motion, 224; Martin-Felton and Love, Different Drummer, 2– 8, 16–17. See also Jacqueline Trescott, “Anacostia Advocate,” Washington Post, Sept. 16, 1977. 73. George Davis, “Museum Visits: Big New Thing in Anacostia,” Washington Post, Dec. 9, 1968. 74. Milton Esterow, “Neighborhood Museum Becomes a Reality,” New York Times, Sept. 15, 1967; John R. Kinard and Esther Nighbert, “The Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.,” Museum 24, no. 2 (1972): 103; Edward P. Alexander, The Museum in America: Innovators and Pioneers (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1997), 148– 51. 75. “Opening Eyes in the Ghettos,” Time, June 21, 1968, 78. 76. Portia James, “Building a Community-Based Identity at Anacostia Museum,” Curator 39 (1996): 24; Neil Harris, Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 314. 77. Carl Bernstein, “Anacostia Theater Set for Smithsonian Branch,” Washington Post, Apr. 23, 1967; Lucia Johnson, “Neighborhood Smithsonian,” Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 8, 1969; Kinard and Nighbert, “Anacostia Neighborhood Museum,” 104– 5; “Museum Honors Anacostia ‘Sage,’” Washington Post, Feb. 9, 1969; Louise Durbin, “Taking The Frederick Douglass Years to Anacostia,” Washington Post, Feb. 15, 1970; Barry Schwartz, “Museums: Art for Who’s [sic] Sake?,” Ramparts, June 1971, 49. 78. Johnson, “Neighborhood Smithsonian.”

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79. Kinard quoted in ibid., emphasis added. 80. “Display Shows Damage Done by Rats,” Washington Post, Nov. 17, 1969; “ABC Discovery Finds Unique Museum in D.C.,” Washington Afro-American, Aug. 4, 1970; Alexander, Museums in Motion, 224; Gaither, “‘Hey! That’s Mine,’” 114; Kinard and Nighbert, “Anacostia Neighborhood Museum,” 105; John R. Kinard, “The Neighbourhood Museum as a Catalyst for Change,” Museum 37, no. 4 (1985): 220. 81. Kinard and Nighbert, “Anacostia Neighborhood Museum,” 105– 6; Phil Casey, “Urban Research in Anacostia,” Washington Post, May 20, 1970; Walterene Swanston, “Center for Anacostia Studies: Changing an Image,” Washington Post, Oct. 23, 1975. 82. Press quotes from: Richard Severo, “Slum Areas Bypassed by Subway,” Washington Post, Mar. 15, 1967; Jim Hoagland and Richard Severo, “New Life for Adams-Morgan?,” Washington Post, Oct. 9, 1967; Richard Severo, “This Is Anacostia,” Washington Post, May 8, 1966. 83. Kinard quoted in Angela Terrell, “An Experiment Blossoms,” Washington Post, Sept. 16, 1972. 84. Kinard and Nighbert, “Anacostia Neighborhood Museum,” 105– 6. 85. Hutchinson, Anacostia Story, xi. 86. Douglas E. Evelyn and Paul Dickson, On This Spot: Pinpointing the Past in Washington, D.C. (Washington, DC: Farragut, 1992), 250– 51; Anacostia Neighborhood Museum Research Department, “The Growth and Development of Anacostia: 1865–1900,” Jan. 1977, SIA-AED, box 11/“Evolution of a Community, Part I.” 87. Hutchinson, Anacostia Story, 138. 88. Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, “The Evolution of a Community,” typescript, 1972, SIA-AED, box 11/“Evolution of a Community, Part I”; John Kinard, “Neighborhood Museum Exhibition Relates the History of Anacostia,” typescript, 1972, SIA-AOD, box 4/2; Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, “The Evolution of a Community, Part II,” slideshow script, 1972, 2– 3, SIA-AOD, box 4/2; Ivan C. Brandon, “Anacostia History Featured,” Washington Post, Feb. 28, 1972; Angela Terrell, “Anacostia on Exhibit,” Washington Post, Feb. 26, 1972. 89. Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, suggestion-box compilation, Feb. 27– Mar. 7, 1972, SIA-AOD, box 4/2. 90. Larry Erskine Thomas, “A Cultural Exhibit That Helps Us to Rediscover Ourselves,” in Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, “The Evolution of a Community,” typescript, 1972, n.p., SIA-AED, box 11/“Evolution of a Community, Part I”; Malcolm X, “Statement of the Basic Aims and Objectives of the Organization of Afro-American Unity” [1964], in The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary, ed. George Breitman (New York: Merit, 1967), 105–11. 91. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Random House, 1993), 6.

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92. Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, “Unemployment” and “Housing,” slideshow scripts, 1972, SIA-AOD, box 4/1. 93. Kinard, “Neighbourhood Museum,” 220. 94. James, “Building a Community-Based Identity,” 27– 36. See also Stephen E. Weil, “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum,” Daedalus 128, no. 3 (1999): 249– 50, 255. 95. Hutchinson, Anacostia Story, xii. 96. Kinard, “Neighbourhood Museum,” 220. 97. Categories adapted from M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). CHAPTER SEVEN

1.

R. Gordon Kelly, “Literature and the Historian,” American Quarterly 26 (1974): 154– 55. 2. Eleanor Holmes Norton, “Toward a More Balanced Urban Agenda: Proposal for a National Neighborhoods Policy,” report, n.d. (ca. early 1970s), 13–14, UND-NUE, box 82/35. 3. Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 213. 4. David Zarefsky, President Johnson’s War on Poverty: Rhetoric and History (University: University of Alabama Press, 1986), 120–22. 5. Public Papers of the Presidents: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963– 64 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 705. 6. Kennedy quoted in Jules Witcover, 85 Days: The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy (New York: Putnam, 1969), 144. 7. Julia L. Mickenberg, Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 279. Mickenberg’s comment specifically addresses Sesame Street. 8. Rossinow, Visions of Progress, 226. 9. US Commission on Civil Rights, A Time to Listen, A Time to Act: Voices from the Ghettos of the Nation’s Cities (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), 69. 10. Kenneth B. Clark, “Beyond the Dilemma,” in Representative American Speeches: 1969–1970, ed. Lester Thonssen (New York: Wilson, 1970), 170; Whitney Young Jr., “High Cost of Jim- Crow Housing,” Chicago Defender, June 10, 1967. 11. This idea had roots in psychologist Gordon Allport’s influential “contact hypothesis.” See Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: AddisonWesley, 1954), esp. 266– 81. 12. Brian Alderson, Ezra Jack Keats: Artist and Picture-Book Maker (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1994), 132.

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13. Keats quoted in Jaqueline Shachter Weiss, Profiles in Children’s Literature: Discussions with Authors, Artists, and Editors (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2001), 174. 14. Ezra Jack Keats, “Ezra Jack Keats Remembers: Discovering the Library,” Teacher, Dec. 1976, 40– 41; Ezra Jack Keats, autobiography draft, Ch. 5- G, USM-EJK, box 71/7; Alderson, Ezra Jack Keats, 15–16, 34. The unpublished Keats interview transcripts and autobiography drafts cited herein are undated, but all appear to be ca. 1976–1983. 15. Ezra Jack Keats, unlabeled typescripts, USM-EJK, box 78/22; Ezra Jack Keats, autobiography project sketches, USM-EJK, box 88/13; Ezra Jack Keats, interview transcript, USM-EJK, box 70/23. 16. Keats, “Ezra Jack Keats Remembers,” 40– 41; Ezra Jack Keats, interview transcript, USM-EJK, box 71/15; Ezra Jack Keats, autobiography draft, Ch. 6-A, USM-EJK, box 71/8. 17. Ezra Jack Keats, interview transcript, USM-EJK, box 71/15; Ezra Jack Keats, autobiography draft, Ch. 6-D, USM-EJK, box 71/16; Florence B. Freedman, “Ezra Jack Keats: Author and Illustrator,” Elementary English, Jan. 1969, 58. 18. “Katz to Draw Murals,” Liberty Bell (Thomas Jefferson High School, Brooklyn), Oct. 26, 1934, USM-EJK, box 78/9; Keats, curriculum vitae, ca. 1948, USM-EJK, box 78/13. 19. Ezra Jack Keats, interview transcripts, USM-EJK, boxes 71/15, 78/22. 20. Ezra Jack Keats, autobiography draft, Ch. 8-E, USM-EJK, box 72/5; Alderson, Ezra Jack Keats, 27, 31, 53. 21. Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day (New York: Viking, 1962); Ezra Jack Keats, autobiography draft, Ch. 13-B, USM-EJK, box 73/15; Erma Perry, “The Gentle World of Ezra Jack Keats,” American Artist, Mar. 1971, 48. 22. Abraham Tannenbaum, “Family Living in Textbook Town,” Progressive Education 31 (1954): 138. 23. Nancy Larrick, “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” Saturday Review, Sept. 11, 1965, 64. 24. “A Conversation with Ezra Jack Keats,” Macmillan publicity flyer, 1974, USM-EJK, box 86/15. 25. Charlotte Blount, “Children’s Bookshelf: A Couple of Snowy Books,” Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, Mar. 17, 1963, USM-EJK, box 60/7. 26. Ezra Jack Keats, “Dear Mr. Keats,” Horn Book Magazine, June 1972, 306–10; Mrs. Stephen Taylor to Keats, June 28, 1965, USM-EJK, box 104/14. 27. Alderson, Ezra Jack Keats, 181. 28. “Picture Book Reality,” Boston Evening Globe, Oct. 27, 1968, USM-EJK, box 28/22. 29. Reviews of Goggles!, by Ezra Jack Keats, in: Albany Times Union, Nov. 16, 1969; Tulsa World, Nov. 16, 1969; School Library Journal, Dec. 1969; all USM-EJK, box 11/28. 30. Ezra Jack Keats, Goggles! (New York: Macmillan, 1969); review of Goggles!, by Ezra Jack Keats, Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, Dec. 1969, 61, USM-EJK, box 11/28.

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31. Alderson, Ezra Jack Keats, 208n6. See also Anita Silvey, introduction to Keats’s Neighborhood: An Ezra Jack Keats Treasury, by Ezra Jack Keats (New York: Viking, 2002), 9. 32. Ezra Jack Keats, autobiography draft, Ch. 12-A, USM-EJK, box 73/9. 33. Ezra Jack Keats, interview transcript, USM-EJK, box 71/15. 34. Keats quotations from: “Author Puts Negroes into Children’s Books,” Minneapolis Star, Oct. 26, 1966, USM-EJK, box 60/7; Jacqueline Radin, “Author of Prize Picture Book to Address Library Council,” Brooklyn World-Telegram, May 20, 1963, USM-EJK, box 60/10; Margo Juston, “Honesty Is Author’s Policy for Children’s Books,” Milwaukee Journal, Mar. 28, 1974. 35. Lillian N. Gerhardt, review of Goggles!, by Ezra Jack Keats, School Library Journal, Dec. 1969, 42; “For Children,” New York Magazine, Oct. 21, 1968, 19; Eldora Gray, “Seeing the Negro Child as He Is: A Child,” Kansas City Star, Oct. 20, 1968. 36. Larrick, “All-White World,” 64. 37. Judy Richardson, “Black Children’s Books: An Overview,” Journal of Negro Education 43 (1974): 391–96; Rudine Sims Bishop, Free within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007), 155– 62; Carole A. Parks, “Goodbye Black Sambo: Black Writers Forge New Images in Children’s Literature,” Ebony, Nov. 1972, 60– 62, 67–70. 38. Sharon Bell Mathis, “Black- on-Black Children’s Books: Love Stories,” article draft, Feb. 15, 1972, 1, UMNC- SBM, box MF3413/3. 39. Silvey, introduction to Keats’s Neighborhood, 11. On the council, see Beryle Banfield, “Commitment to Change: The Council on Interracial Books for Children and the World of Children’s Books,” African American Review 32 (1998): 17–22. 40. “Two Views of Progress,” Interracial Books for Children, Winter 1972/73, 7. See also Sharon Bell Mathis, “State of Black Arts and Letters,” typescript, 1972, UMNC- SBM, box MF3413/3. 41. Ray Anthony Shepard, “Adventures in Blackland with Keats and Steptoe,” Interracial Books for Children, Autumn 1971, 3. 42. Silvey, introduction to Keats’s Neighborhood, 11. 43. Rae Alexander quoted in Richardson, “Black Children’s Books,” 392. Subsequently, this author has become well known as Rae Alexander-Minter; for clarity, this name is used in the text. 44. Keats quoted in Alderson, Ezra Jack Keats, 192. 45. Ezra Jack Keats, “The Right to Be Real,” Saturday Review, Nov. 9, 1963, 56. 46. Robert W. Morrow, “Sesame Street” and the Reform of Children’s Television (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 159. 47. Ben Shapiro, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took over Your TV (New York: Broadside Books, 2011), 318; also “Great American Panel,” Hannity, Fox News Network, June 1, 2011.

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48. Wade Greene, “Sesame Street Director,” Washington Post, Feb. 15, 1970; CTW, “Sesame Street Cast Bios,” Nov. 1970, UMDN- CTW, box 31/19. 49. Joel Spring, Images of American Life: A History of Ideological Management in Schools, Movies, Radio, and Television (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 242– 43. 50. Wendy Smith, Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940 (New York: Knopf, 1990), 266, 340; Helen Epstein, Joe Papp: An American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), 67. 51. CTW, “Sesame Street Cast Bios.” 52. Roscoe Orman, “Sesame Street” Dad: Evolution of an Actor (Portland, OR: Inkwater, 2006), 27–70. 53. Cooney quoted in Maggie Savoy, “Joan Cooney: The TV Producer Who Made Waves,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1970. 54. Gerald S. Lesser, Children and Television: Lessons from “Sesame Street” (New York: Random House, 1974), 169, 207–11; Phylis Feinstein, All about “Sesame Street” (New York: Tower, 1971), 61– 62; CTW, “Sesame Street and the Community,” brochure, 1971, UMDN- CTW, box 51/24. 55. Young quoted in “Urban League Director Laud Sesame Street,” Chicago Daily Defender, Feb. 11, 1970; “Sesame Street,” The Crisis, Mar. 1970, 79; “National Negro Women’s Group Backs New Preschool TV Series,” Chicago Daily Defender, Nov. 8, 1969. 56. “Children’s Television Workshop in 1970–1971: A Proposal,” Apr. 1970, 1, UMDN- CTW, box 1/5. 57. Survey quoted in CTW, “Children’s Television Workshop Annual Report 1973,” UMDN- CTW, box 1/20. 58. CTW, “Sesame Street at Five: The Changing Look of a Perpetual Experiment,” editorial backgrounder, Oct. 1974, 17, UMDN- CTW, box 42/9. 59. Parents quoted in Daniel Yankelovich Inc., “A Report of Three Studies on the Role and Penetration of Sesame Street in Ghetto Communities,” June 1971, 85, UMDN- CTW, box 43/46. 60. Laurie Ouellette, Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 79; “Head Start” comment from Susan Chira, “Sesame Street at 20: Taking Stock,” New York Times, Nov. 15, 1989. 61. David Connell, interview by Richard M. Polsky, transcript, n.d. 1972, 21, CUCC- CTWP. 62. Lesser, Children and Television, 186– 87; Spring, Images, 244– 45. 63. Stone quoted in John Culhane, “Report Card on Sesame Street,” New York Times Magazine, May 24, 1970, 61. 64. Set descriptions and quotations from Betty Baer, “The Secrets of Sesame Street,” Look, Sept. 22, 1970, 58; and Benjamin Spock, “Children, Television, and Sesame Street,” Redbook, July 1970, 24, 28. 65. Nigel Lawson, “The Minor Miracle of Sesame Street,” Times (London), Dec. 22, 1971; Joan Ganz Cooney, “Workshop Position on Monica Sims’s EBU Paper,” draft, Oct. 26, 1971, UMDN- CTW, box 17/54.

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66. Spring, Images, 246. 67. David Serlin, “From Sesame Street to Schoolhouse Rock: Urban Pedagogy and Soul Iconography in the 1970s,” in Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure, ed. Monique Guillory and David C. Green (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 107. 68. Danny Horn, “Hipsters and Squares,” Tough Pigs Anthology, Summer 2004, accessed May 11, 2007, http://www.toughpigs.com/anthhipster00.htm. Like many, CTW staffer Jane O’Connor criticized the Franklin character for reinforcing whites’ stereotypes. O’Connor to Dave Connell et al., memorandum, Feb. 10, 1970, UMDN- CTW, box 35/47. 69. Lesser, Children and Television, 129; James Haskins, “The Pre-school Revolution: Sesame Street,” unpublished paper, 1970, UMDN- CTW, box 21/19; Robinson quoted in Myra MacPherson, “A Salute to Sesame,” Washington Post, Apr. 2, 1970. 70. CTW, “Children’s Television Workshop in 1970–1971”; guest names from CTW, “Sesame Street at Five,” 8. 71. Seth S. King, “A Black Christmas Mythology Evolves,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 1970. On Operation Breadbasket, see Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1987; repr., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 177, 285, 349– 50, 392. 72. Columnist David Wilson quoted in Lesser, Children and Television, 179. 73. Ibid., 225; Culhane, “Report Card,” 70. 74. Audrey Weaver, “Black Kids Praise, Rap White Schools,” Chicago Daily Defender, Sept. 5, 1970. 75. “Sesame Show Banned in Mississippi,” Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1970. 76. Norman A. Felsenthal, “Sesame Street: Socialization by Surrogate,” conference paper, Dec. 30, 1974, UMDN- CTW, box 42/59. 77. Sedulus [pseud.], “Sesame Street,” New Republic, June 6, 1970, 23. 78. Ouellette, Viewers Like You?, 82. 79. Joan Ganz Cooney, introduction to Sharing the Street: Activities for All Children, by Barbara Kolucki (New York: Children’s Television Workshop, 1978), 3. 80. Henson quoted in CTW, “Puppeteer Has a Hidden Hand in TV Show for Pre-schoolers,” press release, Spring 1970, UMDN- CTW, box 31/17. 81. Cooney to Jane O’Connor, memorandum, Feb. 10, 1970, UMDN- CTW, box 35/47. See also producer Matt Robinson’s critique quoted in “A Toddle Down Sesame Street,” Ebony, Jan. 1970, 38. 82. Jeff Moss, comp., “The People in Your Neighborhood,” The “Sesame Street” Book and Record, Columbia Records CR 21530, LP, 1970. 83. John LaTouche and Earl Robinson, Ballad for Americans, piano/vocal score (New York: Robbins Music, 1940), 32. 84. Long quoted in CTW, “Sesame Street at Five,” 8. 85. Cooney to Cynthia Easton, Feb. 1, 1972, UMDN- CTW, box 17/51.

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 222–27

86. Cooney quoted in Culhane, “Report Card,” 57. 87. Ellen Goodman quoted in Lesser, Children and Television, 199. See also Patricia Hayes O’Donnell, “Sex Roles on Sesame Street,” report, Jan. 1977, UMDN- CTW, box 42/18. 88. Cooney to Heide, Apr. 19, 1972, UMDN- CTW, box 17/43. 89. Anne Grant West to Ralph Cobb, July 16, 1971, UMDN- CTW, box 17/42. 90. Nancy Sobowale to Cooney, Jan. 11, 1971; Cooney to Edward Palmer, memorandum, n.d. (Jan. 1971); both UMDN- CTW, box 17/40. 91. Connell, interview by Polsky, 22, CUCC- CTWP. 92. Cooney quoted in Clayton Riley, “A Black Father on Sesame Street,” New York Times, Feb. 8, 1970. 93. Pierce and Eisenberg paraphrased in Dick Polsky, CTW meeting minutes, Boston, Aug. 6– 8, 1969, UMDN- CTW, box 33/10. 94. Eisenberg paraphrased in ibid. 95. CTW, “Writers’ Notebook, 1970–71,” sec. IV-B-1-b, UMDN- CTW, box 33/20. 96. Lesser, Children and Television, 94. 97. CTW, “Earth Day Observance,” press release, Apr. 1970, UMDN- CTW, box 31/17; “ETV ‘Earth Day’ Specials,” Greenwood (SC) Index-Journal, Apr. 21, 1970. On preoccupations with cleanliness, see Ouellette, Viewers Like You?, 82. 98. Urie Bronfenbrenner, “Who Lives on Sesame Street?,” Psychology Today, Oct. 1970, 14. 99. Barbara H. Stewart, “Sesame Street: A Linguistic Detour for Black-Language Speakers,” Black World, Aug. 1973, 20. Also “Sesame Sell to Blacks Criticized,” Broadcasting, Mar. 23, 1970, 52. 100. Linda Francke, “The Games People Play on Sesame Street,” New York Magazine, Apr. 5, 1971, 26–29. Also see Morrow, “Sesame Street,” 76, 153. 101. On such tensions, see Quadagno, Color of Welfare, 36– 37; Katz, Undeserving Poor, 99–100; Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth- Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 132– 35, 159, 164; Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991), 119–23, 149– 52, 164, 179– 80; Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 259– 82. 102. Serlin, “From Sesame Street,” 109; Spring, Images, 247– 48; Jennifer Mandel, “The Production of a Beloved Community: Sesame Street’s Answer to America’s Inequalities,” Journal of American Culture 29 (2006): 3; Ouellette, Viewers Like You?, 81. 103. Dennis Clark, The Ghetto Game: Racial Conflicts in the City (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962), 226, 242. 104. US Office of Economic Opportunity, The Quiet Revolution: Second Annual Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), 4.

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105. David K. Gast, “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius for Multiethnic Children’s Literature,” Elementary English 47 (1970): 664. CHAPTER EIGHT

1.

Norman Mailer, “Why Are We in New York?,” in Running against the Machine: The Mailer-Breslin Campaign, ed. Peter Manso (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 3–16. 2. Osman, “Decade of the Neighborhood,” 110. See also Harry C. Boyte, The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Michael R. Williams, Neighborhood Organizations: Seeds of a New Urban Life (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985). 3. George Frederickson, ed., Neighborhood Control in the 1970s: Politics, Administration, and Citizen Participation (New York: Chandler, 1973); Yates, Neighborhood Democracy; Richard L. Cole, “Citizen Participation in Municipal Politics,” American Journal of Political Science 19 (1975): 761– 81; Donna E. Shalala, Neighborhood Governance: Issues and Proposals (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1971), 8–12. 4. John S. Friedman, ed., First Harvest: The Institute for Policy Studies, 1963– 83 (New York: Grove, 1983), xi–xiii; Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 98–100. 5. Sidney Blumenthal, Our Long National Daydream: A Political Pageant of the Reagan Era (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 281; Raskin quoted in Michael Fortun and Kim Fortun, “Making Space, Speaking Truth: The Institute for Policy Studies, 1963–1995,” in Corporate Futures: The Diffusion of the Culturally Sensitive Corporate Form, ed. George E. Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 254– 55. 6. Special Agent in Charge (SAC), Washington, quoted in FBI director to SAC-Washington, June 7, 1971, FBI- SUBJ: “Institute for Policy Studies”; Medvetz, Think Tanks, 127–28. 7. Theodore J. Lowi, review of Being and Doing, by Marcus G. Raskin, New York Times Book Review, Aug. 8, 1971, 4. 8. Institute for Policy Studies, “The First Three Years of the Institute for Policy Studies, 1963–1966,” report, 1966, quoted in Heritage Foundation, “Institute for Policy Studies,” Institutional Analysis #2, pamphlet, May 1977, 1. 9. Friedman, First Harvest, xi–xiii; Rael Jean Isaac, “The Institute for Policy Studies: A Case History of a Revisionist Think Tank,” in Power and Policy in Transition, ed. Vojtech Mastny (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 106–7. 10. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 404– 5; Hess remark from Kenneth Elvin Grubbs Jr., ed., The Phillip Luce– Karl Hess Debate (Washington, DC: New Guard, 1970), 11. See also Peter J. Steinberger, Ideology and the Urban Crisis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 75–76.

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 236 –39

11. Milton Kotler, Neighborhood Government: The Local Foundations of Political Life (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), xi–xii. 12. “The NAN Staff,” 1977, RAC-RBF, box 603/3609; Milton Kotler, interview by author, Washington, DC, Oct. 21, 2007, transcript in SLU-INAN; Isaac, “Institute for Policy Studies,” 105. On Kotler’s San Quentin work, see also materials in WHS-IPS, box 36/4. 13. Milton Kotler, new preface and afterword to reprint of Kotler, Neighborhood Government: The Local Foundations of Political Life (1969; repr., Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), xii, 107–16. 14. First English Lutheran Church, Columbus, OH, “Annual Report,” 1965, 18, LTS-LWB, box 2/“Annual Report 1965.” 15. Linda-Marie Delloff, “Reliving Nazi Resistance: Pastor’s Hidden Past Makes Compelling Story,” Lutheran, Nov. 2004, 62. 16. “The Ministry of First English Lutheran Church,” n.d. (ca. 1961), LTS-LWB, box 3/“First English.” 17. Leopold Bernhard, sermon, Feb. 12, 1967, LTS-LWB, box 20/“LWB sermons 1967.” 18. Robert Kotzbauer, “The Meaning of ECCO,” WRFD Commentator (Columbus, OH), Jan. 21, 1966, 2– 4, LTS-LWB, box 6/“Articles re: ECCO.” 19. Brian Glick, “Neighborhood Foundations Memoranda,” Yale Law Journal 76 (1967): 1259– 60; Andrew J. White, “The Churches and Community Development,” Lutheran Quarterly 19 (1967): 373–74; Bernhard quoted in Kotzbauer, “Meaning of ECCO,” 4. 20. James Ridgeway, “Missionaries in Darkest Ohio,” New Republic, Feb. 5, 1966, 9–10; Harvey Cox, “Revolt in the Church,” Playboy, Jan. 1967, 140; Robert F. Kennedy, To Seek a Newer World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 57– 58. 21. Kotler testimony in US Senate, Housing Legislation of 1967: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs of the Committee on Banking and Currency, United States Senate, 90th Cong., 1st sess., July 27–28, Aug. 7, 1967 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), 2:1014–15. 22. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Dutton, 1968), 287– 89, 295–96. 23. Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York: Norton, 1969), xiii, 68–71, 191–206, emphasis removed. John Hall Fish makes similar comparisons in Black Power/White Control: The Struggle of the Woodlawn Organization in Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 323–28. 24. Lowi, End of Liberalism, 282– 83, 289. 25. Kotler, Neighborhood Government, 9, 13–19, 55– 60, 82– 87; Milton Kotler, “Politics to the People,” New York Times, Mar. 17, 1975. 26. Kotler, Neighborhood Government, 2, 8–9, 14, 28– 36, 43, 63, 76, 89, 98–101. 27. Mark O. Hatfield, “On Neighborhood Government,” pamphlet, Aug. 1972, HSP-NCU, box 7/4.

389

N OT E S TO PAG E S 239 – 43

28. Milton Kotler, activity report, Institute for Policy Studies, 1973, WHS-IPS, box 35/46; Robert Eells and Bartell Nyberg, Lonely Walk: The Life of Senator Mark Hatfield (Chappaqua, NY: Christian Herald Books, 1979), 103– 5, Hatfield “cornerstone” quote on 105; Hatfield “town hall” quote in “Bill Would Give Power to the People,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 25, 1973. 29. Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 185– 86, 309. 30. George F. Will, “Government as Tinker Toy,” Washington Post, Sept. 2, 1973. 31. Sen. Charles Mathias, “The Constitution versus the National Security State and Some Proposals to Strengthen Democracy,” 119 Cong. Rec., 93rd Cong., 1st sess. (Dec. 20, 1973): 42676. 32. Bender, Community and Social Change, 148– 49; Sam Bass Warner Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 276. 33. Jack Newfield and Jeff Greenfield, A Populist Manifesto: The Making of a New Majority (New York: Praeger, 1972), 12, 196–97. 34. “Recommended Reading,” Libertarian Forum, Dec. 1, 1969, 4; Kotler, author interview. 35. Mailer quoted in Mary V. Dearborn, Mailer: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 261. 36. Tony Lang, “Karl Hess Is Aflame with the Idea That a Man Can Run His Own Life,” Washington Post, Potomac Magazine, Dec. 6, 1970, 14, 20–25; James Boyd, “From Far Right to Far Left,” New York Times Magazine, Dec. 6, 1970, 48– 49, 152– 60. 37. Karl Hess, Dear America (New York: Morrow, 1975), 38– 39. 38. Ibid., 40– 58, 131; Karl Hess, Mostly on the Edge: An Autobiography, ed. Karl Hess Jr. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1999), 170, 207; Hess quoted in Studs Terkel, American Dreams: Lost and Found (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 375–76; Robert V. Friedenberg, Notable Speeches in Contemporary Presidential Campaigns (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 98. 39. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 31– 33. 40. Hess, Dear America, 6, 75–77, 82–94, 100; Hess, Mostly on the Edge, 214. 41. Terkel, American Dreams, 377–78; Hess, Dear America, 80– 82, 88, 100– 4, 146– 48; Hess, Mostly on the Edge, 183– 84; John Chamberlain, “No Real Turncoat,” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, June 17, 1969. 42. Gregory L. Schneider, Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 221n1. 43. Frank S. Meyer, “Libertarianism or Libertinism?,” National Review, Sept. 9, 1969, 910. 44. Hess, Dear America, 145–46, 204–6; Hess quoted in Lang, “Karl Hess Is Aflame,” 20.

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 243 – 47

45. Hess, Dear America, 3, 17–18. Note the comparable urban aspirations articulated in Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 491–98. 46. Jeffrey R. Henig, “Community Organizations in Gentrifying Neighborhoods,” Journal of Community Action 1, no. 2 (1981): 46. 47. Sylvia Lewis, “Adams Morgan: Spiffed up and Speculated Upon,” Planning 42, no. 3 (1976): 27. 48. David Morris and Karl Hess, Neighborhood Power: The New Localism (Boston: Beacon, 1975), 44; Karl Hess, Community Technology (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 38– 40; Hess, Mostly on the Edge, 236. 49. Barbara Collins Turner, “The Adams Morgan Organization (AMO),” in People, Building Neighborhoods: Case Study Appendices to Final Report to the President and the Congress of the United States, by the National Commission on Neighborhoods (Washington, DC: National Commission on Neighborhoods, 1979), 1:151– 60; Milton Kotler, “The Elective Council in Neighborhood Government,” Institute for Policy Studies, May 31, 1974, WHS-IPS, box 36/2; Hess, Community Technology, 40– 41. 50. Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 29– 31. 51. Hess, Mostly on the Edge, 235– 39; Hess, Community Technology, 43– 46; Nicholas Wade, “Karl Hess: Technology with a Human Face,” Science, Jan. 31, 1975, 332– 34. 52. David J. Morris, We Must Make Haste— Slowly: The Process of Revolution in Chile (New York: Random House, 1973), 9–10. 53. “Plowboy Interview: Gil Friend and David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance,” Mother Earth News, Nov. 1975, 6, 14. 54. On environmentalist antiurbanism, see Steven Conn, “Back to the Garden: Communes, the Environment, and Antiurban Pastoralism at the End of the Sixties,” Journal of Urban History 36 (2010): 831– 48. 55. “From the Editors,” The Neighborhood Works (Chicago), Feb. 10, 1978, 2. 56. James J. Kilpatrick, “Today Liberty Depends on Order, Not on Anarchy,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 12, 1971; James J. Kilpatrick, “A Gentleman Anarchist May Have the Answer,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 3, 1974. 57. Morris and Hess, Neighborhood Power, 1, 6–7, 11–13. 58. Ibid., 159–72. The chapter also joined the decade’s corpus of utopian environmentalist fiction, as epitomized by Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (Berkeley, CA: Banyan Tree Books, 1975). 59. Morris and Hess, Neighborhood Power, 15, 143, see also 37– 45. 60. Ibid., 22–25, 43. 61. Robert Cassidy, Livable Cities: A Grass-Roots Guide to Rebuilding Urban America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 245; Turner, “Adams Morgan Organization,” 159; Henig, “Community Organizations,” 48– 49; Nahikian quoted in Lewis, “Adams Morgan,” 27.

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 247– 50

62. Milton Kotler and Leopold Bernhard, “Institute for Neighborhood Studies: Prospectus,” Aug. 1972, WHS-IPS, box 35/46. 63. ANG, “Report on Proceedings: Eastern Region Neighborhood Government Meeting,” Washington, DC, May 1– 3, 1975; ANG, “Staff Support for the Alliance for Neighborhood Government,” report, Apr. 29, 1976; both RAC-RBF, box 603/3608. 64. ANG Bulletin, Sept. 1976; ANG, “Neighborhood Bill of Responsibilities and Rights,” Apr. 25, 1976; both RAC-RBF, box 603/3608. However, “History of the NAN,” typescript, n.d. (ca. 1980), UIC-DSP, box 31/260, claims that representatives from only fifty-two neighborhoods attended. 65. Hamer, “Neighborhood Control,” 790; ANG, “Report on Proceedings.” 66. ANG Bulletin, Sept. 1976; ANG, “Formation of National Association of Neighborhoods,” press release, Oct. 1976; Selina Melnik to Michaela Walsh, memorandum, Oct. 22, 1976; all RAC-RBF, box 603/3608. 67. Member listings for 1976 in ANG, “Staff Support,” Appendix E; and for ca. 1979 in NAN directory, TUL-WC, box 2/“NAN.” 68. Milton Kotler to Michaela Walsh, Oct. 21, 1976; ANG Bulletin, Sept. 1976; NAN Bulletin, June/July 1977; ANG, “Formation of National Association of Neighborhoods (NAN)”; all RAC-RBF, box 603/3608. 69. Sally Martino Fisher, interview by Martha Ackelsberg and Tamar Carroll, New York City, Mar. 23, 2004, WSM-NCNW, doc. 15. 70. Lowi, review of Being and Doing, 4. 71. Kotler, author interview. 72. Hooks to Joseph Timilty, June 28, 1978, JCL-NCN, box 14/“NAACP Correspondence.” 73. Milton Kotler to Leopold Bernhard, Aug. 10, 1965, LTS-LWB, box 6/ “Neighborhood Foundation Correspondence”; Milton Kotler, “Neighborhood Foundations Memorandum #10,” Institute for Policy Studies, Sept. 29, 1965, 26, LTS-LWB, box 6/unlabeled. 74. Milton Kotler, Harvey Wheeler, and William Gorman, “Table Talk: Finding the City,” Center Magazine, May 1968, 17. 75. Milton Kotler and Leopold Bernhard, “The Political Crisis and the Political-Theological Hope,” grant proposal, Jan. 8, 1976, 20–21, LTS-LWB, box 6/“Kotler (2).” 76. Leopold Bernhard and Milton Kotler, “Self- Governing Neighborhoods as an Emerging Unit of Governance,” paper for Conference on Government Reorganization, Washington, DC, Sept. 19–20, 1977, 18, LTS-LWB, box 6/ unlabeled. 77. “Resolution Presented to the Neighborhood Government Conference, Washington, DC, May 1– 3, 1975,” TUL-WC, box 1/“ANG.” 78. Conrad Weiler, interview by author, Philadelphia, Aug. 15, 2006, transcript in SLU-INAN. 79. Milton Kotler, interview by Lawrence O’Rourke, May 19, 1983, UND-BRN, tape 33447.

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 2 51– 55

80. Weiler, author interview. On the referenced conflicts, see Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill– Brownsville Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Ronald P. Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 81. ANG Bulletin, Sept. 1976. On the Italian example, Bruno Dente and Gloria Regonini, “Urban Policy and Political Legitimation: The Case of Italian Neighborhood Councils,” International Political Science Review 1 (1980): 187–202. 82. Dick Simpson, telephone interview by author, July 8, 2010, transcript in SLU-INAN; Milton Kotler, personal communication to author, June 11, 2007. 83. John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 8, 87, 90; Friedman, First Harvest, xii–xiii. 84. Morris and Hess, Neighborhood Power, 157– 58. 85. Kotler, author interview. 86. NAN Bulletin, Feb. 1977. 87. NAN Bulletin, June/July 1977, 21–23, LTS-LWB, box 6/“NAN (2).” 88. Kotler, author interview. 89. Hess, Dear America, 264. 90. Karl Hess, “Why Neighborhoods Must Secede,” New York Times, Jan. 31, 1972. 91. Hess, Community Technology, 47– 48. 92. Ibid., 41– 42, 46– 52. 93. Henig, “Community Organizations,” 50, 53– 54; Cassidy, Livable Cities, 78; Lewis, “Adams Morgan,” 27–28; Sandra Solomon, Neighborhood Transition without Displacement: A Citizens’ Handbook (Washington, DC: National Urban Coalition, 1979), 19–20; Carol Richards and Jonathan Rowe, “Restoring a City: Who Pays the Price?,” Working Papers for a New Society 4, no. 4 (1977): 56. 94. David J. Morris, “Adams Morgan Revisited: Lessons from Community Technology,” Self-Reliance, May/June 1979, 3, 10–11. 95. Greta Salem, The Forty-Fourth Ward Assembly: An Experiment in Neighborhood Democracy (Chicago: Center for Urban Policy, Loyola University, 1980), 14. 96. NAN, convention circulars, Nov. 9–11, 1979, and NAN, platform proposal, n.d. 1978, all UND-NUE, box 40/8. See also Bonita Brodt, “Group Will Draft U.S. Neighborhood Platform,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 8, 1979. 97. “The Neighborhood Platform Conventions,” NAN Bulletin, special edition, n.d. 1979, UND-NUE, box 40/8; Gil Lawson, “Neighborhoods Group Adopts First Platform,” Louisville Times, Nov. 12, 1979; Carolyn Colwell, “Neighborhoods Called a Force for Reform,” Louisville Courier-Journal, Nov. 10, 1979. Other newspaper accounts claim 500– 600 delegates. 98. Dick Simpson, “Neighborhood Empowerment,” Citizen Participation 2 (1980): 19.

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 2 55 – 58

99. “A National Neighborhood Platform: A Proposal by the NAN,” n.d. (ca. 1978), UIC-DSP, box 32/268. 100. NAN, “National Neighborhood Platform,” pamphlet, Dec. 1979, UND-NUE, box 40/8. 101. Jay Lawrence, “Neighborhoods Group Confronts the Question of Who’ll Control Cities,” Louisville Courier-Journal, Nov. 12, 1979; Jim Segrest (NAN Louisville host committee), telephone interview by author, June 25, 2010, transcript in SLU-INAN. 102. Kotler, author interview; Weiler, author interview. 103. Unnamed interviewee quoted in Lawrence, “Neighborhoods Group.” For internal complaints about the NAN Black Caucus, see Kathie Cheever et al. to Charles Koen, Oct. 24, 1980, UIC-DSP, box 32/268. 104. Kotler, author interview; Weiler, author interview; Simpson, author interview; Sally Martino Fisher, personal communication to author, Nov. 9, 2007; NAN convention announcement, Oct. 17–19, 1980, UND-NUE, box 40/8; Tom Wicker, “Kennedy Carries On,” New York Times, Mar. 18, 1980. Also on convention conflicts, see Rick Kohnen, report to Curt Wiley and Dick Simpson, Nov. 15, 1979, 4– 6, UIC-DSP, box 31/260. On Alinskyinspired methods more generally, see, e.g., Mark R. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 40–71. 105. Internal battles and the NAN’s rightward shift are amply documented by materials in UIC-DSP, box 33/282– 85. 106. Molly Abramowitz, Neighborhood Statistics from the 1980 Census (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1984); Kotler, author interview; Weiler, author interview. 107. Jeffrey M. Berry, Kent E. Portney, and Ken Thomson, The Rebirth of Urban Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1993). 108. Carroll Pursell, “The Rise and Fall of the Appropriate Technology Movement in the United States, 1965–1985,” Technology and Culture 34 (1993): 630–35. 109. Ronald Reagan, “Let the People Rule,” speech, Executive Club of Chicago, Sept. 26, 1975, 11–12, RRL-RPC, box 20/“CA-HQ: Reagan Speeches”; Reagan/Bush Committee, “Urban Policy,” position paper, n.d. 1980, RRL-RPC, box 405/“CA-HQ: Urban Policy.” 110. Berry, Portney, and Thomson, Rebirth, 21. 111. John M. Goering, “Toward a National Policy for Neighborhoods: A Conversation between a Policy Maker and a Social Scientist,” Public Administration Review 40 (1980): 557– 58. 112. Robert H. Nelson, “Local Government as Private Property: Towards the Post-modern Municipality,” in Private Property in the 21st Century: The Future of an American Ideal, ed. Harvey M. Jacobs (Northampton, MA: Elgar, 2004), 95, 111. 113. Kotler, new preface to Neighborhood Government, xii. 114. Milton Kotler, personal communications to author, June 8, 18, 19, 2007.

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 2 59 – 6 4 CHAPTER NINE

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

CBS Evening News, Sept. 5, 1970, VTNA. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 204, 220; James P. McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful: The Shifting Spiritual Life of American Catholics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 22; Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (New York: Times Books, 1997), 268. Orsi, “Crossing the City Line,” 50. Hasia R. Diner, Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 13, 27, 31, 165–77. Andrew Greeley, “Address to the National Catholic Educational Association,” San Francisco, Apr. 1977, emphasis added, HSP-NCU, box 6/1. National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs (NCUEA), “The Neighborhood and the Bicentennial,” discussion paper, 1976, HSP-NCU, box 3/6. For a similar but more extensive taxonomy of the white-ethnic revival’s political orientations, see Thomas J. Sugrue and John D. Skrentny, “The White Ethnic Strategy,” in Schulman and Zelizer, Rightward Bound, 178–80. On antiurban policymaking, see, e.g., Steven Conn, Americans against the City: Anti-urbanism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Morris, American Catholic, vii. John Tracy Ellis, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life,” Thought 30 (1955): 385– 86; Arnold Sparr, To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960 (New York: Greenwood, 1990), 164– 65; Philip Gleason, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 287–91. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 102– 4; Gene Burns, The Frontiers of Catholicism: The Politics of Ideology in a Liberal World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 99; Sidney Goldstein, “Socioeconomic Differentials among Religious Groups in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 74 (1969): 626; Peter Steinfels, A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 4– 5; Anthony Burke Smith, The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010). Steinfels, People Adrift, 74; Gene Burns, “Commitments and Noncommitments: The Social Radicalism of U.S. Catholic Bishops,” Theory and Society 21 (1992): 718–19. O’Connor, Edge of Sadness, 458. Donald P. Costello, “The Chicago Ghetto,” in Generation of the Third Eye, ed. Daniel Callahan (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 58.

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 265 – 67

14. Steinfels, People Adrift, 5–7; William M. Halsey, The Survival of American Innocence: Catholicism in an Era of Disillusionment, 1920–1940 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 177–79. 15. Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 448; McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 222–23. 16. William D. Dinges, “Ritual Conflict as Social Conflict: Liturgical Reform in the Roman Catholic Church,” Sociological Analysis 48 (1987): 139– 46; David J. O’Brien, The Renewal of American Catholicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 10. On liturgical change, see Mark Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 62–94. 17. Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 449– 53; McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 180, 205, 215; Daniel Cantwell, “The City and the Mission of the Church,” in The Church and the Urban Racial Crisis, ed. Mathew Ahmann and Margaret Roach (Techny, IL: Divine Word, 1967), 11–12; Joseph J. Casino, “From Sanctuary to Involvement: A History of the Catholic Parish in the Northeast,” in The American Catholic Parish: A History from 1850 to the Present, ed. Jay P. Dolan (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), 1:85– 87. 18. Casino, “From Sanctuary to Involvement,” 85. 19. Ibid., 91; Dean R. Hoge, “Changes in the Priesthood and Seminaries,” in Vatican II and U.S. Catholicism, ed. Helen Rose Ebaugh (Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1991), 69. 20. Michael Harrington, Fragments of the Century (New York: Dutton, 1973), 3, 31. 21. Activists quoted in Arthur Mann, The One and the Many: Reflections on the American Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 36. 22. Martin E. Marty, “Ethnicity: The Skeleton of Religion in America,” Church History 41 (1972): 9. 23. Hernady quoted in “Ethnic Priests Look at Parish Neighborhoods,” National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs Newsletter, June 1974, 5, HSP-NCU, box 4/12. 24. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 173, also 139– 40, 169–70, 205, 215, 245. 25. Dinges, “Ritual Confl ict,” 151– 52. 26. James Hitchcock, The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism (New York: Herder, 1971), 107–9. 27. Frederick Wilhelmsen, “Catholicism Is Right, So Why Change It?,” Saturday Evening Post, July 15, 1967, 12. 28. Garry Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophesy, and Radical Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 19. 29. John Cogley, Catholic America (New York: Dial, 1973), 192. 30. James Colaianni, The Catholic Left: The Crisis of Radicalism within the Church (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1968), 21–22. 31. Barbara Mikulski, introduction to Absent from the Majority: Working Class Women in America, by Nancy Seifer (New York: National Project on Ethnic America, 1973), x.

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 26 8 –71

32. William F. Gavin, Street Corner Conservative (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975), 46. 33. Giulio E. Miranda, “Ozone Park Revisited,” in The Ordeal of Assimilation: A Documentary History of the White Working Class, ed. Stanley Feldstein and Lawrence Costello (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974), 443. 34. Andrew M. Greeley, The American Catholic: A Social Portrait (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 228– 30. 35. Vatican Council II, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbott, trans. Joseph Gallagher (New York: Herder, 1966), 266–70. See also McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 222–23. 36. Charles D. Skok, “Social Teaching of the Church,” in The Modern Catholic Encyclopedia, rev. ed., ed. Michael Glazier and Monika K. Hellwig (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004), 786. 37. Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Letter of His Holiness Pope Paul VI to Cardinal Maurice Roy. . . . (Washington, DC: US Catholic Conference, 1971), 6–7. 38. Geno Baroni, “The Church and the Community,” speech typescript, 1974, HSP-NCU, box 14/12. 39. Harrington, Other America, 141. 40. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 69, 83. Also Vance Packard, A Nation of Strangers (New York: McKay, 1972); Warren G. Bennis and Philip E. Slater, The Temporary Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). 41. Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches: An Analysis of Protestant Responsibility in the Expanding Metropolis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 28. 42. Cox, Secular City, 46– 47. For Greeley’s response, see “An Exchange of Views,” in The Secular City Debate, ed. Daniel Callahan (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 101–26. 43. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Power, and Violence in America (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1969), 248. 44. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973), 125, 260. 45. “The Ethnic Faction,” New York Times, July 5, 1974. 46. Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York: Dutton, 1971), 5. For criticisms of Royko’s characterization, see Andrew M. Greeley, Neighborhood (New York: Seabury, 1977), 27. 47. Michael Novak, “Religion and Politics,” speech, Hawaii, Oct. 1, 1973, HSP-NCU, box 10/7. 48. Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–1985 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 244, 253– 55; Michael Novak, A Theology for Radical Politics (New York: Herder, 1969), 79. 49. Novak, “Religion and Politics”; Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1972),

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50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

398

63; Michael Novak, Choosing Presidents: Symbols of Political Leadership, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992), xii–xiii. See also Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 210, 222–25. Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals, 271–72. Michael Novak, Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in American Life, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1996), x. Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals, 271–72; Novak, Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, 124–25. Novak, Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, 66– 69, 122–25, 225. Ibid., 23, 44, 53, 180, 276. Ibid., 60, 68– 69, 229. Otto Feinstein, “The Story of the Ethnic Heritage Studies Center,” in The Heritage of America: Ethnic Directory I (Detroit: Southeastern Michigan Regional Ethnic Heritage Studies Center, May 1973), 3– 4, HSP-NCU, box 2/9. Richard J. Krickus, White Ethnic Neighborhoods: Ripe for the Bulldozer? (New York: National Project on Ethnic America, 1973), 14. Barbara Mikulski, “The Ethnic Neighborhood: Leave Room for a Boccie Ball,” in Pieces of a Dream: The Ethnic Worker’s Crisis with America, ed. Michael Wenk, S. M. Tomasi, and Geno Baroni (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1972), 55, 57. E.g., Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals, 271–72; cf. Robert Alter, “A Fever of Ethnicity,” Commentary 53, no. 6 (1972): 70. Novak, Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, 8–9, 170, 273–74, 279– 80. Ibid., 208. Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 176. Barbara Ehrenreich cogently argues that images of the “reactionary” bluecollar worker were partly a middle- class fiction that “provide[d] a spiritual touchstone for an emerging middle- class conservatism.” Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 142– 43. Andrew Greeley, “Novak Wrong in Setting Blacks against Ethnics,” syndication copy, Feb. 2, 1976, HSP-EMPAC, box 6/21; Andrew Greeley, “Mr. Novak Still Loves Me,” Catholic Accent, Apr. 29, 1976, 5; Greeley, Neighborhood, 70–76. Greeley quoted in “Andrew Greeley, Inc.,” Time, Jan. 7, 1974, 75. John N. Kotre, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Andrew Greeley and American Catholicism, 1950–1975 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978), 2– 4; Roy Larson, “Sociologist vs. ‘Academic Jungle,’” Chicago Sun-Times, July 8, 1973. Andrew M. Greeley, “Anything but Marginal,” in Callahan, Generation of the Third Eye, 86– 87.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 74 – 7 8

68. Andrew M. Greeley, William C. McCready, and Kathleen McCourt, Catholic Schools in a Declining Church (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1976), 101– 54, 316–24; Kotre, Best of Times, 94–96. 69. Greeley, “Anything but Marginal,” 86. 70. William C. McCready and Andrew M. Greeley, “The End of American Catholicism?,” America, Oct. 28, 1972, 337– 38. 71. Andrew M. Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 227. 72. Andrew M. Greeley, Why Can’t They Be Like Us? America’s White Ethnic Groups (New York: Dutton, 1971), 153. 73. Greeley, Confessions, 217, 227, 278– 82; Greeley “hierarchy” quote in Kotre, Best of Times, 148. 74. Greeley, “Address.” 75. Kotre, Best of Times, 151– 53, 161– 62, 178; Greeley, Confessions, 228–29; Andrew M. Greeley, “Too Much Ado about Ethnicity?,” Momentum 6, no. 3 (1975): 18; John D. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 309. 76. Greeley, American Catholic, 230. 77. Ibid., 230; Greeley, Neighborhood, 89; Andrew Greeley, “Second-Rate Ethnics?,” Long Island Catholic, Feb. 27, 1975. 78. Andrew M. Greeley, No Bigger Than Necessary: An Alternative to Socialism, Capitalism, and Anarchism (New York: New American Library, 1977), 16, 92–95, 108–9, 124. 79. Rotella, October Cities, 47, 106; Royko quoted in ibid. For Marshall Berman’s sketch of comparable paradoxes, see All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 326–28. 80. Carlo Rotella, “Praying for Stones Like This: The Godfather Trilogy,” in Catholics in the Movies, ed. Colleen McDannell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 188. 81. Baroni quoted in Jack Rosenthal, “Angry Ethnic Voices Decry a ‘Racist and Dullard’ Image,” New York Times, June 17, 1970. 82. Micaela di Leonardo, “White Ethnicities, Identity Politics, and Baby Bear’s Chair,” Social Text, no. 41 (1994): 175. 83. Lawrence M. O’Rourke, Geno: The Life and Mission of Geno Baroni (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991), 22– 33, 39– 53, 62–70; Stone quoted in Michael J. McManus, “Geno Baroni: The Organizer,” Washingtonian, May 1976, 47. On Baroni’s mid-1960s social thought, see Robert Bauman, “‘Kind of a Secular Sacrament’: Father Geno Baroni, Monsignor John J. Egan, and the Catholic War on Poverty,” Catholic Historical Review 99 (2013): 301–7. 84. Geno Baroni, “The Ethnic Factor: Ministry in Cities,” Origins: NC Documentary Service, Dec. 18, 1975, 407. 85. O’Rourke, Geno, 57– 59.

399

N OT E S TO PAG E S 278 – 82

86. Baroni “friends” remark from Baroni, “Ethnic Factor,” 407; Baroni “liberals” remark quoted in McManus, “Geno Baroni,” 47. 87. Geno Baroni, “Ethnicity and Public Policy,” typescript, 1972, HSP-NCU, box 3/13. 88. Camilla J. Kari, Public Witness: The Pastoral Letters of the American Catholic Bishops (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004), 63; O’Rourke, Geno, 73, 85. 89. Newsweek quoted in O’Rourke, Geno, 88. On Andrew Greeley’s initial reservations about Baroni’s approach, see Perry L. Weed, The White Ethnic Movement and Ethnic Politics (New York: Praeger, 1973), 39– 40. 90. Baroni, “Ethnic Factor,” 407; George G. Higgins and Geno C. Baroni, “1970 Labor Day Statement,” US Catholic Conference, Sept. 4, 1970, HSP-NCU, box 6/1. 91. Baroni quoted in “Basic Baroni,” NCUEA Building Blocks, Autumn 1981, 5, HSP-NCU, box 4/12. 92. NCUEA, “Demographic Trending Analysis on Ethnic and Racially Identified Neighborhoods, 1960–1970,” report, July 16, 1975, 1, 10–11, HSP-NCU, box 5/7; NCUEA, “Objectives and Programs,” handout, n.d., HSP-NCU, box 2/13; NCUEA, “President’s Report to the Board of Directors,” Sept. 1977, HSP-NCU, box 2/14; NCUEA, “Proposal for Community Development through Ethnic Organizations,” draft grant proposal, n.d., HSP-NCU, box 5/3. 93. Robert Reinhold, “A Priest Is Stirring the Melting Pot to Revitalize Ethnic Neighborhoods,” New York Times, April 20, 1977. 94. See Baroni speech, ca. early 1970s, repr. in O’Rourke, Geno, 215–27, esp. 219. 95. Baroni, “Church and the Community.” 96. Ibid.; Baroni speech in O’Rourke, Geno, 215–27. 97. Thad Radzialowski, “The Hidden Power of Neighborhood Culture,” NCUEA Building Blocks, Autumn 1981, 6–7, emphasis added, HSP-NCU, box 4/12. 98. Sal E. Polizzi, “The Edwards Street Overpass: A Lesson in Political Expediency” (MA thesis, Saint Louis University, 1972), 3– 6, 23, 27, 48; “The Hill Rebuilds,” in Catholic Conference on Ethnic and Neighborhood Affairs: A Status Report (S.l.: s.n., 1975), 29– 31; Gary Ross Mormino, Immigrants on the Hill: Italian-Americans in St. Louis, 1882–1982 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 240– 44; Fred W. Lindecke, “Hill’s Bells Celebrate Ruling on I- 44 Overpass,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 19, 1971. 99. Hernady remarks in Public Papers of the Presidents: Jimmy Carter, 1977 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1978), 1833– 34; Thomas E. Barden and John Ahern, eds., Hungarian American Toledo: Life and Times in Toledo’s Birmingham Neighborhood (Toledo, OH: Urban Affairs Center, University of Toledo, 2002), 39– 41; Cassidy, Livable Cities, 79; Raymond J. Pentzell, “A Hungarian Christmas Mummers’ Play in Toledo,

400

N OT E S TO PAG E S 282– 86

Ohio,” Educational Theatre Journal 29 (1977): 180n5, 185; “Historic Play to Be Filmed,” National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs Newsletter, July 1976, 4, GFL-WBP, box 54/“Ethnic Groups (2).” 100. “Traffic Blocked to Protest Evictions,” New York Times, Apr. 7, 1973; Radzialowski, “Hidden Power,” 6–7. 101. Alex McNeil, Total Television: A Comprehensive Guide to Programming from 1948 to the Present, 3rd ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 338, 371. 102. See Geno Baroni, speech, June 1974, repr. in Catholic Conference on Ethnic and Neighborhood Affairs, 14–15. 103. Dinges, “Ritual Confl ict,” 147; Robert Bellah, “The New Consciousness and the Crisis of Modernity,” in The New Religious Consciousness, ed. Charles Glock and Robert Bellah (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 340. 104. Hitchcock, Decline and Fall, 109. 105. Grogan, Ringolevio, 324. 106. Baroni quoted in Margaret M. Carlan, “Says U.S. Should Accept Ethnic Pluralism,” St. Louis Review, June 16, 1972. 107. Novak, Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, 32. 108. Catholic Conference on Ethnic and Neighborhood Affairs, “Program Goal: A Rationale,” typescript, n.d. (ca. 1975), HSP-NCU, box 14/12. 109. Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 215–17; Irving M. Levine and Judith Herman, “Search for Identity in Blue- Collar America,” Civil Rights Digest 5 (1972): 7–9; Baroni to Irving Levine, June 6, 1974, HSP-NCU, box 15/1. 110. See, e.g., Baroni, “Church and the Community”; Geno Baroni, “EEOC Implications for the Working Class in a Pluralistic Society,” report, Nov. 1975, 4– 5, HSP-NCU, box 5/8. 111. Linda K. Kerber, “Diversity and the Transformation of American Studies,” American Quarterly 41 (1989): 423. 112. Richard Sennett, “Pure as the Driven Slush,” New York Times, May 10, 1976; Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience,” American Scholar 47 (1977): 37; Orlando Patterson, Ethnic Chauvinism: The Reactionary Impulse (New York: Stein and Day, 1977), 153. 113. EMPAC, untitled press release, 1974, HSP-EMPAC, box 1/4; Eileen Zanner, EMPAC membership appeal, n.d., HSP-EMPAC, box 1/3; A New America, Feb. 1975, 1, HSP-NCU, box 4/2; Michael Novak, “With Us, You Have EMPAC,” insert to A New America, Nov. 1975, HSP-NCU, box 4/2. 114. Paul Harvey, “View from the Hill,” Lowell (MA) Sun, Dec. 14, 1971. 115. Chapman quoted in Mann, One and the Many, 31. 116. Baroni, “Ethnicity and Public Policy”; Baroni, “Ethnic Factor,” 407; O’Rourke, Geno, 59– 61, 92, 97–98. 117. John J. Egan, Peggy Roach, and Philip J. Murnion, “Catholic Committee on Urban Ministry: Ministry to the Ministers,” Review of Religious Research

401

N OT E S TO PAG E S 286 – 92

20 (1979): 287– 88; Bernard J. Cooke, “Call to Action: Engine of Lay Ministry,” in What’s Left? Liberal American Catholics, ed. Mary Jo Weaver (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 147– 48. 118. Geno Baroni to Fred Rotondaro, Dec. 20, 1976, HSP-NCU, box 14/3. 119. Joseph A. Varacalli, Toward the Establishment of Liberal Catholicism in America (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983), 29; Bradford E. Hinze, Practices of Dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church: Aims and Obstacles, Lessons and Laments (New York: Continuum, 2006), 68. 120. Cooke, “Call to Action,” 147– 48; unnamed bishop quoted in McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful, 171. 121. NCUEA, “Neighborhood and the Bicentennial.” 122. Hinze, Practices of Dialogue, 66, 70. 123. Peter S. Robinson (NCUEA staffer), “The Neighborhood,” in Liberty and Justice for All: A Discussion Guide, by NCCB Committee for the Bicentennial (Washington, DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1974), HSP-NCU, box 3/5. 124. McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful, 171; Hinze, Practices of Dialogue, 70; Varacalli, Toward the Establishment, 30– 33, 37– 38, 44; Philip Gleason and David Salvaterra, “Ethnicity, Immigration, and American Catholic History,” Social Thought 4, no. 3 (1978): 20–21. 125. Cooke, “Call to Action,” 147– 48; Hinze, Practices of Dialogue, 77; “Detroit Recommendations,” in A.D. 1977 (Hyattsville, MD: Quixote Center, 1977), 5–20. 126. Varacalli, Toward the Establishment, 3, 60– 66; Anthony J. Pogorelc, “Social Movements within Organizations: The Case of Call to Action and U.S. Catholic Bishops” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 2002), 121, 124; John Dearden, “Report to the NCCB,” in A.D. 1977, 21. 127. Baroni to Rotondaro; Varacalli, Toward the Establishment, 99, 103, 145; Madaj quoted in “Just between Us,” Polish American Journal, Jan. 31, 1977; Greeley quoted in Hinze, Practices of Dialogue, 78– 80. CHAPTER TEN

1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

402

Burton I. Kaufman, The Carter Years (New York: Facts on File, 2006), 514. Peterson to Weddington, Jan. 3, 1978 (misdated; probably Jan. 3, 1979), JCL- OEA, box 33/“Neighborhoods 1/78– 3/78.” Rebecca E. Klatch, Women of the New Right (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 139. Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. Jacobson, Roots Too, 246– 311. On similar shifts in feminist literary fiction, see Jay Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 130–32.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 293 – 97

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Micaela di Leonardo, “Gender, Race, and Class,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, ed. David Nugent and Joan Vincent (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 142– 44. Judith Stacey, “Backward toward the Postmodern Family: Reflections on Gender, Kinship, and Class in the Silicon Valley,” in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, 2nd ed., ed. Barrie Thorne with Marilyn Yalom (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 105. Mary P. Ryan, “The Power of Women’s Networks” [1979], in Sex and Class in Women’s History, ed. Judith L. Newton, Mary P. Ryan, and Judith R. Walkowitz (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 183. Terry Haywoode, “Working- Class Feminism: Creating a Politics of Community, Connection, and Concern” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1991), 21. Barbara Mikulski et al., with Catherine Whitney, Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate (New York: Morrow, 2000), 26– 31, 207– 8. See also Joseph F. DiMento and Cliff Ellis, Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 147– 51. O’Rourke, Geno, 85– 87; Mikulski quoted in Rosenthal, “Angry Ethnic Voices.” See also Barbara Mikulski, “Growing up Ethnic Means Learning Who You Are,” Redbook, Oct. 1971, 86, 224–26. Louise Hutchinson, “Winner in Democratic Ranks: Barbara Mikulski,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 23, 1973; “Mikulski: ‘Queen of the Ethnics,’” Newsweek, Nov. 4, 1974, 25. Barbara Mikulski, “Who Speaks for Ethnic America?,” New York Times, Sept. 29, 1970. Michael Barone, “Moving up in Maryland,” Washington Post, June 10, 1986; Alicia Mundy, “Babs in Boyland,” Baltimore Magazine, Oct. 1993, 49. Mikulski quoted in American Jewish Committee, “The Challenge of the Women’s Movement: American Diversity,” conference brochure, June 25, 1975, HSP-EMPAC, box 9/9. Barbara Mikulski, “The White Ethnic Catholic Woman” [1975], in Dialogue on Diversity: A New Agenda for American Women, ed. Barbara Peters and Victoria Samuels (New York: Institute on Pluralism and Group Identity, 1976), 35– 39. Ibid. “Like all symbols, the white- ethnic woman is polyvalent and was and is subject to feminist and progressive interpretations,” writes Micaela di Leonardo, in Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97–98. Nancy Seifer, Nobody Speaks for Me! Self-Portraits of American Working Class Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 13, 20, 24; Seifer “whole world” remark quoted in Vincent Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 391. Nancy Seifer, Absent from the Majority: Working Class Women in America (New York: National Project on Ethnic America, 1973), 18, 21, 45, 59.

403

N OT E S TO PAG E S 298 –302

20. Lee Rainwater, Richard P. Coleman, and Gerald Handel, Workingman’s Wife (New York: Arno, 1959). 21. Christine Winter, “The Emerging Blue- Collar Woman,” Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1974. 22. Seifer, Nobody Speaks for Me!, 25, 37. 23. Kathleen McCourt, Working- Class Women and Grass-Roots Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 9, 199, 220, 230, 235. 24. Jessie Bernard, The Female World (New York: Free Press, 1981), 27– 30, 317–19. 25. Lyn H. Lofland, “The ‘Thereness’ of Women: A Selective Review of Urban Sociology,” Sociological Inquiry 45, nos. 2/3 (1975): 144– 45. See also Dorothy E. Smith, “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,” Sociological Inquiry 44 (1974): 7. A similar recognition inspired Carol Stack’s focus in All Our Kin; see Stack, “Writing Ethnography,” 80. 26. Lofland, “‘Thereness’ of Women,” 146– 55; Karen E. Campbell and Barrett A. Lee, “Gender Differences in Urban Neighboring,” Sociological Quarterly 31 (1990): 495–96. 27. Helen Barolini, Umbertina (New York: Seaview Books, 1979); Tina De Rosa, Paper Fish (Chicago: Wine, 1980). 28. Peterson quoted in McCormack, “Neighborhood Women Are Uniting.” 29. Jan Peterson, editorial, Neighborhood Women Network News 1, no. 1 (1980): 1, emphasis added, WSM-NCNW, doc. 7A. 30. Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 123. 31. Juliet Linderman, “Jan Peterson: Activist, Organizer, Neighborhood Woman,” Greenpoint Gazette (New York), May 7, 2009; Grace Lichtenstein, Machisma: Women and Daring (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 314–16; Mary Field Belenky, Lynne A. Bond, and Jacqueline S. Weinstock, A Tradition That Has No Name: Nurturing the Development of People, Families, and Communities (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 202– 3. 32. Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dial, 1999), 211; Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 193–94. 33. Herbert H. Haines, Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 1954– 1970 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 49– 50. 34. Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock, Tradition, 204– 6, Peterson quoted on 205; Fredelle Maynard, “Woman Power,” Woman’s Day, Nov. 16, 1982, 64, accessed as WSM-NCNW, doc. 9. 35. Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock, Tradition, 206–7, 211; Ronnie Feit and Jan Peterson, “Neighborhood Women Look at Housing,” in The Unsheltered Woman: Women and Housing in the ’80s, ed. Eugenie Ladner Birch (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1985), 181.

404

N OT E S TO PAG E S 302– 4

36. Lichtenstein, Machisma, 316; Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock, Tradition, 210–12, 227, Peterson quoted on 211. 37. Feit and Peterson, “Neighborhood Women,” 180; Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock, Tradition, 213–14; Jan Peterson to Geno Baroni, Apr. 6, 1976, UND-NUE, box 166/16; National Congress of Neighborhood Women Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1976): 1–2, UND-NUE, box 166/16; Peterson quoted in McCormack, “Neighborhood Women Are Uniting.” 38. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “Hers,” New York Times, May 22, 1980; Maynard, “Woman Power,” 64– 65, 170; Michaela Hickey, Inez Padilla, and Christine Noschese, “A Dialogue on the Organization, Goals, and Needs of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women,” June 1978, 12, 14–15, WSM-NCNW, doc. 4. 39. Lindsy Van Gelder, “National Congress of Neighborhood Women: When the Edith Bunkers Unite!,” Ms., Feb. 1979, 53, accessed as WSM-NCNW, doc. 6 (but see editor Tamar Carroll’s reading of the phrase in the document introduction). 40. Tamar Carroll, “Unlikely Allies: Forging a Multiracial, Class-Based Women’s Movement in 1970s Brooklyn,” in Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, ed. Stephanie Gilmore and Sara M. Evans (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 196–97, 200– 3. 41. Anne Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 6. 42. Members quoted in Enid Nemy, “For Working- Class Women, Own Organization and Goals,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 1976. 43. Peterson quoted in NCNW college-program student paper, author/title unlisted, ca. 1980– 81, 8–9, WSM-NCNW, doc. 8. See also Feit and Peterson, “Neighborhood Women,” 177. Cf. Barbara Ehrenreich, “On Feminism, Family and Community,” Dissent 30, no. 1 (1983): 103– 6. 44. See, e.g., Maryann Barakso, Governing NOW: Grassroots Activism in the National Organization for Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 11–12, 25, 121; Barbara Ryan, Feminism and the Women’s Movement: Dynamics of Change in Social Movement Ideology and Activism (New York: Routledge, 1992), 48, 66, 71–72, 82– 83; Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism, 106, 107n17. 45. Betty Friedan, “Their Turn: How Men Are Changing,” Redbook, May 1980, 23, 139. 46. Martha Ackelsberg, “Women’s Community Activism and the Rejection of ‘Politics’: Some Dilemmas of Popular Democratic Movements,” in Women and Citizenship, ed. Marilyn Friedman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 81– 82, 88– 89. 47. Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 196; McCor-

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 305 –7

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65.

406

mack, “Neighborhood Women Are Uniting”; poster quoted in Maynard, “Woman Power,” 173. Jacqueline Leavitt and Susan Saegert, From Abandonment to Hope: Community-Households in Harlem (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 11, 172. Anne Witte Garland, Women Activists: Challenging the Abuse of Power (New York: Feminist Press, City University of New York, 1988), 69. NCNW, board-meeting agenda and reports, May 13, 1977, UND-NUE, box 99/31; Hickey, Padilla, and Noschese, “Dialogue,” 3. McCormack, “Neighborhood Women Are Uniting.” See also Tamar Carroll, introduction to WSM-NCNW, doc. 7A. McCormack, “Neighborhood Women Are Uniting.” On such debates, see, e.g., Leigh Goodmark, A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Law (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Unnamed member quoted in Van Gelder, “National Congress,” 55. See also Harrison, “Hers”; Denise Kulp, “Challenging the Myth of Passivity: Working Class Women’s Culture and Neighborhood Politics,” Off Our Backs 15, no. 5 (1985): 19. Novak quoted in Martin Duberman, Left Out: The Politics of Exclusion (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 328. Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock, Tradition, 215–16. “National Congress of Neighborhood Women’s College: First of Its Kind!,” National Congress of Neighborhood Women Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1976): 3, UND-NUE, box 166/16. Feit and Peterson, “Neighborhood Women,” 180; Kulp, “Challenging the Myth,” 18. Van Gelder, “National Congress,” 56. Haywoode quoted in Kulp, “Challenging the Myth,” 19. Janice Peterson and Christine Noschese, “Our College Program,” ca. 1977, n.p., WSM-NCNW, doc. 2. Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, “Analysis of Chicago Women’s Liberation School,” in Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 82. Terry L. Haywoode and Laura Polla Scanlon, “World of Our Mothers: College for Neighborhood Women,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 21, nos. 3/4 (1993): 134. Kulp, “Challenging the Myth,” 19; Leavitt and Saegert, From Abandonment to Hope, 200. Francis X. Clines, “A Quiet Revolution in Northside,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 1978. Arlene Mancuso, “No Drums, No Trumpets: Working- Class Women,” in Women’s Issues and Social Work Practice, ed. Elaine Norman and Arlene Mancuso (Itasca, IL: Peacock, 1980), 53.

N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 0 7 – 13

66. On Smeal’s image and approach: Barakso, Governing NOW, 58– 59; Susan Dworkin, “Ellie Smeal Brings NOW Up-to-Date,” Ms., Feb. 1978, 64– 67; Greg Walter, “Mother and Housewife Leads NOW into Battle as the Feminist Movement Falters,” People Weekly, Aug. 8, 1977, 66– 67. 67. Theodore F. Sheckels, Maryland Politics and Political Communication, 1950– 2005 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 77– 87. 68. Feit and Peterson, “Neighborhood Women,” 177, 179; Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 196–97. 69. On this evolution, see Jacobson, Roots Too, 206– 45. 70. Holmes Norton quoted in Mancuso, “No Drums,” 54. 71. Robert C. Wood, “National Urban Policy: What Should Happen Next?,” New York Affairs 3, no. 4 (1976): 49– 50. CHAPTER ELEVEN

1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 15–16. McClay, Masterless, 277. Robert B. Reich, Tales of a New America (New York: Times Books, 1987), 168– 69. Public Papers of the Presidents: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–1964 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 1371; also quoted in McClay, Masterless, 277. Ronald Lee, “Electoral Politics and Visions of Community: Jimmy Carter, Virtue, and the Small Town Myth,” Western Journal of Communication 59 (1995): 39– 40, 56. Ibid., 40. Helen Thomas, “Is Bloc Voting Real or Just Imagination?,” Ludington (MI) Daily News, Sept. 24, 1976. Betty Glad, Jimmy Carter: In Search of the Great White House (New York: Norton, 1980), 293–95; Kandy Stroud, How Jimmy Won: The Victory Campaign from Plains to the White House (New York: Morrow, 1977), 277–78. Stroud, How Jimmy Won, 278. Peter G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Post-presidency (New York: Schribner, 1997), 313–14; Glad, Jimmy Carter, 294–95. Dennis Farney, “New Converts,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 18, 1976. Jim Castelli, “Campaign Issues: The Bible and Neighborhoods,” Jednota, June 30, 1976. For polling on this angst, Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (New York: Random House, 1981), 251. Farney, “New Converts.” Peter Goldman, “The Law and Order Man,” Newsweek, Sept. 8, 1969, 33.

407

N O T E S T O PA G E S 314 –16

16. Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969), 33, 166– 67, 175, 184– 86, 347, 470. A succinct southern-strategy overview is Dan T. Carter, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and the Transformation of American Politics (Waco, TX: Markham Press Fund, 1992), 27– 48. 17. Paul Frymer and John David Skrentny, “Coalition-Building and the Politics of Electoral Capture during the Nixon Administration: African Americans, Labor, Latinos,” Studies in American Political Development 12 (1998): 150– 54. 18. David Gergen and Jerry Jones to Ford, memorandum, Sept. 24, 1976, GFL-PHF, box 37/“Political affairs, Ford (12)”; D. Sunshine Hillygus and Todd G. Shields, The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 131– 34. 19. “Battling for the Blocs,” Time, Sept. 13, 1976, 25; Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks, “The Religious Factor in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1960–1992,” American Journal of Sociology 103 (1997): 43. 20. Jonathan Moore and Janet Fraser, eds., Campaign for President: The Managers Look at ’76 (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1977), 119; Rita Hauser to Rogers Morton, memorandum, May 3, 1976, GFL-PFC, box B10/“Hughes Subject File: Voter Groups– Ethnics.” 21. Leo P. Ribuffo, “Is Poland a Soviet Satellite? Gerald Ford, the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine, and the Election of 1976,” Diplomatic History 14 (1990): 396–97; Jay Niemczyk to Ed DeBolt, Apr. 9, 1976, GFL-PFC, box A14/“DeBolt: Heritage Groups.” 22. E. J. Dionne Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 205. 23. Ribuffo, “Is Poland,” 385– 403; Bob Callaway, memorandum to files, Sept. 16, 1975, GFL-PFC, box A13/“DeBolt: Ethnic Leaders”; Myron Kuropas to Brent Scowcroft, memorandum, Mar. 26, 1976, GFL-WBP, box 86/“Kuropas.” 24. Francis Rafferty to Frank Rizzo, June 28, 1973, PCA-FLR, box A3424/“Grays Ferry Council.” 25. George L. Corsetti, dir., Poletown Lives!, film, Information Factory, 1983. 26. Unnamed Ford aide quoted in David M. Alpern, “Courting the Catholics,” Newsweek, Sept. 20, 1976, 16–17. 27. Farney, “New Converts”; “Democratic Platform: ‘A Contract with the People,’” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, July 17, 1976, 1919; Martin Schram, Running for President 1976: The Carter Campaign (New York: Stein and Day, 1977), 224–26; Alpern, “Courting the Catholics,” 16–17. See Daniel K. Williams, “The GOP’s Abortion Strategy: Why Pro- choice Republicans Became Pro-life in the 1970s,” Journal of Policy History 23 (2011): 513– 39. 28. William J. Baroody Jr., commencement speech, Seattle University, June 6, 1976, GFL-WBF, box 13/“Speeches (3).”

408

N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 17 – 1 9

29. Baroody to Gerald Ford, memorandum, May 7, 1976, GFL-PHF, box 36/“Political affairs, Ford (5).” 30. “How Ford Lost the Ethnics,” Ripon Forum, May 1978, 12. The article is attributed only to “members of the Ripon Forum editorial staff.” Standalone versions circulated listing John C. Topping as author (see HSP-NCU, box 11/9), though John McClaughry (personal communication to author, Sept. 5, 2007) asserted sole authorship as a ghostwriter. 31. Reagan radio-ad text, Jan. 23, 1976, GFL-RBC, box 16/“Campaign Communications Strategy (1).” 32. Baroody to Gerald Ford, memorandum, May 28, 1976, GFL-WBP, box 51/“Conference on Ethnicity (2).” 33. Public Papers of the Presidents: Gerald R. Ford, 1976–77 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979), 1468. 34. Baroni remarks in “Proceedings of the White House Conference on Ethnicity and Neighborhood Revitalization,” May 5, 1976, 4– 6, 9, JCL-EA, box 33/“Neighborhood Revitalization 5/76.” For the “totalitarianism” argument, Baroni credits Robert Nisbet. 35. HUD assistant secretary Constance Newman remarks in transcript of White House Conference on Ethnicity and Neighborhood Revitalization, May 5, 1976, 1:37– 39, UND-NUE, box 60/17. 36. Kuropas to William Baroody Jr. et al., memorandum, Apr. 28, 1976, GFL-WBP, box 51/“Conference on Ethnicity (1).” 37. Baroody to Jerry Jones and William Nicholson, memorandum, Apr. 27, 1976, GFL-WBP, box 51/“Conference on Ethnicity (1)”; Lynn May to Bill Nicholson, memorandum, Apr. 27, 1976, GFL-PTRO, box 55/“Ethnicity and Neighborhood Conference”; Lynn May and Steve McConahey to Jim Cavanaugh, memorandum, Apr. 30, 1976, GFL- SGM, box 21/“Ethnic Conference.” 38. Jim Castelli, “White House and the Ethnics,” Jednota, May 19, 1976; see also Michael Novak, “Neighborhood Life,” Arlington (VA) Catholic Herald, May 20, 1976; both GFL-PHF, box C43/“6/30/76 (2).” 39. Kuropas to Richard Cheney, memorandum, July 6, 1976; see also Kuropas to Cheney, memorandum, July 26, 1976; both GFL-WBP, box 54/“Ethnic Groups (2).” 40. “How Ford Lost the Ethnics,” 12–18. 41. People for Ford office, Ethnic Desk description, Fall 1976, GFL-PFC, box F24/“Ethnic Desk: General (2).” 42. Carter/Mondale Urban Ethnic Affairs Desk to Landon Butler, memorandum, Oct. 1, 1976, JCL- CMC, box 203/“Urban Ethnic Affairs.” 43. “Ethnic Anti- Carter Newspaper Ad,” review text, Oct. 16, 1976, and “Catholic Ad #2,” review text, Oct. 5, 1976, both GFL-PFC, box D3/“Copy Clearance: Ads and Brochures 4– 5.” 44. “Text of 1976 Republican Platform,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, Aug. 21, 1976, 2299– 300.

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N O T E S T O PA G E S 319 – 2 1

45. Edward J. O’Donnell, “The Democrats Expel Catholics,” St. Louis Review, June 18, 1976, 8. Also Farley Clinton, “The Meaningless Smile,” Wanderer, Sept. 23, 1976, 4. 46. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics, 130; Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Catholic Defection,” New Republic, Oct. 2, 1976, 10–11. See also Schram, Running for President, 283. 47. “Ethnic Commitment Needed from Carter,” Am-Pol Eagle, July 22, 1976. Also Joseph Kraft, “Will Carter Solve His Ethnic Problem?,” Pittsburgh PostGazette, Aug. 7, 1976. 48. Andrew Greeley, “Democrats Turn Anti-Catholic,” Baltimore Sun, Aug. 6, 1976; Andrew Greeley, “How Come It Took So Long?,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 3, 1976. 49. Michael Novak, “Make Room for Family Democrats,” Washington Star, Aug. 29, 1976. 50. O’Rourke, Geno, 127. See also Carter/Mondale Urban Ethnic Affairs Desk to Landon Butler, memorandum, Nov. 6, 1976, HSP-NCU, box 14/3. 51. Nick Thimmesch, “Carter’s Ethnic Flying Nun,” Lodi (CA) News-Sentinel, Aug. 30, 1976. 52. Victoria Mongiardo, “Autobiography Learning Plan,” graduate paper, Dec. 1975, HSP-NCU, box 4/9. 53. Mongiardo to Landon Butler, memorandum, Sept. 5, 1976, JCL- CMC, box 203/“Urban Ethnic Affairs.” 54. Eizenstat to Jimmy Carter, Jody Powell, and Hamilton Jordan, memorandum, n.d., JCL- CMC, box 29/“Urban Policy– Neighborhoods, 9/76–10/76.” 55. Tatum to Hamilton Jordan, memorandum, Aug. 23, 1976, JCL- CMC, box 203/“Urban Ethnic Affairs.” 56. “Confusing European/Ethnic Constituencies and ‘Catholic Voters’: It’s Time for the Democrats to Think Neighborhood,” unsigned memorandum, July 29, 1976, JCL- CMC, box 16/“Ethnic affairs 6/9/76–10/76.” Carter’s handwritten initials indicate that he reviewed this document. 57. Jimmy Carter, “Our Nation’s Past and Future,” in The Presidential Campaign 1976, comp. Committee on House Administration (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1978), 1:347– 52. 58. David S. Broder, “Carter: Effort to Court Catholics Gains,” Washington Post, Sept. 9, 1976; Carter/Mondale campaign, “Carter Praises Dignity of Diverse Cultural Heritages in Visits to Ethnic Neighborhoods,” press release, Sept. 11, 1976, JCL- CMC, box 203/“Urban Ethnic Affairs.” 59. Alpern, “Courting the Catholics,” 16; Schram, Running for President, 275– 79; O’Rourke, Geno, 132– 33; Carter quoted in Dave Leherr, “Polish Hill Warmly Greets Carter,” Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, Sept. 9, 1976. Fig. 24 caption quotation from Frank Matthews, “I Will Be Strong: Carter,” Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, Sept. 9, 1976. 60. Associated Press, “Ford Admits Error in Europe Stand,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, Oct. 13, 1976. See also John W. Donohue, “Eighty- Seven Neighborhoods,” America, Oct. 16, 1976, 234.

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N OT E S TO PAG E S 32 2–28

61. E.g., Tatum to Jordan, memorandum. 62. The speech was not delivered precisely as written (Schram, Running for President, 277). For the widely distributed prepared text discussed and quoted here, see Carter/Mondale campaign, untitled press release, Sept. 7, 1976, JCL- CMC, box 279/“Neighborhoods.” For the speech as delivered, consult Carter Library audio records. 63. Andrew M. Greeley, “The Neighborhood and the Big World,” speech, Feb. 7, 1974, 1, UND-NUE, box 30/18. 64. Carter/Mondale campaign, untitled press release, Sept. 7, 1976. 65. Several critics pronounced themselves placated: e.g., Andrew Greeley, “For Catholics: A Turned-Around Jimmy Carter,” New York Daily News, Oct. 5, 1976. 66. Ken Auletta, “Is Carter Pulling a Ford?,” Village Voice, Sept. 20, 1976. 67. Pete Domenici, speech, Cleveland, Oct. 9, 1976, GFL-PFC, box F24/“Domenici.” 68. David Gergen, edits to Ford speech draft by Robert Hartmann, Sept. 21, 1976, GFL-PTRO, box 71/“Polish American Congress (1).” The Gergen quotations pertain specifically to Ford’s upcoming speech before the Polish American Congress. 69. Public Papers . . . Ford, 1976–77, 2317, 2760, 2791, 2490. For Rizzo placards, CBS Evening News, Sept. 24, 1976, VTNA. 70. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics, 131. 71. Carter, George Wallace, 45. 72. Biles, Fate of Cities, 225; Milton Ellerin, “Intergroup Relations and the 1976 Elections,” in American Jewish Year Book ’78, ed. Morris Fine and Milton Himmelfarb (Philadelphia: American Jewish Committee, 1978), 71–72; “How Ford Lost the Ethnics,” 18. 73. McClaughry to Myron Kuropas, May 5, 1976, GFL-WBP, box 86/“Kuropas.” 74. Mario T. Noto, Chuck Conconi, Paul Asciolla, and Ernie Lotito to Mondale, memorandum, n.d. 1976, JCL- CMC, box 203/“Urban Ethnic Affairs.” 75. Jordan quoted in “Ethnicity Racial Code Word, Jordan Tells Notre Dame Grads,” Atlanta Daily World, May 21, 1976. 76. On similar GOP rhetorical shifts, see Joe Merton, “‘The Republican Party Is Truly the Party of the “Open Door”’: Ethnic Americans and the Republican Party in the 1970s,” in Seeking a New Majority: The Republican Party and American Politics, 1960–1980, ed. Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013), 67. 77. Marcia C. Kaptur, “Neighborhoods and Urban Policy: The View from the White House,” Practicing Planner 8, no. 3 (1978): 5– 6; John M. Goering and Edward T. Rogowsky, “The Myth of Neighborhood,” New York Affairs 5, no. 1 (1978): 82. 78. Robert Corletta, “The Carter Urban Policy,” May 1978, HSP-NCU, box 3/13.

411

N OT E S TO PAG E S 328 –31

79. Goering, “National Policy,” 558; Susan E. Clarke, “Neighborhood Policy Options: The Reagan Agenda,” Journal of the American Planning Association 50 (1984): 495; Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich, Consensus and Compromise: Creating the First National Urban Policy under President Carter (Lanham, MD: Universal Press of America, 2006), 106–10. 80. Thomas J. Sugrue, “Carter’s Urban Policy Crisis,” in The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post–New Deal Era, ed. Gary M. Fink and Hugh Davis Graham (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 139, 153; Tracy Neumann, “Privatization, Devolution, and Jimmy Carter’s National Urban Policy,” Journal of Urban History 40 (2014): 283– 300. 81. Peter L. Berger, “Mediating Structures: The Missing Link of Politics,” Commonsense 1, no. 1 (1978): 4– 5. On the Right’s “New Class” rhetoric, see Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, 144–95. 82. Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1977), 2– 3, 10. 83. Ibid., 8, 11–12, 15–18; Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 13. See also Dorrien, Neoconservative Mind, 310. 84. Philip A. Klinkner, “Beyond Pseudo-science: Political Parties and PolicyMaking,” Polity 26 (1994): 787– 88; Michael Novak, “Prescription for Republicans,” Commonsense 1, no. 1 (1978): 33. 85. Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: Harper, 2008), 134– 36. See also Michael J. Sandel, “The Politics of Community: Robert F. Kennedy versus Ronald Reagan,” Responsive Community 6, no. 2 (1996): 20–24. 86. “Now Is the Time for All Good Men,” New York Times, Apr. 13, 1980. 87. Terkel, American Dreams, 373–76; John McClaughry, “President Reagan Would Restore a Sense of Community,” Human Events, July 19, 1980, 14–15. 88. McClaughry to Ronald Reagan, n.d. (July 1980), RRL-RPC, box 678/“Correspondence: McCarthy– McClaughry.” 89. McClaughry to Ed Meese et al., memorandum, Oct. 1, 1980, RRL-RPC, box 151/“McClaughry (1/2).” 90. Gavin, Street Corner Conservative, 14–21, 135– 36; Gavin “mahogany” remark from William F. Gavin, unpublished memoir excerpt, 1997, provided to author by Gavin. On Street Corner Conservative’s influence among young conservatives, see Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era (New York: Random House, 1990), 310. 91. John McClaughry, telephone interview by author, Sept. 7, 2007. 92. Ronald Reagan, “Neighborhoods,” radio script, Mar. 1978, RRL-RPC, box 245/“Debate File– Issues–23.” 93. Ronald Reagan, “Hope for the Cities,” radio script, Dec. 1978, RRL-RPC, box 245/“Debate File– Issues–23.”

412

N OT E S TO PAG E S 332–3 4

94. Gavin to William Casey, Richard Wirthlin, and Ed Meese, memorandum, May 8, 1980, RRL-RPC, box 129/“Meese Files– Ethnics (2/2).” 95. Peter Hannaford, The Reagans: A Political Portrait (New York: CowardMcCann, 1983), 177– 82. 96. Nicholas Lemann, “Values, Personal Choice, and the Failure of Liberalism,” Washington Monthly, Dec. 1983, 33. On poll testing, Wynton C. Hall, “The Invention of ‘Quantifiably Safe Rhetoric’: Richard Wirthlin and Ronald Reagan’s Instrumental Use of Public Opinion Research in Presidential Discourse,” Western Journal of Communication 66 (2002): 326– 31. 97. Gavin, unpublished memoir excerpt. 98. McClaughry to Bill Gavin, Ed Meese, and Richard Wirthlin, memorandum, Sept. 26, 1980, RRL-RPC, box 151/“McClaughry (1/2).” 99. McClaughry to Ed Meese et al., memorandum, Oct. 2, 1980, 1, RRL-RPC, box 264/“Schedules: 8/5/80 (1/2)”; Reagan Urban Policy Advisory Group, “Issue: Empowering Neighborhood People to Undertake Self-Help,” Oct. 1980, RRL-RPC, box 151/“McClaughry (1/2).” 100. McClaughry to Ed Meese et al., memorandum, Oct. 1, 1980, RRL-RPC, box 151/“McClaughry (1/2).” 101. Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991), 4. 102. “Reagan for President Ethnic Campaign: A Summary,” Oct. 18, 1979, RRL-RPC, box 86/“Nationalities.” 103. On such code words, see, e.g., Williams, Constraint of Race, 184–92. 104. Sen. Jesse Helms, “Slavic Americans– Good Americans,” 125 Cong. Rec., 96th Cong., 1st sess. (Sept. 12, 1979): 24156. 105. Ronald Reagan, “The Ethnic American and His Role in American Society,” position paper, released Dec. 15, 1979, RRL-RPC, box 129/“Meese Files– Ethnics (1/2).” 106. Biles, Fate of Cities, 253; Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 478–79; Jeremy D. Mayer, Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns, 1960–2000 (New York: Random House, 2002), 164– 68. 107. Wirthlin and Brady to Ronald Reagan, memorandum, Aug. 11, 1980, RRL-RCP, box 264/“Schedules: 8/5/80 (1/2).” 108. Reich, Tales of a New America, 169–71. See also Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 195–98. 109. Reagan/Bush Committee, “More Than Any Other Presidential Candidate” and “The Time Is Now to Rebuild,” print ads, n.d. 1980, RRL-RCP, box 305/“Voter Group Summaries.” 110. Public Papers of the Presidents: Ronald Reagan, 1981 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982), 836. 111. Harry C. Boyte, “Ronald Reagan and America’s Neighborhoods: Undermining Community Initiative,” in What Reagan Is Doing to Us, ed. Alan

413

N OT E S TO PAG E S 33 4 –39

Gartner, Colin Greer, and Frank Riessman (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 109. 112. On this dichotomy, Michael J. Sandel, “The Political Economy of Citizenship,” in The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics, ed. Stanley B. Greenberg and Theda Skocpol (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 144– 45. 113. Clarke, “Neighborhood Policy Options,” 494–96; Helen F. Ladd, “Big City Finances in the New Era of Fiscal Federalism,” in Readings in State and Local Public Finance, ed. Dick Netzer and Matthew P. Drennan (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 416; John O’Connor, “U.S. Social Welfare Policy: The Reagan Record and Legacy,” Journal of Social Policy 27 (1998): 37– 61; David J. Erickson, “Community Capitalism: How Housing Advocates, the Private Sector, and Government Forged New Low-Income Housing Policy, 1968–1996,” Journal of Policy History 18 (2006): 177–78; Biles, Fate of Cities, 255– 56, 267. 114. Raymond A. Mohl, “Shifting Patterns of American Urban Policy since 1900,” in Urban Policy in Twentieth- Century America, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Raymond A. Mohl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 24–28. 115. A different yet complementary element of this vocabulary is described in Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 116. Patterson, Ethnic Chauvinism, 159. E P I LO G U E

1.

2.

3.

414

On authenticity’s centrality to gentrification discourses, see Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). For related claims in the trade press, see Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You through the Day (New York: Paragon, 1989); Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Ray Suarez, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966–1999 (New York: Free Press, 1999). Melvin M. Webber, “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm,” in Explorations into Urban Structure, ed. Melvin M. Webber et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 79–153.

Index abortion, 321; controversy over, 315; opposition to, 316, 318; right to, 326, 304 Abrahams, Roger, 154 Abrams, Charles, 122 Absent from the Majority (Seifer), 297–98 Abzug, Bella, 249 Ackelsberg, Martha, 304 Adams, Frederick, 59 Adams-Morgan, 187, 243– 44, 247, 252; as “ethnic Walden Pond,” 245, 253, 258; negative portrait of, 253– 54 Adams-Morgan Organization (AMO), 243– 44, 247– 48 , 253– 54 Advertising Council, 93, 363n85 affi rmative action, 255, 287; opposition to, 153, 333 African Americans, 14, 26, 139– 40, 145, 149, 168, 175, 178–79, 202, 265, 298, 313, 326, 333; antiblight campaigns, 13, 98–105; Black Arts movement, 151; black culture, debates over, 141, 146, 154, 159– 60; black family, debate over state of, 151– 59, 175, 222–23; black freedom movement, 234; Black Power movement, and white ethnic movement, as counterpart to, 277–78; black urban spaces, and culture- ofpoverty thesis, 141; block club

movement by, 99; block-level communities of, 155; community cleanup drives, 144; community control, debate over, 249; discrimination against, 141; and European Americans, 32; grassroots efforts of, 103– 5, 185– 86; group distinctiveness, assertions of, 150– 51; Moynihan Report, commentary of on, 152– 54, 253; neighborhood museums, 185– 86; neighborhoods of, as “living museums,” 186– 88, 193; neighborhood self-government, 250; pathologizing portrayals of, 152; and segregation, 141, 147; slavery and Jim Crow, debate over effects of on, 146– 48; slum clearance and, 136; sociological views of, 146; urban renewal, displacement by, 161; as urban villagers, 155– 56; white- ethnic movement, relationship to, 294 Agee, James, 180 Alabama, 101, 314. See also Selma marches Alderson, Brian, 203, 207 Alexander, Edward, 186, 192 Alexander-Minter, Rae, 213–14 Alinsky, Saul, 256 Allende, Salvador, 244, 251 Alliance for Neighborhood Government (ANG), 247, 249; “Neighborhood Bill of Respon-

415

INDEX

Alliance for Neighborhood Government (ANG) (continued) sibilities and Rights,” 248, 256. See also National Association of Neighborhoods (NAN) Allitt, Patrick, 271 All Our Kin (Stack), 157– 58, 375n84; feminist scholarship, importance to, 158 Allport, Gordon, 382n11 Almond, Gabriel, 115 alternative technologies, 15, 232, 244. See also appropriate-technology movement America (Coyle), 27 American Catholicism, 15, 261; “Call to Action” (apostolic letter), 268, 285– 86, 288– 89; Call to Action assembly and, 286, 288– 89; counterculture, as alternative to, 283; “cultic quality,” loss of, 280; “ghetto thesis” on, 263, 267, 274; identity crisis in, 260– 61, 283; neighborhood as metaphor for, 275–76; particularism v. universalism in, 276; urban Catholics, conservative voting backlash of, 313. See also social justice: and Catholic church, US Catholic church American City (magazine), 63, 71 American Council for the Community (ACC), 110–11, 116–17 American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods (ACTION), 74, 91–101, 103– 4, 110, 113, 363n85 American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 316, 328 American Jewish Committee (AJC), 284; National Project on Ethnic America of, 297 American Jewish experience, 262 Anacostia district, 189–90, 198, 338; Barry’s Farm, 194–96; Douglass Hall, 195; history of, 194; negative image of, 193–94; Uniontown, 194 Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, 9, 14, 166, 188, 194–95, 198–99, 327; early exhibits at, 193–96; inner- city neighborhood life, theory about, 192–93; mission of, shifts in, 196–97; opening of, 190–91; paradigm shift, as emblem of, 192 Anatomy of a Metropolis (Hoover and Vernon), 75–76 Anderson, Benedict, 9

416

Ann Arbor (Michigan), 92 anticolonialism, 233, 252, 287 anticommunism. See under Cold War anti- Semitism, 108, 224 Appalachia, 142; migrants from, in the North, 178–79 The Appeals of Communism (Almond), 115 appropriate-technology movement, 244– 45, 257, 330 Arendt, Hannah, 235 Art Students’ League, 205 Asch, Sholem, 13, 31– 32, 34, 36– 37, 41, 80, 106, 108, 121, 162, 176 Asciolla, Paul, 260 Atlanta (Georgia), 147, 320 Auden, W. H., 37 Augur, Tracy, 59 Babcock, Frederick, 76–79, 81– 82, 87 “Back Home” (Lewis), 49 Baldwin, James, 74, 140, 142, 149 “Ballad for Americans” (song), 222 Baltimore (Maryland), 101, 258, 294, 321; East Baltimore, 307; Fells Point, 293; Highlandtown, 10, 293–94, 321; Waverly, 82– 84, 85– 86 Banfield, Edward, 11–12, 153, 163– 64 Barnet, Richard, 234, 242 Barolini, Helen, 300 Baroni, Geno, 15, 249, 260, 269, 277–78, 281, 283– 89, 294, 302, 317–18, 320, 327, 400n89; early career of, 278; reputation of, 279– 80 Baroody, Michael, 329 Baroody, William Jr., 316–17, 326, 328 Bauer, Catherine, 68 Beauregard, Robert, 8 Becker, Howard, 176 Bellah, Robert, 283 Bender, Thomas, 240 Bentham, Jeremy, 117 Berg, Gertrude, 50, 212. See also The Goldbergs (radio and television series) Berg, Louis, 30, 352n30 Berger, Peter, 328–29 Bernard, Jessie, 298–99 Bernhard, Leopold, 236– 37, 247, 250 Berrigan, Daniel, 268, 281 Beyond the Burning (Tucker), 150 Beyond the Melting Pot (Glazer and Moynihan), 147, 371n15

INDEX

Beyond Victory (radio program), 62 Billingsley, Andrew, 154, 373n43 Biloxi (Mississippi), 177 Birmingham (Alabama), 102, 104 Black Academy of Arts and Letters, 213 Black Arts movement, 151 Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Spear), 148 “Black Culture: Myth or Reality?” (Blauner), 146 black freedom movement, 234. See also black nationalism, Black Power movement, civil rights movement black ghettos, 14, 138, 139, 149, 150, 163, 181– 82; atomization alleged in, 196; blame, question of, 182, 183; as “Communist-inspired myth,” 144; cultural isolation, claims of, 152; culture of, 154; “dark ghetto” trope, 374n53; and discrimination, 148; distinctive ethnicity in, 155; ethnicity paradigm, as interpretation for, 139– 40; hope, alleged lack of in, 143; historiography on, 373n47; and immigrant ghettos, comparisons to, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 152, 153, 155, 161, 162; and inner- city space, 165; and Jewish ghettos, comparison to, 145; local bonds, alleged as nonexistent in, 149; myth and cultural transmission, as repositories of, 156; neighborhoods, as collection of, 179; v. old ethnic neighborhoods, 141; representation of, debate over, 182– 85; rhetoric of local uplift, 144; strengths of, 156– 58, 187. See also African Americans, ghettos black nationalism, 15, 178, 201, 232, 256, 301; in children’s publishing, 213; community control, calls for, 196, 249 Black Panthers, 242; Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, 259 Black Power movement, 151, 231, 278 Black Psychiatrists of America, 224 Black Rage (Grier and Cobb), 181 Blauner, Robert, 137, 146, 155, 161 blight. See neighborhood blight Blitzstein, Marc, 125 Bloom, Nicholas, 73, 96 Blueprint for Neighborhood Conservation (NAREB), 90 Bolden, Frank, 80

Booker, Simeon, 184 Boston (Massachusetts), 162, 166, 178, 213, 220, 224, 237, 251, 314; desegregation busing in, 178, 251; Hyde Park, 178; Roslindale, 178; Roxbury, 178, 182; West End, 135, 158 Boswell, David, 158 Boym, Svetlana, 130 Boyte, Harry, 334 Brady, Jim, 333 branding: of neighborhoods, 339 Bread Givers (Yezierska), 36 Breslin, Jimmy, 231 Brigadoon (musical show), 45 Britain, 218 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 218 Broadway Boogie Woogie (painting), 53 Brockbank, Alan, 110 Broder, David, 321 Bronfenbrenner, Urie, 225 Brooklyn (New York), 1, 15–16, 168, 185, 203– 5, 210, 214, 219, 249, 251, 258, 282, 290, 300, 303–7; BedfordStuyvesant, 21, 98, 162– 63, 187, 217, 220; Brooklyn- Queens expressway, 282; Greenpoint, 301–2, 304, 306; Park Slope, 320; political speeches in, 322, 324; Williamsburg, 301– 4, 306 Brooklyn College, 322 “Brooklyn Gang” (Mailer and Davidson), 168 Brown, Claude, 160 Brown, James, 162 Brownell, Baker, 115–16 Brownmiller, Susan, 301 Buckley, William F. Jr., 12, 140 Buffalo (New York), 282 Build America Better Council. See under National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) Burgess, Ernest, 78, 139 Cairo (Illinois), 256 California, 101 Callahan, Daniel, 264 Cameron, Ardis, 148 Cantwell, Daniel, 265 Carew, Topper, 186– 88, 193, 243 Carnegie Corporation, 193, 215 Carnegie Foundation, 205

417

INDEX

Carpenter, Niles, 27 Carroll, Tamar, 303, 405n39 Carter, Jimmy, 16, 249– 50, 256, 290, 314, 318, 321–22, 325, 333– 34; “Catholic problem” of, 315–16, 319–20; ethnicpurity remarks, 311–12, 320, 323, 326; governmental devolution, embrace of, 328; neighborhood strategy of, 310–12, 316, 318–23, 326–28; small-town myth, campaign shaped by, 310; Urban Ethnic Desk of campaign by, 320; whiteethnic urbanites, appeals to, 310–11 Casino, Joseph, 265 The Castle (Kafka), 248 Catholic neighborhoods: assimilation and, 263; as formative institutions, 261; as ghettos, 261, 263–74; as metaphor for US Catholic church, 275–76; middleclass stability, rise toward, 264; parishbased subculture, crumbling of, 265; parochial-school integration, confl ict over, 265; as religious subculture, 267; shrinking of, 259– 60; and suburbanization, 263– 64; symbol of, 267; as urban village, 264, 273; white- ethnic revival, relationship to, 261– 62. See also American Catholicism, US Catholic church Catholicism. See American Catholicism, US Catholic church CBS Repertoire Workshop, 215 Center for Anacostia Studies, 193– 94 Chapman, Robert C., 285 Chavez, Linda, 307 Chicago (Illinois), 77, 97–99, 100–1, 104, 148, 213, 217, 237, 245, 255– 6, 258, 265, 270, 288; Beverly Hills, 274; Bronzeville, 151; Humboldt Park, 236; Jewish ghetto in, 31, 139; Maxwell Street market, 167; South Side, 147, 219–20; Southwest Side, 298 Chicago Defender (newspaper), 45, 98, 158, 220 Chicago Plan Commission, 60 Chicago School of sociology, 4, 113, 126, 139, 148, 299 Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, 306 Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear (Coles), 177 children’s literature: African American authors of, 212–13; city, romanticizing of in, 199; culture’s anxieties reflected

418

in, 199; as “culture therapy,” 228; Great Society aesthetic in, 200; as primers, 200; as teaching texts, 199; and “Textbook Town,” 206; urban settings of, 200–201 Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), 215, 217–18, 221–26, 228; founding of, 215; Great Society aesthetic of, 202; hopeful vision of, 200; neighborliness in output of, 202; public outreach by, 217. See also Sesame Street (television series) Chile, 244, 251 Chisholm, Shirley, 249 Christianity, 34; gospel message in, 270 Church of St. Stephen King of Hungary, 282 Cicero, 74 Cicero (Illinois), 120 Cincinnati (Ohio), 25, 45 Cincotta, Gale, 302 city: City Beautiful movement, 55; city planning, 55; and modernity, 8; rebuilding of, 51; secularism of, 269–70; upheavals in, 24 “civic nationalist culture,” 350n12 Civil Rights Act (1964), 220 civil rights movement, 4– 5, 14, 154, 156, 161, 167, 192, 196, 217, 234, 236, 249– 50, 265, 284, 301; criticisms of, 150, 163; intellectuals of, 139, 144; as political alliance, 313; white- ethnic movement as self- described counterpart to, 277–78. See also black freedom movement Clark, Dennis, 227 Clark, Kenneth, 144, 202 Cleveland (Ohio), 237, 323–24, 330; East End, 30; Little Italy, 259; Slovenian center in, 321 Cleveland Federation of Settlements, 24 Clifton, Lucille, 212 Clinard, Marshall, 143– 44 Clurman, Harold, 127 Cobb, Price, 181 Cogley, John, 267 Colaianni, James, 267 Cold War, 12–13, 106–10, 118, 130– 31, 313, 315; anticommunism, 3, 108–10, 115, 241, 314–15; and containment, US policy of, 93; and nuclear fears, 111; and urban blight, 112

INDEX

Cole, Albert, 71 Coleman, A. D., 182 Coleman, Walter “Slim,” 256 Coles, Robert, 11, 14, 160, 166, 176, 178, 179, 182– 86, 193, 197–99; background of, 177; neighborhood theory of, 180– 81 Colombia, 286 Columbia Workshop, 42 Columbus, Christopher, 46 Columbus (Ohio), 236, 242 Common Council for American Unity, 40 Common Ground (journal), 37, 40 Commonsense (journal), 329– 30 The Communal Catholic (Greeley), 276 communism, 107–10, 114, 115, 121, 204– 5; accusations of, 108, 144, 302; in Cuba, 252; in Eastern Europe, 315. See also Cold War: anticommunism Community Action program, 226, 233, 328. See also war on poverty community planning, 13, 52– 53 The Community Press in an Urban Setting (Janowitz), 117 Community Reinvestment Act (1977), 257 Community Technology (Hess), 253 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 154, 177, 250, 301 Connecticut, 325 Connell, David, 218, 223 Conot, Robert, 147 Cooley, Charles Horton, 2, 58 Cooney, Joan Ganz, 200, 202, 218, 221–24, 227; background of, 215; views on gender of, 222–23 Corletta, Robert, 327–28 Cosby, Bill, 219 Costanza, Midge, 249 Costello, Donald, 264 Council on Interracial Books for Children, 213 counterculture, 3, 233, 244, 283 Cowie, Jefferson, 4 Cox, Harvey, 130, 269–70 Coyle, David Cushman, 27–28 The Crack in the Picture Window (Keats), 119–20 Crew, Spencer, 186 The Crisis (magazine), 48, 217 Crothers, Diane, 301

The Crucible (Miller), 118 Cuba, 252 Cuff, Dana, 88 culture- of-poverty thesis, 141– 42; backlash against, 154; conservatives, adoption of by, 153; and “damage imagery,” 141 Cuordileone, Kyle, 114 Dahir, James, 62 Dante, Phil, 182 Dark Ghetto (Clark), 144 Davidson, Bruce, 14, 165– 66, 175–78, 181– 86, 193, 197–99; as advocacy photographer, 171; background of, 167– 68; criticism of, 181– 83; photographic technique of, 171–72; subjects, relationship with, 170–72 Dayton, Walter, 89 Dear America (Hess), 241, 253 Dearden, John, 288 Democratic Party, 142, 231, 240, 273, 294, 314–15, 327, 331, 335; and Catholic voters, 319–21; coalition of, 239, 324– 25; New Politics wing of, 319; policies of, 255; primary elections of, 231, 256, 311; and realignment predictions, 313– 14, 332– 33; and urban renewal, 317; white voters in, 16, 270–71, 313–15. See also New Deal: as coalition Denning, Michael, 44 Depression, 24, 27, 31, 201; art of, 201, 214; class politics of, 29, 43, 106, 108, 204 De Rosa, Tina, 300 desegregation busing, 178, 249– 51, 315, 318, 323, 331, 333 Detroit (Michigan), 40, 244, 272, 281; Call to Action assembly in, 285– 88; Poletown neighborhood, 315 Detroit City Plan Commission, 60 Dewey, John, 26, 110 Dewey, Richard, 67 Dillard, J. L., 154 Dinges, William, 266 Dionne, E. J., 315, 324–25 Discovery (television program), 193 Dissent (journal), 144 Dodd, Thomas, 169 Domenici, Pete, 323, 326 Donaldson, Ivanhoe, 237 Douglass, Frederick, 192 Drummond, William, 355n2

419

INDEX

DuBois, Rachel Davis, 11, 13, 31, 42– 43, 52, 64, 106, 108, 121, 338; background of, 37– 38; festival designed by, 38– 41 DuBois, W. E. B., 64 Duganne, Erina, 172 Duis, Perry, 24 Düsseldorf (Germany), 45 East Central Citizens Organization (ECCO), 236– 37 Eastern Europe, 315 East Harlem (New York), 165– 67, 181, 218; demographic change in, 168; East Harlem Protestant Parish, 169; grassroots organizing in, 169; social conditions of, 169 East 100th Street (Davidson), 168– 69, 176–77, 184– 85; criticism of, 181– 83; family life, images of in, 173–76; visual vocabulary of, 167 East River (Asch), 32, 34, 36– 37, 80, 176; FBI interest in, 366n8; fi lm rights to, 108 Eddy, Margaret, 169 Eddy, Norman, 169 The Edge of Sadness (O’Connor), 123, 128– 30, 264 Egan, Jack, 286 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 398n63 Eisenberg, Leon, 224–25 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 91–92; housing policies of, 86 Eizenstat, Stuart, 320 Elliot, John, 25 Ellis, John Tracy, 263 Ellison, Ralph, 156, 159, 193, 284, 373n51; conservative appropriation of, 12, 163– 64; public testimony of, 160– 61 The Emerging Republican Majority (Phillips), 313 “The End of American Catholicism?” (McCready and Greeley), 274 The End of Liberalism (Lowi), 237 The Enduring Ghetto (Goldfield and Lane), 162 Enke, Anne, 303 Enlightenment, 116, 271 Enterprise Zones, 256 Epstein, Joseph, 182– 83 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 256, 290, 304 Equality and Beyond (Grier and Grier), 149

420

Ericson, Leif, 46 Ethiopia, 190 Ethnic Chauvinism (Patterson), 335 Ethnic Millions Political Action Committee (EMPAC), 284– 85 Ethnic Neighborhood Action Center, 302 Etzkowitz, Henry, 162– 63, 182 European Americans: and African Americans, 32; as ethnic whites, 32; immigrant assimilation model for, 143 The Evolution of a Community (exhibit), 193–94; purpose of, 195–96 Fair Deal, 145. See also Truman, Harry Farish, Matthew, 111 Farmer, James, 154, 161 Fasanella, Ralph, 108 fascism, 12, 21, 22, 67, 114; accusations of, 270, 285; antifacist opposition to, 26, 45, 106 Federal Art Project, 205– 6 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 108, 234, 366n8 Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), 111–12 Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), 82 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 68, 80– 81; mortgage lending, 77. See also mortgage redlining Federation of Italian-American Societies of Greater Cleveland, 323 Feinstein, Otto, 272 Felsenthal, Norman, 220 The Female World (Bernard), 299 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 306 feminism. See second-wave feminism, women’s movement Ferman, Louis, 143 Finian’s Rainbow (musical show), 45 First English Lutheran Church, 236 Fisher, Sally Martino, 249, 256 Florence (Italy), 251 Floyd, Carlisle, 118 En Foco photography collective, 182 Follett, Mary Parker, 26 Ford Foundation, 92, 274, 279 Ford, Gerald, 16, 312, 314, 325; neighborhood campaign strategy of, 310, 316– 19, 323–24, 326–28; “Poland gaffe” of, 315; and white- ethnic communities, 310–11, 318, 323

INDEX

Ford, Henry, 41 Fordism, 3 Forman, Robert, 147 Four Policemen concept, 38 Francke, Linda, 226 Franklin, Vincent P., 373n47 Frazier, E. Franklin, 146, 153 Freedman, Estelle, 301 Freedmen’s Bureau, 194 Freedom Rides, 168 Freedom Summer, 177 Friedan, Betty, 304, 306 Future Shock (Toffler), 269 Gaines, Irene McCoy, 100 Gaither, Edmund Barry, 188, 192 Gambino, Richard, 153 Gans, Herbert, 135– 36, 158, 161, 163 Garagiola, Joe, 282, 324 garden cities, 51, 55 Garrioch, David, 349n15 Gast, David, 228 A Gathering of Ghetto Writers (Miller), 162 Gavin, William, 267, 330– 32 gay rights, 305– 6; in Catholic church, 275 Gelfand, Mark, 75 gemeinschaft, 7, 36, 40, 116 Generation of the Third Eye (Callahan), 264 Generation of Vipers (Wylie), 112 gentrification, 87, 254, 257, 339, 414n1 Georgia, 312 Gergen, David, 323 gesellschaft, 7, 36, 116 Get Together Americans (DuBois), 38, 40 ghettos, 339; and African Americans, 138– 41; Catholic “ghetto thesis,” 263, 274; concept of, as contradictory, 164; conservatism and, 140; Jewish, 31, 138, 139, 145, 162; v. neighborhood, 136– 37, 149– 50, 166; “old” v. “new,” 145; and race, 138; redefi ning of, 138– 45; v. slum, 138; as term, 138; types of, 138– 41; and white- ethnic urban village, 137– 38; as word, 261. See also black ghettos The Ghetto (Wirth), 31, 139 Ghetto Crisis (Etzkowitz and Schaflander), 163 ghettoization, 139; historiography on, 373n47

The Ghetto Reader (Demarest and Lamdin), 162 GI Bill (1944), 145, 264 Giovanni, Nikki, 212 Glazer, Nathan, 147, 149– 51, 153, 158, 371n15, 373n51 Goering, John, 257 Goggles! (Keats), 202, 207– 8, 210, 213 The Goldbergs (radio and television series), 30, 123, 211. See also Berg, Gertrude Goldwater, Barry, 241– 42, 270, 313 Goodman, Paul, 234 Good Neighbor Committee, 40 Good Neighbor Policy, 38 Goodwillie, Arthur, 82 Gordon, Colin, 75 Graebner, William, 24, 106 Graham, Frank P., 110 Granger, Lester, 99 Great Britain. See Britain Great Depression. See Depression Greater Anacostia People’s Corporation, 189 Great Society, 3, 7, 14, 202– 3, 209, 218, 221, 223, 227–28, 232, 253, 323, 327, 334, 338; American liberalism, as era of, 200–1; challenges to from left, 226; as cultural style, 201, 203; expansion of government under, 239; urban grassroots, relationship to, 201. See also war on poverty Greeley, Andrew, 2– 3, 15, 260, 262, 268–70, 273, 277– 88, 322, 400n89; background of, 274; Catholic “ghetto thesis,” attack on, 274; Catholic hierarchy, views on, 274–75; electoral politics, commentary on, 319–20, 411n65; ethnicity, interest in, 274–76 Greenfield, Eloise, 212 Greenfield, Jeff, 240 Greenpoint (Brooklyn), 301–2, 304, 306 Greer, Scott, 2, 10, 131 Grier, Eunice, 143, 149– 51 Grier, George, 143, 149– 51 Grier, William, 181 Grogan, Emmett, 283, 391n45 Gropius, Walter, 59 Gutman, Herbert, 154 Hamtramck (Michigan), 30, 282 Handlin, Oscar, 147

421

INDEX

Harlem, 12, 144, 146– 47, 149, 159; middle class of, 174; and neighborliness, 12, 155; public testimony about, 159– 61. See also East Harlem Harrington, Michael, 145– 47, 158– 59, 269; Catholicism, views on, 265; slums, interpretation of, 74, 141– 43, 155 Harvey, Paul, 285 Hatfield, Mark, 169, 239, 248, 258 Haywoode, Terry, 291, 306 Hazam, Louis, 13, 31, 42– 43, 62– 63, 121 Head Start, 218, 227 Heart of Uptown Coalition (Chicago), 256 Heathcott, Joseph, 4 Heide, Wilma Scott, 222 Hell Town (television series), 283 Helms, Jesse, 333 Helsinki Accords, 315 Henson, Jim, 219, 221 Hentoff, Nat, 147 Hernady, Martin, 266, 281– 82 Hess, Karl, 232– 33, 235, 240, 244– 46, 252, 257– 58; anarchist vision of, 242– 43; background of, 241– 42; neighborhood projects of, 243– 44; racial issues, commentary on, 253– 55 Hest, Roger, 162 Hi, Cat! (Keats), 207 Higgins, George, 279 Hill, Robert, 154 Hine, Lewis, 169 Hinton, Stephen, 46 Hitchcock, James, 266, 283 Hitler, Adolf, 26, 66 Hollywood (California), 21, 109, 281 Home Is Here (Meller), 32– 33, 36 Home Is What You Make It (radio series), 42, 62 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), 82; Residential Security Maps of, 81. See also mortgage redlining Hooks, Benjamin, 250 Hoover, Edgar M., 75–76, 80 Hoover, J. Edgar, 109 Horace, 74 Horne, Lena, 219 House Committee on Un-American Activities, 109 The House I Live In (fi lm), 26 The House in the Middle (fi lm), 111–12 Housing Act (1949), 86

422

Housing Act (1954), 86 Housing and Urban Development, US Department of (HUD), 122, 308, 318 Housing for the Machine Age (Perry), 58, 70 Howard University, 195 Howe, Irving, 145 Hoyt, Homer, 76–79, 81– 83, 87, 361n32 Hughes, Dorothy Pitman, 226 Hughes, Langston, 13, 44– 45, 49, 80, 107, 162, 207 The Human Community (Brownell), 115–16 Hutchinson, Louise Daniel, 194, 197 Illinois, 101, 325 In the Beginning (television series), 283 “In Defense of the Negro Family” (Reissman), 156 India, 143 Indiana, 311 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 242 Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), 244– 45 Institute for Neighborhood Studies (INS), 247 Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), 235– 36, 242– 43, 247, 249, 252; Community Technology workshop, as sponsor for, 244; international agenda of, 251– 52; New Left, as aligned with, 234 International Style, 53 Isaacs, Reginald, 65– 68, 122 Italian American Studies movement, 153 Italy: neighborhood councils in, 251 It Happened on Fifth Avenue (fi lm), 21 Jackson, Kenneth, 7, 80 Jackson (Mississippi), 177 Jacobs, Jane, 12, 136, 161, 245, 329, 331 Jacobs, Paul, 234 Jacobson, Matthew, 32, 292 Jaffa, Harry, 241 James, Portia, 196– 97 Janowitz, Morris, 13, 115, 117–18, 122, 124, 128 Japan, 26 Jefferson, Thomas, 238 Jencks, Christopher, 234 Jersey City (New Jersey), 331 Jim Crow, 26, 98

INDEX

John XXIII, Pope, 264, 268 Johnson, Donald Leslie, 355n2 Johnson, Lyndon B., 201, 310; administration of, 200–1, 227, 234, 242, 328; Great Society speech of, 201 Johnson, Philip, 53 Jordan, June, 212 Jordan, Vernon, 326 Journal of Black Studies (journal), 159 Judaism, 34. See also American Jewish experience Kafka, Franz, 248 Kahn, Tom, 145 Kansas City (Missouri), 86, 101 Kaptur, Marcy, 249 Katona, Arthur, 40 Katz, Michael, 141, 154 Kazan, Elia, 215 Kazin, Alfred, 50, 162, 211–12 Keats, Ezra Jack, 14, 203, 214–15, 227–28, 338; African Americans, portrayals of, 206– 8, 212–13; background of, 204– 6; community, quest for, 210–12; criticisms of, 207, 212–13; diversity, portrayal of, 208–9; as “fellow traveler,” 204– 5; Great Society aesthetic of, 202; hopeful vision of, 200; integrationist liberalism of, 206; neighborliness in works of, 202; social realism of, 204, 208, 214; universalism of, 212; urban neighborhoods, depiction of, 206–12; visual language of, 209–12 Keats, John, 119–20, 122 Keil, Charles, 154 Keith, Nathaniel, 111 Kelley, Robin D. G., 159, 184 Kennedy, Edward M., 256 Kennedy, John F., 234, 270; Kennedy Doctrine, 315 Kennedy, Robert F., 169, 201, 237, 313 Kennedy, Robert Woods, 62– 63, 65 Kerber, Linda, 284 Kerner Commission Report, 237 Kilpatrick, James J., 140, 245 Kinard, John, 14, 166, 188, 190, 192–94, 196–98, 338 King, Martin Luther Jr., 197, 227, 278 Klatch, Rebecca, 291 Klein, Woody, 169 Koen, Charles, 256

Kotler, Milton, 233, 240, 242– 45, 247, 249– 52, 256– 58, 329, 338; background of, 236– 37; views on neighborhoods of, 235, 237– 39 Krickus, Richard, 272 Kuklick, Henrika, 80 Ku Klux Klan, 177 Kuropas, Myron, 316–18 Labor, US Department of, 151– 52 Labov, William, 154 Ladner, Joyce, 154 LaGuardia, Fiorello, 37 Lal, Shafali, 40 Larrick, Nancy, 212 Latino/as, 291, 302– 3, 307– 8, 326 League for Industrial Democracy, 145 Lear, Norman, 283 Lee, Ronald, 310 Lee, Will, 215 Lees, Andrew, 8 Left, 233, 239, 274, 283. See also New Left Leonardo, Micaela di, 278, 293, 403n17 Lesser, Gerald, 225 Lester, Julius, 212 Letelier, Orlando, 251 A Letter to Amy (Keats), 207, 213 Levine, Irving, 284 Levine, Lawrence, 146 Levittown (Pennsylvania), 60 Lewis, Herbert Clyde, 21, 22, 26, 49– 50, 52, 108 Lewis, Oscar, 141 liberalism, 11, 200, 206, 292, 294, 296, 313, 315, 331; and localism, 11, 201 Libertarian Forum (newsletter), 240 libertarianism, 232, 240– 42, 255, 326, 330 Lind, Andrew, 138 Lindeman, Eduard, 26 Lindsay, John, 296 Lloyd, Harvey, 170 localism, 16, 276, 335; and liberalism, 11, 201; politics of, 11 Lofland, Lyn, 299– 300 Long, Loretta, 222 Longview (Washington), 102, 104 Look at Your Neighborhood (exhibition), 53– 54, 56, 69 Lorton Reformatory, 192 Los Angeles (California), 40, 101, 283; Boyle Heights neighborhood, 108–9;

423

INDEX

Los Angeles (California) (continued) Watts uprising in, 147, 153. See also Hollywood (California) Louisiana, 314 Louisville (Kentucky), 255– 56 Lovell, John Jr., 48– 49 Lowi, Theodore, 237– 38, 249 Lynd, Helen Merrell, 349n16 Lynd, Robert S., 349n16 Lynd, Staughton, 234 Madaj, Menceslaus, 288 Madison (Wisconsin), 65– 67 Mailer, Norman, 1, 168, 231, 240, 253 Mama (radio program), 211 Man of ACTION (fi lm), 95–96, 101 Manchild in the Promised Land (Brown), 160 Mandel, Jennifer, 227 Manson, Charles, 259 Marcuse, Peter, 139 Marty, Martin, 266 mass culture, 4, 62, 114–15, 219, 277 Mathias, Charles, 239 Mathis, Sharon Bell, 213 Maxey, Alva, 99 May, Elaine Tyler, 122–23 Mayhew, Henry, 74 McCarraher, Eugene, 273 McCarthy, Eugene, 255, 313 McCarthy, Joseph, 108, 118 McClaughry, John, 326, 330– 32, 409n30 McClay, Wilfred, 118, 310 McClenahan, Bessie, 120 McCourt, Kathleen, 291, 298– 300 McCready, William, 260 McGovern, George, 270, 320 McGreevy, John, 43, 97, 266 McKenzie, Roderick, 2 McNeal, Donald, 82 “Me Decade,” 6 Mediating Structures and Public Policy (project), 328 Meller, Sidney, 31– 32, 34, 37, 41, 52, 106, 121 “melting pot,” 41, 48, 287, 294; criticisms of, 37, 266, 294; neighborhoods viewed as, 23, 47, 107, 125; slums as, 142. See also Beyond the Melting Pot (Glazer and Moynihan) “Memories of a Catholic Boyhood” (Wills), 267

424

Menotti, Gian Carlo, 13, 50, 123–25, 127, 130 Metro North Citizens’ Committee, 169 metropolitan development: concentriczone model for, 78; sector model for, 78 Metzger, John, 80, 85 Mexico, 141 Meyer, Frank, 242 Michigan, 267, 312, 325; primary election in, 311 Mickenberg, Julia, 202 Mikulski, Barbara, 15, 260, 267, 272, 280, 291, 300, 302, 307– 8; background of, 293; cultural diversity, views on, 295; neighborhoods movement, involvement in, 293; and white- ethnic movement, role in, 294–96 military-industrial complex, 4, 239 Miller, Arthur, 118 Miller, Zane, 4, 117 Milwaukee (Wisconsin), 321 Miranda, Giulio, 268 Miron, Dan, 35 Mississippi, 220, 236, 314. See also Freedom Summer Mobile (Alabama), 320 Model Cities program, 328 modernism, 3; and cities, 8, 338; and musical composers, 44, 124 Mondale, Walter, 326 Mondrian, Piet, 53 Mongiardo, Victoria, 260, 320 Montana, 115–16 Montgomery bus boycott, 200 Morris, Charles, 263 Morris, David J., 243– 46, 251, 254– 55, 257 Morrison, Toni, 151 Morrow, Robert, 215 mortgage redlining, 6, 96, 248, 258, 280; opposition to, 232, 249, 254, 302– 3, 322 Mother Earth News (magazine), 245, 330 Movement Against Destruction (MAD), 294 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 152– 54, 156, 158, 175, 377n15. See also Moynihan Report Moynihan Report, 152, 153, 156, 179, 222, 253; criticism of, 153– 54; response to, 157– 58 Ms. (magazine), 303, 306

INDEX

multiculturalism, 307– 8; in education, 215; in fiction, 45, 228; as ideology, 106; United States as mosaic of, 7 Mumford, Lewis, 57 Muppets, 219, 221, 225 Murray, Albert, 14, 155, 161, 193 museums, 182, 188, 191, 197; neighborhoods as, 41, 186; redefi nition of, 192; shortcomings of, 187. See also neighborhood museums Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 53– 56, 63, 69, 167 museum studies, 192 Muskie, Edmund, 294 Myrdal, Gunnar, 146 Nacotchtank Indians, 194 Nahikian, Marie, 243, 247 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 26, 48, 217, 250 National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), 9, 74, 91, 101– 4; antiblight campaign of, 100; racial uplift ideology of, 100 National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), 110 National Association of Neighborhoods (NAN), 248– 49, 251– 52, 258; Black Caucus of, 256; Neighborhood Platform Campaign of, 255. See also Alliance for Neighborhood Government (ANG) National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), 85, 90, 99–100, 103; Build America Better Council of, 89, 96–97, 99 National Black Feminist Organization, 308 National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs (NCUEA), 279, 281, 284, 286, 302, 320, 327 National Clean-up, Paint-up, Fix-up Bureau, 97, 111 National Commission on Neighborhoods, 250, 317, 327 National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW), 11, 15–16, 249, 302, 304– 5, 308; College for Neighborhood Women, 306; constituencies, expansion of, 307; origin of, 300–1; significance of, 303

National Council of Churches, 285; Delta Ministry of, 236 National Council of Negro Women, 217 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 282 National Federation of Settlements, 51 National Opinion Research Center (NORC), 275–76; Center for the Study of American Pluralism of, 274 National Organization for Women (NOW), 222–23, 303– 4, 307 National Resources Committee, 349n16 National Review (magazine), 242 National Urban League. See Urban League The Nation’s Business (magazine), 71 Native Son (Wright), 159 Nazism, 26–28, 34, 66; and Völkism, 67. See also fascism The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. See Moynihan Report Negro Women’s League of Voters (Virginia), 102 Neighborhood (Greeley), 276 neighborhood blight, 12–13, 69, 76, 106; African American newspapers, interpretation by, 98; antiblight campaigns, 90, 91–104; antiblight campaigns, as racially motivated, 73; causes of, 76–77, 82– 83; characteristics of, 75; citizendirected neighborhood improvement v., 74; as contagion, 97, 103; domino theory of, 93; eternal vigilance, necessity of, 93–95; grassroots campaigns against, 23; grassroots groups, importance of, 103– 4; inevitability of, 82; and inner- city, 111; metaphors for, 96; national unpreparedness, as factor in, 112; and neighborhood morale, preservation of, 81; nonwhites, arrival of, 77; obsession over, 70, 73; as pliable concept, 70–71; private-section action, 86– 87; and race, avoidance of discussing, 96– 97; racial exclusion, 74; real- estate theory, and neighborhood life cycle, 73–74; rhetoric of, 72–74; shifting meaning of, 75; and slums, 75, 83; stability, as threat to, 73; as term, 74, 75; and urban renewal, 73; white fl ight because of, 105 neighborhood conservation, 73, 82– 83, 87, 89, 101; African Americans residency,

425

INDEX

neighborhood conservation (continued) as means to halt, 85; advocacy for, 89, 91–92; and federal legislation, 86, 363n49; “fi x-up, paint-up” campaigns, 87; profit incentive for, 90; as strategy against decay, 84– 85 Neighborhood Government (Kotler), 235, 237– 40, 245, 252, 257 Neighborhood Government Act (1973), 239 Neighborhood-Home Festival, 37– 38, 41 neighborhood life- cycle model, 75, 84, 87; federal mortgage policies, effect on, 80– 81; metropolitan development, 78; racial differences, and ideas about, 81; and racial heterogeneity, 76; scientific conservation, theory of, 78–79, 83; stages of, 76, 79– 80 neighborhood museums, 185, 188– 89; as agents of empowerment, 186; as countermodel to traditional museums, 187 Neighborhood Power (Morris and Hess), 245– 47, 251, 254, 257 neighborhoods movement, 239, 246, 293, 309, 327, 334; Catholic ethnics, as wing of, 262; “community control,” debate over, 249– 50; counterculture, appeal to, 240; failure of, 257– 58; fracturing of, 252– 57; international human rights concerns of, 251– 52; local alternative technologies, enthusiasm for, 244– 45; national coalition, as, 247– 52; and neighborhoodism, 232; neighborhood power, slogan of, 231, 248; private community associations, 257; and New Right, 328–29, 335; racial friction over, 249– 51; Republican adoption of, 330– 31; and self-governance, 231– 36, 240, 243– 45 neighborhood-unit plan, 13, 23, 56, 58, 62, 64, 69, 71, 122, 355n2; advantages of, 63; city planning, 53; community planning concepts, 52; criticism of, 67; as “laboratory,” 68; nostalgia, accusations of in, 67; racial segregation, as reinforcement of, 65, 67– 68; widespread adoption of, 59– 60 Nelson, Herbert, 114 Nelson, Robert, 257 Nesbitt, George, 153 Neuhaus, Richard John, 328–29

426

New Class, 328 New Deal, 3– 5, 22, 241, 269, 310, 314, 334; as coalition, 321, 325, 327; and Democrats, 271, 273; Federal Art Project of, 205– 6; greenbelt communities of, 60; liberalism of, 232; opponents of, 82, 241; propagandists for, 22, 27; racial policies of, 11, 145, 337; urban policies of, 84; and visual art, 201 New England, 25, 29, 42, 51 Newfield, Jack, 240 New Jersey, 325 New Journalism, 270 New Left, 3, 15, 233– 36, 240– 42, 248, 252, 273, 329. See also Left New Orleans (Louisiana), 177 New Right, 3, 5, 16, 293, 308, 325; neighborhoods rhetoric, adoption of by, 233, 257– 58, 327–29, 335. See also Right New Thing Art and Architecture Center, 187 New Urbanism, 339 New Women’s Coalition Conference, 308 New York Amsterdam News (newspaper), 98 New York City, 40, 54, 60– 61, 181, 219, 231, 251, 301, 303; East New York, 204, 211; Little Italy, 124, 130, 369n60; Lower East Side, 142, 168, 262, 321; Manhattan, 30, 34, 45, 124, 126, 155, 167– 68, 218, 302; Office of Ethnic Affairs, 296–97; Queens, 56, 268, 282; South Bronx, 333. See also Brooklyn, East Harlem, Harlem New York Radical Feminists, 301; West Village–1 brigade of, 301 New York State, 325 New York Times (newspaper), 91, 121, 168, 182, 270, 280; magazine of, 169 Nichols, J. C., 86 Nisbet, Robert, 115, 117–18, 245, 328, 409n34; laissez-faire philosophy of, 116 Nixon, Richard M., 273, 313, 315, 325–26, 330– 31; administration of, 234; era of, 313; southern strategy of, 314 No Bigger than Necessary (Greeley), 276 Nobody Speaks for Me! (Seifer), 298 North, Sterling, 37 Norton, Eleanor Holmes, 200, 308 Noschese, Christine, 305 Novak, Michael, 15, 260, 268– 69, 276–78, 280, 283, 286, 294, 317, 326; early

INDEX

political work of, 270–71; electoral politics, commentary on, 319–20, 329; ethnicity, views on, 271–73; Ethnic Millions Political Action Committee (EMPAC) of, 284– 85; gay rights, view on, 305; neoconservatism, shift to, 273 Oak Park (Illinois), 167 Obama, Barack, 17 O’Boyle, Patrick, 278 O’Brien, David, 265 O’Connor, Edwin, 13, 123, 128– 30, 264 October Cities (Rotella), 8 Office of Civilian Defense, 28 Office of Economic Opportunity, 237. See also war on poverty Ohio, 46, 207, 324, 325 “old neighborhood,” 21, 107, 114, 277, 291; black urbanites, and story of, 148; imagery in politics of, 311; v. new slum, 155; nostalgia for, 6, 143, 277; social identity of, 125– 30; v. suburb, 277 Old Right, 240, 242. See also Right Olmsted, Frederick Law Jr., 56 Omi, Michael, 139 One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Hoyt), 77 Operation Crossroads Africa, 190 Operation Home Improvement, 89–91, 96–98, 103 Operation Junkyard, 90 Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU), 195–96 The Organizational Weapon (Selznik), 115 Orman, Roscoe, 215 Orsi, Robert, 261 Orvell, Miles, 171 Osgood, Harry, 101 Osman, Suleiman, 232 The Other America (Harrington), 141, 146, 269 Ouellette, Laurie, 220–21, 227 Page, Max, 111 Paper Fish (De Rosa), 300 Park, Robert, 139, 146 Pasadena (California), 90 Patterson, Orlando, 284, 335 Paul VI, Pope, 268, 274, 285 Peel, Mark, 349n15

Pennsylvania, 278, 321, 325; primary election in, 311, 314 “The People in Your Neighborhood” (song), 221 Perry, Clarence, 11, 23, 52, 55– 56, 58, 60– 61, 67, 70, 81, 355n2; influence of, 59; planning guidelines of, 56– 57; race and residence, views on, 64 Perry, Ora Stokes, 102, 104 Peterson, Jan, 15, 290– 91, 293, 300– 4, 308, 338 Pet Show! (Keats), 207 Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), 46, 88, 224, 248, 259, 306, 321; Grays Ferry, 315; Italian Market in, 324; Queen Village, 250 Philadelphia Clean-up, Paint-up, Fix-up Committee, 90, 97 Phillips, Kevin, 313–14 Pierce, Chester, 224 Pinochet, Augusto, 251 Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), 98, 101, 247, 258; Polish Hill, 321 Pittsburgh Courier (newspaper), 80, 141; “Declaration of Principles” on housing, 98 planned communities, 51, 55– 56; progressive possibilities of, 62. See also neighborhood-unit plan Plante, Bill, 259– 60 Poland, 315 Polish American Congress, 411n68 Polish American Historical Association, 288 Polizzi, Sal, 283, 285, 324; as activist, 281– 82 Poor People’s Campaign, 150 Popular Front movement, 3, 12, 21, 26, 44, 49, 108, 206 A Populist Manifesto (Newfield and Greenfield), 240 poverty, 138, 143, 159, 217; culture of thesis, 141– 42, 153– 54, 192; documentaries on, 215; as intergenerational cycle, 141; politics, as topic in, 136; and racism, 154; structural roots of, 203, 224. See also slums, war on poverty Poulson, Norris, 104 Prince Georges County (Maryland), 250 public authority: crisis in, 237; decentralization of in cities, 237– 38

427

INDEX

public housing, 73, 82, 84, 92, 103, 189, 303; anticommunist rhetoric against, 108; federal policies on, 85– 87, 146, 334; scattered-site, 323 Puccini, Giacomo, 124 Puerto Ricans, 147 Pursell, Carroll, 257 Queen, Stuart, 79 The Quest for Community (Nisbet), 116 race, 140, 178; assimilationist model for, 140; ethnicity paradigm for, 139; and ghetto, 138; neighborhood as signifier for, 312; segregation, 26; and urban citizenship, 138; and urban space, 138. See also segregation racially restrictive covenants in housing, 23, 40, 65, 67– 68, 85, 98, 194 Radburn (New Jersey), 55 Radzialowski, Thaddeus, 281 Rainwater, Lee, 159, 297 Raskin, Marcus, 234, 236, 242 The Rat: Man’s Invited Affliction (exhibit), 193 Ratcliff, Richard, 79 Rawls, Lou, 219 Reagan, Ronald, 1, 16, 240, 273, 311, 317, 338; blue- collar strategy of, 332; Enterprise Zones concept, 256; “giantism,” speech against, 257; neighborhood symbols, use of, 2, 327, 330– 34; policies of, 334; Reagan Democrats, 332; and Reaganism, 330; and urban-policy debates, 333 Reasoner, Harry, 259 red scare, 108. See also Cold War: anticommunism Reed, Touré, 99 Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs (Regional Plan Association), 55, 57– 58, 60 Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), 55– 57 Reich, Robert, 310, 333– 34 Reid, Ogden, 109 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. See Kerner Commission Report Republican National Committee, 329 Republican Party, 85– 86, 241, 256, 307, 316, 323, 328–29, 332– 33; moderates in

428

239, 241, 317; neighborhood revitalization rhetoric from, 317, 332; presidential victories of, 16, 86, 256; realignments and, 313, 332; urban policies of, 86, 328; values litany of, 332, 334; white- ethnic appeals of, 314–15, 317 Republican Platform Committee, 239 Reuther, Walter, 92, 97 Ribicoff, Abraham, 160– 61 Rice, Elmer, 44, 48 Richmond Neighborhood Association, 102 Riemer, Svend, 65– 68, 122 Riessman, Frank, 156– 57, 161 Right, 233, 241, 274, 327. See also New Right, Old Right “The Right to Be Real” (Keats), 214 Riis, Jacob, 74, 169 Ring, Alfred, 79 Ripley, S. Dillon, 188– 89, 191, 197 Ripon Forum (magazine), 317, 409n30 The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (Novak), 270–71; utopian neighborhood vision in, 272–73 Rizzo, Frank, 250– 51, 323–24, 326 Robbins, Ira, 92 Robeson, Paul, 215 Robinson, Matt, 215, 219 Rodgers, Daniel, 309 Roemer, Derek, 153 Roe v. Wade, 290. See also abortion Roosevelt, Eleanor, 37, 40 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 38, 310, 321; electoral coalition of, 5, 314; party of, 331 Rose, Reginald, 13, 119–20, 122 Rossinow, Douglas, 200, 202 Rotella, Carlo, 8, 277 Roth, Benita, 291 Roth, Henry, 162 Royko, Mike, 270, 277 Russell Sage Foundation, 55– 57, 62, 64 Rustin, Bayard, 144– 45 Ryan, Mary, 293 Saarinen, Eliel, 356n29 Said, Edward, 196 St. Ambrose Church, 281– 82 St. Louis (Missouri), 98, 285, 324; Cardinals baseball team, 282; Hill neighborhood, 281– 83, 324 The Saint of Bleecker Street (Menotti), 123– 28, 130

INDEX

Sampson, Robert, 6, 374n54 Samuels, Gertrude, 169, 175 Sánchez, George, 108 San Diego (California), 306 San Francisco, 162, 185; Telegraph Hill, 33 San Francisco Diggers, 283 San Quentin State Prison, 236 Scanlon, Laura, 306 Schaflander, Gerald, 162– 63, 182 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 270 Schumacher, E. F., 244, 276, 330 Schwirian, Kent, 75 Scott, Daryl Michael, 141 Sears department store, 101 Sears-Roebuck Foundation, 100–1, 103– 4 Second Vatican Council. See Vatican II second-wave feminism, 3, 291, 308, 403n17; and communalism, 298; and ethnic revival, 292–93, 297; literary fiction of, 402n5; as popular movement, 303; working- class women, 297– 98. See also women’s movement The Secular City (Cox), 130, 270 segregation, 12, 40, 97, 121, 139, 141, 147– 48, 200, 220, 231; in Anacostia district, 194; in armed forces, 26; and blockbusting, 149; critics of concept of, 144, 164; neighborhood-unit plan, as reinforced by, 11, 65, 67– 69; opposition to, 98, 149, 168; in suburbs, 202; white- ethnic movement, 284– 85; white exodus, 149. See also desegregation busing Seifer, Nancy, 15, 291, 296– 300, 302, 308 Selma marches, 278 Selznik, Philip, 115 Sennett, Richard, 284 Serlin, David, 219, 226–27 Service Bureau for Intercultural Education, 38 Sesame Street (television series), 1, 14, 200, 202– 3, 216; aesthetic confl icts on, 225–27; black perspectives on, 217, 226; critics of, 222–24, 226; gender relations, depictions of on, 222–23; and Great Society aesthetics, 218, 221, 227; harmonious neighborhood scenes on, 220–21; nostalgic depictions of cities on, 221, 223; positive reaction to, 217– 18; premier of, 217; racial tolerance on, 215; urban neighborhood, depiction of

on, 202, 215, 218–20; war on poverty, as symbol of, 217–18; work, representations of on, 221–22. See also Children’s Television Workshop settlement movement, 55; in fiction, workers from, 33–34; participants in, 25, 30, 54 Shantytown (Keats), 205 Shepard, Ray Anthony, 213–14 Shriver, Sargent, 270, 271 Shuval, Judith T., 68, 358n60 Simkhovitch, Mary, 54 Simmel, Georg, 52 Simpson, Dick, 255 Sinatra, Frank, 26 Slipher, David, 92 slums: aspiration, culture of in, 142; and blight, 75, 83; despair v. hope in, 143; v. ghettos, 138; as melting pot, 142; as term, 75, 138. See also poverty slum clearance, 73, 82, 88, 130, 363n85; civil- defense motivation for, 111; defense of, 135– 36; federal subsidies for, 84– 86; free enterprise, as threat to, 84; support for, 85. See also urban renewal Small Is Beautiful (Schumacher), 244 Smeal, Eleanor Cutri, 307 Smith, Betty, 211, 306 Smith, Judith, 29, 158 Smithsonian Institution, 167, 188– 92 Snedden, David, 2, 27 The Snowy Day (Keats), 202, 206–7 Socialist Party, 241 social justice, 36, 104, 206, 255, 335; and Catholic church, 15, 130, 264, 268, 274, 278, 287– 88; as racial justice, 227; representation as central to, 182 The Social Order of the Slum (Suttles), 299 Social Organization (Cooley), 2 Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford- Stuyvesant History, 187 Sontag, Susan, 183 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 177 The South Goes North (Coles), 178– 81, 184– 85; criticism of, 182– 83 Soviet Union, 112, 114; expansionist ambitions of, 110; and Polish dissidents, 315 Spear, Allan, 148 Spigel, Lynn, 50 Spock, Benjamin, 218 Spring, Joel, 219, 227

429

INDEX

Stacey, Judith, 293 Stack, Carol, 14, 156– 58, 161, 163, 166, 375n84, 404n25 Stalinism, 34 State, US Department of, 109 Steffgen, Kent, 144 Stein, Clarence, 51, 53, 55, 69 Steinem, Gloria, 226 Steinfels, Peter, 265 Stempel, Larry, 48 Steptoe, John, 212 Stichman, Herman, 60 Stokes, Charles, 143 Stokes, Ora Brown. See Perry, Ora Stokes Stone, Chuck, 278 Stone, Jon, 218 Street Corner Conservative (Gavin), 331 Street Corner Society (Whyte), 299 Street Scene (musical drama), 24, 44– 45, 48– 50, 80, 124–26 The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Hoyt), 77–78 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 237, 250 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 236, 242, 256 Studio One (television program), 120 suburbs: as an age, 130; as American ideal, 7; and antisuburban temperament, 248; children of, 218, 220–21; criticism by counterculture, 283; culture of, 50; fl ight to, 12, 107, 117, 124, 196, 240, 262, 265; governance in, commentary on, 122, 238; isolation in, 202, 338; Levittown model of, 60; as opposite to “old neighborhood,” 277; and privacy, 7, 55; satire of, 119; and sprawling metropolitan expansion, 114, 228; on television, 123, 202, 218; as “Textbook Town,” 206; and US Catholics, 261, 263– 64, 280; voters in, 314, 333 Sugrue, Thomas, 43, 348n10 Sunbelt, 257, 325 Supreme Court, 3. See also Roe v. Wade Susannah (Floyd), 118 Suttles, Gerald, 158 Szwed, John, 154 Tannenbaum, Abraham, 206 Tannenbaum, Judith. See Shuval, Judith T.

430

Tatum, Tom, 321 Taylor, Ronald, 48 Teaford, Jon, 73 “The ‘Thereness’ of Women” (Lofland), 299 Thomas, Larry Erskine, 195–96 Thomas, Lewis, 79 Thompson, Hunter S., 270 Thunder on Sycamore Street (Rose), 119–22 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 180 To Empower People (Neuhaus and Berger), 328– 30 Toffler, Alvin, 269 Toledo (Ohio): Birmingham neighborhood, 282 Tomorrow! (Wylie), 112–14 Tönnies, Ferdinand: gemeinschaft/gesellschaft, concept of, 7 Topping, John C., 409n30 Transnational Institute, 251 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Smith), 211, 306 Triangle Shirtwaist fi re, 295 Truman, Harry, 85– 86; administration of, 86, 111 Tucker, Sterling, 149– 51 Uganda, 190 Umbertina (Barolini), 300 Unheavenly City (Banfield), 163 United States, 6, 17, 25, 28, 34, 36, 53, 59– 60, 63, 65, 143, 160, 168, 212, 244, 255, 260, 263, 270, 287– 88, 294, 312, 316, 333, 340; “geography of nowhere” in, 339; as multicultural mosaic, 7; neighborhood museums in, 185; poverty in, 142; women’s movement in, 300–1 Until That Day (Taylor), 236 “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (Wirth), 27, 62 Urban Land Economics (Ratcliff), 79 Urban Land Institute, 68 Urban League, 98–100, 144, 150, 202, 217; block clubs of, 98–99; Chicago chapter of, 99, 365n108 urban renewal, 317; African American displacement caused by, 136, 161; and antiblight campaigns, 73; and Democratic Party, 317. See also Housing Act (1949), Housing Act (1954), slum clearance Urban Training Center for Christian Mission, 236

INDEX

The Urban Villagers (Gans), 135, 299 US Catholic church, 15, 280, 316; bishops of, 265, 275–76, 279, 285– 88, 316, 318, 321; “Call to Action” (apostolic letter), 268, 285; Call to Action assembly, 286, 288– 89; “Catholic Revolution,” 266– 67; as “community without walls,” 266; crisis in, 265; faith, and urban spaces, 266; identity crisis in, 260– 61, 283; liturgy in, 265, 268, 280, 287; melting pot and, 266; neighborhoods of, 259–76; particularism v. universalism in, 276; and provincialism, 267; quasimystical approach to, 273; racial equality, commitment to, 278–79; social ethic of, 277; structured communalism in, 266; subsidiarity, doctrine of, 268, 276; white- ethnic activists in, 266. See also American Catholicism, Catholic neighborhoods US Catholic Conference, 279, 285 US Chamber of Commerce, 71, 89–90, 103 US Commission on Civil Rights, 202 The Valuation of Real Estate (Babcock), 76 The Valuation of Real Estate (Ring), 79 Van Der Zee, James, 174 Vatican II, 260, 264– 65, 270, 274–75, 283, 288, 316; and aggiornamento, 264; as resource for neighborhood advocates, 268; as upheaval in US Catholic church, 261, 285 Vermont, 330 Vernon, Raymond, 75–76, 80 Vietnam War, 232, 239, 259, 276; veterans of, 243 Voices of Decline (Beauregard), 8 von Hoffman, Alexander, 73 Wallace, George C., 270, 311 A Walker in the City (Kazin), 211 Walter, Mildred Pitts, 212 Warner, Sam Bass Jr., 138, 240 war on poverty, 149, 190, 200–1, 226. See also Community Action program, Head Start Warsaw (Poland), 204 Washington, DC, 101, 104, 143, 166, 188, 234, 246, 302; Adams-Morgan, 187, 243– 45, 247, 252– 54, 258; Anacostia, 189–90, 193–94; demographic transfor-

mation in, 189; Shaw neighborhood, 151 Washington, Harold, 258 Washington, Sylvia Hood, 99, 365n108 Washington Free Community, 232, 243 Washington State, 101 Waskow, Arthur, 234 Watergate scandal, 232, 239, 310, 312 Watts (Los Angeles), 221; uprising in, 147, 153 Waverly: A Study in Neighborhood Conservation (McNeal and Goodwillie), 82– 83 Weaver, Robert, 135– 37 Webber, Melvin, 339 Weddington, Sarah, 249, 290, 293 Wehrly, Max, 68 Weiler, Conrad, 250 Weill, Kurt, 13, 44, 46– 47, 80 Weiss, Marc, 85 welfare state, 4, 10, 328, 334 West Africa, 153 Westbrook, Robert, 22 Westchester County (New York), 168, 221 white- ethnic movement, 268, 290–91, 294, 309; and African Americans, 294; antiCatholic bias, accusations of by, 270; counterpart to civil rights movement, described as, 277–78; economic challenges facing, 280; and racial justice, 284– 85; religious symbols, use of, 282; and segregation, 285; subcultures v. WASP superculture, 272; and urban politics, 272; women in, 295–96, 403n17 white- ethnic revival, 15, 255, 261– 62, 274–76, 278–79, 289, 305, 320; AngloProtestant “superculture,” contrast drawn with, 271–73, 280; Catholicism of, 273; ethnic authenticity, nostalgia for, 277; and feminism, 291–92, 403n17; key texts of, 270, 274; and multiculturalism, 307– 8; narratives of racial innocence of, 284; neighborhood empowerment, as weapon for, 280– 83; politics, effect on, 309; and Vatican II, 268 White House Conference on Ethnicity and Neighborhood Revitalization, 317, 318 Whitnall, Gordon, 63 Why Can’t They Be Like Us? (Greeley), 274 Whyte, William F., 158 Whyte, William H., 118

431

INDEX

Wilentz, Sean, 330 Wilhelmsen, Frederick, 267 Wilkins, Roy, 26 Will, George, 239 Williams, Raymond, 6 Willis, Deborah, 168 Wills, Garry, 267 Wilson, Flip, 219 Winant, Howard, 139 Winter, Gibson, 269 Wirth, Louis, 27, 62, 67, 106, 139, 152; urban ghettos, writings on, 31, 36 Wirthlin, Richard, 333 Wisconsin, 325 WNDT (television station), 215 women’s movement, 292–93, 298, 300–1, 306, 308; neighborhood feminism, 15, 291, 296, 300, 308. See also National Organization for Women (NOW), second-wave feminism Wonder, Stevie, 219

432

Wood, Robert C., 122, 308 World War I, 32, 37, 261 World War II, 2, 21, 31, 52, 118, 264, 327, 350n12 Workingman’s Wife (Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel), 297 Wright, Richard, 159 Wurster, Catherine Bauer. See Bauer, Catherine Wylie, Philip, 113–14; and “momism,” 112 X, Malcolm, 162, 196 Yerxa, Fendall, 109 Yezierska, Anzia, 36 Yiddish literature, 34 Young, Whitney, 202, 217 Young Communist League, 115 Zambia, 190 Zukin, Sharon, 374n53

H I S TO R I C A L S T U D I E S O F U R B A N A M E R I C A Edited by Lila Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda Seligman James R. Grossman, editor emeritus

Series titles, continued from front matter Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run by Sarah Jo Peterson Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice- Cleared Communities by Lawrence J. Vale Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago by Lilia Fernandez Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960 by Richard Harris Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities by Carl H. Nightingale Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago by Tobias Brinkmann In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930 by Peter C. Baldwin Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain by Mark Peel The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin by Christopher Klemek I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn- of-the- Century Chicago by Cynthia M. Blair Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth- Century New York City by Lorrin Thomas Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia by Jordan Stanger-Ross New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era by Jennifer Fronc African American Urban History since World War II edited by Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing by D. Bradford Hunt

Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California by Charlotte Brooks The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia by Guian A. McKee Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis by Robert Lewis The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz in association with the American Antiquarian Society Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 by Chad Heap Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America by David M. P. Freund Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 by Adam Green The New Suburban History edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark by Timothy J. Gilfoyle City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919 by Margaret Garb Chicagoland: City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age by Ann Durkin Keating The Elusive Ideal: Equal Educational Opportunity and the Federal Role in Boston’s Public Schools, 1950–1985 by Adam R. Nelson Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side by Amanda I. Seligman Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It by Alison Isenberg Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century by Andrew Wiese Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890–1919 by Robin F. Bachin In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 by Leslie M. Harris My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working- Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 by Becky M. Nicolaides

Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto by Wendell Pritchett The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 by Max Page Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 by David O. Stowell Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920 by Madelon Powers Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 by Arnold R. Hirsch Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 by Karen Sawislak Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era by Gail Radford Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth- Century Urban North by John T. McGreevy