American Carnage and the Art of the Urban Autopsy

Transcription

1 American Carnage and the Art of the Urban Autopsy S. Paul O'Hara Reviews in American History, Volume 46, Number 1, March 2018, pp (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article Access provided at 22 Mar :08 GMT with no institutional affiliation

2 AMERICAN CARNAGE AND THE ART OF THE URBAN AUTOPSY S. PAUL O HARA Steven Conn. Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. $ Robert W. Snyder. Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, pp. $ Andrew R. Highsmith. Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. $ David Stradling and Richard Stradling. Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, pp. $ At some point in the middle of the 1960s, tucked between the Watts riots of 1965 and the Detroit riots of 1968, American society determined that cities were not only in decline but that they all were in the grips of an urban crisis. Experts, naysayers, policy makers, and prognosticators all outlined the depth of the urban crisis. One cannot be expected to rate as an expert on the city, lamented the new Cleveland mayor Carl Stokes in 1968, unless one foresees its doom. And indeed, the declarations of an urban crisis did reflect some very real tensions and problems with race relations, capital disinvestment, crime, and environmental degradation. However, critics of American cities also created a sense of crisis which had its own language of decay, chaos and collapse. Furthermore, the language of the urban crisis not only shaped policies and governmental practices it also exacerbated the process of disinvestment. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the urban crisis signaled the impending death of many American cities. Such rhetoric of urban conditions and urban blight continue to resonate in the body politic, even as recently and unequivocally as Donald Trump s inauguration speech in which he spoke of mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner-cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across Reviews in American History 46 (2018) by Johns Hopkins University Press

3 136 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2018 the landscapes of our nation... crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives. Here is all the imagery and rhetoric of the urban crisis. It is a passage which could have been lifted from 1968, but one that still describes many current deindustrialized and disinvested cites. One of the sad truths of the great economic divergence of the last twenty years is that a handful of American cities are booming with reinvestment, repopulation, and resettlement, yet other cities still struggle to recover from the twentieth century. Clearly, the transformation of American urbanism was deep, profound, and long-lasting its manifestations both shockingly real, frustratingly imagined, and deeply racialized. In his 1996 history of Detroit, Thomas Sugrue framed one of the key questions that urban historians have asked for the past twenty years: just what were the origins of the urban crisis? In Sugrue s work, as well as numerous other monographs that followed, historians have found multiple culprits, including the suburbanization of people and jobs, disinvestment and deindustrialization, institutional racism and segregation, the failure of or defunding of government programs, and the political limits of post-war liberalism. Most of the works under review reaffirm Sugrue s point that the roots of the urban crisis predated the riots and disinvestment of the late 1960s, even as each study suggests that the moment of disinvestment, deindustrialization, and crisis varies greatly by city. The urban crisis has framed much of the discussion of American urbanism and historiography, and it is at its heart a declension narrative. Such histories start with the implicit understanding of the stark realities of late 20 th century cities and look backward for causes, origins, and blame. They function as urban autopsies; it is a search for a cause of death. For the books under review, finding the origins of the urban crisis is the underlying quest, even when not explicitly stated by the author. Each study shows how, throughout the past century, American policy makers, politicians, and employers have assumed that there is something fundamentally unsound and unnatural about the urban environment. The books show how reformers tried to fix the urban environment or craft policies that made it easier for capital and people to flee cities. Other residents lamented what their city had become and remembered what it once had been through a fog of nostalgia. The physical space of the city experienced either high turnover of residents or slow abandonment. Meanwhile, local officials and the people who continued to live in these cities struggled to find solutions, stability, and answers to the various and ongoing urban crises. Yet at the same time, each book tries to move beyond the simplicity of an autopsy of the urban crisis by showing dynamic, organic, and transforming urban spaces. Steven Conn gives perhaps the broadest vision of urban history and the urban crisis by tracing the evolution of American anti-urban sentiment. Critics of the city, Conn points out, have long tended to define the city in two

4 O HARA / American Carnage 137 ways. One version saw the city as a physical space of density; a place where too many people lived in close contact with each other. The second version saw the city as a public realm of unruly democratic processes and shared power. Either way, the cultural and intellectual ethos of anti-urbanism assumed that the urban environment was flawed and dangerous. Even as early as the Progressive era, reformers either tried to fix the unruly public realm by establishing political reforms or reshape neighborhoods by crafting sprawling parks and sweeping boulevards. Meanwhile urban reformers such as city managers restored order to the political chaos of the too-democratic city. By the 1920s, both of these movements assumed that answers to urban problems could be found in decentralization of both politics and populations. Garden cities could release the pressure that built in cities. Reformers assumed that genuinely sub-urban planned spaces could replicate the lost worlds of smaller villages, places defined by their homogeneity, abundant space, and simple politics. This movement could then reshape city neighborhoods, too. The great irony here being that such urban planners, Conn points out, often tended to be the most anti-urban; their plans assumed the inherent flaws and problems of population and politics. The city was something that needed to be fixed, abandoned, or replaced. New Deal reforms during the Great Depression did little to alleviate these basic assumptions about urban flaws. Not only did slum clearance proponents try to eliminate the supposed worst elements of American cities, but New Deal policies that created greenbelt suburbs actively tried to lure people out of the cities. Educational films such as The City, which was written under the guidance of leading urban theorist Lewis Mumford, categorized all the problems of the urban environment and offered suburban living as a panacea to these concerns. At the same time, new American folklore and memory created an idea of Americanism encapsulated in either the homogenous New England town or the culturally pure Appalachian hills. Conservative leaning Americans could find in the imagined New England town the spirit of commonweal and political consensus. For the more liberal set, the Highlander folk school offered Appalachia as a genuinely American form of independence and autonomous radicalism. Hence, long before post-war suburban policies, housing segregation, and Nixon s dismantling of the Great Society, an intellectual tradition that ranged both left and right had firmly established the idea that cities were flawed. Freeway construction, racial politics, and disinvestment in the post-war period (the usual suspects of urban decline) exacerbated this trend, but Conn shows how the ethos of anti-urbanism was already well in place. Anti-urbanism allowed federal officials and policies to pursue, at best, benign neglect, and intentional redistribution of resources, which undermined urban society, at worst.

5 138 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2018 The anti-urban assumption of American policy makers sets the stage for much of the history and historiography that we know will follow. We know what will become of New York City, Flint, and Cleveland; the autopsy questions of urban decline become why, when, and under whose watch. Yet urban histories offer more than mere autopsy. In his history of Washington Heights, Robert Snyder provides an intimate portrait of the urban experience. Gone, for the most part, are the urban planners and social critics who promised broad sweeping changes to the city. Instead, Snyder gives us the narrow neighborhood at the far northern end of Manhattan. Snyder s story is still full of urban discord, investment and disinvestment, and transformation. And like all urban histories of the twentieth century, we know that this will end in crisis. Yet Washington Heights lets Snyder move block by block as this transformation comes. Perhaps most telling is Snyder s own backstory; Washington Heights was the neighborhood of his parents who, though they left the neighborhood for the suburbs, still spoke highly of the place (a gentle reminder in the wake of Conn s history of anti-urbanism, that one did not necessarily need to be anti-urban to move to the suburbs). Rather, Washington Heights encountered a great deal of turnover. Families moved in and families moved out. New immigrants from new places transformed the neighborhood block by block, only to be replaced by yet another group. This gave the neighborhood a vibrant fluidity. Snyder points out that the diversity of the neighborhood did not make racial segregation and discrimination less entrenched, but rather that the process of racial segregation was more varied. A resident of Washington Heights was often defined by their block and these racial and ethnic patterns would vary block to block. Over time these patterns changed. As Eastern European Jews were replaced by German Jews and as African Americans were replaced by Dominicans, not only did neighborhoods change but they very categories of race and ethnicity transformed as well. This fluidity of space created shifting boundaries within the neighborhood, which exacerbated tensions over race, housing, and culture. Yet such fluidity and change made urban reforms all the more difficult. New York city in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s prided itself as a multicultural, liberal city. Officials believed that they could negotiate a multicultural city and were thus largely immune from deep racial tensions. However, in places such as Washington Heights, the constantly shifting terrain of ethnic and racial boundaries gave post-war liberals little foundation upon which to build their policies. For example, Snyder points out that Washington Heights s new neighborhood pool was integrated (as per liberal city policy), but the neighborhoods around the pool were deeply segregated. Little good, it seems, to build a new integrated public pool if residents could not safely walk through the surrounding neighborhoods to access it. Moreover, the integration of public pools, with their bodily intimacy and the need for

6 O HARA / American Carnage 139 equal access, only triggered greater fantasies and fears about racial integration; concerns that would foreshadow the greater conflicts about school integration which would soon follow. By the mid-1950s, concern over integration combined with rising fears about youth, crime, gangs, and juvenile delinquency. The 1957 stabbing death of young Michael Farmer and the sensational trial that followed created a vision of a city beset by violent gangs defined by different races and ethnicities; a vision then seared into the American mind with West Side Story. But, Snyder points out, the Farmer case also demonstrates an important post-war pivot. On the one hand, city officials paid the case little attention, in essence refusing to acknowledge the limits of post-war liberalism. On the other hand, for residents of Washington Heights and readers of the press coverage, gang violence signaled a city now in decline. It had become a dangerous place filled with unruly youth and dangerous racial divides. It became, in the eyes of many, a place to leave if you could. Long before the very real crises of race riots in the 1960s or the drug violence of the 1980s, the story of the decline and danger of the Heights was established. But this sense of urban decline was less rooted in the anti-urbanism described by Conn than in a sense of nostalgia; for many the neighborhood was not what it once had been. It was not the density or vibrancy of the city, but the racial difference of the newest residents (whomever they might be) which was seemingly to blame for the changed neighborhood. The environments of Washington Heights were less radically remade by white flight or disinvestment than by shifting tensions over race and integration, new understandings of religion, race, and housing. In his study of Flint, Michigan, Andrew Highsmith offers a very different perspective on urban spaces, urban history, and the coming of the urban crisis. His is a story of a mill town, built around a central manufacturer and defined by the twentieth-century labor struggles (and successes). The declension narratives of the mill town look very different from Washington Heights s tales of suburbanization or drugs, instead the mill town has been defined by industrial jobs and the loss of those jobs. And certainly Flint fits this storyline. In the middle of the twentieth century General Motors and Flint boomed, by the end of the century GM had closed its plants and Flint was in freefall. But Highsmith shows us that the story of Flint is far more complicated than just lost jobs. The seeds of Flint s fall, especially its patterns of structural inequality and entrenched social divides, were planted long before the closure of the auto plants. All of the markers of post-war social divisions were present in Flint. Alongside corporate growth and rising union power lay vast racial inequalities, segregation, and disinvestment. In Flint, like so many other places in the 1950s, suburban growth meant a reduction in urban population and its accompanying tax base. At the same time, racial segregation further divided the

7 140 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2018 physical spaces and public cultures of the city. Highsmith argues that the de facto segregation in Flint was just as intentional as any other form of racial separation. Hence the political instabilities of racial segregation, alongside the suburbanization of peoples and jobs, left Flint vulnerable to the economic disruptions of deindustrialization. Yet Highsmith points out that, while all of this is equally true in Flint as elsewhere, such a post-war declension story also hides important aspects of Flint s industrial history. Racial segregation in Flint did not necessarily cause its downfall, nor was it exclusively shifts in the manufacturing economy, but rather the intricate ways that economic shifts reverberated within a segregated community. Unlike the anti-urban critics described by Conn, for residents of Flint, the contours of urban history were not shaped by a sense of crisis. Nor did the residents of Flint conjure nostalgia similar to the residents of Washington Heights about how the neighborhoods once were. Instead, the people of Flint, alongside GM and city leaders, developed a persistent optimism about the possibility of revitalization. While we, as historians, may look back and see declension, leaders in Flint saw a series of new opportunities, up to and including the titular sign that adorned abandoned factories promising that demolition means progress. Highsmith points out that these efforts at revitalization often exacerbated the problems of racial segregation and suburbanization; community center public schools, new freeways and subdivisions, and efforts at downtown revitalization made racial divisions deeper. So too is blame broadly shared in Flint. While General Motors was actively moving production out of the city proper to its surrounding countryside, it did so with the cooperation of an urban government that envisioned greater metropolitan growth. Federal programs, such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Authority also set the template for racial division and suburban mobility. But once again, many saw suburbanization as progressive growth not urban crisis. Residents of the city and the suburbs, leaders of the city, General Motors, and others invested in the region all held a belief in metropolitan capitalism ; it was not necessarily assumed that the city, the suburbs, and GM were all pitted against each other. But the absence of such an assumption did not alleviate the racial tensions or divides of a segregated city, nor could it keep GM tied to the city when the company looked to move elsewhere. No sense of optimism in revitalization or progress could alleviate the pain of plant closures. Revitalization efforts also come to define the story of Cleveland in the 1970s, as told by Richard and David Stradling. At first glance, the Stradlings book also has the makings of an urban autopsy, a decline and death marked by (or perhaps begun by) the 1969 Cuyahoga river fire. Yet the authors point out that the story of decline and crisis that they set out to write is not the one that they found; the river fire did not define the city of Cleveland although

8 O HARA / American Carnage 141 in the decades since, the story of the fire has taken on larger meaning in the city s collective memory. Instead of outrage, crisis, or collapse, local response to the 1969 fire was measured and minuscule. Clevelanders were not surprised that their river burned, just as they were unsurprised by the dozen times it had caught fire before. Such was the reality of a working industrial town. However, shortly after the 1969 fire, the imagery, meaning, and metaphor of a burning river became much more symbolically important. It became part of several larger national conversations, including the post-war critique that cities were obsolete, the emerging environmental critique of a polluted landscape, and the racialized imagery of a black city literally on fire. The resonance of such narratives made the imagery of a burning river into a powerful metaphor. The way people understood the image of a burning river helped solidify the language of an urban crisis. For a nation facing race riots, political assassinations, and environmental concerns, the decidedly unnatural sight of a burning river became a symbol of anti-urban assumptions and fears; something was seemingly amiss and the urban crisis had begun. Cleveland became, in the critical eyes of the nation, the city where the river burned. Yet the Stradlings argue that urban decay in Cleveland was not just metaphorical but real and tangible. Housing stock, public services, air and water quality, and other markers of the urban environment did decline. The story of Cleveland becomes not just the environmental paradox of a burning river but the city where the river burned. Similar to Highsmith s analysis of Flint, the Stradlings argue that decline in Cleveland is a demonstration of the limits of post-war liberalism s ability to curb unequal investment and racial segregation. At the same time, the response to Cleveland s air and water also demonstrated the limits of environmental agitation and policy to address the broad and systemic degradation of the city. The challenge for Cleveland, and its new black mayor Carl Stokes, was to remake its image of obsolesce while also stemming the tide of decline, to address the unfair narrative of a city on fire while also addressing the very real issues facing the city. For the Stokes administration, which, instead of the river, becomes the focus of the book, this becomes a multi-front effort. Stokes tried to visibly fix urban conditions ranging from downtown renewal to the eradication of rats, while also trying to build a broader Greater Cleveland that crossed multiple municipal boundaries and addressed larger environmental concerns. Yet despite the heart-wrenching letters from school children in Cleveland and its suburbs begging the mayor to fix the environment, the shortcomings of municipal government became one more example of the limits of liberal reform. Despite Stokes s valiant efforts, Cleveland remained the city where the river burned. So where does this leave the chronologies and commonalities of American urban history? Each of these books shows just how deeply contextualized the politics of the urban environment really are. The environments of Washington

9 142 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2018 Heights grew directly out of the lived experiences of the people in Washington Heights. Likewise, the post-war histories of Flint and Cleveland were defined by the economic and racial realities of these cities. Ultimately these are not histories of the urban crisis but rather histories of Washington Heights s crisis, Flint s crisis, Cleveland s crisis, and even urban planners imagined ideas of the urban crisis. However, some important themes do emerge from these excellent studies. First, these studies demonstrate how important it is to distinguish the perception of crisis from the realities of crisis. Clearly in the second half of the twentieth century, American cities faced serious and very real issues. Yet, at the same time, urban environments within the American political imagination often carried imagined qualities of chaos, decline, crisis, and danger. Part of the task of the urban historian is to understand how these feed each other both directions; all four of these works make such connections. Second, these works all challenge our understanding of not just the chronology of the urban crisis, which has been sneaking backward ever since Sugrue s history of Detroit, but also our chronology of liberalism. In all four of these books, the New Deal and its policies do not come off well. The New Deal represents the foundation of twentieth-century liberalism, but at the core of New Deal urban policy lay an assumption that cities needed to be fixed through blight removal, suburbanization, community-schools, and red-lining bank policies. Not only did these policies more deeply entrench structural inequalities, but when Great Society reforms such as the Model Cities program tried to address these inequalities, policy makers, industrialists, and suburbanites had already assumed that an urban crisis was either imminent or already underway. Lastly, these works show how difficult but necessary it is to delineate different kinds of crises from each other. Within these works, we can trace racial violence, deindustrialization, disinvestment, environmental degradation, and structural inequalities. Certainly, each of these various crises influenced and informed each other and they were interconnected, but at the same time, they were different issues. In Cleveland, for example, the capacity to conflate the various crises into a single city on fire meant no solutions or reforms could ever take hold. Even in President Trump s Inaugural address, we see the conflation of poverty, plant closure, drugs, and crime into a single sentence describing American carnage. Often the declension narrative is assumed, even by policymakers, but not always, as these studies show. Hidden by the national language of anti-urbanism and urban crisis, some city residents displayed an optimistic and pragmatic determination to make their cities function and thrive. If we lose the nuances, contexts, and complexities of urban decline and we forget the efforts to survive the reverse these trends, then we are left with vague and decontextualized references to American carnage. The history of American cities is too rich for that, and these fine studies, each

10 O HARA / American Carnage 143 in their own way, tap into the rich veins of urban history to do more than just mark the death of cities. To return to the metaphor, the autopsies show multiple causes of death, the list of suspects is long, the time of death varies greatly. But perhaps most importantly, reports of the death of American cities have often been greatly exaggerated. S. Paul O Hara is an Associate Professor of History at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is the author of Gary, The Most American of All American Cities.