When historians refer to “urban renewal,” they are not describing one singular policy. After 1945, as Andrew Highsmith, Irene Holliman, and Guian McKee show, leaders of renewal efforts in Flint, Atlanta, and Philadelphia assumed that a combination of slum clearance, office towers, and expressways would bring white, middle-class people back to downtown. Surprisingly, African American leaders in Flint and Atlanta often cooperated in these plans. In Philadelphia, however, Mayor Frank Rizzo, known as a racist, used renewal funds to create jobs for African American and Puerto Rican women. Federal officials also financed suburbanization, thus channeling resources away from the nation's inner cities and leaving behind a wake of dilapidated infrastructure and racialized poverty. White Americans attributed renewal and suburbanization to the work of markets, overlooking the decisive hand of politicians and public policy. The skewed effects of these renewal and suburbanization programs denote a time “when affirmative action was white.”
Irene Holliman was unable to attend the Organization of American Historians meeting. Holliman and Highsmith had organized the session.
2.
Albert Churella, "The Standard Railroad of the World: A History of the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1846-1968" (manuscript under contract to the University of Pennsylvania Press that Professor Churella generously shared with us); Barbara Hahn, "Union Terminal: Business Clubs, Railroads, and City Planning in Cincinnati, 1880-1933," Journal of Urban History 30 (2004): 707-28; Dominic Vitiello, "Machine Building and City Building: Urban Planning and Industrial Restructuring in Philadelphia, 1894-1928," Journal of Urban History 34 (2008): 399-434. See also architectural historian Hilary Ballon's observation that "Penn station was the first urban renewal project in twentieth-century Manhattan," in her, New York's Pennsylvania Stations (New York, 2002), 35.
3.
Roger Biles, Big Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago ( DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984).
4.
Waldemar Kaempffert , "Science in the News," New York Times, September 10, 1939, D8, in ProQuest Historical Newspapers, New York Times, (accessed January 16, 2008). http://proquest.umi.com.ezproxy.fau.edu/pqdweb?index=1&did=113361057&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt=10&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=HNP&TS=1230135980&clientId=3326.
5.
Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003).
6.
Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939-1989, rev. ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). Technically speaking, state road engineers fixed route coordinates and supervised construction of main or "trunk" roads. Nevertheless, because MacDonald's engineers approved payment of the federal government's share of highway construction expenses, in effect those same engineers exercised considerable leverage in such matters as route selection, materials, and design. Skilled at working with members of Congress and presidents of the United States as well as with a far-flung network of state road engineers, between 1921 and the mid-1960s MacDonald's engineers dominated road building. Historian Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987) finds that the authority of MacDonald's engineers rested on their regular invocation of the ideal of apolitical expertise and on their posts as chairs of key committees within the American Association of State Highway Officials.
7.
Paul Barrett and Mark H. Rose, "Street Smarts: The Politics of Transportation Statistics in the American City, 1900-1990," Journal of Urban History25 (1999): 405-33, including quotations from Toll Roads and Free Roads.
8.
Rose, Interstate; Seely, Building the American Highway System; Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956 ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
9.
Roger Biles, Richard J. Daley, Politics, Race, and the Governing of Chicago (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995); Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); John F. Bauman and Edward K. Muller, Before Renaissance: Planning in Pittsburgh, 1889-1943 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); David Schuyler, A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1940-1980 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002); Roy Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh (New York: Wiley, 1969); Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
10.
"Wagner Asks U.S. for New Slum Aid,"New York Times, January 11, 1958, p. 18, Proquest Historical Newspapers, New York Times, (accessed January 21, 2008). http://proquest.umi.com.ezproxy.fau.edu/pqdweb?index=0&did=82671930&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt=10&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=HNP&TS=1230136464&clientId=3326.
11.
On the other hand, historian Jon C. Teaford, "Urban Renewal and Its Aftermath," Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 2 (2000): 443-65, determines that "Title I and its amendments generated more paperwork than buildings" and that in fact "private demand and available financing . . . spurred . . . reconstruction" in "Midtown and Lower Manhattan, the Chicago Loop, and in downtowns across America." For a compelling effort to debunk several myths surrounding urban renewal, see Marc A. Weiss, "The Origins and Legacy of Urban Renewal," in Pierre Clavel, John Forester, and William W. Goldsmith, eds., Urban and Regional Planning in an Age of Austerity (New York, 1980), 53-80. Thanks to Ray Mohl for bringing Weiss' essay to our attention.
12.
Wendell E. Pritchett, "Which Urban Crisis: Regionalism, Race, and Urban Policy, 1960-1974," Journal of Urban History 34 (2008): 280; Morton Keller, "Looking at the State: An American Perspective" (review essay), American Historical Review 106 (2001): 114-18; Christopher Klemek, "From Political Outsider to Power Broker in Two `Great American Cities': Jane Jacobs and the Fall of the Urban Renewal Order in New York and Toronto," Journal of Urban History 34 (2008): 309-32; Mark H. Rose, "Reframing American Highway Politics, 1956-1995," Journal of Planning History 2 (2003): 212-36; papers presented by Brian Robick and Margaret Rockwell at a session titled "Urban Renewal," bi-annual meeting of the Society for American City and Regional Planning, Portland, ME, October 2007.
13.
Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance; Mark I. Gelfand, Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933-1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
14.
Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Raymond A. Mohl, "Making the Second Ghetto in Metropolitan Miami, 1940-1960," Journal of Urban History 21 (1995); 395-427; Raymond A. Mohl, "The Second Ghetto Thesis and the Power of History," Journal of Urban History 29 (2003): 243-56; Lizabeth Cohen, Thomas W. Hanchett, and Kenneth T. Jackson, "AHR Forum: Shopping Malls in America," American Historical Review 101 (1996): 1049-1121; Owen Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Robin F. Bachin, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Jeffrey Helgeson, "Migration Neighborhoods: Mapping Opportunity in Black Chicago" (paper presented at the Urban History Seminar, Chicago Historical Museum, February 2008, which the author courteously shared with us). See also Amanda Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), where the author shows that the much-discussed process of "white flight" to the suburbs did not take place until after Mayor Daley refused to supply city services such as building inspections and enforcement of housing codes.
15.
Michael Omi and Harold Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994); Sally H. Clarke, Trust and Power: Consumers, the Modern Corporation, and the Making of the United States Automobile Market (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Louis Hyman, "Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America," (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007), which Professor Hyman kindly sent to us; "Credit Cards are Just Speck in the Big Picture, but Spreading," New York Times, May 9, 1960, p. 38, Proquest Historical Newspapers, New York Times, (accessed February 13, 2008) http:// proquest.umi.com.ezproxy.fau.edu/pqdweb?index=0&did=105432170&SrchMode=1&sid=3&Fmt=10&VInst= PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=HNP&TS=1230136617&clientId=3326; Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
16.
Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2006); Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 2006); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Margaret Pugh O'Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
17.
"Job Loss Upstate Scored by Rabbi," New York Times, January 9, 1960, p. 25, Proquest Historical Newspapers, New York Times, (accessed February 15, 2008) http://proquest.umi.com.ezproxy.fau.edu/pqdweb? index=0&did=105173998&SrchMode=1&sid=5&Fmt=10&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName =HNP&TS=1230137015&clientId=3326; Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Richard A. Greenwald, "Labor, Management, and the Political Economy of the Postwar New York Waterfront" (manuscript under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press that Professor Greenwald generously shared with us); Mark H. Rose, Bruce E. Seely, and Paul Barrett, The Best Transportation System in the World: Railroads, Trucks, Airlines and American Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).
18.
Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); Becky Nicolaides, "How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs," in The New Suburban History, ed. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Arnold R. Hirsch, "`Containment' on the Home Front: Race and Federal Housing Policy from the New Deal to the Cold War," Journal of Urban History 26 (2000): 158-89.
19.
David M.Freund, ColoredProperty: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
20.
For broad treatments of deindustrialization, see Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht, The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Having studied "how a Christian pro-business social movement grew from the bottom up as well as top down," however, historian Bethany Moreton, "The Soul of the Service Economy: Wal-Mart and the Making of Christian Free Enterprise, 1929-1994," Enterprise & Society 8 (2007): 777-83, adds the important point that "analyses of the shift to the service economy narrate the story of de-industrialization from the perspective of an auto plant in Detroit rather than a megachurch in Dallas."
21.
Rose, Seely, and Barrett, The Best Transportation System in the World; Joel Rast, Remaking Chicago: The Political Origins of Urban Industrial Change ( DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999). On the potential for a diminution of market talk among business leaders, see the report of Harvard Business School historian Richard H. K. Vietor, How Countries Compete: Strategy, Structure, and Government in the Global Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007), 2, that "when I teach the . . . [Business, Government, and International Economy] course to executives, they see the degree to which economic performance is indeed a function of government policy."
