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

By Benjamin Looker

Despite the pundits who have written its epitaph and the latter-day refugees who have fled its confines for the half-acre suburban estate, the city neighborhood has endured as an idea central to American culture. In A Nation of Neighborhoods, Benjamin Looker presents us with the city neighborhood as both an endless problem and a possibility.

Looker investigates the cultural, social, and political complexities of the idea of “neighborhood” in postwar America and how Americans grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces from World War II to the Reagan era. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood’s significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. By studying the way these contests unfolded across a startling variety of genres—Broadway shows, radio plays, urban ethnographies, real estate documents, and even children’s programming—Looker shows that the neighborhood ideal has functioned as a central symbolic site for advancing and debating theories about American national identity and democratic practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9780226290454

Book preview

A Nation of Neighborhoods

Edited by Lila Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda Seligman

James R. Grossman, editor emeritus

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Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto

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Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run

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Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities

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Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago

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Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960

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Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities

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New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era

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African American Urban History since World War II

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The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia

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Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis

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The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York

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in association with the American Antiquarian Society

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The New Suburban History

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A Nation of Neighborhoods

Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America

Benjamin Looker

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

BENJAMIN LOOKER 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 978-0-226-29031-7 (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

Part I Neighborhood Visions from Popular Front to Populist Memory

1 Microcosms of Democracy: Depicting the City Neighborhood in Wartime America

2 Communities under Glass: The Neighborhood Unit Plan and Postwar Privatization

3 The Specter of Blight: The Neighborhood under Siege

4 Routes of Escape: Cold War Individualism and Community Ties

Part II The Urban Crisis and the Meanings of City Community

5 A Place Apart: The New Ghetto and the Old Neighborhood

6 Brilliant Corners: Representing the Inner City, from Outside and from Within

7 Peaceable Kingdoms: The Great Society Neighborhood in Stories for Children

Part III Defining Urban Pluralism in the Age of the Neighborhoods Movement

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

9 A Theology of Neighborhood: Post–Vatican II Catholicism, Ethnic Revival, and City Space

10 Neighborhood Feminisms: Refiguring Gender in the Urban Village

11 Local Spaces and White House Races: Urban Communities and Presidential Politics

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

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 close-knit 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 reimagine 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 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 second-wave 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 fixity, 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 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 small-scale 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 centralization. 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 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 two-career households, Me Decade self-absorption to a permissive, rights-obsessed 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 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 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 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 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 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 Edward 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 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, 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 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 self-government, 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 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 January 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.

Part 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 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