How States Shaped Postwar America

State Government and Urban Power

Nicholas Dagen Bloom

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226498454
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The history of public policy in postwar America tends to fixate on developments at the national level, overlooking the crucial work done by individual states in the 1960s and '70s. In this book, Nicholas Dagen Bloom demonstrates the significant and enduring impact of activist states in five areas: urban planning and redevelopment, mass transit and highways, higher education, subsidized housing, and the environment. Bloom centers his story on the example set by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose aggressive initiatives on the pressing issues in that period inspired others and led to the establishment of long-lived state polices in an age of decreasing federal power. Metropolitan areas, for both better and worse, changed and operated differently because of sustained state action— How States Shaped Postwar America uncovers the scope of this largely untold story.

Notes

Chapter One

1. The literature on the suburbs is now large, including, but not limited to, Lila Corwin Berman, Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2002); David Freund, Colored Property: State Politics and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Barbara Kelly, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Mathew Lassiter, The Suburban Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Richard W. Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). My research on planned suburbs informs this analysis as well, including the summaries of the suburban critique. See Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001), and Bloom, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America’s Salesman of the Businessman’s Utopia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003).

2. John C. Bollens and Henry Schmandt, The Metropolis: Its People, Politics and Economic Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 12–13. “Urban” was defined as a city or incorporated area with a minimum population of 2,500, a dated standard, but one that influenced policy discussions of the time. Today, for instance, the Census Bureau defines urban areas, for purposes of funding, as places with population greater than 50,000. It is challenging to use terminology consistently for a book stretching over so many time periods, regions, and settings. I use the term “urban” in this book in the sense of all nonagricultural communities and often vary its use with “metropolitan” to indicate policies affecting both urban and suburban areas. I use “city” or “center city” for activities within traditional municipal boundaries. “Central business district” and “downtown” are used to describe civic, business, and cultural centers of cities.

3. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 187.

4. William Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Doubleday, 1956); John Keats, The Crack in the Picture Window (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961); Martin Stavars, Megalopolis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961); Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964).

5. David Brandon, Office of Planning Coordination, “Planning for Development in New York State,” January 1970, Nelson A. Rockefeller Gubernatorial Records (NAR GUB), Hugh Morrow, Series 21 (FA242), Box 14, Folder 153, 5.

6. Neal Peirce, The Megastates of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Ten Great States (New York: Norton, 1972), 98–99.

7. Robert Connery and Gerald Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York: Executive Power in the Statehouse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 244.

8. Peirce, The Megastates of America, 419.

9. “News Conference by the Governor Concerning Legislation to Meet the Problems of the Core Area...