The Analog

In an an October issue of the Saturday Evening Post, the legendary Jane Jacobs wrote a summary of her just published The Death and Life of Great American Cities. For the moment I would like to just excerpt her concluding paragraph. Then, in a rather roundabout way, I will try to show how Jacobs’ vision fit within a newly emerging Left, one that differed in fundamental ways both from the the Old Left of the New Deal and the more moderate Cold War liberalism of the Fifties. What we shall see is a Left moving away from not only class and labor, the crux of the Old Left, but also the restricted technocratic version of liberty held by Cold War liberals. In place of these two models, Jacobs points towards a fuller, more complex form of freedom that is grounded in authenticity and community. Certainly there were gains and losses in this transition, but here I just want to focus on the nature of the transition itself, and specifically Jacobs’ place within it.

But before we get to the excerpt from the Jacobs article, just a few words on the book and Jane Jacobs. Here’s a passage from her New York Times obituary in 2006:

In her book “Death and Life of Great American Cities,” written in 1961, Ms. Jacobs’s enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs’s prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble.

Ms. Jacobs’s thesis was supported and enlarged by her deep, eclectic reading. But most compelling was her description of the everyday life she witnessed from her home above a candy store at 555 Hudson Street.

Indeed, her street scene descriptions are some of the finest passages of urban writing you will ever see: full of energy, movement and exact observation. But let’s move on now to her 1961 Post article. In the article she describes the vibrancy of the North End in Boston and her own Manhattan neighborhood, which she and her neighbors were fighting to protect from bulldozers. She also attacks the idiotic thinking behind projects such as Morningside Heights in Manhattan. We’ll get back to some of that later. For now, let’s look at the conclusion of her Post article:

The true problem of city planning and rebuilding in a free society is how to cultivate more city districts that are free; lively and fertile places for the differing plans of thousands of individuals—not planners. Nothing could be farther from the aims of planners today. They have been trained to think of people as interchangeable statistics to be pushed around, to think of city vitality and mixture as a mess. Planners are the enemies of cities because they offer us only the poisonous promise of making every place in a city more like dull and standardized Morningside Heights. They have failed to pursue the main point: to study the success and failure of the real life of the cities. With their eyes on simple-minded panaceas, they destroy success and health. Planners will become helpful only when they abandon what they have learned about what “ought”‘ to be good for cities. When they learn how fulfilling life in a city really can be, then they will finally stop working against the very goals they set out to achieve.

This is a really sharp example of the intellectual Left finding its bearings after its decade of silence in the Fifties. Here we have Jacobs, a bona fide activist and intellectual, writing in the rather stodgy and safe Saturday Evening Post. But if she represents a re-energized Left, she is also presenting a reformulated Left, one more centered on the spiritual needs of the self and community. So, what happened to the old class-based Left?

The Missing Generation

Daniel Bell

Many scholars have argued persuasively that it disappeared as a result of suppression. Maurice Isserman in If I Had a Hammer…: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left and Ellen Schrecker in Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America argue that McCarthyism (which really existed well before McCarthy provided a label for it) hollowed out the New Deal Old Left, leaving what Irving Howe called a “missing generation” when the New Left sprang into existence. As a result, the radical infrastructure that could act as a repository of knowledge simply did not exist. This meant that when the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was founded, they had no bridge to the past. Instead of an experienced and practical group of hard-nose lefties to turn to for guidance, they only saw guys like the technocratically liberal Daniel Bell, who published his most famous book, The End of Ideology, in 1961. Needless to say, Bell was not going to guide them to much of anything. Indeed, there is much truth to this narrative of a missing generation of radicals. For example, magazines like Partisan Review, which had been fiercely political in the Thirties had long since stopped bothering with radical politics. In fact, its main political thrust had become liberal anti-communist. In 1961 Partisan Review’s only sustained political statement came in a double issue dedicated to Soviet dissidents. For the young New Left, they could only feel alienated from the milk-toast Cold-War liberalism they saw–and ultimately intellectually impoverished by having no institutional and spiritual roots. Versions of this story can be found in Irving Howe’s Margin of Hope, Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and the Isserman’s If I Had a Hammer.

The Generation Liberal Intellectuals Missed

I think there is some truth in this story, but I feel that it shortchanges the Civil Rights Movement of the Fifties. I really don’t think you can talk about a “missing generation”in the Fifties when there were thousands of people participating in a truly radical movement which generated enormous cultural shifts and created an incredible amount of institutional knowledge. What was actually missing was a generation of Northeastern elite intellectuals to support them and amplify their message. With some exceptions, such as Michael Walzer at Dissent, Northern intellectuals found little or no spiritual affinity with the Movement, even if they supported its putative goals. And what remained of the Old Left did not take much interest in it either. Alongside a missing generation, I think it makes sense to talk in terms of shifts on the Left. In the Fifties there was a new Left emerging, but it was so different that other parts of the Left did not know how to assimilate it.

Bayard Rustin

Why did Fifties and early Sixties liberals, particularly the intellectuals have so little interest in the Civil Rights Movement.? For instance, why didn’t the Partisan Review cover the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961? Why no special double issue for them? Not that devoting a double issue to Soviet dissidents wasn’t a worthy, even morally necessary, thing to do. But the U.S. had its own political dissidents as well, dissidents who badly needed platforms in New York. Why not publish great intellectual activists like Bayard Rustin? He had certainly spent his share of time wrongfully imprisoned, just like I’m sure many of those Soviet dissidents had. It’s understandable that Partisan Review had become a bit timid because of McCarthyism in the 1950s, but by 1961 there was nothing to fear from a full-thoated support of the Civil Rights Movement. While there was talk of MLK being a communist, nobody was ready to haul a bunch of black ministers in front of HUAC, or, for that matter, some writers and editors expressing support for them. Also, those intellectuals, whether we’re talking about writers for Partisan Review, Commentary, or the New Yorker certainly supported the concrete goals of the movement. So what was going on?

The Civil Rights Movement: Ideology and Freedom

The truth is, the Civil Rights Movement as it developed in the Fifties and at the beginning of the Sixties made many on the Left skittish because of its passionate moral commitment. For Cold War liberals, the horrors of Stalinism and Fascism had made them rightly suspicious of ideology. Between 1917 and 1945, how many innocents had been killed in the name of ideology? However, what kind of progressive politics could you have without ideology? Really none beyond technocratic Washington D.C. stuff. When intellectuals wrote about politics you got a kind of fussy technocratic pragmatism from people like Daniel Bell and Arthur Schlesinger. Popular historians like Daniel Boorstin stressed the level of consensus that existed throughout American history. Political scientists showed that politics was really just a constellation of “interest groups” rationally pursuing their interests within the rule-governed political arena. And, really, they had a point. The prosperity of the United States and the catastrophic failures of “ideological” states provided quite a bit of proof that they were on the right track.

So, again, what to make of the Civil Right Movement? As Richard King has shown in his Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom, it did not fit into any established understandings of how politics should work. Unions and place of work meant little to the movement. In fact, meetings were almost always held in churches. Also, you couldn’t really call it a “rational” form of interest group politics. Individuals were voluntarily risking their lives, which really does not fit into any poli-sci model of rational, self-interested behavior. And where was the “rule-governed political arena”?

The Civil Right Movement was truly something new under the sun for the Left. First of all, it was, as King writes, the first time “political initiative [had] shifted from Washington back out into the country itself” since the Depression. It happened to shift the center of the Left away from secular urban centers to religious communities in the South. But for technocratic liberals, one of the biggest problems was the radically new conception of “freedom” being constructed through the movement. Mid-century liberals understood freedom in a rather pinched sort of way, primarily because of their fears about totalitarianism. For them, freedom was best thought of as “negative liberty,” the term popularized by Isiah Berlin. This type of freedom can be roughly defined as freedom from government interference within one’s personal sphere so as long one is not harming others. While the members of the Civil Rights Movement would have understood the value of “negative liberty,” it is not what really drove them, not what inspired all the freedom songs. In addition to negative liberty, Richard King identified three other strands that made up the Movement’s idea of freedom:

Freedom as autonomy: “a cluster of characteristics…such as autonomy, self-determination, pride, and self-respect”

Participatory freedom: fulfilling one’s potential as a citizen by actively participating not just in voting, but in demonstrations, political meetings, or open political discussion. Voting and participation are not viewed merely as a right or a duty, but as a positive and purposeful action that expands and enriches one identity.

Freedom as collective deliverance: freedom from occupiers or captivity. This conception of freedom does not come from any philosophical tradition, but from, in the case of African Americans, the Old Testament, specifically Exodus.

By combining these four types, the Civil Rights Movement had created a far more textured and complex vision of freedom than was held by Cold War liberals. It was rooted in community and when put into practice, it transformed its participants. Those who participated in the movement found a truer, higher self through participating in collective action. This transformational energy was what drew the nascent New Left to the Civil Rights Movement in 1961 and 1962, and the visions of authenticity and broad notions of freedom are reflected in its founding document, The Port Huron Statement. Here’s a taste:

Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved: one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.

This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism — the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own. Nor do we deify man — we merely have faith in his potential.

Montgomery, 1956

My overall point is not that the narrative of the missing generation is wrong. It isn’t: those McCarthyite pressures were real, and ultimately they shifted political energies away from class-based concerns. But that doesn’t mean that radical politics disappeared. Thousands of people were engaging in radical politics in those years, just not of a communist or socialist variety.

The New Left Shift: Authenticity, Individuality, and the Disappearance of Class

So we have the Civil Rights movement leading a shift towards a community-based politics that puts a broad vision of freedom and the transformation of the self at the core of its politics. In itself this was radically different than either the Old Left politics of the Thirties or Cold War liberalism. We also have McCarthyism gutting the more class-based form of Leftism. If you came of age politically in those years, and were inclined to the Left, you saw very little discussion of labor and class from intellectuals. For the Civil Rights Movement, this must have been part of the reason that it had so little initial connection to labor, centering instead on the church. As a newly energized Left developed in the late Fifties and early Sixties, there were two other factors that contributed to this new landscape:

• Anxiety about loss of ethnic authenticity: I blogged about this here. Many who had moved to the suburbs and who were long separated from ethnic enclaves felt anxiety about being homogenized. There had been very little immigration into the U.S. since immigration laws were tightened in the Twenties. This anxiety, according to Theodore Solotaroff, led to the fascination with urban Jews and their neighborhoods. Also, for many young whites who were part of the emerging New Left, black people in the South represented an authentic “folk”. As Grace Elizabeth Hale shows in A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America, SNCC’s Freedom Singers traded on this romance quite effectively, touring college campuses in the early Sixties to raise money for the Movement.
  

• The Organization Man and Conformity: William H. Whyte, who mentored Jane Jacobs, published Organization Man in 1957. By 1961, the phrase “Organization Man,” was commonly used in the press as shorthand for the bland office worker lacking in all creativity and initiative, a man of reduced humanity, a passive product of efficient business practices. The other word I have seen with nauseating regularity in writings from 1961 is conformity. Somehow the United States had become a nation of conformers who all agreed the conformity was for losers.

Jane Jacobs and the New Politics

Now let’s go back and look at that excerpt from Jacobs again. You can see that this is the rhetoric of a New Left:

“The true problem of city planning and rebuilding in a free society is how to cultivate more city districts that are free; lively and fertile places for the differing plans of thousands of individuals—not planners.”

It is important to note that the cities planners whom Jacobs was rebelling against would have identified themselves as liberals. But they were liberals who were not thinking from a community perspective and who had a very limited vision of freedom. Jacobs, on the other hand, thinks of freedom in more expansive terms. In one memorable passage, she describes a conversation with a Boston city planner about the North End, an Italian neighborhood in Boston that she had just visited. Jacobs loved the North End. He was dumbfounded:

The North End

“Why in the world are you down in the North End?” he said. “Nothing’s going on there. Eventually, yes, but not yet. That’s a slum!”

‘It doesn’t seem like a slum to me.” I said.

‘Why that’s the worst slum in the city. It has 275 dwelling units to the net acre! [Excluding streets, nonresidential land, etc.] I hate to admit we have anything like that in Boston, but it’s a fact.”

‘Do you have any other figures on it?” I asked

He did. Statistics showed that the neighborhood’s delinquency, disease and infant-mortality rates are among the lowest in the city. The child population is just about average. The death rate is low, 8.5 per 1000, against the average city rate of 11.2.

‘You should have more slums like this,” I said. ‘Don’t tell me there are plans to wipe this out. You ought to be down here learning as much as you can from it.”

‘I know how you feel.” he said. “I often go down there myself just to walk around the streets and feel that wonderful, cheerful street life. You’d be crazy about it in summer. But we have to rebuild it eventually. We’ve got to get those people off the street.”

My planner friend’s instincts told him the North End was a healthful place. Statistics confirmed it. But his training as a city planner told him the North End had to be a “bad” place. It has little park land. Children play on the sidewalks. It has small blocks. In city-planning parlance, the district is “badly cut up by wasteful streets.” It also has “mixed uses”— another sin. It is made up of the plans of hundreds of people—not planners. Such freedom represents, as one of the wise men of city planning put it. “a chaotic accident . . . the summation of the haphazard, antagonistic whims of many self-centered, ill-advised individuals,”

Under the seeming chaos of a lively place like the North End is a marvelous and intricate order—a complicated array of urban activities. These activities support and supplement each other, keeping the neighborhood interesting and vital. The planners would kill it.

It’s important to remember that all the revitalized urban neighborhoods and the lively downtowns of college towns all across the country are are direct result of this brand of politics.