Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Logue was born and raised in Philadelphia in a devoutly Irish Catholic and staunchly Democratic home, which he would recall later as being “without any racial prejudice.”3 Until his father died in 1934 when Ed was thirteen and his four siblings—John, Gordon, Frank, and Ellen—were eleven, ten, nine, and seven, respectively, the family lived comfortably in a rowhouse on Mount Vernon Street just north of Center City, Philadelphia. Ed’s father earned a decent salary as a city tax assessor, good enough to send five children to the private Notre Dame Academy in Rittenhouse Square and to nearby Cape May for the summer. Logue’s happiest early memories were linked to the excitement of downtown Philadelphia: “From childhood, I was always interested in cities.”4 He particularly prized the “walking trips” he made with his father around town.5 He also enjoyed hearing his aunt, a Catholic nun named Sister Maria Kostka, discuss with his father an ambitious architectural design for Chestnut Hill College, a Catholic women’s college she founded in 1924 and ran for her order, the Sisters of Saint Joseph.6 But then Ed’s father suddenly died during a routine hernia operation, leaving the family precariously dependent on a meager monthly insurance check of $134.84 and the charity of an uncle who bought them a semidetached house in the outlying Overbrook neighborhood. Renting out the third floor barely helped make ends meet.7

  Yale College, where Logue matriculated in September 1938 as a bursary or scholarship student after rejecting the free ride at Catholic University arranged by his aunt the nun, shaped many aspects of Logue’s adult life. Logue was a political science major who studied with Harvey Claflin Mansfield, Albert Galloway Keller, and the labor economist E. Wight Bakke, author of a remarkable eight-year study of unemployed workers and their families in Depression-era New Haven, published in 1940, that made a deep impression on Logue.

  Yale influenced young Logue outside the classroom as well. The Yale College that Ed Logue entered in fall 1938 newly aspired to having a more diverse undergraduate community of academic as well as athletic and societal leaders, having lagged behind Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago in this regard. Carrying the name of a traditional Yale family had been the best ticket to Yale admissions, so much so that the application requested a mother’s maiden name to catch candidates with maternal rather than paternal connections.

  As a striving, not-well-off, Irish Catholic graduate of a public high school in Philadelphia, Logue encountered a Yale that was beginning to break down social boundaries among its students but was still a bastion of elite Protestant prep schoolers. Only 213 students out of his freshman class of 855—about a quarter—had graduated from public high schools. Almost a third of the total matriculants were “Yale sons.” At Yale, Catholic students historically had experienced less prejudice than Jewish students had. Interestingly, however, because Catholics were less oriented toward higher education in the first half of the century and Catholic colleges eagerly recruited those who were, the Catholic presence on campus lagged behind the proportion of Catholics in the general population. In contrast, Yale’s Jewish students far exceeded their numbers nationally. Moreover, many of the Jews and Catholics who attended Yale gained entrance because they grew up in New Haven and qualified for the scholarships Yale reserved for local boys to improve town-gown relations.

  Yale’s first residential colleges had opened in 1933, only five years before Logue arrived, thanks to a $16 million gift from the alumnus Edward Harkness aimed at improving the undergraduate residential experience. By 1940, Logue’s junior year, the popular colleges had succeeded in decreasing the proportion of undergraduates living off campus to 13 percent from 38 percent in 1920, and the fraternities and exclusive senior societies that had fragmented the student body were declining in influence as well. But although the new colleges aimed to bring together students of different backgrounds, exclusionary policies still guided roommate matching. Rooming committees were told never to mix Jews and Catholics with Protestants, prep school with public school students, or the well-off with scholarship recipients. Not surprisingly, then, Logue’s Yale friends were overwhelmingly Catholic and Jewish. Brother Frank Logue (Class of ’48) well understood the Yale that he and his brothers entered: “A great WASPy university admitted those four sons of a widowed Irish kindergarten teacher” is the way he later put it, wryly noting that most of their Berkeley College roommates were Jews, a sign of how fully Yale segregated its students.8

  Attending Yale at this moment in time made Ed Logue, his brothers, and his friends grateful for the liberalization of the university that was enabling their attendance but resentful of the still-powerful vestiges of privilege. Logue’s good college and law school friend John Arcudi, an Italian Catholic whose parents owned a small grocery in nearby Westport, explained how, as a bursary student, he felt apart from what he called the “white shoe boys” from prep school. “We … the people who had been the waiters in Commons … were a separate part of the Yale society.” The lower social status of students like Arcudi and Logue played out politically as well. Both recounted their alienation from a student body that in the presidential election of 1940 overwhelmingly supported the Republican candidate Wendell Willkie against their hero, the Democratic incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They responded by inviting the Republican New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, an enthusiastic FDR supporter, to a rally to reassure New Haven’s many Italians that the president bore no prejudice, despite his criticism of Mussolini. When Roosevelt won the election, Logue and a Jewish friend on scholarship, Allen “Bud” Scher, “celebrated quietly” and walked across a Yale campus that “was like a graveyard. There was no celebration for FDR by the Yalies,” according to Scher, who derisively called them “the bloods.”9

  Watching so many of his peers shun Roosevelt made Logue only more combative. He joined the Labor Party in the Yale Political Union debating society (a more left alternative to the Liberal and Conservative Parties and the nexus for pro-union students) and devoted himself to supporting New Haven’s working class, whether by leafleting at the nearby Winchester Repeating Arms Company plant or rallying behind Yale’s own dining hall workers—many of whom he knew well from working in Freshman Commons—when they went on strike in 1941.10

  A decade later, in 1951, when Logue needed security clearance to work in the American embassy in New Delhi, the FBI talked to a supervisor in the Yale dining services who remembered him as “not dependable” and “‘sneaky’ in all of his actions, including always eating the leftovers from the plates in the dining room.” The FBI agent investigating continued, “She stated that he was in her opinion the poorest worker that was ever employed in the Yale Dining Room. She further advised that applicant was constantly spreading ‘malicious rumors’ about the management of Yale University, stating that ‘they were dictators, slave drivers, and oppressing the employees of Yale.’” It was not clear how much of her condemnation was due to Logue’s pro-labor politics, his incompetence as a worker, or his hearty appetite—most likely, a combination of all three. In any event, Logue was eventually fired for “inadequate effort.”11

  Logue didn’t just connect to Yale’s workers on campus. His social position and political sympathies made him more at home in their urban world outside the campus gates than most other Yale students were. When as a senior he showed a date around New Haven and “she was totally uninterested,” he took that as grounds enough to end the relationship.12

  Logue’s bond with Yale’s low-level employees, so appalling to his dining-services supervisor from freshman year, only grew over his college career and drew him into helping with a full-scale union-organizing drive mounted during his senior year, 1941–42. The 1930s and early 1940s were a dynamic period for labor in New Haven, as elsewhere in the United States. Garment workers, clock workers, metalworkers, and other local laborers succeeded in organizing unions for the first time. Even the drivers for the Chieppo Bus Company, hired by the university to drive students to the Yale Bowl and other sports fields, struck for union recognition. With so much
local activity, Yale’s janitors, maids, maintenance, and power and boiler room workers joined in, motivated by serious complaints of their own: miserably low wages, long hours (often seven days a week), and poor working conditions—no overtime, sick leave, holiday pay, job protection, or vacations other than a three-month summer layoff. With the arrival of a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizer, long-simmering discontent boiled over and led to the chartering of a CIO local in May 1941, followed by an overwhelming electoral victory for the union in October. When negotiations with the university broke down the next month, four hundred workers went on strike—the first in Yale’s history. Finally, in February 1942, came a favorable contract between Yale University and Local 142 of the United Construction Workers, affiliated with the United Mine Workers–CIO. Logue threw himself into this yearlong roller-coaster ride of a unionization struggle, which he later recalled as “a time with a lot of idealism, a lot of ‘we’re going to do what we can to make the world better.’” He was rewarded upon graduation with a full-time job as general organizer for the local.13

  As an activist on the New Haven labor scene, Logue had a clear political position: pro-labor and anti-communist. Although he wasn’t religious himself, Logue’s Catholic upbringing propelled his anti-communism, just as it helped inspire his commitment to social justice.14 But mostly, he was a New Dealer to the core, convinced that the best way to improve ordinary people’s lives was to empower the federal government to be a force for good.15 In New Haven, that approach meant much more than organizing workers. As Logue would have been aware, the New Haven Central Labor Council had advocated for the City-Wide Conference for Slum Clearance and Better Housing in 1937. After publicizing the poor conditions in which many New Haveners lived, the city’s labor leaders helped secure funding for Elm Haven Housing, New Haven’s first federally funded low-rise public housing project. Two more much-needed public housing projects would soon follow. The New Haven labor movement taught the budding-activist Logue that enlightened government could play a key role in delivering decent, affordable homes, along with good jobs, to its citizens.16

  Knowing it was only a matter of time until he was drafted into World War II, Logue decided in November 1942 to enlist in the navy, hoping to become a combat flyer. To his surprise and dismay, he was turned down. Throughout his life he remained convinced that his labor activism had made him unacceptable to the navy. He even wrote to President Roosevelt in outrage: “The Navy seems to have a policy on organizers. Keep ’em out.” (The FBI found no evidence for Logue’s suspicion in its security investigation of him in 1952. Nor did I in my Freedom of Information Act inquiry of 2009. But the recruitment officer at the Philadelphia Naval Aviation Selection Board, who recorded “lack of interest in Naval Aviation” as the official grounds for rejection, might privately have deemed Logue too politically unreliable.)17 Logue then enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces, hoping to qualify as a pilot, and received orders to report for flight training in early 1943. His farewell message to Local 142’s membership conveyed how much he connected the union struggle at Yale with the democracy he would soon be defending abroad. “Unions are the greatest single force today in preserving and strengthening our democracy on the home front. Do your part in our fight for democracy by being an active, loyal union member and by practicing that tolerance of your fellow man regardless of race, creed or color which is the core of democracy and the American labor movement.”18

  Before too long, Logue washed out of pilot training (not uncommon in this highly selective military division) and had to content himself with being a bombardier. He served in the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy from 1944 to 1945, flying seventeen missions, winning his share of medals and stars, and mustering out as a second lieutenant in summer 1945. On the ground, he was impressed with Florence, Siena, and Rome, but Logue most often mentioned how all that time in the “great glass bubble” gave him a valuable bird’s-eye view of European cities, teaching him to “read” the physical layout to “get a feeling for how a city is put together.” It was “the best possible city planning training I [could have] had.”19

  Although Logue was not likely aware of it, the famed French modernist architect Le Corbusier (the professional name of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), whose dramatic schemes to remake cities would powerfully influence postwar urban renewers like Logue, also credited aerial views with inspiring him: “When one has taken a long flight over the city like a bird gliding, ideas attack you … everything became clear to me … I expressed the ideas of modern planning.” Le Corbusier’s signature linear radiant city, with its rational division of urban functions, towering skyscrapers, and lyrical flow of highways, apparently came to him while studying the problems of nineteenth-century cities from airplanes during the 1930s and 1940s. Likewise, Le Corbusier’s own bold interventions on the landscape were easily discernible from the air.20 This aerial perspective encouraged Logue, Le Corbusier, and other modernists, including the New Haven planner Maurice E. H. Rotival, to reimagine the city as made up of distinct, legible parts—residential neighborhoods, downtown cores, industrial and market districts, and connective roadways—that could be grasped from above and modernized in discrete sections as needed. Peering down on Europe, Logue learned “how a city’s functions separated themselves and how they worked together.”21 From these heights, a city was like a complex machine whose interconnected parts required frequent recalibration for the full urban mechanism to work properly.

  Once the European war ended and Logue returned to the United States, he took up his life again in New Haven, using the GI Bill to matriculate at Yale Law School. He also went back to working part-time as an organizer for Local 142, which continued to unionize Yale workers, concentrating now on the university’s dining halls, library, and hospital.22 At Yale Law, Logue was drawn to an iconoclastic group of law professors known as legal realists. They condemned the Harvard-based, case-method style of legal education, with its orderly rules to explain judicial decisions. Instead, they argued that legal judgments were more idiosyncratic, more politically motivated, and more shaped by pressures from the larger society. Logue particularly admired a member of this group, Fred Rodell, whom he had met through the union struggle on campus before the war. Rodell became a mentor, father figure, and close friend.23

  Rodell was an irreverent political progressive, affectionately known as “Fred the Red,” who had scorned the mainstream legal academic culture when at the age of twenty-nine he wrote an article published in the Virginia Law Review titled “Goodbye to Law Reviews,” denouncing the whole law review system as flawed and hypocritical. Three years later, in 1939, Rodell published a tract titled Woe unto You, Lawyers, which took aim at the law profession itself as no more than hired guns of the privileged, wielding legal jargon as ammunition. For decades Rodell annoyed the Yale University Corporation and administration by being a persistent gadfly, most infuriatingly when he canceled his classes during the Local 142 strike of November 1941.24

  With the encouragement of Rodell and other leftists on the law school faculty, Logue and his friends worked energetically to challenge the university not only on its labor practices, but also for its racial and religious discrimination—through quotas in admissions and prejudices in faculty hiring—and for its weak defense of academic freedom in the increasingly anti-communist atmosphere of the 1940s. As its president Charles Seymour famously said, “There will be no witch-hunts at Yale because there will be no witches. We do not intend to hire Communists.” Logue may have personally disliked communism, but he adamantly rejected red-baiting of any kind.25

  On and off campus during these immediate postwar years, Logue developed a political identity as a pro-labor liberal and a committed racial integrationist. He founded a Yale chapter of the national American Veterans Committee (AVC), a progressive movement of veterans committed to challenging the conservative American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. When the AVC went through a bruising battle between its liberal and communist wing
s, Logue characteristically chose the anti-communist side.26 But opting for the more moderate path in the AVC did not stop Logue from bravely championing the cause of racial integration, raising havoc at the slightest hint of discrimination or injustice. In fact, Logue’s very first publication, in 1946, was a book review of Robert C. Weaver’s Negro Labor in the left-wing magazine The Progressive, in which Logue called for government pressure to deliver “social justice” to African American workers, “now, not soon.” That same year he shot off an angry letter of complaint to the editor of the left-leaning Catholic Commonweal magazine, protesting that the article “Veterans on Campus” did not adequately treat the special problems of black veterans.27

  In Logue’s academic program at Yale Law School, which was condensed into two years to advance returning vets more quickly, he focused on labor and legislative law but also gained exposure to urban policy from two teachers, Myres McDougal and Maurice Rotival. McDougal taught a required first-year course on real property, which he introduced by saying, “If you are interested in deed transfers, if you are interested in mortgages, that’s not my course. You will learn that stuff in the first or second year at work out of law school. My interest is to convey how the law can achieve appropriate public policies in the utilization of real property.”28 McDougal, who also teamed up with the political scientist Harold Lasswell to train Yale Law School students to advocate for more democratic social policies, would himself become the first chair of the New Haven Redevelopment Authority when it was established in 1950 to enable the city to compete for funding newly available under the Federal Housing Act of 1949.29 From Rotival, a charismatic and prominent modernist planner who was on the faculty at the Yale School of Art and Architecture and had developed a renewal plan for New Haven in the early 1940s, Logue learned the latest thinking about urban redevelopment.