By the time Ed Logue left New Haven in late fall 1947, he had developed a political disposition best described as being a rebel in the belly of the establishment beast. At this stage, and arguably for the rest of his life, Logue thrived as an insider comfortable in the bastions of power who then fought hard to improve what he judged were damaging deficiencies. His combative stance did not always sit well with others. An unidentified Yale University official with whom Logue interacted over labor issues—possibly R. Carter Nyman, appointed as Yale’s first personnel director for service and clerical staff in 1939—admitted when interviewed by the FBI in 1951 that he had no grounds to doubt Logue’s loyalty to the United States but, back in 1941–42, he had been incensed that as a scholarship student Logue “was doing everything in his power to upset the administration of the school that was giving him the opportunity for an education.” When budget cuts had required the laying off of maids at Yale, Logue apparently thought, to this individual’s outrage, that “they should be continued on the pay roll because he, LOGUE, felt it was the University’s moral obligation to look after them.”30
Logue brought this reformist zeal to his personal life as well. He met his future wife, Margaret DeVane, daughter of the powerful Dean DeVane, soon after he returned to New Haven for law school. She was only a sophomore at Smith College at the time, though emotionally mature for her age and as politically liberal and idealistic as her future husband. They would marry in June 1947, when she still had a year of college to go, which did not please her parents. They were no happier when their future son-in-law called a strike of workers at Grace–New Haven Hospital (later renamed Yale–New Haven Hospital) in April 1947, while his future mother-in-law lay on an operating table inside undergoing a minor procedure.31 Marriage to Margaret, the dean’s daughter, may have ensconced Logue deeper in the Yale establishment, but it did little to suppress his appetite for rebellion. A favorite family story captured the armed truce on matters political between Ed Logue and Dean DeVane. One day when Logue was making calls to schedule a union meeting from the DeVanes’ living room, the dean walked in and said, “You know, Ed, I like you and I can respect what you’re doing, but please don’t do it from my telephone.”32
Logue would practice “tough love” throughout his life, holding the people and institutions he most valued to what he considered to be higher standards. This commitment to productive engagement, however contentious, made him increasingly impatient with the cynical aloofness often displayed by his mentor Fred Rodell and other political skeptics given more to critique than to action. Appropriately, one of Logue’s favorite sayings was “Keep the left hand high,” referring to the boxer’s training to be ever vigilant in fending off counterpunches. His longtime colleague Allan Talbot explained what Logue meant: “public service as a form of combat” was to be welcomed, not avoided.33
After graduating Yale Law in October 1947, Ed Logue pursued his ambition to practice labor law by moving back to his hometown of Philadelphia to apprentice with a well-respected practitioner, Morris H. Goldstein, who represented the International Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America–CIO and other CIO and AFL union locals in Philadelphia.34 It would turn out that returning to Philadelphia offered Logue much more than training in labor law. Most importantly, it helped direct his attention to city building as a cornerstone of progressive politics.
Logue had already visited and drawn inspiration from the influential “Better Philadelphia Exhibition,” which in 1947 the planners Edmund Bacon and Robert Mitchell and the architects Oskar Stonorov and Louis Kahn had installed downtown in the top two floors of Gimbels department store to engage the public in imagining what Philadelphia might look like by its three hundredth anniversary in 1982—“if you support city planning.”35 Logue had been one of almost four hundred thousand people to attend this exhibition, which aimed to be both educational and entertaining. Here he observed the “shadow of blight” spreading ominously over the heart of Philadelphia as a pendulum swung back and forth. He watched sections of Center City flip over on a huge thirty-by-fourteen-foot scale model, synchronized with a narration, to show proposed improvements by 1982. He walked around a life-size reconstruction of what the exhibition’s creators considered a “dingy and overcrowded” block in South Philadelphia badly in need of rehabilitation. Here, at the top of the Gimbels flagship store, Logue and many others were introduced—through novel, World’s Fair–type exhibits—to fundamental concepts that would underlie urban renewal for decades to come.36 “It was magic,” Logue still mused nostalgically five decades later.37
The political connections that Logue already had in Philadelphia made it easy for him to find organizations and individuals who shared his view of urban redevelopment as a promising new frontier for liberal experimentation. In no time, he was attending meetings of the Philadelphia Housing Association, the Citizens’ Council on City Planning (CCCP), the Philadelphia branch of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Here he served as a Democratic committeeman for his district and as a dedicated campaign worker in the exciting 1949 “revolution” in Philadelphia politics when the Democratic reformers Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth successfully wrestled the city out of the almost century-long stranglehold of the GOP machine.38 In the late 1940s, Logue’s Philadelphia became his schoolroom for early instruction in both physical and political renewal. And he was not alone in this regard. Many individuals were involved in both struggles, including Molly Yard, who was a leader of the Clark-Dilworth team, a board member of ADA, and the executive secretary of the CCCP. (She would cap her long career in progressive politics with the presidency of the National Organization for Women in 1987.) Housing low-income Philadelphians and redeveloping “blighted” neighborhoods stood high on the reformist Democratic Party agenda.
As Logue’s fascination with urban policy grew, so, too, did his impatience with the daily tedium of practicing law. As he wrote to Fred Rodell in July 1948, “The law is a whore’s trade. I don’t want a nice law practice for anything but the income, and I’m a son of a bitch if I’ll throw away ten or twenty years of my life building up an income.” Looking back a quarter century later, he also recalled becoming frustrated with the limited reach of a union attorney: “I discovered that being a labor lawyer was serving the interests of people who are in the labor unions and labor movement, but you weren’t going to run it … I knew … that that was not for me.”39
Casting about for alternatives, he came up with two job offers in politics. One was working for the recently elected U.S. senator Hubert H. Humphrey, who had made himself a liberal hero by proposing an enlightened civil rights plank for the 1948 Democratic Party platform. His passionate plea that “the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights” precipitated the walkout of infuriated Southern Dixiecrats from the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, which Logue had attended as a local Democratic committeeman. The other offer came from the new Democratic governor of Connecticut, Chester Bowles, an advertising tycoon who had brilliantly masterminded a national system of price controls during World War II for the Roosevelt administration.40 In accepting the Bowles offer, Logue, for the first but not the last time, chose a local or state position over a federal one, because he felt he could make a greater impact more quickly at this level.
Logue became Bowles’s labor secretary, part of a liberal administration that swept into office determined to create a “Little New Deal” to reform Connecticut state government after a long Republican reign. Here Logue first tested the waters of government service as a more rewarding way to improve the world than practicing law—and he liked it. He became involved in many of Governor Bowles’s socially progressive initiatives in civil rights and social welfare, including coping with an acute postwar housing shortage, which further awakened Logue to the looming urban crisis: “His housing program �
� was the most farsighted and the most effective in any state at that time,” Logue later recalled.41
Partners in a whirlwind pace of work in Hartford, Ed Logue and Chester Bowles forged a warm friendship that would last for four decades, with Bowles serving as another father figure whose political commitment, social compassion, and moral integrity won Logue’s admiration.42 The voters of Connecticut proved less smitten with Bowles and his liberal agenda, however, and they booted out the governor and his idealistic young crew after a two-year term. Soon thereafter, President Harry S. Truman appointed the defeated Bowles as ambassador to India and Nepal, the third American to serve since India had declared its independence from the British Empire in 1947. Bowles invited Logue to come along as his special assistant, and by January 1952, Ed and Margaret Logue were on their way to New Delhi for about eighteen months, until the newly elected Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, sent both Bowles and Logue packing in spring 1953.43
India beckoned as a great adventure to thirty-year-old Ed and twenty-five-year-old Margaret, the only damper being questions raised by the State Department under its Loyalty and Security Program that red-flagged Ed and his brother John’s political activities. Ed was singled out for his labor organizing; for signing petitions sponsored by suspected communist-front organizations, such as one protesting the threatened deportation of the radical longshoreman Harry Bridges; and for other political actions that the State Department deemed suspicious. Logue responded at length to the chair of the State Department’s Loyalty Board, infuriated to be charged with harboring communist sympathies. He defended himself not by citing his history of anti-communism but rather by taking the more principled position of claiming that all his actions were legal and proper exercises of his constitutional rights. He reserved his greatest anger for the “improper and offensive” attention to his brother John, a lifelong adherent of the idealistic, anti-fascist, antiwar World Federalist Movement, founded in 1947 to promote more effective world governance than the fledgling United Nations appeared to promise: “It seems to me that my brother should have a right to know that sort of malicious gossip not only exists but has been dignified with such notice as this by his government.”
Years later, Margaret would shudder at memories of the incident. “Ed was terribly upset by it. Our first taste of McCarthyism.”44 Logue would reflect at greater length on the damage wrought by McCarthyism as he journeyed back to the United States in summer 1953. He blamed President Truman and his secretary of state Dean Acheson’s loyalty program, “which includes every last janitor and was never able to focus on the problem—nor to separate treason, subversion and actual disloyalty from either fuzzy thinking or radical thinking, the first of which cannot be helped and the second of which is in my opinion, so long as it is not unreasonable, subversive or disloyal, a useful thing to have in government, on the campus and elsewhere.”45
RURAL INDIA NURTURES AN URBANIST
Many aspects of Logue’s experience in India profoundly affected him. He and Bowles became only more committed to improving civil rights in the United States when faced with mounting Indian criticism of American racial discrimination, particularly from the influential Communist Party of India. “The number one question at any press conference or forum was, ‘What about America’s treatment of the Negro?’” bemoaned Ambassador Bowles.46 In early 1953, Logue composed and began circulating widely a proposal he called “Is One Hundred Years Long Enough?” in which he idealistically called for a vigorous national commitment over the next ten years, in anticipation of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, to acknowledging that “the Negro problem in America today is not a Negro problem. It is a white problem.” He urged “mak[ing] democracy meaningful for thirteen million Americans who are not yet full partners in our society,… an opportunity to show our friends abroad, particularly the darker-skinned peoples in Asia and Africa, that American democracy is genuine and not the hollow mockery it sometimes seems when the color line is drawn.” Logue tried—unsuccessfully—to interest liberal organizations such as the Ford Foundation and the United Auto Workers in sponsoring a national, community-based campaign aimed at white Americans, “to examine ourselves to see the way to progress and to move toward it.”47
Most important for Logue’s later career in city building were his observations of the community development work that the U.S. government and the Ford Foundation were supporting across India. Focused on modernizing rural villages, assumed to be the bedrock of traditional Indian society, the State Department’s Point Four Program promoted a holistic approach to improving a village’s built environment, social welfare, and technical knowledge. Named for the fourth point in President Truman’s inaugural address of 1949, the program was born out of the fires of the Cold War to, in Truman’s words, “make the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas,” so that the “free peoples of the world, through their own efforts” would be able to “lighten their burdens.”48 New physical infrastructure such as wells, roads, schools, clinics, and community centers were to accompany reforms in land ownership and tenancy, public health, and education in everything from literacy to improved farming methods. Thirty-five thousand “village workers” trained by the Ford Foundation provided expertise on the ground. The goal was a more modern, self-sufficient, and, not least, democratic India—an India that could be counted on as a solid anti-communist American ally in Asia.49
Soon after Bowles and Logue arrived in New Delhi, they became intrigued with a demonstration project already under way at Etawah, in the nearby state of Uttar Pradesh. Originally conceived by the American architect and planner Albert Mayer in 1948 at the encouragement of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, this model site, covering ninety-seven villages, combined an anti-colonial Gandhian commitment to village survival with the extension service techniques (improved seeds, tools, fertilizer, livestock, irrigation) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In just three years, food production had increased by 50 percent and the project’s reach had extended to over three hundred villages. A more urban pilot project—the Indian government’s new cities of Faridabad and Nilokheri, intended for refugees of the partition of British India into the separate nations of Islamic Pakistan and Hindu India—likewise practiced an integrated approach, combining construction of new infrastructure with improved economic and social programs. Every family received a house with running water, factory jobs, and access to a modern hospital and schools.50
Bowles immediately went to work encouraging Prime Minister Nehru’s government and his own to partner in a much more ambitious, national-level undertaking. On the anniversary of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s birthday, October 2, 1952, Nehru proclaimed the launch of a nationwide program of community development with fifty-five projects, covering sixteen thousand villages and more than eleven million people. Although Nehru famously adhered to a policy of nonalignment in the raging Cold War, he framed this approach to eradicating village poverty through individual and community self-help as the next step in India’s democratic revolution. Nehru’s linkage of development and democracy pleased the Americans, who were themselves operating with assumptions rooted in the modernization theory popular at the time that economic progress would yield political democratization. Nehru’s American partner hoped that the result of its investment in community development would be not only more plentiful harvests and higher living standards but also an India that would serve as a bulwark of the “free Asia” it sought against the threat of communism. Looming over the American agenda was the recent “loss of China” to the communists, who had built their political base among the suffering peasants of China’s villages.51
While analysts now may debate the virtues and effectiveness of the massive American-supported efforts in rural development, there is little doubt that Bowles, Logue, and their colleagues felt that they were successfully applying modern Western science and democratic values to previously “backward” and
exploitative rural conditions. But they also recognized the need to proceed cautiously. Bowles took special care to argue—particularly within his own State Department—that community development must be viewed as an Indian program that relied on a “grassroots, village-by-village attack upon poverty, directed by and participated in by the Indian people themselves.” It could not be a top-down, colonial-style American imposition, despite the reliance on expert advisers. As he warned his Republican successor as ambassador, George Allen, “Any effort by the Administration or Congress to tie political strings to Indian Aid or to force us to go out to ‘claim credit’ which really belongs to the Indians, will be disastrous.” Bowles was right to worry. For many reasons—including the Indian government’s reticence to enforce true land reform and wrest control from the landholding rural elites, and Point Four’s failure to adequately engage ordinary Indians in decision-making—community development was never as popular among villagers as Bowles had hoped.52
This Indian experience would stay with Logue for many years. By 1955, when he was working in New Haven, Point Four would provide a model for the kind of integrated physical and social reconstruction he was promoting at home. “As you may have heard, I am busy in a New England version of community development,” he wrote to Douglas Ensminger, the Ford Foundation’s representative in New Delhi. The following year, he tried to recruit Ensminger to speak to a seminar on urban renewal that he was co-teaching at Yale, convinced of the relevance of the community development experience in India. And in 1957, Logue was still claiming that his Indian community development work remained “very pertinent to the work I am now doing,” including its pitfalls. When he sought to give Bowles a balanced view of New Haven’s progress in urban renewal, he honestly admitted, without detailed elaboration, “New Haven has a good program. If our present plans mature by the end of the year, we will be one of the half dozen best in the country. However, you remember Nilokheri and Faridabad and Etawah. Their problems reappear here in other forms. We certainly have not found the panacea.”53
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