The community development work in India that so inspired Logue was the brainchild of a very distinctive—and politically progressive—group of social scientists and agricultural experts, which helped convince Logue of the worthiness of the undertaking. They had been agrarian Social Democrats within the New Deal’s Department of Agriculture, supported by its reformist secretary Henry Wallace and clustered in its Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Farm Security Administration, and land-grant college training programs. There they promoted all kinds of innovative projects to help family farmers—and even in some cases sharecroppers and farm workers—cope with the Great Depression and the growing threat from corporate agriculture. During World War II and its immediate aftermath, they found their cooperative county planning committees, state agricultural extension services, and other grassroots participatory schemes—what they called a “cultural approach to extension” for valorizing farmers’ long-standing customs and traditions—suddenly under attack in an increasingly anti-communist Congress. Despite the fact that most of them, like Logue and Bowles, condemned communism, they were pushed out of government service as too radical. The growth of international rural development work in the late 1940s and 1950s in what was then called “the third world”—sponsored by Point Four, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization—provided these agricultural reformers with an opportunity to practice their integrated program of agricultural modernization and agrarian democratization overseas.54
Among this group, Logue particularly admired Wolf Ladejinsky, a Russian Jew who had immigrated to the United States, studied at Columbia, worked in the Department of Agriculture in Washington, and after World War II became a skilled strategist for pushing reluctant Asian governments to widen land ownership as the best defense against communism. The Logues met Ladejinsky when he came to India to advise on land reform, and they then visited him in Japan for three weeks as the last stop on their return trek through India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Singapore, and Hong Kong. As the architect of sweeping land redistribution under the American Occupation, Ladejinsky surely conveyed to the Logues how the reconstruction of Japan was successfully integrating a reeducation in democracy with the physical rebuilding of a nation devastated in war. At the end of the trip Logue enthused in a letter to Ford’s Ensminger back in New Delhi: “This country could be the proving ground for democracy in all of Asia.”55
Later, in 1954 and again in 1956, Logue rallied to Ladejinsky’s defense when he was red-baited. First, Ladejinsky was forced to leave Japan when the Republican secretary of agriculture deemed his Russian origins a security risk. Then, two years later, when he was working on land reform in South Vietnam, the State Department dismissed him for a technical conflict of interest, as he had bought stock in a Taiwanese company that had a contract with the U.S. government. Logue was convinced that Ladejinsky was being politically targeted and was outraged. As he wrote to another associate from his India days, “Wolf is the leading democratic expert in the world on land reform. There is a certain irony in the fact that his resignation was forced because he was the only American publicly known to have invested a private dollar in private enterprise in Chiang Kai-Shek’s Formosa.” Logue tried to get the Ford Foundation to hire Ladejinsky, but it wouldn’t touch him. Nor would other American organizations fearful of a communist taint. From 1956 to 1961 Ladejinsky worked directly for the South Vietnamese government, until the Ford Foundation and later the World Bank finally took him on as a consultant.56 Historians have recognized that New Deal agricultural reformers carried many of their domestically tested ideas abroad to the developing world as the United States expanded its sphere of influence during the Cold War. But they have barely begun to track individuals like Ed Logue—or his American embassy colleague Bernard Loshbough, who helped direct development programs in India and then returned to the United States to work in housing and redevelopment in Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh. They brought many of those ideas back home again and applied them to America’s urban problems in the 1950s and 1960s. “It is ironic—perhaps shocking,” Loshbough mused in 1962, “that an urbanite like myself had to travel 10,000 miles to India to learn that a homegrown product like agricultural extension can likely be adapted for effective use in urban centers.” Loshbough would launch a highly regarded, Ford-funded “urban extension” program in Pittsburgh that mimicked its model in India, deploying “urban agents” to organize “self-help renewal” projects in four neighborhoods.57 The roots of Logue’s lifelong concern with improving America’s urban environment likewise grew deep in the soil of rural India, where, in the early 1950s, a complex alliance of different sorts of modernizing progressives—nonaligned Indian leaders, reformist agricultural experts, and a New Deal–inspired American embassy staff serving under a committed liberal ambassador—all embraced village renewal as the key to India’s success with democracy.
Logue brought the excitement of helping to build a new India to his work in New Haven. When the opportunity arose to join Lee in creating a model of urban renewal for the nation, he felt that he was undertaking his own version of Etawah, Faridabad, and Nilokheri. His urban upbringing in Philadelphia, his years as a rebel at Yale, his commitment to labor organizing, his aerial perspective as a bombardier, his civil rights activism, his legal training, his government service, and, most recently, his nurturing of a more modern and democratic India—each of these experiences shaped the Ed Logue who in January 1954 threw himself into the challenge of addressing the urban crisis in America through remaking his adopted hometown of New Haven.58 In the years ahead, Logue and his partner Mayor Dick Lee devoted themselves to what became an enormously ambitious, expensive—and ultimately controversial—undertaking. Redeveloping New Haven would be one of the most important testing grounds for federal urban policy in the 1950s and 1960s, and it would catapult Lee and his first lieutenant Logue into national prominence.
MULTIPLE CRISES IN NEW HAVEN
The city that Ed and Margaret Logue returned to from New Delhi was actually made up of at least four distinct New Havens—and none were faring well. First, there was Yankee New Haven, centered on the city’s impressive Green, dating back to the Puritan colony’s seventeenth-century settlement and originally containing its marketplace, burying ground, and meetinghouse. Later, it provided an anchor for Yale College’s development directly to the west after its founding in 1701. By the Federal Period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Green had become one of the finest public squares in the country, graced with three venerable Protestant churches built between 1812 and 1815 and lined with majestic elm trees that gave New Haven the moniker of “Elm City.” But by the time of Lee’s ascension to the mayoralty in 1954, the neighboring, private Yale University was dwarfing the public Green in size and national prestige, the picturesque site where town and gown converged barely masking the growing tension between them.59 There were numerous fault lines, but the widest was the financial burden the city bore from having so much of nonprofit Yale’s property off the municipal tax rolls. As the university’s ambitions grew after World War II, so, too, had its real estate holdings. Every new building constructed on a previously occupied site increased the tax load on nonexempt taxpayers. This problem had already become obvious to Logue as a law student years earlier. In 1946, he wrote to his future wife, Margaret, “While it is true that Yale does wonders for New Haven, it still uses up a lot of tax-free land. Aside from the med school, Yale seems to have had a pretty casual attitude toward the government and the welfare of New Haven.”60
At the Green’s southern border sat a busy downtown commercial district, choked with local as well as long-distance traffic in the days before the Connecticut Turnpike (I-95) bypassed the city in 1958. The intersection of Chapel and Church Streets was its heart: there stood two major department stores, Malley’s and Shartenberg’s. For years, New Haveners met up “at the clock at Malley’s.” A third department store, Gamble-Desmond, had closed i
n September 1953, right before Lee’s election as mayor, a disturbing sign of the city’s growing commercial troubles. Surrounding these department stores, which had anchored downtown since the nineteenth century, were a dozen blocks of theaters, offices, and storefronts in conditions ranging from modestly modernized to comfortably dowdy to downright dilapidated. They housed pharmacies, luncheonettes, barbershops, and haberdasheries; jewelry, camera, and novelty stores; bowling alleys and billiard halls; and smoke, hat, and dress shops. Inexpensive office space—a worrisome amount of it empty—was for rent upstairs. Almost all these downtown businesses were locally owned, many by ethnic New Haveners, particularly Jews, for whom opening a store offered a promising route to upward mobility. For decades, downtown New Haven had served as the commercial center not just of the city but also for the surrounding Southern Connecticut region. More and more, however, brand-new suburban shopping centers were encroaching on New Haven’s retail dominance, with their easier car access and acres of free parking.
New Haven as a political and administrative headquarters dominated a third side of the Green. Here were impressive structures—a Victorian Gothic city hall, a colonnaded neoclassical post office, and courthouses, law offices, and banks associated with the city’s status as the seat of New Haven County. Not far away, in the city’s better-off neighborhoods, bankers and lawyers from prestigious local firms, many of them Yale Law graduates, occupied stately homes and supported exclusive social institutions such as the Graduate Club and the New Haven Lawn Club. Gradually, though, counties were declining in importance in Connecticut—their governments would be officially abolished in 1960. And the city’s elite were increasingly becoming New Haveners by day and residents of leafy, prosperous suburban communities like Woodbridge, Orange, Madison, North Haven, Branford, Guilford, and Hamden by night, thereby shifting their identities and allegiances from city to suburb.
By the mid-1950s, New Haven’s fourth dimension of factory districts and working-class communities was showing the greatest fragility of all. New Haven had thrived as a manufacturing center for many kinds of goods in the nineteenth century—carriages, hardware, clocks, rubber boots, garments, and munitions. Since 1870, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, maker of military and sporting weaponry, had been the city’s largest employer, operating a mammoth plant not far from Yale’s gates. But now its declining payroll was causing alarm. Although 21,000 had worked there during World War I and 13,700 during World War II, by the 1950s the plant employed just 5,000.61
For over a century, immigrants had poured into New Haven to take up plentiful jobs in factories and with the city’s important railroad and telephone networks. First came the Irish and Germans, followed by the Italians and Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. They crowded initially into immigrant districts like the Oak Street tenement neighborhood bordering downtown, and then, once established, moved on to stable working-class communities such as Wooster Square, Dixwell, and Fair Haven, settling on streets lined with modest but respectable brick rowhouses and clapboarded three-deckers. By 1953, African Americans from the South made up the latest stream of migrants looking for high-wage manufacturing jobs. Unfortunately, they were arriving just as the city’s industries drastically retrenched. The consolidation of corporations nationally made New Haven’s factories less valued outposts of major firms, their dated physical plants too hemmed in to allow expansion, and cheaper nonunion labor more easily found elsewhere. Moreover, as flexible trucking transport replaced domestic rail and water shipping, New Haven’s superb access to both mattered less. With more and more New Haveners struggling to make a living, housing and neighborhoods deteriorated, as landlords were less willing to invest in their properties. These and other changes over the course of the twentieth century destabilized industrial New Haven and increased the number of city residents—old and new—searching for good jobs and decent homes.
ELECTING DICK LEE AS MAYOR
Dick Lee’s victory in 1953 over the Italian Republican mayor William Celentano, after two failed challenges in 1949 and 1951, validated his decision to make the city’s creeping decline his poster cause. In the previous two elections, Lee had charged Celentano, a successful funeral home operator, with the usual failure to deliver quality services. Both candidates had worried about the city’s deterioration, but their proposed remedies had skirted the larger structural problems with quick fixes—more parking here, a traffic light there, better street paving everywhere. The Yale Law School professor Eugene Rostow, who recruited Logue to help with Independents for Lee in 1953, said that despite Lee’s Yale connections, “very few of us at the university took any interest in Dick’s first two attempts to become mayor … They were really ordinary affairs with Dick hitting conventional themes of efficiency and honesty.”62 What made 1953 so different was that after his second defeat in 1951, Lee said, “I began to tie in all these ideas we’d been practicing in city planning for years in terms of the human benefits that a program like this could reap for a city … And I began to realize that while we had lots of people interested in doing something for the city they were all working at cross purposes. There was no unity of approach.”63
The excitement generated by Lee’s third campaign was palpable, even among the usually blasé and locally disinterested Yale community, who were more invested in electing the nationally prominent fellow “egghead” Adlai Stevenson as president than a provincial politician named Dick Lee as mayor. “When he campaigned to rebuild the city in 1953, he struck a responsive chord,” Rostow continued. “He was attacking fundamental ills of our time, the moral, economic, and social injustice of the slum … I believe the reason he finally won in 1953 is that he abandoned the stock clichés of electioneering and allowed his morality to come through. Voters sense this in a candidate. From 1953 … the people have understood that Dick means it when he says that slums are evil and the city must be rebuilt. They sense his commitment.”64 Ed Logue was only one of many idealistic liberals who signed up to work for Lee.
Logue and his ilk had good reason to believe that Lee might be just the one to pull off an audacious plan to revitalize the city. Lee was born in New Haven to a working-class English and Irish family (though he played up the Irish side for its greater political rewards), attended local public schools, and soon after graduating high school in 1934 found jobs locally, first as a reporter for the New Haven Journal-Courier, then as a staff member of the Chamber of Commerce, and, beginning in 1944, as the head of Yale’s news bureau. Each job embedded lower-class Lee in another bastion of elite power in the city—the Republican newspapers of the locally powerful Jackson family, the organized business community, and Yale University. By 1953, Lee had already served for fourteen years as a New Haven alderman representing the Irish Democratic Seventeenth Ward, where he had grown up. With a foot in both town and gown and with a new, potentially more civic-minded Yale president, A. Whitney Griswold, at the university’s helm, Lee seemed well positioned to overcome the difficult relations of the past and lead a collaborative effort to turn around New Haven.
Conservatively dressed in tweeds, button-down collars, and bow ties from Fenn-Feinstein and J. Press—New Haven men’s clothiers selling a newfangled Ivy look—townie Lee appeared as Ivy as the bluest of Yalies as he ran from wake to bar mitzvah to League of Women Voters tea, solidifying his ties with the city’s many communities.65 Explained one of his aides,
When he is with the Irish, his ethnic background comes out and he looks like he grew up in Dublin. When he is at the university, he is a wise old man. Over at the Chamber he is a shrewd capitalist. With the unions he is a cigar-chomping tough guy. He’s not just “acting” either. He really knows how to talk the language of each of those groups.66
Lee’s aide might have added that in the 1953 election, Lee even gained the trust of the local chapter of the NAACP, to which he promised more blacks on the police force and an end to police brutality.67 Logue, too, noted how broadly Lee could communicate: “Dick was a marvel … There was
n’t anything or anyone in that town he didn’t know or couldn’t get a read on in five minutes—a good natural politician.”68 It was Lee’s commitment to bringing multiple New Haven voices to the table, in fact, that would later propel him to work closely with Logue to design an innovative structure of community consultation for urban renewal, the Citizens Action Commission (CAC).
Lee was the first of three elected officials to partner with Logue in his career of rebuilding cities, providing the political cover that made Logue’s work possible. Mayor John Collins of Boston and Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York would follow. All shared Logue’s conviction that rebuilding a city physically was a necessary part of revitalizing its economy and offering greater opportunity to its residents. The partnership that Lee and Logue forged in New Haven thus became the template for the kind of collaboration that Logue would repeatedly seek in his career: a committed elected official to run political interference while he, the administrative expert supported by a nationally recruited professional staff, determined what to do and how to pay for it.
GETTING TO WORK
Within weeks of Lee’s inauguration in January 1954, the mayor and Logue began scheming how to structure their redevelopment agenda to take the greatest possible advantage of new federal programs aimed at revitalizing cities. They were also determined that the mayor’s office would fully control the effort—and not leave it to the appointed Redevelopment Agency Board, with its ties to party regulars, or the city’s current staff, whom they considered ineffective.69
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