Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  PLURALIST DEMOCRATS

  One of the greatest challenges New Haven urban renewers faced was finding a democratic way of implementing urban renewal that incorporated citizen input—valued by them as well as required by the federal government—without compromising the knowledge and authority of public officials. In New Haven, Logue would begin seeking what he considered an ideal balance, and it would remain a preoccupation throughout his career. Tellingly, by his next stop in Boston, he would arrive flaunting his signature slogan “planning with people.”

  Logue felt confident that he had long demonstrated a deep commitment to advancing democracy, in the United States and the world. It was omnipresent in his language and his goals, whether he was unionizing low-level Yale workers, fighting in World War II as a bombardier, organizing veterans for greater rights and benefits, working as a labor lawyer and Connecticut’s labor secretary, helping a new Indian nation develop, promoting racial progress, or—now—redeveloping a city in crisis. All these efforts, he thought, fulfilled the political ideology that he had expressed to the State Department’s Loyalty Board when he sought its approval to serve in India. Here Logue wrote that “every nation should have as its primary aim the development of conditions of life which will make it possible for every person living in that nation to achieve the maximum human dignity and individual fulfillment.” He then described what he felt was the best route to achieving a democratic America: “I believe in a society which is pluralistic,… in which there are many centers of power.”6

  What Logue intimated here, and elaborated on during his years in New Haven, was a view of the world as divided between public and private interests, where the achievement of a more democratic and egalitarian American society lay in strengthening the public sector to mediate between diverse but often conflicting private interests. He felt that a redevelopment official like himself—independent, impartial, and public-spirited—had the responsibility to protect the public interest from entrenched politicians motivated by favoritism or private-sector actors pursuing their own self-interest.7 Logue’s like-minded successor as development administrator of New Haven, L. Thomas Appleby, and New Haven alderman William Lee Miller coauthored a piece in The New York Times Magazine in which they explained the danger of officials not actively protecting the public good from what today we would call narrow NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”): “What happens when a neighborhood says it wants no Negroes, no low income public housing, no site for a public high school? Sometimes that’s exactly ‘what the people in the area themselves want,’ but it is … hard to work with on a community-wide basis.”8

  During the 1950s, as money was flowing abundantly from Washington to New Haven for federal urban renewal, the Yale political science professor Robert Dahl and his students decided to turn their city into a laboratory for confronting a key question facing Cold War America: How well was democracy functioning in the United States as it met challenges from communism and socialism? The result was Dahl’s Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City, published in 1961, based on extensive interviews and other field study from 1957 to 1959. Two related works by Dahl’s graduate students, who helped him with the research, appeared subsequently: Nelson Polsby’s Community Power and Political Theory (1963) and Raymond Wolfinger’s The Politics of Progress (1974).9 Dahl and his students were engaged in a research project to test ideas about political elitism formulated by the Italian political theorists Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto as well as the claims of the American sociologists C. Wright Mills and Floyd Hunter. Mills and Hunter had published books a few years earlier provocatively arguing that a small, cohesive, interlocking group of social, economic, and political elites had come to dominate American society and to exercise disproportionate and self-interested influence in decision-making.10 They concluded that American democracy was not alive and well.

  Dahl decided that the best way to investigate the validity of these arguments about the health of American democracy was to move beyond theory and observe practices on the ground—to track how decisions were made and who made them—in a high-stakes arena such as urban renewal, which was transforming his home base of New Haven at the time. He concluded that although clearly some people had more influence than others, the lack of a single homogeneous ruling elite undermined the claims of Mills and Hunter (and later G. William Domhoff, who would revive Hunter’s analysis through his own investigation of New Haven in Who Really Rules? New Haven and Community Power Reexamined).11 The dispersal of power through what Dahl labeled “pluralist democracy,” which he insisted could be observed empirically, ensured that no small political or economic faction was all-powerful. Who Governs? would win the American Political Science Association’s prestigious Woodrow Wilson Prize for the field’s best book in 1962 and remains a classic. When Dahl died at the age of ninety-eight in February 2014, his New York Times obituary still described him as “his profession’s most distinguished student of democratic government.”12

  Dahl and his students requested and received thorough cooperation from Mayor Lee and the redevelopment administrator Logue. Not only did they interview both Lee and Logue extensively, but Wolfinger also spent a year in city hall as a participant observer. From July 1957 through January 1958, he worked for Logue’s agency. In February 1958, he moved next door to the mayor’s office and spent the next five months watching Lee do his job. Throughout this period Wolfinger wrote detailed memos to Dahl, minutely dissecting how decisions were made, who influenced them, and how power was exercised in New Haven. Meanwhile, Dahl and Polsby were busy interviewing everyone involved in the city’s activities, with particular attention to members of the Citizens Action Commission (CAC), the body the renewers created to engage a wide, bipartisan cross section of New Haven’s citizens in their ambitious redevelopment plans. This advisory commission was, in Wolfinger’s words, “designed to sell redevelopment to those groups that remained fairly aloof from redevelopment—professional men, middle-class do-gooders, liberals, and most important, big business—and to use their membership to lend an aura of prestige, nonpartisanship, and business community support to redevelopment.”13

  Dahl’s pluralist analysis of urban renewal identified a complex collaboration between private and public interests. Private interests, he argued, were represented by the almost six hundred people involved in the CAC, including a high-powered executive committee and subsidiary action committees organized around problem areas: industrial and harbor development; the central business district; housing and slum clearance; health, welfare, recreation, and human relations; education; and the metropolitan New Haven region. Among these hundreds of participants were leading bankers and businessmen, but also representatives of labor unions, civic associations, ethnic and racial organizations, and charities. The public interest, in contrast, was embodied in the elected mayor and his administrators under Logue, who managed the process from plan to implementation in what Dahl labeled an “executive-centered order.”

  As Dahl and his students explained the process, the CAC and its committees heard about the redevelopment plans as they progressed, but rarely if ever initiated, opposed, or altered proposals brought before them by Lee and Logue. They were too divided and uninformed for that. But they were plenty capable of expressing “vigorous opposition [that] might easily have blocked a proposal.” CAC members thus “represented and reflected the main sources of articulate opinion in the political spectrum of New Haven,” exposing the mayor and his redevelopment team to public attitudes. As a result, “members of the administration shaped their proposals according to what they expected would receive the full support of the CAC and therefore of the political spectrum.”14 A “litmus test,” was how Logue’s deputy H. Ralph Taylor described it to Dahl. Max Livingston, a well-respected member of the CAC who represented New Haven’s Jewish community, explained how he thought the process worked: ideas that “originate with the professionals” need to be “sold” to the CAC, and then the CAC “takes a very vital role i
n organizing the opinion of the community … so they have the political backing that they need in order to become reality.” Livingston gave an example of how he helped save a recreation budget for Dixwell from aldermanic cutting by “contacting every organization and every person we could think of … who would get up on their feet” and defend the program.15

  To Dahl’s mind, this complex process proved that there was no power elite pulling the strings of New Haven’s government. Rather, Lee and Logue’s need to anticipate the diverse concerns of organized community interests represented on the CAC created a feedback loop that put a pluralist form of democracy in place as the city remade itself with federal assistance. The CAC’s Third Annual Report in 1957 described itself accordingly as a “grassroots organization” that included “a cross-section of community life with all its rich and varied character … These representative men and women are the democratic foundation on which the success of urban renewal in New Haven depends.”16 As a member of the CAC executive committee told Dahl, they aimed to embrace “every darn organization in the city, PTA, church, labor, whatever and build on that organizational structure which is the life blood of your community.”17 Time and again, the political scientists found the urban renewers consciously acting within a framework of representational democracy. Wolfinger, for example, quoted a “major city official” defending even backroom negotiations as democratic if a wide range of voices were at the table: “People say in a democracy that you should not be secretive in any of your public acts, but, you know,… you have to realize that if you talk about wholesale relocation and demolition, then the people … would be filled with fear and frustrations … So, all in all,… while we explore very carefully all the implications of every project, we have to be careful not to have any public discussion until we are absolutely satisfied that we are right.”18

  In addition to the CAC, Logue often pointed to other democratic vehicles that provided crucial feedback from the community to the Lee administration. He cited proudly the appointed neighborhood renewal committees that vetted plans and the frequent public hearings, required by federal law, where opponents could raise objections. In addition, he claimed, the mayoral election every two years served as a kind of referendum on urban renewal, where the strength of Lee’s mandate usually fluctuated with the ups and downs of the program.19 As Logue told Dahl and Polsby in 1957, “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t make such a joke of the democratic process—debate and discuss and everything else and nothing gets accomplished … Two years is a hell of a short time and if people don’t like it, they can throw us out.”20

  To gauge public opinion even more frequently, Logue and Lee commissioned Harris polls about every six months, with particular attention to urban renewal. They were pleased with a 1957 Harris survey that showed 71 percent of the sample approving of the Oak Street project and only 6 percent disapproving, and they expressed concern over a 1959 survey that showed Jewish support for Lee slipping slightly over the dislocation of downtown merchants—many of whom were Jews—despite the group’s generally strong support for redevelopment.21 Logue’s Redevelopment Agency also opened a temporary “Progress Pavilion” at the intersection of Church and Chapel Streets with scale models, wall panels, and a comment book that Lee famously scrutinized in search of public feedback.22 Whenever critics charged New Haven’s urban renewal with being undemocratic, its leaders argued that they had plenty of evidence to the contrary. The CAC gave input regularly; rarely was much opposition expressed at public meetings; Lee continued to get reelected, often in landslides; and urban renewal polled well.23

  THE LEE-LOGUE TEAM

  If the CAC and other mechanisms provided a way for private interests to influence New Haven’s urban renewal, then Lee and Logue meant for Logue’s powerful, well-endowed New Haven Redevelopment Agency—staffed by well-trained, impartial experts—to embody the public interest. And the responsibility to protect that general good began at the top, with the city’s leaders. The development administrator Logue and the mayor shared a common vision for what a rebuilt New Haven should look like and the self-confidence that they could make it happen, frequently contrasting themselves favorably to their predecessors, the redevelopment director Sam Spielvogel and Mayor William Celentano. Their conviction that they were on the right track was reinforced when someone of the stature of Hubert H. Humphrey—ex-mayor of Minneapolis, senator, and later vice president from 1965 to 1969—confided, “Dick, you son of a gun, what we really ought to do is let the other mayors spend a day with you and your staff. Then they’d understand what we mean by creative federalism.”24

  Despite their shared ambition for New Haven, Lee and Logue played very different roles in its renewal. Lee was the “outside guy,” responsible for cultivating support on the streets of New Haven, in the Connecticut legislature, and in multiple arenas nationally. Amid his constant campaigning for mayor, he also flirted with seeking higher office, in particular a Senate seat that many thought was his for the asking. Labeled “the hottest piece of political real estate in Connecticut” by The Hartford Courant, Lee nonetheless decided that he couldn’t abandon New Haven’s renewal. Others speculated that he feared leaving the safe harbors of New Haven, where he had no worries about his lack of a college degree or being considered provincial.25 But even as he stuck close to home, Lee modeled himself after the era’s prototype of the young, liberal, charismatic, Irish Catholic politician: the senator and then, in 1961, president John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK), with whom he had a political friendship. Lee felt that he was making New Haven the testing ground for Kennedy’s national urban agenda.26

  Ever the public relations man, Lee promoted New Haven’s renewal brazenly, labeling everything he did—as minor as installing a traffic light—as “another step in our city-wide renewal program.” Probably his most notorious sales job for urban renewal was widely disseminating photographs that documented the rooting out of some ten thousand rats he claimed had infested the Oak Street tenements. For a number of years Lee had his own local television show, where he discussed redevelopment plans, and he penned a regular Sunday column in the Bridgeport Herald. Lee testified in support of urban renewal before countless congressional committees, lobbied hard for changes in federal regulations to benefit cities, and turned his presidency of the U.S. Conference of Mayors into a bully pulpit for the cause.27 When President Johnson signed an act establishing the new cabinet-level agency of Housing and Urban Development, he respectfully sent Lee one of the pens he had used, with the note, “You deserve a lion’s share of the credit for efforts leading to the new department which will advance the progress of our cities.”28

  Logue, as New Haven’s development administrator, was the “inside guy” whose job it was to make sure that their grand plans got formulated, funded, and implemented. With Lee providing political protection, Logue prided himself on being an innovative, tough-minded, effective administrator who ran an exemplary Redevelopment Agency. This included working his staff hard. Sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, with frequent evenings and weekends spent at the office, were de rigueur, leaving Margaret and other wives to complain at times about being redevelopment widows.29 Many staff responded well to Logue’s high expectations, throwing themselves into the work and learning how to handle his intense, demanding style. Harold “Hal” Grabino recalled his own quick learning curve. Soon after he started working as general counsel at the Redevelopment Agency, he was assigned to complete a form for the Feds outlining all the Connecticut statutes relevant to urban renewal. “I did a lousy job,” he said. When he handed it to Logue, Grabino recalled, “He lace[d] into me, like Logue always did … and he was right. So I took it back, and I redid it. And from that day on, I resolved that that is never going to happen again.”30 For young professionals like Grabino, Ed Logue became a mentor and a model of a self-assured, rigorous, and principled public servant who knew how to get results.

  Some subordinates, however, chafed at Logue’s demanding management style. Soon after Allan
Talbot arrived to work in the New Haven Redevelopment Agency, one of his first assignments was to prepare the annual report for the agency. “He looked at my script and kind of threw it away, and said some expletive, that this was totally inadequate, and [when] I began to question what was inadequate about it, he took the chair from behind his desk and threw it across the room,” Talbot said. “So the techniques were one of … intimidation … [to accomplish] what he wanted.”31 In time, Talbot came to admire Logue, but for some others, the dressing-downs still remained open wounds years later.

  Logue worked best with thick-skinned employees who not only could tolerate a demanding boss but also were willing and able to challenge him. The Ed Logue who had styled himself a rebel in the belly of the establishment beast during Yale days responded well to other rebels in his midst, as long as they were smart, savvy, and hardworking. After Grabino’s humiliating lesson in the need for higher standards, he recognized, “If you were sure of yourself, and you held your ground, and you screamed back at him and didn’t let him get away with it, you became friends. And that’s the way it worked with Ed.”32 In fact, later, when Logue was building a new staff in Boston, he became frustrated with how deferential people seemed. He claimed to sorely miss his New Haven underling Tom Appleby’s “Goddammit, Logue, you’re wrong! Fucking wrong, WRONG, WRONG!”33 Logue’s deputy in New Haven, Ralph Taylor, said that Logue went so far as to tell him, “You son-of-a-bitch, if you lose the courage to tell me I’m wrong and I’m crazy, I’ll fire you.”34