by Jane Jacobs
In the meantime, the city has pushed its case by other means. Late in 1941, the Greater Scranton Foundation Fund was formed with $25,000, to bring work to Scranton. The fund has $9,000 not yet spent. It has succeeded in bringing to the city the Standard Piezo Co., a radio parts plant which by the end of the year will employ about 1,000, mostly women, and two tobacco companies and four clothing companies, representing a total of 5,000 jobs. Through the Smaller War Plants division of WPB and the Army, the city has obtained camouflage net work employing 1,000 people.
The newspaper editor and the Chamber of Commerce director have made weekly trips to Washington for the past 15 months in an effort to get war plants for the city, and recently a permanent Washington representative for the city was hired.
Since the first of the year, letters have been written to 400 officials of the Army, Navy and WPB, setting forth in detail, in many instances with charts and figures, what Scranton has in surplus electric power, labor, sites, transportation, etc. More than 300 answers have been received and have been examined by a member of The Iron Age staff. They provide a post-graduate course in the runaround.
Since the letters on Scranton emphasized the city’s surplus of labor and housing and its need of new plants, the reply from the WPB Plant Facility section’s assistant director, J.O. Lanham, Jr., is something of a classic. It reads, “We have analyzed the contents of your letter and it is our opinion that your chief asset is the possession of buildings and potential employees. Basically you lack the machine tools which are most important to the war program. Because of this, it is doubtful whether you will be successful in obtaining prime contracts under your present conditions and plans.” It was to this division that most of the other government replies referred the Scranton representative.
The reasons for all this strange frustration appear to be veiled in mystery. The ostensible reasons, when any have been given at all, have been implausible.
A member of The Iron Age staff, seeking an explanation, recently spoke with R.H. Bailey, Jr., secretary to Senator Joseph F. Guffey, of Pennsylvania. Mr. Bailey, queried on why he believed the recommendations of the Anthracite Commission had not been followed, said: “I think the real reason is very simple and plain. Just about the time, very soon after, the report was submitted the construction of plants was curtailed.”
When it was pointed out to him that even now new plant sites are chosen and that the lists are published, he replied, “Is that so?”
Mr. Bailey, after mentioning the piston ring plant as evidence that Scranton was not doing so badly, disavowed any knowledge of the opposition to its location. He finally said, “Anyway those anthracite regions, that area around Scranton, why they’ve been going back for years. What if they did get some war plants? It wouldn’t help.”*4
It was pointed out to him that this viewpoint was at odds with the one expressed in the report of the Federal Anthracite Coal Commission, which Senator Guffey had signed. Mr. Bailey’s reply to this was a query as to whether his questioner wanted information or an argument.
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*1 It appears that Jacobs means that because of the shortage of industrial work, men are seeking positions that in a traditional patriarchal sense would have been considered women’s jobs, like secretarial or teaching jobs. As she implies, this was the reverse of many other parts of the country where women took on industrial positions usually reserved for men.
*2 The “President” was, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then in the middle of his unprecedented third term as president of the United States.
*3 Established by President Roosevelt in January of 1942, the War Production Board supervised the production of weapons and supplies for the U.S. war effort in World War II. It oversaw the conversion of peacetime industry to war-related production, regulated and directed the manufacture of munitions and equipment, and enforced rationing of materials and commodities needed for the war effort.
*4 In later years, ironically, Jacobs would come to agree with Bailey’s judgment. See “Strategies for Helping Cities” in this volume, and chapters 7 and 12 of Cities and the Wealth of Nations, “Transplant Regions” and “Transactions of Decline,” respectively, for more on the failure of industries “transplanted” into declining regions and war work to spark economic development.
Islands the Boats Pass By
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EXCERPT FROM HARPER’S BAZAAR, JULY 1947
Some look like neatly cut Christmas cookies. Some are like drop cakes that spattered too much, and some are old-fashioned, golden cornmeal sticks. They are dotted all along our Atlantic coast—the green and brown islands which are the fringes of a continent.
A few are familiar to mainlanders as summer resorts. But many—like Matinicus off Maine, the Elizabeths off Massachusetts, Tangier in the Chesapeake, Ocracoke off North Carolina—are Never-Never lands where life follows its own eccentric course, unnoticed and little disturbed by the rest of the world.
To live happily, as well as comfortably, on their few square miles, the natives of these islands have developed special talents for self-sufficiency and gregariousness. Silently, patiently, and by the hour, island children watch the ways of men and boats, then copy the adult skills with precision and delight. In the idle late afternoons on the wharfs, they are tireless listeners, and assured narrators of their own small adventures in crossing a cow pasture or making an off-island visit. It is no accident that so many good yarns are tales of islands and islanders.
Matinicus Island, at the mouth of Penobscot Bay, is, except for one lighthouse rock, the last outpost between Maine and Spain. Summer visitors are few and the island has never had a hotel or boarding house. Even in summer, the mailboat from Rockland reaches it only three times a week. But the occasional visitor always finds, after some searching and inquiring, that islanders are willing to take him in and treat him well.It is no accident that so many good yarns are tales of islands and islanders.
The men of Matinicus are tall and hardy. During the bitter Maine winter their sturdy boats beat through the icy waters to haul lobster. They take their bearings by landmarks called Whaleback, Two Bush, Rum Guzzle, the Barrel, the Hogshead, Tenpound, and Wooden Ball. In the snug workshops along the waterfront, they still build most of their own boats, endlessly whittle buoys, and fashion lobster pots. Questions are answered slowly and obliquely, leaving it to the listener to supply the conclusion. “What time am I putting out tomorrow? Well, we go by Boston almanac, but Boston’s a hundred and thirty-five miles by water, two hundred miles Rockland way. Sun’s up here twenty minutes before Boston.”
No capricious fortune has touched Matinicus, but something strange and a little sad is happening on this island. Its inhabitants speak wistfully of the days when they used to have a band and there were dances in the lodge hall. Men and women in their forties like to remember the vanished spelling and wood-chopping bees of their childhood, the croquet tournaments and the hanging of May baskets, the bonfires on Hallowe’en. Other people remember when everyone used to turn out for town meetings, and elections for selectmen were fiercely contested. In those days, there were four stores on the island, and the stove and cracker barrel sessions lasted far into the night.*
The parents of today’s fourteen school children had thirty or forty classmates. Their grandparents had seventy or eighty. Since 1880, the population of Matinicus has dwindled to little more than a third. Over the same period, lobster fishing has become so profitable that the Matinicans have given up farming. They are more prosperous than ever before.Today the one store closes at five o’clock in the afternoon, the public library has vanished, the lodge hall is boarded up, and town meetings are conducted by rote.
Just why these changes should have been accompanied by a virtual disappearance of community life, the islanders do not know. Today the one store closes at five o’clock in the afternoon, the public library has vanished, the lodge hall is boarded up, and town meetings are conducted by rote. “The old American stock is dying out, and
not just in population,” says one old-timer thoughtfully. “Well, what other ways?” “Oh, knowing about how to have fun together, cooperating.”
But Matinicus still has a gently exuberant flavor and an extraordinary natural beauty. The fields, where hay and potatoes were once raised, have the feeling of remote hilltop pastures, quiet and close to the sun. Roads and paths wind along the mossy, hummocky floors of spruce and fir forests so deep and dark they seem unending, then emerge suddenly among tumbled granite boulders at the sea.
The burying ground at Matinicus is small, but its gravestones span almost two centuries. The newer ones, surrounded by trimmed turf and planted flowers, bear only names and dates. The older ones, the ones that lean crazily into a tangle of blueberry bushes and long, ragged grass, say bravely again and again, “Gone But Not Forgotten.” You need scratch away only a little of the lichen to read it.
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* In chapter 9 of Cities and the Wealth of Nations, “Bypassed Places,” Jacobs diagnoses the loss of such practices as a result of prolonged isolation from dynamic urban economies. This theory of cultural forgetfulness through economic stagnation also underpins her final book, Dark Age Ahead.
No Virtue in Meek Conformity
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FOREWORD TO STATE DEPARTMENT LOYALTY SECURITY BOARD INTERROGATORY, MARCH 25, 1952
Upon first reading the questions submitted to me, I was under the impression that possibly I was to be charged with belonging to the UPWA union and to registering in the American Labor Party.*1 But since neither of these has been declared illegal for government workers, I concluded, upon further thought, that I am probably suspected of being either a secret Communist sympathizer or a person susceptible to Communist influence. I then realized that it is probably at least as difficult for you to put me and my answers in context, so to speak, as it is for me to put the questions in context. Therefore, I am including this foreword to “put myself in context” as best I can. I shall try not to waste your time by repeating material which is in my answers.I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment.
It still shocks me, although we should all be used to it by this time, to realize that Americans can be officially questioned on their union membership, political beliefs, reading matter and the like. I do not like this, and I like still less the fear that arises from it. But I understand the necessity for such questions in the case of government workers in sensitive departments. And I understand that you must examine carefully where there appear to be inconsistencies or deviations. For my part, I am interested, as a citizen deeply concerned in the preservation of traditional American liberties, in presenting my viewpoint as fully and as plainly as possible. I am not answering the enclosed questions in a spirit of sparring with you or trying to get away with anything. I want you to know how I feel.
First of all, I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment. I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, and that I too would have to be vigilant. I was made to feel that it would be a disgrace to me, as an individual, if I should not value or should give up rights that were dearly bought. I am grateful for that upbringing. My grandfather, on my mother’s side, was a lifelong enthusiast of third-party movements in the agrarian and populist tradition. On at least one occasion, in 1872, he ran for Congress on the Greenback-Labor ticket, and a scrapbook of that campaign has come down to me through the family.*2 I am pleased to see how many of that party’s planks, “outlandish” at the time, have since become respectable law and opinion, and I am proud that my grandfather stuck his neck out for them. I am proud of my country that he could do this and also be a respected and successful lawyer. Some members on my father’s side of the family, in Virginia, did not believe in secession or slavery, and opposed their state’s participation in the Civil War. They too were respected for their beliefs, even in the heat of war and of divided family. After the War, they became Republicans, in further assertion of their beliefs, a tradition which passed down to my father and his brother. I am proud of that also, and of a remoter relative, a Quaker, who, believing in women’s rights and women’s brains, set up her own little printing press to publish her own works without a masculine nom de plume. Perhaps it is partly because of such personal tradition that I feel our American tradition of freedom to deviate from the accepted viewpoint is not a cliché or of secondary value.
I believe that there are today two great threats to the security of the American tradition. One is the power of the Soviet Union and its satellites.
Elsewhere in this interrogatory I say what I think of the Soviet government.*3 I believe that our military preparations are necessary for countering the power of the Soviet Union and for halting further aggressive war. But I do not think military readiness, in itself, will defeat Communism. I do not think we can consider the job finished with that. I think it buys us time to do the bigger job. We must demonstrate that it is possible to overcome poverty, misery and decay by democratic means, and we must ourselves believe, and must show others, that our American tradition of the dignity and liberty of the individual is not a luxury for easy times but is the basic source of the strength and security of a successful society.I do not agree with extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and because once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe.
The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and because once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe. Extremists typically want to squash not only those who disagree with them diametrically, but those who disagree with them at all. It seems to me that in every country where extremists of the left have gotten sufficiently in the saddle to squash the extremists of the right, they have ridden on to squash the center or terrorize it also. And the same goes for extremists of the right. I do not want to see that happen in our country.
In the case of the first threat I mentioned, the international threat of Communist systems of government, I have been able to do something practical through my work in the State Department. In the case of the second threat, that of McCarthy—or of the frame of mind of which McCarthy is an apt symbol—there is little practical that I could do other than take a stand in assertion of my own rights.*4
I believe I should tell you where I draw my lines. I believe in the right of Communists, or anyone else, to speak and publish and promulgate ideas in the United States. I believe they or anyone else definitely does not have any right to spy or to sabotage, and should be prosecuted for these acts.
In my personal behavior, I believe I have the right to criticize my government and my Congress. I make these criticisms within the framework of our own system and tradition. I would not aid another country instead of the United States or do any act which would be against the national or international interests of our country and for the interests of the Soviet Union or its satellites.
I would not personally ostracize anyone on account of their political beliefs, but I do not and would not disclose or talk about any material entrusted to me by the government.
Among the public figures who are making known their views today, I would say that the point of view of Justice William O. Douglas most closely coincides with my own.*5
This is how I st
and. I realize you too must draw lines. I am deeply concerned, not only for my own personal welfare, but as a citizen, in where you draw your lines.
Perhaps people with my point of view are in a minority today. But the fact of being in a minority does not, in itself, trouble me, nor do I see anything un-American about being in a minority position. Quite the contrary. The minority views of one day are frequently the majority views of another, and in the possibility of this being so rests all our potentiality for progress. Perhaps hindsight will show me to have been right, perhaps wrong. But we cannot run our lives by hindsight. These are hard times for any American to steer a course. The only guide which I feel that I can follow is not the fluctuating dicta of those who are victors in the battle for popularity at a given moment, but my own understanding of the American tradition in which I was brought up.
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*1 The United Public Workers of America was a union for government workers affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO. Jacobs was a member between 1943 and 1945, when she worked for the Office of War Information (OWI), and again between 1947 and 1951, when she worked for the State Department. Called the United Federal Workers of America when Jacobs joined during the war, it was a militant union, active in progressive and civil rights politics, particularly in New York. Some of the union’s leaders and members were Communists, which attracted the attention of the FBI and congressional Cold Warriors in the late 1940s and led to its expulsion from the CIO in 1950.