Amerika’s writers and editors were acutely mindful of their Russian readers. “Reader comments,” an in-house memo noted, “indicate that the magazine should not present too concentrated a dose of the more remarkable (to the Soviet reader) facets of the American standard of living. They simply aren’t believed.” Modern kitchens? Ordinary factory workers with their own wristwatches? Private airplanes for recreation? To write for Amerika meant seeing every word through the eyes of a reader in Moscow or Leningrad. An account of her duties Jane prepared in the late 1940s suggests she well understood this psychological side of her work. Her task, she wrote, was to “create the precise impression desired upon a Russian readership…much misinformed by its own press regarding America.” Touchy subjects, like the American economic system, had to be “treated with discrimination and judgment, to convince rather than to antagonize.” Here was the propagandist at work. Here, too, was a writer determined to reach her readers.
In September 1948, Bob Jacobs’s first cousin, John, not long back from service in the South Pacific, dissatisfied by his flirtations with law school and advertising, came to work for Amerika. He recalls himself as “a personable young man,” but footloose, living with his wife, Katia, in the Village near Jane and Bob. “Why don’t you come here and work?” Jane suggested, referring to Amerika. He came for an interview and got the job; he could rightly say there were no Communists in his family because his brother, Edward, who had been a Communist, a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, had been killed in the Spanish Civil War.
“It was the most marvelous job,” John Jacobs says of his time with Amerika, “with wonderful articles to write and a month to do them in.” He did one on modern art, got to know one of the de Koonings. “I was happy as a clam.” He and his colleagues “were doing God’s work, giving the poor Russian people” information useful and true. As for Jane, she was “the best editor I ever had.” One time he was supposed to be writing “a moody New York piece in the E. B. White mode, and I knew it wasn’t working.” He took it to Jane. By the time she was done with it, it was all he had wanted it to be but hadn’t been able to bring off himself. “When Jane took something on,” he says, “that something was dead,” finished, you never had to worry about it again.
Back at the OWI, Jane had gotten a brief, unrewarding taste of being a supervisor. But by now, a few years older, she was better in that role. Government employee efficiency ratings were typically arranged in two columns—on the left for the work itself, on the right for any administrative or supervisory elements of it. Now, in August 1950, for the first time Jane was being rated—highly—on these administrative measures. She was still a writer, but now had five junior writers under her. Freelancers reported to her, too. All in all, she estimated, the supervisory side of her work took up three-quarters of her time.
—
Beginning in mid-1948, the geopolitical conflict that led to the founding of Amerika and Soviet Life in the first place touched down on Jane’s personal life.
Communism had come to be seen in America as not only an external threat but also an internal one, with spies and “fellow-travelers” seen or imagined everywhere; patriotism and loyalty were to be proven, not assumed. Responding to the Republican sweep in the 1946 congressional elections and trying to counter criticism from the anticommunist right, President Truman in 1947 issued Executive Order 9835, requiring a loyalty review of most federal employees; should it yield “reasonable grounds” to believe you were disloyal to the government, you were out of a job.
Under Truman’s order, Jane, a State Department employee, had to fill out what might have seemed a routine enough form, “Request for Investigation Data,” giving the government the tools to investigate her loyalty and political correctness: list where you’ve worked, where you’ve lived for the past ten years, give names and addresses of friends, neighbors, and colleagues. This led to a series of FBI field investigations across three months in the late summer and early fall of 1948 that included reports about Jane—thirteen of them—from agents in Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., Newark, Boston, and other cities.
Most of those the FBI interviewed called Jane loyal, respectable, patriotic, or, in the language of one report, “of good character and reputation.” But, inevitably, she had rubbed some people the wrong way. And some of her free-spiritedness had not escaped the eyes of neighborhood busybodies. The FBI learned that at one point Jane and Bob had put in for visas to visit Siberia. It cited one or more of Jane’s ex-colleagues at Iron Age to the effect that she was a troublemaker. It pictured Jane’s first employer in New York, Robert Hemphill, as a “sugar daddy,” the Butzner women reputedly his mistresses, the three of them observed from nearby apartments sitting inside on hot summer days half naked. FBI informants describing Jane as “liberal” were sometimes further queried as to just what they meant by that. One said that “she had a complete mind of her own and would not be swayed by the opinion of others…[and] had no interest in the Communist Party or Communist front groups and that she was a person who would not have her thoughts dictated by any party whether it was a Communist or Fascist group.” Got that right. Another said that to him “liberal” meant Communist leanings—though he admitted “he had no reason for making this statement” except that Jane lived in Greenwich Village, where Communists were said to live, and he’d heard her say things, though he couldn’t remember what.
—
Years later, amid the acrimony of the Vietnam War, critics seeing the United States as behaving like a police state took to calling it—alive to the German spelling’s totalitarian flavor—“Amerika.”
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On July 19, 1948, a letter from Carroll St. Claire, acting chairman of the State Department’s Loyalty Review Board, went out to Jane, requesting answers to a number of specific questions. The letter probably reached her on Wednesday the 20th. By Friday, she had written a three-page reply. No, she’d not been a union organizer while at Iron Age, but simply a member of the union. She had indeed, with Bob, put in a request to visit Siberia. She hadn’t followed the Communist line during the war. She had never subscribed to Daily Worker, the Communist Party U.S. newspaper. And she’d never been a member of the Communist Party, nor ever been affiliated with it, nor ever been a member or participant in any “sympathetic associations” of the CP.
The final word on Jane, as of February 1, 1949, was that the FBI had uncovered some “unfavorable information relating to character or suitability of subject,” but that she had been “cleared for loyalty and security.” As most of the troubling information went back to before 1943, this was “not considered significant at this time.”
And that seemed to be that.
—
Around the time Jane’s loyalty to America was being investigated, she got hit hard, from the other side, by the Russians:
It has long been known that the lying little magazine “Amerika,” published in the Russian language, pursues the goal of deceiving readers, of creating in them a false impression about the contemporary situation in the United States, of disguising the imperialist policy of Wall Street, and of extolling in every way possible the “achievements” of America.
It was September 16, 1949, and V. Kusakov of the Academy of Architecture of the USSR was using the pages of Izvestia, which represented the views of the Soviet government, to tear into two recent issues of Amerika. Both featured articles about American architecture, and both were written by Jane Jacobs.
CHAPTER 8
TRUSHCHOBY
THE COVER SHOWED TWO small girls in little dresses and black patent leather shoes, ribbons in their hair, faces aglow, squeezed close together, standing on the seat of a playground swing as it flew up against the deep indigo sky. Here was Amerika, issue number 29, reaching its Soviet readers probably in the summer of 1949, delivering its buoyant message of America. The issue’s lead article was titled “New Horizons in the Architecture of the U.S.A.” It was written by Jane Jacobs, and it was
thick with images of American buildings and structures, set out on the broad American plain, all expressing American health and vitality: Cozy clapboarded houses. A southwestern pueblo. Dams, grain silos, and electric transmission towers. Chicago School architecture from the late 1800s. And, of course, that larger-than-life hero of American architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, with “Fallingwater” and others among his architectural triumphs; one shot shows him beside an early model of the Guggenheim Museum, years before its iconic helix would rise over Fifth Avenue in New York. The following issue of Amerika, with part 2 of the article, showed a modern school, a modern hospital ward, open vistas and unobstructed views, an upper-middle-class suburban living room—all fireplace, sofas, great glass windows—inviting us to step through its sliding glass door and, cocktail in hand, settle down into the new postwar America.
But Comrade Kusakov, associate member of the Academy of Architecture of the USSR, was having none of it. In his Izvestia piece, Kusakov wrote off one building praised in Jane’s article as “an ugly flat, steel box, architecturally dead and joyless,” described Wright’s school and experimental community, Taliesin, as “a monstrous variation of prehistoric cave dwellings and modern shacks.” But it was not architecture so much that inspired his righteous Communist wrath. Rather, it was part of the built environment that Jane had hardly touched on at all—namely, American housing conditions, the facts surrounding which “expose completely the liars on the editorial staff of the magazine Amerika.”
In American cities, he charged, six million apartments and houses were slums. In New York alone, half a million people lived in slums. “Poverty districts” consumed more than twelve square miles of Chicago. Out in the country, half a million people lived in trailers. There, for all the world to see, was “the ever increasing housing crisis which the cities of America are experiencing.” American capitalism “dooms the majority of the population to a negative existence and death in ill-smelling cesspools, in slums deprived of air, sunlight, and trees or shrubs. The colossal, ever increasing death rate in the slums of American cities is a devastating verdict on the ‘American way of life’ and on that misanthropic ‘culture’ from which it is born.”
America did have a housing crisis; for all the propaganda bluster of the Izvestia article, that much was true. A casualty of almost two decades of depression and war, much housing was in disrepair; a third of the nation’s homes were said to lack complete plumbing systems. During the war, shipyard and war factory workers were content to simply find a place, any place, to live; no one was building or rebuilding. One critic would picture postwar slums as “a heritage of the building booms of the 1890s” and early twentieth century, the old properties decaying ever since. In 1949, American newspapers were reporting on a new federal bill that would provide for public housing and slum clearance; some of Kusakov’s statistics were drawn from the debate surrounding it.
No matter that the Soviets were in worse shape. As the embassy cultural affairs officer Ralph Collins observed in commenting on the Izvestia attack, most housing in Moscow, shabby, old, and crowded, would be deemed slums by Americans. “It is obvious,” he wrote, “that ‘slums’ means one thing to Americans and another to Russians.” A slum wasn’t just a slum? A hopeless mess of dark, dirty, dilapidated housing unfit for human habitation? That wasn’t plain enough? Well, maybe not. In forwarding a translation of the Izvestia attack and Collins’s analysis to Marion Sanders in New York a few days later, M. Gordon Knox, the American embassy in Moscow’s first secretary, suggested that the Russian reaction to Jane’s articles could be seen as “flattering” to Amerika—in that they had been noticed. Still, Kusakov warranted a response. “Let’s see,” he enjoined Sanders, “if we can’t clear up what a slum is.”
“Izvestia on our architecture piece really made us cringe,” an Amerika staffer standing in for Sanders wrote Knox a few days later. “Jane, particularly, is unnerved by being tagged a mendacious capitalist writer. I’m used to it.” But, he assured Knox, they would go ahead with what soon they were calling “the housing story,” trying to cover points Knox had raised. Interview a housing authority official in New York, Knox had suggested. Perhaps set out,
by cubic meter of space, by plumbing facilities, what lodgings are of minimum standards and what would be condemned. Factors such as fire risk and danger of collapse could be spelt out specifically…What are the regulations for how many people can sleep in one room, for how many people can use one toilet, etc. The result, I suspect, will be that Russian readers will think the condemned houses [in America] are luxury liners.
By early February, Amerika had a draft of the article they could send the embassy in Moscow. “The article on the Slum by Jane Jacobs is a courageous, careful, and, to me, highly successful” one, wrote Knox to John Jacobs, who was apparently standing in for Marion Sanders. “It packs a ‘punch’ and makes a point, and I congratulate Jane.” Of course, then he went on to offer two pages of suggestions. For example, Jane had confused things by saying that housing might satisfy minimum standards yet be “slums anyway because they are ugly or discouraging to morale.” He couldn’t buy that: maybe the great Hearst estate in San Simeon, California, was ugly and, were he living there, it might damage his morale, “but it ain’t no slum.”
By March, following more back-and-forth between Moscow and New York, Knox had received the changes, which, he wrote back to Sanders, now back in the saddle in New York, were “acceptable here.” The translation had worked out well, too. They’d worried, he explained, “that the article might contain the Russian word ‘trushchoby’ on every page, which is the word the Soviet press constantly uses in describing the horrible American slums.” But though the translators hadn’t been coached on the point, he went on, the dreaded word appeared only once. This, in cold war terms, was something of a triumph.
Jane’s piece, appearing across ten pages of Amerika in August 1950, was titled “Planned Rebuilding of Run-Down Urban Areas”: “The working day is done. In large and small cities people stream out the doors of offices, factories and shops and fill buses, trams and the subways that will take them home. Parking lots, filled during the day with private automobiles, empty out, and rush hour begins…Everyone is going home.” But what kind of homes? Ninety-seven percent of Americans had electricity, 95 percent lived one family to a house or apartment, which averaged five rooms each, not including the bathroom. But, Jane allowed, “average” figures inevitably mean that “a lot are below average.” A fifth of American houses needed rehabilitation, lacked bathrooms or proper ventilation, or otherwise failed to meet minimal standards. It was these, and what was being done about them, that her article was about. Comrade Kusakov had pointed up America’s housing problems? Well, Jane was showing how America was tackling them.
It was a serious and factual piece, scant on color and rhetorical flavor with probably more meat and muscle than most American readers of Life, Time, or Reader’s Digest would have swallowed, thick with facts and figures, case studies, history all the way up to the 1949 housing act. How did a “lagging district” or “run-down neighborhood” in America get that way? Some just grew old and worn with time. The decline of others, paradoxically, owed to periods of outsized prosperity during which aggrandizing industrial or shopping districts impinged on them. And just what were proper housing standards? In America these differed by locality; the city of Baltimore, for example, required that windows could come to no less than 10 percent of floor area, and that a bedroom could occupy no fewer than eleven cubic meters. Even the smallest apartments had to have plumbing with at least one sink.
Jane introduced her readers to the Danish social activist Jacob Riis, author of How the Other Half Lives, who in the late nineteenth century explored the slums of New York, campaigning against unsanitary housing. At one point, as she told the story, Riis set himself up at a crosswalk in the notorious Five Points neighborhood known as Mulberry Bend, flanked with back alleys with names like Bandit’s Roost and Ragpickers Row. “M
ulberry Bend,” declared Riis, “must disappear”—which largely through his influence and publicity it did, becoming a park.
As might be expected, Jane’s long article ended on a bright note. “Neglected, dilapidated houses, as residents of American cities now see, have started to disappear,” though of course, she admitted, “they cannot disappear in a day.” But the grim, too-familiar history of old neighborhoods filling with wave after wave of immigrants or other impoverished newcomers, was no more, she concluded. For example, “neglected Chicago districts, reconstructed today, will never be vacated and re-settled as before. They will disappear; they have already disappeared.”
The article’s illustrations contributed as much to the message as its text: futuristic apartment complexes, slums erased, a new American cityscape replacing them. It opened with a full-page photo of an “obsolete building” being dismantled by a crew of rugged workmen, the steel skeleton of a proud new high-rise towering above and behind it. In before-and-after illustrations of Baltimore, readers saw a decaying inner courtyard, littered with rubble, scraggly wooden fences falling apart, giving way to a cleaned-up ball court, the rear faces of the old buildings freshly painted and stuccoed.
In all this—in Jane’s survey of the problem, her explanation of its roots, and her review of measures taken to remedy it—she expressed conventional strategies and sensibilities she would later question or disparage. One source of urban decline, as we’ve heard her say, was residential buildings left amid shopping and industrial districts; zoning laws to keep them apart had come too late to prevent this unhappy mixing—a mixing she’d come to celebrate. Better site layout and building practices had made it possible to use for the building itself only 10 to 15 percent of the site, the rest given over to sports facilities and open space; proportions like that, she’d later argue, represented a negation of the traditional city. And, she was saying now, bad neighborhoods had best be made to disappear, simply disappear. Jane’s article on slum clearance was solid, thorough—and completely of its time.
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