Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Let’s see if we can’t clear up what a slum is? Knox had asked, and now, a year later, Jane had taken a shot at it. But for Jane, this seemingly narrow question would slip out of its original borders, become something big to chew on, broaden into one of the biggest questions of all: What, really, was the Good Life? After two decades of economic depression and wartime constraints, Jane, like many other middle-class Americans, now enjoyed the luxury of being able to settle back and consider new living choices and opportunities. Her choices would differ from those of many of her friends, many of her family members, many other Americans.

  —

  Jane and her brothers and sister were settling down, having kids, the first generation of baby boomers. The youngest of them, Jane’s brother Jim, was the first to marry, and soon he and his wife, Kay, had a daughter, Jane, born in 1946. Betty, in an on-again off-again relationship with Jules Manson—a union mediator and academic, smart, handsome, a fine dresser—finally married him early in 1947, giving birth later that year to a daughter, Carol. John worked with Uncle Billy in Fredericksburg; their mother, Bessie, now almost seventy, had sold the family house in Scranton and moved down to Fredericksburg, where she lived in a nice house on Sunken Road and let out rooms for students at nearby Mary Washington College. Jane and Bob’s first son, James Kedzie Jacobs—Jim—was born in 1948, a few months after she and Bob had moved from Washington Place to a dilapidated former candy store on Hudson Street, a broad north-south street a few blocks back from and parallel to the Hudson River.

  A too-hasty glance might have suggested that Jane, Bob, and their young son had moved into a slum. Theirs was a three-story house, reputedly built by a sea captain for one of his two daughters in 1849, situated in one of the gnarliest areas of the West Village, the adjacent streets back from the Hudson piers full of decaying warehouses and light industry, a cacophony of noisy trucks, populated by rough-hewn seamen and longshoremen. The upper two floors had been an apartment, and into them the Jacobses moved while trying to resurrect what had been a first-floor candy store that sported Canada Dry and Phillies Cigars signs out front, rusted sheet-metal fittings, and a bullet hole in the frosted glass left over from some gang fight predating the Jacobses’ arrival. What passed for a backyard was a garbage dump. The whole place was overrun by rats—“big ones,” Jane would say many years later. Even later, in the mid- and late 1950s, with the house filled with Jane’s children and sometimes visiting relatives, the place was often cold in winter, being heated largely by the fireplace in the living room, which was often banked by dawn, the house left cold; one visitor remembers needing seven blankets to keep warm. The house was loose-chinked enough that, even set back from a window, a magazine page could sometimes be seen fluttering in the draft. Of course, there was no air conditioning; they used wet washcloths to keep cool during the hot New York summers. The house demanded all their money, energy, and time. They rebuilt the foundation and installed new, industrial-grade windows. The street side of the house was in such bad shape that they had to tear down some of it and reface it. Bob’s father kicked in some money to help with the repairs, but they ended up doing much of the work themselves. Jane and Bob had bought the house, son Jim estimates, for $7,000, which even in 1947 dollars wasn’t much.

  Its asking price in 2009 was $3.5 million.

  In June 1950, a few months before the slum article appeared in Amerika, Jane’s brother John and wife, Pete, had their only son, Decker. Five days later, Jane gave birth to her second son, Edward Decker, or Ned, as he would be known. For six weeks, she was on maternity leave, returning to Amerika early in August.

  —

  In March 1952, Jane heard from the Loyalty Board again.

  Two and a half years had passed since she’d been judged, despite residues of “unfavorable information,” loyal enough to keep her job. But all through the late 1940s and into the 1950s Red Fever spiked: the first Soviet atomic bomb, revelations of Soviet spying, the accusations against Alger Hiss, the “Pumpkin Papers” affair and the rise to prominence of Richard Nixon, the Hollywood blacklist, the Korean War, the investigations of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, of course, that opening salvo of full-blown McCarthyism at the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950. There, the zealous junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, produced a paper he claimed was a list of known Communists working for the State Department: “I have here in my hand a list of 205— a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” Sprung up from legitimate concerns—real enemies, real danger, real traitors—had grown, out of all reasonable bound, a new Red Scare, drenched in suspicion, accusation, and mistrust.

  The house at 555 Hudson Street, in New York’s West Village, about 1950, a few years after Jane and Bob bought it Credit 7

  In April 1951, under intense partisan pressure, President Truman signed a new executive order lowering the bar to dismissal to mere “reasonable doubt” of loyalty. Of more than 9,000 government employees cleared under the earlier standard, the cases of more than 2,500 were reopened. Jane’s was among them. In September, Conrad E. Snow, chairman of the State Department’s Loyalty Review Board, requested that the FBI assess Jane’s case; he wanted to know now about her voting registration, her union membership, and just when she’d changed her views about American entry into World War II. A report coming from the FBI’s Baltimore office cited an informant who perceived “a degree of immorality and disloyalty about the applicant and her group.” It was something “she could not put her finger on.” She had “no concrete evidence that applicant is disloyal.” Still, on March 14, 1952, Snow wrote Jane, demanding more answers to more questions.

  This time, Jane rose up in righteous wrath. Her 1949 response had been confined to three single-spaced typed pages. This time, within a week or so, she had drafted an eight-thousand-word missive that constitutes as extraordinary a statement of one particular strain of patriotic feeling as you’ll find anywhere.

  “Enclosed are the notarized answers to your interrogatory,” she wrote Snow on March 25. Her answers were going to be long, she explained, and she would not try to fit them into the limited space allotted to them. What was more, since she was “addicted to editor’s notes and prefaces and the like,” she’d taken the liberty of “enclosing a foreword to my answers”— a foreword!—even bothering to explain why she needed to do that: she had concluded that she was “probably suspected of being either a secret Communist sympathizer or a person susceptible to Communist influence.” If Snow or others questioning her sympathies were to understand her answers, she would need to put herself, her life, her family, and her most deeply held values in context.

  A representative page from Jane’s 180-page FBI file, 1948 Credit 8

  “It still shocks me,” she wrote her inquisitor, “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.” And yet, she understood that it might be necessary for some government employees. “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.” And so she began.

  “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.”

  She went on to talk about some of her freethinking forebears, on both sides of her family. Like some on her Virginia side who had opposed secession or slavery on the eve of the Civil War and became Republicans i
n the then staunchly Democratic South. She was proud, too, “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.” The American tradition of freedom to deviate from accepted viewpoints, she declared, was no cliché to her. It was a lived and sacred value.

  There were, she said, two great threats to the security of the American tradition. One was the power of the Soviet Union and its satellites. The other was “the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them.” As to the first, she felt that in her work with the State Department, she had done her bit. “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.” That, of course, was precisely what she was doing now.

  She believed, she said, in the right of Communists to speak and publish their ideas in the United States. But neither they nor anyone else had the right to spy or sabotage; those who did should be prosecuted.

  As for herself, she had the right to criticize the government or Congress, but would never aid another country or act against the interests of the U.S. or for those of the Soviet Union.

  All in all, she felt her views aligned best with those of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, among the most committed civil libertarians ever to sit on the Court.

  “This is how I stand,” Jane came near to wrapping up, or at least to wrapping up her foreword; she hadn’t gotten to Snow’s questions yet. She realized that her views might represent a minority position, she wrote. “But the fact of being in a minority does not, in itself, trouble me…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.”

  And with that, Jane Jacobs, age thirty-six, finally turned to Snow’s nine questions. Here, in its entirety, was the first of them:

  1. Please discuss fully, for the information of the board, your membership and activities in the United Public Workers of America including (a) dates of membership and present membership status; (b) the nature and extent of your interest and activities and offices held, if any; (c) your attitude toward the Foreign Policy Resolution adopted by UPWA at the 1946 convention at Atlantic City, New Jersey, and other positions reportedly taken by the union leadership indicating adherence to the Communist Party line such as opposition to the American plan for the control of atomic energy, opposition to the Marshall Plan, support of Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party in 1948, opposition to the Atlantic Pact, support of the Communist dominated World Federation of Trade Unions, etc. and (d) your attitude toward UPWA’s expulsion from the CIO in 1950.

  She was asked, too, about any involvement she’d had with the American Labor Party; about delivery to her apartment of the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper in America; whether she’d ever subscribed or received the American Review on the Soviet Union; whether she was acquainted with two particular people of apparently questionable political sympathies; and, in several forms, about any relationship she may have had with the Communist Party—in particular, of course, the classic question, the one that, in its indelible cadence, would come to define the era: “Are you now or have you ever been…” a member of the Communist Party, or a front group to it, or affiliated with, “or in sympathetic association” with such a group?

  She was not, nor had she ever been, a Communist, she replied. Nor had she supported its ideologies. Nor had she “made a contribution of time, talent, or money,” in the words of the loyalty board’s question, to its activities. She believed that to the extent it engaged in espionage or sabotage, the American Communist Party was dangerous and needed to be thwarted; but that to the extent it was merely a purveyor of propaganda, it was not dangerous. As for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, she saw it as “an apparatus for political tyranny. I abhor the Soviet system of government, for I fear and despise the whole concept of a government which takes as its mission the molding of people into a specific ‘kind of man,’ i.e. ‘Soviet Man’; that practices and extols a conception of the state as ‘control from above and support from below’; that controls the work of artists, musicians, architects and scientists; that controls what people read and attempts to control what people think.”

  On all this, Jane was unambiguous, clear, and impassioned. On that long, detailed first question, however—her involvement with the United Public Workers of America—a sympathetic reader could watch the nuanced, shifting course of Jane’s sympathies play out on the page, her personal conflict palpable. She had joined the union, then known as the Federal Workers Union, in the late fall of 1943, soon after she started at the Office of War Information. She’d paid her dues. She’d attended meetings of the OWI branch of the union. She’d written a few routine pieces for them, sold raffle tickets to raise funds. She believed in unionization and collective bargaining. She felt the union did a good job in settling grievances. This, at least, was how she felt until about 1947. She was not long in her new State Department job, however, “before I became aware that the union was now very politically minded,” and concluded that it hewed to the Communist Party line and seemed unduly critical of the United States.

  What to do? She didn’t like the union’s Communist leanings, differed with much of its political line, but still felt strongly “that it was a good thing to have a union”; and the union did, she felt, concern itself with “useful and legitimate functions.” So she stayed. Her conviction to do so grew only stronger as public and congressional attacks on it mounted. “I resented the implication that it was dangerous to continue to belong to the union.” She remained until the fall of 1951, at which time “I just became too unhappy about it. I had always been in conflict with myself over it, and my objections to the union in the concrete reached a point where they outweighed my feelings for a union in the abstract.”

  There was more like this, more thoughtful weighing of a difficult issue, more painful personal conflict exposed and expressed, pages of it, with regard to both the union and the American Labor Party, in which she was registered as a member until 1949. Early on, she admitted, she’d realized that the party had “a strong Communist element, as did virtually all liberal organizations of the time”—though, she emphasized, she “certainly and definitely did not think of it as tantamount to the Communist Party.” She was attracted to it in part, she wrote, out of affinity for third parties generally, going back to her grandfather’s participation in the Greenback Labor Party of the nineteenth century. “Third parties,” she wrote, “have a valuable function in needling popular opinion and putting forward and familiarizing new ideas. It was a lively and militant third party which, I felt, a third party ought by rights to be.”

  It was a different time. The government could ask such questions. People like Jane were enjoined to answer them if they wished to keep their jobs. Of the specific figures in Snow’s interrogatory, most are forgotten today—the United Public Workers of America, their Atlantic City convention, Henry Wallace, the Progressives, the World Federation of Trade Unions. They are the stuff of a particular moment in history. Only Senator McCarthy and his -ism remain in the consciousness of mainstream America.

  Jane submitted her response and never heard anything further. She’d long wonder about this silence and would ask her brother John, a lawyer, on the brink of a distinguished legal career, what he made of it. Oh, the federal bureaucracy just doesn’t know how to cope with you, he’d say. But years later, in 1998, after rereading Jane’s “foreword,” he changed his mind. No, he guessed, the loyalty board reviewer must have been won over by the sheer power and feeling of her ideas; Jane had “left the reviewer with no option but to agree.”

  Maybe so, but any judgment the government might have made was rendered moot when Jane submitted her resignation from A
merika.

  —

  It was a miracle Amerika held on as long as it did. As the cold war heated up, the Soviets reputedly did all they could to discourage its distribution, manipulating circulation numbers in order to claim their citizens just weren’t interested, returning 25,000 unsold copies each month. “I think it’s a safe conclusion that Amerika as we know it will shortly be throttled to death,” Gordon Knox, the embassy’s first secretary, had written Marion Sanders in the spring of 1950. Yes, it was good for Amerika to have a presence in Russia even if few Soviet citizens could get their hands on it; he understood that. But “my suggestion is that we quit quite soon,” maybe once the British did—their publication, British Ally, was getting similarly hammered—“so that we keep a solid front and make it clear that the Soviets cannot tolerate Free World publications in the USSR…The cold war has become a good deal colder, and Amerika inevitably is one of the casualties.”

  The scuttling of the magazine didn’t come right away. As late as early 1952, it was still given to soul searching over its mission, “presenting to the Soviet people the best in American civilization”; it was conjuring up article subjects apt to show off America to Russia’s disadvantage, even weighing color palettes most likely to appeal to Russian readers: too many bright blue skies were “blinding to an inhabitant of the gray-brown Russian landscape.” But in the end, Knox was right, the magazine folded later in 1952 and moved the vestiges of its operation to Washington, D.C., where it would be revived in 1956 under a different name.