Product Description By now, it should be obvious that the government-sponsored initiative to renew this country's large cities which began in the 1930s and continued largely unabated in the East and Midwest through the 1960s and beyond has been a profound and devastating failure. More homes were destroyed than were ever built; once-great metropolises like Detroit lay in ruins; once-thriving neighborhoods were overwhelmed with drugs and crime; buildings that were built to last centuries fell to the wrecking ball mere decades after they were built; an entire generation of young people, both those who came to the cities and those who were driven from the cities into the suburbs, have grown up rootless, in a Hobbesian state in which man's life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
The traditional explanation, the one which no one believes anymore, is that all this was done to eliminate "blight." A more recent explanation, only slightly less implausible, is that it all came about because of faulty design, as if a nation of 260 million people, one which had already produced the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, couldn't come up with anything more inspiring that the average strip mall. The real story, it turns out, is different from both previous explanations. What began as the World War II intelligence community's attempt to solve America's "nationalities problem" and provide workers for the nation's war industries degenerated by the early post-war period into full-blown ethnic cleansing.
E. Michael Jones has followed the advice of Christopher Wrenn. Looking around, he saw monuments, but monuments to the folly and malice of social engineering and a government that had declared war on large segments of its own people. In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to do with design or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of a country that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be "Americanized" according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and "integration," the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got transformed into something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the actual communities of people they saw as a threat to their control.
The Slaughter of Cities proposes a new take on familiar territory, e.g., to give just one example, the civil rights movement. Does anyone, for example, really know why Martin Luther King abandoned his southern strategy and came to Chicago during the summer of 1966? Does anyone really know who brought him there? Does anyone know who told him which ethnic neighborhoods he would march through? Hint: it was a religious denomination usually associated with Philadelphia that had been at work trying to "integrate" Chicago's neighborhoods since 1951.
Jones concentrates on four cities - Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago - in a book whose conclusions will be shocking and controversial. The destruction of the ethnic neighborhoods that made up the human, residential heart of these cities was not an unfortunate by-product of a well-intentioned plan that somehow went awry; it was part of the plan itself.
Group conflict impacts planning choices. June 4, 2008 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"Slaughter of the Cities" tells the tale of woe for Philadelphia's urban decay. The writer examines and explains the constituent factors that are rarely discussed, in particular, the social-ethnic-religious power groups and perceived group interests that motivated particular public policy decisions that had adverse impacts on certain groups.
This book should be required reading for advocates of the "New Urbanism" who too often shy away from discussion of ethnic, racial, and religious factors in land use and urban development. "Slaughter of the Cities" covers these questions in a frank manner that should be emulated by others.
Jones has to be kidding - NO stars! November 22, 2006 4 out of 29 found this review helpful
CONTRACEPTION is to blame???? PUH-leese!
Jones seems to think there's a nefarious plot of some kind against Catholics by Protestants - a plot that Catholics can thwart by having more kids.
In what century is HE living?
Someone should tell him to read John T. McGreevy's "Parish Boundaries" .
A Different Perspective January 2, 2006 19 out of 20 found this review helpful
I just finished reading "The Slaughter of Cities", and I found it a useful complement to such books as "Suburban Nation" and "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" - each give some treatment of how a rather small number of people with a somewhat sincere vision gutted the moderate-sized to large cities of the US, but whereas in the latter two books Plater-Zyberk and Jacobs, respectively, argue that planners had a wrong-headed planning vision that did not create livable environments, Jones shows that, in the case of ethnic enclaves, there is reason to believe that, in practice, the driving forces behind these communities' demise were
1. Unfavorable tax and zoning treatments of the row-house, the staple of these communities,
2. An almost blind faith in an integrationist ideology that lead the Ford Foundation and the American Friends Service Committee, inter alia, to "integrate" neighborhoods by any means necessary (and "integration" typically meant white flight), and
3. the ethnic prejudices of the "WASP" establishment, which lead the ethnically homogenous municipal and federal housing agencies to be predisposed to break up enclaves filled with people from poor Catholic neighborhoods.
One can be found in most treatments of twentieth century urban renewal, two I've seen discussed only partly, but three I have never heard discussed - and Jones presents a variety of evidence from primary sources to show that this was, at very least, a contributing factor to the demise of ethnic enclaves in Boston, Philidelphia, Chicago and Detroit.
But, in order for those points to stand out, you almost need to be taking notes. Jones' book is written basically as a series of journal entries that treat a variety of topics without a real unifying theme, except for an often tangental "WASP establishment" plug - but that doesn't really lead to a universal "ethnically motivated prejudice" theme because the "WASPs" made up the overwhelming majority of the professional class from the 1940s to 60s, so of course the people whose actions destroyed the ethnic enclaves were overwhelmingly "WASPs."
Overall, I this book introduces the reader to a range of underutilized primary sources and brings together books from sociology literature in ways that I had never seen before. It isn't your standard planning text.
excellent March 20, 2005 11 out of 15 found this review helpful
Another excellent book by an excellent writer! If you liked his other works then you'll probably like this book also.
Hmm could CPClark be the same as C Clark???? what a weirdo!!!
'Truth' Seeker October 21, 2004 3 out of 49 found this review helpful
1. One would be foolish to argue from such specious premises.
2. We do not need text-based 'evidence.' We have Clark-based evidence. We were there.
3. Good luck with your search. A hint, though - you might try another volume.
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