the american economy a historical encyclopedia phần 8 pptx

Britain secured equal rights to control any future transisth- mian canal Americans might build, a right it retained until the 1901 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. Even in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Britain, along with its four- teen European Union colleagues, has had a voice in U.S. transportation policies over such issues as landing rights of American airlines and mergers of transportation companies; an example of the latter is the recent merger of Chrysler with Daimler-Benz, a leading manufacturer in America of heavy- duty trucks and school buses. Transportation Policy in the Early Republic Upon achieving independence, Americans rejoiced in their expansive new country, but several major transportation issues confronted policymakers. These problems included in- adequate access to the two great waterways that could afford easy transportation across much of North America—the Mississippi/Ohio and the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence systems; the Appalachian barrier to communications between the eastern and western halves of the United States; and poor north-south roads along the eastern seaboard. To the frustration of Americans, full access to the Missis- sippi/Ohio and the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence systems remained tantalizingly just out of reach. For years to come, American policymakers sought to make those two great systems provide effective transportation. The challenge proved particularly great in the prerailroad age, when only waterways could economically transport high-volume, low-value farm products for distances greater than 20 or 30 miles. The Paris peace settlement of the 1780s gave the United States the eastern side of the Mississippi Valley down to Florida, but Florida, controlled by Britain since 1763, re- verted back to Spain. Spain knew that if farmers living on the three-eighths of American soil drained by the Mississippi, the Ohio, and their tributaries had access to the world’s oceans through New Orleans, a flood of settlers would spill over into Louisiana and Texas, leading to a spread of American power. Therefore, Spain resolutely resisted the efforts of John Jay and other American diplomats to let American rafts and flatboats float down to New Orleans to connect with shipping on Lake Pontchartrain. America’s inability to change Spain’s attitude caused many frontierspeople to support the new U.S. Consti- tution, since a stronger national government would be more capable of pressuring Spain into negotiating navigation rights. In 1795 New Orleans finally became incorporated in America’s transportation system when Spain acquiesced to Pinckney’s Treaty out of fear that if it did not unlock New Or- leans, Americans would ally with George III, their former king, and seize the city. So Pinckney’s Treaty opened up the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, but Spain’s cession of New Or- leans and Louisiana to powerful France in 1800 again threat- ened to stifle the West. President Thomas Jefferson remained determined to enable western farmers to transport their produce through New Orleans. He told Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe that the United States should “marry the British fleet and nation” if Napoleon would not sell New Or- leans. The crisis ended in 1803 when Napoleon agreed to sell New Orleans and all of Louisiana. With the political problem solved, the question became how to turn the “father of waters” into a practical, two-way highway. Over the next two centuries, steamboats (and their diesel successors) and the dams, locks, navigation aids, and dredging of the Corps of Engineers fulfilled this goal. The history of transportation policies in regard to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River differs from that of the Mississippi. Very different geography, British control of the St. Lawrence, and the eagerness of merchants and investors in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore to bridge the Appalachian barrier between the East and the West created transportation routes into the middle of the country. These new routes diminished the interest of American politicians in Montreal and Quebec as possible entrepôts of the Midwest. Several geographic considerations made the St. Lawrence less important than the Mississippi as an outlet to saltwater: Most of the rivers in the middle of the country flowed south into the Mississippi, not into the Great Lakes; the lakes and the St. Lawrence froze in the winter; and an im- passible obstacle, Niagara Falls, existed between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario until the Welland Canal provided a bypass in 1829. Not until the mid-twentieth century, during President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, did American policymakers join with Canada in developing the St. Lawrence Seaway (1959) to make the St. Lawrence a practical outlet for mid-America. In the early nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, proposed a grand system of canals and turnpikes to connect eastern river systems with the trans-Appalachian Ohio/Mississippi system and to provide north-south roads to supplement seaboard coastal shipping. The National Road (or Cumberland Pike), which initially (in 1818) connected the Potomac at Cumberland, Maryland, with the Ohio at Wheeling, Virginia, and later was extended at each end to Baltimore and central Illinois, is a tangible result of Gallatin’s plan. Two twentieth-century highways, U.S. 40 and Interstate 70, followed the route of that first federal highway. But by the 1830s the job of developing transportation routes across the Appalachians shifted from the federal government to states and seaboard cities. Henry Clay and President John Quincy Adams, proponents of the American System that would have given the federal government responsibility for developing a transportation system, lost control of the national government to Andrew Jackson (president from 1829 to 1837) and his followers, who favored a limited federal role. Jackson demonstrated his attitude most famously with his “Maysville veto” (1830), a refusal to spend federal funds on a highway. In the 1830s the national government handed over maintenance of the National Road to the states through which it ran. The prevailing consensus was that the formation of an American transportation policy should be decentralized. Rivers and Canals Before the Civil War, East Coast ports vied with each other to extend their hinterlands across the Appalachians. Investors and local leaders wanted the produce of the Midwest to reach world markets through their cities rather than via New Or- 486 Transportation Policy leans and the Mississippi or by the St. Lawrence. Clearly, New Yo rk City became far more successful than its rivals, and the Erie Canal served as the foundation of its success. In all of American history, the decision to build the Erie Canal may be the most significant example of a well- conceived transportation policy. As early as the 1740s, New Yo rk’s lieutenant governor, Cadwallader Colden, had realized that a canal through the Mohawk Valley could connect the Hudson to Lake Erie and thereby expand New York City’s hinterland to encompass the heart of the continent. In the early 1800s, as New Yorkers planned to build the canal, the federal government declined to participate in the project. President James Madison had constitutional scruples about whether the federal government should undertake such a project—especially since it would not benefit Virginia—so it became an undertaking of solely the state government of New York. DeWitt Clinton, its most vociferous supporter, won the backing of the state legislature (and the governor- ship for himself) and began construction on July 4, 1817. When the canal opened in 1825, it ran 363 miles from Lake Erie at Buffalo to Albany on the Hudson, and its impact on New York City, 150 miles downriver from Albany, became ap- parent immediately. Western grain went through New York City, and manufactures and immigrants headed for Ohio, In- diana, and Illinois traveled up the Hudson from the city. The success of the Erie Canal stimulated Boston, Philadel- phia, Baltimore, and Charleston to attempt to duplicate New Yo rk’s achievement. Pennsylvania’s rugged Allegheny Moun- tains between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh yielded no path- way for a canal crossing, so Philadelphians persuaded the state legislature to underwrite the Main Line system. Instead of a single canal like the Erie, Pennsylvania’s Main Line connected Philadelphia on the Delaware River to Pittsburgh at the Ohio with a mix of canals, railroads, and inclined planes. (Inclined planes used steam-powered winches placed on the tops of ridges to pull flatcars up railroad tracks.) The Main Line system, a brave effort that enthralled Charles Dickens with its scenic views, proved a colossal economic failure. Railroads Also a failure, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, financed by investors from the Baltimore/Washington region, did not breach Maryland’s mountains and never reached its second namesake. By the 1830s most of New York’s rivals realized that their best hope of reaching the other side of the Appalachians depended on the new British invention—railroads. On July 4, 1828, investors at Baltimore watched Charles Carroll of Car- rolton, Maryland, a signer of the Declaration of Indepen- dence, inaugurate a new transportation age as he turned the first shovelful of dirt to begin construction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In the early 1830s, the longest single railroad line in the world, the Charleston and Hamburg, stretched from Charleston, South Carolina, toward the Mis- sissippi. In the 1850s Philadelphians, having given up on the Main Line system, completed the Pennsylvania Railroad to connect the City of Brotherly Love with Pittsburgh. But un- fortunately for all of New York City’s rivals, by the time their railroads reached the beginnings of the Ohio/Mississippi system on the other side of the mountains, New York merchants had two western rail connections of their own. The Erie Rail- road, completed in 1851, ran from the Hudson to Lake Erie along the latitude of the Pennsylvania–New York border, and by the middle of the 1850s, the steamboat operator Cornelius Vanderbilt had tied together a series of small railroads between Albany and Buffalo into the New York Central, which soon had connections into Manhattan. By the time of the Civil War, maps of the U.S. transportation system showed a vast array of railroads and a few key canals—of which the Erie remained by far the most important, for it carried from the Midwest to New York more freight than the combined total carried by all the major railroads that crossed the mountains. Four key railroad trunk lines existed: the Erie and the New York Central ran from Lake Erie to New Yo rk City, the Pennsylvania ran from Pittsburgh to Philadel- phia, and the Baltimore and Ohio ran from Wheeling to Bal- timore; each of the four had subsidiaries or partners that continued into the heartland. In the South, a railroad route from Charleston to Memphis had been built, and the Boston and Albany brought Boston in touch with the West, albeit over one of New York’s railroads. But as George Rogers Taylor and other transportation historians have noted, America’s railroads and canals were not the product of a carefully planned national transportation policy. They had resulted from a series of rival policies, with each financed and supported by individuals and concerns representing parochial interests that had little or no care about a national transportation policy. No uni- form gauge existed on American railroads. In cities such as Philadelphia, Richmond, or Pittsburgh, transferring cargo from one railroad to another required the use of a horse and wagon because “connecting” railroad companies often did not physically join each other. The national government did become interested in transportation policy in a limited capacity when officials authorized the use of army engineers to survey the line of the Baltimore and Ohio and in 1850 when Con- gress approved a grant of federal land to finance the Illinois Central’s route from Chicago to New Orleans. But between the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lin- coln, local investors and city and state governments continued to make the key decisions about transportation policy. After the election of Lincoln and the Civil War, even though states, municipalities, and private investors continued to have considerable input concerning transportation policy, major decisions occurred at the national level. The two biggest issues in the last third of the nineteenth century involved the building of railroads between the heartland and the Pacific Coast and determining how much public regulation should be exercised over the railroad companies that had become so dominant in the American economy. At a time when railroads had no competition from motor vehicles or airplanes, they employed more people than the U.S. government, and more money was invested in them than in all of America’s manufacturing. By the 1850s many people had foreseen a rail connection between the Mississippi Valley and California. Jefferson Davis, secretary of war in Franklin Pierce’s administration, ordered a study of possible routes, and just five years after Mexico Transportation Policy 487 had ceded a huge part of its territory in the treaty ending the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848, negotiators persuaded Mexico to sell the Gadsden Purchase to the United States. The purchase ceded the Gila Valley to the United States, a good southern route to California. Before the United States lurched into the Civil War and during the war as well, several general assumptions developed about what the policy should be in regard to a Pacific railroad. Because of the vast distances, sparse population, and rugged terrain involved, private investors could not bear the entire cost of construction; government aid would be required, and it had to come from the national government, not from states. Furthermore, people believed a Pacific railroad should be a privately owned en- tity, not a government-operated route like the Erie Canal or the failed Pennsylvania Main Line. When Americans first started envisioning a transcontinental railroad, no one could foresee the construction of as many railroads as would be built by 1893—five! In the 1850s every major city in the Mississippi Valley, from New Orleans northward, hoped to become the termi- nus of the transcontinental railroad. When President Lincoln signed legislation chartering two companies, the Union Pa- cific and the Central Pacific, to build the rail connection between the center of the country and California, the South had already seceded, eliminating any possibility of a route from New Orleans or Memphis. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 and an amending law in 1864 chartered two private companies, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, to construct the railway. The Union Pacific built from Omaha westward, and initially, the Central Pacific was to build from Sacra- mento 150 miles into Nevada. However, effective lobbying by the Central Pacific brought authorization (in 1866) for that railroad to go indefinitely eastward until it met the tracks of the Union Pacific. The joining of the two lines occurred on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, in a cele- brated ceremony that was instantly reported to the entire nation by telegraph. Congress gave generous land grants and cash loans to the Central Pacific and Union Pacific and to three other transcontinental railroad companies that were soon chartered: The Southern Pacific joined San Francisco to New Orleans in 1883; the Northern Pacific connected St. Paul and Portland, Oregon, in 1883; and the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe reached southern California in 1888. In return for the generous help of the nation, the railroads committed to carrying troops for half fare, a provision the nation appre- ciated during World War II (after which the discount ended). A fifth transcontinental line, the Great Northern, completed between St. Paul and Seattle by James J. Hill in 1893, was built when the nation no longer felt compelled to give railroads huge land grants. By the end of the nineteenth century, many Americans thought national policy had been much too fa- vorable to the railroads, and disgust over the Crédit Mobilier scandal and other reports of unsavory corporate influence on members of Congress increased the dissatisfaction. (Crédit Mobilier was a company established by the Union Pacific Railroad and received contracts to construct its rail lines. Company stock was given to members of Congress, who then granted land and federal subsidies to the company to increase their profits. The involvement of prominent politicians was exposed in 1872 and 1873, with several resigning from office as a result.) But historians have not reached a consensus about the wisdom of the policy of giving great gifts of land to expedite construction of the western railroads. Now, in the twenty-first century, when almost all long- distance passenger travel occurs by automobiles or airplanes and when trains no longer carry most freight, it is hard to en- vision how much railroads dominated both freight and passenger business in the late nineteenth century. However, because railroads had overbuilt, extending their lines into places with too few customers to maintain a profit, and because managers looted many companies, even in the age of railroad dominance, railroad bankruptcies were very common, especially during the economic downturns of 1873 and 1893. Yet, despite the weak financial condition of many lines, the public became convinced that the railroads still took advantage of their customers. Farmers in states such as Kansas or Min- nesota, many served by only a single railroad, resented paying higher freight rates than shippers between Chicago and New Yo rk.They thought the only explanation for higher rates west of the Mississippi and the still higher rates west of the Mis- souri was that competition between the several trunk lines running east from Chicago kept rates low, whereas out on the prairies, the lack of competition allowed companies to gouge their captive clients. Farmers in Texas, a state that had given considerable public land to the railroads, were infuriated by the rail companies’ failure to complete their lines in the time required by their charters. Everywhere, Americans wondered if the free railroad passes given to members of Congress and other legislators constituted bribes, designed to persuade them to ignore unfair rates. The public’s unhappiness with railroads in the late nineteenth century led to a national policy of strictly regulating and supervising railroads, which was destined to endure into the last quarter of the twentieth century. When railroads had a natural monopoly, it made sense for the public to intervene in the absence of competition, but the country’s determination to control railroads persisted long after real competition developed from automobiles and trucks running on government-financed highways and airplanes taking off from publicly built airports. The national policy of strictly controlling the railroad industry took root in the 1870s with the so-called Granger Laws—laws passed by Midwestern farming states to regulate railroads. Those laws, named after a farmer’s organization, the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, eventually ran afoul of the interstate commerce clause in the Constitu- tion. When an 1886 Supreme Court decision (the Wabash case) drastically limited states’ ability to regulate intrastate commerce that had interstate links, Congress gave the federal government jurisdiction over railroad traffic. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 mandated fair rates for interstate railroad traffic and established the quasi-judicial Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to supervise railroads. Con- gress approved the act by a vote of 219 to 49 in the House of Representatives and 43 to 15 in the Senate, indicating strong public support for it. The creation of the ICC constituted a landmark in the evolution of national transportation policy, 488 Transportation Policy but a series of court decisions over the next quarter century undermined the ICC’s effectiveness. Not until the Progressive Era, during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, did the ICC effectively control railroads. The 1903 Elkins Act forbade secret rebates to favored shippers. The Hepburn Act of 1906, one of Roo- sevelt’s most important reforms, gave the ICC power to actu- ally set railroad rates (subject to appeal in the courts) and extended its jurisdiction to express companies and oil pipelines. During World War I, the federal government took total control of railroad operations after bad weather and inept distri- bution of freight cars caused a breakdown in the nation’s rail system. After the war, however, railroad operations returned to prewar conditions, but the government retained a high de- gree of control over the railroads. For the next 60 years, the ICC opposed the railroads’ efforts to fight truckers for freight by slashing rates, and the government’s antitrust policies dis- couraged railroad mergers and consolidations. In the early twentieth century, just when the public began insisting on strict regulation of the apparently monopolistic railroads, two new technologies—the automobile and the airplane—emerged, for which new transportation policies had to be devised. Automobiles Although an experimental automobile was demonstrated in France in 1769, the first really modern cars were invented in Germany in 1886. Despite being steadily improved in suc- ceeding years, autos remained unreliable and expensive until Henry Ford introduced his Model T in 1908, a truly revolu- tionary advance over earlier vehicles. Remarkably sturdy, easily repairable, and priced at $825 initially—and sold for under $300 in the 1920s—it was within the reach of the middle class. Ford’s Model T and a range of cars produced by over 200 other manufacturers brought a public clamor for good roads, and governments at every level responded. From the 1830s to the early years of the 1900s, the federal government had contributed little to America’s roads, but from Woodrow Wilson’s administration to the present, it has consistently played a major role in the building and maintaining of Amer- ica’s highways. Wilson signed the Federal Aid Road Act in 1916, laying the foundation of the federal highway policy. This act, which had epochal implications for federal-state relations because of its matching-dollar provision, offered cooperating states $5 million in 1917 and an additional $5 million each year thereafter (culminating in $25 million in 1921) if they would spend a dollar of state money for each dollar they received from the federal government. Allocation of the 50:50 matching dollars to the 48 states occurred according to a formula based equally on area, population, and post road mileage. For nearly a hun- dred years, the federal government has appropriated highway money to states under such a matching-dollar system, but the ratio between federal and state dollars has varied greatly, sometimes going to 90:10 for parts of the interstate system. The formulas, always the subject of intense political debate, have become far more complicated than the original one based on population, area, and post roads. The most important of the federal highway matching-dollar programs, the interstate system launched in 1956 during Eisenhower’s administration, began after fierce debates. The creation of that system required major decisions about transportation policy. Should trucks pay fuel and tire taxes comparable to the real estate taxes railroads paid to states and localities? Should truckers’ fuel taxes be as high in relation to their vehicle weight as passenger car fuel taxes were to the weight of automobiles? Should most of the interstates be toll roads paid for by users? Americans answered all these questions in the negative. Airplanes The Wright brothers realized one of humanity’s greatest dreams in 1903. News of their flight spread speedily, and within a quarter century, large numbers of Americans had seen airplanes thanks to the barnstormers who seemingly flew into every hamlet. Although airlines and airplane manufacturers operated as private industries, a consensus developed that government at the national, state, and local levels should establish policies that would help this exciting new form of transportation—all the more so after World War I demonstrated the military significance of airplanes. The ear- liest planes were marvels, but they were not very efficient. Not until the first modern airliner, the Douglas DC-3, began fly- ing in 1935 was it possible for an airline to make a profit just from the passengers its planes carried. In the 1920s, under the pretense that the U.S. Post Office had a desperate need to speed mail through the air, the federal government began awarding airmail contracts to airlines. This stimulus and the creation of a system of navigation aids with federally paid air controllers, became as vital to the airlines as federal land grants had been for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads in the 1860s, and few among the public begrudged that help. States and localities assisted the airlines by con- structing airports and not charging the airlines for the total cost. And in the mid-twentieth century, to ensure that airlines made money, the Federal Aviation Administration limited the number of airline routes and regulated ticket prices. In the last third of the twentieth century, a fundamental change in national transportation policy occurred as the nation adopted deregulation—although it would be more accu- rate to describe this as a policy of less regulation. In 1978 Pres- ident Jimmy Carter approved legislation deregulating the airline industry. Total deregulation had not occurred—federal inspectors continued to enforce rules about safety and proper maintenance, and the actual flights of air carriers remained under the watchful eyes of air controllers. Deregulation actu- ally meant a virtual end to restrictions on who could serve which routes and what prices airlines could charge for tickets. The results proved dramatic. Increased competition, lowered ticket prices, and passenger mileage more than doubled. New airlines sprang into existence, and some airlines, most notably Southwest, flourished. But all did not. Bankruptcy or forced takeover became the fate of some of the famous pioneering airlines, such as Pan American, TWA, and Eastern. Jimmy Carter’s administration also deregulated the railroad industry with the 1980 Staggers Act, named for a con- gressman from West Virginia—a state whose coal companies Transportation Policy 489 had long chafed under the railroads’ inability to cut freight rates without going through the onerous process of obtaining ICC approval. Even before the Staggers Act, the federal government had begun easing its antitrust policies to permit the railroad industry to merge troubled lines, and it had agreed to let the railroads shed their unprofitable passenger service to local governments’ transit systems or, in the case of long- distance service, to a federally supported quasi-governmental agency, Amtrak (founded in 1970). A series of mergers resulted in two giant railroad companies, the Union Pacific and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, controlling the West’s historical routes from the center of the country to California; two other giants, CSX and Norfolk Southern, dominating railroad traffic east of the Mississippi; and two medium-sized railroads, Kansas City Southern and Illinois Central (the latter a subsidiary of a Canadian railroad), operated in between the western and eastern giants. As part of the trend toward less regulation, President Bill Clinton signed a law in 1995 that curtailed some of the ICC’s powers, dividing its remaining responsibilities between the Surface Transportation Board and the Federal Highway Administration and termi- nating the ICC itself. In that same year, a federal trucking deregulation superseded most state trucking regulations. As the United States proceeded into the twenty-first century, national transportation policy rested on the assumption that much of the regulation that had developed since the late- nineteenth-century days of the Granger Laws unduly ham- pered American economic development. Recent trends continue to move toward some sort of deregulation, but that does not mean railroads, airlines, trucks, passenger cars, tug- boats and barges, and pipelines operate in a totally laissez- faire state. Through the power of the purse, in such laws as the Intermodal Surface Transportation Act of 1991 and its 2001 successor, the national government continues to mold transportation policy. Using the threat of withholding highway funds, for example, Washington has successfully pres- sured states to enact laws requiring the use of seat belts and curbing driving under the influence of alcohol. In the coming years, debates about transportation policy will center on certain key issues. How far should deregulation proceed? How should the nation weigh the social benefits of Amtrak against its inability to be self-supporting? In the urban areas, how should federal money be divided between mass transit and highways? What is the relationship between transportation policy and urban sprawl? How should transportation policy relate to petroleum policy? —Joseph A. Devine References Bilstein, Roger E. Flight in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Goddard, Stephen B. Getting There. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Nevins, Allan, with Frank E. Hill. Ford. 3 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1954–1963. Tay lor, George Ro ger s. The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951. 490 Transportation Policy Urbanization 491 Urbanization involves an ongoing process of social and economic transformation resulting in and maintaining high- density population concentrations. The U.S. Bureau of the Census defines an area with a population concentration of 2,500 as urban land. Early urban areas (predating 1850) were associated with centers of finance and modes of transportation such as ships and railroads. In the midwestern and northeastern United States, many urban centers expanded at the turn of the twentieth century when immigrant populations from Europe and migrant populations from more rural areas moved into the factory cities of the Northeast for economic opportunities in mass industry and commercial districts. At first, the urban expansion of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occurred in an unplanned manner. The industrialized American city of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries prompted economic growth, and the forces of trade and commerce created both advantages and disadvantages for the urban dwellers. Prior to mass industry and modern transportation systems, the maximum expansion of an urban population remained relatively small, around 30,000—enough to maintain a social cohesion within the urban geography. With the advent of industrialization, as cities expanded beyond former proportions with populations of various cultural and ethnic characteristics, component neighborhoods developed according to the social and economic attributes of the resident population. As a result, social cohesion became more characteristic within neighborhood boundaries, and neighborhood locations took on patterns that distinguished the wealthy from the poor. Wealthier neighborhoods were located near commercial districts or in suburban locations, whereas low-income neighborhoods often developed near the factories where residents worked. The three essential components of the city were the factory, the railroad, and the slum. According to the Tenement House Commission of 1894, around the turn of the twentieth century in New York City, three out five residents lived in slum neighborhoods. Experts define the term slums as urban developments and poor neighborhoods; more typically, they are described as working-class neighborhoods characterized by deteriorating and overcrowded housing. However, new tenement apartments, built by investors to maximize the number of people per square foot with minimal ventilation, also made up part of the slum landscape. In the beginning of the twentieth century, some Americans responded to slum development by attempting to alter the behaviors of workers through such measures as closing down saloons, teaching immigrants to behave like Americans, increasing police forces to maintain order, and providing health services to prevent contagious diseases from spreading into more afflu- ent neighborhoods. Therefore, this period of urbanization became characterized by urban administration and charita- ble organizations that treated poverty-ridden slum neighborhoods as elements of diseases, something to be controlled, contained, and reformed (hence the term blight for working-class sections of the urban environment). By the 1920s housing investigations and urban zoning were incorporated in the functions of many local urban administrations. But investigations often were limited to reporting on the immoral and unsanitary behaviors of individuals rather than criticizing the owners of slum housing who profited from the rental properties. Urban studies in the 1930s relied on the ideology and methods of analysis that developed in an age of emergent so- ciological studies; these studies were dominated by the work of Charles Darwin in the field of biology and then Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism. Spencer’s basic Darwinian premise held that everything in the universe starts out inco- herently and gradually becomes coherent. Therefore, it was argued, human society and the urban hierarchy, from rich to poor, developed as part of a natural order of things. Those who were most successful had superior skills in the division of labor and subsequently reaped rewards through differences in the wage structure and in the quality of urban housing. Ex- perts described the emergence of a variety of urban neighborhoods, from the slums to the mansions of the rich, as func- tional in natural Darwinistic models of the human evolution of inferior and superior social groups, often identified by race 492 Urbanization or cultural attributes. Establishing the classical tradition in urban studies based on Darwinian ideology, Robert E. Park and E. W. Burgess provided a seminal work, The City, on urban development theory in the field of human ecology. There, the relationship between social changes, group mobility, and housing quality became established. In an article titled “Succession: An Ecological Concept,” Park explained his notion of cities and growth as the movement of populations to natural areas. Cities were locations that grew like rings on a tree, with the growth based on the social characteristics of populations. In fact, the analogy of tree rings is a biological reference that presumed human society had two levels of natural organization that determined growth—the biotic (natural) and the cultural. The biotic occurred in the unthinking realm of human existence that was analogous to plants, where plants have natural areas of development based on unthinking natural competition. For Park, all else with regard to hu- mans and the social order remained cultural. Park and Burgess based their work on economic ideas of evolutionary change as the product of competition resulting in the survival of the fittest, another Darwinian concept. Processes of neighborhood development began, they con- tended, with the commercial development of the city. Com- ponent neighborhoods surrounding the commerce of the city competed for space. The relationship between unique resident groups and their status in the division of labor, so necessary to the economy and efficiency of the city, determined the relative status for each neighborhood. The less necessary or redundant the labor was, the lower the quality and value of the neighborhood. However, they noted that these changes had dimensions limited by preexisting struc- tural or cultural formations that created the larger collective civilization. Park found that society, in its biotic and cultural forms, took on territorial dimensions, whereby some cultures lived in poorer inner-city areas near industrial sites and other cultures lived in more desirable urban and suburban areas. He likened this phenomenon to Darwin’s web of life, which, in human dimensions, took on the particularly human characteristics of survival of the fittest within the framework of laws and customs. In the human ecology model for urban development, there was a parallel theory fundamental to economics at that time. In Introduction to Economic History (1922), Norman Scott Brien Gras outlined the entire story of economic history as evolutionary stages manifested in met- ropolitan society, the economy, and the natural laws of human nature and competition. Based on the work of Burgess and Park, economists often describe the ideas of social mobility, housing, and labor as the natural order of human activity, tied to the characteristics and behaviors of social groups. Such arguments under- pinned public and private policies that guided institutions to discriminate against minority communities. In the 1940s Amos Hawley took the focus of analysis away from the “natural” abilities of particular social groups and instead examined human ecology as it adapted to the demands of a capitalist system. Although Hawley discussed the urban model of community development as clusters or neighborhoods identified by residents characterized by divisions of labor, his theory defined community as part of a social system that was primarily economic in its dimensions. Similar to Park and Burgess, Hawley observed that a community functions as a society that takes shape around the local economy, similar to an organism that takes shape around its particular function. But Hawley regarded the economic system, not culture or human nature, as the ultimate determinant of the internal development of the community. In spite of his differences with the Park and Burgess work, Hawley described the community’s development in urban society using evolutionary references to the natural world, much as succession theory did. His term system development was analogous to the development of a biological system. Hawley regarded a society as a formation interdependent between a population and the capitalist environment—similar to the system of an organism in formation in a particular environment. The circulation of the system remained dependent on the way that capital maximized the operation of the system toward profit. In Hawley’s view, capital interacted with people in the system, just like the rest of the environment, and it was responsible for the characteristics of community development. He pri- oritized the capitalist economy as an external environmental factor and a source of contention to assimilate within the system in order to take on particular and useful dimensions. Hawley proposed that the development of the urban system should be scientifically examined as a way of understanding a capitalist society and its methods of circulation and evolution as it entered the system and reformed the community. He regarded the capitalist economy as invasive and sometimes counterproductive in social formation and advocated for an ecological approach to class analysis. The environment did not exist as a deterministic evolutionary process in this case, he said, but was part of an interactive and interdependent economic process. Hawley explicitly stated the economic dynamics in a human ecology of change. In fact, any theory of the communities formed as people come together in a particular place cannot dismiss the economically interdependent relationship. In this sense, households, neighborhoods, and communities operate as interdependent economic units, and within the community, each household creates a value. Economists describe households and the places within which they live as subunits of neighborhoods within a larger community and the sustaining economic system. The logic seems clear in terms of the literature on slums in the twentieth century. Peo- ple with poor wages lived in poor dwellings. Therefore, society and the various neighborhoods in the community environment of the urban work world will change as work opportunities change. In terms of the industrial economy, the booming demand for workers during both world wars and the populations that migrated into the urban areas for jobs where opportunities and the demand for labor opened up caused the urban character to expand and change. In periods of depression, the reverse process would occur. As work opportunities decreased, some neighborhoods would become more vulnerable than others to adverse effects. In many cases, 492 Urbanization 493 low-skilled labor in the manufacturing sector realized the changing tide of the economy first. Changes in the urban economy and society appeared before World War II. Without effective housing programs for inner-city neighborhoods, many buildings continued to de- teriorate. The U.S. Housing Act of 1937, defined the term slum as “any area where dwellings predominate, which, by reason of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangement or design, lack of ventilation, light or sanitation facilities, or any combination of these factors are detrimental to safety, health, or morals.” In the 1930s the federal legislation designed to ad- dress urban slums came under the short-lived Public Works Administration and public housing programs. Subsidized public housing developed as a new legislative concept that was never popular with strong lobbies such as the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB). In the 1950s public housing programs came under heavy attack in the hearings led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, where they were de- picted as part of a socialist or communist policy agenda. Slum neighborhoods in cities throughout the nation remained neglected because of opposition to government housing programs for the poor. But there was no similar opposition to other federal housing programs aimed at private home ownership. Subsidized loans for homes helped to bail out failing banks at a time when many Americans attributed economic depression and previous economic hardships to the devastating effects of business cycles in the capitalist system—a situation that led many to question the viability of such a system. So the government gave the economy a source of growth by subsidizing the private home market. Specifi- cally, in the 1930s the federal government provided incentives for home ownership in the form of subsidies, including support for contractors who built large suburban communities. Subsidized home ownership also shifted economic growth and employment from the city to the suburbs, leaving inner- city residents with limited opportunities for jobs or afford- able, quality housing. By the time the Great Depression ended, some major precedents had been set that would create the basis for all future developments in housing legislation. The housing legislation of the 1930s bailed out banks, provided opportunities for home ownership, and quieted much of the social unrest of the times. But the critical response to the challenges of the day provided a form of long-term legislation for home ownership and housing that led to “suburbanization,” at a time when transportation made it feasible to establish residential neighborhoods farther from factories. These compound developments led to a population decline in the major cities of the Midwest and Northeast. Subsidized housing loans helped to create massive suburbs in the periphery of urban centers, and new transportation infrastruc- tures redeveloped cities in response to the demand for automobile travel in an era marked by the commuter relationship between suburbia and the city financial center. Eventually, as critical masses located outside city boundaries, the financial industry and economic growth followed as nodes of suburban financial centers, as opposed to the former model of central finance in inner-city commercial and financial districts. But subsidized home ownership remained exclusively for white city dwellers. Many people of color found their communities were left behind; they clustered in poor neighborhoods and found their job opportunities had decreased. Urbanization in the 1950s occurred as a result of public and private policies for investment and the perception of the characteristics of poverty associated with the inner-city minorities and a variety of problems that existed only in certain urban neighborhoods—the other America. In the classical tradition, the other America included a population that existed outside the economic and social mainstream of the rest of the nation. The classical theory of urban development lacked a critical perspective discussed in the work of David Harvey (1973), a prominent author on city planning and social justice issues. Urban planning and zoning had a history of maintaining the “city beautiful” with parks and eliminating or degrading poor neighborhoods in the interest of new transportation systems to convey suburban populations to jobs and shopping in the core city. The poor and minorities were restricted to certain zones and kept out of wealthier neighborhoods to preserve property values. Raymond Mohl noted that American planning focused on the needs of city officials and businesspeople instead of the lower classes—the opposite of European planning, which incorporated all aspects of the city. Social concerns continued to drive urban planning in Europe, whereas in the United States, the movement focused on real estate values and re-creating the aristo- cratic city. Harvey’s work on the topic of urban development contributed greatly to changing ideas about the natural processes of housing deterioration and real estate investments in rental properties. Harvey described urbanization as a development in modern history within the context of an environment of local power and business interests. He coined the term redlining in describing discrimination and the banking system and the related aspects of rental property and landlord disinvestments that existed both in urban planning and in federal and local guidelines for lending. In Harvey’s analysis, nothing natural or evolutionary brought about urban decay. Rather, these developments occurred as the result of human decisions made within institutions that condoned racism by sin- gling out communities of color as high-risk neighborhoods that could not qualify for the loans necessary to their development. In the 1950s a neoclassical analysis of urban neighborhoods and slums ignored the social justice issues Harvey raised. Milton Friedman provided the theoretical basis for eminent domain in his classic work Democracy and Freedom (1963), in which he described the forced removal of particular urban neighborhoods and their populations as a necessary plan for the improvement of the entire city. According to Friedman, as local governments selected neighborhoods for purposes of redevelopment, a decrease in low-income housing led to the displacement of poor populations. But the social consequences for slum residents translated into gains for the greater community as luxury apartments and commercial buildings replaced dilapidated buildings surrounded by 493 business districts. City planners typically referred to slum residents as part of a cost-benefit equation, whereby the slum dweller as a social deviant required scarce municipal re- sources in the form of services. As Friedman saw it, the result increased taxes and neighborhood effects that compromised property values and caused the flight of the middle class. In addition to the consumption of scarce services, the slum dweller existed outside the social and economic norms of the larger community and was thus responsible for the physical condition of the slum neighborhood. Friedman noted that slums fulfilled their requirements by providing basic housing to unproductive or underproductive members of society. The Friedman analysis failed to provide a historical context for the accumulated problems of segregated zoning, pref- erences in home loans, community disinvestments, or the real estate interests of absentee landlords. The fact was that poor communities and largely communities of color found themselves permanently displaced as city officials destroyed entire neighborhoods for the purposes of slum clearance when investors found that new commercial buildings for banks, offices, and luxury apartments could increase the value of inner-city property and bring a better return on their real estate investments. In the works of both Hawley and Harvey, the lack of a critical perspective led to viable alternatives to the classical economics of evolutionary urban development. Hawley ad- dressed the factors of capital accumulation in a capitalist society, and Friedman acknowledged important factors re- garding urban economies, unemployment, and the slums. For his part, Harvey brought to the fore the fact that communities of color were excluded from housing opportunities during the period of suburbanization and that many urban communities became zoned or redlined into areas that were denied access to loans; further, he argued that these developments occurred as the result of a public policy calculated in a racist institutional environment and were lobbied for by powerful interests. However, in their differing versions of urbanization, all three authors discussed the logic of natural competition and the inability of certain groups to adapt. It should be noted that Harvey’s and Friedman’s arguments were advanced in a time when federal programs set the stage for urban riots—violent uprisings that occurred throughout major cities. The chaos of urban riots led to a more organized community activism that was an outgrowth of city development issues and public policy. Activist planners—students of the social justice argument who were concerned with issues of equity and social justice in the city—took up the cause of urban activism. In the 1970s and 1980s, the social justice approach to urbanization failed to account for the reality that an economic shift had limited job opportunities in the city. Suburbaniza- tion, transportation, and technological changes created new locations for economic development outside the city. Urban- ization under inner-city activism contributed to an inner-city population that was dependent on increases in public welfare and bereft of opportunities for social mobility. The failure of social programs, the findings of the McGone Commission on the Watts riots (in 1965), and President Lyndon Johnson’s Kerner Commission’s investigations into the large number of people of color acting against local symbols of white Ameri- can society in 1967 challenged the limitations of the social justice model. In the 1970s these findings led to theories of “spatial mismatch”—theories that examined inner-city population locations and economic growth as two distinct and separate developments that led to a mismatch of jobs and people seeking jobs. Both commission reports discussed the problems of residential segregation that contributed to a lack of access to the economic growth that shifted from the city to the suburbs. A contributing work on this issue, written by John F. Kain and titled “The Effect of the Ghetto on the Dis- tribution and Level of Nonwhite Employment in Urban Areas,” acknowledged that as certain groups received access and opportunity to move to the suburbs, so did the economy. Cities that were formerly the centers of industrial production moved to the periphery of postindustrial developments around employment associated with jobs such as those in services and high technology. By the 1970s and 1980s, theories of spatial mismatch became tangible explanations for increases in urban decay and urban poverty. The central business districts of urban areas saw retail increasingly move to megamalls in suburban areas, and inner-city core businesses and employment continued to decline. The inner-city poverty rate, which had been decreasing, began to rise. Large portions of the population in cities were simply left behind, and inner-city people of color who never escaped poverty found their opportunities were even more limited. In “The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: Three Decades Later,” Kain discussed the historical and statistical warfare between proponents and opponents of the spatial mismatch theory. The basis for the theory was that housing discrimination led to the residential isolation of minority populations, which denied them access to employment opportunities. William Julius Wilson revived the theory in his book The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Pub- lic Policy. Wilson’s work revisited the idea that inner-city poverty was the result of a racial group being isolated from opportunity because of a disparity between the locations of residences and job opportunities. Bennett Harrison dis- counted this argument by using empirical evidence to demonstrate the prevalence of the “dual labor market” in the postindustrial era. In his analysis, Harrison concluded that lack of skills, not spatial dislocation, created the problem. Inner-city minority populations did not possess the skills to adapt to the new technological industries that were replacing older, less-skilled industrial production lines. Therefore, in a dual labor market—one for the less skilled and one for those with higher-level technological skills—the compensation for the skilled workers proved adequate, whereas that for individuals without skills remained less secure and certainly less rewarding; in turn, this situation reduced the unskilled worker’s capacity to find and keep a job. Spatial mismatch provides an analysis of the factors of unemployment and wages based on the history of housing discrimination. Harrison argued that changes in the require- 494 Urbanization ments for skilled labor had put inner-city minorities in poverty. But in both cases, the opportunity structure of employment for communities of color remained limited, either by a lack of educational opportunities or a lack of economic opportunities. And in any case, housing and investment opportunities were limited, putting inner-city communities at risk for high unemployment and poor housing conditions. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a radical departure from the notion of institutional discrimination. The Moyni- han argument concluded that the problems could be traced to the dysfunctional and pathological culture of the minority population typically found in African American, inner-city neighborhoods. The aberrant urban culture was primarily distinguished by the prevalence of female-headed households, crime, and out-of-wedlock births, all of which caused the deterioration of inner-city neighborhoods. Whereas spatial mismatch acknowledged the compounded problems of institutionalized and historical racism, Moynihan’s arguments established a basis for social welfare reforms designed to encourage responsible behaviors (marriage and employment), rather than institutional reforms and civil rights. David Bartlet, David Elesh, Ira Goldstein, George Leon, and William Yancey, in their work “Islands in the Stream: Neighborhoods and the Political Economy of the City,” examined the political economy of urbanization in a work on the postindustrial city. The authors outlined the history of redlining and disinvestments for urban communities of color throughout the period of industrial flight in the 1970s and 1980s to dispel evolutionary notions concerning urban populations. They provided the basis for a continued discussion of urbanization as located in a period of deurbanization in the absence of institutional reforms. Their argument held that the continued discriminatory practices of financial institutions and government policies accelerated the decline of specific neighborhoods in the period of transition that occurred as industries moved from urban centers to other re- gions or nations. At that time, the phrase postindustrial economy was often used to describe a major trend in evolutionary urban changes in the Western world. In the literature, postin- dustrialism meant the process whereby losses in mass- manufacturing jobs were replaced with jobs in high-technology or service industries. The postindustrial age was incorporated into postmodern theories of a society that moved in social stages through major changes in production. Modern societies invested in the technology for mass production, and postmodern societies moved out of mass production and into the information age with more advanced computer technology. In this developmental model, service industries were seen to operate as the predominant sources for employment in the postindustrial/modern age. In “Neighborhoods and the Political Economy,” the authors described the city as various neighborhoods, not in the biotic system of the evolutionary economics of natural development but as a composite of neighborhoods within an urban environment, where officials and investors continued to tar- get certain neighborhoods for redevelopment. Neighbor- hoods became islands in the stream, a phrase used to describe areas within a city context as changing and interrelated enti- ties. These neighborhoods were part of the circulation of labor, investments, and disinvestments that was organized by the various levels of governance in relationship to the larger context of the economy affecting the city. The discussion was posed as an alternative to a more simplistic and classical ver- sion of a monocentric city, or the city that grows “naturally” from the central business district to surrounding areas, like the rings in a tree. The deindustrialization and urbanization processes of the postindustrial cities coincide with the rein- dustrialization and urbanization of other areas, generally from the northeastern and midwestern industrial cities of the United States to the southern and the Sun Belt states. By the 1970s the movement and transformation of industry required changes in local government initiatives and practical and theoretical changes in planning that left some neighborhoods in economic and social disintegration. The theories of postmodern industrial societies influ- enced the planning principles of urban development. The success of urban land-use strategies became measured by their capacity to prepare cities for future development in order to conform to the needs of service industries in the information age. Downtowns in large cities built new businesses and offices for corporate headquarters and financial services with computerized and centralized operations. Such plans have led to residential development for the modern aristocrat, the cosmopolitan urbanite, in a period when cities seek to revitalize and to increase populations with gentrified neighborhoods. In this case, the political economy of the city, rather than the science of nature and evolution, shapes urbanization. Even more classical authors of urban theory ac- knowledge that, as economic growth creates obsolescent spaces in postindustrial cities, revitalization plans displace poor populations considered obsolescent in the new industrial technologies. By contrast, spatial mismatch theories also describe the obsolescence of low-skilled populations. There- fore, urbanization would appear to be a natural and func- tional operation of society and the economy, combined with the more political dimensions of urban management on the part of government administration. Even if the economic principles of the free market are the only standard by which to examine urbanization and its development, the contradictions are still remarkable because government policy and administration have directed urbanization. Government interventions, such as those in the Great Depression, have compensated for financial and social fail- ures in the free market. Public subsidies for home ownership and transportation infrastructure have determined urban development. And planning and targeted public investments continue to influence the demographics of urban centers. The continued presence of poor neighborhoods, characterized by low-income groups and decreasing property values, serves as an impetus for urban redevelopment and the fluc- tuation of populations, moving back and forth from the suburban to the urban and from one region to another as the economy and jobs shift and as housing locations become targeted for change. This is an evolutionary model, but the Urbanization 495 [...]... trade, and combatants on both sides again engaged in aggressive acts to disrupt American trade with their enemies Eventually, again as in the earlier conflicts, these acts led America to enter into the war The U.S government encouraged American businesses to take advantage of the increased opportunities for trade brought about by the war As a neutral nation with an impressive productive capacity, the. .. conflicts that Americans faced in this period The policy of allowing settlement on Native American land led to a series of smallscale frontier wars The Native Americans were often aided by Britain and Spain, the two countries that claimed the North American mainland outside the United States Despite these conflicts and the deaths of thousands of settlers and tens of thousands of Native Americans, the U.S... interest in the settlement of the Louisiana Purchase area began Changes in warfare technology made it even easier then for the U.S government to push the Native Americans aside Be Careful What You Ask For: Manifest Destiny and Civil War, 183 0s through the 186 0s By the 183 0s many American political leaders spoke of the United States having a “Manifest Destiny” to expand, by force if necessary, across the continent... Britain on a most-favored-nation status, closely tying together British and American trade It also contained promises from Britain to refrain from the types of provocative acts that had led to calls for war With the country’s trade tied to Britain and the reasons for war against that nation muted, the Federalists next tried to further cement the Anglo -American alliance by leading the country to war... intimidate the Spanish, mysteriously blew up in the waters of Havana’s harbor, the public demanded war, and the administration of President William McKinley quickly complied, asking for a declaration of war in April 189 8 The United States easily won the Spanish -American War, and Spain ceded control of all its remaining overseas possessions outside of Africa to the United States The taking of Spain’s... for the emerging factions of American politics, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans The Federalists hoped to make America the junior partner in a British-dominated global economy, and going to war against Britain was obviously not conducive to achieving that goal The first step toward bringing about the Federalist policy was the negotiation of Jay’s Treaty This treaty put American trade with... controls over the economy (most notably, a temporary wage-and-price freeze) The cold war also provided some justification for expanding and maintaining the Keynesian welfare state that began with the New Deal Keeping the population stable and prosperous took on greater saliency with the dynamics of the cold war, and a larger welfare state aided that process The cold war began to fizzle out in 1 989 as the Communist... Power: AmericanBritish Diplomacy in North America, 184 2– 184 8 Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999 Eisner, Marc Allen From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State-Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000 Hawley, Ellis W The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their... otherwise—to society at large The year 1912 marked the creation of the U.S Children’s Bureau, a significant shift toward the nationalization of welfare The Children’s Bureau took up causes of maternal and child health, maternal and child mortality rates, and health provisions for mothers and children in poor urban and rural areas The country’s entrance into World War I altered the role of the federal government... C., Charles L Schwartz, and Donald S Tate Social Welfare: A Response to Human Need Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997 Karger, Howard Jacob, and David Stoesz American Social Welfare Policy: A Pluralist Approach New York: Longman, 19 98 Katz, Michael B In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America New York: Basic Books, 1997 ——— The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare . into Louisiana and Texas, leading to a spread of American power. Therefore, Spain resolutely resisted the efforts of John Jay and other American diplomats to let American rafts and flatboats float down. In the 1940s Amos Hawley took the focus of analysis away from the “natural” abilities of particular social groups and instead examined human ecology as it adapted to the demands of a capitalist. destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet and seize the American colony of the Philip- pines. The attack on Pearl Harbor was the first step in the plan, and with it came American entry into the war. The war effort

Định dạng
Số trang	72
Dung lượng	540,39 KB