From Containment to Liberation: The Postwar University and the Architecture of Urban Renewal
Michael H. Carriere
The University of Chicago
History Department
On April 12, 1947, Robert E. Garrigan, Executive Director of Chicago’s South Side Planning Board (SSPB), forwarded a draft of a speech he had been working on to Dr. Henry Heald, President of Illinois Institute of Technology and Chairman of the SSPB. It was clear from the attached memorandum that Garrigan was quite proud of the speech, which Heald was to present at an upcoming event. “I will not brag about its organization,” wrote Garrigan, “but I think it will make good newspaper copy.”
The speech laid out the mission statement of the newly organized SSPB, a group that, concerned about urban blight in the area between 12th Street and 47th Street (east of the Pennsylvania Railroad), had come together just one year earlier. “[T]he simple fact remains,” wrote Garrigan, “that Chicago is rotting away.” Referencing a map highlighting vacant land in the organization’s area of concern, Garrigan found that “It is easy to see by looking at this map how rot is covering the entire South Side and growing and spreading away from the center of the city leaving devastation, disorganization, crime and lost lives and investments in its wake.” Yet even such visual aids could not adequately represent the sheer horror of Chicago’s streets. Making an incredible comparison, Garrigan found that
This picture of destroyed buildings and homes is worse than any picture of London destruction by the German Air Raids of the last war. The lost lives, human misery and financial loss caused by blight in Chicago in the past 25 years has probably far surpassed the destruction caused by the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Because blight doesn’t happen all in one day, with a lot of drama, but instead creeps on us until it strangles us without our knowing it, we give it no attention.”[1]
Despite the enormity of the problem, though, Garrigan did not feel that all hope was lost. To Garrigan, the solution to urban blight could be found in the world of modern urban planning, a world that would help lead to “a definite and sound policy for replanning and rebuilding Chicago” (or, as Garrigan prophetically warned, “someday there will be no Chicago.”). First and foremost, this was a project that would require incredible skill and expertise, as “[t]here are very few laymen and in fact not many technicians in the field of urban redevelopment who understand its full scope and significance.” And such experts had to engage in large-scale planning, planning that dealt with every aspect of the urban dweller’s life – and not just the immediate problem of adequate housing for south side residents. “It is our position,” wrote Garrigan on this subject, “that it is just as important to the welfare and future prosperity of this city to plan where the people will work as it is to plan where they will live.” [2]
Yet this would be a struggle. To drive this point home, Garrigan returned to his war analogy. “It is without hesitation,” wrote Garrigan, “that I tell you that the invention and manufacture of the atom bomb was as nothing compared to the solution of the problem of urban redevelopment.” Garrigan, however, remained optimistic. “This is not necessarily discouraging,”[3] he proclaimed,
for we are much farther along in the problem of urban redevelopment than were the physical scientists at the beginning of the Manhattan Project. All that is needed now to make urban redevelopment a reality is a Chicago size Manhattan Project and we intend to initiate that here today.”[4]
“We hope,” concluded Garrigan, “that all the people of Chicago and all organizations of Chicago will join with us in developing a movement, or let us say a crusade, to save Chicago.”[5]
To SSPB leaders – which included representatives from many nearby institutions and organizations – there was a clear need for a “crusade” to contain the spread of creeping blight in Chicago, a crusade that could only be won through the implementation of modern urban planning. And the driving force behind such efforts was IIT, whose leaders and faculty members played vital roles within the SSPB, individuals who seemed to represent the type of modernism that proved so attractive to urban renewal in Chicago. This essay focuses upon this relationship between the school and the redevelopment group, and hopes to show just how extensively postwar urban universities drew from the language of modernism not only in the creation of new university buildings[6], but also in the way they attempted to recreate the urban environment surrounding such structures. The clean (some might say sterile), abstract lines and carefully proportioned spaces associated with modern urban planning provided both IIT and the SSPB the antidote for the urban disorder that seemed to be surrounding them on all sides. The leaders of such institutions wholeheartedly embraced modern urban planning as early as the 1940s, and such a strategy played a crucial role in the urban renewal efforts that Chicago would implement throughout the postwar era.
Yet there was more to this embrace of modern urban planning than such a clear-cut contrast between perceived urban order and disorder. As in the case of the rise of modernism within the design of campus buildings themselves, the turn to the modern within urban planning came to serve as a physical representation of the values of postwar American liberalism, values that liberal university leaders (and many within the surrounding community) wholeheartedly endorsed and believed was their mission to teach to the young people of the United States. Modern urban planning – with its predilection for large-scale projects, its commitment to consensus and rationality, its embrace of expertise and specialization, its distrust of history, its vision of an evolving administrative state, and its deification of technology (among others) – proved a perfect fit not only for the broader vision of American liberalism, but also for the way many liberal leaders were coming to view the city within the postwar era. The push to suburbanize urban space and have the city serve the automobile – popular thoughts among many urban liberals – were key tenets of modern urban planning. The actual plan of the urban university, just as in the aesthetics of the buildings that made up such a plan, can be read as a concrete articulation of both the values of American liberalism – which universities were seen as exemplifying – and the way that liberals pictured their ideal urban landscape. Such a marriage between modernism and liberalism would have tremendous repercussions for the broad arc of twentieth-century US history.
Of course, I am not the first to note this relationship between modernism and modern urban planning and American liberalism. One is struck by the parallels between Garrigan’s speech and the rhetoric of Cold War anti-communism, a comparison made all the more vibrant by Garrigan’s wartime analogies. As historian Arnold R. Hirsch notes in the foreword to the 1998 edition of his seminal work Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 it was during the 1940s and 1950s – and not the 1960s[7] – that the push for urban renewal truly got going. And it was during this same era that the concept of “containment” became incredibly important to the realm of urban planning. As he writes:
It is perhaps my greatest regret that the current plight of our cities remains almost reflexively linked to the 1960s and the presumptive failure of well-intentioned but soft-headed social ‘reforms’ such as public housing. Much of Making the Second Ghetto’s burden was to demonstrate that the compounded shortcomings of slum clearance, urban renewal, and segregated high-rise public housing resulted not from an unfettered liberalism’s social experimentation during the civil rights era but, rather, from a conservative reaction more emblematic of the 1950s and the Cold War. Indeed, what we experienced was the ferocious application of a domestic ‘containment’ policy – the word itself was frequently used by contemporaries in this context – that complemented American foreign policy in rhetoric and imagery.[8]
Hirsch is correct to note the presence of the concept of “containment” in both foreign and domestic policy, a point he makes even more strongly in his recent article “Containment on the Home Front: Race and Federal Housing Policy from the New Deal to the Cold War.” To Hirsch, “‘Containment’ became as much a hallmark of racial housing programs as it was of American foreign policy,” as federal housing initiatives and urban renewal programs only served to reinforce existing patterns of segregation – a fact that helped “contain” African-Americans in the worst neighborhoods in America. In such accounts, urban renewal becomes something of a defensive strategy, a means to maintain the status quo in urban life and its residential patterns.[9]
Such narratives of postwar urban planning dovetail nicely with other scholarly accounts of the politics of space and urban planning during this historical era. Geographer Matthew Farish, in his work on the relationship between disaster and American cities in the postwar era, has found that Cold war concerns led many on the home front to embrace this concept of containment in their daily lives as well. To Farish, such a project allowed for “the internal manifestations of the ‘splitting’ caused by the doubling-back of paranoid political projections – on the return of containment to haunt a second, domestic space.” Put another way, the idea of containment didn’t only apply to America’s foreign policy mission in such faraway places as Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. For urban Americans who lived constantly under the threat of nuclear annihilation (as America’s Cold War enemies would surely target the nation’s cities for attack), the notion of urban containment – literally limiting the size of the cityscape – allowed them a way to prepared for a myriad of dangers. “Containment, therefore,” concludes Farish, “was at once a foreign policy and a narrative of the nation.”[10]
Cultural critic and American Studies professor Andrew Ross offers a similar understanding of this conception of Cold War containment, as a means to protect the American state from threats both external and internal. In an important essay on the intellectual climate of Cold War America, Ross finds that
The first [conception of containment] speaks to a threat outside of the social body, a threat that therefore has to be excluded, or isolated or quarantined, and kept at bay fm the domestic body. The second meaning of containment, which speaks to the domestic contents of the social body, concerns a threat internal to the host which must then be neutralized by being fully absorbed and thereby neutralized.”[11]
Ross’s deliberate use of the language of immunology highlights what he calls “the Cold War culture of germophobia,” a concept that fits in rather nicely with George Kennan’s postwar description of world communism as a “malignant parasite” threatening the well being of America and its allies. On the international level, this culture of germophobia found its expression in such Kennan-penned documents as the “Long Telegram” and “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” both of which argued for the need to contain Soviet expansion. On the domestic scene, this push against malignant parasites manifested itself, among other places, in the intense preoccupation with urban planning and its dreaded enemy - blight.[12]
As the above example of Garrigan illustrates, there is much truth to such an understanding of the urban landscape in postwar America. To Garrigan and his associates in the SSPB, “creeping” urban blight did seem to take on the characteristics of disease, and there is little doubt that such civic leaders saw the need to contain the spread of this sickness. The rhetoric of Cold War liberalism had found an avenue through which to speak to concerns on the home front, and the language of domestic liberalism found much to draw from in the anti-communist understanding of containment. If nothing else, the reliance upon wartime imagery and Cold War concepts allowed those concerned with urban blight an urgency that it may not have achieved under different circumstances. America could now be seen as fighting two wars, each vital to the survival of the nation: a fight against global communism, and a fierce – and equally important – struggle for the souls of American cities.
Yet, as the example of Garrigan also shows, there was more to such a struggle than the need to contain the enemy. The concept of containment, in many ways, attempts to merely maintain the status quo. What Garrigan truly envisioned was a world liberated from the dangers of urban blight, where such decay was defeated once and for all. Whereas the notion of containment reveals a rather conservative approach to urban renewal (simply maintaining certain residential patterns, for example), this sense of liberation entailed a dynamic approach to redevelopment, one in which structures would be completely demolished and new buildings constructed in their wake. Such proponents of urban renewal didn’t want to only contain blight; they wanted to create an entirely new cityscape. Here one sees the more optimistic side of Cold War liberalism – historian Samuel Taylor Zipp calls such early attempts at renewal examples of “benevolent intervention” – where advocates firmly believed that they were in the process of freeing the hearts and minds of urban dwellers across the United States. “Liberal sponsors” of urban redevelopment, according to historian Allen J. Matusow, “had assumed that on consequence of knocking down the housing of the poor would be to supply them with better.” It is this more hopeful side of American liberalism and urban redevelopment – a side that drew heavily from the liberal values discussed above – that I wish to explore in this essay. Such an endeavor will hopefully provide the reader with a fuller account of both, one that is not bound by an over-reliance on such ideas as containment.[13]