Jon C. Teaford - The 20th-Century American City: Problem, Promise & Reality

The Twentieth-Century American City

Problem, Promise, and Reality

THIRD EDITION

Jon C. Teaford

PURDUE UNIVERSITY

1986, 1993, 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2016
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Teaford, Jon C., author.

Title: The twentieth-century American city : problem, promise, and reality / Jon C. Teaford.

Description: Third edition. | Baltimore, Maryland : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041798| ISBN 9781421420387 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421420394 (electronic) | ISBN 1421420384 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421420392 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Cities and townsUnited StatesHistory20th century. | UrbanizationUnited StatesHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC HT123 .T43 2016 | DDC 307.760973dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041798

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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First published in 1986, The Twentieth-Century American City was originally part of The American Moment series. This series offered works that combined narrative and analysis on a wide range of topics in American history. It included studies of everything from labor and sports to politics and foreign policy. These books were designed to be accessible to the general reader and appropriate for use in college classes.

The Twentieth-Century American City was the urban affairs contribution to the series. It focused on the persistent struggle to cope with and improve the urban way of life. The book examined the problems of the city, reform initiatives aimed at remedying these problems, and the resulting realities that too often fell short of reform goals. Class and ethnic fissures fragmented the metropolis, and the new technology of the automobile imposed an added burden on cities that had developed in the age of the horse and streetcar. Economic depression and world war brought new challenges as well as an increased role for the federal government in metropolitan development. Peace, however, proved even more disruptive to the traditional city, ushering in an era of accelerated suburbanization and decentralization. Each generation had to adapt the city to changing realities and face the myriad problems that arose when millions of often-clashing people shared Americas urban space.

A second edition of The Twentieth-Century American City, appearing in 1993, updated the earlier edition by expanding the final chapter. Most notably it examined the phenomenon of edge cities, hubs of business and employment developing along the metropolitan fringe. Edge cities contradicted traditional conceptions of the city as a circle with a dominant downtown core surrounded by subordinate outskirts. Centers were arising along the edge, and the core seemed increasingly peripheral to American life.

The third edition further updates the account, bringing the narrative to the end of the twentieth century and into the first years of the new millennium. A refashioned the continuing struggle to re-center the metropolis and bolster the flagging historic core. It also examines the growing concern about suburban sprawl and the efforts to curb outward expansion. Troubled by the environmental, social, political, and financial costs arising from rapid suburban growth, sprawl haters endeavored to convince Americans that the compact settlement of the small lot or multifamily dwelling was preferable to the wasteful consumption of disappearing farms and forests. At the close of the century, as during the previous ten decades, promises of change faced the troubling realities of metropolitan life. Persistent inner-city poverty cast a shadow over the boosterish celebration of downtown revitalization, and the longstanding desire of Americans for ample private space posed an obstacle to the forces opposed to suburbanization.

The third edition does not change the trajectory of the work. In each of the editions the aim has been to illuminate perceived problems and the responses to those ills. Throughout the century the city was deemed a problematic space that Americans needed to improve. Urban life was Americas great domestic dilemma. Cities from New York to Los Angeles were grand monuments to American wealth and enterprise, but they also reflected the social and economic fragmentation of the nation. Race, ethnicity, and class splintered the metropolis and thwarted efforts to create a harmonious whole. The city incorporated both Americas successes and its maladies. It was an American portrait of great beauty and equally great ugliness. Looking upon it, Americans could see what was both right and wrong with their nation and their way of life.

The Twentieth-Century American City

At the dawn of the twentieth century virtually all observers agreed that the age of the city had arrived. Speaking for reform-minded clergy, Reverend Josiah Strong preached that the new civilization is certain to be urban; and the problem of the twentieth century will be the city. Likewise, the economist Richard T. Ely warned that Americans had to prepare for the coming domination of the city, and for an extension of urban conditions even to rural communities. And the civic reformer Frederic C. Howe proclaimed more optimistically that the city is the hope of the future.... Here the industrial issues, that are fast becoming dominant in political life, will first be worked out. Whether hopeful or despairing, Americans recognized that New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco, not the myriad of dreary hamlets strung along the railroads or the dozing county seats dotting the map of America, would determine the destiny of the nation. Commercial growth, industrialization, and the labor-saving mechanization of agriculture all seemed to ensure that urbanization would be the inevitable wave of the future.