The case of St. Louis in the 1940s demonstrates the central importance of this decade in American urban history. To understand how planners and elected officials made such extensive use of federal funds in the 1950s and 1960s for public housing and urban renewal, we have to recast the 1940s as a critical period in the formation both of a new urban vision and of a political coalition emboldened to carry it out. Frustrated in their attempts to rebuild in brick and mortar, slum clearance advocates in St. Louis set about redefining the terms of debate over the future of the city itself. They mobilized behind a vision of the city at a crossroads, poised between progress and decay. Yet despite such stark rhetoric, slum clearance was not so much a technological or economic imperative, but a carefully assembled political agenda to remake the urban landscape.
See U.S. Dept. of Labor, Impact of the War on the St. Louis Area, 22-24 and Appendix Table Q, p. 49 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946).
2.
See letters in the Housing Shortage Complaints File, Series One, Box 24, Records of the Mayoral Administrations of St. Louis, Raymond T. Tucker Papers, Washington University Special Collections, hereafter abbreviated as the RTP-WUSC. St. Louis faced an especially acute problem because it was prevented from expanding its territory by a political boundary fixed in 1876. As a result, any new housing in undeveloped areas would fall outside of the city's annexing and taxation reach. Since the built footprint of the city had matured by 1945, and very little new housing had come on line since the boom of the 1920s, the physical stock deteriorated under the strain of severe overcrowding.
3.
Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Byron W. Daynes et al., eds., The New Deal and Public Policy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998); Patrick Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890-1943 ( Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Karen Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Edward Spann, Designing Modern America: The Regional Planning Association of America and its Members (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press , 1996).
4.
Most of the scholarship on the 1950s and 1960s includes background material on the 1940s, but does not focus explicitly on the period. See for example: Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America's Salesman of the Businessman's Utopia (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); W. Edward Orser, Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); Kenneth Fox, Metropolitan America: Urban Life and Urban Policy in the United States, 1940-1980 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press1990); Susan Fainstein et al., Restructuring the City: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment (New York: Longman, 1986).
5.
One of the few detailed studies of this period is Philip J. Funigiello's The Challenge to Urban Liberalism: Federal-City Relations During World War II (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1978). Also see Kristin M. Szylvian, “ The Federal Housing Program During World War II” in Donald Albrecht, ed., World War II and the American Dream (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) and Mark Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1941-1956 (Lawrence, KS: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979). Much work on the 1940s appears as part of broader surveys of slum clearance, public housing, and urban redevelopment histories spanning many decades. See for example: Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002); Jon Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); John Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1974 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).
6.
For a parallel case, see Robert Spinney, World War II in Nashville: Transformation of the Homefront (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1998).136-148.
7.
“ Progress or Decay: St. Louis Must Choose” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Special Supplement Section, January-March 1950.
8.
Guy Greer and Alvin H. Hansen , Urban Redevelopment and Housing: A Program for Postwar (Washington, DC: National Planning Association, Pamphlet No. 10, 1941); Richard J. Seltzer, Proposals for Downtown Philadelphia, a Report for the Urban Land Institute (Chicago, 1941); A. Joseph Stewart, Proposals for Downtown Louisville, a Report for the Urban Land Institute ( Washington, DC, 1942); Carl S. Wells, Proposals for Downtown Detroit, a Digest of a Report for the Urban Land Institute ( Washington, DC, 1942).
9.
City Plan Commission, St. Louis after World War II (City of St. Louis, 1942).
10.
Betty Burnette , St. Louis at War: The Story of a City, 1941-1945 (St. Louis: Patrice Press, 1987), 21.
11.
City Plan Commission, Plan Commission Annual Report, 1944-1945 (St. Louis: City Plan Commission, 1945), 16. Hereafter abbreviated as PCAR.
12.
Study reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 27, 1945.
13.
PCAR, 1942-1943, 19.
14.
See letters in file 1337 of the League of Women Voter Records, Western History Manuscript Collection, Record Group 530, University of Missouri—St. Louis. Hereafter abbreviated LWV Records, WHMC 530. Letter from Mrs. George Roudebush, LWV President, to Mr. Richard Nichols, Public Safety Committee Chair, March 3, 1942; Letter from Mrs. Aaron Fischer, LWV President, to Miss Mary Lou Rogers, American Federation of Labor, August 5, 1945; Letter from Mrs. Aaron Fischer, LWV President, to the Hon. John J. Sullivan, Congressional Representative, December 14, 1945.
15.
PCAR, 1945-1946, 19.
16.
This figure includes the entire St. Louis Industrial Area, an official wartime designation roughly analogous to today's metropolitan region. The Missouri side of the area had 1,39 permanent units; the Illinois side of the area had 1,76 units. The city of St. Louis alone had nearly half of the total number of public housing units for the entire region. See U.S. Dept. of Labor, Impact of the War on the St. Louis Area, Appendix Table Q, p. 49.
17.
Harland Bartholomew and Associates, 17.
18.
U.S. Dept. of Labor, Impact of the War on the St. Louis, 22-24.
19.
Letter from the League of Women Voters to Mary Lou Rogers, American Federation of Labor, August 5, 1944, file 1337, LWV Records, WHMC 530.
20.
Avis Carlson, The League of Women Voters in St. Louis: The First Forty Years, 1919-1959 (St. Louis: League of Women Voters , 1959); Priscilla A. Dowden, “Over this point we are determined to fight”: African-American public education and health care in St. Louis, Missouri, 1910-1949 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1997).
21.
A radio program scripted by the League of Women Voters and broadcast on KFUO in July of 1938 typifies their dramaturgical efforts around social reform. In the script, league member “Mrs. Layman” takes her colleague “Mrs. Campbell” on an imaginary journey through the slums of St. Louis to convince her of the necessity of public housing. See KFUO Radio Broadcast Transcript, July 1938, LWV Records, file 1368, WHMC 530.
22.
Louise M. Young , In the Public Interest: The League of Women Voters, 1920-1970 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989). On the role of women as advocates for the city, see Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
23.
Circular to all membership from Mrs. Ingram Boyd, Jr., Chair of the League of Women Voters City Planning Committee, June 19, 1945, file 1337, LWV Records, WHMC 530.
24.
See multiple letters in file 1337, LWV Records, WHMC 530.
25.
For example, see the letter from Mrs. Ingram Boyd, Jr. to Mayor Kaufmann, May 1, 1946, file 1337, LWV Records, WHMC 530.
26.
See the CCHCP Report, “Organizations Interested in Housing and Slum Clearance in the St. Louis Area,” unpublished mimeograph, 1948, file 6, CCHCP Records, WHMC 376.
27.
On the support for slum clearance by downtown commercial interests, see Joseph Heathcott and Maire Murphy, “Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal: Industry, Planning, and Policy in the Making of Metropolitan St. Louis, 1940-1980 ,” Journal of Urban History (Winter 2005).
28.
Deborah Jane Henry, Structures of Exclusion: Black Labor and the Building Trades in St. Louis, 1917-1966 (PhD Thesis, University of Minnesota, 2002).
29.
For details on the support of organized labor for public housing and other Progressive programs, as well as for later criticisms of government programs, see files 56, 59, and 69 in Calloway Papers, WHMC 11, and files 81, in Calloway Addenda, WHMC 540. Also see Lon W. Smith, An Experiment in Trade Union Democracy: Harold Gibbons and the Formation of Teamsters Local 688, 1937-1957 (MA Thesis, Illinois State University, 1993).
30.
Typescript of article by Ernest Calloway, “Public Housing: U.S. Democracy In Action” The CIO News, August 14, 1944, file 81, Calloway Papers Addendum, WHMC 540.
31.
CHCP, “Organizations Interested in Housing and Slum Clearance in the St. Louis Area”; correspondence on housing matters, file 239, HWC Papers, WHMC 434; correspondence and research on housing conditions in the city, files 283 and 284, HWC Papers, WHMC 434.
32.
Mason C. Doan, American Housing Production, 1880-2000: A Concise History (Lanham: University Press of America, 1997), 48-53; R. Allen Hays, The Federal Government and Urban Housing: Ideology and Change in Public Policy ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 147-151. Also, for examples, see: Richard H. Foster, Jr., “Wartime Trailer Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area” Geographical Review70, 3 (July 1980), 276-290.
33.
On the evolution of the municipal corporation from the Progressive-era “good government” movement, see: Gail Radford, “From Municipal Socialism to Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of American Public Enterprise ” Journal of American History, 90, 3 (December 2003).
34.
PCAR 1944-1945, 16.
35.
PCAR 1943-1944, 5; Letter from Mrs. Aaron Fischer to Mayor Kaufman, July 11, 1945, file 1337, LWV Records, WHMC 530.
36.
I use the term “fair market” here because it is the common term used at the time. However, the phrase is clearly inaccurate because it obscures the very high public investment in redeveloped land. There is nothing “fair” in strict liberal economic terms about redevelopment practice, unless one abstracts the public stake and only regards the land delivered to private developers as a tabula rasa. This critical position on development is most thoroughly articulated in the work of Gregory Squires. See, especially, Capital and Communities in Black and White: The Intersections of Race, Class, and Uneven Development (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
37.
Marc Weiss, “ The Origins and Legacy of Urban Renewal,” in Pierre Clavel et al., eds., Urban and Regional Planning in an Age of Austerity (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 58-70.
38.
PCAR 1946-1947, 19-22.
39.
Letter from Mrs. Ingram Boyd, Jr. to State Senator William Studt, December 21, 1945, file 1337, LWV Records, WHMC 530.
40.
PCAR 1946-1947, 22.
41.
For a brief treatment of the case, see Charles Kimball Cummings, “ Rent Strike in St. Louis: The Making of Conflict in Modern Society” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Washington University, 1976), 90-92.
42.
“City drafts bill for 4th public housing project” St. Louis Star Times, December 20, 1946; “Fourth public housing site tentatively picked” Globe-Democrat, December 29, 1946; PCAR 1946-1947, 23.
43.
As “city engineer” and chief of staff of the Planning Department, Bartholomew published a series of important studies and technical bulletins between 1915 and 1942. In lieu of a comprehensive plan, these publications served as guideposts for zoning land uses and for the planning of streets, commercial areas, sewers, grade separations, and public facilities. See Norman J. Johnston, Harland Bartholomew: His Comprehensive Plans and Science of Planning (PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1964) and Mark Abbott, The Master Plan: The Life and Death of an Idea (PhD Dissertation, Purdue University, 1985).
44.
Letter from Harland Bartholomew to Mrs. Ingram Boyd, Jr., December 18, 1945, file 1337, LWV Records, WHMC 530.
45.
Letter from Mrs. Aaron Fischer to State Senator William Studt, May 24, 1946, file 1337, LWV Records, WHMC 530. Studt was the chair of the State Senate's Municipal Corporations Committee.
46.
PCAR 1946-1947, 33.
47.
City Plan Commission, 1947: 70-72.
48.
City Plan Commission, 1947: 28-35.
49.
Ernest Calloway , CIO News; Memoranda and report on the Housing Forum, 1949-1950, file 3, CCHCP Records, WHMC 376.
50.
“New Plans for Giving St. Louis a `Face Lift': Urban Redevelopment Proposal Would Follow Pittsburgh's Blueprint” by John Costello, St. Louis Globe-Democrat , February 1, 1953; “A New St. Louis Rips Up Its Past” Business Week, September 10, 1955. On the efforts of planners and business leaders to position the American downtown as a middle-class consumer district, see Liz Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Press, 2003), 257-289.
51.
PCAR 1944-1945, 16.
52.
Press release of the League of Women Voters of St. Louis, October 15, 1948, file 1309, LWV Records, WHMC 530.
53.
Letter from Mrs. L. Matthews Werner to Nathaniel Sweets, September 14, 1948, file 1309, LWV Records, WHMC 530.
54.
“Bond Issue Election Results, 1923-1955,” unpublished document, St. LouisPublic Library Records (hereafter abbreviated SLPL).
55.
For African American opposition to urban renewal projects, see the correspondence in the files on Mill Creek Valley, Urban Renewal, City Plan Commission, and the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority in the Raymond A. Tucker Papers, Series II and Series III, RTP, WUSC.
56.
Cummings, “ Rent Strike in St. Louis” 91.
57.
Letter from Fred Hume to Irving Solomon, September 27, 1949, Housing Authority 1949-1951 File, Series One—Box 23, RTP, WUSC.
58.
“Slum Surgery in St. Louis,” Architectural Forum94, 4 (April 1951), 128-136.
59.
PCAR 1937-1938, 27-28.
60.
Joseph Darst, “ Urban Redevelopment Program in a Typical American City” Government News (June 1950) 18.
61.
Memo from Fred Hume to Mayor Darst, May 13, 1949, Housing Authority 1949-1951 File, Series One—Box 23, RTP, WUSC.
62.
On the sources of national opposition to the 1949 Housing Act, see Leonard Friedman, Public Housing: The Politics of Poverty (New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1969), 58-75. Nathaniel Keith provides one of the best accounts of the intricate processes, alliances, and deals that enabled the Act's passage: Politics and the Housing Crisis since 1930 (New York: Universe Books , 1973), 76-85.
63.
See multiple telegrams from Darst to U.S. congressional representatives and Public Housing Administration officials, Housing Authority 1949-1951 File, Series One—Box 23, RTP, WUSC. The telegrams lobby in favor first of passage of the Housing Act, then in favor of the highest possible appropriations, and by 1950-1951 against proposed cuts in the allocation of funds for construction.
64.
“Progress or Decay: St. Louis Must Choose” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Special Supplement Section, January-March 1950.
65.
Joseph Bunzel , “Citizens' Housing Associations” Journal of Housing (April 1947). The CCHCP newsletter reported that as of 1950 there were some 75 such organizations around the country.
66.
Cchcp, Housing Forum Newsletter , April 11, 1950, Housing 1949-1951 File, Series One—Box 24, RTP, WUSC.
67.
Cchcp, Housing Forum Newsletter , April 24, 1950, Housing 1949-1951 File, Series One—Box 24, RTP, WUSC.
68.
R. Allen Hays, The Federal Government and Urban Housing: Ideology and Change in Public Policy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) 57-79; Roger Biles, “Public Housing and the Postwar Urban Renaissance, 1949-1973,” in John F. Bauman, Roger Biles , and Kristin M. Szylvian, eds., From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-century America (University Park, PA : Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). Arnold Hirsch reminds us that anticommunism often functioned as a racially coded lever of opposition to public redistributionist policies and programs. See his essay “With or Without Jim Crow,” in Arnold R. Hirsch and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., Urban Policy in Twentieth Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 65-99.
69.
Letter from Mrs. Aaron Fischer to William Wyatt, March 25, 1945, file 1337, LWV Records, WHMC 530. Fischer was president of the St. Louis branch of the league, and Wyatt was the chief housing expediter for the Public Housing Administration in Washington, DC.
70.
Harland Bartholomew, “ Non-Conforming Uses Destroy the Neighborhood,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics (February 1939), 96-97.
71.
Slha, Old Brick: The First Annual Report of the St. Louis Housing Authority (City of St. Louis, 1946), SLPL, 23, 25-26.
72.
“The Home Wreckers” Also see Bulletin of the National Housing Conference, n.d., Housing Authority 1951-1952 File, Series One—Box 23, RTP, WUSC.
73.
Press release of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, May 30, 1950, Housing 1949-1951 file, Series One—Box 24, RTP, WUSC.
74.
The papers of Joseph Vatterot and the Vatterot housing development firm can be found at St. Louis University Archives, Pius XII Library, St. Louis, MO.
75.
Letter from Mayor Darst to Joseph Vatterot, January 9, 1950, Housing and Urban Development File 1949-1951, Series One—Box 24, RTP, WUSC.
76.
The list of organizations represented at the institute is extensive, but includes a number of prominent bodies: the St. Louis Housing Authority, Plan Commission, Health Department, public library, school board, Real Estate Board, Real Estate Brokers' Association, Home Builders Association, Harris Teachers College, Stowe Teachers College, Eden Theological Seminary, Saint Louis University, Washington University, professional groups representing architects, social workers, engineers, and women in higher education, YMCA, YWCA, Jewish Service Agency, Jewish Federation, Metropolitan Church Federation, Archdiocese of St. Louis, Salvation Army, numerous individual churches, synagogues, missions, and settlement houses, Teamsters, AFL, Urban League, NAACP, Housewives Mutual Association, Ethical Society, Girl Scouts, Saint Louis Association of Colored Women's Clubs, and the Saint Louis chapter of the National Council of Negro Women.
77.
Proceedings of the Institute on Housing, Washington University, St. Louis, March 22, 1952, WUSC, 10.
78.
Residential succession, of course, is a very old idea in the rhetoric and research on real estate, dating back to the nineteenth century. The assumptions upon which succession theory are based generally lack an explanatory framework for issues such as discrimination, segregation, and uneven development fostered by public policy choices. For an example of such a study, see Otis Dudley Duncan and Beverly Duncan, The Negro Population of Chicago: A Study of Residential Succession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). Alternatively, on the uneven structure of urban real estate, see: Gilbert Osofsky , Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto ( New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 105-123; Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
79.
Proceedings of the Institute on Housing, 19-21.
80.
John Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1975 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 142-182.
81.
Proceedings of the Institute on Housing, 25.
82.
Telegram from Mayor Darst to Federal Home and Housing Administration, 16 November 1949, Housing Authority 1949-1951 File, Series One—Box 23, RTP, WUSC; Telegram from Abner Silverman to Mayor Darst, November 18, 1949, Housing Authority 1949-1951 File, Series One—Box 23, RTP, WUSC.
83.
Press release from office of Mayor Darst, June 29, 1950, Housing Authority 1949-1951 File, Series One—Box 23, RTP, WUSC.
84.
Letter from William Murray to William Bergeron, August 25, 1950, Housing Authority 1949-1951 File, Series One—Box 23, RTP, WUSC; Letter from G.B. Cleary to Mayor Darst, May 25, 1951, Housing Authority 1949-1951 File, Series One—Box 23, RTP, WUSC; “Razing job begins at site of 4th housing project,” Post-Dispatch, May 28, 1951.
