Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Allan Talbot captured well the Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect of Ed Logue in his appreciative account of the Lee administration, written after working there for five years: “[Logue was] a man who over the years has been variously described as ‘a brilliant programmer,’ ‘the toughest man in the world,’ ‘a perfectly charming man,’ ‘an egotistical S.O.B.,’ [and] ‘one of the best friends I ever had.” Talbot concluded, “Logue’s drive has been his most salient characteristic in public service. It has given him the image of a tough, able, and often abrasive man of action.”35 Years later, Grabino still cherished Talbot’s imaginary myth about Logue: “Every summer, Logue goes up to the Vineyard, takes a shovel out of the house, and digs in the sand. And he pulls up something called self-doubt. And he looks at it for a few minutes, and he puts it back, and that’s the end of it for a year. And that’s Logue. No self-doubt whatsoever.”36

  Over time, Lee and Logue developed a productive partnership as the politician and the redevelopment expert, where the mayor depended on Logue’s administrative talents to sustain his high national profile. In the late 1950s, when the Eisenhower White House threatened drastic cuts in urban renewal appropriations, Logue organized a delegation of mayors to meet with the president; Lee served as the spokesman and funds were restored. When Lee became chair of the Urban Renewal Committee of the American Municipal Association (now the National League of Cities), Logue became its secretary and expertly steered the committee. And in 1959–60, at the platform committee chair Chester Bowles’s bidding, Logue did much of the work on his and Lee’s jointly drafted urban platform for the 1960 Democratic Convention—“the first,” he boasted, “that any party ever had”—and organized a high-profile conference in Pittsburgh to showcase JFK’s urban agenda.37

  Although Logue and Lee respected each other’s distinctive contributions and recognized that together they made a winning combination, they nonetheless could clash—at times harshly. Most of Lee and Logue’s spats were petty, quickly forgotten disturbances in their otherwise effective—often affectionate—teamwork. Occasionally, these disputes flared into larger confrontations. The major ones were usually rooted in their very different ways of operating. Logue, the brash, goal-oriented Yale lawyer, sometimes struck Lee as insufficiently concerned with process and the effect he was having on others, particularly people with votes, money, or influence. Lee was not alone in this view. Even Logue’s good friend Sviridoff, in a confidential interview with Yale’s Dahl, conveyed his own fear that should Lee run for the Senate, “This program is likely to fall flat on its face … Logue is a brilliant guy, in his field … but Logue primarily is a doer. And he has no feel for just getting along with people.”38 Deputy Taylor likewise noted the risks in his boss’s confrontational style. “I think he is doing it quite deliberately and I’m also not sure he needs to … This is my major criticism of Ed … I think he gets as far being tough as you possibly can get. Where he really overdoes it is with the outside public.” As a result, Taylor saw no obvious successor to Lee, should he seek higher office.39

  But Lee deserved blame as well, in particular for sometimes banishing Logue to the back office without adequate authority and recognition. As Logue explained the occasional tension, “I was ready to be a behind-the-scenes fella. But there’s a difference between being a subordinate and a slave. Once Dick cut the ground under me in public … When he did that, I just got up and quit.”40 On another occasion, Logue made a public statement, informed by a secret Louis Harris survey of shoppers, that downtown New Haven was dying and required drastic life support, including a new department store. Although there was nothing surprising about that observation, Logue’s statement infuriated executives at Malley’s, who had no interest in attracting a competitor. Lee unleashed his wrath on Logue.41 A misstep like that only reinforced Lee’s conviction that he couldn’t trust Logue’s political judgment. “If given a free rein, in a week he would be run out of town,” Lee confided to Dahl’s graduate student researcher Wolfinger.42 Lee’s mistrust of Logue’s instincts fed his considerable, and by many accounts, annoying, micromanaging tendencies. In one instance, Lee insisted on spreading around the lucrative title-search business arising out of the property transfers frequent in urban renewal. When Logue resisted the mayor’s dictate, Lee responded tartly, “For God’s sake,… start to be a little political in your thinking!” Logue stood his ground, however, insisting, “Too much of you and too much of me has gone into this program, and too much more hard work lies ahead for both you or me[,] for either of us, or our wives, to be content with anything less than the best people or the best method.”43

  THE NEW ADMINISTRATIVE EXPERT

  Lee may have had periodic frustrations with his partner Logue, but he knew that New Haven’s—and his own—success in urban renewal rested on Logue’s assuming a new kind of administrative responsibility called for in the post–New Deal environment of expanding federal power. Success as this kind of expert depended not on mastery of a narrowly defined body of technical information, as had often been the case earlier in the twentieth century during the Progressive Era. Instead, it required broad skills to negotiate for the resources available to cities from Washington and to oversee a wide range of initiatives on the ground. That expansive portfolio included urban planning, real estate, design, construction, management, legal matters, public relations, community organizing, and lobbying. A lawyer like Logue, who emerged from legal training at Yale schooled in public interest law (long before the term became popular in the 1970s) with a focus on labor and legislation, was particularly well suited to engage with the growing government bureaucracy of postwar America. Moreover, Logue had gained valuable administrative experience working with Chester Bowles in Hartford and New Delhi.44

  Ambassador Bowles, in writing his final evaluation of Logue before he departed India in March 1953, gave him the highest rating possible and predicted future success, praising him for just this kind of broad mastery: “By academic training and job experience, as well as by temperament and inclination, Mr. Logue is what is known as a ‘generalist’ rather than a ‘specialist’ … He is able to get into any new problem without specialized knowledge and sort out the difficulties and recommend solutions.”45 Three years later, after Logue was ensconced in his new role as development administrator in New Haven, he explained his new position to the Ford Foundation’s Doug Ensminger back in New Delhi—no stranger himself to the important role that experts were playing in Indian development: “Urban redevelopment and renewal in itself is a rapidly expanding career. Some of the leading people in it come from a public housing background and some from an administrative or planning background. In the course of time a new kind of ‘area generalist’ skill will be built up around this program.” He added, “My own work, which is coordinating that program with all the related activities, is an even newer field, and I think the most challenging of all.”46

  Other observers at the time shared Bowles and Logue’s recognition that a new kind of “generalist” expert was needed to manage the growing investment the federal government was making in many realms of American society, the nation’s cities included. Although enthusiasm about statist solutions to economic and social problems ebbed and flowed with the party in power—with some retrenching, for example, when the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower took the reins from the Democrat Harry S. Truman—the trend was still upward, as Eisenhower expanded government authority more than popular stereotypes often have it.47 A New Deal agency like the Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933 to deliver hydroelectric power to the rural, multistate Tennessee River region, and the postwar Atomic Energy Commission, established in 1947 to manage atomic energy for military and civilian uses, required broadly trained managerial experts to oversee these pioneering activities of the federal government. That David Lilienthal, trained as a lawyer, headed both these innovative agencies testified to the increasing priority put on administrative skill rather than narrowly defined technical knowledge.48

  Beyond
the New Deal, World War II was pivotal in promoting more rational state planning and the greater administrative expertise needed to implement it. When Hubert Humphrey laid out a liberal social agenda for the United States in his 1964 book, War on Poverty, he urged a transfer of “our genius for planning and management,” which had successfully met wartime “attacks from both sides of the globe,” to “fight[ing] the war on poverty.”49 Logue shared Humphrey’s conviction. As early as 1948, in a speech to the American Veterans Committee, he said, “To some people, planning is a bogey; but all veterans are familiar with it; it operates on all levels, sometimes it is good and sometimes bad, but all of us would agree it is necessary.”50

  Even as it became clear that a new kind of expert was emerging to oversee urban redevelopment, there was no common label for this budding role. Time magazine dubbed the new field of redevelopment “urbanology,” which the journalist Fred Powledge defined as dominated by “educated, articulate men, who had training or experience, or both, in … disciplines bordering on the behavioral sciences, along with an appreciation for and understanding of practical politics, [and] were able to accumulate and use power in rebuilding cities.”51

  Dahl’s graduate student Wolfinger invented the term “cosmopolitan professionals” to describe the same group of urban administrators, stressing how a national mandate and professional standards protected them from local, sometimes provincial, and often resistant municipal authorities. Working “in policy areas where federal grants provide a substantial part of the budget and where skill and national connections are the most important factors in obtaining such aid,” these professionals enjoyed a remarkable degree of professional and political independence, Wolfinger argued. “Because these officials are oriented toward goals, norms, and publics beyond their city of current employment,… they can bring to bear resources of power somewhat independent of the contending local interests that often stymie progress.” Wolfinger optimistically predicted that the public, particularly the needy poor, would benefit from the emergence of this new, independent urban policy elite. “These officials have a vested interest in maximizing the programs for which they are responsible,” he hypothesized. “The likelihood is that such expansion will be in the direction of more services for the poor, improvement of the social and physical environment, and attempts to impose a greater degree of rationality and coordination on market processes.”52 Mike Sviridoff claimed that he was looking for just such staff members, whom he labeled “urban generalists,” when he hired for New Haven’s CPI. “There was no one professional road leading to this new program,” he explained.53

  Logue was excited that in assembling his redevelopment staff in New Haven, he was helping to define a new profession. Without it, “slum-fighting,” he suggested, would be like “leaving firefighting in Times Square to a company of volunteer firemen.”54 But even if this new administrative role required general rather than narrow technical expertise, its authority must still be based in science. The Rotival plan had set out three stages of block development, three categories of roadways, and recommendations presented with color-coded and graphically patterned prescriptive maps. New Haven’s officials created additional measures of their own, such as categorizing all existing structures in New Haven as “Standard” or “Substandard” and identifying all “Families to be displaced by proposed improvements” as “Multi-member,” “Single-member,” or “Roomers.” The Redevelopment Agency also developed twelve criteria through which to concretize the amorphous category of blight, including population change and density, intermixture of land uses, room overcrowding, age of housing, dwelling-unit conditions, average monthly rent, welfare cases, and juvenile and tax delinquency. The presence of more than six characteristics, they calculated, indicated blight.55 Beyond providing intellectual ballast to their expertise, these quantifiable measurements had the benefit of helping Lee and Logue render potentially controversial determinations of blight—and any actions taken to remedy them—as based on indisputable facts.

  Logue’s first rule in assembling his team of experts was to recruit nationally, not draw from the ranks of locals burdened with loyalties more personal than professional. One of New Haven’s top Democratic Party bosses in fact never forgave Logue for spurning his candidates. “Logue would infuriate us,” he recalled bitterly. “I’d send a guy over to Redevelopment for a job … The least I expected was that Logue would talk to him. Instead, the guy would come back to me complaining, ‘What the hell is this city coming to? That damned Logue just about threw me out of his office.’”56 Once qualified staff were recruited, Logue determined to keep them outside of civil service, which further aggravated local politicians. He wanted the freedom to set salaries competitive nationally, not locally, and to hire and fire at will. By origin, civil service had aimed at insulating public employees from the old patronage politics of party machines. But in most American cities by the post–World War II era, the job security offered through civil service employment had become integral to the reward structure of entrenched local politicians.57

  By separating urban renewal staffing from the city’s business as usual, Logue was able to bring top talent into city employment. Many of his hires would continue working at this jurisdictional level, even as they jumped from one professional opportunity to another over their careers. None of Logue’s cosmopolitan and well-educated lieutenants arrived intending to spend his life in New Haven, and none in the end did.58 But in the Eisenhower era, when national politics seemed stodgy and uninspiring, ambitious young liberals like Logue and his staff felt that city-level government, under the guidance of a reform mayor like Lee and backed by federal bucks, held the most promise for progressive innovation.59 That urban renewal attracted this kind of professional redevelopment staff came in for attack by the politically conservative magazine Human Events in its special issue “The Case Against Urban Renewal.” The Republican challenger to Dick Lee in the 1961 mayoral election was approvingly quoted as saying, “A cult of planners and redevelopers has sprung up; they move from city to city, from one fat public job to another.”60

  In recruiting nationally, Logue favored individuals broadly educated in public policy or law who took political science, economics, and philosophy seriously.61 Grabino recalled, “Logue liked lawyers. He liked the way they operated … Ed always thought that properly educated and trained lawyers were good people to move programs.”62 One account of Logue’s staff meetings captured what Grabino meant, with Logue described as a “brilliant synthesizer” who took stock of all the myriad issues in his agency’s complex projects and combined them seamlessly into a “brief” that he would dictate, leaving spaces for others to fill in details.63

  It is worth noting that despite Jane Jacobs’s skepticism about top-down planning in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, she shared Logue’s embrace of an administrative structure for cities in which expert staff members had broad, general knowledge rather than narrowly defined and isolated responsibilities in what she called bureaucratic “labyrinths.” She even singled out New Haven as a knowable “little city” where “agency heads and their staff … can be experts … in their own responsibilities, and … on the subject of New Haven itself.” Having observed the operation in New Haven as she researched her book, Jacobs appreciated its staff’s avoidance of the “fractionated empires” that she complained dominated many larger cities.64

  Logue’s second rule favored hiring individuals with a track record in the redevelopment field: “I wanted people who either had good experience on their own or had worked in organizations that were accomplishing something.”65 In the early years when urban renewal was a new frontier, people with experience drafting and implementing key national housing acts were particularly valuable to have on staff. They knew all the fine print in these complex laws as well as how best to negotiate with the Urban Renewal Administration bureaucracy. Speaking on the television news show Meet the Press in 1966, Lee attributed New Haven’s success to just this advantage: �
�I have an outstanding staff … We study the programs as they evolve in Washington. We help develop this, support the legislation, and in some cases write the legislation, and then when the money is passed out we are there with a bushel basket.”66 New Haven’s success at negotiating for Paul Rudolph’s garage and Yale’s payment for the site of two former high schools to count as noncash local contributions, thereby increasing the total federal allocation, resulted directly from the skillful maneuvering of Washington veterans in the New Haven Redevelopment Agency.67

  Logue’s first major hire once he became the head honcho was for an executive director of the Redevelopment Agency, essentially his deputy. Ralph Taylor had trained at the Littauer School of Public Administration at Harvard, become a Massachusetts state housing administrator and an expert on the Housing Act of 1949, and then directed the redevelopment program in Somerville, Massachusetts, overseeing one of the first urban redevelopment projects in the nation.68 Dahl noted that Taylor “was considered a professional by his peers throughout the country,… including those in the federal agencies.” With that experience, Taylor “knew how to cut through the interminable delays … and he exploited statutes and rules to gain concessions for New Haven.”69

  Another key appointment was Tom Appleby, also an experienced redevelopment professional. He had earned a master’s in public administration from the University of Minnesota, had previously worked in Washington, D.C., and at the local level in Norfolk, Virginia, and had a prominent administrative pedigree and contacts as the son of Paul Appleby, whom Logue had met in India when, as the dean of Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs (the nation’s first school of public administration, established in 1927), Appleby consulted on improving Indian administrative structures. Grabino likewise arrived that first year, having been drawn to New Haven, like Logue was, by Yale Law School. Grabino excelled as a law student and after a few years, bored in private practice, leapt at the opportunity to join the new adventure of urban renewal, to which he had first been introduced in law school by Myres McDougal and Maurice Rotival, much as Logue had.70