Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

    36. Quote from “Philadelphia Plans Again,” AF 87, no. 6 (December 1947): 66–88.

    37. Logue, interview, Schussheim, 12.

    38. Logue’s concern over poor housing conditions is in Logue to Richardson Dilworth, November 15, 1948, EJL, Series 1, Box 5, Folder 76. For Logue on the Philadelphia Citizens’ Council on City Planning, see EJL, Series 1, Box 5, Folders 82–83. On the election, see G. Terry Madonna and John Morrison McLarnon III, “Reform in Philadelphia: Joseph S. Clark, Richardson Dilworth, and the Women Who Made Reform Possible, 1947–1949,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 127, no. 1 (June 2003): 57–88.

    39. Logue to Fred Rodell, July 31, 1948, Fred Rodell Papers, Haverford College Special Collections, Addition 1927–80, Box 11, Item 105, a remarkable letter in which Logue acknowledges the limitations of Goldstein’s practice and declares, “What I really want to do eventually is get into politics.”

    40. Rodell got Logue the job offer from Chester Bowles; Logue, interview by Jean Joyce, May 27, 1974, Bowles, transcript, 2. On the job offer from Humphrey, Logue to Hubert Humphrey, February 16, 1953, Series 3, Box 15, Folder 54. Humphrey’s speech is at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/huberthumphey1948dnc.html.

    41. Chester Bowles, “The Role of the States,” in Two-Thirds of a Nation: A Housing Program, ed. Nathan Straus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 236–55; Logue, interview, Steen, December 13, 1983, New York, NY, 3; on Logue’s work on Bowles’s staff, see EJL, Series 2, Boxes 9–12.

    42. Logue’s candid assessment of Chester Bowles’s strengths and weaknesses in Logue, second interview by Jean Joyce, October 2, 1976, Essex, CT, Bowles, transcript, passim but particularly 62–63.

    43. Bowles wanted Logue’s help in India, but he also wanted Logue to keep an eye on Connecticut politics, “something we must definitely not let slip away from us”; Chester Bowles to Logue, September 18, 1951, EJL, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 12. Logue’s work in India—and the entire Bowles operation there, including a great deal about Point Four and community development—is documented in EJL, Series 3, Boxes 13–22.

    44. Conrad E. Snow to Logue, May 17, 1952; quotation from Logue to Conrad E. Snow, June 23, 1952; and attached “Interrogatory for Edward J. Logue,” MDL; Margaret Logue quote from email message to author, December 21, 2005. Finally, in November 1952, Logue received an official letter declaring that he was no security risk to the United States; Carlisle H. Humelsine to Logue, November 3, 1952, EJL, Series 3, Box 15, Folder 62.

    45. Logue to Tom [?], July 19, 1953, EJL, Series 4, Box 29, Folder 113, 2. The following spring, Logue shared harsh criticisms of McCarthy with his mother: “It is distressing to hear supposedly informed people talking about McCarthy in the way you report. He is a menace to the freedoms all our wars have been supposed to protect. He is a dishonest, immoral man who has brought nothing but evil into American life”; Logue to Resina Logue, May 3, 1954, EJL, Series 4, Box 28, Folder 86.

    46. Chester Bowles, Ambassador’s Report (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 31.

    47. “Is One Hundred Years Long Enough?,” Winter 1953, MDL; Penn Kimball to Logue, January 12, 1953, EJL, Series 3, Box 15, Folder 59; Logue to Paul Hoffman, May 30, 1953, EJL, Series 3, Box 15, Folder 52, and Logue to Dyke Brown, July 18, 1953, EJL, Series 3, Box 15, Folder 36, on the hope that the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Republic will sponsor his idea. Logue was not easily discouraged and reminded Bowles of it when he became a board member of the fund: Logue to Chester Bowles, December 23, 1954, EJL, Series 4, Box 23, Folder 10. While in India, Logue chastised the editor of the embassy’s publication, American Reporter, for failing to tell the whole truth about racial discrimination in America; Logue to Jean Joyce, September 10, 1952, EJL, Series 3, Box 13, Folder 1.

  Two civil rights activists of the 1960s also became inspired by their time in India: Harris Wofford, intimate of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kathleen Neal Cleaver—a Black Panther Party member and the wife of Eldridge Cleaver—who grew up in India while her father, Ernest Neal, a rural sociologist from Tuskegee, worked in community development there. See Ernest Neal to Logue, February 10, 1953, and Logue to Ernest Neal, April 15, 1953, EJL, Series 3, Box 16, Folder 78, where they discussed Logue’s “Is One Hundred Years Long Enough?”

    48. Harry S. Truman, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1949, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/50yr_archive/inagural20jan1949.htm.

    49. On Truman and Point Four, see Bowles, Ambassador’s Report, 323. The Ford Foundation had recently reinvented itself after the death of Henry Ford, Sr., in 1947 as a more ambitious, activist, and international-oriented philanthropy, with a strong commitment to India and Pakistan. A Ford office opened in New Delhi just as the Logues arrived in January 1952; Alice O’Connor, “Community Action, Urban Reform, and the Fight Against Poverty: The Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas Program,” JUH 22, no. 5 (July 1996): 586–95.

    50. On Etawah, Faridabad, and Nilokheri, see Bowles, Ambassador’s Report, 197–98, 202; Robert McGill, Report on India, reprints of articles from the Atlanta Constitution, December 1951, 11, 12, 18, 21, 29. The “Guide to Albert Mayer’s Papers on India” (hereafter Mayer) in the University of Chicago’s Special Collections, available online at http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/southasia/mayer.html, provides a useful outline to Mayer’s involvement in India. Also see his account: Albert Mayer and Associates, Pilot Project, India: The Story of Rural Development at Etawah, Utttar Pradesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). Logue described Nilokheri as “a development project which has been created out of a swamp in three years. One of the most remarkable things in my life,” in Logue to Don Herzberg, February 18, 1952, EJL, Series 3, Box 15, Folder 53. Margaret Logue described both sites vividly in a letter home: Margaret Logue, Letter III, February 23, 1952, EJL, Series 3, Box 16, Folder 70.

    51. Saunders Redding, An American in India (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), 21–29. Redding, an African American English professor at Hampton Institute, urged Bowles and Logue to accept Indian neutrality. Bowles elaborates on not requiring too strident an anti-communism from the Indians in Ambassador’s Report, 343. On his personal anti-communism, see Chester Bowles, “‘The Most Powerful Idea in the World,’” NYT Magazine, May 13, 1951, 9, 29, 30.

    52. Quotation from Chester Bowles, “Asia Challenges Us Through India,” NYT Magazine, March 23, 1952, 53 (italics in original); Chester Bowles to George V. Allen, March 7, 1953, MDL. On the community development program in India, also see Bowles, Ambassador’s Report, 195–214, 322–47; Cynthia Bowles, At Home in India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 130–55; Chester Bowles, Promises to Keep: My Years in Public Life, 1941–1969 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 548–50; Chester Bowles, The Makings of a Just Society: What the Postwar Years Have Taught Us About National Development (Delhi: University of Delhi, 1963), 56–62. For progress reports from 1953, see Jonathan B. Bingham, “The Road Ahead for Point Four,” NYT Magazine, May 10, 1953, 12, 65, 67; and from 1955, Chester Bowles, “India Revisited: ‘Spectacular Progress,’” NYT Magazine, April 3, 1955, 13, 63–67; Howard B. Schaffer, Chester Bowles: New Dealer in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 63–79. For an excellent overview, see Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development, 1947–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1990), 76–93, 121–25, 141–43, 162–79, 206–7. A thorough collection of sources is Action for Rural Change: Readings in Indian Community Development (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1970). For astute analyses of the failures of community development, see Bipan Chandra, Aditya Mukherjee, and Mridula Mukherjee, India After Independence (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000), 146–48; and Lane E. Holdcroft, “The Rise and Fall of Community Development in Developing Countries, 1950–65: A Critical Analysis and an Annotated Bibliography,” MSU Rural Development Paper No. 2 (1978)
, Department of Agricultural Economics, Michigan State University. A more strident condemnation of community development, with some useful insights, is Garvin Karunaratne, “The Failure of the Community Development Programme in India,” Community Development Journal 11, no. 2 (1976): 95–118. On the larger context of American development activities, see Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), particularly 75–107 on community development in India. Other works offering important discussions are Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), particularly 66–100; Nicole Sackley, “The Village as Cold War Site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 3 (November 2011): 481–504; and Subir Sinha, “Lineages of the Developmentalist State: Transnationality and Village India, 1900–1965,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 1 (2008): 57–90.

    53. EJL, Series 4, Box 25, Folder 43: Logue to Douglas Ensminger, January 15, 1955; Logue to Ensminger, August 21, 1956; Logue to Allen Wagner, May 8, 1957; “Rough Draft to Hon. Chester Bowles,” May 15, 1957, EJL, Series 4, Box 23, Folder 13, 3–4. In 1956, Logue wrote to two Indian graduate students at Yale, “The program [urban renewal] has very much in common with your country’s community development program, which my wife and I had firsthand opportunity to observe when we were in India three years ago”; Logue to Gurherdial S. Grewal and Kulbir Singh Gill, September 28, 1956, EJL, Series 4, Box 26, Folder 56.

    54. The classic text on the agricultural reformers in the New Deal is Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966). More recent literature on them and their move to the developing world is extensive; see Jess Gilbert, “Agrarian Intellectuals in a Democratizing State: A Collective Biography of USDA Leaders in the Intended New Deal,” in The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America, ed. Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 213–39; Jess Gilbert, “Low Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal: A Different Kind of State,” and Mary Summers, “The New Deal Farm Programs: Looking for Reconstruction in American Agriculture,” in Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed, ed. Jane Adams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 129–59. Also see Douglas Ensminger, interview by Harry S. Taylor, June 16 and July 7, 1976, Harry S. Truman Library, Columbia, MO. I have benefited enormously from an extensive email exchange with Jess Gilbert, Clifford Kuhn, and Mary Summers.

    55. For the Logues’ stay in Japan, see Logue to Ensminger, July 8, 1953, EJL, Series 3, Box 15, Folder 48; Logue to Bowles Family, July 8, 1953, EJL, Series 3, Box 13, Folder 10; Logue to Dyke Brown, July 18, 1953, EJL, Series 3, Box 15, Folder 36.

    56. “Time of Trial for Wolf Ladejinsky, Land Reform Expert Ousted from Job,” NHR, December 31, 1954; Wolf Ladejinsky to Logue, January 14, 1955; Logue to Ladejinsky, February 6, 1956; Ladejinsky to Logue, February 15, 1956; and Logue to Ladejinsky, March 20, 1956, EJL, Series 4, Box 27, Folder 69; Logue to Ensminger, March 20, 1956, EJL, Series 4, Box 25, Folder 43; Logue to Paul Appleby, March 20, 1956, and Appleby to Logue, March 22, 1956, EJL, Series 4, Box 23, Folder 2; Logue to Chester Bowles, March 27, 1956, EJL, Series 4, Box 23, Folder 12. On Wolf Ladejinsky and his land reform work, see Bowles, Ambassador’s Report, 181, 185, 374; Wolf Isaac Ladejinsky and Louis J. Walinsky, eds., Agrarian Reform as Unfinished Business: The Selected Papers of Wolf Ladejinsky (New York: Published for the World Bank by Oxford University Press, 1977), particularly introduction, 2–22; Al McCoy, “Land Reform as Counter-Revolution: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Tenant Farmers of Asia,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 3, no. 1 (Winter–Spring 1971): 24; Cullather, Hungry World, 94–105.

    57. Bernard Loshbough quoted in Albert Mayer, “Transplantation of Institutions in Both Directions: Examples from India and the U.S.A.,” Duke University seminar, February 2, 1962, 19, Mayer, Folder 41, in Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 145; on Loshbough’s Pittsburgh work, O’Connor, “Community Action, Urban Reform,” 603, 622n46. Much of the attention to ideas moving from the developing world back to the United States focuses on the poverty programs of the 1960s, not urban renewal and infrastructural improvements; see Immerwahr, Thinking Small; Alyosha Goldstein, Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action During the American Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

    58. Ed Logue wrote something similar in “Life as a City Builder—‘Make No Little Plans’”: “Looking back, my training at Yale, in college and law school, my war-time experience, my service with Chet Bowles in Hartford and New Delhi, prepared me to be a city builder in a new and different way,” 5.

    59. This description of New Haven is based on Elizabeth Mills Brown, New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); New Haven Colony Historical Society, New Haven: Reshaping the City, 1900–1980 (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2004); Vincent Scully, Catherine Lynn, Erik Vogt, and Paul Goldberger, Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); and Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

    60. Logue to Margaret DeVane, January 1946, EJL, Series 4, Box 4, Folder 56.

    61. Robert J. Leeney, Elms, Arms, and Ivy: New Haven in the Twentieth Century (Montgomery, AL: Community Communications, in cooperation with the New Haven Colony Historical Society, 2000), 61, 108.

    62. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 16.

    63. Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 120.

    64. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 16–17.

    65. On Ivy-style dress: “Report by Dahl and Wolfinger, Mayor Richard C. Lee,” May 2, 1958, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Special Interviews,” 1, 3; Paul Moore, Jr., “A Touch of Laughter,” in My Harvard, My Yale, 20; Horowitz, On the Cusp, 45–53.

    66. Quote from John P. Kotter and Paul R. Lawrence, Mayors in Action: Five Approaches to Urban Governance (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), 137.

    67. NAACP support from Mandi Isaacs Jackson, Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 65.

    68. Logue, interview, Schussheim, 9.

    69. Maurice E. H. Rotival to Logue, memorandum, January 15, 1954, “Confidential,” Rotival, Box 37. Lee and Logue began talking to Rotival about assisting with ambitious redevelopment within weeks of Lee’s election; see Logue to Rotival, December 16, 1953, and Rotival to Logue, December 23, 1953, Rotival, Box 37.

    70. On the Federal Housing Acts of 1937, 1949, and 1954 and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, see Susan S. Fainstein and Norman I. Fainstein, “Economic Change, National Policy and the System of Cities” and “New Haven: The Limits of the Local State,” in Susan S. Fainstein, Norman I. Fainstein, Richard Child Hall, Dennis R. Judd, and Michael Peter Smith, Restructuring the City: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment, rev. ed. (New York: Longman, 1986), 13, 15, 37, 47.

    71. Linda Corman, “Former BRA Head Takes Another Look at the City He Helped Plan,” Banker and Tradesman, October 21, 1987, 6.

    72. Logue, “Can Cities Survive Automobile Age? New Haven Used as a Test Case,” Traffic Quarterly 3, no. 2 (April 1959): 175.

    73. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 159–61.

    74. William Finnegan, Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 34.

    75. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 152.

    76. Logue, “Can Our Cities Survive?” [1958], EJL, Series 4, Box 23, Folder 19 (draft of what would appear in NYT Magazine, November 9, 1958, as “Urban Ruin—or Urban Renewal?”). Draft text is slightly different than final published version.
These quotes from draft, 3.

    77. Logue, “Urban Ruin—or Urban Renewal?,” 17.

    78. Henry E. and Katharine Pringle, “New Haven,” SEP, May 28, 1949, 126.

    79. “Slum-Cut New Haven Sizes Up Logue,” CSM, April 26, 1960; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 38.

    80. Joe Alex Morris, “He Is Saving a ‘Dead’ City,” SEP, April 19, 1958, 118.

    81. Logue, “A Marshall Plan for Our Cities,” BG, August 7, 1960.

    82. MLogue, interview.

    83. Logue, “Can Cities Survive Automobile Age?,” 178. A couple of years earlier, Logue wrote to the architect John Follett, who, with John Graham, was designing the new Malley’s department store: “This opportunity which you as architects and we as administrators now have comes to us in large part from the genius of Maurice Rotival … We have great confidence in his judgment”; Logue to John Follett, July 2, 1957, Rotival, Box 35, Folder “N.H. City, 1956–7.”