PART III
The Resurrection of Corporate Capitalism (1975–1989)
CHAPTER 12
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The Landscape of Decline
At the end of the 1970s, Thomas and Geraldine Vale retraced the trip George Stewart had taken thirty years earlier to document the American landscape as seen from U.S. 40, from Atlantic City to San Francisco. Large stretches of the road had been replaced by Interstates 70 and 80 and much of the old two-lane highway had been widened to four, six, or even eight lanes. But the views from most of the places where Stewart had stopped to take photographs remained remarkably unchanged. In Ellicott City, the county seat of rural Howard County, Maryland, the streetcars were gone, but otherwise things looked much the same. Where U.S. 40 crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, trees had taken over open pastureland and a barn had been taken down, but the Methodist church that Stewart had photographed had a new roof and fresh coat of paint. Blankenship Drugs inhabited the same building it had three decades earlier on a largely unchanged main street in Marshall, Illinois. In Grainfield and Oakley, Kansas, additional grain elevators had gone up and the old Grainfield railroad station had disappeared, having been moved by the Lions Club to a local park, where it had promptly been burned down by vandals, but otherwise these small wheat towns remained much as they had been.
Some places did look different. What had been farm fields a few miles west of Frederick, Maryland, had become a suburban subdivision. One side of a street of row houses in Baltimore had been knocked down, partially replaced by a high-rise public housing project, while some of the remaining homes had been abandoned. The St. Louis and San Francisco skylines had been altered by large residential and office buildings, though in the former case they hid a deep loss of population and vitality. In the West, the Vales noted the growth of settlements built around recreation, towns like Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and campgrounds for recreational vehicles.
The seeming sameness of so much of the country after thirty years of growth reflected a very particular pattern of development. The population of the country grew from 151 million in 1950 to more than 226 million in 1980, an increase of one-half. It had thickened to an average density of 64.0 people per square mile, from 42.6 thirty years earlier. But population growth had been highly concentrated. Over the course of three decades, the population in urban areas swelled by seventy million, while the rural population grew by only five million. In 1980, 45 percent of the population lived in a suburb, 30 percent in a central city. Over half the population lived on an edge of the country, in a county abutting the Atlantic or Pacific coast, the Gulf of Mexico, or one of the Great Lakes. Away from the coasts and the metropolitan centers, you could still drive for hours without seeing many people or dwellings, as the Vales discovered. The number of acres of forest had barely dropped in the decades after the Second World War, as the reforestation of abandoned agricultural land and the replanting of trees on cut timberland almost fully compensated for the woodlands lost to urban growth and suburban sprawl. Compared to the other industrial powers—with the exception of the Soviet Union—the United States remained a little-settled nation, with large swaths of undeveloped land. France had four times as many people per square mile as the United States; the United Kingdom, nine times; Japan, twelve.
Driving across the middle of the country, the Vales did not much note one of the great developments of the postwar era, the interregional and intraregional redistribution of population. The center of gravity of the nation had shifted toward the West and South. In 1950, 29 percent of the population had lived in the Midwest; in 1980, only 26 percent. The Northeast fell from 26 percent of the population to 22 percent. Within these regions, people moved outward from the cities to the suburbs. The South, by contrast, after losing population share between 1950 and 1960, experienced a reversal, going from 31 percent in 1950 to 33 percent in 1980. The West jumped from 13 percent of the population to 19 percent. Though the regional gains and losses in themselves were modest, together they meant that by 1980 a majority of Americans lived in the South or West, a development with profound social, cultural, and political implications. In media and popular discourse, it became common to portray the nation as divided into an ascending “Sun Belt” or “southern rim,” made up of the South and Southwest, and a declining “Snow Belt” or “Rust Belt,” the latter term used particularly for the industrial parts of the midwestern and Middle Atlantic states.
The Rust Belt
Thirty years after World War II, the Northeast and Midwest still contained the bulk of the nation’s wealth and industrial capacity. In 1977, 70 percent of the pig iron produced in the United States and Canada came from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New York. That year the New England, Middle Atlantic, and North Central states accounted for 58 percent of all value added in manufacturing. In 1975, they housed the headquarters of 379 of the 500 largest industrial corporations. The Far West had the highest per capita income of any region, as had long been the case, but the New England, midwestern, and Great Lakes states also exceeded the national average.
The pattern of wealth and economic dominance, though, was shifting. With companies and people moving out of the cities of the Northeast and Midwest to suburbs and other parts of the country, many of the traditional centers of national power grew shabby. A train trip in the mid-1970s from New York to Washington would have given a sense of their decay.
After World War II, the private companies that owned the nation’s railway system concentrated on freight operations. Dirty, aging passenger trains provided feeble competition to burgeoning car and airplane travel, which received government subsidies through road and airport construction and the provision of air traffic control. In 1970, the Penn Central, a merger of the once mighty Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads, went bankrupt. In an effort to keep at least a skeleton system of passenger rail travel intact, Congress created a nonprofit corporation, Amtrak, to take over and operate intercity train lines. Inheriting a hodgepodge of decaying trains and stations, chronically underfunded, and confronted with an unrealistic expectation that it would become self-supporting, Amtrak struggled to survive in a nation that since World War II had developed along physical and cultural lines defined by the automobile.
During World War II, millions of soldiers and civilians had entered and left New York through Pennsylvania Station, the magnificent McKim, Mead & White building from the early twentieth century, with its soaring steel arches and glass ceiling. But in 1963, over the protest of preservationists, the station had been demolished to make way for a new Madison Square Garden. So during the 1970s, train travelers from New York departed through a cramped, airless station beneath the sports arena.
New York had been an aberration among large northeastern and midwestern cities in holding steady in population after World War II, but between 1970 and 1980 it lost more than 800,000 residents, over 10 percent of its population. The recessions of the 1970s hit New York particularly hard, with the local unemployment rate hitting 12 percent in 1975. As jobs and city services disappeared and crime increased, many city residents, particularly whites, found the suburbs or other parts of the country more attractive. Apartment building owners and the financial institutions that backed them stopped investing in poor neighborhoods, seeing little likelihood for future profit, leading to a wave of housing abandonment and arson. During the 1977 World Series games at Yankee Stadium, ABC television repeatedly turned its cameras on burning buildings in the nearby South Bronx, sending out images of the nation’s leading city as a circle of hell. Films like Taxi Driver (1976) and Escape from New York (1981) portrayed New York as dark, decayed, and dangerous. For literary critic Alfred Kazin, who had lovingly written about the New York of his youth, the city had become “a world coming apart. . . . The great big, dissolving center.”
Newark, the first Amtrak stop after New York, once had been a thriving industrial city. But after World War II it bled industry, mi
ddle-class residents, and retailing to its suburbs, leaving behind a majority black population, much of it poor. The 1967 riot devastated a city already in crisis. Near the train station, a few major employers remained, notably in the insurance industry, but elsewhere one abandoned factory after another lined the tracks through the city.
Trenton, the New Jersey capital, presented another vista of decline and abandonment. A center of iron manufacturing and pottery making, it had stopped growing by the 1920s. After World War II, many leading companies moved, reduced operations, or shut down, including the historic Roebling ironworks, where the cable wire for the Brooklyn Bridge had been drawn. State offices provided some new jobs, but the workers in them generally drove in from suburbs, on highways that sliced up the city and robbed access to its riverfront. At night they left behind a desolate downtown. As Amtrak crossed the Delaware River, the sign on an adjacent bridge, “Trenton Makes, the World Takes,” once an expression of civic pride, seemed to mock the down-and-out city.
The Philadelphia suburbs flourished during the postwar years but at the expense of the city proper, which lost 6 percent of its population between 1950 and 1970 before plummeting another 13 percent during the following decade. The city suffered severely from the decline of manufacturing, which in 1951 had provided 46 percent of its jobs but in 1977 only 24 percent. The number of Philadelphians on public assistance jumped from roughly 200,000 in 1970 to nearly 340,000 in 1980. North Philadelphia so decayed that eventually Amtrak all but stopped using the station there. Baltimore presented a similar, if anything sorrier, picture. After slowly bleeding population during the quarter century after the war, between 1970 and 1980 it lost 13 percent of those who remained, falling to tenth in size among the nation’s cities, after having been sixth in 1950. So many row houses had been abandoned that the city started a homesteading program, offering, for a dollar, buildings it had taken over for tax arrears to families willing to fix them up and live in them.
Washington, D.C., was visibly deteriorating too, shrinking from a 1950 population peak of 802,178 to 638,333 in 1980. Leaving the train in Washington, passengers did not actually disembark inside Daniel Burnham’s gorgeous 1907 Beaux-Arts Union Station, which had been virtually abandoned as passenger rail use declined. The federal government decided to turn the station into a visitors’ center for the 1976 bicentennial, relegating travelers to a cramped, makeshift area behind the station proper. In 1974, Washington finally got to elect its own mayor, as Congress, in the wake of the civil rights movement, ceded much control over the federal district to its increasingly black population. However, as so often happened when an African American got to run a major city, Walter Washington inherited a decaying infrastructure and shrinking tax base.
Urban decline in the Midwest, if anything, was more severe than in the Northeast. Between 1950 and 1980, Chicago lost 17 percent of its population, Cincinnati 24 percent, Detroit 35 percent, Cleveland 37 percent, and St. Louis a staggering 47 percent. (Indianapolis, Columbus, and Toledo bucked the trend with significant population gains.) Between 1948 and 1977, Cleveland lost 46 percent of its manufacturing jobs. It lost an even greater percentage of jobs in retail trade, mostly as a result of suburban shopping mall development.
Companies had been relocating production out of Snow Belt cities for decades: New England textiles had moved to the South, New York garment firms to rural Pennsylvania, midwestern aircraft companies to the West Coast. They relocated to be closer to markets, raw materials, and cheap power and to lower labor costs, find more compliant workers, and escape unions. General Electric and General Motors set an example when in reaction to the display of union power after World War II they began dispersing plants away from their northeastern and midwestern strongholds, building many factories in the South. The weak economy of the 1970s, international competition, the sharp run-up in oil prices, and new pollution control requirements accelerated the abandonment of older industrial facilities.
Infrastructure and technological advances made the dispersion of production easier than in the past. The interstate highway system lowered the cost of truck transportation and made it feasible to locate factories and warehouses in areas previously too inaccessible. Container cargo ships cut the cost of international shipping, while jumbo cargo jets made it possible to move even large goods quickly. Long-distance telephone calls became cheap enough for businesses to depend on them to communicate with distant facilities.
Cities deserted by industry often found themselves devastated. High levels of homeownership made it difficult for workers to relocate from declining cities with falling house prices, as did the thick webs of familial and ethnic ties characteristic of many industrial communities. Pollution also plagued the old manufacturing centers, as heavy industry left behind toxic residues that had been overlooked in earlier years when business boomed, environmental consciousness had not yet blossomed, and local industrialists exerted great power. When the Cuyahoga River, which runs through the center of Cleveland, improbably caught fire in June 1969, it became a symbol of the spoilage of the cities of the old manufacturing belt and the dystopia they had come to represent to many Americans.
Many companies moved their headquarters and offices, as well as their factories, out of the cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Frequently they did not travel far, settling in suburban office parks or nearby towns, as companies sought to exchange high central-city expenses for placid settings near the suburban communities in which their executives lived. Some major universities—like Stanford, Princeton, and Duke—drew companies to nearby “research parks” in bucolic suburban settings, where ideas, money, and personnel could move easily between the academic and corporate worlds.
By world and historical standards, the Northeast and Midwest remained astoundingly wealthy during the 1970s, with large middle and upper classes that could afford comfortable homes, two and three cars per family, vacations, college educations, snowmobiles, boats, recreational vehicles, and all the other accoutrements of the good life. Suburban areas in particular continued to grow and prosper. But the region also contained cities that suffered enormously from the combination of national recession, interregional shift, deindustrialization, and suburbanization, shocking repudiations of the notion so common in the post–World War II years that the United States surpassed all other societies in its standard of living and had achieved an ever-upward trajectory of economic and social development.
The Sun Belt
Long after World War II, the South remained considerably poorer than the Northeast or Midwest, with substantial areas of deep urban and rural poverty. But compared to the Northeast and Midwest, its trajectory was ascending. In the mid-1970s, average income, adjusted for inflation, fell in the North but continued to grow in the South. Some of the income convergence between the South and the rest of the country reflected the postwar exodus of poor southerners to other regions. In effect, the South exported some of its poverty through migration. But the region experienced real growth in productive capacity and wealth, too. The greatest economic development took place along the periphery of the region, in northern Virginia; Charlotte and the Durham–Raleigh–Chapel Hill region of North Carolina; southern Florida; and Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth. But Atlanta, in the heart of the old Confederacy, emerged as the economic center of the region.
Rapid urbanization accompanied southern growth (though it remained the most rural region of the country). In 1980, two-thirds of southerners lived in an urban or suburban area, compared to half in 1950. Unlike in the Northeast and Midwest, Sun Belt cities continued to grow or at least hold their own as their suburbs swelled. Metropolitan Houston exploded from 806,701 people in 1950 to 2,905,353 thirty years later, of whom nearly half lived in the city proper. Metropolitan Atlanta mushroomed from a population of 671,797 in 1950 to 2,029,710 in 1980, though almost all the growth took place in the suburbs. Some of the growth of southern cities reflected the continued annexation of outlying area
s, a process that had ground to a near halt in the North, but much of it came from burgeoning corporate offices and service industries. In 1975, the South housed the headquarters of sixty-three of the five hundred largest industrial corporations, compared to just thirty-nine companies twenty years earlier.
Start-ups and in-migration of firms to the South and Southwest far more than compensated for plant shutdowns and out-migrating companies. The region continued to attract and generate jobs in low-wage, labor-intensive industries, like textiles, simple garment manufacturing, food processing, and furniture making, as companies took advantage of the low-tax, anti-union, pro-business environment so heavily promoted by government development agencies and business boosters. But the region also experienced growth in technically sophisticated sectors, particularly the defense and aerospace industries.
The Sun Belt benefited from the changed economics of energy. The huge jump in energy prices during the 1970s brought new wealth to oil-producing areas, notably Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and California, at the expense of the rest of the nation. Houston boomed as the oil capital of the country. The city and its surrounding area contained nearly a quarter of the petroleum refining capacity of the country and over half the petrochemical manufacturing capacity. Over two-thirds of the world’s oil production tools were manufactured in Houston, which housed the headquarters of hundreds of oil and oil service companies. But the city also developed into a leading medical, legal, electronics, and aerospace center.
Houston embodied in extreme form the traits of the growing urban South. With business leaders dominating local politics, Houston pursued a pro-growth agenda with a vengeance, being almost unique among major American cities in having no zoning regulations at all (in a state with no taxes on either corporate or personal earnings). Though blacks and Hispanics made up nearly half the population, through the 1970s the Houston government effectively locked them out of power by using at-large elections to choose the city council and continuing to annex white suburbs. Downtown Houston was almost entirely commercial (though some very poor black neighborhoods with shotgun shacks were nearby), with a vast suburban expanse surrounding it, speckled with high-rise office buildings and shopping malls. The near total lack of public transportation led to severe highway congestion and air pollution. Low taxes and rapid growth meant insufficient services. Inadequate policing along with extreme income inequality contributed to a very high crime rate. The helter-skelter, explosive growth in Houston provided something of a national Rorschach test, horrifying many northern intellectuals, exemplary to many southern (particularly Texas) boosters, and attractive to thousands of laid-off midwestern industrial workers who migrated to the city in search of work.
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