The United States is always turning a corner. Nothing ever quite stays fixed. No matter what period you select for examination, it always seems to be a moment of transition, when one age is giving way to another. Although it is the common fate of mankind to feel that the golden age lies somewhere in the past, in this country we forever appear to be just leaving the golden age; it is the time we ourselves knew, bafflingly changing its character just when we had concluded that it was permanent; and if we are compelled to brood about the future it is because the future is always beginning to take shape before our eyes.
One of the greatest moments of change, obviously, came somewhere in the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century. Ordinarily we ascribe the profound change which then began to the First World War, which knocked the props out from under so much of Western society. Yet the war itself may have been the product of change rather than its cause. Perhaps the transformation had already commenced when the rulers of Europe made their fateful, ruinous decision in the early summer of 1914.
Paul Angle is a man who thinks this is so. As director of the Chicago Historical Society he has just finished an eighteen-year stint of examining every page of the Chicago Tribune for the period from 1895 through 1913, supplementing this with an equally thorough study of such magazines as The Independent, The Nation, the Literary Digest, The Outlook, the Century, and the Ladies’ Home Journal; topping off with careful perusal of such items as the World Almanac, Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide, and two standard biographies of Woodrow Wilson. This study has led him to two conclusions—first, that that period was an authentic golden age of a sort, and, second, that it came to an end and gave way to a different age before the great war in Europe ever began.
He sets forth his argument persuasively:
Consider, if you will, the income tax, and the changes, social and economic, which it effected. Consider the New Freedom with its shift of emphasis in the goals of government. Consider the coming of age of the automobile and the evidence it offered of the perfection of mass production. Consider the beginnings of automation, bearing then the lowly term of labor saving. Consider the acceleration of the suffrage and prohibition movements. Consider the revolution in women’s dress and the increasing frankness in drama and fiction. And consider the impact of “modern” art and “modern” music. I hold that after 1913 life in the United States would have changed radically even if there had been no World War.
What, specifically, was life in 1913 changing from?
In 1913 the United States was still predominantly a rural nation. More than half of all the people lived either on farms or in towns of fewer than 2,500 inhabitants; we were still, basically, a nation of small-towners. Yet the change was well under way. During the first ten years of the new century the urban population had increased by thirty-four per cent, while the rural population had gone up by only eleven per cent. Furthermore, the immense shift in the weight of population had begun. The Pacific Coast area was even then the most rapidly growing section of the entire country; although California in 1913 still ranked no better than twelfth in population among the states of the Union, the trend that would bring it up to the top in another half century was there to see if anyone had had an eye for it.
Along with this there was, equally visible and equally fateful, the development of the automobile industry. New York’s annual Automobile Show in January of 1913 found eighty-eight manufacturers putting more than 700 vehicles on display, at prices ranging from $395 up to !7,000; the angular, blocky cars of earlier days were beginning to be streamlined, the electric starter was coming into use, and the automobile was becoming something the ordinary man or woman could handle.
Crossroads: 1913, by Paul M. Angle. Rand, McNally & Company. 278 pp. $5.95.
Furthermore, the business was expanding beyond anything that anyone—except, probably, Henry Fordhad ever thought possible. By the end of 1913 more than 1,190,000 passenger cars were registered, a number which seems small enough today but which was fantastic by the standards of the day. (In 1900 there were just 8,000 cars.) Even more significant was the rate of growth. Nearly half of all of those cars, 461,500, were produced in 1913 alone.
Production of auto trucks, incidentally, lagged far behind. In all the United States there were in 1913 fewer than 68,000 trucks, and the World Almanac remarked that “there is nothing to indicate that this branch of the industry will ever progress as has the passenger car division.” Still, the truck did seem to have possibilities. Considering the potentialities of “the auto wagon,” the Chicago Tribune said whimsically that “highly imaginative men have indulged themselves with fanciful expectations of the horseless city.” In Chicago alone, more than five million tons of merchandise were transported by truck in 1912.
Politics was changing. Woodrow Wilson had become President, had broken precedent of long standing by going to Congress in person to read his messages, and was driving ahead toward a vast, epoch-making extension of the federal government’s powers over the nation’s economic life. In his inaugural address he warned that “we have not counted the human cost of our industrial achievements” and declared that “the government has been used too often for private and selfish purposes.” Government must concern itself with things previously left in other hands: specifically, there needed to be tariff reform, a new banking and currency system …
Out of which there came the Federal Reserve System, devised, in Wilson’s words, “so that banks may be the instruments, not the masters, of business and of individual enterprise and initiative.” Out of which, also, there came the income tax: mild enough, in all conscience, by present-day standards—it came in originally as part of the tariff bill, and it was devised to make up for the loss in revenue which would come from lower tariff rates—it imposed a “normal” tax of one per cent on incomes above $4,000, with additional surtaxes ranging up to three per cent on incomes over $100,000. Not very many people in the America of that day had incomes of more than $4,000. The burden was light, and the step was popular. Yet as liberal a magazine as The Nation warned that there was no theoretical limit to the income tax, and pointed out that “it is possible for governments to increase repeatedly the rate of such a tax, without being stopped by its sudden non-productiveness.”
Mr. Angle ranges far and wide in his examination of the year of transition, discussing everything from women’s dress, which seemed, to the conservative, dismayingly provocative, to the new dances (tango, maxixe, bunny hug, and turkey trot), which seemed even worse; touching on the rising motion-picture industry, the burgeoning of “ragtime,” the appearance of such composers as Jean Sibelius, Arnold Schönberg, and Richard Strauss, and the state of the American novel; and through it all he shows clearly that one America was indeed passing away and that another was being born. And he concludes:
I wish I could remember where I was when the year came to an end on the night of December 31. Since I had turned thirteen only a week earlier I must have been at home. At 10:30 or thereabouts my father would have been asleep over the Saturday Evening Post; my mother, up since 6:30, would have been nodding over her mending. The three young children, a girl and two boys, would have been bedded down for a couple of hours; my older sister was in Dallas, studying music. So I would have gone to the kitchen for a nightly snack: cheese—Herkimer, aged Wisconsin brick, or imported Swiss (none of your devitalized stuff in packages)—or a saucer-full of raw oysters, supplemented with pie and coffee. And then I would have gone to bed, unaware that I had just passed through a pivotal year, and without the slightest suspicion that I would ever write a book about it.
The Automobile
By BRUCE CATTON
The legislation that came in with the New Freedom undoubtedly paved the way for unending change, and the mass production and labor saving processes devised in places like Detroit did the same; yet it may be that the greatest single instrument of change was the automobile—not the business of making and selling it but the car itself—the bewildering device that gave unlimited freedom of movement and then bound that movement up in a constantly constricting circle, compelling its user to modify almost every aspect of the place where he lives, the place where he works, and his method of getting back and forth between the two.
One would not be much too fanciful to argue that the most momentous problem of the present day is the traffic problem. The trouble with it is that it seems to be basically insoluble, simply because every step taken to reach a solution only makes the problem worse. The automobile has changed both the city and the country, and there are times when it seems to be altogether beyond control; we began by adapting it to our use, and now we are adapting ourselves to its demands. What the end of it all may finally be is beyond human computation.
Some of the aspects of this problem are examined by Mitchell Gordon in an irascible and disturbing book, Sick Cities: Psychology and Pathology of American Urban Life. Mr. Gordon holds that our cities are desperately ill, and he feels that the automobile is responsible for much of the illness. He does not profess to see a real cure anywhere, but he does present an arresting study of what the motor car is doing to us— of “all the sprawl and congestion that vehicle brings with it wherever it goes.”
Sick Cities: Psychology and Pathology of American Urban Life, by Mitchell Gordon. Macmillan Company. 366 pp. $6.50.
He argues his case thus: By enabling millions of people to live just about anywhere they choose, instead of remaining close to rapid-transit stations, the automobile has scattered urban populations all over the map. Doing this, it has virtually killed off public transit systems, and it has created a traffic jam of nationwide proportions. More and more cars are hauling fewer and fewer people per trip, and in many cities downtown traffic moves more slowly now than it did in the horse-and-buggy days. When supersonic air transports are in service, it will actually be possible for a traveller to go from Los Angeles to New York more quickly than he can get to and from the airports at each end of the line.
Mr. Gordon presents some figures which are both outlandish and solid.
The auto’s appetite for space is horrendous. The 41,000-mile interstate highway system born with the passage of congressional legislation in 1956 will occupy more land than the entire state of Rhode Island when it is completed in 1972. … Two-thirds of Los Angeles’ entire downtown area is already given over to the automobile—approximately 33 percent of it to parking lots and garages and the rest to roads and highways. Each one of the city’s interchanges, linking one freeway to another, consumes approximately 80 acres of real estate; every mile of freeway, 24. By 1980 the city is expected to have 34 square miles of land devoted to its freeway system—about the size of the entire city of Miami.
The business is expensive—to put a three-mile stretch of freeway through Cleveland it was necessary to remove an estimated $20 million worth of assessed property from the city’s tax rolls—and spending money does not seem to help much. In Los Angeles (all of these studies of the dire nature of the traffic problem seem to use that city as the horrible example), Mr. Gordon remarks, $900 million has already been invested in more than 300 miles of freeways and expressways, but municipal highway officials believe that by 1980 they will need more than 1,500 miles of those arteries, for a total investment of more than $5 billion. One official recently remarked that even after all of this is done, traffic conditions by 1980 may well be worse than they are today.
“Statistics tell this poignant tale,” says Mr. Gordon. “In the decade from 1947 to 1957, the nation as a whole constructed 53,000 miles of highway lanes while Detroit was stamping out enough automobiles to cover 200,000 miles of highway lanes bumper-to-bumper.” He quotes the warning of Urban Land Institute President Boyd Barnard: “The expected increase of automobiles in the next decade will mean bumper-tobumper traffic not only on all our present roads, turnpikes and expressways, but all those that are in the planning stage as well.” Mr. Barnard, apparently, feels that the automobile “has created problems which appear almost insolvable.”
Traffic congestion, of course, is not by any means all of the story. The real difficulty, as Mr. Gordon sees it, is what he calls “urban sprawl.” The urban area reaches farther and farther into the country, the city decays at its center, problems of schooling, policing, water supply, sanitation, and municipal finance increase more rapidly than they can be handled—and, in short, our cities, where more and more of us live, are being blighted. The author cites the Census Bureau as authority for the statement that more Americans today live in substandard housing than live on farms, and one out of every six dwellings in the nation is either dilapidated or substandard.
Various remedies have been proposed, to be suremore adequate city planning, comprehensive “urban renewal” programs, and some consolidation of the multiplicity of governmental organization which shares responsibility for such matters. But Mr. Gordon seems to be a pessimist, and he goes on to remark bleakly:
We can leave our cities pretty much as they are and avoid radical remedies which would drastically remake them. More people in more automobiles, with more time and money to spend keeping them in motion, will speed up the conquest of urban space on earth and, notwithstanding the huge sums that will be poured into new concrete carpeting, compound congestion at critical places. Urban acreage will continue to be ravaged by blight despite vast renewal efforts. Recreational facilities will be harder to reach but more crowded. And, as the sprawling metropolis spreads its jurisdictional patchquilt of governments across the urban landscape, protection from crime, the schooling of underprivileged youth, the disposal of refuse, and a myriad of other local services will be more and more difficult to adequately finance and effectively provide.
Finding a Community
By BRUCE CATTON
Gloomy enough, all of this, to be sure. Yet the automobile can be blamed too much. The development of the American city has followed its own pattern, and “urban sprawl” had set in well before the requirements of the automobile had had any substantial effect. If urbanization has brought a host of grave problems it appears that it is the city itself, rather than the means men use to get in and out of it and to and fro inside it, that needs examination.
Such an examination, much less emotional and also much more comprehensive and scholarly than the one just cited, is provided in The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915, by Blake McKelvey, who undertakes to study what might be called the metropolitan character in America and tries to see just what was going on in the period before the motorcar took over.
In 1860 the Federal Census showed that the United States contained 141 cities, the Census Bureau defining as a city any place that contained more than 8,000 people. Nine of these cities were above the 100,000 mark, and all of them were ports, owing their growth and position largely to water-borne traffic. (They included New York, its sister city Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago.) During the next half century both the number of cities and their respective sizes increased prodigiously; by 1910 there were 228 cities of 25,000 or more, 50 containing more than 100,000, and 8 of more than 500,000.
Clearly enough, the forces that pull men into cities to live and work had been greatly intensified in the years immediately after the Civil War. A big city was no longer of necessity a place based on water transportation; the railroad network was expanding, and the factory town was rising. America was becoming an industrial nation, and there was a new base for metropolitan development. Cities grew faster and larger than ever before, and as they did they tended for a time to become conglomerations of diverse peoples who came surging into centers that were not prepared to handle their social or material needs. It took a long time to bring the evolution of a genuine community out of such conglomerations, and before this happened there were troubles which the muck-rakers discussed as “the shame of the cities” early in this century.
Meanwhile, there were developments. The center of the city became less and less a desirable place to live, and with improved transit facilities people began moving out to the rim; but as they moved out, business people moved in—at least for daytime occupancy—and until around 1920 the trend toward urban concentration continued. Yet all this while, the city was proliferating into suburbs, the center kept thinning out, and presently it was the metropolitan district rather than the city itself that was important.
The city, in short, began to change radically late in the second decade of this century, changing not because of the automobile but because of the nature of its own growth. In effect, it began to turn into something different just as it began to reach maturity; becoming a genuine community, it started to turn into a complex aggregation of communities, with new problems which at bottom are no more difficult than the problems encountered earlier in its growth. The change began before the automobile; as Mr. McKelvey says, the process of urbanization reached its turning point by 1915.
The automobile, in short, is just one problem. There are many problems, all of them arising from the fact that the way we Americans live and work together is undergoing change. As Mr. McKelvey sees it there is no real cause for dismay here. No, the development of the past century has been good. As he sums it up:
The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915, by Blake McKelvey. Rutgers University Press. 370 pp. $10.
We have seen how policies and techniques of settlement, of production, and of distribution contributed to the growth and decay of cities; how these in turn created civic and social problems that required new adjustments: and how men and women of all ranks and places, organizing to work for the goals they sought, achieved through strife and compromise sufficient economic integration to enable the urban population … to attain an unprecedented state of material well-being.
Apparently we have reason to believe that the process will continue.
