The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing (review)

This is one of the worst books I have ever read, at least of the academic variety. It would probably be more accurate to say of the purportedly academic variety, since Jones's book rests on what looks to be a remarkably thin evidentiary base. Whole chapters unfold with footnotes to only three or four secondary sources. Certain astonishing assertions aren't footnoted at all. I've never seen an allegedly scholarly book quite like it.

Jones's sparse footnotes are particularly worthy of comment, given his provocative thesis. The collapse of countless ethnic neighborhoods in the urban North in the 1950's and '60's, Jones argues, was the result of a plot by a liberal internationalist elite—one composed mostly of mainline Protestants but including assimilationist Jews, all of whom shared a virulent anti-Catholicism. The principal weapons employed by this elite were public housing, urban renewal, freeway building, and somewhat later, busing for purposes of school integration. Jones doesn't mean "plot" in a metaphorical sense. He apparently has in mind a sitting-around-the-boardroom kind of plot, although its exact workings are never explained. He is mightily contemptuous of those many academics—fools like me, in other words—who see in the post-1945 collapse of America's industrial cities a tragedy caused in part by misguided good intentions but more fundamentally by changes in the nation's economy and a forced reckoning with our national legacy of slavery and racial oppression.

Jones's liberal elite achieved power in 1941—a direct result of their having maneuvered the United States into World War II. (Not surprisingly, Jones cleaves to conspiratorial views on Pearl Harbor.) They proceeded to encourage the migration of black Southerners to the industrial cities of the North, partly to sustain war production and thus the successful prosecution of the elite's internationalist goals, and partly—or so it is suggested—to undermine the strength of ethnically-dominated trade unions. (Since nothing happens in Jones's world without a powerful someone's intending it to, his "elite" must necessarily include some very strange bedfellows. Social democrats labor hand-in-glove with corporate big-wigs.) With large numbers of blacks now resident in suddenly overcrowded cities, the elite was able to initiate the first stages of what Jones calls a plan to "ethnically cleanse" those cities of white ethnic Catholics. Defense-related housing projects were the entering wedge, followed after the war by more ambitious plans for "slum clearance" and urban renewal. In virtually every instance, the elite used blacks as a "battering ram"—Jones's words—against white ethnic strongholds. "Slum clearance" projects typically displaced large numbers of poor black residents, who were then encouraged to move into nearby white ethnic neighborhoods—no matter that they brought with them a legacy of indolence and criminality. Certain ethnic neighborhoods were assaulted even more directly, by means of urban freeway building and massive public housing projects. The intended results were soon achieved: white ethnics moved in droves to the rapidly expanding suburbs, where they turned into deracinated conformists and mindless materialists—ideal consumers, in short, from the perspective of advanced capitalism.

Since white ethnics were the subjects of consciously-orchestrated ethnic cleansing, Jones regards their sometimes violent resistance to neighborhood integration as morally justified, even admirable. Liberal Catholic interracialists, who condemned the violence—often enough, I concede, from the fastness of all-white suburbs—were nothing less than "... the WASP-subsidized fifth column within the Catholic Church" (p. 533). The bishops stand no higher in Jones's opinion, since none of them was willing to publicly champion the preservation of all-white urban neighborhoods. When it comes to non-Catholics, Jones is even freer with his condemnatory judgments. African-Americans are repeatedly depicted as lustful and violent. Episcopalians can't think—they can "only approve or disapprove, based on commonly shared ethnic prejudice" (p. 183). "Arrogance and mendacity" are "ethnic characteristics which...