Reclaiming American Cities: The Struggle for People, Place, and Nature since 1900

Part I: The Patrician Decades, 1900-1940

PA R T I The Patrician Decades, 1900–1940 “This page intentionally left blank” The first third of the twentieth century—bracketed by the inaugurations of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 and his distant cousin Franklin D. ­ Roosevelt in 1933—was the golden age of the American city. It was the heyday of tall slender “skyscrapers,” Model A Fords and Stutz-Bearcats, high-speed and luxurious inter-city railroads, convenient and affordable commuter rail service, the spread of ­ national radio networks, the rise of big city professional sports, and the convenience of buying and selling stocks via “wire” or telephone. America before it entered World War I in 1917 was a country of smug confidence bred of growing corporate wealth and overseas imperialism. It was also a time of unfettered laissezfaire , widening disparities in wealth, pervasive political corruption, and abject living conditions for the poor. As a result reformist efforts sprang from various strands of progressivism, including urban beautification, clean government, anti-trust, natural resource conservation, and, most enduringly, the settlement house movement and its offshoots concerning sanitation and public health, housing, playgrounds, child labor reform, minimum wage, unionization, workplace safety, and public education. After the war and a raging influenza pandemic, the nation’s cities rebounded as the stage sets for the Roaring 20s and the Jazz Age. Prohibition, lasting from 1919 until 1933, fostered the titillating culture of the speakeasy, along with organized crime and mob violence epitomized in Al Capone’s 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre . (The legendary violence of the era would be a staple of late twentieth-century period films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Sting, The Untouchables, and Road to Perdition ). This was the era memorialized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and Babbitt, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The twenties was a time of instant heroes like Babe Ruth (“the King of Swat”) and Charles A. Lindbergh (“Lucky Lindy”). It was an era of religious and ethnic witch hunts most famously reflected in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 and the chilling executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. Corporate profits and influence flourished under the complacent Republican administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, which collectively spanned 1921–1933. Big city machines and bosses such as Tammany Hall in New York, Mayor James Michael Curley in Boston, and “Big Bill” Thompson in Chicago ran their cities like medieval fiefdoms, with anyone seeking political favors paying the necessary kickback. Stock prices soared like the 102-floor Empire State Building, driven by an unshakable faith in a permanent state of peace and prosperity. In Scott Fitzgerald’s words, it was an “era of wonderful nonsense.” It also proved, of course, to be a house of cards. “This page intentionally left blank” ...