Urban Renewal in American Cities and Responses of the White Working-Class Ethnic Groups: A Preliminary Exploration

In the post-World War II decades, urban renewal became a part of the larger vision for the revitalization of American cities. Between 1949 and 1974, federal legislation provided a legal and economic framework for demolition of so-called blighted areas and replacing them with new modern housing, infrastructure, and facilities for services and commerce. It was a response to the perceived urban crisis: a move of city residents to the suburbs and collapse of the tax base, congestion of urban areas, and aging urban infrastructure. The areas slated for demolition or highway construction belonged often to communities of color and to older urban working-class white ethnic communities. This article examines the responses of various white ethnic groups, including American Polonia, to the local plans of urban renewal, which ranged from apathy, to acceptance and support, to internal mobilization and protest, to coalition building and political action.

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Sustaining Labor Politics in Hard Times: Race, Labor, and Coalition Building in Racine, Wisconsin

Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas ◽

10.1215/15476715-8849568 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 41-63

Author(s):

Naomi R Williams

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Working Class ◽

Local Politics ◽

Coalition Building ◽

Local Elections ◽

Industrial Workers ◽

Labor Politics ◽

Working People ◽

Hard Times ◽

The 1960S

Abstract This article explores the shifting politics of the Racine, Wisconsin, working-class community from World War II to the 1980s. It looks at the ways Black workers’ activism influenced local politics and how their efforts played out in the 1970s and 1980s. Case studies show how an expansive view of the boundaries of the Racine labor community led to cross-sector labor solidarity and labor-community coalitions that expanded economic citizenship rights for more working people in the city. The broad-based working-class vision pursued by the Racine labor community influenced local elections, housing and education, increased the number of workers with the power of unions behind them, and improved Racine's economic and social conditions. By the 1980s, Racine's labor community included not only industrial workers but also members of welfare and immigrants’ rights groups, parents of inner-city students, social workers and other white-collar public employees, and local and state politicians willing to support a class-based agenda in the political arena. Worker activists’ ability to maintain and adapt their notion of a broad-based labor community into the late twentieth century shows how this community and others like it responded to the upheaval of the 1960s social movements by creating a broad and relatively successful concept of worker solidarity that also incorporated racial justice.

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Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion in Postwar America

Whom We Shall Welcome ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823284399.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-16

Author(s):

Danielle Battisti

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Ethnic Groups ◽

Social Position ◽

American Identity ◽

The Political ◽

World War ◽

Postwar America ◽

Immigration Laws ◽

Italian American ◽

White Ethnic

The introduction comments on the nature of campaigns to reform American immigration laws after World War II, Italian American identity, and the political and social position of white ethnic groups.

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The epidemiology, microbiology and clinical impact of Shiga toxin-producingEscherichia coliin England, 2009–2012

Epidemiology and Infection ◽

10.1017/s0950268815000746 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 143 (16) ◽

pp. 3475-3487 ◽

Cited By ~ 65

Author(s):

L. BYRNE ◽

C. JENKINS ◽

N. LAUNDERS ◽

R. ELSON ◽

G. K. ADAK

Keyword(s):

Ethnic Groups ◽

Shiga Toxin ◽

Rural Areas ◽

Urban Areas ◽

Severe Disease ◽

Phage Type ◽

Diagnostic Methods ◽

E Coli ◽

Animal Contact ◽

White Ethnic

SUMMARYBetween 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2012 in England, a total of 3717 cases were reported with evidence of Shiga toxin-producingE. coli(STEC) infection, and the crude incidence of STEC infection was 1·80/100 000 person-years. Incidence was highest in children aged 1–4 years (7·63/100 000 person-years). Females had a higher incidence of STEC than males [rate ratio (RR) 1·24,P< 0·001], and white ethnic groups had a higher incidence than non-white ethnic groups (RR 1·43,P< 0·001). Progression to haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) was more frequent in females and children. Non-O157 STEC strains were associated with higher hospitalization and HUS rates than O157 STEC strains. In STEC O157 cases, phage type (PT) 21/28, predominantly indigenously acquired, was also associated with more severe disease than other PTs, as were strains encodingstx2genes. Incidence of STEC was over four times higher in people residing in rural areas than urban areas (RR 4·39,P< 0·001). Exposure to livestock and/or their faeces was reported twice as often in cases living in rural areas than urban areas (P< 0·001). Environmental/animal contact remains an important risk factor for STEC transmission and is a significant driver in the burden of sporadic STEC infection. The most commonly detected STEC serogroup in England was O157. However, a bias in testing methods results in an unquantifiable under-ascertainment of non-O157 STEC infections. Implementation of PCR-based diagnostic methods designed to detect all STEC, to address this diagnostic deficit, is therefore important.

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The Distant Magnet After Twenty-Five Years: An Essay in Self-Criticism

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875897005689 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 31 (2) ◽

pp. 295-312

Author(s):

P. A. M. TAYLOR

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Working Class ◽

Ethnic Groups ◽

Colonial Period ◽

Class I ◽

World War ◽

Railway Construction ◽

Push And Pull ◽

The Impact

When, in September 1971, I published The Distant Magnet, I planned a personal synthesis, supplemented by small pieces of my own research. I was not taking up a position in any controversy, nor was I engaging in polemic with any other scholar. Yet I did intend some change of emphasis, and in particular I wanted to stress Europe more than anyone had done since Marcus Hansen. I sought realism in the description of travel conditions, rather than dwelling on the wholly exceptional horrors of 1847. I demonstrated how foreign was America's working class. I stressed the American conditions common to all immigrants, rather than the differences between ethnic groups. I showed how British capitalism, supplemented by that of France, Belgium, and, later, Germany, opened up overseas areas and at the same time undermined, further and further eastwards, Europe's peasant economies. I had in mind the impact of factory competition and railway construction in eroding the secondary occupations on which so many peasants depended. In other words, I asserted that the modernization of a small corner of Europe was responsible, to use old-fashioned language, for both “push” and “pull.” To restrict length, and to acknowledge my own shortcomings, I omitted the Colonial period, and also all Hispanic and Oriental migrations – and, of course, before World War II these latter were not very big.

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The Optimism of Absence: An Archaeology of Displacement, Effacement, and Modernity

Contemporary Archaeology and the City ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198803607.003.0022 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Paul R. Mullins

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

World War Ii ◽

Urban Renewal ◽

The United States ◽

World War ◽

Global Projects ◽

Post War ◽

The 1960S ◽

The University ◽

American Cities

In the 1960s Edward J. Zebrowski turned the razing of Indianapolis, Indiana into a compelling show of forward-looking community optimism illuminating the power of displacement. When Zebrowski’s company toppled the Knights of Pythias Hall in 1967, for instance, he installed bleachers and hired an organist to play from the back of a truck as the twelve-storey Romanesque Revival structure was reduced to rubble. Two years later, the ‘Big Z’ hosted a party in the Claypool Hotel and ushered guests outside at midnight to watch as the floodlit building met its end at the wrecking ball (Figure 12.1). Zebrowski’s theatricality perhaps distinguished him from the scores of wrecking balls dismantling American cities, but his celebration of the city’s material transformation mirrored the sentiments of many urbanites in the wake of World War II. The post-war period was punctuated by a flurry of destruction and idealistic redevelopment in American cities like Indianapolis just as the international landscape was being rebuilt from the ruins of the war. In 1959 the New York Times’ Austin Wehrwein (1959: 61) assessed the University of Chicago’s massive displacement in Hyde Park and drew a prescient parallel to post-war Europe when he indicated that ‘wrecking crews have cleared large tracts, so that areas near the university resemble German cities just after World War II’. Indeed, much of Europe was distinguished less by ruins and redevelopment than demolition and emptied landscapes removing the traces of warfare that states wished to reclaim or efface; in the United States, urban renewal likewise took aim on impractical, unappealing, or otherwise unpleasant urban fabric and the people who called such places home (see also Ernsten, Chapter 10, for this process associated with the policies of apartheid in Cape Town). These global projects removed wartime debris and razed deteriorating prewar landscapes, extending interwar urban renewal projects that embraced the fantasy of a ‘blank slate’ as they built various unevenly executed imaginations of modernity. However, many optimistic development plans in Europe and the United States alike were abandoned or disintegrated into ruins themselves, simply leaving blank spaces on the landscape. Consequently, the legacy of urban renewal and post-war reconstruction is not simply modernist architecture; instead, post-war landscape transformation is signalled by distinctive absences dispersed amidst post-war architectural space and traces of earlier built environments.

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National Urban Renewal

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.147 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Christopher Klemek

Keyword(s):

Public Housing ◽

Urban Renewal ◽

Affordable Housing ◽

Urban Areas ◽

Large Scale ◽

Planning Process ◽

Public Works ◽

Public Authorities ◽

Neighborhood Politics ◽

American Cities

Urban renewal refers to an interlocking set of national and local policies, programs, and projects, implemented in the vast majority of American cities between 1949 and 1973. These typically entailed major redevelopment of existing urban areas with a view to the modernization of housing, highway infrastructure, commercial and business districts, as well as other large-scale constructions. Reformers from the Progressive Era through the Great Society strove to ameliorate the conditions of poverty and inequality in American cities by focusing primarily on physical transformation of the urban built environment. Citing antecedents such as the reconstruction of Second Empire Paris, imported via the City Beautiful movement, and then updated with midcentury modernism, US urban planners envisioned a radical reorganization of city life. In practice, federal programs and local public authorities targeted the eradication of areas deemed slums or blighted—often as much to socially sanitize neighborhoods inhabited by racial minorities and other marginalized groups as to address deteriorating physical conditions. And while federal funding became available for public works projects in declining central cities under the auspices of improving living conditions for the poor—including providing public housing—urban renewal programs consistently destroyed more affordable housing than they created, over more than three decades. By the end of the 1960s, urban residents and policymakers across the political spectrum concluded that such programs were usually doing more harm than good, and most ended during the Nixon administration. Yet large-scale reminders of urban renewal can still be found in most large US communities, whether in the form of mid-20th-century public housing blocks, transportation projects, stadiums, convention centers, university and hospital expansions, or a variety of public-private redevelopment initiatives. But perhaps the most fundamental legacies of all were the institutionalization of the comprehensive zoning and master planning process in cities nationwide, on the one hand, and the countervailing mobilization of defensively oriented (NIMBY) neighborhood politics, on the other.

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Immigration to American Cities, 1925–2017

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.561 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Charlotte Brooks

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Rural Areas ◽

Urban Areas ◽

Urban Policy ◽

Small Towns ◽

Japanese Americans ◽

Early 21St Century ◽

National Debate ◽

American Children ◽

American Cities

The Immigration Act of 1924 was in large part the result of a deep political and cultural divide in America between heavily immigrant cities and far less diverse small towns and rural areas. The 1924 legislation, together with growing residential segregation, midcentury federal urban policy, and postwar suburbanization, undermined scores of ethnic enclaves in American cities between 1925 and the 1960s. The deportation of Mexicans and their American children during the Great Depression, the incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II, and the wartime and postwar shift of so many jobs to suburban and Sunbelt areas also reshaped many US cities in these years. The Immigration Act of 1965, which enabled the immigration of large numbers of people from Asia, Latin America, and, eventually, Africa, helped to revitalize many depressed urban areas and inner-ring suburbs. In cities and suburbs across the country, the response to the new immigration since 1965 has ranged from welcoming to hostile. The national debate over immigration in the early 21st century reflects both familiar and newer cultural, linguistic, religious, racial, and regional rifts. However, urban areas with a history of immigrant incorporation remain the most politically supportive of such people, just as they were a century ago.

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