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A Nation of Neighborhoods

Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America

The University of Chicago Press

Microcosms of Democracy: Depicting the City Neighborhood in Wartime America

In 1943, the left-wing screenwriter Herbert Clyde Lewis dropped by his boyhood neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant in central Brooklyn, following an absence of several decades. After a string of minor successes as a novelist, Lewis had recently moved to Hollywood, where he avidly participated in Popular Front political causes and would later garner recognition as scenario author for films such as the 1947 Yuletide heart-warmer It Happened on Fifth Avenue. During World War II, however, he enlisted in the cadre of journalists all around the country composing essays on the ubiquitous "why-we-fight" theme.

Lewis's account of his trip, syndicated in newspapers nationwide, fused commonplace wartime morale-building tactics with an exuberant celebration of the "old neighborhood" as the very basis of the nation's moral stamina in a time of threat. After describing his hunt for childhood friends and visits to a few fondly remembered shopkeepers, Lewis proceeded to link this little space with the outcome of the war, the resolve of the nation, and the triumph of American ideals of diversity and tolerance over fascism. In this account, the close-packed, aging city neighborhood becomes "the greatest miracle that had ever visited the earth," a place where "people came from all the corners of Europe, the Near East and China," where they "lived side by side, rubbed shoulders in the streets, and — wonder of wonders! — managed to get along." The robust durability and heterogeneous quality of Lewis's childhood neighborhood are transformed into emblems of national character and will: this right here is "what we were fighting for ... a way of life the whole world could adopt and profit by."

Lewis's writing, in some ways so characteristic of boosterish wartime journalism, nonetheless distilled a widely circulating set of ideas about the neighborhood's role in American political life, employing themes that would color discussions over the remainder of the decade. As the historian Robert Westbrook makes clear, US propagandists typically urged support for the war effort not by calling for loyalty to the state itself but rather by inviting Americans "to discharge a set of essentially private moral obligations," chiefly those to neighbors and family. Onto this appeal to local ties, a disparate collection of home-front artists and commentators welded an optimistic and frequently utopian rhetoric of neighborhood, one that self-consciously — indeed, almost obsessively — worked to connect the intimate, semiprivate realm of the stoop and corner with grand public matters of war and peace, fascism and democracy, ethnic conflict and national pluralism. Constructing neighborhoods of the imagination out of words, images, festivals, and songs, these figures developed a distinctive wartime language of place.

That language waxed and waned over the course of the 1940s, as idealized renderings of neighborhood relationships unfolded across a variety of fictional and nonfictional urban texts. Numerous scholars, of course, have tracked concrete home-front experiences in individual urban settings. The focus here, by contrast, is on the cultural output of writers and artists who introduced new ways to describe the city neighborhood's worth, set forth fresh benchmarks by which ordinary urbanites might interpret their own residential environs, and championed divergent platforms for the role that everyday neighborhood interactions ought to play in the nation's broader cultural and political spheres. Even as liberal journalists, social critics, and New Deal government propagandists sketched the ideological contours of this invented place, a range of arts workers and cultural producers elaborated their visions. Using a cohesive set of narrative conventions, wartime cultural texts across numerous genres offered up far-reaching propositions about the social potential inherent in the midcentury industrial city's intimate local settings.

In these communalist chronicles, assertions about the neighborhood and the wider body politic are oftentimes tightly conjoined, making it almost impossible to discern which provided sustenance to the other. Indeed, as an ideological and imaginative construct, the small-scale city neighborhood sat close to the core of wartime understandings of American nationhood and purpose. Whatever the empirical conditions in real-life city districts, many progressive commentators used abstract versions of such places as favorite surrogates for a long checklist of values: solidarity and participation, the melting pot and intergroup fraternity, street-level democracy and the heroism of common people. At a moment of seemingly existential national peril, novelists, dramatists, and composers joined journalists and planners in crafting portraits of the local neighborhood as a template for healthier forms of national community. Variants of this language, in turn, would ripple through legal, planning, and organizing circles — infusing the court battles to overturn racially restrictive housing covenants, featuring in a renewed progressive enthusiasm for Clarence Perry's neighborhood-unit scheme of community planning, and undergirding grassroots campaigns against neighborhood blight that preceded the mass urban-renewal demolitions of succeeding decades.

Nonetheless, if these wartime sentiments permeated much propaganda and social commentary, they found their most compelling expression in artistic forms, ranging from jubilant novels of local solidarity to urban musical pageants, cross-cultural community arts festivals to didactic radio plays. Like their journalistic and academic counterparts, an array of artists, arts activists, and cultural workers understood themselves as participants in a broader debate over what "neighborhood" ought to mean and what part it might play in the creation of a better postwar world. And just as the war effort itself could deceptively seem to have cobbled over some of the structural fault lines cutting through US society, so this construction of the neighborhood as American democracy writ small promulgated an urban story at best provisional and even contradictory in its claims. As is often the case, fictional works strongly registered these tremors as they strained to compress intractable social realities into aesthetic form.

Together, such texts participated in a collaborative project of imaginative place-making, one that insistently cast face-to-face urban communities as a moral engine for democratic citizenship, ethnic tolerance, and an eventual global peace. Close examination of a handful of the richest and most elaborate products of that effort, however, reveals some of the ambivalences and inconsistencies embedded within that project. Outlining this discourse's characteristic elements, the chapter first surveys how wartime patriotism and local urban space intersected in popular journalism and social criticism. Next, the manner in which several prominent liberal and left-wing novelists, scriptwriters, and activist educators built out this newly conceived space comes into view particularly in their preoccupation with questions of ethnic relations, cultural assimilation, and the national political implications of local forms of interpersonal community. Finally, an account of the creation and critical reception of the 1947 Broadway show Street Scene, one of the decade's most ambitious artistic sketches of blue-collar neighborhood existence, exposes tensions over the envisaged fate and significance of the working-class, ethnic-accented city community that surfaced as the presumed wartime consensus exhausted itself. All indicate the momentary convergence of propaganda, social science, literary fiction, and performance around a progressive yet conflicted, pervasive yet ultimately fragile, vision for block-level urban life.

Wartime Rhetorics of Neighborhood Revivalism

The exigencies of international conflict exerted powerful pressures on the fabric of the nation's urban neighborhoods. Although the Depression-era collapse of the private housing market and construction industry had dramatically slowed changes to residential built environments, during the early 1940s city populations underwent tremendous upheavals. Approximately one-fifth of all Americans made major relocations due to military service or moves to production centers. Meanwhile, city residents struggled to cope with disruptions wrought by rationing, unfamiliar regulations, economic tumult, heightened racial and ethnic frictions, and separation from family and longtime neighbors. In a typical expression of trepidation, the Cleveland Federation of Settlements warned in 1942 of "days of confusion, bewilderment and incipient danger for the agglomeration of races and nationalities in the congested areas of our city." During a conflict that was, as William Graebner puts it, "intensely isolating and individualizing," urbanites learned to accept what Perry Duis calls a "'substitute culture' of temporary replacements for artifacts, institutions, and social relationships." But even as ordinary residents developed local strategies to deal with everyday hardships — from victory gardens to alternative childcare arrangements — commentators and artists responded to these constraints by proclaiming the cultural worth and vitality of the close-knit city neighborhood, whose denouement had heretofore suggested an inevitable drift into oblivion.

Taken as a whole, these descriptive practices had at least three defining ingredients. First was a fervently revivalist rhetoric: while critics generally accepted sociological arguments about the decline of community sentiment over preceding decades, they also trumpeted a vigorous contemporary reinvigoration of that spirit. For many observers, this upsurge marked a return of qualities that, though recently forgotten, had characterized a virtuous preindustrial past. Thus, in wartime homages to the city neighborhood, writers constantly relied on the language of Jeffersonian democracy or nineteenth-century labor republicanism, peppering their prose with analogies to New England's colonial town meetings, to the camaraderie of the frontier west, or to the hardy little institutions that held together sparsely populated rural communities. Describing his city's 1940 scheme establishing neighborhood councils, for example, a Cincinnati official called it "a movement which is strengthening democracy at its roots, for it is bringing back the old colonial institution, the town meeting." Even as such comparisons reversed a "lost-golden-age" angst of previous years, they also exemplified an approach wherein the city is praised when it is least characteristically urban, at least in the sense that urbanity had traditionally been described: densely populated, fast-paced, volatile, and anonymous.

A second ingredient was a pervasive attempt to connect the local with the national and global, even when carried out in somewhat strained cause-and-effect terms. As the neighborhood goes, according to such claims, so goes America. Numerous essayists fixated on the smallest of neighborhood acts both as key to the war effort and as the sine qua non of American moral superiority over foreign enemies. For national settlement leader John Elliot, isolationist sentiments regarding the war stemmed from citizens' isolation from their next-door neighbors, and could be combated by cultivating "local community life and face-to-face relations." In a similar vein, a Washington Post essayist opined that "We can't be a friendly neighbor to nations unless we are friendly neighbors in our own little corner of the country," insisting that the cordial exchange of victory-garden produce signaled the return of national traits "which have gained for us the trust and confidence of other nations." This casual leap from a neighborly gift of fresh-picked tomatoes to the grand international alliance against fascism captures the essence — and the extravagance — of these narrative habits. Some intellectuals went even further, seeing the efforts to produce local-level neighborliness, if multiplied a thousand times over, as holding the potential to usher in a brotherhood of man in a strife-torn postwar world. As Eduard Lindeman, the pioneering social work theorist, asked rhetorically in 1944, "Does it seem likely that Democracy can survive and take on new vitality if it is not founded firmly upon small groups of the friendship variety?" The fate of the nation and an eventual world peace, it seemed, rested on the everyday actions of millions of individual Americans in thousands of individual neighborhoods.

The third element of this language grew out of an official wartime antiracism, wherein liberal cultural and policy elites joined Popular Front calls for Americans to overcome ethnic and racial divisions in favor of a united front against fascist foes abroad. As NAACP official Roy Wilkins put it, Adolf Hitler had "jammed our white people into their logically untenable position": opposition to Nazism, like it or not, entailed public disavowal of that philosophy's racial-supremacist doctrines — and thus, in rhetoric if not in practice, rejection of discrimination at home. Acknowledging this contradiction, pronouncements from officialdom often cast such prejudices as incompatible with a struggle against fascism. Journalists and novelists, government propagandists, and liberal organizations promoted this vision in an outpouring of multiethnic dramas — from military "platoon" stories of Demskys and Romanos and O'Shannons banding together under the stars and stripes, to homilies of home-front communities forging a more inclusive "Americanism." Perhaps most famously, in the 1945 propaganda film The House I Live In, a young Frank Sinatra chides a gang of neighborhood youths for tormenting one boy because of his religion, asking how American fighters could ever defeat Japan if they allowed similar prejudices to divide them. Of course, this discourse had deep contradictions. Not only were such pieties often simply ignored — as with the ongoing racial segregation of the armed forces, the continued existence of Jim Crow, the forced dislocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans, or the waves of antiblack hate strikes at war production facilities — but they also countenanced a broad erasure of African Americans from film and other representational media, a maneuver that evaded the explosive question of their inclusion in the body politic. Still, as in Herbert Clyde Lewis's essay, such rhetoric formed a central element of this wartime neighborhood vision, with the nation's block-level urban communities frequently cast as the word of social diversity made flesh and contrasted with the aims of fascist foes abroad.

Notions of urban neighborhoods as potential small-scale democracies had once been championed by Progressive-era intellectuals such as John Dewey and Mary Parker Follett. Through the 1930s, however, a number of social scientists and commentators had dismissed those ideas as untenable, believing that such locales had a rapidly diminishing social importance in the lives of metropolitan inhabitants. But by 1942, even the renowned sociologist Louis Wirth — who only four years earlier, in his classic essay "Urbanism as a Way of Life," had theorized the rise of an impersonal, atomistic urban society — was marveling at a "new birth of community consciousness" in American cities. The Depression, he argued in retrospect, had alongside privations stimulated a "rekindled sensitivity ... of the inhabitants of every community to the conditions of life and the problems of their neighbors." And now, he maintained, urbanites who for years had lived side by side as strangers were engaging in social intercourse; under the "unifying influence of the patriotic motive," civilian defense work was "for the first time making neighbors out of 'nigh-dwellers.'" Such an upsurge in community solidarity, Wirth felt, held dramatic prospects for the postwar period: it might spark "the building of a more genuine democratic order than we have known since the days of the American frontier."

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Excerpted from A Nation of Neighborhoods by Benjamin Looker. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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