St. Augustine's Press
By
now, it should be obvious that the government-sponsored initiative to
renew this country’s large cities which began in the 1930s and continued
largely unabated in the East and Midwest through the 1960s and beyond
has been a profound and devastating failure. More homes were destroyed
than were ever built; once-great metropolises like Detroit lay in ruins;
once-thriving neighborhoods were overwhelmed with drugs and crime; buildings
that were built to last centuries fell to the wrecking ball mere decades
after they were built; an entire generation of young people, both those
who came to the cities and those who were driven from the cities into
the suburbs, have grown up rootless, in a Hobbsian state in which man's
life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
The traditional explanation, the one which no one believes anymore, is
that all this was done to eliminate “blight.” A more recent
explanation, only slightly less implausible, is that it all came about
because of faulty design, as if a nation of 260 million people, one which
had already produced the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, couldn't come up
with anything more inspiring that the average strip mall. The real story,
it turns out, is different from both previous explanations. What began
as the World War II intelligence community’s attempt to solve America's
“nationalities problem” and provide workers for the nation's
war industries degenerated by the early post-war period into full-blown
ethnic cleansing.
E. Michael Jones has followed the advice of Christopher Wrenn. Looking
around, he saw monuments, but monuments to the folly and malice of social
engineering and a government that had declared war on large segments of
its own people. In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban
renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to do with design
or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the WASP
ruling class to take control of a country that was slipping out of its
grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be
driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to
be “Americanized” according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods
they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the
South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government
elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and “integration,”
the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got transformed into
something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the
actual communites of people they saw as a threat to their control.
The Slaughter of Cities proposes a new
take on familiar territory, e.g., to give just one example, the civil
rights movement. Does anyone, for example, really know why Martin Luther
King abandoned his southern strategy and came to Chicago during the summer
of 1966? Does anyone really know who brought him there? Does anyone know
who told him which ethnic neighborhoods he would march through? Hint:
it was a religious denomination usually associated with Philadelphia that
had been at work trying to “integrate” Chicago's neighborhoods
since 1951.
Jones
concentrates on four cities – Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and
Chicago – in a book whose conclusions will be shocking and controversial.
The destruction of the ethnic neighborhoods that made up the human, residential
heart of these cities was not an unfortunate by-product of a well-intentioned
plan that somehow went awry; it was part of the plan itself.
The Slaughter of
Cities
Urban Renewal
as Ethnic
Cleansing
670 pages, 6 1/2 X 9 1/2, cloth, introduction,
notes, bibliography, index
ISBN: 1-58731-755-3
$40.00 (£28.00)