Reviews in American History

At some point in the middle of the 1960s, tucked between the Watts riots of 1965 and the Detroit riots of 1968, American society determined that cities were not only in decline but that they all were in the grips of an "urban crisis." Experts, naysayers, policy makers, and prognosticators all outlined the depth of the urban crisis. "One cannot be expected to rate as an expert on the city," lamented the new Cleveland mayor Carl Stokes in 1968, "unless one foresees its doom." And indeed, the declarations of an urban crisis did reflect some very real tensions and problems with race relations, capital disinvestment, crime, and environmental degradation. However, critics of American cities also created a sense of crisis which had its own language of decay, chaos and collapse. Furthermore, the language of the urban crisis not only shaped policies and governmental practices it also exacerbated the process of disinvestment. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the urban crisis signaled the impending death of many American cities.

Such rhetoric of urban conditions and urban blight continue to resonate in the body politic, even as recently and unequivocally as Donald Trump's inauguration speech in which he spoke of "mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner-cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across [End Page 135] the landscapes of our nation … crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives." Here is all the imagery and rhetoric of the urban crisis. It is a passage which could have been lifted from 1968, but one that still describes many current deindustrialized and disinvested cites. One of the sad truths of the great economic divergence of the last twenty years is that a handful of American cities are booming with reinvestment, repopulation, and resettlement, yet other cities still struggle to recover from the twentieth century. Clearly, the transformation of American urbanism was deep, profound, and long-lasting—its manifestations both shockingly real, frustratingly imagined, and deeply racialized.

In his 1996 history of Detroit, Thomas Sugrue framed one of the key questions that urban historians have asked for the past twenty years: just what were the origins of the "urban crisis"? In Sugrue's work, as well as numerous other monographs that followed, historians have found multiple culprits, including the suburbanization of people and jobs, disinvestment and deindustrialization, institutional racism and segregation, the failure of or defunding of government programs, and the political limits of post-war liberalism. Most of the works under review reaffirm Sugrue's point that the roots of the urban crisis predated the riots and disinvestment of the late 1960s, even as each study suggests that the moment of disinvestment, deindustrialization, and crisis varies greatly by city. The "urban crisis" has framed much of the discussion of American urbanism and historiography, and it is at its heart a declension narrative. Such histories start with the implicit understanding of the stark realities of late 20^th century cities and look backward for causes, origins, and blame. They function as urban autopsies; it is a search for a cause of death.

For the books under review, finding the origins of the urban crisis is the underlying quest, even when not explicitly stated by the author. Each study shows how, throughout the past century, American policy makers, politicians, and employers have assumed that there is something fundamentally unsound and unnatural about the urban environment. The books show how reformers tried to fix the urban environment or craft policies that made it easier for capital...