The Slaughter of Cities

📖 The Scoop

By now it would 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 Hobbesian 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 out 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 and full-blown ethnic cleansing. E. Michael Jones has followed the advice of Christopher Wrenn. Looking around, he saw monuments, but monuments to folly and malice of social engineering and a government that had declared war on large segments of its cultural history. You will see bloodshed and poisoning and have accusations of defendants, the slaughter of cities, and genocide and the heads of leaders up for auction, torched houses and cities in flames and enormous spaces of territory blazing with hostile fires. Behold the scarcely traceable foundations of the most eminent cities: anger destroyed them. Behold wastelands empty for thousands of miles: anger emptied them. - Seneca, De Ira 1.21-2. E. Michael Jone's tour-de-force indictment of urban renewal in the East and Midwest from the 1930s through the 1960s offers an entirely new interpretation of what all historians have seen as a program of abject failure. Instead of laying blame at the feet of misguided designs or good-hearted (through bad-headed) desires to rid cities of blight, Jones finds fault in the plans themselves, plans whose goals had little or nothing to do with civic involvement but all too much to do with ethnic cleansing. Jones does not shrink from naming names, citing the letters and memos whose authors never thought their words would see the light of day. His exhaustive research provides proof positive that urban renewal was not a benign policy gone sour but an intentional program meant to prop up a dying ruling class and rid the cities of inconvenient ethnics. -- From back cover.

Genre: Political Science / Public Policy / City Planning & Urban Development (fancy, right?)