Big Cities: New Deal, war years

The Depression overwhelmed anything it touched—it broke Big Cities, rolled over chamber-style economic development, brought the West a Dust Bowl and crushed the South. Big Cities under mayors like Detroit’s Cavanaugh and NYC’s La Guardia, with a little “help†from a guy named Robert Moses, took advantage of the war relief, infrastructure development programs of FDR’s New Deal. Chambers fought Roosevelt tooth and nail. The New Deal, as far as cities went, wasn’t all that it is cracked up to be today, but still the feds launched several important sub-state economic development-related initiatives—workforce being one. During the Depression the suburbs were still debated and we contrast Le Corbusier with his helpmate Moses, and Frank Lloyd Wright with his proponents Catherine Bauer and Rexford Tugwell. The idea of a “multi-nuclear metro area†results in several FDR “New Town†initiatives. During the Depression and War Years, however, neighborhood-focused community development confronts the formation of new black migrants from the Great Migration. A new CD wing unfurls, under the leadership of Saul Alinsky playing reveille for radicals. But then Pearl Harbor. World War II turns American economic development upside down and inside out. Building factories and war contracts, the Fortress strategy leaves the Pacific Coast and becomes the normal chamber strategy across the nation. War production, however, spawns suburban industrial growth. The requirements of war production gives rise to a new, and generation long, federal policy called industrial decentralization. Industrial decentralization may have been the most important federal economic development policy—ever!