The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing
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 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 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 communities 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.
E. Michael Jones, long known as an extremely conservative Catholic commentator on a variety of cultural issue from the motives of modern philosophers to music and architecture, turns in "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing" to the destruction of American cities by urban planners during the twentieth century.Jones argues throughout "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing" that the purpose of the "urban renewal" plans of twentieth-century America was to discriminate against the migrant, originally non-English speaking Roman Catholic working class populations of the inner cities of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Boston. He argues that this was done through co-operation between a black underclass of migrants from the South and a white, classically Protestant ruling class that viewed the high Catholic birthrate as a threat to its dominance in the long term. Jones thinks that the plans of these two groups combined to remove the separation between these Catholic communities and a hostile outside world, with the result that Catholic culture lost its distinctive character and it became much tougher to maintain adherence to official Church teachings as they moved into the suburbs.
Because, today, suburbs (and even more exurbs) are as Phillip Longman has said the most conservative sections of global society today - the ones where living a life in accordance with the strict regime of the Vatican are easiest owing to their low living costs allowing affordable families - it is impossible for me to see Jones' criticism of suburbs as well-argued. This is especially true when one sees that today people without motor-cars have far fewer children than those most reliant upon them. They are also far more amenable to stable marriages than European or East Asian cities. He does not explain how population growth among Catholic migrant groups would have been accommodated in any other manner in the post-Depression period: there is obviously only a finite amount of space in old "cities". Even the fabled "baby boom" and growth of faith and family in the very period urban renewal occurred is now known to be a phenomenon of suburban Catholics - with the emphasis on suburban
Michael Jones is a quack. Catholics of middle class background were leaving for the suburbs starting in the 1940s. This depressed property values in the white Catholic neighborhoods, as said nabes had no further waves of immigration to replenish them. There was no WASP conspiracy, and the “Catholic voters” merely transported their enclaves to suburbia, where they settled among other Catholics.