From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America

By Jennifer S. Light

This study of Cold War era urban planning explores how defense technology was employed to reshape America’s cities.

During the early decades of the Cold War, large-scale investments in American defense and aerospace research and development spawned a variety of problem-solving techniques, technologies, and institutions. From systems analysis to reconnaissance satellites to think tanks, these innovations soon found civilian applications in both the private and public sector. City planning and management were no exception.

Jennifer Light argues that the technologies and values of the Cold War fundamentally shaped the history of postwar urban America. From Warfare to Welfare documents how American intellectuals, city leaders, and the federal government chose to attack problems in the nation’s cities by borrowing techniques and technologies first designed for military engagement with foreign enemies.

Experiments in urban problem solving adapted the expertise of defense professionals to face new threats: urban chaos, blight, and social unrest. Tracing the transfer of innovations from military to city planning and management, Light reveals how a continuing source of inspiration for American city administrators lay in the nation’s preparations for war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 24, 2003
• ISBN: 9780801881466

Book preview

From Warfare to Welfare

From Warfare to Welfare

Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America

Jennifer S. Light

This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the Pribram Fund.

© 2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2003

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Light, Jennifer S., 1971–

From warfare to welfare : defense intellectuals and urban

problems in Cold War America / Jennifer S. Light

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8018-7422-X (alk. paper)

1. Urban policy—United States—History—20th century.

2. Federal-city relations—United States—History—20th century.

3. Technology and state—United States—History—20th

century. 4. National security—United States—History—20th

century. 5. United States—History—1945– I. Title.

HT123.L45 2003

307.76’0973’0904—dc21    2003006229

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Planning for the Atomic Age: Creating a Community of Experts

PART I : Command, Control, and Community

2 The City as a Communication System

3 Cybernetics and Urban Renewal

PART II : Cities in the Space Age

4 Urban Intelligence Gathering

5 Moon-Shot Management for American Cities

PART III : The Urban Crisis as National Security Crisis

6 Cable as a Cold War Technology

7 Wired Cities

Conclusion

Notes

Note on Sources

Index

Acknowledgments

This book had its origins in a summer I spent working at the RAND Corporation. I joined a team working on new methods for defense science and technology planning, designing a WWW-based tool for collaborative public policy decision making. The plan was to use this technology to lead military officials through a decision-making environment and then to model the consequences of their choices—and alternatives—in the context of several different wartime scenarios.

Part of my job was to prepare a literature review of findings on the historical role of information technology in collaborative decision making. The conclusions I drew were entirely unexpected. Rather than finding that decades of investments had produced definitive knowledge about how such tools improved decision-making processes, I concluded that in all but a few cases, the results of such technologies were murky. My mentors at RAND urged me to publish the findings, but I declined. Perhaps I was missing something, I thought; surely, so many resources would not be devoted time and again to trying to improve on a category of innovations whose benefits repeatedly remained unproven?

It is precisely that question—How and why are resources allocated time and again to support the adoption of technical and technological tools whose benefits remain unproven?—that motivated me to write this book. I focus on how several decades of American city planners and managers came to rely on innovations first developed to fight the cold war. The RAND Corporation plays a starring role in this history, and I am indebted to Robert Lempert and James Bonomo for offering me the opportunity to see firsthand the inner workings of that fascinating institution.

Equally essential to the start-up of this project was the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Support from the Graham Foundation is acknowledged in remarkably many of my favorite books on the history and theory of architecture and urban planning. I am honored to be able to thank the foundation here for generously sponsoring much of my research travel and all of the visual material costs of this project.

Historians whose focus is the recent past occasionally have the good fortune to meet some of the men and women who have made history, and several of the participants in this historical story generously gave their time for extended conversations. Harry Finger patiently answered many of my questions during a chance encounter at a New Year’s Eve party, and in a later, more structured conversation, helped me to understand more precisely how both Democrats and Republicans saw hope for the future of America’s cities in the products of the nation’s defense and space programs. M. C. Branch invited me into his home to share his recollections and let me read his as-of-yet unpublished autobiographical musings on the history and future of planning. Leland Johnson, Laurence Lynn, and Henry Rowen each offered answers to questions I could not figure out based on documentary records alone and pointed me toward additional sources to incorporate into the book. Speaking with these men in person and on the telephone confirmed what I had hoped in undertaking this project—that in many cases, efforts to transfer defense and aerospace innovations to address the nation’s urban problems were undertaken with good intentions.

Interdisciplinary research thrives in a community that makes collegiality across departments a priority, and Northwestern University provided an ideal home in which to write this book. Colleagues across the campus, including Jonathan Caverley, James Ettema, Susan Herbst, Eric Klinenberg, James Schwoch, and Marc Ventresca all volunteered to read a draft version of this book, and the final result reflects their extensive comments and criticisms. John Hudson, whose career at Northwestern’s Geography Department spanned the era of defense- and space-agency sponsorship for the kinds of research described in this book, helped to compensate for decades of department records having been lost in a flood.

Northwestern University also provided extensive institutional support for this project. Colleagues in the Department of Communication Studies made all efforts to arrange my teaching schedule to facilitate productive research. At the School of Communication, Dean Barbara O’Keefe extended the honor of Ameritech Research Professor for a year, giving me the time and funding to complete the book. At the Institute for Policy Research, Fay Cook warmly welcomed me to join the institute’s interdisciplinary community of scholars as a faculty fellow. Funding from the University Research Grants Committee provided additional support for research travel.

The insights of colleagues at several other institutions also significantly shaped the pages of this book. Michael Dudley sent his then-unpublished research on the defensive dispersal movement. Stephen Graham offered comments on an article-length version of my arguments. Robert Bruegmann, John Cloud, Michael Gordin, Richard John, Nicholas King, Ronald Kline, Bill Leslie, Richard Light, and John Durham Peters each offered feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript. Peter Buck read a draft manuscript as he has read nearly everything I have ever written, and our conversations continue to be a highlight of my return visits to Cambridge.

While this project was not based on my dissertation, so many of the skills I learned in graduate school, and people I met in those years, laid the intellectual foundations on which this project could be built. Sherry Turkle, Everett Mendelsohn, and Peter Buck were scholarly models par excellence. Fellow graduate students, including Eileen Anderson-Fye, Michael Gordin, Kristen Haring, Edward Jones-Imhotep, David Kaiser, Nicholas King, and Deborah Weinstein, continue to be sounding boards for ideas.

Historical research is impossible without the work of librarians and archivists, and several stand out for special mention. At the Los Angeles City Archives, Jay Jones met me as planned on the morning of September 11, 2001, and kept the archives open when most city buildings had closed. At the RAND Corporation, Vivian Arterberry, Ann Horne, and Roberta Shanman helped me to locate the information I was looking for in record time. At the Municipal Archives of the City of New York, Kenneth Cobb and Leonora Gaitlin offered astute advice about files in the John Lindsay collection. At Northwestern University Library, Victoria Zabohlsky and the team of librarians in interlibrary loan tracked down obscure conference proceedings and limited-circulation reports. In doing so, they significantly reduced the amount of research travel needed to complete this project.

At the Johns Hopkins University Press, this project was ably assisted by Robert J. Brugger, who urged me to write history. Our conversations convinced me that historical inquiry has an important, if undervalued, role to play in current affairs, and I hope this book will find its way to both historians and city administrators. Melody Herr shepherded the manuscript through the review and publication process, making every step a pleasure. Dennis Marshall offered superb advice about polishing and tightening my arguments. An anonymous referee provided several helpful comments, both substantive and organizational, that strengthened the final product.

Finally I must mention the personal relationships that sustain any professional exercise. My father, Richard, the other Professor Light, taught me the value of simplicity in academic writing. My mother, Patricia Light, reminded me that if I took breaks for fun I would finish the book sooner. My sister, Sarah Light, provided moral support and additional incentives for research trips to New York City. My grandmother Dede, whose entire American lifetime has been spent in New York City, shared her own memories of the period. Jonathan Caverley gave me eight years of seeing the U.S. military far more up close and in person than I ever expected to. This book is dedicated with love and appreciation to him.

From Warfare to Welfare

Introduction

At the 1966 meeting of the National League of Cities, the league’s president, Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh, called attention to a troubling contradiction of the era in his opening speech. Our readiness to jump into wars when they are outside the three-mile limit seems much greater than our readiness to jump into wars inside our national boundaries, he observed. Federal spending was continuing to favor the defense and space agencies over domestic programs, and Cavanaugh cautioned this was a narrow and shortsighted view of how to provide for the nation’s security. In his estimation, an equal threat to the security of the United States could be found at home. In a recent three-month period, Mayors had confronted thirty-eight urban rebellions. Yet federal appropriations still implied that the guerilla warfare in the Mekong Delta was sixteen times more important than the guerilla warfare on our city streets.¹

Cavanaugh accompanied his critique with a proposed solution. Earlier in the decade, he noted, the nation’s political leaders had committed themselves to putting a man on the moon, had appropriated adequate funding, and by 1966 this target lay in sight. Observing that federal antipoverty efforts appeared to offer ideal defensive weapons to combat the nation’s domestic troubles, Cavanaugh, together with the league’s Resolution Committee, urged Congress to commit to the War on Poverty with equal resolve by creating a ten-year urban redevelopment fund to mobilize national support for the needs of cities.²

The next speaker on the program perceived Mayor Cavanaugh’s remarks as public slaps in the face. James Webb, that year’s president of the American Society for Public Administration, was also the top official at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). I didn’t come here to challenge the priorities of the American city, Webb defended, and I would like to say that neither I nor any other leader in the space program has ever suggested that it should have any priority over the needs of the American city.³ This meeting was not the first where Webb had spoken about urban issues, but his address got off to an especially rocky start.

The exchange between Cavanaugh and Webb underscored a period of complicated interactions between U.S. city administrators and the nation’s defense and aerospace communities. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Vietnam War and the Apollo Program became symbolic targets for city planners and managers who argued that society’s spending priorities were misplaced during an era of urban crises at home. However, at the same time that some were denouncing profligate defense and aerospace spending as detracting from more urgent matters, many urban administrators looked to the military-industrial complex for guidance. From Mayor Cavanaugh’s call to mobilize a national effort to combat urban poverty on the model of the space program to New York City Mayor John Lindsay’s efforts to import military management expertise from the RAND Corporation to streamline city operations, even those big-city mayors who publicly shamed the excessive resources committed to the military-industrial complex simultaneously saw in those investments potential opportunities to improve cities. Webb’s invitation to speak to an audience of thirty-five hundred mayors and other city officials reflected the era’s popular view that America’s defense and aerospace communities possessed essential knowledge to be shared with city planners and managers facing crises on domestic soil. So, too, did the award that the National Academy of Public Administration later named for Webb, celebrating contributions to urban research and management.

In fact, collaborative relationships between America’s military-industrial complex and its city planners and managers already had begun to take shape two decades earlier, in the years immediately following World War II. In a climate of concerns about reducing urban vulnerability to atomic attack, military strategists, urban planners, atomic scientists, social welfare advocates, and local government officials came together for a sustained conversation about improving the nation’s physical and social infrastructure in the postwar period. The social networks these civil defense discussions created centered around fears of external threats lay the groundwork for a new type of collaboration in the decades that followed, collaborations that would refocus the attention of military and urban planners and managers toward new fears about internal threats to the nation’s security: urban problems.

In the decade following World War II, another set of anxieties about the state of American cities moved to center stage alongside fears of urban vulnerability to atomic attack. Traffic, poverty, overpopulation, and crime appeared to be worsening, despite the nation’s rising standards of living. Federal programs, most prominently urban renewal, tried to steer U.S. cities on a course toward prosperity. Yet early efforts fell far short of their goal. By the late 1950s, exasperated urban planners and managers were seeking new directions for urban reform.

Military planners and managers in industry and government suspected they might have something to offer their colleagues in city administrations. Investments in defense and aerospace research and development already had spawned a variety of innovations whose potential applications to supervising complex and large-scale systems seemed nearly limitless.⁴. As it would happen, defense research institutions such as RAND and SDC and aerospace companies such as Lockheed and McDonnell recently had decided that the long-term survivability of their organizations depended on finding ways to transfer these innovations beyond military markets. City planning and management quickly emerged as targets of opportunity. The proposal, a more systematic and scientific approach to city administration, seemed to promise a remedy to the urban professions’ grand public failure.

At the U.S. Housing and Home Finance Agency (later the Department of Housing and Urban Development) and in cities across the nation, administrators were captivated by the promise of more scientific planning and management tools. Yet lacking in-house familiarity with the tools, they required some assistance. Beginning in the early 1960s, experts from think tanks and aerospace companies found themselves recruited to serve as advisers to American city governments. From cybernetics to computer simulations to satellite reconnaissance, techniques and technologies originally developed for military users in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s thus became the focus of efforts to better plan and manage U.S. cities in the 1960s and 1970s.

At first, the transfer of defense and aerospace innovations to urban operations proceeded apart from any sense of a war on city problems. The partnership seemed made in heaven—a more scientifically sound approach to planning and management for cities and more contracts for the defense and aerospace community. These ongoing efforts at market expansion then unexpectedly received a booster shot and a new rationale from national political events: the escalation of urban crisis.

No official wars were fought in the continental United States during the twentieth century. Yet as Cavanaugh suggested in his remarks to the National League of Cities, the urban riots of the 1960s came perilously close. As a tradition of nonviolent protests gave way to more militant protests in the latter part of the decade, city leaders faced civil-rights demonstrations, urban riots, and conflicts over Vietnam. The long, hot summers from 1965 to 1968 saw more than three hundred episodes of civil disorder, resulting in two hundred deaths and the destruction of several thousand businesses. Threats of bombing and other acts of sabotage escalated, presenting mayors and law enforcement across the nation with situations increasingly out of their control. In several cases, quelling urban riots became a domestic job for military troops.⁵.

Yet members of the armed forces and the National Guard keeping order in U.S. city streets during these disturbances provided merely a short-term link between the defense and aerospace communities and city governments during the cold war. Alongside such public maneuvers were less visible examples of how military strategy and national security expertise were called upon in a longer-term effort to bring order to America’s increasingly racially divided urban cores. As former Newsweek correspondent Samuel Yette discussed in his book The Choice (1971), following urban riots the House UnAmerican Activities Committee pressured President Lyndon Johnson to declare martial law in U.S. cities. Johnson, instead of calling for a full-scale domestic deployment of military troops, recruited an army of defense intellectuals—civilian scientists and social scientists from top universities, think tanks, and aerospace companies.⁶.

Defense intellectuals from institutions such as RAND and Lockheed, already seeking urban markets, found further opportunities for work in the violence that had engulfed American cities. By framing the urban crisis as a national security crisis, their task became civil defense of a new variety: maintaining domestic urban security by continuing to apply defense and aerospace innovations and ideas to city planning and management. Cities, federal agencies, think tanks, and foundations followed Johnson’s lead, creating numerous fora to bring together defense intellectuals to analyze the causes of urban violence and disorder and to prevent them in the future. At the Kerner Commission, at a RAND Workshop on Urban Problems sponsored by the Ford Foundation, and at meetings on urban technology organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a shared vision of the escalating urban crisis as a national security crisis—the same turn of phrase Cavanaugh had used to call for an end to excessive defense and aerospace spending—helped to transform urban problems into strategic challenges to be met by defense intellectuals deploying techniques and technologies of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, and reconnaissance.⁷.

Cold War Cities and the Military-Industrial Complex

The appeal of cities as residential areas has waxed and waned throughout American history. In the three decades immediately following World War II, the middle classes deemed many U.S. cities decidedly undesirable places to live. Historians describing the period have devoted significant attention to the discovery and rediscovery of urban problems, and public and private efforts to solve those problems, alongside the simultaneous burgeoning of a middle-class suburban landscape.⁸.

To date, however, accounts of American urban history have overlooked how two of the era’s defining features, the cold war and the growth of a military-industrial complex, intersected with the approaches that federal and local leaders chose to address the complex problems they identified in the postwar period. A few historians have documented how the military-industrial complex served as an economic engine for urban and suburban physical change. Studies of the development of suburban housing for returning GIs, the role of the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act in creating an interstate system, and the ways some municipal leaders seeking funding for local priorities profited from increases in defense spending, describe a physical reshaping of the landscape in line with military priorities—or at least how planning projects undertaken for other reasons in the cold war era could be made to line up with the rhetoric of national defense.⁹.

Yet such accounts, which have offered insights into relationships between urban and suburban physical and social change, have remained silent about the rise of a new class of urban experts, men (and indeed they were almost exclusively men) whose personal experience working for military sponsors led them to identify connections between the challenges faced by military and urban planners and managers. In a climate of a perceived crisis in urban administration, and fearing that urban problems presented threats to domestic order, many American city planners and managers turned to these men, and to the nation’s military-industrial complex, for advice and inspiration. The same individuals and institutions who rose to prominence developing strategies to protect the nation from atomic attack thus found several decades of work guiding domestic responses to urban problems. A central focus for their efforts was the application of defense and aerospace techniques and technologies to urban operations.¹⁰. Innovations originally designed to combat America’s foreign enemies overseas and at home became the weapons of choice in battles to solve urban problems and maintain security in the nation’s cities.

Tracing the migrations of individual experts and the evolution of defense and aerospace institutions alongside their transfer of specific techniques and technologies to several cities, this book presents evidence to suggest that a new narrative, one in which the military-industrial-academic complex and technical and technological developments inside city administrations become central, deserves to assume its place alongside other themes in American urban history.¹¹. In this narrative, a different set of actors, the bevy of technological enthusiasts referred to as defense intellectuals—civilian scientists and social scientists who were employed by the defense establishment—play starring roles. Their positions as advisers to government long outlasted their efforts to transfer any specific innovation.

From Warfare to Welfare offers a retelling of American urban history. Its story about the adoption of innovations in local government, and the complexities of technology transfer, brings perspectives from the history of science and technology to the American urban context. Historians of science and technology have identified the cold war and the growth of a military-industrial-academic complex as defining features of twentieth-century U.S. science and engineering. Defense- and space-agency initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program created big science endeavors to pool intellectual resources from across disciplines. Federal sponsorship offered financial incentives to reorient university researchers toward the study of topics for mutual gain. And institutions from think tanks to aerospace companies provided new fora for civilian researchers to apply their knowledge in the service of national defense.¹². Large-scale investments in defense and aerospace research and development thus brought to America’s security establishment an arsenal of new techniques, technologies, and institutions.

Despite their origins in a culture marked by secrecy, many cold war–era developments in science and engineering remained exclusive accessories to the defense establishment only temporarily. From systems analysis to satellites to think tanks, these innovations soon were adopted and adapted for civilian applications in both public and private sectors. While the story has not yet been part of conventional accounts of American urban history, city planning and management were no exception.

The products of defense and aerospace research and development influenced a variety of operations in American cities, from transportation planning to crime control to emergency management. This book focuses on several of their more unexpected influences: in community development ventures, comprehensive planning efforts, and projects to facilitate communication among citizens. The book’s title refers to its overarching theme: that during the cold war, strategies for urban problem solving were heavily influenced by, and in some cases directly derived from, military techniques and technologies originally used against America’s foreign enemies. Experiments in the nation’s cities adapted the expertise of defense professionals to face new enemies: urban chaos, blight, and unrest. Seven chapters take the reader from World War II to 1975, documenting three decades of collaborations among defense and aerospace experts and urban planners and managers. Their stories reveal how the rise of a military-industrial-academic complex offered these collaborators professional prestige, research funding, and hope for maintaining order in U.S. cities.

City planning has been and remains an activity of both public and private organizations—for example, municipal government, developers, chambers of commerce, and private design firms. This book focuses on activities inside city governments. Throughout, a focus on applications in New York City and Los Angeles details the effects of military innovations and expertise in specific urban settings. Despite geographic, administrative, and cultural differences undermining the precision of terms such as urban and city, both New York City and Los Angeles have come to represent for the second half of the twentieth century what Chicago was to the sociologists of the first half—each an archetypal American city that scholars have used to make claims about trends in the character of urban life across the nation.¹³. Taking a fresh look at the familiar faces of these two much-studied metropolises, together with discussion of related developments in smaller cities (Pittsburgh and Dayton are two examples), illustrates how the defense and aerospace community shaped the intellectual history of city planning and management as academic disciplines, the organizational development of American cities, and the day-to-day practices of city administrators in surprising and important ways.

A critical finding of this book is that applications of military innovations and expertise to urban problems rarely served as sources of solutions. Defense and aerospace executives and engineers found new employment as consultants to cities and federal urban programs. Think tanks and aerospace companies found new civil systems contracts. University scholars found military sponsorship for urban research. City administrators, both Democrats and Republicans, found new approaches to management. Yet average city dwellers found few visible effects.¹⁴. In city after city, for innovation after innovation, few experiments achieved their promised reforms. The lasting significance of this episode for U.S. urban history instead lies in its creation and maintenance of an urban power elite whose influence on the ways Americans conceptualize cities and their problems has persisted to the present day.¹⁵.

In this retelling of American urban history, focusing on links between defense and aerospace innovations and urban life, the book also outlines an alternative history of what contemporary scholars characterize as cybercities—metropolitan areas where media spaces and physical spaces converge; where communications infrastructure is as important as gas, electricity, sewers, and water; where citizens, businesses, and government are linked into multiple communications networks.¹⁶. Conventional accounts trace cybercities’ origins to an emerging culture of simulation in the decades following World War II. This book suggests that the history of cybercities is better understood through an appreciation of simulations in the context of military war games at RAND and MIT than in the context of theories about postmodernity from Jean Baudrillard. Ironically, it was during a period of postwar antiurbanism, when military innovations were brought to bear on urban problems, that the early seeds of vibrant cybercities were sown.

The arguments of this book, while historical, should prove useful to contemporary urban planners and managers. By embedding the theme of defense and aerospace technology transfer in narratives of American urban development, From Warfare to Welfare offers insights to city administrators contemplating the adoption of military innovations old and new—computer simulations, global positioning systems, geographic information systems, and the internet. For while the defense intellectuals’ actual proposals rarely worked out as they had hoped, their legacy still remains with us.

CHAPTER ONE

Planning for the Atomic Age

Creating a Community of Experts

In a presentation to the American Municipal Association in November 1945, University of Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth asked a question that was on many minds in the months following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Does the atomic bomb doom the modern city? Reflecting on the science of atomic destruction, much of it developed at his own institution, he suggested the answer to this question was no.¹. Wirth cited the size and growth pattern of the nation’s cities and the administrative changes needed to disperse populations and industries away from downtowns vulnerable to attack. He concluded that such a massive reshaping of urban form could not reasonably be achieved in a short amount of time. Whether or not a bomb might doom the modern city in the event of an atomic attack, the existence of atomic weapons should not drive American city planning. According to Wirth, the realistic strategy for assuring urban security was world control of atomic weapons—not defensive city planning.

Wirth’s resistance to dispersal is unsurprising, given that his life’s work revolved around neighborhood-based studies of concentrated urban culture. Yet this opinion leader in so much urban research would cultivate less of a following in his conclusions about the ideal form for postwar cities. In the years immediately following World War II, a remarkable amount of expert attention began to focus on the question of what cities should look like in the atomic age. Defense experts, atomic scientists, urban planners, and public officials united around the idea of defensive dispersal—that deliberate dispersal of population and industries could reduce cities’ vulnerability to attack.

That any scholar’s resistance to defensive dispersal lacked broad appeal fits neatly with standard accounts of American urban development. Classic narratives of American urban and suburban history have long emphasized the theme of urban disintegration in the postwar period. In the decades from 1945 to 1975, myriad forces dispersed the nation’s populations and industries. The federal urban renewal program gutted urban cores. The national highway program cut wide swaths through many cities. Private developers created suburbs such as Levittown for returning GIs. Suburban and regional malls decimated street life and commercial districts of downtowns. Middle-class whites fled cities for the safety of suburbs and private communities. Whether they have emphasized the primacy of public policies, private developers, specific building types, creditors, industry, or simply the desire of the middle classes, urban and suburban historians have placed the stories of sprawl and fear of the city at center stage in their accounts of American postwar urban development.².

The actual dispersal of America’s twentieth-century urban physical landscape owes far more to the range of factors that scholars already have identified than to the defensive dispersal movement. However, as a force acting on the American urban professional landscape, the movement’s impact was significant and lasting. While in 1945 Louis Wirth argued against a national dispersal program on account of the accompanying need for centralized governance and planning, many other urban professionals, from planners to politicians, viewed the proposal to align city planning with the nation’s security needs as a great opportunity. As dispersal planning provided for the national defense, simultaneously it seemed to promise solutions to many city problems that urban leaders had identified in the prewar period—including traffic, congestion, and slums. Defense rationales for dispersal offered strategic rhetorical backing to bolster political support for comprehensive postwar planning, for increased federal aid to cities, for the continuing professionalization of planning and urban administration, and for increased funding to urban research.

It is this story of dispersal that served as a turning point in American urban history. For in these conversations about dispersal, a new approach to city planning and management, dedicating military expertise to the nation’s urban needs, began to take shape. The military-industrial-academic complex that infiltrated so many aspects of life in the cold war would also guide American approaches to addressing urban problems.

From the walled cities of ancient Rome and the Renaissance to nineteenth-century Paris, where Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann created boulevards to facilitate the movement of troops through the city, concerns about national security have played a role in shaping the urban environment. In Europe, with its centuries of recorded military history and where cities from London to Berlin to Budapest have had to recover from bombing attacks, urban scholarship has framed cities past and present in conversation with war and military innovation. By contrast, studies of American urban development, planning, and administration have focused hardly at all on the ways that national security needs and military innovation have shaped the fate of specific American cities.³.

Fig. 1. Illustrations like this one of lower Manhattan accompanied numerous articles written by supporters of the defensive dispersal movement. This sketch depicts projected damage zones following an atomic blast, revealing how many of the city’s escape routes would be unusable in the event of an attack. It appeared in a discussion of transportation planning for national defense in Edward Conway, A-bomb over Manhattan, which appeared in America Magazine (July 22, 1950). Reprinted with permission of America Press, Inc. © 1950. All rights reserved.

Fig. 2. New York City Hall ca. 1943 displays civil defense emblems and a sign characterizing New York City as Target No. 1. Reprinted with