In 1929, America’s cities basked in the glow of nearly three decades of rapid growth and general prosperity. By 1932, cities were foundering and sliding toward bankruptcy as they attempted to deal with the massive unemployment of the Great Depression. The continuation of the depression for another eight years affected cities in several fundamental ways. First, urban growth nearly halted. Population stagnated and did not rebound until World War II, while new construction did not reach 1920s levels until the postwar era. Second, the depression created a municipal fiscal crisis that forced cities to cut back drastically on basic urban services and facilities, leaving many of them with serious problems in these areas by 1945. Deteriorating conditions and inadequate housing in central cities helped lead to the burgeoning of suburbs in the postwar era. Finally, urban unemployment and fiscal problems caused cities to turn to the federal government for aid, producing long-term alliances between cities and both the federal government and the Democratic Party. The Second World War then created so many new war-related jobs that rural and small-town people flocked from rural areas to metropolitan areas. A number of southern and western cities expanded rapidly, laying foundations for a major shift in urban population centers away from the Northeast and Middle West toward Sunbelt areas of the South, the West, and especially the Pacific Coast.
The most visible impact of the Great Depression in the nation’s cities was the huge decline in new construction. Housing starts fell to one-tenth of the peak years of the 1920s, and commercial or industrial construction likewise almost halted. Cities that had been growing rapidly for many decades suddenly seemed frozen in time, looking in 1940 much as they had in 1930. In the residential areas of cities and in their suburbs, miles of streets and sidewalks seemed to disappear as grass and weeds grew up in thousands of vacant lots. By 1940 almost all the major cities faced serious problems that stemmed in part from the depression: an aging and neglected physical plant, increased taxation made necessary by the decline of property values, and reduced urban services. War production demands created a substantial construction boom of new factories and other facilities in a number of cities and their suburbs; but there was little spending on the urban infrastructure.
Urban population during the 1929-45 era followed a pattern that was dictated by the economic health of each city. Prior to the 1930s, city populations had increased steadily through in-migration and the annexation of outlying suburbs. The Great Depression halted both these trends, and urban population growth slowed dramatically and in some cities was reversed. Among the nation’s largest 15 cities, only New York and Los Angeles showed any significant gains, and even their growth rates were far below those of the 1920s. World War II then reversed the population trend of the 1930s. Between 1940 and 1945, many cities experienced huge influxes of war workers and their families. The arrival of so many new residents created extremely overcrowded housing conditions and increased social problems.
During the 1930s, unemployment and destitution became a familiar part of urban life, most visibly in the big cities. During the depths of the depression, from 1931 to 1933, the nation’s largest cities held hundreds of thousands of unemployed people, and RELIEE rolls exceeded anything ever seen before. In some manufacturing cities like Detroit, up to half and sometimes higher proportions of the labor force found themselves unemployed or working part-time. By 1931, private charitable agencies were overwhelmed, and municipal governments began to spend ever larger portions of their funds to aid the unemployed.
While New Deal programs brought help from 1933 to 1941, the economic atmosphere of cities remained grim. Even in the late 1930s, unemployment remained high, and city dwellers who did hold jobs lived in fear of losing them. Yet without the New Deal’s massive job programs, the history of the nation’s cities during the depression years could have been quite turbulent. The only major urban violence arising from economic conditions occurred during the middle and late 1930s in connection with the formation of the new industrial labor unions; but even these disturbances fell far short of anything like a general uprising of the urban working class.
The continuing sluggishness of the urban economy throughout the 1930s also had an impact on the movement of people within cities, and from the city to the suburbs. Both types of movement slowed considerably. Very few people could afford to buy new homes on the urban fringe, and so they remained in houses and neighborhoods that in the normal course of events would have been turned over to a new generation of upwardly mobile families leaving overcrowded, substandard housing. World War II brought rising incomes and an influx of new residents, but little new housing. Thus, by 1945, cities contained a large number of people who had been living for over a decade in undesirable housing conditions, but whose savings were now sufficient to allow them to buy new homes.
In the postwar era, home builders, some of whom had learned how to mass-produce relatively good, inexpensive houses for the federally financed war worker housing projects, responded by constructing huge numbers of houses, mostly in the suburbs. Suburban housing was especially attractive because it allowed families to escape the problems that bedeviled the central cities and which they had been nearly powerless to deal with since 1930. The outflow of the city’s middle classes, which had begun in a limited
A tenement in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1938 (Library of Congress)
Way in the 1910-30 era, now commenced on a much larger scale.
Only the federal government in the 1930s might have been able to help America’s cities sustain themselves as places where a large portion of the middle - and upper-income groups would have wished to live, but it proved unwilling to undertake such an ambitious (and perhaps impossible) task. Although the New Deal was quite active in cities, its spending, with the exception of low-income housing projects, was aimed primarily at relieving urban unemployment and only secondarily at efforts to improve the basic fabric of city life. Even so, the assistance that the New Deal brought to cities and city residents brought Roosevelt and the Democratic Party great support, and the urban vote played a major role in the emergence of the Democrats as the nation’s new majority party in the POLITICS IN THE ROOSEVELT ERA.
The United States Conference of Mayors, formed in 1932 to seek federal aid for the unemployed, helped draw President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal into their relationship with the nation’s cities. Led by Mayor Frank Murphy of Detroit, the conference pleaded with the Roosevelt administration to give cities money to employ the jobless—a financial burden that cities like Detroit could no longer carry. Indeed, by 1933 most of the nation’s cities were headed toward bankruptcy or already in the hands of receivers. The municipal fiscal crisis of 1931-33 arose from the fact that property tax revenues fell sharply at the same time that unemployment relief added a large new item to municipal budgets. Few state governments had the resources, or, dominated by unsympathetic rural legislators, the desire to give cities much if any assistance.
The New Deal responded to the mayors’ requests for help by providing millions of dollars for urban employment projects. Almost all the federally funded projects—through such agencies as the Federal Emergency Reliee Administration, the Civil Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration—made improvements in the urban environment. These included such activities as street repairs, urban highway and bridge construction, the embellishment of parklands, and the expansion of water and sewer systems; but the projects were never large enough or numerous enough to make a major impact on the overall quality of city life. More important, the Roosevelt administration never conceived of these activities as anything like a coordinated or comprehensive attack on the basic urban problems of poverty, lack of education and skills, social disorganization, crime, pollution, and traffic congestion.
The only long-range, permanent urban improvement undertaken by the New Deal was its slum clearance and low-income housing program embodied in the United States Housing Act of 1937. Under the United States Housing Authority, terrible slums were cleared and replaced by safe, sanitary public housing projects. The chief drawbacks to the program were its late start and small scale. Still in operation today, it has never come close to replacing all the substandard dwellings in America’s cities and has played only a small role in housing the urban poor.
In contrast to the economic stagnation and nearly static nature of the urban physical plant, the social and cultural life of cities retained a real vitality for their heterogeneous populations. City life was grim for the unemployed and impoverished, but for many working-class families and those of middle and upper income, the cities still offered a cornucopia of moderately priced or free entertainments and diversions: parks, playgrounds, professional SPORTS teams, movie theaters, department stores, soda fountains, dance halls, night clubs, amusement parks, and dozens of other attractions. Crime, vice, juvenile delinquency, and poverty continued to plague cities, but were accepted as part of the price of urban living—balanced by the big and little pleasures of city life.
A significant long-term trend often obscured by the economic problems of cities was that ethnic differences and antagonisms began to fade as the immigrants of the 1890-1920 era were gradually replaced by the second and third generations. Most cities still had their Little Italy or Polish Town; saloons (brought back by the end of prohibition) still catered to particular ethnic groups; and urban political machines still based much of their strength on ethnic allegiances. But dance halls, cabarets, and amusement parks became places where younger people of all backgrounds were thrown together. Both neighborhood theaters and downtown movie palaces showed Hollywood MOVIES that largely ignored the distinctiveness of America’s ethnic cultures and thus tended to undermine them. City park and RECREATION departments sponsored a variety of sports and recreational programs that also brought people from different ethnic groups into contact. Tensions and even conflict persisted, and AfRlCAN AMERICANS and Mexican Americans remained isolated—but important change was under way.
World War II turned attention to the use of America’s cities as war production centers. The huge task of economic MOBILIZATION for war ended urban unemployment and actually created a greater demand for workers than the local labor force could supply. Extraordinarily heavy wartime MIGRATION added a new layer of in-migrants to
American cities, particularly in rapidly growing Sunbelt cities. Despite some tensions between in-migrants and old-timers, the wartime emphasis on national unity, the breakdown of ethnic (and to some degree racial) barriers in war plants, and the intermingling of peoples at USO centers and other recreational facilities further reduced ethnic suspicions and differences. However, the renewed influx of African Americans, and a substantial immigration of Mexican immigrants into the cities of the West Coast, often heightened racial animosities and in some cities brought a wave of racial violence.
In conclusion, America’s cities suffered significantly during the Great Depression from massive unemployment and financial problems that forced them to cut back drastically on municipal facilities and services. The New Deal made its major contribution to the nation’s cities by giving work relief to the unemployed. Despite federal construction projects in the cities, the urban physical plant as a whole, and especially urban housing, was in poor condition by 1945. There was never any major attempt to address the basic social, economic and physical problems of the cities, problems sometimes exacerbated by World War II. When the war ended, the central cities appeared increasingly unattractive to many of its middle - and upper-income residents. They began to move to the suburbs and new housing as quickly as possible—creating problems for central cities that ultimately became even more serious than the ones they faced during the 1930s.
See also POPULATION TRENDS.
Further reading: Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Philip Funigiello, The Challenge to Urban Liberalism: Federal-City Relations during World War II (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978); Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933-1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
—Joseph L. Arnold
World History
