Books in Review The City

THE INTELLECTUAL VERSUS THE CITY: FROM THOMAS JEFFERSON TO FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT. By Morton and Lucia White. Harvard University Press and MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962. 270 pp. $5.50.

What absurdity can be imagined greater than the institution of cities? asked Elizabeth Peabody, one of the transcendentalist Brook Farmers. Na- thaniel Hawthorne advised, All towns should be made capable of purification by fire, or of decay, within each half- century, and Ralph Waldo Emerson opined, Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. Frank Lloyd Wright believed, The carcass of the city is far too old, too far gone. I t is too fundamentally wrong for the future we now foresee. Hopelessly, helplessly, in- organic it lies there.

These are fragments of the consider- able evidence offered by philosophy pro- fessor Morton White and Lucia White in support of their thesis that the Ameri- can intellectual has been anti-urban. Their book is one of a series presenting the major urban and regional research findings of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Harvard and the Massachu- setts Institute of Technology.

Starting with the irenic or tolerant age of Franklin, Crevecoeur (Letters from an American Farmer), and Jeffer- son, the Whites trace the intellectuals dismay at the city-its size, its im- personality, its vices and ugliness, and its artificiality. The authors discuss, in addition to those already named, Mel- ville, Poe, Henry Adams, Henry and William James, William Dean Howells, novelists Norris and Dreiser, Jane Ad- dams (of Hull House fame), John Dewey, philosophers Royce and Santa- yana, and, for good measure, Lewis Mumford who is described as, the most

learned of all writers to turn his atten- tion to the nature and destiny of Man- hattan.

Anti-urban sentiment is of two kinds. The romanticists would like to go back, if not to nature at least to the simpler life of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- tury village and hamlet. In this tradition the pre-Civil War intellectuals would have no cities if they could. After the war, the anti-urban attack was taken up by those whose enemy was not the city per se but who believed that the city as then constituted was too wild, too vulgar, too ostentatious, too uncontrolled, too gaudy.

Conclude the Whites : The intellectuals criticisms of urban life have had major impact on the ordinary mans attitude toward the city and on those writers who flourish somewhere between the highest reaches of our culture and the popular mind. The anti-urban tradition is at its best when it conveys esthetic, psychological and moral ideas, and itn- pressions of the citys defects. The au- thors feel that the American city today must educate and absorb those entering its gates into its economy and the demo- cratic process; it must encourage in- dividuality; and it must provide easy channels of interurban communications.

The moral message of the contem- porary critics is not fundamentally dif- ferent from what it was in the age of Jefferson, Emerson and Dewey. The modern thinker, however, cannot de- ceive himself about the place in which those values must be realized today. The wilderness, the isolated farm, the planta- tion, the self-contained New England town, the detached neighborhood are things of the American past. All the worlds a city now and there is no escaping urbanization, not even in outer space.

The book is worth reading, but it is not wholly convincing. Its greatest weak- ness is its preoccupation with the anti-

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urban and its once-over-lightly approach to the pro-urban elements of the intel- lectual tradition. The book would be more valuable had the authors broadened their horizons. Perhaps the same conclu- sion would have been reached; but evidence of thought favorable to the city would provide balance and a greater measure of objectivity. Finally, the authors implicit definition of intellectual is narrow. Except for Jefferson and perhaps Franklin, one looks vainly for inclusion of representatives of the world of juridical and political thought.

These criticisms notwithstanding, the Joint Center and Professor and Mrs. White should be congratulated, for they bring to the contemporary urban tinker and thinker a new way of looking at their favorite subject.

HOWARD N. MANTEL Institute of Public Administration

The Presidency RUM, RELIGION, AND VOTES: 1928 RE-

EXAMINED. By Ruth C. Silva. The Penn- sylvania State University Press, Uni- versity Park, 1962. ix, 76 pages. $5.00.

When John F. Kennedy was elected, he probably settled the Catholic issue and the presidency once and for all time. Following A1 Smiths crushing defeat in 1928 it had become almost axiomatic that a Roman Catholic could never make it to the White House-after ail, that was what defeated Smith wasnt i t? As a matter of fact, no it wasnt!

Dr. Ruth C. Silva sat down at her computors and absolutely demolished the old political shibboleth about Catholi- cism. She next did exactly the same to the prohibition argument (some people contended that A1 Smiths wet views hurt him severely). This book is a de- tailed description of the methods used to study the 1928 election and the results that Dr. Silva obtained. She proves her point quite well.

Probably the most important contri-

bution of Dr. Silvas book is not the emergence of the fact that A1 Smiths Catholicism did not cost him the election. Rather it is the manner in which she shows the error of many political pundits who readily expound upon the obvious reasons for certain occurences in Arner- ican political behavior with little statis- tical data or systematic research to sub- stantiate their pronouncements.

We Americans are a cussedly complex lot. It is a brave man who can always explain why we acted the way we did. Miss Silva took an accepted fact and knocked it jolly welt into a cocked hat. A few more studies like this and our pundits are really going to have to watch their pontifications.

Warning! This is not one of those snappy little books one whips through and sets aside with a sigh of Wasnt that interesting. It is interesting, but if you ever failed arithmetic in school- forget it ! If careful statistical analysis fascinates you however, and if the appli- cation of science in political science inbrigues you, then this is your meat.

W. J.D.B.

Additional Books And Pamphlets

(See alea Researcher's Direst and other departments)

Accounting COST ACCOUNTING FOR MUNICIPAL

OPERATIONS. By Bart McCafferty. Munic- ipal Finance Officers Asociation of the United States and Canada, 1313 East 60th Street, Chicago 37, December 1962. 8 pp. Tables. 75 cents.

Council-Manager Plan THE COUNCIL-MANAGER FORM OF Gov-

ERNMENT IN PENNSYLVANIA. A Citizens Handbook. Institute of Local Govern- ment, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pitts-