Dry rot to decay: Big City change in the “Wonder Bread†years, 1945–1960

The Truman and Eisenhower administrations inherited a strong and intrusive federal government and a totally changed international and global system. Truman had his urban and social ambitions, but a hostile world, the Korean War, put them off to the side. A skeptical Eisenhower took his foot of the federal gas pedal, but still Congress pushed him into creating the Small Business Administration (SBA), and the lobbies pursuing a national interstate highway system put a bill on his desk. He signed it, engendering perhaps the most destructive phase of urban renewal as Big Cities dug up their neighborhoods for highways and bypasses to connect to suburbs—which were exploding. The white middle class was heading out to the “burbs†and the Age of the Leave it to Beaver sitcom suburb had begun. Cities responded, developing plans by the new leader of CBD-focused urban renewal, Victor Gruen. Public housers built huge high-rises for residents of the Second Ghetto. Now in a permanent war with Russia, and leader of the free world, the United States occupied a unique and quite beneficial position in the world’s economy. American prosperity resulted, a prosperity that would mask changes in Big Cities that transformed dry rot into outright full-scale decay by the beginning of the 1960s. But you would never have known it at the time—except in the New England textile mills, which were going down for the last time. A disease appeared in New England’s manufacturing base that tossed textile workers onto the streets in tens of thousands. Industry demanded action; so did unions—but little happened at the state level, however, despite active new governors like Muskie and Herter. The “disease with no name†had struck, and the only visible source of destruction was southern governors with IRBs in hand to steal the mills and move them down South. The shadow war intensified. Finally, port authorities became transportation behemoths, developing a metro presence and freeing themselves from Big City constraints. The NY–NJ Port Authority innovated and a logistical revolution in ports followed. Containerization hit in the mid-1950s, and within the decade most major ports were relocated to vast suburban expanses able to accommodate intermodal transportation. Big City waterfronts had lost a major player in their jurisdictional economic base. Economic development had its first major example of onionization.