When I began my master’s degree in history in 2016, I knew what I wanted to study. To me, the most important event in Western history is the economic revolution that occurred in Europe beginning about 1750—the Industrial Revolution. I was steeped in knowledge about its impact from reading books like The Rise of the Western World, How the West Grew Rich, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, and The Great Divergence.
Indeed, my master’s thesis concentrated on details of that revolution. But my history studies taught me much more. My academic adventure evolved into a struggle to understand why “change over time” (that’s how historians define history) occurs as it does. That is one of the reasons I created this blog: I was looking for a theory of history.
Before discussing Jane Jacobs, let’s look at the problem. Consider Raleigh, North Carolina.
Like many cities, Raleigh has been planning, subsidizing, and revising its downtown for decades. In 1977 it turned a downtown thoroughfare, Fayetteville Street, into a pedestrian mall. That didn’t work out—in 2006 Fayetteville became a street again. Raleigh supported a gourmet restaurant (the Mint) with $1 million. It failed. In 2008 taxpayers paid for a downtown convention center and wooed a name-brand hotel with $21 million.
This wasn’t good, either. “The only way the RCC [the convention center] attracts users is by offering deep discounts on rooms and services and even paying large subsidies to attract conventions and meetings,” wrote two policy analysts in 2008.[1] Now the government is planning another convention center at an estimated price of $387 million.
I could go on . . . but if you live in an American city, you probably have seen (and paid for) something similar—public efforts to bring people downtown. Continue reading “Let’s Not Blame Jane Jacobs”
It makes a good story. In the late 1800s demand for wood was insatiable—for houses, for ships, for fuel, for railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country, then moving on to another forest, leaving ugly cutover land behind them. President Theodore Roosevelt expressed fear of a “timber famine.” Trees are being destroyed, he said, “far more rapidly than they are being replaced.”[1]
George Vanderbilt (grandson of the “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt) came to the rescue.
Vanderbilt’s mansion near Asheville, North Carolina, was built on land that included about 125,000 acres of forest, much of it already logged. Vanderbilt hired a young man, Gifford Pinchot, to manage the lands around the Biltmore estate, with the goals of making money while restoring and protecting the forest. Pinchot hired a German forester, Carl Schenck, to work for him. Pinchot went on to be the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, and Schenck started the first forestry school in the nation.
“Pinchot implemented a management plan that improved the forest while returning a profit to the landowner, the first of its kind in America and served as a national model,” states the National Forestry Foundation on its website. [2]
You’ve probably heard that Henry Ford II resigned from the board of the Ford Foundation because it had veered far away from its donor’s intent. In his 1976 resignation letter, Ford (grandson of Ford Sr.) wrote:
“In effect, the foundation is a creature of capitalism—a statement that, I’m sure, would be shocking to many professional staff people in the field of philanthropy. It is hard to discern recognition of this fact in anything the. foundation does.
“It is even more difficult to find an understanding of this in many of the institutions, particularly the universities, that are the beneficiaries of the foundation’s grant programs.”[1]
This is a guest column by Jay Schalin, senior fellow at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Born in Pennsylvania, he responded to my request for “state stories.”
The uplands of northern Pennsylvania were a wild and wooly place in the early years of our nation. Rough men carved out large fortunes—or eked out bare livings—by extracting its natural resources, with violence occasionally erupting from their endeavors. Sometimes, the triggers for violence were the treatment of workers, as occurred in the eastern coal fields, pitting the pro-union Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society, against coal baron Franklin Gowen and his Pinkerton Detective Agency allies (the theme of a 1970 movie starring Sean Connery).
Another case of industrial violence resulted from a clash between competing technologies. It featured small independent entrepreneurs attacking the purveyors of more efficient, larger-scale methods. This is somewhat reminiscent of the violence wrought by English textile workers known as “Luddites” against more efficient factories in the early 19th century. Continue reading “Wood Wars on the Susquehanna”
