FIGURE 10. The title page of Constitutional Chaff (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941).
Systems of thought, no matter how objective they may purport to be, have underlying emotional bases and values. The development of modern city planning and housing reform has been emotionally based on a glum reluctance to accept city concentrations of people as desirable, and this negative emotion about city concentrations of people has helped deaden planning intellectually.
—Jane Jacobs, 1961
Jane Jacobs wrote her first essays on the city soon after arriving in New York, tracing in them relationships between people, geographies, and city dynamics, even as forces converged to break apart those relationships. Soon thereafter, at twenty-two, she decided to go to college to study geography and economic geography, fields of inquiry that she would pursue for the rest of her life. She would not earn a degree, but her coursework led to her first book, Constitutional Chaff: Rejected Suggestions of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, an examination of the intellectual foundations of the creation of the U.S. Constitution, published by Columbia University Press in 1941. Soon thereafter, as a government employee during World War II and the Cold War—primarily as a writer for the Office of War Information (OWI) and the State Department—she would further develop her lifelong interest in “systems of thought,” the patterns of thinking that shaped intellectual paradigms and approaches. By understanding such systems, she sought to understand differences in the ways people thought things like cities and civilizations should work, and how, as best she could understand them, they actually did work. Speaking through one of her characters in Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, her sixth book, Jacobs wrote, “I like uncovering systems.”1
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she had a similar goal, Jacobs sought to contrast the way the city worked with the wishful thinking of city planning and urban design theories and practices. Describing the book in 1959, she said, “This book is neither a retelling in new form of things already said, nor an expansion and enlargement of previously worked out basic ground, but it is an attempt to make what amounts to a different system of thought about the great city.” In attempting to lay the foundation for a new system of thought about great cities, she would inquire into underlying assumptions, emotional and ideological biases, and specious methods, and, as will be discussed in Chapter 7, she sought to replace flawed “images” of the city with better ones.2
Like Francis Bacon, who, in the early seventeenth century, contrasted his scientific method with prevailing superstitions, hasty conclusions, and other misguided habits of thought, Jacobs in Death and Life judged that “the pseudoscience of city planning and its companion, the art of city design” were similarly founded on conjecture, unstudied presumptions, and misapplied principles—and “anything but cities themselves.” Writing her book in the same years when the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and coined the term “paradigm shift” to describe the destruction and transformation of orthodox conceptual systems in science, Jacobs also consciously sought a paradigm shift through her similar sensitivity to the influence of contexts and social communities on ways of thinking, away from “orthodox” ideas about cities and their design. However, in becoming a target of McCarthyism as a State Department employee after having worked diligently for the federal government, Jacobs had a short fuse for the group-think of “normal science,” as Kuhn called it, when she came to understand the failings of the theories and practices of urban renewal a few years later.3
In a brief autobiography that accompanied an early review of Death and Life, Jacobs wrote, “When I was twenty-two, and had been five years out of high school, I decided I did want to go to school again and learn a lot of things I had become curious about.”4
Columbia University’s Extension program, later renamed the School of General Studies, was ideal for this purpose, because it offered working and returning students, as well as women, access to regular university courses and faculty in a flexible curriculum. So in September 1938, Jacobs (still Jane Butzner) left her position as a secretary at the Peter A. Frasse and Company steelworks headquarters to enroll at Columbia University.
Allowed to pursue her own interests, Jacobs completed two full-time years of day classes in subjects including geography, geology, chemistry, zoology, biology, philosophy, patent law, constitutional law, and the development of legal institutions—nearly all of them subjects to which she returned in her later work. Ironically, one of the courses that Jacobs liked least was in sociology. Although later labeled as a sociologist, perhaps because the back cover of the familiar paperback version of Death and Life indicates that the book should be shelved with titles in sociology, Jacobs recalled being very unimpressed by the one course she took at Columbia in the subject. In fact, had she matriculated, it would likely have been as a geography major. Much more of a geographer than a sociologist, Jacobs took the most courses in economic geography, a study that anticipated her books on cities and economics: The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations in particular. Despite leaving the academy without a degree, this field remained the natural intellectual location for much of her work.5
In the late 1930s, economic geography was a relatively young discipline but an important part of Columbia University’s large Department of Geography. With the kind of multidisciplinary approach that appealed to Jacobs, at Columbia, geography was understood to involve at least two fields of learning: physiography and one other, such as economics, history, botany, or zoology. At higher levels of study, the program was administered by a multidisciplinary committee, including a professor of physiography, a professor of economic geography, and other appropriate disciplinary representatives, instead of being in the hands of any one school or department. This reflected the idea that while geography was considered the “mother of the sciences,” it was distinct from the physiography or physical geography studied in departments of geology. As defined by the president of the Association of American Geographers in 1922, geography was “the science of human ecology”—a study that emphasized the reciprocities between human activity and the environment in ways that also greatly appealed to her. It was a theme that Jacobs had already explored in her first essays on the city, and it would be a central principle in her lifework.6
Among the faculty with whom Jacobs studied was the economic geography professor Herman Otte, who specialized in the economics of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the multistate regional planning agency created by President Roosevelt in 1933, which Jacobs later discussed at length in Cities and the Wealth of Nations. There, decades later, she critiqued Otte’s (and others’) belief that a region could become significantly productive without the economic and cultural development stimulated by a great city.
Nevertheless, it was likely in one of Otte’s economic geography courses that Jacobs first read Henri Pirenne’s Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (1925), one of the single most influential books on her thinking about cities. In her last book, Dark Age Ahead, she wrote that Pirenne “laid the foundations for modern understanding of cities” and that Medieval Cities was “a basic text for understanding how the world’s economic networks operate and how they fail.” While confirming her esteem for Pirenne’s ideas, the acknowledgment actually significantly underemphasized the influence of his book on her own study of cities, economies, and civilization. Jacobs not only cited Pirenne in most of her books, but also expanded on his themes from Medieval Cities within The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, and Systems of Survival. In the first book, Jacobs drew heavily on Pirenne’s research on the origins of European cities to explain how cities grew and how they failed. In the second, she was influenced by his history of the development of cities into great cities and into city-states that were nations unto themselves. In the third, Jacobs was particularly influenced by Pirenne’s discussion of the tensions between economic and political organization, as well as his analysis of the ways that economic changes in the eleventh century simultaneously gave rise to cities and social change that freed serfs from agricultural servitude, created a powerful and productive middle class (the term is Pirenne’s), and prompted unprecedented structures of liberty and democracy (viz. civilization). In Systems of Survival, Jacobs expanded on the theme of “traders” versus “guardians,” her shorthand for the often competing moral systems of commerce (freedom of economic and cultural exchange) and authority (control of economic and cultural exchange) to which Pirenne alluded.7
Pirenne’s book was also on Jacobs’s mind when she set out to write Death and Life. Not only had Pirenne outlined the qualities of a great city; in Medieval Cities he offered an explanation of the “death and life” of cities after the collapse of the Roman Empire (a theme also discussed in Dark Age Ahead) and the reemergence of cities following the revival of exchange and urban economies. At a time when cities were threatened from within and without by anti-urban and suburban forces, and the geographic allegiances of the middle class—which, as Pirenne had explained, was historically important to the city’s prosperity—his book still resonated in the 1950s. Thus, when, in 1958, she first outlined her book proposal for Death and Life, Jacobs noted that Pirenne’s work had “much to say on how life is organized in contemporary cities.”8
Among her other studies at Columbia, Jacobs was particularly interested in the sciences. Rather than being random or unrelated interests, as is often supposed, Jacobs’s studies in biology, zoology, and geology all fell within the larger field of geography; the study of natural ecology in these courses complemented and informed the study of human ecology in her geography courses. Indeed, the interest in the sciences that Jacobs cultivated at Columbia, especially in the natural and life sciences, synthesized with her studies in geography to produce seminal theories of city functions and dynamics. The life sciences were her key to developing Pirenne’s historically oriented theories of “death and life” into new and timeless principles about city dynamics. From the time of her science courses at Columbia, Jacobs followed scientific developments in such emerging fields as genetics, cybernetics, and complexity science, which enabled her to argue that concepts and research methodologies familiar to the life sciences could be applied to cities. In Death and Life, she thus compared the “immense and brilliant progress” made in the life sciences between the 1930s and the 1950s to the stultification of the “pseudoscience” of city planning during the same period with intellectual conviction, not just rhetorical bluster. Discoveries in the life sciences, which revealed the complex workings of biological systems, helped to corroborate her belief that fully functioning cities cannot be spontaneously generated from utopian and artistic desires. Rather, cities had to be considered a part of nature, functioning like other natural and living systems. Together, Jacobs’s studies in geography and the sciences would soon lead her to think of herself as a “city naturalist.”9
Toward the end of her life, Jacobs recalled that she had “a wonderful time with various science courses and other things that I took there [at Columbia]. And I have always been grateful for what I learned in those couple of years.” Her appreciation for her studies, and their significance in the development of her lifework, however, was in significant contrast with her feelings about the academy as an institution and with the bitter ways she also recalled her abridged college experience. After two years, Jacobs was effectively expelled, or at least that is how she saw it, because she had taken too many classes for an Extension student, earning sixty-five credits in two years. As she later related, “After I had garnered, statistically, a certain number of credits, I became the property of Barnard College [Columbia’s women’s college].” Barnard, however, rejected her application on the basis of her high school grades, replacing the good feelings that she had developed for higher education after high school with a lifelong bitterness toward academia. The only consolation was that she would not be obliged to follow Barnard’s required curriculum and so, making the bitter best of the situation, considered herself “allowed to continue getting an education.” Years later, she would reject numerous honorary degrees in continued protest of what she regarded as higher education’s greater concern with selling degrees than educating.10
Yet while this part of Jacobs’s early encounter with the academy has often been repeated, less well known is the fact that around the time that Barnard College rejected her application, Columbia University Press accepted her first book proposal. Indeed, while Jacobs was taking more classes than she should have as an Extension student, she was also writing a book inspired both by her courses in constitutional law and the development of legal institutions and by the “enthusiasm and wisdom” of her friend, landlord, and former employer, Robert Hemphill. While the exact nature of Hemphill’s involvement in Constitutional Chaff is unclear, she wrote in 1949 that “the idea of such a study, and the method for working it out was my own conception. It was done during the time I was attending Columbia, but was not a part of my school work. When it was completed, I submitted it to the Columbia University Press, which accepted it for publication.”11
With similar enthusiasm, the press advertised Jacobs’s first book with this statement:
No better, no more instructive way of showing the extent of the compromise (worked out by the Constitutional Convention delegates) has ever been prepared. Here, article by article, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, and even clause by clause, are the components of our present Constitution and the ideas which they displaced.12
Constitutional scholars agreed. It received favorable reviews from the eminent constitutional scholar Max Farrand and the Department of State historian E. Wilder Spaulding, who described the book as an important contribution for being “so ingenious and so effectively carried out.” Likely unaware that Jane Butzner was also Jane Jacobs, scholars continued to cite the book decades later.13
When Jacobs found that she could not return to Columbia to start her third year of college, her thoughts turned again to writing about the city. She was still working on the manuscript for Constitutional Chaff, but just as she had done when she first came to New York looking for a job, she turned to freelance writing, and, following up on her essays on the city’s working districts, she wrote about how the city worked. In an investigation comparable to her essays on the historical geography of the city’s working districts, she now examined the city’s infrastructural systems in an article titled “Caution, Men Working,” published in Cue: The Weekly Magazine of New York Life in May 1940.
Particularly notable in this short article was Jacobs’s suggestion of a field and a method of study: Jacobs described herself as a “city naturalist.” As she stated in a distinctly geographic metaphor, Jacobs explained that the city naturalist could understand the city by following and studying the “rivers,” “trails,” and “tributaries” of the city’s infrastructure. “Despite the almost hopeless variety,” she wrote, “the city naturalist, keeping an eye on the letters of the covers, can tell whether he is following the course of one of the great underground rivers, whether he is on the trail of a main stream of electricity, or gas, or one of the tributaries, whether brine to chill the produce markets or steam to heat the skyscrapers, is running under his feet.”14
Although this explanation was metaphorical, it suggests the continuity of her interests and the impact of her education; her exposure to the ideas and methods of human and natural ecology in her geography courses was evident. Years later, in the introduction to the 1993 Modern Library edition of Death and Life, Jacobs noted that, in the course of writing the book in the late 1950s, “I realized I was engaged in studying the ecology of cities.” However, her 1940 article suggests that her study had in fact started much earlier.15
What is more, in the spring of 1940, as Jacobs charted the paths of the city’s underground infrastructural networks, the essential life force hidden below the city’s surface, she was also writing a radical intellectual archaeology of a fundamental social institution, the U.S. Constitution. Here, Jacobs’s studies of urban ecology and systems of thought were both at work, later to be combined in Death and Life, Systems of Survival, and The Nature of Economies, among her other works.
Unfortunately, there is otherwise relatively little of Jacobs’s voice in either “Caution” or Constitutional Chaff. The edited book was a serious academic exercise but with only a short introduction by her, and the magazine article was light reading for a subway ride. “Read the monograms on manholes and you will know what runs underneath,” went the article’s hook. Nevertheless, for Jacobs, both studies were close readings of things that people usually took for granted but that were essential to their lives.
At a superficial level, “Caution” explained the emblems a city dweller might observe on manhole covers and other street plaques. The embossed acronyms CT&ES Co, W-U-TEL Co, ECSCOLTD, NYS Co, MR Co, MRC, and NYM&NT, for example, revealed the location of, respectively, Consolidated Telegraph and Electrical Subway Company’s electric wires, Western Union’s pneumatic tubes, Empire City Subway Company’s telephone wires, New York Steam Company’s pipes, Manhattan Refrigeration Company’s brine lines, Merchants Refrigerating Company’s brine lines, and New York Mail and Newspaper Tube Company’s tubes that linked the main post office to branch stations. Others included the USTD (the pneumatic tube system of the U.S. Treasury Department), the HPFS (High Pressure Fire Service), DPW (Department of Public Works), and the small covers marked BPM (Borough President of Manhattan), which were found on sidewalk corners and covered the locations of sunken surveying monuments.
More than a simple field guide, however, the article was an early exercise in observing the city. The diversity of manhole and service box covers was evidence of the city’s complexity and a reminder of the easily overlooked infrastructure of underground utilities, which kept the “working districts” working. City infrastructure also had a history: Croton Water System emblems recalled the first supply of fresh water from outside the city in 1842 and its collection in a monumental Egyptianate building that was in fact a massive reservoir; later replacing the storage of water with books, the building cum reservoir became the New York Public Library. Like a palimpsest, the city’s maze of pipes and cables became more intricate with the passing years, as “new covers with new and varying designs are added to the accumulation of nearly a century.” Jacobs implied that the accretions of technology, rather than contributing to the city’s artificiality, had actually enhanced the city’s naturalness and its durability.
Despite the essay’s unlikely subject matter, “Caution” demonstrated that the young Jacobs already regarded the city as a historical topography, a critical bridge in the gap between past and future, and a living artifact of civilization created from and inscribed on the old city and handed forward from one generation to the next. Rapid, large-scale “tabula rasa” urban redevelopment would necessarily destroy the sinews and systems of the urban body.
As unlikely as it may seem at first, Jacobs’s Constitutional Chaff was a similar investigation. Jacobs was very keenly aware that the Constitution was a living artifact of similar significance, part of the infrastructure of society and civilization, while being an open framework within which the adjustments necessary to accommodate new needs could be fashioned. As she wrote in her introduction, “The authors of the Constitution were compelled to set up some organization and endow it with some power.” But, on September 17, 1787, “the Constitution was signed, and the rest was up to the people.”16
It is unlikely that the similarities between the city as a framework and the Constitution as a framework were lost on Jacobs. Both the Constitution and the city created the public realm, and urban history revealed the reciprocity between cities and the constitution of social order. As Pirenne observed, the rebirth of Western cities in the Middle Ages created a middle class and new liberties: “Freedom, of old, used to be the monopoly of a privileged class,” he wrote. “By means of the cities it again took its place in society as a natural attribute of the citizen.” In order to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, the Constitution did something similar.17
Later, in Systems of Survival, Jacobs would cite Hannah Arendt, who, in The Human Condition (1958), had observed that in antiquity law making and city building both belonged to the highest ranks of political life. “Before men began to act,” Arendt wrote, “a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public realm of the polis and its structure [being] the law.” The Greek idea that the city, the polis, was embodied in its citizens resonated with Jacobs. Her understanding of the simultaneity of the city and its citizens was evident from her earliest essays. In 1955, as Jacobs’s ideas for Death and Life began to catalyze as she observed urban redevelopment breaking the link between past and future, she wrote, “Hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of plans and purposes built the city and only they will rebuild the city.” This idea was closely related to her feeling that once the Constitution was signed, “the rest was up to the people.” For both city building and governance, in other words, Jacobs looked to—or idealized—an engaged and self-determined citizenry, a true polis. In Death and Life, and in subsequent works including Cities and the Wealth of Nations and Toronto: Considering Self-Government, Jacobs took up the topic of self-government directly, and in all cases this was closely related to the city. In the second to last chapter of Death and Life, “Governing and Planning Districts,” Jacobs described the city council chamber of New York’s City Hall as a microcosm of the city. “Whole segments of city life, problems of neighborhood upon neighborhood, district upon district, parades of remarkable personalities, all come alive in this room,” she wrote. She may have been thinking of Pirenne, and anticipating Systems of Survival, as she observed, “The members of the Board listen, interject and sometimes hand down decrees on the spot, like rulers holding court in the manor during medieval days.”18
Despite the reputation that Jacobs later developed for fighting with City Hall, and her own feelings of aggravation for having to do so, she believed that debate was central to the system of government established with the Constitution. As she learned in writing Constitutional Chaff, debate was the means of balancing the powers of control from above and democratic self-government from below. As she wrote in Systems of Survival, “Where democracy means more than having the vote, many citizens engage part-time in public affairs.”19 Similarly, in Death and Life, while Jacobs described herself as “a fierce and rooted partisan,” she could still remark of New York’s city council members that “their energy, wits, patience, and human responsiveness are, on the whole, creditable. I see no reason to expect great improvement from finding better.” In this, her words echoed the Constitutional Convention delegate Benjamin Franklin, whose intelligence and intellectual curiosity Jacobs long sought to emulate, and whose words the young Jacobs quoted in the introduction to Constitutional Chaff. Commenting on the debates from which the Constitution emerged, Franklin had also remarked that he could “expect no better”: “When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, the passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does…. I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.”20
In this light, Constitutional Chaff-—a study of the rejected proposals for the Constitution—was the reconstruction of a process tending toward the good, as well as a reflection of Jacobs’s interest in truly understanding others’ points of view, which, like her intense desire to understand the basis of ideas and the workings of things like cities, was central to her intellectual approach. Understanding did not substitute skepticism for agreement or acceptance, however. As Jacobs explained, when arguments for the inclusion of certain constitutional provisions were won, what the advocates “thought time would prove has given way to what we think time has proved.” Her study was accordingly one in which “the Constitution we have is contrasted with the constitutions we might have had.”21
Of particular interest to Jacobs, young and old, was the central debate on the fundamental issue of balancing local self-determination with federal governance. James Madison’s proposed provisions for regional planning and interstate cooperation, for example, anticipated forever vexing national and urban issues. Seeking a bridge between competing states and a limited federal government, Madison had argued, “Power should be vested in Congress to grant charters of incorporation in cases where the public good may require them and the authority of a single state may be incompetent. The primary object of this is to secure an easy communication between the states, which the intercourse now to be opened, seems to call for.” Thinking of large public works that would not otherwise materialize, like canals (or today’s high-speed rail) connecting the coast to “western settlements,” James Wilson of Pennsylvania concurred. That the new TVA, which Jacobs later criticized, was a rare instance of such a congressional charter of incorporation, created despite the fact that such constitutional provisions had been rejected, would not have been lost on her.22
That Jacobs had opinions about federalism and the nature of authority by this time is clear. Constitutional Chaff did not include her commentary, but its structure provides some evidence of her thinking. Although the book was organized by chapters corresponding to the articles of the ratified Constitution, followed by the losing or rejected suggestions of the delegates pertaining to each section of the given article, Jacobs also included a few appendices. One of these highlighted a special debate of the Constitutional Convention: the question of the length of the chief executive’s term of office. As it happens, when Jacobs wrote this in 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term. Apparently opposed to FDR’s expansion of the federal government through New Deal legislation, she would have been all the more opposed to this precedent. As the authors of the Constitution determined, while a single term of office “tended to destroy the great motive to good behavior, the hope of being rewarded by a re-appointment,” too long a period of service for the executive magistrate would tend to centralize power.23
In keeping with her lifelong critiques of top-down decision making, Jacobs’s dissatisfaction with FDR led to her support for his opponent, Wendell Willkie. In fact, she felt strongly enough about this to volunteer at the Willkie Clubs New York campaign headquarters.24 For financial perhaps as well as political values, Willkie, who was originally a Democrat and FDR supporter, became a public critic of New Deal programs that competed with private enterprise; as the president of a New York-based business that was the nation’s largest electric utility investment company, he was an outspoken critic of the TVA, which Willkie argued would create government-funded competition for private power companies. Although he had never held an elected office, he rose to become the Republican Party nominee for the 1940 election. While it is hard to say whether she embraced what Willkie stood for as much as she opposed Roosevelt’s federalism, when it came to supporting the people’s power of democratic self-government from below, Jacobs was already “a fierce and rooted partisan.”25
Jacobs’s enthusiasm to leave high school and begin her career in New York found new expression when, finished with Columbia and Constitutional Chaff in late 1940, she could immerse herself again in the “great world of work outside oneself.” Always interested in “how things worked” in her later writing, she would delve into a deep investigation of the “morals and values that underpin viable working life.” But in January 1941, she was happy simply to land a permanent job as a secretary to the managing editor of The Iron Age, a weekly trade magazine for the metals industry published by the Chilton Company, which, through her persistence, would turn into her first full-time writing job. Hardly a dream job, it nevertheless presented an opportunity to support herself, to develop her writing career, and to learn something about the world of work.26
Aligning with her interests in economic geography, The Iron Age would offer Jacobs a bird’s-eye view of an elemental part of the national and regional economy. And being from Scranton, and having some practical understanding of the metals industry from her work at Peter Frasse, as well as some basic knowledge of geology and chemistry from her courses at Columbia, she already had experience and knowledge to build on. Never one to passively accept a job description, she would work to understand it all and make it all work better.
Following a pattern typical of her early years of employment, Jacobs’s efforts and initiative at The Iron Age quickly resulted in a promotion from secretary to editorial assistant. With more responsibilities came the broader horizon of observation that she relished. Among her first tasks had been collecting information about the production rates of blast furnaces and other industry data through telephone calls, and this soon expanded to making weekly trips to Philadelphia and traveling around the Northeast to visit metals industry firms and scrap-metal dealers, to gather news and information on market conditions in person. While the subject matter may have been tedious and specialized—at least until World War II made industrial production, especially of metals, of vital national interest—Jacobs began to develop an understanding of a regional economy, which she would draw on in her later books, even as she became increasingly familiar with a New York-Philadelphia-Washington beat that she would cover again as a writer for Architectural Forum.
Over the next two years, Jacobs accrued greater responsibility and independence as she was promoted to associate editor. While cutting her teeth on the long technical articles that were The Iron Age’s lead stories, she was placed in charge of several small editorial departments, including new products, new literature, and a new metal powders department. By late 1942, she took on such tasks as attending scientific conferences and important industrial meetings throughout New England, the Northeast, the Ohio Valley, and the Midwest, choosing papers to be abstracted in the magazine and developing news items from conference talks. She sought out contributions from scientists and metallurgists directly, worked with them on presenting their ideas, edited their manuscripts, and laid out their articles. When necessary, she visited the magazine’s press in Philadelphia to handle lastminute layout and editing problems, and during a vacation period, she managed the magazine’s Cleveland office—perhaps her first trip to a city that she would later write about for Architectural Forum.
As associate editor, Jacobs also had the autonomy to initiate and write her own features, technical articles, and special projects, and she had the job security—or so she thought—to pursue activities of special interest to her. She continued to travel, visiting mining operations, refiners, fabricators, and other large-scale metals purchasers in order to seek information and ideas for her own articles.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, The Iron Age tapped into the war effort and, although she had been an isolationist before Pearl Harbor, Jacobs found herself on the domestic frontline. Iron Age was soon full of reports of wartime production; photographs of women building airplanes and fashioning bayonets; stories of the latest American, German, and Japanese airplanes, ships, and subs; and advertisements by the makers of helmets, shell casings, tanks, and their suppliers. Jacobs traveled often to Washington, where she visited contacts and officials from various government agencies, including the War Production Board (WPB), the Board of Economic Warfare, the War Department, the Navy, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Labor, to gather news, discover ideas for new articles, and obtain interpretations of facts gleaned elsewhere.
Jacobs’s first bylined article for the magazine, “Non-Ferrous Metals” (as J. I. Butzner), was a comprehensive overview of the new industrial metals landscape, and in it she discussed the supplies and uses of copper, aluminum, magnesium, zinc, tin, lead, and silver by the Army, Navy, Signal Corps, Ordnance Department, and private industry, as well as by allies and enemies. “All the common non-ferrous metals have become precious metals, sought after and hunted down, cherished and pampered, aliens to thoughtless use and ordinary ends,” she reported. Describing the new economics of tin, for example, she reported, “‘Lost by enemy conquest’ is the brief and inexorable reason for the tin shortage. No more tin from Malaya, Thailand, or the Netherlands East Indies. No consolation that the enemy doesn’t have enough either.”27
In writing this long and detailed report on the metallurgical landscape, Jacobs was particularly interested in innovations to deal with shortages. Anticipating her lifelong interest in practical as well as conceptual experimentation (she was later rumored in FBI reports to tinker with inventions herself), she missed no opportunity to discuss creative solutions to shortages in all of the nonferrous metals, as well as future peacetime applications. Also characteristic of her expansive interests, a discussion of silver ranged beyond industrial production, and, for The Iron Age, into unexpected discussions of anthropology, economics, and politics. “Silver is taking a new role in culture,” she observed. “Since man first prized it, it has been primarily a decorative and monetary metal, used in tiny amounts by industry other than the ‘arts.’ In the last year, however, silver has become truly an industrial metal.” Meanwhile, the importance of silver brazing alloys triggered debates over monetary policy and various Senate hearings over whether the Treasury should sell its silver and gold, recalling policy debates introduced to her by Robert Hemphill.28
Two years into her job at The Iron Age, things started to turn sour. Jacobs’s managing editor, T. W. Lippert, was uninterested in the storytelling and editorializing in “Non-Ferrous Metals” and indicated that she should stick to technical writing. In “Silver Alloy Brazing with High-Speed Localized Gas Heating,” Jacobs gave him what he wanted, returning to the subject of silver in mind-numbing metallurgical detail, her tone now as cold as a knife’s edge. Later describing Lippert as a chauvinist, Jacobs also seemed to be showing him that she could write a technical article as well as anyone. And with the editorial authority to select her own illustrations, she seems to have had the last laugh by accompanying her silver alloy article with photographs of young women in flower-print dresses operating radiant gas superheat burners and brazing marine-lighting fixtures.29 She didn’t stop there, however. Jacobs turned her frustrated energy toward trying to unionize the office’s clerical workers, particularly the women; advocating for equal pay; freelance writing; and eventually activism on behalf of her hometown.
Some years later, during the Red Scare of the late 1940s, Lippert told the FBI that Jacobs was “a very brilliant, intelligent young lady,” who initially “conducted herself in a very nice, respectable manner and did her work properly.” (Other colleagues similarly recalled that she was “the type of person who could talk on any subject. … She was a very intelligent person and could do the work of three girls.”) However, Lippert soon found her to be contrary and queer (she sometimes smoked a pipe in the office) and described her as “a trouble-maker and an agitator who would cause trouble no matter where she went.” Looking back on Jacobs’s employment with Iron Age, which ended five years before, Lippert offered that she was probably a communist fellow traveler all along. “She followed the Communist Party line all during her period of employment,” he stated, also suggesting her support of a second front in the war, when Germany attacked Great Britain and Russia, as evidence of her communist sympathies.30
Jacobs’s eccentric behavior was not the issue, however. At the time, the USSR was an ally and Jacobs, the author of a book on the U.S. Constitution, was no communist. Nonetheless, with millions of men going to war, and women taking on new roles in the world of work on the homefront, it was a time of great social change—and changes in the domestic workforce gave new impetus for unionization.
As Jacobs described in two of her freelance articles for the New York Herald Tribune, written in 1942 and 1943, women were taking on the work of men who had gone overseas and were entering fields that were formerly the exclusive domain of men. In her freelance article “Women Wanted to Fill 2,795 Kinds of Jobs,” Jacobs explained that, according to the U.S. Employment Service, five million women entering the workforce in 1943 were taking on many jobs traditionally filled by men. She observed that, before the war, “no women were listed as electricians, welders, draftsmen, or engine-lathe operators” in the Employment Service directories. “Women are working now at all of these classifications,” she wrote, “and before the end of the war probably will have tackled the whole list and more.” She went on to joke about the manly titles of some service directory jobs—antisqueak men, blow-off men, hotbed men, sweater men, keep-off men, and odd-shoe men—but her point, in all seriousness, was that “it can hardly be said that any occupation is absolutely unsuitable for women.” Within the military, as Jacobs reported in “Waves and Waacs Go Through Assignment Classification Mill,” another freelance article, the trend was similar, with women in the Navy and Army auxiliary units “doing virtually every operation that male officers do ashore.”31
Having established that women worked as well as or better than men in industry, Jacobs concluded that a discussion of equal pay naturally followed. As she later explained to the Loyalty Security Board in 1949, which was suspicious of communist infiltration of U.S. unions during the Red Scare, any arguments that she used to convince others to join a union in the early 1940s were “solely to do with wages, particularly equalization of pay between men and women for similar work, and job security. Neither my motives nor my comments regarding unionization had anything to do with political ideologies.” Collective bargaining was simply a tool for advocating basic equality.32
Moreover, although Lippert later described these activities as evidence of Jacobs’s communist sympathies, he admitted that Jacobs had told him of her intentions at the time and that he had respected the workers’ freedom of choice in the matter. The subject was then in no way out of the ordinary. After the labor movements of the 1920s and 1930s, union membership was common in New York workplaces. And Jacobs’s union was hardly radical at a time when liberal politics in New York were robust, with socialist and communist groups being a significant presence in the political landscape, even in city government. (Two avowed communists held seats on the New York City Council during the war years.) Jacobs’s union, the Book and Magazine Local of the United Office and Professional Workers of America International, was a mainstream choice, moderate in comparison with others.
Thus, when Lippert apparently fired Jacobs (or “let her terminate her services”) in November 1943, it was not her politics that were the issue so much as that she had become so absorbed in projects extraneous to the magazine’s primary business and was “taking so much time from her work to engage in these activities” that she was no longer focused on her job.33
Frustrated by the lack of opportunities to write her own articles and clearly constrained by the technical writing format, Jacobs spent an increasing amount of time on freelance work, becoming a regular freelancer for the Herald Tribune starting in February 1942. She eventually contributed over twenty Sunday feature articles, frequently the cover stories of the Science, Education, or Editorial sections. Likely irritating Lippert further, these articles sometimes expanded on her research and work for Iron Age— although from her point of view, the freelance versions told the larger and more important human and urban stories denied by Iron Age’s technical focus.
One of these, “Trylon’s Steel Helps to Build Big New Nickel Plant in Cuba,” described the reuse of the steel from the New York World’s Fair “Trylon” and other abandoned buildings to construct a new mining operation in Cuba. Jacobs had mentioned the new plant, which would offset a significant portion of the U.S. wartime nickel shortage, in her article “Non-Ferrous Metals.” There, however, she was not permitted to discuss the geographic, cultural, and economic transformation of the Cuban peninsula on which the plant and three new towns were being built. Particularly interested in the way that the location of the plant had caused the towns to grow, she wrote, “Until last May [1942], the palm-covered peninsula was inhabited only by one family of Cuban subsistence farmers living in a tiny shack. Now 6,000 construction workers and engineers have built a railroad, pier, roads, and housing, and are working twenty hours a day pushing to completion about fifteen plant buildings.” The story likely reminded Jacobs of her time in rural Appalachia, and it was reminiscent of her essays on New York’s working districts, while also anticipating her books on city economies.34
Apart from freelance writing and encouraging her colleagues to advocate for equal pay, a third activity that grew out of her work and frustrations at The Iron Age was organizing a campaign to protest the policies of the WPB and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which Jacobs believed were contributing to the economic decline of her hometown of Scranton. In doing so, Jacobs combined her writing and activism for the first time, bringing together her interests in cities and urban economies in an effort that ultimately resulted in an outcome that would encourage her later work on behalf of cities.
Jacobs’s Scranton campaign began in late 1942, about a year into the war effort, and focused on bringing attention to the city as an attractive location for war production. She knew the city, of course, from having lived there, but she also understood the larger industrial landscape from her visits to metals industries in the Northeast and her visits to war production agencies in Washington. Further armed in April 1942 with a report by the Federal Anthracite Coal Commission, which recommended the Scranton region for war plants, she helped to organize a targeted letter-writing campaign with the Scranton Chamber of Commerce, a local foundation, and a local newspaper.
As Jacobs reported in “30,000 Unemployed and 7,000 Empty Houses in Scranton, Neglected City”—an unbylined “News of Industry” section story published in Iron Age in March 1943—the city was one of “eighty-two paradoxical industrial areas of unemployment and empty houses” being underutilized at the same time when manpower and housing were in short supply in war production centers. Nevertheless, she reported that it had proved difficult to convince government officials of the city’s merits:
Since the first of the year, letters have been written to 400 officials of the Army, Navy, and WPB, setting forth in detail, in many instances with charts and figures, what Scranton has in surplus electric power, labor, sites, transportation, etc. More than 300 answers have been received and have been examined by a member of The Iron Age staff [Jacobs]. They provide a post-graduate course in the run-around.35
Jacobs’s meeting with the office of a Pennsylvania senator, Joseph Guffey, who was also the chairman of the Senate’s Mines and Mining Committee, proved equally frustrating and quickly turned unpleasant. Talks with the senator’s aide collapsed when Jacobs was told that the Scranton region had been declining for years and that a few war plants would not help. When Jacobs countered that this opinion conflicted with the findings of the Federal Anthracite Coal Commission, the aide asked “whether his questioner wanted information or an argument.”36
Jacobs must have known that the senator was right about Scranton, and in this sense she may indeed have acted the part of a civic-minded troublemaker. She had, after all, left the city because of the general economic decline that followed the collapse of the coal mining industry, and, as she reported in “30,000 Unemployed,” another twenty thousand people from Scranton had since left the city for “crowded war boom cities.” She understood the magnetism of great cities, of course. As she wrote in “Waves and Waacs,” an article written within days of the Scranton piece, “Location is a prime concern with the girls. Most want to be in New York or some other metropolitan center.”37
Thus, although it was decades before she wrote on urban and regional economies in The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs probably knew that, despite any new factories, Scranton’s postwar fate would remain fundamentally unchanged. Indeed, her attempts to cajole the politicians and WPB to promote industrial relocations in Scranton was, in the context of her general mistrust of bureaucracy, an unusual engagement with the government in pursuit of federal intervention. It was a memorably frustrating encounter with what she later described in Systems of Survival as the “guardian moral syndrome.”
The story about Scranton’s “30,000 Unemployed” was nevertheless an important short-term success for Jacobs and the city. Making the first of many public speeches for local causes, the twenty-six-year-old was a keynote speaker at a labor protest rally in Scranton’s Casino Hall, a downtown theater. In her speech, as with her article, Jacobs called on the government to utilize the resources of the region for the war effort, in fulfillment of recommendations of the president’s economic commission. She also followed up on her Iron Age piece with a freelance story in the Herald Tribune and another, “Daily’s Effort Saves City from ‘Ghost Town’ Fate,” in Editor & Publisher. “For the first time in U.S. history,” Jacobs boasted, “a mining town whose veins of mineral wealth have been worked out is avoiding a ghost town fate.” Read by newspaper editors and executives around the country, more than three hundred newspapers picked up the story, leading a number of small companies and the Murray Corporation’s factory for Boeing B-29 wings to locate their operations in Scranton.38
The success of Jacobs’s campaign to save Scranton from a “ghost town fate” was such that a representative of the city’s Chamber of Commerce recommended that March 25, 1943—the date of Jacobs’s article in Iron Age—should “go down in the history of Scranton as IRON AGE Day, for that day marks the turning point in Scranton’s history.” Had her article carried her byline, and Iron Age given credit where it was due, it might have been “Jane Butzner Day.” The magazine was pleased to take credit and ran a two-page spread promoting itself. Although it included her name, the Scranton Tribune did the same with a one-page ad that highlighted the newspaper’s role in publicizing the manufacturing campaign. Later that year, in September 1943, The Scrantonian finally recognized Jacobs’s efforts directly with the headline “Ex-Scranton Girl Helps Home City: Miss Butzner’s Story in Iron Age Brought Nationwide Publicity.”39
Two months later, Jacobs left Iron Age. Although her first writing job had been a frustrating one, she would leave with a sense of the power of her writing, as well as a feeling for writing itself as an activist project— something that she would return to in earnest with Death and Life.
In the autumn of 1943, Jacobs left Iron Age and joined the war effort as a propaganda writer for the U.S. government. In November, she applied for a position with the News and Features Bureau of the OWI, located in the Argonaut Building, General Motors’ former New York headquarters at the corner of 57th Street and Broadway. She was hired as a feature writer for the Overseas Division, and on November 29 she signed the OWI’s Declaration of Secrecy, which charged her to bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America, to serve the country honestly and faithfully against all their enemies whomsoever, and to keep secret any information about the OWI’s purposes and methods of propaganda and psychological warfare. One of her last freelance articles for the Herald Tribune, which was about the U.S. Army’s Air Force magazine, may have helped her application; it received praise from Henry Arnold, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces.40
For the next two years, Jacobs served with conviction, honed her writing and editing skills, and earned praise and promotion from her supervisors. Less than a year into her work for the OWI, Jacobs handled many of the bureau’s top assignments, including special psychological warfare articles for European outposts. In October 1944, her bureau chief observed that she had “developed into one of the mainstays of the feature-writing staff.” Two things, he noted, had been responsible for this: Jacobs’s “quick grasp of the propaganda job to be done, and her ability to do a fast, efficient and well-handled piece of work with any assignment given her.”41
The nature of Jacobs’s propaganda work during the war, at least what is known about it, was not especially cunning. It was not unlike her freelance work. More public relations than misinformation, much of her work consisted of telling the story of the United States and its government, people, and way of life. She sometimes worked with overseas intelligence services to monitor and respond to false information in foreign media, whether borne of ignorance or counterintelligence, and she may have contributed to reports that overstated U.S. war production, military readiness, and the like. Jacobs was engaged, in other words, in what she called the guardian moral syndrome, which applied particularly in wartime. Characteristics of this mentality, moral system, or “syndrome,” as she defined it in Systems of Survival—after the Greek word meaning “things that run together”—included being nationalistic, shunning exchange, exerting prowess, being obedient and disciplined, respecting hierarchy and tradition, maintaining territory, and deceiving for the sake of the task.42
All of these guardian qualities were exemplified in her work for the OWI, but this was not the moral system that best suited Jacobs’s nature, and her work for the government during World War II and the Cold War likely helped her to come to understand this about herself. Although it was years before she formulated the distinctions between the guardian and the trader moral systems—and explicitly expressed her identification with the trader system—she already prized exchange; valued dissent; was open to initiative, enterprise, inventiveness, and novelty; shunned force; believed in voluntary agreement; and collaborated easily with strangers and aliens. All of these characteristics were part of the trader, or exchange-oriented, moral system described in Systems of Survival.43
FIGURE 11. Jane Jacobs, ca. 1945, around the time she left the OWI and joined the State Department’s publication branch. Jacobs Papers.
Thus, although the trader moral system was generally inappropriate during wartime, Jacobs was inevitably oriented by its principles in her propaganda work. Whether by temperament, security classification, or previous experience, most of her writing assignments were articles and pamphlets about American history, government, and culture for use by U.S. Information Libraries, especially in nonaligned nations. Drawing on her research for Constitutional Chaff, she wrote a pamphlet about the United States for distribution to Indian troops at the request of the British government. It outlined U.S. history and the country’s system of government, cultural achievements, productivity, education system, and social status of women and minorities. A series of articles about the history of American labor, which was used in magazines in Switzerland and other countries, drew on her own experience with unionization, as well as her support for the American Labor Party (ALP) in the 1940s. (Jacobs volunteered for ALP’s candidate for Congress, Roger Baldwin.) A weekly column on aspects of American culture whose topics were chosen by Jacobs, and other articles in a light but informative vein, including biographies of noted figures in U.S. government, education, business, and culture, were written for placement in foreign newspapers and magazines in Portugal and Spain, Sweden and Iceland, Switzerland, and the Soviet Union—countries for which Jacobs served as a special liaison.44
Jacobs already identified with the trader moral system. There is evidence that she consciously regarded her propaganda work as a straightforward act of communication and exchange rather than of deception. Moreover, during the same years that she worked for the OWI, she became interested in interpersonal dynamics and social structures as their own subjects of study.
In March 1944, soon after she began her work at the OWI, Jane met Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr. They married in May with a modest ceremony, officiated by a pastor from a local Presbyterian church, at the Butzner home, and she became Jane Jacobs in name. A honeymoon of bicycling in northern Pennsylvania and upstate New York followed.
A year younger than she, Bob Jacobs had attended Bard College before graduating from Columbia University’s School of Architecture with a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1942. After that, he went into Columbia’s “In-Training Program in Aircraft” as part of the war effort. In the early 1960s, he taught as an adjunct associate professor of architecture at Columbia and specialized in hospital design. When they met, however, Bob worked for Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation on Long Island, where her sister, Betty, also worked as a designer and engineer. Jane and Betty had moved out of Hemphill’s Morton Street apartment in October 1935, and Bob joined them at 82 Washington Place until 1947, when Bob and Jane, going against the grain, had saved enough money to buy a three-story “slum building” at 555 Hudson Street. While Betty would later move to the middle-class Stuyvesant Town project, the Jacobses renovated the decrepit storefront building, formerly a convenience store situated between Mr. Halpert’s laundry and Mr. Koochagian’s tailor shop, on a block of other storefront businesses described in Jacobs’s famous Hudson Street ballet. With little money themselves, the Jacobses’ renovation project exemplified the unslumming she later wrote about. What Jacobs managed to prove, a reporter later noted, was that her neighborhood may have been low-rent, but it was not a slum.45
Bob Jacobs would have a great influence on Jane’s thinking. He knew a great deal about modern architecture in theory and practice, as well as New York City, having learned a lot about the city’s organization and workings from his father. Robert H. Jacobs Sr., a transportation engineer, was born in upstate New York and had worked as a division engineer for New York City’s transportation department during the city’s subway design and construction building boom. Jane Jacobs’s critiques of modern architecture and transportation planning, in other words, were shaped in part by having a modern architect for a husband and a transportation engineer for a father-in-law.
Of her husband, she wrote in the acknowledgments to Death and Life, “by this time I do not know which ideas in this book are mine and which are his.” Their partnership would also include activist work. She later described him as the political mastermind behind many of their neighborhood battles.46
Apart from bicycling (other bike trips would follow), in 1945 one of the couple’s early shared activities was joining the American Sociometric Association. Founded in New York by the psychiatrist-sociologist Jacob L. Moreno, the organization sought to advance the study of the foundations of human society and interpersonal relations. Moreno, whose early theory of “the encounter” influenced Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” thesis on the interpersonal nature of human existence, had a particularly metropolitan sensibility. Moreno later wrote that it was “only in New York, the melting pot of the nations, the vast metropolis, with all its ethnic and psychological problems and its freedom from all preconceived notions,” that he could fully explore the concepts of sociometric group research. Moreno, who had criticized Freud for destroying the spontaneity of everyday life in the artificial and intimidating setting of his office, believed that it was only “on the street” and in people’s natural surroundings that social dynamics could be effectively studied.47
This geographic and urban sensibility, as well as Moreno’s emphasis on “concreteness” in his study of social systems, likely appealed to Jacobs. “We have to consider every individual in his concreteness and not as a symbol, and every relationship he may bear to each other person or persons in its concreteness and not as a symbol,” wrote Moreno. He believed that sociometry could “produce as a counterpart of the physical geography of the world, a psychological geography of human society.” At a more practical level, he believed that sociometry could be considered “the cornerstone of a still undeveloped science of democracy.” Influenced by John Dewey’s writing on democracy, Moreno wrote, “Sociometry can assist the United States, with its population consisting of practically all the races on the globe, in becoming an outstanding and permanent example of a society which has no need of extraneous ideas or of forces which are not inherent in its own structure.”48
These ideas were especially appealing to many during the war years, especially after the horrific bombings of Japan in August 1945. Across the nation and around the world, people sought new ways to rebuild an international dialogue. In October 1945, the United Nations was formed. Within the American Sociometric Association, members, including the anthropologist Margaret Mead, sought ways of building intercultural tolerance, assisting war veterans, and studying American attitudes toward the Soviet Union in order to prevent future conflict.49
Although the extent of Jacobs’s engagement with sociometry seems to have been brief, her membership in the society suggests self-consciousness of the intersubjective sensibility that she brought to her writing, including her propaganda work. As she later suggested in discussing her work for the OWI, she served the war effort not with an ambition to be duplicitous, but with the goals of an empathetic writer. She explained that “in writing these, and other, articles [for the OWI], it was necessary for me to have gained an insight into misapprehensions concerning America current abroad; a basic understanding of which common facets of American life are totally unfamiliar abroad; facets of the American scene likely to elicit the greatest interest and admiration; and methods of giving foundation and background knowledge without becoming pedestrian.”50
This sensibility, which was certainly typical of her thinking and writing, posited a dialogic process between writer and reader, based on an assumption of the other’s intelligence and point of view. While Jacobs’s dialogue books—Systems of Survival and The Nature of Economies—made this explicit, her work as a propagandist caused her to become more conscious of her native empathetic orientation. Jacobs certainly sharpened her rhetorical weapons during her years of work for the government, but what was more exceptional about her approach was its apparent similarity to what she did before and after the World War and Cold War—including her writing and thinking about cities. In approaching war propaganda as she would most any writing, through the trader moral system, her propaganda was a bridge-building effort. However, as might be expected, this approach would soon cause her trouble with those who believed that any honest and open-minded communication with the enemy was suspect.51
The end of World War II allowed the OWI to be shut down. Anticipating her last paycheck in December 1945, Jacobs searched for new work. She took on freelance writing projects that kept her busy until October 1946, when she returned to government work and a nearly identical job for the State Department at the Argonaut Building.52
In her freelance work of the late 1940s, Jacobs cast a wide net and hauled in a mix of unexpected projects. Taking advantage of her experiences at Iron Age and a sixty-three-hour training course in physical metallurgy that she completed shortly before leaving the magazine, she edited numerous technical articles for Powder Metallurgy Bulletin and a textbook published by Macmillan called Powder Metallurgy. She wrote an article on Christmas traditions for Junior Bazaar and several articles on New York State government for The Empire Statesman. Closer to her special interests in geography and human ecology, she wrote an essay for Harper’s Bazaar on coastal islands between North Carolina and Maine, in which she “studied the way of life of their people, researched their history, and interpreted the changes in island life which had occurred,” following the pattern of her early essays on the city.53
Other projects included editing a book on historical anthropology, about which little is known, and writing memoirs for others, including a popular memoir of wartime intelligence work in the South Pacific by the Royal Australian Navy commander Eric Feldt called The Coast Watchers, published by Oxford University Press in 1946. For Feldt’s book, Jacobs took satisfaction not just in organizing the chaotic bundle of material and maps handed to her, but also in interpreting the author’s intentions and translating them for an American audience. “One portion of the task entailed making everything understandable to American readers without loss of the distinctively Australian character of the account,” she wrote. “To do this,” she continued, “I applied in reverse, so to speak, the special knowledge I had gained at the Office of War Information of the techniques of writing for a foreign readership.”54
Another notable project that Jacobs pursued in December 1945 was a writing trip to Siberia. Editors at the New York Herald Tribune, Harper’s Magazine, Oxford University Press, and Natural History all expressed great interest in her proposal for a feature article, and with their letters in hand, Jacobs and her husband applied for visas at the Soviet consulates in New York and Washington on three occasions. Their visa applications were ignored. Perhaps aware that she had worked for the OWI, the Soviets may have considered her a potential spy, but more likely they wanted to avoid any sightseeing trips in the vicinity of Stalin’s gulag prison camps.
Without visas, the project never materialized, but it would haunt her. Although the Soviet Union was still an ally when she conceived the project, her desire to visit the USSR became cause for suspicion in 1948, when the FBI investigated her for communist sympathies and connections to a suspected espionage ring. Although tensions between the United States and USSR had been growing, only months before her visa applications, Stalin had indicated his willingness to enter the Pacific War. The Soviet Union was, moreover, not only part of Jacobs’s OWI assignment, but, as she indicated in response to a second investigation by the FBI and Loyalty Security Board in 1949, there was considerable curiosity in America about Soviet life and Siberia at the time.
Moreover, a trip to Russia would help her write a very salable story, and it was natural that Jacobs, who had been part of the OWI’s USSR team, would be interested to see the country. While at the OWI, her group had launched a Russian-language magazine, the outcome of an agreement to exchange information, which was drafted by Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, shortly before the war’s end. Known as Little Amerika, it was the precursor of the larger, full-color magazine Amerika Illiustrirovannoye, or Amerika Illustrated, which Jacobs focused on while at the State Department’s Russian Magazine Section, part of its International Press and Publications Division.55
In the months between Jacobs’s employment with the OWI and her return as a staff writer for the State Department in October 1946, Amerika had been reimagined as a lavishly illustrated magazine modeled on Life. As Time reported in 1946, “Little Amerika left the Russians cold; Amerika Illustrated was hot stuff.” Full of pictures and stories, many written by Jacobs, of quintessentially American scenes—Arizona deserts, TVA dams, Radio City Music Hall, the bluegrass country, the Senate in session, New York and Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, and Manhattan’s garment district—the magazine quickly became a popular and coveted object in the USSR. Unlike its exchange counterpart (Soviet Life), Amerika reportedly generated long lines at Soviet newsstands and black-market prices, which were only increased by distribution problems and a limited initial circulation of ten thousand copies. Although circulation was expanded to fifty thousand, and although Amerika’s official price in 1946 was 10 rubles (83 cents) a copy, “in the black market Russians have eagerly paid 1,000 rubles ($83) for a look at the Amerika most of them will never see, except in pictures.”56
Despite the pictures and greatly increased production budget, Amerika published articles very similar to those that Jacobs had first written for the OWI. The public relations mission was much the same: to present a sympathetic and appealing vision of how Americans lived, worked, and played. To this end, in addition to presenting the most favorable aspects of American history and culture in specially written or commissioned articles, Amerika reproduced articles from a variety of U.S. publications like Life, Fortune, and Architectural Forum. The approach was “strictly factual, never boasting, and never political. Never are there any direct criticisms of the worker’s paradise.” Comparing Soviet Life and Amerika in 1956, the Christian Science Monitor observed, “Both put their countries’ best foot forward. Both emphasize the good things of life, the cultural interests of their people, their sports, and home life. Both steer clear of any political arguments or dialectics.”57
For Jacobs, Amerika was thus another opportunity for genuine cultural exchange. Although she indicated in her State Department application that she had viewed her previous propaganda work as no less straightforward than everyday communication during the Cold War, her viewpoint nevertheless became increasingly suspect.
Jacobs worked for Amerika for close to six years, one of a staff of some twenty people, including five Russian editors and translators. As a “publications writer,” she was required to be knowledgeable about American history, institutions, politics, and customs and to have a basic understanding of the history and psychology of the Russian people, in addition to creative literary ability, the ability to work simultaneously with words and pictures, and an understanding of the State Department’s objectives. Her day-to-day tasks included a responsibility for proposing, planning, developing, and writing “the more difficult and complex articles and those dealing with delicate and controversial subjects for publication.” Because they were producing an illustrated magazine, writers and editors thought carefully about the combination of text and images, and she worked closely with a photographer and illustrators to choose the best images to accompany each article.58
FIGURE 13. Cover of Amerika no. 43, which focused on urban redevelopment. Columbia University Libraries.
Jacobs recognized that the subject matter was “often potentially controversial, as respects our readership (e.g., articles on facets of the American economic system, the press, the U.S. system of government, the American legal structure) and must be treated with discrimination and judgment, to convince rather than to antagonize.” During the Cold War, Soviet newspapers tended to emphasize the worst aspects of American life—crime, homelessness, unemployment, and racism—while also spreading rumors that the majority of the U.S. population was poor and threatened by starvation. Stories were also subject to Soviet censorship, and the goal was to avoid that. A great deal of time was invested in the development, writing, translation, and review process for each article. With all of these parameters in mind, Jacobs understood that her magazine’s writing required not only “clear, interesting, and literate presentation,” but also “a constant consciousness of the appropriate choice of words, specific facts and types of logic necessary to create the precise impression desired upon a Russian readership which is much misinformed by its own press regarding America and lacks background information, both in detail and in the large, which is taken for granted by Americans.”59
FIGURE 14. Betty Butzner Manson, Jane’s sister, holds an infant and stands with a friend outside a new A&P grocery store near Stuyvesant Town, where Betty lived. The photo was taken in early 1948 and published in Amerika no. 23. Around the time of this issue, Jacobs modeled maternity clothes for a feature in the magazine. In the same year, John Jacobs, Bob’s cousin, joined the magazine’s staff. Columbia University Libraries.
As she gained experience and responsibility, Jacobs participated increasingly in editorial and planning meetings in which articles, sequence, and overall magazine impact were decided. She also supervised article and overall magazine graphics; supervised and edited junior writers’ work; evaluated research material; and assigned and edited freelance work. She had greater discretion in initiating contact with and interviewing prominent figures for original magazine articles in all fields, from politics to science to culture, as well as in soliciting reprinted articles from other magazines and books.
The work, in other words, was, for the most part, what she had long wanted, a permanent editorial position with a magazine of some substance and significance. Despite its unique mission, Amerika offered Jacobs welcome opportunities to pitch and write almost any story of interest to her and to be in contact with the editors of other magazines in the city from whom she could solicit stories of interest. She excelled at the job, and, not long after a maternity leave in 1948 for her son Jimmy (James Kedzie Jacobs), she was formally promoted to publications editor in November 1949. By that time, she was already fulfilling many of the responsibilities of the chief of the Russian Magazine Section. As she wrote in explanation of her request for promotion in September 1949, “My supervisory and planning responsibilities have consistently grown and now occupy approximately seventy-five percent of my time; the remainder being devoted to developing and writing of complex articles.”60
Following another maternity leave in 1950 for her son Ned (Edward Decker Jacobs), Jacobs was formally promoted to chief of the Pamphlets and Graphics Unit in October 1951. As an editor-in-chief, she planned future articles; reviewed story ideas; worked closely with the copy and publications editors and the art director; critically analyzed all copy by staff, senior writers, and outside contractors; and interviewed, hired, and supervised freelance writers. She had come a long way since writing her first freelance articles fifteen years earlier.61
Having served her country, earned the respect of her colleagues, received excellent reviews from her supervisors, and otherwise dedicated herself to her work for Amerika, Jacobs was probably not worried to receive a letter from the FBI in April 1948, indicating that they would be conducting a background check on her. The U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (the Smith-Mundt Act), required government employees like her to fill out a personnel data form for review. In particular, the law required the State Department to “take all appropriate steps to prevent any agent of a foreign power from participating in educational and cultural exchange programs” regulated by the new law, including Amerika and short-wave broadcasts by the Voice of America.62 (The latter, originally a counterpropaganda project created by the OWI, was transferred to the State Department after the war’s end, along with Amerika.)
However, the law was part of the growth of America’s “second Red Scare,” which had previously seen President Truman sign an executive order called the Loyalty Order in March 1947. The order required the establishment of loyalty programs within federal government departments, and the State Department accordingly established its Loyalty Security Board, whose activities would, at first, seem rather pro forma to Jacobs. What began as a pro forma background check in 1948, however, turned into a four-year investigation, the extent of which Jacobs was perhaps unaware; it lasted until Amerika was shut down and she resigned from the State Department in 1952.
Indeed, unbeknownst to Jacobs, she had already drawn the attention of security authorities. Her application for a visa to visit Siberia in December 1945 had sent up red flags with SODAC, the FBI’s Soviet Diplomatic Activities unit, and was recorded in a 1946 security file. As part of an exchange of information agreement, Secretary (and NKVD/KGB agent) Pavel Fedosimov of the Soviet Consulate General in New York City reported to U.S. authorities that Jacobs and her husband had applied for a visa and had been learning Russian in anticipation of their visit.63
The real trigger for the FBI’s investigation of Jacobs and her husband, however, was her contact with Alger Hiss, whom the FBI had been investigating as early as 1945. Various FBI informants had claimed that Hiss, a State Department employee since 1936, had been a communist and a Soviet agent. Unaware of this, in 1945, Jacobs had turned to Hiss, one of her supervisors at the State Department, for assistance in applying for her Soviet visa, and he referred her to contacts at the Soviet Embassy. Moreover, in 1948—at just the time that all of Hiss’s State Department-Soviet interactions were being investigated—Jacobs listed Alger Hiss as a personal reference on her 1948 investigation data form. And so, in June 1948, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, wrote a memo stating that the pro forma background investigation of Jane Jacobs should become part of the larger “Voice of America” investigation concerning Hiss.64
A few months later, in August 1948, Hiss appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where he was accused of being a former Communist Party member. Following additional accusations and court trials, in January 1950, he was charged with perjury (not espionage) and sentenced to five years in prison. In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy made an infamous speech in which he claimed to have a list of known communists who were working in and shaping policy in the State Department. Jacobs was likely among them. McCarthy was adamant that all State Department employees who had transferred from war agencies like the OWI, especially those associated with “the now-convicted traitor” Hiss, be investigated. As he explained in a speech made to the Senate on February 20, McCarthy believed that there were “thousands of unusual characters in some of those war agencies” and that they required additional screening.65
McCarthy was aware that the majority of war agency transfers had been screened prior to their reemployment. For Jacobs, this would have taken place in early 1946, between her employment for the OWI and State Department. Moreover, McCarthy was aware of the activities of the Loyalty Security Board. However, he claimed that while “approximately 4,000 employees [had] been transferred to the Department of State from various war agencies such as the OSS, FEA, OWI, OIAA, and so forth,” one thousand of these had not been subjected to a preliminary examination. Recognizing his political motivation, the Washington Post coined the term “McCarthyism” in a March 1950 political cartoon.66
The FBI’s investigation of Jacobs was personally supervised by Hoover on account of the connection to Hiss. Agents questioned her friends and family members; former teachers, neighbors, and landlords; and former and current neighbors, employers, coworkers, and personal references around the country. By October 1948, agents had conducted no fewer than thirteen interviews. The most clearly reliable informants were emphatic that Jacobs was loyal to her country. However, some—including T. W. Lippert (her former supervisor at The Iron Age), a disgruntled former coworker, and some old Greenwich Village neighbors—made disparaging remarks about her character and offered suspicions of her politics and communist sympathies. Coming remarkably close to Jacobs’s self-described approach to communicating with a foreign readership, one informant told an FBI agent that Jacobs “was always trying to present as closely as possible the picture of the average working man in America as being identical with the average working man in Russia,” which the informant felt was untrue and therefore made her “a bad security risk.”67
FIGURE 16. Senator Joseph McCarthy (seated) giving a press conference in 1950. McCarthy targeted State Department employees like Jacobs. Getty Images.
Supplied with such information by the FBI, in mid-1949, the State Department’s Loyalty Security Board interrogated her for the first time, asking Jacobs to reply to questions concerning her union membership, her voting registration with the communist-infiltrated ALP in the 1940s, her support or affiliation with the Communist Party, subscriptions to communist literature, her proposed trip to Siberia, her association with suspect individuals, and why a former employer had described her as a “trouble-maker.”68
In early 1950, around the time Hiss was convicted of perjury, Jacobs was placed on probationary status at the State Department pending further investigation, despite a recent promotion. A few months later she was required to sign yet another Oath of Office; the document had recently been updated to include a new affidavit regarding subversive activity and affiliation, which required government personnel to affirm that they were not “Communists or Fascists.”
In 1952, at the height of McCarthyism, Jacobs was interrogated again by the Loyalty Security Board. This time, perhaps aware for the first time that she was the subject of unusual attention, she replied at length to repeated questions about her union membership and activities, including her membership in a prohibited union of federal employees, the United Public Workers of America; her views on communism and foreign policy; her ALP affiliation; her alleged subscription to the Daily Worker; her association with suspect individuals; and her views on the Communist Party, the Soviet system of government, and the aims and policies of the Soviet Union.69
When first asked by the Loyalty Security Board about her suspected affiliation with the Communist Party and its front organizations, Jacobs had replied that she thought “too much of the Bill of Rights to become involved with that party,” assuming that a short but succinct answer would suffice. When writing at greater length on the subject in 1952, however, she explained that, in contrast to the Soviet system, she believed in decentralized, participatory, and local self-government, with “control from below and support from above”; free and uncensored experimentation, innovation, and self-expression; and humanity and moderation. She wrote:
I abhor the Soviet system of government, for I fear and despise the whole concept of a government which takes as its mission the molding of people into a specific “kind of man,” i.e. “Soviet Man”; that practices and extols a conception of the state as “control from above and support from below” (I believe in control from below and support from above); that controls the work of artists, musicians, architects and scientists; that controls what people read and attempts to control what people think; that turns every agency of society, as unions, schools, recreational clubs, and all economic and production activities, into instruments for the state’s purposes; that centralizes into the monolithic state every activity which should properly be controlled locally or by individuals; that makes free experimentation in any field, from manufacturing to teaching, impossible; that leaves its people without channels to express their opinions on, or to direct, the basic questions of national policy; that deals with opposition by executing, imprisoning, transporting or otherwise silencing dissidents. I think the Soviet system, in common with all totalitarian government, is a system which, once instituted, inevitably makes people the helpless victims of those with an appetite for power. I think that, as a system, it therefore puts a premium on the cynical and the ruthless, and that its methods automatically tend to elevate to power people with these qualities and to eliminate from positions of power the humane and the moderate. I believe that it subordinates every other human value to the purpose of power—power over its own citizens and power internationally among nations.70
She explained further that she believed that the fight against communism would be won by showing that it is possible to overcome poverty, misery, and decay by democratic means. “We must ourselves believe, and must show others, that our American tradition of the dignity and liberty of the individual is not a luxury for easy times but is the basic source of the strength and security of a successful society,” she wrote.71
As for her admitted penchant for argumentation and critique, Jacobs defended herself by deploying her rhetorical skills and turning her questioners’ questions around, arguing that her fondness for “chewing over odd ideas” was perfectly consistent with American rights and ideals of individualism and free speech. She believed in “the right of Communists, or anyone else, to speak and publish and promulgate ideas in the United States,” just as much as she believed in her own right to “criticize my government and my Congress.” She stated, moreover, that this was a personal credo that must be collectively defended for the good of the nation:
I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment. I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant. I was made to feel that it would be a disgrace to me, as an individual, if I should not value or should give up rights that were dearly bought.72
In a coup de grâce, she argued, finally, that the greatest threats to American democracy were not from without but within. Identifying two such threats—“the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them”—she wrote, “In the case of the first threat, the international threat of Communist systems of government, I have been able to do something practical through my work in the State Department. In the case of the second threat, that of McCarthy—or of the frame of mind of which McCarthy is an apt symbol—there is little practical that I could do other than take a stand in assertion of my own rights.”73
Although it is hard to imagine that someone at the Loyalty Security Board was not moved by these heartfelt words, in March 1952, the State Department announced that its Publications Branch would be shut down and moved from Manhattan to Washington, DC, a move that Jacobs and her coworkers protested. As reported in the New York Times, nearly seventy of the department’s seventy-five staff members refused to relocate, and the branch chief, Marion K. Sanders, Jacobs’s immediate supervisor, quit in protest of the reorganization plan. The Times supported the protest; a June 1952 editorial explained that the United States “has only two means of communicating with the people of the Soviet Union: the Voice of America broadcasts—which are more or less successfully jammed—and Amerika.” If Amerika was abolished, it continued, the Soviet censors would win.74
Although it was many years before Jacobs wrote about the trader and guardian moral syndromes in Systems of Survival, the symbolism of Amerika’s move from New York, city of exchange, to Washington, city of government guardians, was unlikely lost on the younger Jacobs. From the time of her first essays on New York’s working districts, she recognized that the city was largely synonymous with exchange; she may also have remembered Pirenne’s histories of the growth of the middle class, municipal institutions, and freedom from hierarchal powers as the merchant class claimed power from religious authority. One of Jacobs’s coworkers, quoted in another Times editorial, observed that moving Amerika from New York to Washington “removes publication specialists from the New York area, where our nation’s printing, photographic art, and editorial facilities are concentrated. For those who believed that Amerika’s mission was to exchange information, its purpose was thus undermined, in various ways, by the move.75
Like many of her colleagues, Jacobs refused the move to Washington (which was apparently expected) and, in April 1952, she submitted her resignation as chief of the Pamphlets and Graphics Unit, Magazine Section, Publications Branch, International Press Service, effective May 2. This had the benefit, apparently unknown to her, of ending her investigation by the FBI, and it provided her with the opportunity for a career change in the U.S. capital of the publishing world. Through Amerika, which frequently borrowed articles and images from other magazines, she had connections, as well as a résumé that included skills such as managing staff; working on layout, graphics, and production; and having a background as a senior writer and general editor. With experience writing and editing articles on topics including American architecture, U.S. cities, and urban redevelopment for Amerika (and a husband who was an architect and an architecture magazine subscriber), she started work with Architectural Forum in May.
Although Jacobs was soon employed as an associate editor at a Time, Incorporated, publication, and free of the interrogatories and communist hysteria, her encounters with McCarthyism contributed to her lifelong suspicion of “control from above” and the “dominant opinion of the moment.” Even unaware of the extent of the suspicions against her, the idea that someone who was so deeply invested in the traditions of American idealism, who had authored a book on the U.S. Constitution, and who had faithfully served the war effort and government was engaged in “un-American activities was embittering.
In the decade ahead, she would unleash her frustrations in a counterattack against the Urban Renewal Administration and its cronies in Death and Life. When she came to realize the problems, she was only emboldened in taking what, for many years, was a minority position about urban redevelopment. An ideal architectural and urban design critic, she considered dissent to be both a personal and a national tradition. In her 1952 interrogatory, she wrote of a distant Quaker relative, a woman who believed in “women’s rights and women’s brains and who had “set up her own little printing press to publish her own works without a masculine nom de plume.” She recalled Virginian ancestors who had opposed slavery, secession, and their state’s participation in the Civil War, and a grandfather who ran for Congress on the Greenback-Labor platform in 1872. Speaking of third parties like the Greenback party, which supported labor rights and women’s suffrage, but also of her years of support for the ALP, she wrote, “I am pleased to see how many of that party’s planks, ‘outlandish at the time, have since become respectable law and opinion. Although she parted intellectually with the ALP’s platform, she had been attracted to it as a “lively third party rooting for a good many ideas which I too thought were good at the time”—including its positions on state-supported housing. Although her ideas had changed, she continued to register in the ALP, despite knowing that communists were in control of the party, because she resented the idea that she should be afraid to exert her right to do so. “You are surely aware of the fear which government workers feel over how their every action will be interpreted,” she wrote to her interrogators. “To live in such fear seemed, and seems, to me a miserable state for a free, self-respecting American to find himself in.
“The fact of being in a minority does not, in itself, trouble me, nor do I see anything un-American about being in a minority position,” she stated. “Quite the contrary. The minority views of one day are frequently the majority views of another, and in the possibility of this being so rests all our potentiality for progress. Death and Life came out of such courage, and it strengthened her conviction in her own system of thought.76
