Books in Review

The City
THE INTELLECTUAL VERSUS THE CITY:
FROM THOMAS J EFFERSON TO FRANK
LLOYD WRIGHT. By Morton and Lucia
White. Harvard University Press and
MI T Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1962. 270 pp. $5.50.
What absurdity can be imagined
greater than the institution of cities?
asked Elizabeth Peabody, one of the
transcendentalist Brook Farmers. Na-
thaniel Hawthorne advised, All towns
should be made capable of purification
by fire, or of decay, within each half-
century, and Ralph Waldo Emerson
opined, Cities force growth and make
men talkative and entertaining, but they
make them artificial. Frank Lloyd
Wright believed, The carcass of the city
is far too old, too far gone. I t is too
fundamentally wrong for the future we
now foresee. Hopelessly, helplessly, in-
organic it lies there.
These are fragments of the consider-
able evidence offered by philosophy pro-
fessor Morton White and Lucia White
in support of their thesis that the Ameri-
can intellectual has been anti-urban.
Their book is one of a series presenting
the major urban and regional research
findings of the J oint Center for Urban
Studies of Harvard and the Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology.
Starting with the irenic or tolerant
age of Franklin, Crevecoeur (Letters
from an American Farmer), and J effer-
son, the Whites trace the intellectuals
dismay at the city-its size, its im-
personality, its vices and ugliness, and
its artificiality. The authors discuss, in
addition to those already named, Mel-
ville, Poe, Henry Adams, Henry and
William J ames, William Dean Howells,
novelists Norris and Dreiser, J ane Ad-
dams (of Hull House fame), J ohn
Dewey, philosophers Royce and Santa-
yana, and, for good measure, Lewis
Mumford who is described as, the most
learned of all writers to turn his atten-
tion to the nature and destiny of Man-
hattan.
Anti-urban sentiment is of two kinds.
The romanticists would like to go back,
if not to nature at least to the simpler
life of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
tury village and hamlet. In this tradition
the pre-Civil War intellectuals would
have no cities if they could. After the
war, the anti-urban attack was taken
up by those whose enemy was not the
city per se but who believed that the city
as then constituted was too wild, too
vulgar, too ostentatious, too uncontrolled,
too gaudy.
Conclude the Whites : The intellectuals
criticisms of urban life have had major
impact on the ordinary mans attitude
toward the city and on those writers
who flourish somewhere between the
highest reaches of our culture and the
popular mind. The anti-urban tradition
is at its best when it conveys esthetic,
psychological and moral ideas, and itn-
pressions of the citys defects. The au-
thors feel that the American city today
must educate and absorb those entering
its gates into its economy and the demo-
cratic process; it must encourage in-
dividuality; and it must provide easy
channels of interurban communications.
The moral message of the contem-
porary critics is not fundamentally dif-
ferent from what it was in the age of
J efferson, Emerson and Dewey. The
modern thinker, however, cannot de-
ceive himself about the place in which
those values must be realized today. The
wilderness, the isolated farm, the planta-
tion, the self-contained New England
town, the detached neighborhood are
things of the American past. All the
worlds a city now and there is no
escaping urbanization, not even in outer
space.
The book is worth reading, but it is
not wholly convincing. Its greatest weak-
ness is its preoccupation with the anti-
I 16
19631 BOOKS IN REVIEW 117
urban and its once-over-lightly approach
to the pro-urban elements of the intel-
lectual tradition. The book would be
more valuable had the authors broadened
their horizons. Perhaps the same conclu-
sion would have been reached; but
evidence of thought favorable to the city
would provide balance and a greater
measure of objectivity. Finally, the
authors implicit definition of intellectual
is narrow. Except for J efferson and
perhaps Franklin, one looks vainly for
inclusion of representatives of the world
of juridical and political thought.
These criticisms notwithstanding, the
J oint Center and Professor and Mrs.
White should be congratulated, for they
bring to the contemporary urban tinker
and thinker a new way of looking at their
favorite subject.
HOWARD N. MANTEL
Institute of Public Administration
The Presidency
RUM, RELIGION, AND VOTES: 1928 RE-
EXAMINED. By Ruth C. Silva. The Penn-
sylvania State University Press, Uni-
versity Park, 1962. ix, 76 pages. $5.00.
When John F. Kennedy was elected,
he probably settled the Catholic issue and
the presidency once and for all time.
Following A1 Smiths crushing defeat
in 1928 it had become almost axiomatic
that a Roman Catholic could never make
it to the White House-after ail, that
was what defeated Smith wasnt i t? As
a matter of fact, no it wasnt!
Dr. Ruth C. Silva sat down at her
computors and absolutely demolished the
old political shibboleth about Catholi-
cism. She next did exactly the same to
the prohibition argument (some people
contended that A1 Smiths wet views
hurt him severely). This book is a de-
tailed description of the methods used to
study the 1928 election and the results
that Dr. Silva obtained. She proves her
point quite well.
Probably the most important contri-
bution of Dr. Silvas book is not the
emergence of the fact that A1 Smiths
Catholicism did not cost him the election.
Rather it is the manner in which she
shows the error of many political pundits
who readily expound upon the obvious
reasons for certain occurences in Arner-
ican political behavior with little statis-
tical data or systematic research to sub-
stantiate their pronouncements.
We Americans are a cussedly complex
lot. It is a brave man who can always
explain why we acted the way we did.
Miss Silva took an accepted fact and
knocked it jolly welt into a cocked hat. A
few more studies like this and our pundits
are really going to have to watch their
pontifications.
Warning! This is not one of those
snappy little books one whips through
and sets aside with a sigh of Wasnt
that interesting. It i s interesting, but
if you ever failed arithmetic in school-
forget it ! If careful statistical analysis
fascinates you however, and if the appli-
cation of science in political science
inbrigues you, then this is your meat.
W. J.D.B.
Additional Books
And Pamphlets
(See alea Researcher's Direst
and other departments)
Accounting
COST ACCOUNTING FOR MUNICIPAL
OPERATIONS. By Bart McCafferty. Munic-
ipal Finance Officers Asociation of the
United States and Canada, 1313 East
60th Street, Chicago 37, December 1962.
8 pp. Tables. 75 cents.
Council-Manager Plan
THE COUNCIL-MANAGER FORM OF Gov-
ERNMENT IN PENNSYLVANIA. A Citizens
Handbook. Institute of Local Govern-
ment, Graduate School of Public and
International Affairs, University of Pitts-