OUP - Abstract

The Challenge of the Working-Class City: Recasting Growth Politics and Liberalism in Milwaukee, 1937-52

Dissertation School: University of Iowa

Pages: 698

Publication Date: January 2001

Availability:
Available from the HUD USER Helpdesk P.O. Box 23268 Washington, DC 20026-3268 Toll Free: 1-800-245-2691 Fax: 1-202-708-9981 Email: oup@oup.org

Access Number: 10724

Descriptors:
Cities. Urban problems. Redevelopment. Racial discrimination. Politics. Public housing.

Abstract:
This doctoral dissertation examines the changing landscape of U.S. urban political culture and policy in the 1940s. The author argues that growth liberalism, the foundation of post-World War II urban policy in the U.S., prevailed only after being contested and reshaped by a powerful yet fragmented working-class political culture. This conflict pitted the principles of metropolitan efficiency and productivity against the ideals of democratic access and distribution. Growth liberalism, at heart a conservative response to the working-class city, undermined postwar urban policy from its inception. The author investigates a range of conflicts and debates in the city during the 1940s, including those over gambling and leisure, labor politics and protest, racial discrimination, municipal debt, housing, and redevelopment. In the friction of these many contests and negotiations between widely differing ways of thinking about the city, the political culture and urban programs of postwar growth liberalism took form. The imbrication of an emerging Cold War and the vision of the city as an engine of private economic growth crowded out, although did not eliminate, alternative images of the city as an arena for enhancing economic and political democracy. [AUTHOR ABSTRACT MODIFIED]

Back to Search Result of DDRG Dissertations