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Quote by E. Michael Jones

“To write the history of neighborhood strife during this period of time without describing the efforts of people like Louis Wirth and his collaboration with the psychological warfare establishment during World War II, or the American Friends Service Committee and their work in both Philadelphia and Chicago, or Paul YIvisaker and his creation of the Gray Areas grants for the Ford Foundation and their subsequent takeover by a quintessential establishment figure like McGeorge Bundy, or Leon Sullivan, one of the players created by the Ford Foundation, and his collaboration with Robert Weaver while head of the Federal Housing Administration, is to tell less than half of the story. It is to do a remake of King Kong without the gorilla. It is also a bad example of whiggish history, a genre depressingly familiar to anyone who has done any reading in the conventional accounts of the sexual revolution and the civil rights movement, where effects have no causes and actual people making actual decisions in actual rooms are replaced by broad historical forces and Enlightenment melodramas like the triumph of liberation over bondage and light over darkness.”

Quote by E. Michael Jones

Book:The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing
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The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

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E. Michael Jones

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“Catholics, Louis Wirth found out first-hand, did not like what he had to say and were willing to use their political clout to prevent him from saying it in not only religious institutions but public institutions where they wielded local political power. Like Wilhelm Reich, another German Jewish Marxist immigrant, Wirth saw the Catholic Church in America in a different light from the way his WASP contemporaries did. As a result of growing up in an essentially Protestant country, they had long seen the Catholic Church, because of what had happened in England, as malign but essentially marginalized. Wirth’s view was much closer to Reich’s sense that the Catholic Church was the main competitor to Marxism for the mind of modern man, primarily because both systems were more all-encompassing than the essentially/laissez-faire English ideology. Given his Marxist politics, his repudiation of traditional religious belief, and his assimilationist attitude toward ethnicity, it is not surprising that Wirth would be drawn to the internationalist cause during the days preceding World War II. Like his New York counterpart, Robert Moses, Wirth saw ethnicity as retrograde and something which was to be replaced by faith in things rational and enlightened. The irony, of course, is that in espousing the Enlightenment, Wirth was also espousing what one might call internationalist ethnocentrism, which is to say, the views of the dominant ethnic group in the United States at that time, the WASP East Coast establishment, as defined by the interests of the Rockefeller family, which had created the University of Chicago, Wirth’s employer, and the modern social sciences along with it. By identifying with the cause of the Rockefeller family and the ethnic interests they represented, Wirth became a paradigm of the assimilation he would impose on his fellow Americans. This meant not repudiating ethnicity in the interest of class — although that’s what Wirth claimed he did — but rather exchanging one ethnic identification for another. Wirth was a paradigmatic example of what Digby Baltzell urged in his 1963 book The Protestant Establishment, the Jew who rose to a position of acceptance in the WASP ruling class by internalizing their cause and using the latest scientific advances (in the social sciences) to do their bidding. By doing what he did, Wirth endowed ethnicity with something less than ultimate value.”

Urban Planning
Book:The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing
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“It is not, of course, only the Japanese who find flat sterile surfaces attractive and kirei. Foreign observers, too, are seduced by the crisp borders, sharp corners, neat railings, and machine-polished textures that define the new Japanese landscape, because, consciously or unconsciously, most of us see such things as embodying the very essence of modernism. In short, foreigners very often fall in love with kirei even more than the Japanese do; for one thing, they can have no idea of the mysterious beauty of the old jungle, rice paddies, wood, and stone that was paved over. Smooth industrial finish everywhere, with detailed attention to each cement block and metal joint: it looks ‘modern’; ergo, Japan is supremely modern.”

DesignArchitectureJapanUrban PlanningJapanese Culture
Book:Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan
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“So often, we had the tendency of saying, they're the problem. No, they're not the problem. Our heart is the problem. they are just there to show me what is in my heart. They don't put those things in my heart. They don't put the wrath, the bitterness in my heart. Those things are already there. They are the vessels God uses to to release what is in my heart so that I am aware of how black my heart really is.”

RelationshipsSinRepentance
Author:Lowell Nelson
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“Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency. Since 1818, the city had spread out along the river, warehouse by warehouse, factory by factory. Judge Woodward's wheels had been squashed, bisected, pressed into the usual rectangles.”

WheelsDetroitUrban PlanningGridHexagons
Book:Middlesex
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“Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region.”

DemocracyCaliforniaCitizenshipUrban PlanningUrban Politics
Book:The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles
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