New books may give St. Louis a new Image.
Judd, Dennis R.
If we go in search of the overall image of St. Louis as a city and
a region, the scholarly literature is not reassuring. What most
academics have mostly found interesting about St. Louis is its status as
a troubled city and region.
In 1970, Lee Rainwater, then a professor at Washington University,
published a book about the social disaster that had unfolded in the
Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. Appropriately titling the book "Behind
Ghetto Walls," he described the Pruitt-Igoe housing project as a
federally sponsored slum that had become worse than the ghetto it
replaced. Five years later, Eugene Meehan, then at the University of
Missouri-St. Louis, published "Public Housing Policy," a
biting analysis of the failure of the public housing program in the
United States. He wrote that Pruitt-lgoe was a disaster from its
conception. As it happens, in the five years separating these books
Pruitt-lgoe had become one of the world's best-known symbols of
urban decay. Photos of its implosion by charges of dynamite seemed to
capture in a single image the abject failure of federal policy and the
continuing plight of the inner cities. In his monumental work
"Cities of Tomorrow," Peter Hall called the photo "an
instant symbol of all that was perceived as wrong with urban renewal,
not merely in the United States but in the world at large." Thus
St. Louis became a stand-in for the problems of the post-war American
inner city.
St. Louis has also often been widely adopted as the textbook case
of governmental fragmentation and its sins. The many suburbs with fewer
than 5,000 citizens (including the Village of Champ, with 11) and the
racial and class segregation that separated these miniature towns
invited sharp criticism. There was a dark side to the proliferation of
these governments.
Working as a consultant for the litigants in the St. Louis
desegregation case in the early 1980s, political scientist Gary Orfield documented how suburbs in the St. Louis area had used their zoning
powers to keep blacks and the poor from following the affluent to the
suburbs. Of course, the desegregation case brought a certain kind of
fame to St. Louis--it was only settled, finally, in the last year--and
Orfield's findings became copiously cited in the scholarly
literature.
The St. Louis region also has been regarded as the best example of
the long, futile struggle for metropolitan reform (urban historian Jon
Teaford has said that "Nowhere did the battle for metropolitanism
rage so loudly or long as in Saint Louis County.") In 1926, 1930,
1959, 1962, 1989, and 1990, attempts were made to either replace the
multitude of governments with one regional body (the first four times),
or to more modestly reduce the number of governments. In the 1980s the
debate over metropolitan fragmentation took a new turn, when scholars
working for the Washington-based Advisory Council on intergovernmental
relations questioned the reformers' assumption that larger
governments would result in more efficiency and better services. The
Board of Freeholders proposal of 1989, which would have reduced the
number of municipalities in the St. Louis region from 92 to 37, was put
forward right in the midst of this debate.
I am sure that living in St. Louis has shaped my own writing. By
the time I moved to St. Louis in 1970, people had already been streaming
out of the city for two decades. In fact, I was a beneficiary of the
process. That year I bought a four-bedroom house in University City for
$18,600 on a block being abandoned by white families. When I wrote the
first edition of my textbook, this experience stuck with me. The
statistics I compiled for the book revealed that St. Louis consistently
led the nation in rates of population loss from the urban core. Living
here provided a perfect perspective from which to observe
suburbanization, deindustrialization and racial segregation. And, as
John Farley, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois
University--Edwardsville, has amply demonstrated, St. Louis continues to
be one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States.
Though St. Louis has been used often as a premier example of urban
decline, relatively little has been written about the politics of the
city. Why is this? Perhaps its politics are not as sexy or as easy to
interpret as those of Chicago, for instance. For much of this century,
the machine politics of that city provoked an outpouring of research and
popular literature. St. Louis has long been characterized by a
machine-style, but not a machine politics. The trading of small favors
is not usually as interesting as big-time boss politics and its
extravagant scandals. And unlike Atlanta, St. Louis was not a primary
site for the national civil rights struggle, and therefore blacks did
not become incorporated into the stable political coalition that has
built that city into a regional economic powerhouse. Unlike San
Francisco, St. Louis politics have not involved a rough-and-tumble
competition for power by a multitude of ethnic groups,
environmentalists, liberal activists and gays. And unlike such cities as
Miami and Los Angeles, it has not recently attracted a floodtide of
newer immigrants from Latin America and Asia. The politics of St. Louis
just haven't seemed as obviously exciting as politics in those
cities.
But the politics of the city maybe changing, and if that happens,
surely the research on St. Louis will reflect those changes. The grip of
the old power structure is slipping. With access to federal funds and
bonding authority, the Empowerment Zone has become a significant player,
at least for now. Without it, the prospects for a convention hotel would
be dim indeed. The years of leadership training sponsored first by
Leadership St. Louis and now by Focus may be bearing fruit, as citizens
become more involved in the political process. Metropolis St. Louis is
gaining more voice and influence every day. Who knows? Precisely because
of these changes, the efforts to give the city a home-rule charter may
achieve a breakthrough in the next year or two. Perhaps the Washington
Avenue loft district will spearhead a long-sought revival of downtown.
And perhaps the next election cycle will bring in a new mayor capable of
forging a coalition sufficient to accomplish downtown revitalization.
Please don't shoot the messengers if it doesn't happen,
but perhaps the next generation of scholars who write a bout St. Louis
will be able to write at least as much about success as failure. But I
will be observing it all from a different vantage point. Sometime late
this summer I will be moving to Chicago, to assume a new position as
professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
I'm excited about the opportunity. I also look forward to reading
the wonderful books on St. Louis that will be published in the next
couple of years by my colleagues Lana Stein and Terry Jones. Lana has
already written two books about the city ("Holding Bureaucrats
Accountable" and "City Schools & City Politics"). She
has just completed a major book-length study tracing the evolution of
politics in St. Louis. Watch for it to come out sometime next year.
Terry will soon publish a study of governmental fragmentation in the St.
Louis area. His new twist is to say that despite a history of failed
reform, prag matic cooperative arrangements have evolved that serve the
citizens of the region well. Look for his book, "A Mosaic of
Governments," in the next month or two.
His book is notable because it offers a narrative of success rather
than failure. Perhaps his message will signal a new trend.
Dennis Judd is professor of political science at University of
Missouri St. Louis.