The Slaughter of Cities : Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing by E. Michael Jones - $111 - (Ottumwa, IA)

hardcover Starred Review* The high-rise "projects" may have been a dismal failure, it is said, but urban renewal was done with good intentions. Not so, Jones argues in this immense volume that spans from the World War I era to the 1993 death of Philadelphian Dennis Clark, whose urban renewal career led him from Catholicism through Quakerism to agnostic Irish nationalism and whom Jones makes a touchstone of urban renewal's moral quality. The redlining, condemning, bulldozing, race riots, white flight, and aggrandizement of federal authority at the expense of cities and states that accompanied urban renewal were, Jones says, the consequences of WASP elites fighting to keep hold of the reins of power. Those elites saw the potentially powerful Catholic ethnic neighborhoods, with the church's influence animating them, as their primary political enemies. Armed with social engineering techniques, abetted by the subversive skills of Quaker do-gooders and military intelligence, and further empowered by fellow WASP jurists, they devastated Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston generally and the welfare of blacks in particular. But they maintained power, having gutted the Catholic ethnics, who fell into the trap of overt racism, and driven them into socially atomizing suburbia. Incorporating all the details into his sweeping narrative (the notes just refer to his sources), Jones makes gripping drama out of urban development. Unfortunately, the epic it recounts is tragic. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Posted in Ottumwa, IA, Books
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