The Slaughter of Cities Quotes

“In 1970 the Quakers released a slim book entitled “Who Shall Live? Man’s Control over Birth and Death: A Report Prepared for the American Friends Service Committee” which was the result of a decision which the Family Planning Committee of the AFSC reached in December 1966 “to explore the issues involved in abortion.” That meeting in turn flowed from the November 1966 meeting that the AFSC had had with Planned Parenthood, and that meeting resulted from the setback the Quaker and Episcopalian forces for sexual liberation and eugenics in Philadelphia had suffered at the hands of Martin Mullen, when the governor capitulated to his demands and backed away from state-promoted birth control in August of the same year. As a result of their meeting with Planned Parenthood, the Quakers decided to “make a study of the availability of family planning services for medically indigent families in the city and to form an estimate as to the extent of the unmet need for such services. “Who Shall Live” was the fruit of this labor.

“Who Shall Live?” is a graphic example of moral theology in the Quaker mode. It begins by announcing that “for 300 years members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) have been seekers after the truth” and concludes by admitting that they have been so far unsuccessful in their efforts. Where once people like Fox and Penn “thought of himself as created only a few thousand years ago,” the enlightened Quakers who wrote birth-control tracts in the 1960s “now know he is part of an evolutionary process that has been going on for billions of years. In that process he has arrived at a stage of knowledge and technology whereby he himself has the power, at least in part, to determine the direction
in which he will evolve in the future.”

Having decided that their religious forebears were wrong on just about everything because they didn’t understand science, the 1970 Quakers then give some sense of their own grasp of science as it applies to population issues. Looking at the world from outer space in 1968, the Quakers found it “incredible that 3.5 billion people should be living on that small spinning planet.” Taking their cue from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” the Quakers concluded quite logically that if the planet cannot sustain 3.5 billion people in 1968, then it certainly couldn’t sustain 6 billion people in the year 2000. Unless drastic population-control measures are introduced immediately, dire consequences will follow. “Lamont C. Cole, who is a Professor of Ecology warns that we may one day find ourselves short of breathable air,” the Quakers announced breathlessly.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“The city’s ultimate solution to the problem of racial migration was “intensive centralization’ Which is to say the erection of high-rise Bauhaus-style Wohnmaschinen on a massive scale beginning with the erection of the Robert Taylor Homes just south of IIT in the years from 1960 to 1962 and marching south with the same kind of building for the next two miles. Eventually some 27,000 Chicago blacks were re-settled on the quarter-mile-wide strip between the railroad tracks to the east and the Dan Ryan Expressway to the west. There the blacks from Mississippi and their descendants for the next two or three generations settled into welfare dependency as wards of the state that had brought them north as cheap labor but didn’t know what to do with them when the jobs that were supposed to employ them left town. The inherent weaknesses in the black family might have fared no better had they been left to develop in bungalows surrounded by trees and grass, but after a while it became clear that the Bauhaus formula for dealing with living arrangements according to materialist principles exacerbated the problems the sharecroppers brought north with them.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“The ethnics caught up in the racial struggies oi the post-war period in Chicago were in the unenviable position of people who had the rules changed on them in mid-game. The Poles who settled Calumet Park as Sobieski Park had created their neighborhood enclaves under certain assumptions, all of which got changed when the environmentalist East Coast WASP internationalist establishment took power in 1941. Not only hadn’t they been informed of the rule change, they were doubly vulnerable because compared to their opponents who were further along on the scale of assimilation, they didn’t have a clear sense of themselves as Poles or Catholics or Americans or “white” people.

They also feared the sexual mores of the invading black hordes but could not articulate this fear in polite language. As a result, each attempt to explain their position drove them further beyond the pale of acceptable public discourse. More often than not, the only people who were articulating their position were the American Civil Liberties Union and American Friends Service Committee agents sent into their neighborhoods to spy on them. One AFSC spy reported that fear of intermarriage “caused the intensity of feelings” in Trumbull Park.*

Black attempts to use the community swimming pool were similarly seen in a sexual light. The ACLU agent who was paid to infiltrate bars in South Deering reported that the real motivation behind Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision mandating desegregation of Southern schools, was to move “niggers into every neighborhood” to intermarry and thereby send the “whole white race . . . downhill.”

Deprived of their ethnic designation as Catholic by a Church that was either hostile (as in the case of Catholic intellectuals) or indifferent (as in the case of the bishops and their chancery officials), Chicago ethnics, attempting to be good Americans, chose to become “white” instead, a transformation that not only guaranteed that they would lose their battle in the court of public opinion, but one which also guaranteed that they would go out of existence as well, through the very assimilation process being proposed by their enemies.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“And if McCloy couldn’t get government money to fund these operations, there were other options available to him. Toward the end of his tenure as high commissioner in Germany in the early 50s, McCloy wrote to the Ford Foundation mentioning Der Monat and asking them to “help to carry on certain operations which the future U.S. Embassy may find it difficult to continue, but which are of great significance to United States objectives in Germany.”

The Ford Foundation, we are told, “obliged.” Other organizations were happy to oblige as well. One of the things one notices in the reports on the housing riots in Chicago is that the reports which were filed by spies working for the Office of War Information and the Office of Facts and Figures during the war years started getting filed by spies working for the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Friends Service Committee once the war was over. This was precisely the devolution of government policy by “private” agency which McCloy was urging at the Ford Foundation, which would in turn become a major benefactor of the American Friends Service Committee, which in turn became a major player in disrupting ethnic neighborhoods in cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland, California and elsewhere by promoting racial “integration.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“Only after the nation had been herded into suburbs for over a decade were perceptive critics like Lewis Mumford able to see the type of person the housers were trying (and succeeding) to engineer. The suburbs fostered what Mumford called “compulsory mobility,” which was more controlling than the compulsory stability of being forced to live within the medieval city’s walls, because it limited the possibility of human interaction much more dramatically. And without the possibility of contact that is not managed for commercial or other purposes congenial to those who want to control him, man is reduced to the most vulnerable form of individual life and political impotence. The sprawling nature of the suburb was itself a form of control. “Sprawling isolation,” according to Mumford, “has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control” than enclosure and close supervision because it dramatically limits the possibility of human interaction and the unpredictable and uncontrollable flow of information that goes with it.

Modern forms of social control depend on controlling the flow of information, not on constant supervision. By limiting the options to choosing a Ford over a Chevy or Coke over Pepsi, the people who control the flow of information channel behavior into certain acceptable patterns while at the same time promoting the illusion of freedom of choice. By inhibiting direct contact, the suburb allows information to be “monopolized by central agents and conveyed through guarded channels, too costly to be utilized by small groups or private individuals.”

As a result, “each member of Suburbia becomes imprisoned by the very separation that he has prized: he is fed through a narrow opening: a telephone line, a radio band, a television circuit.*! Here Mumford is articulating, without being specific about it, one of the prime goals of psychological warfare, namely, the prohibition of unauthorized communication among subject peoples. Mumford goes on to say that “this is not . . . the result of a conscious conspiracy by a cunning minority” but his disclaimer is less persuasive than the picture of social control he paints. If, one wonders, this system has not been put into effect by conscious design, how did it get there? Is it possible to have social control without social controllers?”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“In addition to the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception, a ban which had added force because of the religious cohesion of the ethnic neighborhood, one of the main things which fueled this demographic increase in Philadelphia was the rowhouse. It was cheap enough for a worker to own. It was more spacious than an apartment, and instead of paying rent and being at the mercy of landlords, a man could own his home free and clear in the time it took him to pay off his mortgage. Since it was located in the city near public transportation, the rowhouse did not require the expense of owning a car. Since it was surrounded on both sides by other houses, it was cheap to heat. As a result, it allowed the working-class Catholic family to have a large family, and over a period of time, it allowed him to benefit from the political power which followed demographic increase, which is precisely what was causing Blanshard and the Phillips crowd concern.

The attack on the rowhouse which the Better Philadelphia Exhibition orchestrated meant an attack on all of the cultural attributes that went with the rowhouse, a building which symbolized the cultural independence of the ethnic neighborhood based on religious cohesion and the economic independence of immigrant workers who could own their own homes. The attack on the rowhouse in Philadelphia was a covert attack on the Catholics who lived in them, orchestrated by a ruling class that knew, as good Darwinians, that demography was destiny and that they, because of their all but universal adoption of contraception, were on the losing end of the demographic equation. Urban renewal, like the sexual revolution which followed it eighteen years later, was the WASP ruling class’s attempt to keep “the United States from becoming a Catholic country by default.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“It was a civics lesson which cities across the northern tier of the country would all learn in similar fashion. Dzink and his Polish supporters had, in good American fashion, convinced their elected representatives of the justice of their cause, only to have the federal government countermand their efforts with a combination of black intelligence operations directed against American citizens and overwhelming military force. The government’s actions in the Sojourner Truth case would also establish a precedent in both housing and racial matters for the post-war period. Whenever blacks claimed discrimination, they could be sure of the federal government’s concern. Whenever the Catholic ethnics
would claim that their neighborhoods were being targeted for destruction, they were written off as racists suffering from paranoid delusion. No matter how much clout the ethnics could muster locally, it could always be countered by some judge, appealing to higher moral principles. The same was true of Poles in Detroit, where “vested powers might have considered Polish Detroiters and neighborhood brokers expendable.” One year later when the worst race riot in the history of the country broke out in Detroit, the Poles again were blamed, but with the experience of Sojourner Truth behind them, Detroit’s residents were skeptical. “After the street battles of 1943,” Capeci writes, “Conant Gardens residents remembered ‘something funny’ about the 1942 housing controversy, something phoney that seemed to come from outside the neighborhood.” Residents of Chicago would soon notice the same thing.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“The racial template which got placed over ethnic conflict in Detroit and other industrial cities of the North would obscure the real dynamics of the struggle, which was ethnic and religious rather than racial. Black in-migrants, as a result, were thrown into direct competition, not with the WASP elite which was orchestrating events, but rather the ethnics — specifically the Poles and to a lesser extent, the Italians — who lived in the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the black ghettoes that were now filled to the bursting point with people hoping to benefit from the new employment opportunities the war economy provided. This led to some tragic misunderstandings, as blacks possessing their own nativist prejudices started accusing Poles of racism. The Poles who had been born in Europe were generally oblivious to racial concerns. Their children, the Poles who had been born in America, thought that the adoption of racial attitudes was part of the Americanization process. Poles in general wanted to know why they were being singled out as responsible for a situation which antedated their arrival in this country by hundreds of years, and blacks, facing Poles in direct competition for jobs and housing, wanted to know why “too many blacks had been fired to make jobs for other racial groups, some of whom can hardly speak our language and owe no allegiance to our flag.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“The fact that virtually all of the nation’s new housing was built in the white, de-ethnicized suburbs during this period of time meant that the only real area of expansion for black housing was housing already inhabited by “whites,” which is to say ethnics living in the cities. By forcing the emptying of ethnic neighborhoods, Louis Wirth’s system killed two birds with one stone: it opened up new areas for black migration and at the same time it broke up the suspect ethnic neighborhoods by driving their inhabitants to the suburbs, where they were assimilated. Solving the race problem in housing meant breaking up those neighborhoods and making them available to racial minorities who were not welcome in the neighborhood precisely because of their ethnicity.

At some point in the period under discussion, it became obvious that “integration” was nothing more than an unattainable ideal or a meaningless fiction. The system of social engineering that was erected in this country after the war needed that fiction as justification for a housing policy which was ultimately segregationist in intent. The system involved allowing ethnic neighborhoods, “areas now inhabited by whites” to “be made available for Negroes.” The dispossessed white ethnics would then be driven to the suburbs where they were “Americanized” according to class — each suburb would be segmented according to price — and absorbed into the mainstream of American life, which is to say, subjected to the controls imposed by media culture and the car.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“The suburb as engine of assimilation was described by Myrdal a full ten years before William O. Whyte wrote his book. The discrepancy in time is easy enough to understand. Whyte was describing the suburban phenomenon empirically after it had happened. Myrdal was describing the intention behind the plan the foundations had concocted to solve the nationalities problem before the plan had been put into effect. In both a priori and a posterior accounts, the role class plays in assimilation is crucial. Neighborhoods have always had a dual identity in America. They functioned as an index of ethnicity but they also functioned as an index of class. The two indices were in fact related because certain ethnic groups traditionally occupied the upper-class neighborhoods (the WASP) and the lower-class neighborhoods (the blacks) and the neighborhoods in between (the ethnics).”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“The United States could not win the war if blacks continued as sharecroppers down South. The South was not an important area either politically or economically as far as the internationalists were concerned. (“The white South,” Myrdal wrote, “is itself a minority and a national problem.”) It was important only as a source of much-needed labor, at a time when most white southerners concurred because they no longer needed them to chop or harvest cotton and considered migration a simple solution to their biggest social problem. The foundations which did the thinking for the internationalist ruling class quickly realized that that flow of labor into the factories of the industrial North was impeded less by the system of political segregation in the South than by what they would eventually term the de-facto housing segregation in the North, which meant, in effect, the existence of residential patterns based on ethnic neighborhoods. The logistics problem facing Louis Wirth and his colleagues in the psychological-warfare establishment was not so much how to move the black up from the South — the wage differential and the railroads would accomplish that — but rather where to put him when he got there. Northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia were essentially an assemblage of neighborhoods arranged as ethnic fiefdoms, dominated at that time by the most recent arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as the Irish and Germans.

As Wirth makes clear in his sociological writings, any group that has this kind of cohesiveness and population density had political power, and the question in his mind was precisely whether this political power was going to be used in the interests of the WASP ruling elite, who needed these people to fight a war that had nothing approaching majority support among ethnics of the sort Wirth viewed with suspicion.

This group of “ethnic” Americans posed a problem for the psychological-warfare establishment because it posed a problem to the ethnic group that made up that establishment. This group of people constituted a Gestalt - ethnic, Catholic, unionized, and urban - whose mutual and reinforcing affiliations effectively removed them from the influence of instruments of mass communication which the psychological-warfare establishment saw as critical in controlling them. If one added the demographic increase this group enjoyed — as Catholics they were forbidden to use contraceptives — it is easy enough to see that their increase in political power posed a threat to WASP hegemony over the culture at precisely the moment when the WASP elite was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with fascism. It was Wirth’s job to bring them under control, lest they jeopardize the war effort.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“Louis Wirth made no bones about his suspicion of the groups that were traditionally known as “ethnic,” ic., the recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Like Stalin, his mentor on the nationalities issue, Wirth considered ethnics as a fifth column which could not be trusted to serve the interests of the ruling class. Those interests became national security issues once that elite succeeded in maneuvering America into war. In this he shared the political views of the psychological warfare establishment as well as the ethnic prejudices which undergirded them. The purpose of psychological warfare as it was resurrected at the University of Chicago in the late ’30s was ultimately ethnic.

The WASP elite used their advanced communications techniques to prevent ethnic groups in America from communicating with their countries of origin but also to disrupt communications among the members of those groups in the United States as well. “At heart modern psychological warfare has been a tool for managing empire,” writes Christopher Simpson, “It’s primary utility has been its ability to suppress or distort unauthorized communication among subject peoples, including domestic U.S. dissenters who channeled the wisdom or morality of imperial policies.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“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.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“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.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

“As a group which believed in civic responsibility and the salutary effect of applied social science, it was natural that the WASP elite would take an interest in housing. In cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston, the panels of experts in the housing field invariably had a definite ethnic cast. They became certified as experts either by going to the already mentioned Ivy League universities or by getting appointed to boards of the various cities’ planning commissions, which were often descendants of local ruling class initiatives that began with the city-beautiful movement or the settlement house movement around the time of World War I.

The Philadelphia Housing Association was one such group. It started off as a blueblood organization complaining about backyard privies and piggeries in South Philadelphia and recommending common-sense measures for local improvement of the housing situation, things like liens against absentee landlords to pay for repairs. All of that changed in 1937 with the New Deal housing act of that year, which established local housing authorities across the country with federal money and government authority. The various housing authorities were charged with creating master plans by staffs of “experts” of a certain ethnic (i.c., WASP) cast which was invariably not the ethnic cast of the neighborhoods which were targeted for destruction. Urban renewal as practiced in the case of Berman v. Parker meant that certain people were empowered to come up with a master plan for the cities, one that would now have the power of law, specifically eminent domain, behind it along with enormous amounts of federal money, which was made available to tear down neighborhoods where people from other ethnic groups lived. The experts could do this according to their own purportedly scientific but ultimately ethnocentric criteria of things like blight, hygiene, decay, etc. Taken together the WASP penchant for meddling in housing along with residual WASP anti-Catholicism meant bad news for places like Bridesburg and Poletown, especially when this group was empowered to act on its ethnic prejudices by federal money and a Supreme Court that was willing to abridge property rights in the interest of increased social engineering.”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing