Shawn

“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

“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

“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