Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles

312 Pages·2005·4.48 MB·English

by  Don Parson

Making a Better World
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Making a Better World
Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the
Direction of Modern Los Angeles
Don Parson
Foreword by Kevin Starr
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
The University of Minnesota Press acknowledges the work of Ed Dimendberg, editorial
consultant, on this project.
The University of Minnesota Press is grateful for permission to reprint excerpts from
the following material. The oral history interviews of Herbert M. Baus and William B.
Ross were conducted in 1990 by Enid H. Douglass, Oral History Program, Claremont
Graduate School, for the California State Archives State Government Oral History
Program. Quotations from the oral history interview with Rosalind Wiener Wyman
are reprinted courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
Copyright 2005 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parson, Donald Craig.
Making a better world : public housing, the Red Scare, and the direction of
modern Los Angeles / Don Parson ; foreword by Kevin Starr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-4369-5 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-4370-9 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Public housing—California—Los Angeles—History. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.)—
History. I. Title.
HD7288.78.U52L76 2005
363.5’85’0979494—dc22
2005010867
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents,
Larry T.and Patricia A.Parson
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Contents
ix Foreword Kevin Starr
xv Preface
xvii Acknowledgments
xix Abbreviations
1 Introduction:Of Politics,Public Housing
Projects,and the Modern City
13 1.The New Day of Decent Housing:Building a
Public Housing Program
45 2.Homes for Heroes:Public Housing during
World War II
75 3.David and Goliath:The Struggle to Expand
the Public Housing Program
103 4.The “Headline-Happy Public Housing War”:
Public Housing and the Red Scare
137 5.“Old Town,Lost Town,Shabby Town,Crook
Town”:Bunker Hill and the Modern
Cityscape
163 6.This Modern Marvel:Chavez Ravine and
the Politics of Modernism
187 Conclusion:“Thus the Sixties Reap the Folly of
the Fifties”
201 Chronology of Public Housing Events
in Los Angeles
203 Appendix A:The File on Frank Wilkinson
209 Appendix B:Sources
213 Notes
267 Index
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Foreword
Kevin Starr
For reasons that lie deep within the U.S. psyche, public housing has
never come easily to these United States; nor, for that matter, has
the political philosophy behind public housing, social democracy, been
an enduring U.S. characteristic. Social democracy and public housing,
in point of fact, have been inWnitely more successful in Europe, the
United Kingdom, and the British Commonwealth than they have ever
been in the United States, and this disparity dramatically underscores
the revolutionary nature of the New Deal and the social democratic pro-
grams, including public housing, that had their origins in the late 1930s
and that managed to survive, many of them, into the new millennium.
As Gwendolyn Wright has suggested in Building the Dream: A
Social History of Housing in America(1981), the Puritans theologized
the home into a prototype of the church, a sacred commonwealth,
armed against the temptations of society with the father-householder
ruling his Xock like an Old Testament patriarch. In a predominately
Protestant nation, this metaphor of the house as a sacred and private
realm persisted with great force through most of the nineteenth century.
When they were Wrst introduced into the United States in the 1850s,
for example, apartment buildings impressed many as scandalous in their
implicitly promiscuous housing of unrelated strangers, men and women
alike, along the same corridor. In innumerable court decisions, U.S. juris-
prudence again and again defended the home against civil or criminal
intrusion. Ownership of a home, moreover, implied personal maturity,
ix