Working the Dead Beat (6 page)

That bestseller was only the beginning. In 1954 he published
The Great Crash
, a book detailing the excesses and follies that had precipitated the Depression and which, Galbraith suggested, could make another crash inevitable. Two years
later, on a visit to poverty-riddled India, Galbraith realized that a society begins to produce “unnecessary” goods as it becomes wealthier, with corporations creating artificial demand for their products through advertising. That insight led to
The Affluent Society
in 1958, a bestseller that made Galbraith's name internationally. He portrayed a society in which consumer culture had run amok, social services were being neglected, and the private sector was being indulged at the cost of the public one — all of which increased the likelihood of both inflation and recession.

Meanwhile he was also working as a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson's failed 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, later admitting he had erred in tailoring Stevenson's message too much to the “intellectual elite.” That didn't stop him from serving as an economic advisor to John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign and working the floor at the Democratic convention. He also became a speechwriter and advisor to the young president.

He was Kennedy's ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963, persuaded First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy to undertake diplomatic journeys to the subcontinent, and was an early critic of the disastrous Vietnam War. While his observations and insights were circulated at the highest levels of the Kennedy administration, they were often dismissed by other economists and, in the case of the Vietnam War, by Kennedy's military advisors, including the then hawk Robert S. McNamara.

After Kennedy was assassinated, Galbraith worked as an advisor and speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson, drafting speeches for the “Great Society” legislation aimed at eradicating poverty and racism. After splitting with Johnson over the Vietnam War, he campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and then worked for Democratic presidential candidates George McGovern in 1972 and Morris Udall in 1976. He supported Senator Edward Kennedy's failed effort to run against Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Following his retirement from Harvard, Galbraith remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent his summers at an “unfarmed farm” in Newfane, Vermont. He continued to criticize prevailing economic thought, attacking control of U.S. politics by the wealthy in
The Culture of Contentment
(1992). In
The Good Society
(1996) he set forth his vision of a just, equitable society politically organized to help the poor. In 2004, when he was ninety-five, he wrote
The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time
, an essay arguing that corporate managers manipulate consumers and the government.

Although Galbraith essentially said goodbye to his native country in 1925, he often reflected on his early days on the farm and the hard physical labour they entailed. His vision was clearly not clouded by nostalgia. “My mind on many matters still runs back to those early Ontario years,” he allowed the year before he died of complications of pneumonia in Cambridge, on April 29, 2006, at age ninety-seven, “particularly to the farm and particularly to the hard work on the farm. I consider one of the fortunate parts of my life escape from the routines of early agriculture.” His willingness to move on never stopped us from claiming him as one of our favourite sons.

 

Jane Jacobs

Writer, Urban Thinker, Social Activist

May 14, 1916 – April 25, 2006

T
WO UNRELATED ACTS
of civil disobedience disrupted Toronto mayor William Dennison's annual levee on January 1, 1970. A girl of thirteen tried to shake hands with His Worship at the men-only event, and the Provocative Street Players, an offshoot of the Stop Spadina movement, arrived with a twenty-foot-long sign denouncing a proposed expressway through the downtown core. Security guards escorted the provocateurs outside the building, where they gave full voice to their musical lament “The Bad Trip.” The times were changing in Toronto the Good.

The lead vocalist was the nineteen-year-old son of writer, activist, and urban theorist Jane Jacobs, the acclaimed author of
The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
She and her husband, architect Robert (Bob) Jacobs, had arrived in Toronto in June 1968, seeking a refuge for their draft-age sons from the voracious demands of fighting the American war in Vietnam.

Almost immediately, the citizen-activist, who had brought a crosstown expressway to a screeching halt in New York City, was embroiled in a fight in her new country against the “single greatest menace” to the “most hopeful and healthy city in North America.” Before she was through, the expressway that would have cut a vicious swath through downtown neighbourhoods had been abandoned, and many of the local citizenry had been emboldened to have faith in their inherent good sense and ability to think for themselves.

As a public speaker Jacobs was feisty, as a writer she was provocative, as a thinker she was original. Curiosity and common sense are the drivers coursing through her eight books, from her
classic
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(1961) through her final clarion,
Dark Days Ahead
(2004). Largely self-educated, she was an acute observer and an intellectual scavenger, storing facts and incidents in her prodigious brain for later analysis. From the small and the concrete — the street under her feet — she worked upwards and outwards, drawing a complex web of activity connecting neighbourhoods, cities, economies, and human behaviour to explain why some systems worked and others failed.

The ideas that fascinated her have a common theme: local control, biodiversity, and how an organic harmony can reside in what, at first glance, seems chaotic. Nothing exists in isolation; the principles that underlie the workings of the natural world apply equally well to the economic one. A pragmatist rather than an ideologue, she didn't tell readers what to think; she inspired them to look around with fresh insight and to have the confidence to act upon their own conclusions.

“I studied city planning, and when I read her book [
Death and Life
] all of my city planning was turned upside down because she looked at it from a different angle — from the angle of the human being,” architect Eberhard Zeidler said after Jacobs died on April 25, 2006. “It changed my architecture because I started to think of architecture — no matter if you design a hospital or a factory or a house — not as a thing you do, but as a thing you do for people.”

Her theory that cities are ecosystems that can be smothered by rigid, authoritarian planning; that busy, lively sidewalks help cities thrive as safe, healthy places; and that good urban design mixes work, housing, and recreation are now taken as gospel, but they were heretical when
Death and Life
was first published. It is often linked to other epochal works that were written in the early 1960s, books such as
Growing Up Absurd
by Paul Goodman (1960),
Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson (1962),
The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan (1963),
Understanding Media
by Marshall McLuhan (1964), and
Unsafe at Any Speed
by Ralph Nader (1965).

She was “completely original,” according to her editor, Jason Epstein. In his view, her later works, such as
The Economy of Cities
(1969) and
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
(1984), were just as important as
Death and Life
and will eventually become part of mainstream thinking and reading. Describing Jacobs as a “genius of common sense” with a “20/20 vision for reality,” he said she “saw something academic economists hadn't seen because they get so caught up in other people's abstractions that they can't see what is really happening.”

But because she was an original, people had trouble categorizing her. She was called everything from a self-styled economist to an urbanologist. Because she helped defeat the Spadina Expressway, she was branded a left-wing activist; because she believed competition is essential for communities to thrive and that subsidies are counterproductive, she was sometimes stamped a right-wing conservative; because she advocated in her most controversial book,
The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty
(1980, 2011), that Quebeckers should decide for themselves if they wanted to remain in Canada, she was denounced as a separatist.

Jacobs reviewed the history of Quebec from the British victory on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 through the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s; looked at the separation of Norway from Sweden in 1905, among other examples; described how cities influence the development of nation-states; and concluded that Quebec sovereignty would be a good thing. Otherwise, Montreal might eventually become a mere regional centre in the Toronto hinterland and Québécois culture and language be overwhelmed. “In sum,” she wrote, “Montreal cannot afford to behave like other Canadian regional cities without doing great damage to the economic well-being of the Québécois. It must instead become a creative economic centre in its own right . . . Yet there is probably no chance of this happening if Quebec remains a province.”

The label that irked her most was
amateur
— gifted, but an amateur nonetheless — because she had dared to write about planning in
Death and Life
without professional credentials. “I am a professional writer, I'm not an amateur writer,” she insisted in an interview with the
Globe and Mail
in 2000, pointing out that when she wrote about planning, she was making a living as a professional critic at
Architectural Forum
.

In reality, Jacobs was two personalities: the ferocious intellect who talked about issues and a gentle-natured woman interested in the lives of complete strangers. A friendly figure, she wandered the streets of her midtown Toronto neighbourhood, her magpie eyes peering out from behind the owlish glasses that rested on her apple cheeks. She shopped in local stores and appeared at citizen-organized meetings to present cogent opinions that countered bureaucratic bombast and wrong-headed platitudes. Her attire was casual rather than stylish. She usually wore sneakers and a denim jumper over a white long-sleeved turtleneck. Over the years her straight hair, cut in a chin-length bob with bangs, mutated from brunette to pewter to chalk.

Many thought her intimidating — and she was when confronting cant and artifice — but mostly she was unassuming and idiosyncratic. After Christmas, instead of discarding her tree, she would hang it from a hook in the ceiling of her porch, letting it dangle about an inch off the floor, where it danced and swayed like an evergreen dervish until summer finally had its way and turned it brown. Like everything else about Jacobs, it was transformed from commonplace to unique.

JANE BUTZNER WAS
born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on May 14, 1916, the year before the Americans entered the First World War. She was one of four children of John Decker Butzner, a doctor, and Bess Mary Butzner (née Robison), a teacher and nurse. An independent, curious child and an avid reader, she took great advantage of the riches to be found in the local reference library, museum of natural history, and zoo. By the time she had completed high school, she was “thoroughly sick of attending school and eager to get a job.”

She worked as a reporter for the
Scranton Tribune
before moving to New York to live with her older sister in the early 1930s. Jobs were scarce during the Depression, and she scrambled to find short-term secretarial work. Between assignments she wrote four articles about working districts of the city that she sold to
Vogue
— her first real literary sale.

Her parents wanted her to go to university, so she went to the School of General Studies at Columbia; however, she was bored by the courses required for completing a degree. “I went for a couple of years to university because I wanted to learn, not because I wanted to sit in custodial care or wanted credentials,” she said later about her decision to quit university to embark on her own curriculum of reading, observing, wondering, thinking, and trying to assemble her thoughts into a coherent piece of writing.

To support herself, she worked in magazines and as a feature writer for the Office of War Information. She met her husband, Robert Hyde Jacobs (who was working at the same defence plant as her sister), when her sister invited him to a party in the apartment the two young women shared. “I walked in the door,” Bob Jacobs said later, “and there she was, in a beautiful, green woollen evening dress, and I fell in love. It took me a little longer to convince her.” Four months after they met in March 1944, they were married.

After peace came, she found a job at
Architectural Forum
, a journal that she read frequently because her husband was a subscriber. It never occurred to her to stay home and be a full-time wife and mother after her children, James Kedzie (April 1948), Edward (Ned) Drecker (June 1952), and Mary (Burgin) Hyde (January 1955), were born. Her female forebears had always worked in their communities, so “I grew up with the idea I could do anything,” she said later.

At the magazine she was assigned stories on urban life and structures and was stunned to discover that “city planning had nothing to do with how cities worked successfully in real life.” One of her readers was William H. Whyte, editor of
Fortune
magazine and author of
The Organization Man,
who hired her to write an article on cities. She concluded in her essay that “Designing a dream city is easy. Rebuilding a living one takes imagination.”

The
Fortune
article caught the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, which asked her if she had any other ideas about cities. She did, envisaging “writing a series of articles, which might be a book, of about ten chapters, mostly about city streets, and that it would take me a year.” The foundation offered her a grant in 1958 and she set to work on the manual Remington typewriter that she used for the rest of her life.

It took more than two more years and as many grants to complete
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, a book that has never been out of print since it was first published in 1961. She was challenging not simply the mistakes she saw around her but the very idea that an urban utopia could be designed. Her argument was that cities begin at the pavement level and grow organically in a self-organizing mix of commerce and domesticity. Zoning by function — a prime example being the razing of neighbourhoods to build isolated public housing projects — deprived whole areas of the interactive human oxygen they needed to survive as dynamic entities.

Many urban planners and architectural writers were aghast, but the book found a receptive audience. Partly it was the writing, which was clear, concise, and jargon-free; partly it was the argument, which moved from the concrete — a city sidewalk — to the abstract; partly it was the fact that her book connected with a generation of young adults who were trying to make sense of the postwar world.

She was barely back at work from her book leave when the City of New York decided to appropriate her own neighbourhood for urban renewal — a case study of the “intellectual idiocies and ignorance of city workings that I had been writing about.” She protested along with her neighbours and was made chairman of the Committee to Save the West Village. The journalist and critic had been transformed into an activist.

About this time, opposition to the Vietnam War was coming to a boil on many American campuses. Jacobs joined a protest march on the Pentagon in 1967 and found herself smack up against a row of soldiers in gas masks. “They looked like some big horrible insect, the whole bunch of them together, not human beings at all. And I was also not only appalled at how they looked, but I was outraged that they should be marching on me, an American,” she said in an interview with the
Boston Globe
, explaining her decision to move to Toronto with her family in 1968.

Her husband, a hospital architect, found work with architect Eb Zeidler, a friend and colleague. The Jacobs family moved into a flat on Spadina Avenue — in the path of the proposed expressway — and then into a house on Albany Avenue, in the nearby Annex area. She was still unpacking when she found new foes to combat with the radical activism she had learned on the streets of New York City: developers who wanted to tear down historic properties to erect high-rises, and politicians who wanted to build expressways to bring cars from the suburbs into the downtown core.

She made a profound impression on reformist city politicians such as Mayor David Crombie and alderman John Sewell, who were opposed to the expressway. They had known her reputation as an activist and her writing before they met her in the flesh. In addition to giving them a living, breathing, pragmatic model of an ethical thinker, she gave them and other activists who cared about the city in which they lived the confidence that their ideas mattered and that it was essential to act upon them.

She was not above civil disobedience. Besides her Spadina antics — lobbying, writing, marching — she helped save a historic inner-city neighbourhood. In 1973, developers had erected hoardings around a row of Victorian houses at the corner of Sherbourne and Dundas Streets and were about to demolish them. During a protest, Jacobs told Alderman Sewell to rip down the hoardings, because she knew that it was against the law to demolish a building unless there was a hoarding surrounding it. He said, “I can't.” She said, “You must.” And it was done. That act of vandalism led to the city's first non-profit housing project.