No Little Plans

How Government Built America's Wealth and Infrastructure

Ian Wray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429950834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Is planning for America anathema to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness? Is it true, as ideologues like Friedrich Von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand have claimed, that planning leads to dictatorship, that the state is wholly destructive, and that prosperity is owed entirely to the workings of a free market? To answer these questions Ian Wray's book goes in search of an America shaped by government, plans and bureaucrats, not by businesses, bankers and shareholders. He demonstrates that government plans did not damage American wealth. On the contrary, they built it, and in the most profound ways.

In three parts, the book is an intellectual roller coaster. Part I takes the reader downhill, examining the rise and fall of rational planning, and looks at the converging bands of planning critics, led on the right by the Chicago School of Economics, on the left by the rise of conservation and the 'counterculture', and two brilliantly iconoclastic writers – Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson.

In Part II, eight case studies take us from the trans-continental railroads through the national parks, the Federal dams and hydropower schemes, the wartime arsenal of democracy, to the postwar interstate highways, planning for New York, the moon shot and the creation of the internet. These are stories of immense government achievement.

Part III looks at what might lie ahead, reflecting on a huge irony: the ideology which underpins the economic and political rise of Asia (by which America now feels so threatened) echoes the pragmatic plans and actions which once secured America's rise to globalism.

1

Introduction

They passed through a smiling landscape – it was a fertile land they saw there …Where the earth grew green, there life throve; it marked a good place for people to live.

They were looking for such green places with rich growth in which to build their own homes – here they would have liked to stop and settle, if others hadn’t arrived before them.

Vilhelm Moberg¹

Driven from their homes in Illinois, Missouri and elsewhere by prejudice, violence and persecution, the members of the Mormon Church had little option but to head west in search of the ‘white horse of safety’ which their founder Joseph Smith had foretold in a prophecy His follower Brigham Young knew that such a place existed – a place of high mountains, timber clad valleys, good farming land, and a great salt lake – and it was all unclaimed.

When the starving and exhausted Church members finally arrived at what became Salt Lake City, they found land which would only produce crops if it was irrigated. This was no place for self-serving capitalism and rugged individualism. Young laid it down that there should be no private ownership of water rights: ‘There shall be no private ownership of the streams that come out of the canyon, nor the timber that grows on the hills. These belong to the people: all the people’ (quoted in Brogan, 2001, p. 241).

Water and land would be made available by the community’s representatives, who swore on the Holy Bible to do so fairly. To construct the irrigation ditches, Mormon families were organized into groups, where men were required to contribute labour in proportion to the amount of land they wished to cultivate. Access to forest timber was regulated on the same basis. Experience of Smith’s autocratic rule had made this easy to accept. Mormon towns and villages were planned and laid out by authority and all Mormon farming and business ventures were cooperative. The Mormons ran the most successful cooperative venture ever realized in America and they did so without outside trade or capital (Brogan, op. cit.).

Figure 1.1. Salt Lake City in 1850: promised land for the Mormons.

Was the Mormon Church a singular abnormality, where autocratic theology had cut across the individualism so characteristic of America? Is planning and rule from above anathema to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, or simply so unusual and so ineffective that it can be ignored or condemned? The economists and politicians who took control of America’s economy and society during the 1970s would certainly have us believe so. It suited their purpose and fitted the philosophy and values handed down by the likes of Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan, who we shall encounter as this narrative unfolds.

To Look for America

Our objective is simple: to go in search of another America, a country shaped by government, by plans and by bureaucrats (sometimes rather colourful and autocratic bureaucrats), not by businessmen and women, shareholders and bankers. By ‘building America’s wealth and infrastructure’ I mean exploring how the country has been shaped by government decisions and big plans, for good and sometimes for ill.

No Little Plans is the sequel to Great British Plans (Wray, 2016). Like the earlier book, its intellectual genesis goes back to Great Planning Disasters, a masterly book written by the geographer Peter Hall in the late 1970s, just as Western society was beginning to lose the rational compass which had guided its prodigious development since the end of the World War Two. Hall looked for examples of big plans which had gone wrong and set out to explain why (Hall, 1980). Like its predecessor, this book inverts Hall’s theme, by looking for great planning achievements and explaining how they happened. I use the word achievement advisedly, because it soon becomes clear that searching for ‘successful’ plans is, as in the title of Lewis Carroll’s absurd poem, ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. Carroll has a crew of ten hunting the elusive Snark: the only member of the crew to find it vanishes, leaving the narrator to explain that it was not a Snark after all, but a Boojum (Carroll, 1876).

So it is with the best laid plans. Uncertainty is rife. A plan which is actually implemented may not necessarily be successful. A plan which is not implemented looks like a failure, but if it is poorly conceived this may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Something which seems hugely popular for one generation may not stand the test of time. Social values can change, or the successful planner may simply overreach him or herself

We shall encounter such extraordinary reversals of fortune as the book unfurls. Robert Moses, the great bureaucrat who planned New York was hailed as a hero before the war, castigated as a villain in the 1970s, and is now enjoying something of a reputational revival. The moonshot, a project that appeared to critics at the time to be a colossal waste of resources, has had more than a few serendipitous long-term benefits – profoundly important benefits in fact. Those who would like to follow the process of wrestling with the meaning of successful plans are invited to dip into chapter 1 of Great British Plans.

It seemed natural to move from studying British infrastructure plans to those of America. Surprisingly, the book I had in mind did not seem to have been attempted before. There were, of course, books celebrating the achievements of businessman and entrepreneurs (such as Evans et al., 2004; Isaacson, 2014), but not officials and bureaucrats. There was plenty of material and all accessible in English. It would prove interesting to see whether the American planning style echoed the British style. One might perhaps expect it to – although as my editor Ann Rudkin cautioned at the outset: ‘It’s a much bigger country, you know’.

America proved to be bigger, and more different, in every sense. In fact it could hardly have been more different. British plans, I had come to discover, often had little or nothing to do with government, which sometimes went out of its way to stall or frustrate people with big ideas. Instead initiative came from below, from philanthropists, businesses, urban landowners, great estates, local government or universities, and invariably from passionate individuals who simply would not let their ideas go to waste.

It should have been obvious that the British style would not be replicated across the Atlantic. Delivering the Godkin Lectures at Harvard in 1970, Richard Crossman, British intellectual, academic, and cabinet minister, set out the characteristics of the British planning style for his American audience. Normally a fierce critic of the British government machine, Crossman decided to play up its virtues. This would not wash with an incisive and anonymous questioner in the audience: ‘A great many ideas in this country come from inside the bureaucracy… the most dramatic example I can think of is the Marshall Plan, which came from inside the bureaucracy. I think it is hard to imagine something as innovative as that coming from inside the machinery you’re describing…’ (Crossman, 1972, p. 81). Here surely was a clue to what my studies would reveal.

The Case Studies

My approach has been strictly empirical, researching case studies of American plans which led to significant achievements that are widely (though not necessarily unanimously) agreed. For the most part they are environmental, transport and economic plans. Stretching a point slightly, I include America’s role as the arsenal of democracy in World War Two, and the development of the internet, a plan which has led, not so much to a change in physical reality, but to an alternative reality; a virtual reality

The case studies are wide ranging as shown in table 1.1 where they are set out in order of appearance, together with some indicative dates. History is not tidy and these dates cannot be at all precise. Does the National Parks story begin with Theodore Roosevelt’s election, or with the writings of American transcendentalist philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson? Where does planning for New York end? With the fall from grace of Robert Moses after his failed World’s Fair project? Does the internet story finish with the completion of the first US network, or with the subsequent development of the World Wide Web? The gestation period for big plans can be long and timescales for their impact can be even longer, especially taking into account unanticipated and serendipitous events. As the Omega Centre at University College London discovered, in their review of international mega projects, unexpected consequences in big projects are not at all unusual (Omega Centre, 2012).

Table 1.1 The case studies and their defining characteristics.

Case Study	Indicative Dates	Defining Characteristics
The American Railroads	1830–1890	State support for early railroad building and for the transcontinental railroads, including the role of ‘land grants’ to railroad companies
The National Parks	1875–	The world’s first national parks, their genesis, evolution and philosophical underpinnings
Hydroelectric Power and Continental Water Supply	1902–1984	The politics and building of aqueducts and the dams which irrigate much of the American west
The Second World War Arsenal	1939–1945	The role of the private sector and of government in massively increasing productive output and materiel
The Interstate Highways	1944–1975	The creation of a national system of interstate highways
Planning and Building for New York	1921–1965	The influence of advisory regional planning and the power of city- and state-led planning and implementation
The Apollo 11 Moonshot	1961–1969	Interplanetary travel, including the development of computer guidance systems, missile technology and integrated circuits
The Internet	1940–1971	The scientific plans and government supported research which led to the creation of the internet; and then to the World Wide Web and the rise of the knowledge economy

Of the chosen case studies, four are linked with transport and communications: the railroads, the interstate highways, planning for New York, the internet, and the moonshot (on the basis that the last may have laid the foundations for future interplanetary travel). One case study, the National Parks, is focused solely on environmental management, although we should remember that much of the regional planning for New York also focused on recreation and the natural environment, with some astounding results in terms of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations and Sources
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: American Retreat
• Part II: American Advance
• Part III: American Dilemma
• Index