How States Shaped Postwar America: State Government and Urban Power
REVIEWED BY MICHAEL R. GLASS
How the States Shaped Postwar America: State Government and Urban Power
By Nicholas Dagen Bloom
University of Chicago Press, 2019
392 Pages
New York City residents are often lampooned, perhaps justifiably, for their provincialism. As the iconic 1976 New Yorker cover encapsulated, for many New Yorkers the world might as well end at the Hudson River. But consider how much the state government affects their daily lives. Every morning, the typical New Yorker commutes on a subway car financed with state-backed bonds. If they work in the financial district or in Times Square, they likely ascend an office tower constructed with state tax subsidies. If they attend a business convention, take the bar exam, or mourn at a presidential election party, they will find themselves in the glass cubes of a state-built convention center. For college, many will attend a public university elsewhere in the state, or if they stay closer to home, a city university, where the state still pays over half the operating costs. For a quick weekend get-away, they will drive on a state-maintained highway to a hiking trail, campground, or ski resort at a state-run park in the Catskills or Adirondacks.
In these and other ways, argues historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom, “state government remains both indispensable and invisible to most Americans.”[1] Whereas most histories of public policy focus on either national developments or a local case study, Bloom, in his recent book, How States Shaped Postwar America (2019), examines state governments: the often overlooked, though eminently important layer in the federalist political structure. In particular, Bloom examines how state governments shaped urban life in the postwar era. As the midcentury “urban crisis” of deindustrialization, job flight, and population loss tore at the foundation of cities, state officials formulated an array of policy responses. Unlike municipal governments hamstrung by the inflexible property tax, state governments could draw from a robust base of tax revenues to fund programs, and with their centralized bureaucracies, state officials could address issues from a broader, regional perspective. Using New York as the anchor, while making comparisons to elsewhere, Bloom surveys a range of topics in thematic chapters, exploring everything from highways to housing, parks to colleges, urban renewal to water treatment.
Bloom shows that state governments delivered tangible improvements for urban residents, even if they rarely received the credit. Take the case of highways. It is well known that the federal government revolutionized transportation by covering 90 percent of the costs for highway construction with the Interstate Highway Act (1956). Less known is the fact that states were responsible for maintaining and operating the roads. Filling-in pot holes was less glamorous than cutting the ribbon for a new highway, but this sustained state-level investment literally keeps the system together. Likewise, the role of federal housing agencies in remaking the American metropolis is widely acknowledged. Bloom, however, shifts attention to state-level housing agencies. During the 1960s and 1970s, these public-private partnerships built thousands of middle-income housing units, including large-scale projects in Rochdale Village, Co-op City, and Roosevelt Island. While residents purchased the units directly from a private builder, the projects were financed with state-backed bonds, which lowered the borrowing costs. The state, in other words, indirectly subsidized housing construction by extending credit to private builders.
Higher education presents another rich case study in state-level governance. Notwithstanding the catalysts of the G.I. Bill and federal student loans, state governments underwrote the growth in public higher education. During his tenure, Governor Nelson Rockefeller dramatically expanded the State University of New York (SUNY) system. Bloom examines how Rockefeller deliberately scattered the campuses throughout the state: to Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, New Paltz, Stony Brook, and elsewhere In these places, apartment-renting, pizza-ordering, bar-hopping students buoy the local economies. Today in western New York, for example, SUNY students, staff, and alumni comprise one-fourth of the population.[2] For this reason, Bloom argues, we should see public universities as urban development projects, with their campuses as essentially planned communities. This analysis can be extended to other state-supported college towns around the country like Madison, Wisconsin; Columbia, Missouri; and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Even for the City University of New York (CUNY), the state has played a vital role. Especially since the 1970s fiscal crisis, the state has paid an ever-larger share of the costs for the CUNY system. As of 2017, state aid comprises about 60 percent of CUNY’s total funding—leading Bloom to quip, “CUNY should probably be renamed in honor of the state.”[3]
Especially in the realm of public transportation, Bloom shows, the state’s role has been covert. With the rise of automobility, urban transit suffered declining ridership and sinking revenues. States swooped in to create urban transit authorities—hence the birth of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) in 1965. The state bailed out the subways not so much with direct subsidies, but more with creative uses of debt. To investors, the MTA looked like a losing proposition, given its revenue problems, accrued deficits, and deferred maintenance. But with bonds offered under the full faith and credit of the State of New York, rather than the MTA alone, investors proved willing to lend funds for new subway cars, track maintenance, and other upgrades. The state, in short, kept the MTA afloat by cosigning on its debt. Of course, debt reliance also has its downsides. Today, the MTA remains $34 billion in debt for capital projects, siphoning one-fifth of its annual revenues to repay bondholders. For their part, New Yorkers have recently tried to re-politicize the state’s role as a financial backstop. One group, the Riders Alliance, has encouraged riders to share their commuting horror stories under the hashtag, “#ThanksCuomo.”
If there is a central theme uniting all these policy areas, it is that state governments helped cities cope with the unruly processes of urbanization. When jobs fled, roads crumbled, subways creaked, classrooms overfilled, waterways clogged, or septic tanks exploded, states stepped into the breach and devised pragmatic solutions. The postwar era, in Bloom’s telling, was a “golden age of urban policy” for state governments.[4] On the one hand, states aimed to facilitate economic development in cities aching from the urban crisis; on the other hand, they helped smooth the rough edges of that development with social welfare programs. Part entrepreneur and part reformer, state governments helped cities manage a period of transformation and change.
At times, though, Bloom glosses over the inequalities created by economic development. In a chapter on state-subsidized office towers, sports stadiums, and other urban renewal projects, Bloom concludes that “Metropolitan areas, where most Americans live, are the primary beneficiaries.”[5] But the evidence presented for these benefits is questionable. For instance, relying solely on javitscenter.com as a source, Bloom states that that the Jacob K. Javits Center, built in 1986, created “17,000 jobs, two million annual visitors, and 480,000 annual hotel rooms.”[6] A few pages later, relying on figures published on mccormickplace.com, Bloom asserts that the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago boasts an economic impact of “about $3.5 billion per year.”[7] A skeptical reading of these sources might reveal a more complicated picture. For example, a future historian might consult the website for Hudson Yards, the new luxury playground built atop a railyard. The website says the project will contribute $19 billion to New York City’s GDP and create 55,752 jobs. The website does not disclose that it was financed with the federal EB-5 program, which allows foreign nationals to purchase visas by investing in census tracts with high unemployment. By producing a gerrymandered map—which connected census tracts from the West Side of Manhattan all the way up to public housing projects in Harlem, like a wobbly tower of Jenga blocks—the Hudson Yards developer was able to collect $1.2 billion in EB-5 financing at the preferential rate for “distressed” urban areas. In other words, Hudson Yards created jobs while looting tax subsidies from Harlem; or as one commentator put it, “Hudson Yards ate Harlem’s lunch.” It seems reasonable to ask whether unemployed people in Harlem will benefit from copper-clad staircases, a cavern of boutique stores, and a hotel with rooms starting at $800 per night. The past generation of urban history scholarship has taught us to always ask, almost reflexively: Development for whom?
The omissions are as telling as the evidence behind some of the claims. In a book-length study of state government, Bloom decided not to address several key policy issues, including K-12 education, welfare, and prisons. To be fair, these are all much-studied topics, and Bloom is attempting to reveal the state’s role in lesser-known policy areas. At the same time, these are fundamental matters, and their omission leaves a void. State aid for K-12 public education, for example, is consistently the largest item in state budgets. While a numerical aid formula might seem dull and monotonous, every part of that formula—like all governmental structures—is the product of fierce political contestation. By allocating sizable aid payments to school districts already rich in property wealth, failing to raise the aid quotas to keep pace with rising price levels, or tweaking the formula in a host of other insidious ways, state legislators perpetuate “stealth inequities,” argues school finance scholar Bruce Baker. Thus, state aid too often exacerbates, rather than mitigates, educational inequalities, cutting against Bloom’s characterization of the postwar era as a “golden age” for states. For many activists, like the Alliance for Quality Education, who continue to press for a more equitable state aid formula, the postwar era was a dark age, not a golden age, since it cemented these unequal structures.
The same could be said for the decision to exclude prisons and policing. Over the past decade, the literature on “the carceral state” has been one of the most vibrant fields in modern American history. Bloom, however, decides not to engage with it. Instead, he seems to deliberately sidestep the topic. In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, he writes, “I came to realize that Nelson Rockefeller was more than just…the man responsible for the Rockefeller Drug Laws.”[8] As the historians Julilly Kohler-Hausmann and Heather Ann Thompson have shown, Governor Rockefeller, in establishing mandatory-minimum drug sentences and brutally suppressing the Attica uprising, was a key actor in the nationwide punitive turn in carceral policy, but Bloom decides not to examine these fateful choices made by Rockefeller. Most of all, this omission is a missed opportunity since there is still so much to be said about the role of state governments in the making of mass incarceration. While much of the carceral scholarship has focused on federal or local policy, the majority of prisoners are currently housed in state prisons. How did this come to be? It will be the task of other scholars to examine prisons and policing at the state level.
How States Shaped Postwar America is a welcome addition to a body of scholarship that has, with rare exceptions, almost completely ignored state governments. At its best, the book shows the subtle ways that state officials shaped the postwar metropolis through clever governing techniques like cosigning the debt issues for infrastructure projects, decentralizing the campuses for public universities, and funneling state tax revenues for the maintenance of highway networks. But the costs and benefits of these policies cannot be reduced to tabulations of investment figures and job tallies, even if state boosters insist on speaking about their accomplishments in these terms. Indeed, the costs and benefits of metropolitan development have never been distributed evenly. While Bloom makes legible the invisible role of the state government in a range of venues, it is often the most tangible interactions with the state that shape politics for ordinary citizens—the level of resources in their children’s schools, the police officers patrolling their neighborhoods, and the prisons caging their friends and relatives. To analyze these state policies, along with the accomplishments enumerated by Bloom, would paint a much more complicated, and probably less uplifting, portrait of state governments.
Mike Glass is a history Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His dissertation explores the history of educational inequality in suburban Long Island. He’s currently a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellow. Before graduate school, he taught high school history for seven years in New York City public schools.
[1] How States Shaped Postwar America, 312.
[2] How States Shaped Postwar America, 178.
[3] How States Shaped Postwar America, 194.
[4] How States Shaped Postwar America, 27.
[5] How States Shaped Postwar America, 53.
[6] How States Shaped Postwar America, 46.
[7] How States Shaped Postwar America, 51.
[8] How States Shaped Postwar America, 315.