I read Kirkpatrick Sale's Dwellers in the Land and tried to figure out how we would get a bioregional America by the book's publication date.
United States Directors of National Planning
1935-1940: Rexford Tugwell (Democratic)
(serving under Franklin D. Roosevelt)
1940-1947: David Lilienthal (Independent)
(serving under Franklin D. Roosevelt and William O. Douglas)
1947-1953: Lewis Mumford (Independent)
(serving under William O. Douglas)
United States Directors of National Development
1953: Robert Moses (Republican)
(serving under Robert Taft and Lucius D. Clay)
1953-1963: James Rouse (Democratic)
(serving under Lucius D. Clay and Richard Nixon)
1963-1965: Floyd Dominy (Republican)
(serving under Richard Nixon)
United States Directors of Regional Planning
1965-1969: Lewis Mumford (Independent)
(serving under William O. Douglas)
1969-1977: Floyd Dominy (Republican)
(serving under John J. Rhodes)
1977-1979: Jane Jacobs (Independent)
(serving under Joe Edwards)
1979-1985: Hector Macpherson, Jr. (Republican)
(serving under Joe Edwards)
1985-1989: Maynard Jackson (Democratic)
(serving under Cliff Finch)
1989-1991: Kirkpatrick Sale (The Movement)
(serving under LaDonna Harris)
Convenors of the United States Regional Assembly
1991-0000: Al Gore (nonpartisan)
The Greenbelt Towns, Rex Tugwell’s centrally planned and cooperatively owned suburbs, represented the height of the New Deal – but also its limits. Even Congressional liberals only begrudgingly funded the project, which smacked not merely of typical Rooseveltian populism but of the diktats of Gosplan in Bolshevik Russia. In some places, federal surveyors setting out the Towns faced hostility and violence from locals who feared the “red colonies” that were to come, with their rows of Art Deco apartment blocks. With uncharacteristic humility, Tugwell accepted help from an outside source: Lewis Mumford and the Regional Plan Association of America. The critic and his friends believed in careful development, permaculture, and the creation of communities which were based in, and acted as stewards of, their landscape. Mumford advised Tugwell’s National Planning Office to consult with locals and to plan democratically before drawing up a Greenbelt Town. Drawing on the work of sociologist Howard Odum, Mumford and Tugwell developed a list of several hundred distinct American regions. Each one’s distinct geographical and cultural features would be carefully taken into account during development. Only a few more Greenbelt Towns were built after the RPAA’s intervention, although these are some of the most iconic and well-loved suburban cities in the nation – all built to human scale and integrated into their natural environment. Instead, the Planning Office began to draw up projections for each region’s future growth. This was to be its most important legacy.
As war neared, Tugwell and his social engineering schemes were eased out of the picture. The Directorate’s stores of research were too useful to scrap, however, and they were passed to David Lilienthal, the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Lilienthal was instructed to use the regions as a blueprint for industrial mobilization across state lines, essentially taking the TVA model national. He simplified the web of small regions drawn up by Tugwell and Mumford. Their number was reduced to around forty, mostly mapped onto major watersheds, aquifers, and existing transportation and fuel distribution networks, and these were no mere lines on a map. Each was a government agency, run by an administrator who reported directly to Lilienthal. Like the TVA, these regions had their own police forces and housing bureaus for the legions of men and women hired to operate the power facilities which the government was busily purchasing or constructing. (The RPAA guidelines were largely disregarded during this wave of hasty wartime construction.)
After V-J Day, it was widely assumed that the “War Regions” would be abolished as part of demobilization. Their usurpation of powers traditionally reserved to the states had been extremely unpopular among the political class. (The classic noir In the Long Run [1948], with John Garfield as the young Eastern-born planner whose reputation is systematically destroyed by a crooked California state senator, is required viewing for those interested in the era.) However, the new President was even more enamored with radical experiments than Roosevelt had been, and Bill Douglas thought that planning deserved another hearing. With Tugwell now disqualified by his flirtation with the Communist Party, Douglas skipped the middleman and gave the regions directly to Lewis Mumford.
Their remit was smaller – it was widely understood that dam construction, for instance, had to go back to its traditional home at Reclamation (or was that the Army Corps of Engineers?) – but the regions now mustered their wartime experience and professional staff to create dense, collaboratively designed suburban communities.
However, the delicate process took time, and by 1952, only thirty of a projected 250 projects had been completed. There was talk of a housing crisis for young veterans and their families – a much-exaggerated issue but one with emotional heft. The Republicans pledged to fire Mumford and to either abolish the regions or to use them solely to facilitate rapid private-sector housebuilding. The charge that Douglas was keeping GIs homeless ranks up there with his push for desegregation in explaining Robert Taft’s upset victory in 1952.
Robert Moses, the celebrated planner who had effectively controlled several War Regions during the late conflict, was recruited to direct Taft’s “Homes for Heroes” effort. However, his vision of verdant automobile suburbs accessed by immense superparkways would have no time to spread beyond the New York metro area. Bob Taft’s cancer was diagnosed even before he had even been sworn in as President, and his term lasted only months. His successor, a political newcomer, was initially willing to keep Moses on, but the builder fell afoul of the freshly appointed Vice President Nixon, a middle-class conservative wary of technocrats (and suspicious of Jews). Nixon arranged for Moses’s alleged corruption to be exposed, and he retreated to New York to guard his fiefdoms, a diminished force.
President Clay’s replacement, James Rouse, a business Democrat and a real estate developer himself, was no less shady than Moses but was uninterested in megalithic construction projects. As with most political issues of the day, the Clay administration would just let the private sector sort it out – helped along with generous tax breaks, regulatory exemptions, and eye-wateringly generous grants. The regions shed staff and became a limp, invisible layer of government as sprawl spread across the landscape. Like many other members of the Clay and Nixon administrations, Rouse used his long tenure to enrich himself. The revelations about his consulting relationship with crooked Maryland business mogul Spiro Agnew were part of the explosive cocktail of corruption, labor unrest, and war fatigue that shattered the old two-party system in the mid-1960s. Nixon replaced Rouse with Floyd Dominy, the dam-happy, pro-development chief of the Bureau of Reclamation, reviving Lilienthalism as part of his attempts to grant the Republican Party populist appeal. Unfortunately for Nixon, all the pork-barrel spending in the world couldn’t assuage the radiation-poisoned veterans of the China War or their outraged families.
Douglas picked up right back where he’d left off, reappointing Lewis Mumford to the rebranded Office of Regional Planning. This time, however, the two were radicalized, unfettered by partisan politics, and held a position of command over a fractured Congress. With the help of allies outside Washington – many of them ex-Republicans such as Tom McCall and Harold LeVander – Mumford stripped power from his own office, transforming the regions into elected bodies that both democratized the physical landscape and provided the President’s independent bloc with a new base of power. They shrank and multiplied, until there were several hundred in the continental United States, each developing a constituency of middle-class radicals who saw them as the key to halting development in their backyards.
By the time Rhodes and Dominy came roaring back under the banner of spendy Nixonism, it was too late. The Dominator would never build a dam again, and even housebuilding would be tough ask. The new libertarian coalition of young radicals, upwardly mobile professionals, rural conservatives, and black nationalists was formalized with the ascension of Colorado’s biker-attorney governor to the Presidency. Swingeing cuts to federal spending were accompanied by a swelling of the regions’ responsibilities as they took the lead on transportation and education. The Movement was still shaky, of course. Jane Jacobs, formerly a hero for her role in bringing down the Moses machine that ran the New York Harbor, Hudson Valley, and Peconic Watershed Regions, fell afoul of the left for her alleged promotion of gentrification and the right for her urbanite ethos which clashed with the back-to-the-land mood music.
The crawl towards microfederalism had become centripetal by this point. Even when the centralist and relatively pro-growth Democrats returned to power, their point man on planning was a Jacobsean urbanist who had led Atlanta’s freeway revolts, and whose only substantial criticism of the hollowing of the federal government was that it could enable segregationists. Maynard Jackson’s concerns were mulled over by the Harris-Jontz administration, and anti-discrimination laws were some of the few vestiges of existing federal law to survive the Constitutional Renovation process. (The existence of any federation-level law enforcement troubled some on the Movement’s libertarian wing, including the Planning Director, but he was too excited by the impending abolition of his own office to protest much.)
Al Gore, the sworn representative of the communities and ecosystems of the Cumberland River, was surrendered the Senate gavel in 1991 upon the dissolution of the fifty-four states. As he hoisted the hammer to inaugurate the new bioregional upper house, he remarked on the historical poetry of the moment – after all, he was from the Tennessee Valley…