When the Feds Believed in Strong Towns

“Community action through community agreement on community projects.” From the 1942 “Small Town Manual for Community Action” described below.

It’s well-known now that much of the problems with development after World War Two resulted from the willingness of the federal government to subsidize city borrowing to build lots of infrastructure, much more than the city could maintain, even if they attracted the development for it.

But what if the federal government had pursued a Strong Towns approach after the war? It could have happened.

A while ago I came across some old copies of a magazine called Coronet and the March 1943 issue caught my eye, with its cover story “Main Street on the War-Map,” by Sigmund Sameth. According to Sameth, when the United States entered World War Two the Department of Commerce was already at work on a way to help small towns across the country because the Depression had hurt them hard. Much like today, they were suffering from a variety of ills: the Depression had closed down factories, young people were moving to bigger towns and cities, and local retailers were losing business.

And like today, the response of a lot of people was (in the words of the article): “Let George do it.” In other words, it was somebody else’s problem to solve. Many people looked to their state governments or hoped to be part of a New Deal project. Today’s leaders of the same stripe would be putting together tax incentives, offering to seize and demolish tax-paying buildings by eminent domain for land assemblage, and trying to borrow a lot of money for new roads, pipes or other infrastructure.

Unlike today, however, government officials didn’t believe they had a never-ending cornucopia of debt-financed construction and unlimited economic growth to pay for it. If nothing else, the Depression and its bankruptcies of banks and municipalities, was good for understanding that the money could run out. Plus, it was understood that most New Deal programs were temporary and so towns needed to be able to get themselves on a solid foundation. Once the country became involved in the Second World War that took priority and it became imperative that towns not burden the government or hinder war work with their problems.

The 1942 manual is available in digitized form in Google Books.

So in 1942, the Department of Commerce published a a short booklet called the “Small Town Manual for Community Action!” and distributed it far and wide. “This is up to you, individually and collectively,” said its introduction. “No organization has been established and subsidized to tell you everything that you should do. None is planned…Not all the jobs that you can do have been suggested. Not all communities can use every suggestion in it. But every community will find some ideas in these pages which the community can put to work…But no community can use this guide unless you, the individual reading this foreword at this moment, say to yourself, ‘I’m going to pitch in to make this work.’”

The recommendations were deceptively simple and, at the bottom, consist of getting everyone together to talk about what needs to be done and then doing it. The important thing was to focus on actual needs, and not wants.

For instance, the manual gave an example of a town that was surrounded by farms, but the farmers got their supplies and did their shopping elsewhere because they could go to movies in the other town. So for agricultural towns, figuring out how to get the farmers in to town was a key task of the meetings. Another example was given in the Coronet article was Port Jervis, New York. They were spending a lot of money on gasoline and losing time driving to a distant town to buy groceries, so they started a produce market in their town, keeping money in the local economy, along with some savings.

According to Coronet, “Instead of whining for federal projects, the [Community Action] plan helps towns to help themselves. Sources of basic local prosperity are analyzed and systematically exploited.”

Sounds familiar, right?

“The specific steps taken by Port Jervis probably wouldn’t apply to another community in the United States,” Sameth wrote for Coronet all those years ago. “It’s strictly a cut-to-measure program, with the individual town doing the tailoring.”

Another town that put the manual to good use, according to Coronet, was Olathe, Kansas. In the 1940 U.S. Census, Olathe had a population of just under 4,000. 

“When war broke out it was a municipal has-been…Abandoned homes and empty stores made Olathe look like a Hollywood lot after the actors and electricians have left.”

Again, an all too familiar story in the United States today. Far too many cities in the upper Midwest have far too many abandoned homes. Detroit, Chicago, Akron, and others all have sections where all but a handful of houses on a block have been demolished. St Louis even developed an industry exporting bricks from demolished buildings. 

A page from the “Small Town Manual for Community Action.”

According to Coronet, the people of Olathe were able to recover by renting rooms in their houses to people who came to nearby Kansas City, Missouri for war work, and they converted an empty school into a rest and relaxation center for servicemen stationed nearby.

While the challenges faced by America’s small towns today are not the same as they were 75 years ago—when the country was on a total war footing and after ten years of a depression—they are similar. Small towns are losing young people not to war, but to bigger cities, despair and drugs. The economy, as measured by GDP and stock prices, might have been doing fine pre-pandemic, but increasing numbers of Americans were already finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. Many towns are beginning to understand that their infrastructure is overbuilt and there’s no way for them to pay for it without either raising taxes, abandoning it, or engaging in another cycle of the Growth Ponzi Scheme.

Thus far, Americans’ response to these challenges has been what the authors of the “Small Town Manual for Community Action” and the Coronet article called America’s greatest wartime enemy: a spirit of apathy and disengagement where people expected someone else to solve their problems, as summarized by the phrase “Let George do it.”

Economic development experts continue to push the next deal with Bass Pro Shops or Amazon, trading property taxes and millions of dollars of infrastructure improvements for a few jobs. Transportation engineers continue to think that more and wider highways will solve all problems. Too many city and town governments seem to think that the solution to homelessness, poor transit, climate change and economic malaise is to seek more funding from Washington. 

The sort of honest examination of needs and assets, of collaboration and willingness to see a bigger picture as counseled in the “Community Action” manual, would strike many people as radical.

The manual was intended to serve as a guide for post-war economies, but it seems to have never been used for its intended purpose. Searching Google will find digital copies of the booklet and library locations, along with some newspaper articles from 1942, but nothing to suggest it had a wide impact.

Very soon after the war Congress scrapped the idea of sober and honest self-examination for lots of easy money and neon dreams. Federal acts supported the popular new urban planning of the time—single-use zones, wide roads with lots of parking and shopping centers—and the crowded, narrow tenement and brownstone districts were torn down.

Whether money or loan guarantees, the results were the same: the streetcar suburbs, the traditional neighborhoods and the downtowns were emptied of residents and the rural fringes experienced their first boom of post-war prosperity.

The historic Kensington Building in Norfolk, Nebraska. Image credit.

Of the towns mentioned in the Coronet article, Olathe is now a large suburb of Kansas City, with over 100,000 residents, lots of surface parking lots, housing subdivisions lacking apartments, and stores and wide arterial roads. Port Jervis has continued to decline, largely because of the decline of railroads. Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin is a small town that looks to be doing okay. Barnesville, Georgia is also still a small town, though its population has continued to grow. McKinney has become a suburb of Dallas; between 1950 and 1990, the town grew by about 10,000 people, and then by 170,000 between 1990 and 2020. Norfolk, Nebraska has also become more dependent on the automobile, but retains a nice downtown and a reasonably healthy economy.

One of the great “what-ifs” of American urban history must be the question of how post-war urban development would have gone, had it been along the lines of incremental development and the proto-Strong Towns approach of the Community Action manual.

Cover image via the “Small Town Manual for Community Action”

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About the Author

Matthew M. Robare is a Boston-based freelance writer specializing in urbanism and transportation. Follow him on Twitter @MattRobare. His website is www.mattrobarewrites.com.