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Philip Spiess
With the recent discussions, pro and con, about American socialism (which began with Social Security and later with Medicare), here is a saga of its early development in the Cincinnati environs:
GREENHILLS, OHIO: A Government Experiment in Planned Communities
Once upon a time, in the days of yore before we were born, boys and girls, there was a presidential administration in Washington, D. C., known as the “New Deal.” It was the administration of a president, one Franklin Delano Roosevelt (fifth cousin to an earlier president, Theodore Roosevelt, whose administration was known as the “Square Deal”), who, in the early days of establishing his administration, created something known as “the Brain Trust,” a group of academics from Columbia University who developed the New Deal’s early policy recommendations. There were four original members of this presidential advisory body; they were Samuel Rosenman, Adolf Berle, Raymond Moley, and Rexford Tugwell (others came and went over the next several years). The only one that will concern us here is Rexford Tugwell, who, colleagues noted, “was like a cocktail. His conversation picked you up and made your brain race along.”
Rexford G. Tugwell (1891-1979) was an economist at Columbia University (1920-1932) who had studied the works of the turn-of-the-century muckraker and fighter for workers’ rights, Upton Sinclair (author of that notorious novel, The Jungle, 1905, on the meat-packing industry, which led to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, courtesy of Professor Harvey Wiley). An experimentalist economist, Tugwell promoted agricultural planning, led by industry, to stop the rural poverty that had become endemic due to a crop surplus after World War I, specifically advocating the controlling of production, prices, and costs – a method particularly relevant as the “Great Depression” began – but which was viewed as Socialist by many.
After Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, Tugwell was appointed Assistant Secretary of the U. S. Department of Agriculture; in 1934 he became Undersecretary of the department. He helped create the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and served as its director; his management of its production of crops by adjusting the subsidies for non-production was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1936. In 1933 Tugwell helped create the Soil Conservation Service, which was instrumental in restoring poor-quality farming land and introducing better agricultural practices to conserve the soil, actions which reclaimed farmlands from the ravages of the 1930s “Dust Bowl” [cf. John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) or John Ford’s Academy Award-winning film based on the novel (1940), or, better yet, see Pare Lorentz’s 1936 documentary film, The Plow That Broke the Plains, one of the great documentary films of all times, which was actually made for Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration (see below), and was justly accused of being “New Deal” propaganda].
In April, 1935, FDR and Tugwell created the Resettlement Administration (RA), a subdivision of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, to create healthy communities for the rural unemployed by relocating them to new communities for access to more urban opportunities. Some of the RA’s activities dealt with land conservation and rural aid, but the construction of new urban satellite cities was its most prominent activity. Tugwell stated: “My idea is to go just outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community and entice people into it. Then go back into the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them.” His inspiration for these communities was based on the work of Sir Ebenezer Howard, an urban reformer of early 20th-century Great Britain, whose “Garden City” movement in England [from 1920 on; cf. Letchworth Garden City or Welwyn Garden City (twenty miles north of London), for examples] sought to combine the best features of both town and country, offering the social and economic advantages of a community which had both fresh air and public green spaces. [N.B.: The Resettlement Administration’s programs were taken over by the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), created in 1937.]
Tugwell’s communities were styled “greenbelt communities,” as they were to be surrounded by a wide band of open land (i.e., the “green belt”), separating them from adjacent suburban developments in order to reinforce their sense of local community cohesion. Designed with three goals in mind: (1) to combine the advantages of city and country life; (2) to provide good housing at reasonable prices for moderate income families; and (3) to provide jobs for unemployed workers, they were to demonstrate a new kind of suburban living, with housing situated within easy walking distance of gardens, employment, and the town center. All of the property was owned by the federal government, which, through the building of the towns, gave jobs to twenty-five thousand unemployed workers. The properties were rented to families based on income, housing need, and family size. (Not surprising, given the times, yet surprising, given “New Deal” politics, the planners and selection committees excluded African American families from renting homes, and restrictive covenants prevented them from eventually purchasing homes; thus the “greenbelt towns” were created as racially segregated, all-white suburban communities.)
Initially, Tugwell had hoped to build at least twenty greenbelt towns throughout the United States; the original goal was to create towns that would have 25,000 housing units in them, but instead, because of budget cuts, the figure was reduced to 5,000 units, and very often only about 1,600 buildings – housing units, service buildings, and community structures – were built. Ultimately, Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration built and owned only three greenbelt communities before the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found the program unconstitutional, ruling that housing construction was a state power, not a federal one. The three greenbelt communities constructed were: Greenbelt, Maryland (1937), ten miles north of Washington, D. C.; Greenhills, Ohio (1935-1937), about fourteen and a half miles north of downtown Cincinnati; and Greendale, Wisconsin (1936-1938), three miles southwest of Milwaukee; a fourth town, planned for New Jersey, was summarily scuttled.
Greenbelt, Maryland, was the largest of the three greenbelt towns; as such, it received the most public attention (being just outside of Washington, D. C.). It had 885 dwellings, carefully arranged on super blocks with generous open spaces between them. There was a town center, containing the municipal building, retail stores, a movie theater, a gas station, a public swimming pool, and the public school, which also served as the community center. Footpaths wound through each neighborhood, passing under the major roads for safety and linking the dwellings to the town center. But in 1954 the Baltimore-Washington Parkway was built through part of the green belt, and then in the 1960s the Capital Beltway cut through the middle of the green belt as well. Thereafter, the Committee to Save the Green Belt reacquired 230 acres of the original greenbelt area, which had been sold to developers in the 1950s, and established the Greenbelt Forest Preserve. Greenbelt, Maryland, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997.
Greenhills, Ohio, which is our main concern here, was the third federal “greenbelt community.” The first residents moved in on April 1, 1938. Greenhills is located mostly on the eastern side of Winton Road, just north of what is now Winton Woods park, and so originally it was surrounded by forest (in 1939, the forest south of town was given to the Hamilton County Park Board and became Winton Woods). Greenhills cost $11.5 million to build, which included purchasing 5,360 acres of land in Springfield Township. Around 3,300 workers, most of them with the WPA [Works Progress Administration] spent 4.3 million man-hours constructing the town (they used mules for earth-moving instead of machines, in order to increase the manpower employed), and many of these workers became the town’s first residents (most of the original buildings they built are still in use). The land north of the town consisted of large farms, where residents could get fresh milk and produce. The Greenhills Historic District, the original government-built area, is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places; in 2017, Greenhills was designated a National Historic Landmark (recommended for such by Hamilton County as a potential tourist booster).
Urban planners Justin Hartzog [who also planned Mariemont for Mrs. Mary Emery – perhaps another essay] and William Strong designed Greenhills’ roads to follow the natural topography of rolling hills, and the housing was situated on purposely narrow dead-end streets, with no four-way intersections, in order to cut down on traffic and make it safer for children to play. The village was subdivided into somewhat circular “super blocks,” with most homes oriented so that their fronts looked out on park areas, with their backs to the street; utilities were installed underground. Shared courtyards, playgrounds, and intersecting walkways were designed to encourage social cohesion among the residents. Everything that residents presumably needed was located near one street, making it a walking community; the school, shops, and community building were run as cooperatives, the goal being to create a collective utopia. (The shopping center could be considered one of the first “strip malls” in Ohio.). Most of the 676 dwellings were apartments or multifamily townhouses, with only a few stand-alone private homes (by 2000 there were 1,639 houses in Greenhills). Many of the apartments had a modern style (simple Colonial or Art Moderne), with flat roofs for easy maintenance. All units were rented, not purchased, with a typical rent of $27.62 a month (around $500 in current terms).
You had to apply to join the Greenhills community. Government officials interviewed prospective residents’ neighbors in Westwood and other Cincinnati suburbs to determine their “moral character” and make sure that they could maintain the property in good order. Prospective residents needed to have a steady job (this was the Great Depression, after all), which meant making between $1,000 and $2,500 a year ($18,000 to $45,000 today). The residents’ income was checked every year; those who exceeded the maximum were asked to leave. Today, many resident families include third- and fourth-generation descendants of the original “pioneers” who occupied the original homes, and African Americans (as well as other non-whites) live there now [see above for their original exclusion].
There is a village green at the center of Greenhills, and the town’s motto is “Pioneering a Dream.” The Greenhills Community Building or village hall, now the James Whallon House, originally included a library, a gym, and a movie theater; it was decorated with two WPA [Works Progress Administration] murals by Paul Chidlaw and Richard Zoellner. Adjacent is an Art Moderne public swimming pool; the Winton Woods City School District serves Greenhills, and a branch of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is located there as well. The early days were filled with community ice cream socials (there is a seasonal custard shop today) and cookouts (today there is one sit-down restaurant in town), during which blue gill caught in Winton Woods lake were grilled. In the days before television, neighbors visited and helped out with one another; it is said, in those days, “everybody knew everyone.”
Following World War II, the U. S. government decided to sell off the “greenbelt towns”; in December, 1949, the Greenhills Home Owners Corp., a nonprofit tenant group, purchased 610 acres of Greenhills for $3.5 million. Tenants then bought the homes they had been renting. Following that change, new one-family homes in a typical suburban style of the period were built, and Greenhills became a bedroom community of Cincinnati with a village manager. The farmland north of town was sold in 1952 to create “New Greenhills,” which, however, ended up being named Forest Park. And in 2009 officials tore down fifty-two of the original flat-roof apartments (although they were on the National Register of Historic Places), despite the protests of many longtime residents. In December of 2017, still more original apartment buildings were torn down; they were plagued by mold, asbestos, failing foundations, and original boilers giving up the ghost – the village simply couldn’t afford the cost of repair and/or restoration. Indeed, by 2010, the population of Greenhills had sunk to 3,615, about its 1950 level, largely because people today want larger houses than Greenhills had to offer. So Greenhills is now trying to conceptualize new, more modern homes, which, it is hoped, will be compatible with the 1930s styles, utilizing curved corners and having interplay with the adjacent green spaces.
Greendale, Wisconsin, located in Milwaukee County, is about three miles southwest of Milwaukee proper, but is part of the Milwaukee metropolitan area; its construction was begun in 1936. In 1949, the Public Housing Administration (which had superseded the Resettlement Administration in its ownership of the property) gave Greendale residents the right to purchase their homes from the government. This transfer of ownership from the government to the people was mostly complete by 1952. (The Greendale Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005; it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2012.)
[Footnote: A result of Rexford Tugwell’s government efforts was that his suburban resettlement program caused him to be condemned as a Communist (conservatives in Congress called him “Rex the Red”) and un-American, because of the program’s cooperative and social planning aspects. However, Tugwell was never affiliated with the Communist Party. In 1938 he was appointed the first director of the New York City Planning Commission; during World War II he served as the Governor of Puerto Rico (1941-1946); and, in his later years, he was first a professor at the University of Chicago, and then a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.]
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