Contemporary Authors

• The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Crisis Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2002
• Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2009
• The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction University of Virginia Press (Charlottesville, NC), 2011
• American Conversations, Volume 2 Pearson (Upper Saddle River, NJ), 2013

1. American conversations LCCN 2012020977 Type of material Book Main title American conversations / James H. Merrell, Jerald Podair, Andrew Kersten ; volume 1 edited by James H. Merrell ; volume 2 edited by Jerald Podair and Andrew Kersten. Published/Created Upper Saddle River, N.J. : Pearson, c2013. Description 2 v. : ill. ; 26 cm. ISBN 9780132446839 (v. 1 : pbk.) 0132446839 (v. 1 : pbk.) 9780131582613 (v. 2 : pbk.) 0131582615 (v. 2 : pbk.) CALL NUMBER E173 .A7235 2013 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. The struggle for equality : essays on sectional conflict, the Civil War, and the long reconstruction LCCN 2011009245 Type of material Book Main title The struggle for equality : essays on sectional conflict, the Civil War, and the long reconstruction / edited by Orville Vernon Burton, Jerald Podair, and Jennifer L. Weber. Published/Created Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2011. Description xiii, 306 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780813931739 (cloth : alk. paper) 0813931738 (cloth : alk. paper) 9780813931777 (e-book) 0813931770 (e-book) Links Inhaltsverzeichnis. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=024670711&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA CALL NUMBER HN90.S6 S77 2011 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HN90.S6 S77 2011 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. Bayard Rustin : American dreamer LCCN 2008025176 Type of material Book Personal name Podair, Jerald E., 1953- Main title Bayard Rustin : American dreamer / Jerald Podair. Published/Created Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield Pub., c2009. Description xiii, 173 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9780742545137 (cloth : alk. paper) 074254513X (cloth) Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0820/2008025176.html Shelf Location FLM2015 038908 CALL NUMBER E185.97.R93 P63 2009 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 4. The strike that changed New York : blacks, whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis LCCN 2002004315 Type of material Book Personal name Podair, Jerald E., 1953- Main title The strike that changed New York : blacks, whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis / Jerald E. Podair. Published/Created New Haven : Yale University Press, c2002. Description xi, 273 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0300081227 (cloth : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER LB2844.47.U62 N4867 2002 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles - 2017 Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

• Princeton University Press blog - http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2017/04/19/jerald-podair-on-the-building-of-dodger-stadium/

  Jerald Podair on the building of Dodger Stadium
  April 19, 2017 by PUP Author
  PodairThis April marks the 55th anniversary of Dodger Stadium’s grand opening. The stadium is well-known in the world of professional sports for its beauty as well as its history, but when Walter O’Malley moved his Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957 with plans to construct a new ballpark next to downtown, he ignited a bitter argument over the future of a rapidly changing city. For the first time, City of Dreams by Jerald Podair tells the full story of the controversial building of Dodger Stadium—and how it helped create modern Los Angeles by transforming its downtown into a vibrant cultural and entertainment center. Podair recently took some time to answer a few questions about the book, and how Dodger Stadium came to serve as the field of battle between two visions of Los Angeles’s future.

  What drew you to Los Angeles as a historical subject?

  JP: I’ve always had the native New Yorker’s outsized pride in his home city, but if New York was America’s city of the twentieth century, Los Angeles may well be its city of the twenty-first. Our national multicultural experiment—one the rest of the world is watching closely—will, for better or worse, play out in Los Angeles. So I became fascinated by the ways in which Los Angeles grew and developed during the twentieth century, especially during the years following World War II, when it began to turn outward toward the nation and world.

  I also came to study Los Angeles through the equally fascinating historical figure of Walter O’Malley, who altered the historical trajectories of America’s two most important cities when he moved his Brooklyn Dodgers west in 1957. The New York portion of O’Malley’s story is well documented, the Los Angeles period much less so. O’Malley was strikingly unfamiliar with Los Angeles when he moved there—his total time spent in the city amounted to less than ten days—and he had not anticipated the serious obstacles he would face in building his new stadium. There is a myth, especially prevalent in New York, that O’Malley enjoyed smooth sailing once he arrived in Los Angeles and that the road to Dodger Stadium was an easy one. This, as I discovered, was emphatically not the case. I was drawn to writing about O’Malley and his struggles in Los Angeles as a way to understand the larger story of that city’s journey to power and status in postwar America.

  And why Dodger Stadium?

  JP: No American sports venue epitomizes its home city as does Dodger Stadium. It would be out of place anywhere else. Dodger Stadium serves as a form of civic glue for a fractured, transient city. The people of Los Angeles disagree about many things, but not about Dodger Stadium. To them, it is an object of pride and fascination. So it seemed to me that Dodger Stadium would be the perfect vehicle through which to tell the story of the emergence of Los Angeles as a modern city through its signature sports venue. I’m always telling my students at Lawrence University to take a smaller (but not small) story and use it to tell a larger one. This book is an instance of taking my own advice.

  You argue in your book that the battle over building Dodger Stadium was really a battle over the modern identity of Los Angeles. What do you mean by that?

  JP: The battle over Dodger Stadium divided the city of Los Angeles in half. Two clashing visions of the city’s future lay at stake. A revitalized downtown—which Dodger Stadium would anchor—was essential to the first of those visions, championed by business interests such as the Chandler family, publishers of the Los Angeles Times, and political elites led by Mayor Norris Poulson. Their Los Angeles was an ambitious city of “no little plans,” with civic institutions that matched its growing economic and cultural power. They wanted a downtown comparable to those in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles’s rival to the north, San Francisco.

  But Los Angeles was also a city of what the historian Kenneth Starr has called the “Folks,” white middle class property owners with Midwestern roots who had settled in peripheral areas and who felt little connection to downtown and what it represented. To them, Dodger Stadium was a diversion of taxpayer resources—and the Folks identified very strongly as “taxpayers”—from the basic, everyday functions of government in their neighborhoods: schools, roads, policing, and sanitation. So their more circumscribed understanding of what Los Angeles should be and the purposes it should serve clashed with the vision of those who were identified, both geographically and philosophically, with downtown.

  Between 1957 and 1962, Dodger Stadium served as the field of battle between these two visions of Los Angeles’s future. We know of course that the stadium was built, so the advocates of “no little plans” won that round. But even today, the argument over the city’s identity continues. Downtown Los Angeles is a much more vibrant place than it was when the Dodgers arrived in 1957, if you measure by institutions and edifices—museums, concert halls, sports arenas, restaurants, high-end apartments, and office towers—but it still lacks the coherency and depth, the soul, if you will, of more historically established downtowns. It remains a work in progress. And there are still those who, like the Folks who opposed Dodger Stadium in the 1950s and 1960s, view downtown as a drain of resources from their own communities. In many ways, they continue to see downtown Los Angeles as irrelevant to their lives. So in that sense, the argument over Dodger Stadium and the city’s modern identity continues today.

  In your book, you discuss the political cultures of New York and Los Angeles in the years following World War II. How did they differ?

  JP: I think the very different political cultures of New York and Los Angeles determined that Walter O’Malley would get what he needed—affordable land on which to build his privately financed ballpark—from one city but not from the other. New York’s municipal politics in the 1950s featured a strong orientation toward the public sector and organized labor that, while not necessarily anti-capitalist in nature, did not offer an entrepreneur like O’Malley a particularly sympathetic atmosphere. This meant that when he asked for assistance from New York City officials in acquiring land parcels in Brooklyn that were beyond his individual financial means in order to construct a stadium with his own funds, he was branded—unfairly, in my view—as seeking a “giveaway.” But in Los Angeles, publicly owned land at Chavez Ravine overlooking downtown was made available to O’Malley in exchange for property he owned elsewhere in the city. Los Angeles officials were thus willing to do what their counterparts in New York were not.

  In my view, this was because the political culture of Los Angeles—where the statist reforms of the New Deal had less staying power than in New York—was more hospitable to businessmen, especially one like O’Malley whose private undertaking promised to advance the public good. In New York, the focus was almost obsessively on O’Malley’s profits; that the city would benefit from a new Dodger ballpark was deemed of lesser importance. In Los Angeles, the weight accorded these considerations was reversed. In deciding a taxpayer suit seeking to void the Dodger Stadium contract in favor of O’Malley, the California Supreme Court said as much. The Dodgers were permitted to make money on the deal, the court ruled in 1959, as long as there were tangible benefits accruing to the people of Los Angeles. Those benefits—a world-class stadium, not to mention millions of dollars in property taxes paid by the privately held stadium—were enough to justify state assistance to a private entrepreneur. O’Malley moved to Los Angeles for this very reason. Although O’Malley was a businessman and not a philosopher and probably would not have used the term “political culture” to explain his decision to leave New York, this is clearly what he had in mind. Had New York’s political culture been different, he undoubtedly would have remained there. And that would have been Los Angeles’s loss, since along with Walter’s son and successor Peter, the O’Malleys are widely regarded as the best sports ownership group in the city’s history.

  Why are Los Angeles politics so difficult to untangle?

  JP: One my previous books examined the byzantine politics of New York City, but I can tell you, my hometown has nothing on Los Angeles. For one thing, New York has party identifications. Los Angeles’s nonpartisan system makes it difficult to identify who belongs where. Yes, I knew that say, Mayor Norris Poulson was a Republican (he had served as a GOP congressman) and that Edward Roybal, a Mexican American city councilman who opposed the Dodger Stadium contract, was a Democrat, but there was nonetheless a disorienting quality to the political landscape that made it hard to follow.

  Also unlike New York, there were few ethnoreligious identifying markers to guide me. Los Angeles had racial divides, of course, but during the 1950s it was a largely white Protestant city that lacked the deep-seated tribalism of New York. Beyond the Melting Pot, the classic book about the resilience of ethnic and racial politics in New York, could not have been written about Los Angeles. Los Angeles did not have a political machine like New York’s Tammany Hall or even a “power broker” like Robert Moses, who determined what got built in New York during the postwar years. I’m not saying that bosses and dictatorial bureaucrats are good things, of course, but they certainly make a city’s political terrain easier to “read.” Los Angeles’s politics were also relatively decentered, with media taking the place of strong party organizations and referenda (such as the 1958 vote on the Dodger Stadium contract that determined its fate) devolving power to the grassroots.

  Approaching Los Angeles, I felt a bit like Walter O’Malley himself, who stepped off the plane from New York in October 1957 to encounter a Los Angeles political landscape with no parties, no machines, no power brokers, no white ethnics, and no center. Disconcerting, to say the least. But like O’Malley, once I got my bearings, I found Los Angeles a fascinating place to be. I feel that the surface of this city’s history has barely been scratched.

  How does your book speak to current issues involving public financing for stadiums and arenas in cities seeking to attract or retain sports teams?

  JP: When it was completed in 1962, Dodger Stadium was the first privately funded sports venue since Yankee Stadium forty years earlier. Over the past half-century, it has earned a great deal of money for both Dodger ownership and—since it is on the tax rolls—the city and county of Los Angeles. In contrast, municipally financed stadiums invariably fail to recoup their costs in line with their projected timetables. San Francisco’s city-built Candlestick Park, which when it opened in 1960 was compared favorably with the yet-to-be-completed Dodger Stadium, took over 30 years to pay itself off, far longer than expected.

  While the costs of private stadium construction are almost prohibitively high today, Dodger Stadium offers a lesson for cities seeking to build sports arenas without saddling themselves with debt or blowing up their budgets: get as much private money as you can. That is easier said than done, of course, because the threat of ownership to leave town or to reject an offer from a suitor city is omnipresent. But private financing beats public spending every time. Walter O’Malley had a personal stake in making Dodger Stadium the cleanest, most welcoming, most efficiently run and most attractive sports venue in America, because it belonged to him. He was responsible for it, good or bad. Around the same time Dodger Stadium went up, the municipally owned Shea Stadium opened in New York to house the National League’s new franchise, the Mets. Arriving well over budget, Shea Stadium was charmless and hulking, with dirty corridors and bathrooms and surly employees. The city of New York maintained it poorly. Unlike Dodger Stadium, no single individual was accountable when things went wrong at Shea Stadium, as they often did. The contrast between private and public ownership could not have been starker.

  Another lesson of the Dodger Stadium story is one that many sports economists will dispute, but which I hold to nonetheless: these teams are worth keeping. Something goes out of a city’s soul when a sports franchise leaves. Certainly that was the case in New York, where aging Brooklyn Dodger fans still lament their team’s departure. For all the brave talk about “not needing” a team, after it goes there is an emptiness that even improved municipal bottom lines cannot fill. This is a distinctly non-empirical view I’m propounding, and I’m sure that “the numbers” argue against me, but to cite one example, the last time I was in Seattle I saw “bring back the Sonics” signs in windows, years after their NBA team left for Oklahoma City. Ask Seattle fans—and the city ardently pursued a replacement team a while back—how the money they saved when the Sonics left town feels jingling around in their pockets. It’s cold comfort. They want their team back. Similarly, ask Brooklyn fans what they’d do if they could do it all over again in 1957. The “let them leave” bravado would vanish. They’d want their Dodgers back. They’re baseball fans, not accountants.

  Are you a Dodgers fan?

  JP: No, I’m actually a lifelong (and long-suffering) fan of the New York Mets, who are the spiritual successors of the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team I am too young to remember personally. But studying and writing about Dodger Stadium—for my money, America’s most beautiful ballpark—has certainly pulled me in the direction of its featured attraction. When you’re sitting in the upper deck at Dodger Stadium at dusk on a summer night in LA with the organ music playing and the San Gabriel Mountains beckoning in the distance, it’s hard not to root for the home team.

  Jerald Podair is professor of history and the Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He is the author of The Strike That Changed New York and Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer and City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles.

• Lawrence University - http://faculty.lawrence.edu/podairj/my-cv/

  JERALD PODAIR
  Lawrence University
  711 E. Boldt Way SPC 19
  Appleton, WI 54911-5699
  Department of History
  319 Main Hall
  920-832-6677
  podairj@lawrence.edu

  2700 Beechwood Court
  Appleton WI 54911
  920-831-0350
  CURRENT POSITION:
  Professor of History and Robert S. French Professor of American Studies, Lawrence University.
  EDUCATION:
  Princeton University, Ph.D., 1997.
  Dissertation: “ Like Strangers: Blacks, Whites, and New York City’s Ocean Hill –Brownsville Crisis, 1945-1980”
  Study of race relations in post-World War II New York City, built around Ocean Hill-Brownsville school decentralization crisis of 1968.
  Winner, 1998 Allan Nevins Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians.
  Dissertation Advisers: Alan Brinkley and James McPherson.
  Princeton University, M.A., 1991.
  Columbia University Law School, J.D., 1977.
  New York University, B.A., magna cum laude, 1974.
  PRIOR EMPLOYMENT:
  Chair, Department of History, Lawrence University, 2008-2010.
  Associate Professor of History, Lawrence University, 2003-2009.
  Assistant Professor of History, Lawrence University, 1998-2003.
  Lecturer, Princeton University Department of History, 1997-1998.
  Assistant in Instruction, Princeton University Department of History, 1994-1997.
  Practicing Attorney, New York, NY, 1977-1988.
  PUBLICATIONS:
  Books
  Land, Power, and the Fate of Modern Los Angeles: Building Dodger Stadium (Princeton,
  NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
  American Conversations: From the Centennial to the Millennium, by Jerald Podair and
  Andrew E. Kersten (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2012).
  The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the
  Long Reconstruction, edited by Jerald Podair, Vernon Burton and Jennifer Weber (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011).
  Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).
  The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville
  Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
  Finalist, 2003 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award, awarded by the
  Organization of American Historians for the best book on any aspect of the struggle for civil rights in the United States.
  Honorable Mention, 2003 Urban History Association Book Award, for best book in North American urban history.
  Articles and Reviews
  Review, The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Conflict: Intellectual Struggles Between Blacks and
  Jews at Mid-Century, by Glen Anthony Harris, American Historical Review, 118
  (October 2013): 1209-10.
  “Albert Shanker” and “New York Teachers Strike (1968)” in Melvyn Dubofsky, ed.,
  The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor, and Economic History
  (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
  Review, “Progressive Appleton: Through the Lens of W.D. Schlafer,” Voyageur, 30
  (Summer/Fall 2013): 39-43.
  Review, Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture, by Oyvind
  Vagnes, Film & History, 42 (Fall 2012): 72-73.
  Review, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City
  Teachers Union, by Clarence Taylor, American Communist History, 11
  (December 2012): 308-10.
  “An Awful Choice: Bayard Rustin and New York City’s Civil Rights Wars, 1968,” in
  Jerald Podair, Vernon Burton, and Jennifer Weber, eds., The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011).
  “’One City, One Standard’: The Struggle for Equality in Rudolph Giuliani’s New York,”
  in Clarence Taylor, ed., Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the
  Giuliani Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011).
  “Walter O’Malley,” in Steven Riess, ed., Sports in America: From Colonial Times to the
  Twenty-First Century (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2011), 689-90.
  Review, The American Worker on Film: A Critical History, 1909-1999, by Doyle
  Greene, Film & History, 41 (Spring 2011): 120-22.
  Review, Power, Protest and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles
  in New York City, by Melissa F. Weiner, History of Education Quarterly,
  51 (November 2011): 598-600.
  “Introduction: A Book to Remember,” A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord (Lodi, NJ:
  Everbind Anthologies, 2010).
  Review, The New Yorker Theatre and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies, by Toby
  Talbot, Film & History, 40 (Fall 2010): 122-23.
  “You Decide: View Teachers Unions as Enemy or Work with them to Achieve Mutual
  Goals,” New York Daily News, October 15, 2010.
  Review, Inventing the American Way: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to
  the Civil Rights Revolution, by Wendy Wall, American Studies, 50
  (Spring/Summer 2010): 217.
  Review, Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial, by James A. Miller
  American Communist History, 9 (April 2010): 97-99.
  Review, “Black Thursday Remembered: Race, Politics, and Campus Unrest in Northeast
  Wisconsin During the Late 1960s,” Journal of American History, 96 (June 2009): 166-69.
  Review, Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, by Wayne Barrett
  and Dan Collins, The Historian, 70 (Winter 2008): 769-70.
  Review, For All White-Collar Workers: The Possibilities of Radicalism in New York
  City’s Department Store Unions, 1934-1953, by Daniel J. Opler, American
  Historical Review, 113 (December 2008): 1569.
  Review, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity, by Eric L.
  Goldstein, Labor History, 49 (February 2008): 128-29.
  Review, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism, by Daniel H.
  Perlstein, Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 31 (July 2007): 139-40.
  Review, Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley, by Kate
  Rousmaniere, and Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven’s
  Working Class, 1870-1940, by Stephen Lassonde, Labor: Studies in Working-
  Class History of the Americas, 4 (Spring 2007): 115-18.
  “Edward Daniels,” in Sara B. Bearss, ed., Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Richmond:
  The Library of Virginia, 2006).
  “Ocean Hill-Brownsville Strike (1968),” in Eric Arnesen, ed., Encyclopedia of U.S.
  Labor and Working-Class History (New York and London: Routledge, 2007).
  “Neighborhood Power,” Journal of Urban History, 31 (July 2005): 746-52.
  Review, The African-American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period
  to the Present, Joe W. Trotter, Earl Lewis, and Tera W. Hunter, eds., Urban
  Studies, 42 (July 2005): 3-5.
  “Lights Out,” Reviews in American History, 32 (June 2004): 267-73.
  “The Strikes That Changed New York: Race, Culture, and Ocean Hill-Brownsville, 1960-
  1975,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 26 (January 2002):
  7-23.
  Review, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto, by
  Wendell Pritchett, Urban Studies, 40 (January 2003): 183-85.
  Review, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto, by
  Wendell Pritchett, American Studies, 43 (Fall 2002): 139.
  “Ocean Hill-Brownsville” and ”Albert Shanker,” in Peter Eisenstadt, ed., The
  Encyclopedia of New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
  2005).
  Review, Black Newspapers & America’s War for Democracy, 1914-1920, by William G.
  Jordan, The Historian, 65 (March 2003): 724-25.
  “Views From the 110th Floor,” Review, Twin Towers: The Life of
  New York City’s World Trade Center, by Angus Kress Gillespie, and Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center, by Eric Darton, H-Urban, H-Net Reviews, August 2000.
  URL: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews
  “New York,” in Waldo E. Martin, Jr., and Patricia Sullivan, eds., Civil Rights in the
  United States (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2000).
  “’White’ Values, ‘Black’ Values: The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Controversy and New
  York City Culture, 1965-1975,” Radical History Review, 59 (Spring
  1994): 36-59.
  “The Failure to ‘See’: Jews, Blacks, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Controversy”
  (Temple University Center for American Jewish History, 1992).
  CONFERENCE PAPERS AND INVITED LECTURES (partial list):
  “Bringing Out the Best in Everyone: The Senior Research Seminar for History Majors at
  Lawrence University” (presented at National Conference on Undergraduate Research, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI, April 12, 2013).
  “Lincoln, the Constitution, and the Civil War” (invited panel presentation, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI, January 10, 2013).
  “The Only Life: Liberal Arts and the Life of the Mind at Lawrence University” (Honors Convocation, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI, May 31, 2012).
  “An American Historian’s London” (invited lecture, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI, February 15, 2012).
  “The King We Don’t Know” (invited lecture, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI, January 16, 2012).
  “The Strike That Changed New York: Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the Politics of Education
  and Race Relations in New York City” (panel presentation at Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY, August 19, 2010).
  “’One City, One Standard’: The Struggle for Equality in Rudolph Giuliani’s New York” (presented at Conference of The Historical Society, George Washington University, Washington, DC, June 4, 2010).
  “How the Milwaukee Braves Changed American History” (invited lecture, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI, April 9, 2010).
  “Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer” (invited lecture, National Railroad Museum, Green Bay, WI, February 27, 2010).
  “Lincoln’s Road to the Emancipation Proclamation: Understanding Freedom’s Ambiguities” (presented to Wisconsin Academy for the Study of American History, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, July 23, 2009).
  “Why Biography Matters: Bayard Rustin and the Limits of the American Radical Dream” (Annual Malcolm Lester Lecture in History, Davidson College, Davidson, NC, September 24, 2008).
  “’Scab’ or ‘Racist’?: Public School Teachers and the Dilemmas of Liberalism in New York City During the 1960s” (presented at Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, New York, NY, March 28, 2008).
  “New York, Los Angeles, and the Rise of Walter O’Malley” (invited lecture, SABR, Milwaukee, WI, August 19, 2006).
  “Freedom’s Voices: Teaching the History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement” (presented to Teachers Academy for the Study of American History, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, July 18, 2006).
  “Like Strangers: Blacks, Jews, and New York City’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis”
  (invited lecture, American Jerusalem Academy for Contemporary Jewish Studies, Highland Park, NJ, January 22, 2006).
  “Space Wars: Urban Space and the Resegregation of the American City” (Comment, “Changing Planning Methods, Breaking Barriers to Development,” National Conference on Planning History, Coral Gables, FL, October 21, 2005).
  “American Metaphor: Race and Baseball in the United States” (Comment, “Race and Baseball,” presented at Northern Great Plains History Conference, Eau Claire, WI, September 29, 2005).
  “An Awful Choice: Bayard Rustin and New York City’s Civil Rights Wars, 1968” (presented at “A New Nation,” Princeton University, Department of History, Princeton, NJ, April 9, 2005).
  “Back Door to Freedom: The Paradoxes of the Emancipation Proclamation” (presented in conjunction with “Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation,” Lawrence University, Appleton, WI, February 3, 2004).
  “New Currencies: Racial Identity and the Redefinition of the New York City Public
  Education Market, 1960-1980” (presented at “Selling Race: The Limits and Liberties of
  Markets,” University of California at Los Angeles, Center for Modern & Contemporary
  Studies, Los Angeles, CA, October 25, 2002).
  “Free Labor and Its Paradoxes: Edward Daniels and the Gunston Hall Experiment”
  (presented at the Southern Labor Studies Conference, Miami, FL, April 28, 2002).
  “The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis of 1968: New York’s Antigone” (presented at the
  Conference on New York City History, City University of New York, New York, NY,
  October 6, 2001).
  “’Making Our Own Rules For Our Own Schools’: Racial Identity and the Battle For New
  York City’s Education Market, 1960-1980” (presented at Annual Meeting of the
  Organization of American Historians, Los Angeles, CA, April 27, 2001).
  “The Strike That Changed New York: Race, Culture, and Ocean Hill-Brownsville, 1960-
  1975” (presented at the Conference on New York State History, Fordham University,
  Bronx, NY, June 17, 2000).
  “Mugged Liberals: Jews, Blacks, and New York City’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis”
  (presented at “The History of American Jewish Political Conservatism,” Washington,
  DC, April 16, 1999).
  “Redefining a City: Jews, Catholics, African-Americans, and School Decentralization in
  New York, 1960-1975” (presented at Annual Meeting of the Organization of American
  Historians, San Francisco, CA, April 19, 1996).
  “’Community’ and Its Perils: Local School Control and Civil Rights in New York City,
  1960-1980” (presented at Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research
  Association, New York, NY, April 12, 1996).
  “Crucible at Ocean Hill-Brownsville: New York City Teachers and School
  Decentralization, 1965-1975” (presented at “Rebellion, Revolution, and Reform: Teacher
  Unionism in New York, 1900-1995,” sponsored by the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
  of New York University and the New York Labor History Association, New York, NY
  May 20, 1995).
  “What Is ‘American’?: The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Controversy and the Struggle for
  ‘American’ Culture” (presented at Annual Meeting of the Organization of American
  Historians, Anaheim, CA, April 16, 1993).
  “’We Speak Different Languages’: The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Controversy and the
  Fall of New York City’s Liberal Consensus” (presented at Annual Meeting of the
  American Historical Association, Washington, DC, December 30, 1992).
  “The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Controversy: Labor, Liberalism, and the Civil Rights
  Revolution” (presented at the North American Labor History Conference, Wayne State
  University, Detroit, MI, October 16, 1992).
  “Race, Class, and the ‘Progressive’ Union in the 1960’s: The United Federation of Teachers and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Controversy” (presented at “Reworking American Labor History: Race, Gender, and Class,” sponsored by the University of Wisconsin – Madison and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, April 10, 1992).
  “The Silent Majority Speaks: Dragnet 1968 and Television’s Cultural Backlash”
  (presented at Annual Conference of the North East Popular Culture Association,
  St. Michael’s College, Colchester, VT, October 12, 1991).
  AWARDS AND HONORS:
  Allan Nevins Prize, awarded by Society of American Historians, 1998.
  New York State Historical Association Manuscript Prize, Honorable Mention, 1998.
  Fellow, New York Academy of History, 2009-Present.
  Member, Wisconsin Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, 2008-2009.
  Lawrence University Award for Excellence in Scholarship, 2010.
  Lawrence University Faculty Convocation Award, 2011-12
  GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS:
  Lawrence University London Centre Visiting Professor, 2011.
  Lawrence University Faculty Research Grant, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2005.
  Mellon Dissertation Writing Fellowship, Princeton University, 1993-1994.
  Temple University Center for American Jewish History Research Fellowship, 1991.
  Mellon Foundation/Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni Fellowship, 1991.
  City University of New York Graduate Center, Center for the Study of Philanthropy,
  Research Fellowship, 1991.
  Philip A. Rollins Prize, Princeton University Department of History, 1990-1993.
  COURSES TAUGHT:
  Republic to Nation: The United States, 1789-1896
  Nation in a Modern World: The United States, 1896-Present
  The American Civil War
  Race Relations in America, 1865-Present
  The 1920s, the Great Depression, and the New Deal
  Reconsidering the 1960s
  American Experiences: An Introduction to American Studies
  The American Civil War: A Transatlantic Perspective
  The Transatlantic Sixties: The United States and Great Britain
  The JFK Assassination in American Politics, Culture, and Memory
  Lincoln: Revolutionary American
  The Practice of History (senior-level research seminar)
  SPECIAL ACTIVITIES:
  Panelist, Freshman Studies Discussion of Race Matters, January 18, 2013.
  “Joe McCarthy: Local Antihero” (Lawrence University Summer Seminar, July 12, 2012).
  Moderator, “Black America: A Prescription for the Future” (Schomburg Center for
  Research in Black Culture, New York, NY, February 26, 2012).
  Recipient, Bob Wurdinger Athletic Service Award, Lawrence University, 2012.
  Review Panelist, National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Research
  Programs, Scholarly Editions Grants, 2009.
  Historical Consultant, The History Museum at the Castle, Appleton, WI (formerly
  Outagamie County Historical Society), “Sports and Spirit” (Museum exhibit, opened May 2009).
  Historical Consultant, National Railroad Museum, Green Bay, WI, “The Pullman Porters: From Service to Civil Rights” (Museum exhibit, opened July 2008).
  Member, Working Group for Tutorial Education Assessment, co-sponsored by Lawrence
  University, Williams College, and the College of Wooster, 2008-2010.
  Lawrence University Junior Faculty Mentor, 2003-05, 2008-10.
  Historical Consultant, Outagamie Historical Society, Appleton, WI, “The Times They
  Are A-Changin’” (Museum exhibit on 1960s, opened June 2006).
  Freshman Studies Lecturer, Lawrence University, 2005-07 (“The King We Don’t Know:
  Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech in American History and
  Memory”).
  Organizer, “New Approaches to the Civil War: An Interdisciplinary Symposium,”
  Lawrence University, April 16, 2005.
  Organizer, Colloquium on “Beyond the Battlefield: Teaching the Civil War Across the
  Disciplines,” sponsored by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, Lawrence
  University, April 15, 2005.
  Project Evaluator, Northeast Wisconsin Teaching American History Program, University
  of Wisconsin-Green Bay (National Endowment for the Humanities), 2003-2005.
  President, American Association of University Professors, Lawrence University chapter,
  2005-06.
  President, Gamma-Delta Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, Lawrence University, 2003-04,
  2005.
  Member, Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) Review Committee for Newberry
  Library Seminar in the Humanities, 2005-06.
  Lecturer, Teachers Academy for the Study of American History, University of
  Wisconsin-Oshkosh (National Endowment for the Humanities), 2004, 2006 (“Freedom’s Voices: Teaching the History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement”).
  Historical Consultant, Civil Rights Chronicle: The African-American Struggle for
  Freedom (Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International, 2003).
  Historical Consultant, Outagamie Historical Society, Appleton, WI, “Joseph McCarthy:A Modern Tragedy” (Museum exhibit, opened January 2002).
  Historical Consultant, “Brownsville Black and White” (Documentary film, released
  November 2000).
  Commenter, “Brownsville Black and White,” San Diego (February 2002) and Brooklyn
  (April 2002) Jewish Film Festivals.
  Historical Consultant, “New York in Black and White: The Sixties, Civil Rights, and the
  Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis” (Radio documentary, WNYC-New York,
  broadcast January 2000).
  Review Panelist, National Endowment for the Humanities, Faculty Research
  Awards for Historically Black, Hispanic-Serving, and Tribal Colleges and Universities, 2001-2002.
  Historical Consultant, “America’s Story from America’s Library” (American history
  website produced by Library of Congress, 2000).
  Pre-Law Adviser, Lawrence University, 1999-2003.
  Faculty Adviser, Lawrence University Multicultural Affairs Committee, 1998-Present.
  Instructor, Bjorklunden Seminars, Lawrence University, 2000-2003, 2007
  (“The Sixties: Great Books”; “The Sixties: Great Films”; “The American Civil War: What Might Have Been”; “Lincoln: Man, Myth, Icon”; “The Best and Worst of America’s Presidents”; “The Presidential Elections That Changed America”).
  Instructor, Lawrence University Summer Institute for Secondary School Teachers of
  Advanced Placement United States History Courses, 1999-2000.
  Head of Assistants in Instruction, Princeton University Department of History, 1997-
  1998.
  Instructor, Princeton University Summer Scholars Institute for Incoming Students, 1997.
  PROFESSIONAL AND HONORARY SOCIETIES:
  Phi Beta Kappa
  New York Academy of History
  American Historical Association
  Organization of American Historians
  The Historical Society
  American Studies Association
  Urban History Association
  REFERENCES:
  James M. McPherson, Department of History, Princeton University (Emeritus).
  Alan Brinkley, Department of History, Columbia University.
  Gary Gerstle, Department of History, Vanderbilt University.

• Lawrence University - https://faculty.lawrence.edu/podairj/

  JERALD PODAIR
  Podair_Jerald

  Contact me:

  Jerald Podair
  Professor Of History and Robert S. French Professor of American Studies
  Lawrence University
  711 E Boldt Way SPC 19
  Appleton, WI 54911-5699
  920-832-6677
  Email: podairj@lawrence.edu

  My CV

  About Me:

  I am Professor of History and the Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University, in Appleton, Wisconsin, where I have taught since 1998. I’m a native of New York City and a former practicing attorney. I received my B.A. from New York University, a J.D. from Columbia University Law School, and a Ph.D. in American history from Princeton University. My research interests are in 20th century American urban history and racial and ethnic relations.

  I am the author of The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, published by Yale University Press, which was a finalist for the Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book on the struggle for civil rights in the United States, and an honorable mention for the Urban History Association’s Book Award in North American urban history. My biography of the civil rights and labor leader Bayard Rustin, entitled Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer, was published in 2009 by Rowman & Littlefield. My co-edited book, The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction, was published in 2011 by the University of Virginia Press. I contributed an essay entitled, “An Awful Choice: Bayard Rustin and New York City’s Civil Rights Wars, 1968,” for that volume. I am also the co-author of American Conversations: From the Centennial to the Millennium, a collection of primary sources in American history after 1877, published by Pearson in 2012. I’m presently writing a book entitled Building Dodger Stadium: Land, Power, and the Fate of Modern Los Angeles for Princeton University Press, in which I use the struggle over the construction of the iconic ballpark between 1957 and 1962 to examine arguments over civic identity in an emerging 20th century American supercity.

  My articles and reviews have appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, The Journal of Urban History, Reviews in American History, Radical History Review, Labor History, Film & History, and American Studies. I contributed an essay, “’One City, One Standard’: The Struggle for Equality in Rudolph Giuliani’s New York,” to Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era, published by Fordham University Press in 2011.

  At Lawrence University, I teach courses on a variety of topics in nineteenth and twentieth-century American history, including the Civil War and Reconstruction; Abraham Lincoln; the Great Depression and New Deal; the 1960s; the JFK assassination; and the Civil Rights Movement. I also teach Lawrence’s first course in American Studies, which I introduced in 2007. Since 2004 I have taught Lawrence’s Senior Experience research seminar for history majors, “The Practice of History.”

  I am the recipient of the Allan Nevins Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians for “literary distinction in the writing of history,” and a Fellow of the New York Academy of History. I was appointed to Wisconsin’s Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, on which I served from 2008 to 2009. In 2010, I was honored by Lawrence University with its Award for Excellence in Scholarship, and in 2012 with its Faculty Convocation Award. In 2013 I co-edited Learning for a Lifetime: Liberal Arts and the Life of the Mind at Lawrence University, a volume of essays by Lawrence alumni on the impact of liberal education on their professional, intellectual, and personal development.

  My Courses:

  Republic to Nation: The United States, 1789-1896 (HIST 131)

  Nation in a Modern World: The United States, 1896-Present (HIST 132)

  The American Civil War (HIST 470)

  Race Relations in the United States, 1865-Present (HIST 345)

  The 1920s, Great Depression, and New Deal (HIST 350)

  Reconsidering the 1960s (HIST 480)

  American Experiences: An Introduction to American Studies (HIST 200)

  The Practice of History (HIST 650)

  The JFK Assassination in American Politics, Culture, and Memory (HIST 353)

  Lincoln: Revolutionary American (HIST 472)

Death at an early age
Michael E. Staub
The Nation. 276.6 (Feb. 17, 2003): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
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Full Text:
THE STRIKE THAT CHANGED NEW YORK: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis. By Jerald E. Podair. Yale. 273 pp. $35.

In October 1968, at the height of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis, New York Mayor John Lindsay got heckled off the stage at a synagogue in Brooklyn. "Lindsay must go!" shouted the enraged crowd when he attempted to address the congregation about his support for school decentralization. As the Mayor and his wife left the temple protected by a battery of police, a mob about 5,000 strong attacked their limousine. Was this any way for a nice middle-class Jewish community to behave?

Although the 1960s continue to be remembered, and taught, chiefly as an era when left-wing protests and liberal commitments flourished, we have long known (but far less often acknowledged) that the same years also fostered the emergence of white populist movements motivated by harsh racial biases. Jerald Podair brings this far more sobering portrait of the 1960s and their racial and ethnic politics starkly to light in The Strike That Changed New York, his study of the decentralization and attempted desegregation of the city's public school system. As Podair meticulously re-creates, the angry white people--in newly reconfigured alliances of Irish, Italian and Jewish Americans--often got their way.

Meanwhile, there is a new trend evident, especially in journalistic writings about school desegregation in the 1960s. These writings downplay Northern white racism, bash black militancy as intolerant and foolishly hostile to integration, and lament liberal accommodation to radical demands. In these accounts, Brooklyn's Ocean Hill-Brownsville, where African-Americans set up a local all-black board to administer their district's failing public schools, becomes the textbook case. In Someone Else's House, for instance, Tamar Jacoby tells the Ocean Hill-Brownsville story as a cautionary one about the kind of tragedy that ensues when white liberals (like Lindsay) get themselves wrapped around the little fingers of black militants demanding "community control" through decentralization of public education.

In a New York Times Magazine article this past October, staff writer James Traub suggested much the same. Labeling the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis "one of the great, agonizing racial psychodramas in New York history," he also took jabs at black militancy and at left-wing impulses in the 1960s as a whole. Traub summarized the results of the community-control experiment as wholesale inefficiency, a destruction of meritocracy and the mismanagement of tens of millions of dollars in school funds by poor nonwhites. He sarcastically contrasted the brainy and successful management style of the current (white) superintendent with "all those years of homegrown, ethnically correct leadership." And he declared: "Among all the experiments forced on a reluctant city by the turmoil of the 60's, community control was arguably the most harmful." Yet these accounts reach their conclusions largely by leaving out crucial background.

Just when current Mayor Michael Bloomberg has won applause by declaring New York school decentralization dead and buried, it is good to be reminded that the community-control experiment was neither as misguided nor unjustified as retrospective accounts circulating now might have us believe. As Podair's book helpfully documents, community-control activists and their supporters (who at that time, by the way, included the New York Times) did not pull the idea of a decentralized school system out of thin air. For one thing, it was manifestly evident that the city's public schools were not all created equal. Most black children in New York attended schools that were more than 90 percent nonwhite. They also invariably sat in overcrowded classes that little resembled those of white schoolchildren. Furthermore, after a tenure of five years, all teachers gained permission to transfer out of black schools--and most opted to do precisely that. In practice, this relegated black children to larger classes taught by the least experienced teachers in the city. As Podair observes, "by the early 1960s, New York effectively had a dual public school system."

In these circumstances it is small wonder that the scholastic levels of black children seriously lagged behind those of their white counterparts. For their part, white teachers deeply resented the implications of black parents that this might be due to teachers' indifference or bigotry. The (overwhelmingly white) United Federation of Teachers cited its efforts to bring African-American history into the public schools. And UFT president Albert Shanker strenuously fought for a multimillion-dollar compensatory education program (called More Effective Schools) that he said would help solve the low achievement of black students. (Not incidentally, this labor-intensive program also meant more UFT jobs.)

For its part, though, by the mid-1960s, the black community had long lost patience with the teachers' union. It saw the union's tactics not only as self-serving but as downright dangerous to the emotional health of its children. As far as many African-American leaders were concerned, the reasons black kids did not perform as well as white kids were painfully obvious: White teachers judged black kids according to "white" and middle-class standards of achievement. The system routinely "tracked" pupils according to an apparatus that seriously devalued "black" culture. And as Podair shows, most white UFT teachers did not even bother to deny any of this. They did believe a "culture of poverty" stunted black children's intellectual development, and often said so publicly. Thus, as community-control advocates angrily argued, despite the UFT's stated belief in a pluralistic, "race-blind" meritocracy, the reality of the situation was that many white teachers were not convinced poor black kids could make it.

On May 9, 1968, the local school board of Ocean Hill-Brownsville sent a letter to Junior High School 271 science teacher Fred Nauman telling him he had been dismissed. Seventeen other white and Jewish Ocean Hill-Brownsville educators also received notification that their services would no longer be required in the district. In response, the UFT called a citywide teachers' strike. Two more strikes followed.

Podair's version of events captures the awesome complexity of the crisis. No major player came away looking spotless. It was a story, as Podair states, with "few clear-cut heroes or villains." UFT president Shanker, for instance, despite a lifelong commitment to social democratic causes, did not hesitate to fuel the antiblack prejudices of his union's rank and file--the better to bolster his own stature. The African-American administrator of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district, Rhody McCoy, seeking to break the teachers' strike by any means necessary, hired replacement teachers and provided the names of striking teachers to draft boards (hoping to cost them their deferments from service in Vietnam). And Mayor Lindsay, a high-minded proponent of community control, badly miscalculated white middle-class resentment (as his nightmarish visit to the Brooklyn synagogue suggested). According to Podair, his actions tended only to widen the chasm between white and black New York.

Once settled, there was little doubt that the strike had been the most embittering in the city's history. The UFT claimed victory: Its teachers had been reinstated, and the authority of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board had been broken. But the union's triumph came at a high price. Nearly a million children had been out of school for almost two months. Far more significant, the strike gutted any illusion of an enduring black-Jewish political partnership. As the strike proceeded, blacks had charged teachers with racism, while the largely Jewish union had labeled community-control advocates black anti-Semites.

One of Podair's major arguments concerns the city's Jews, especially those outside Manhattan, who now increasingly saw their interests as opposed to those of their erstwhile African-American allies. "For decades," Podair writes, "New York's Jews had straddled the white and nonwhite worlds of the city, attracted by aspects of each." Jews had long served as cultural mediators between white and black New York, and so had "helped blunt the force of more primal racial passions." After Ocean Hill-Brownsville, this would no longer be the case. Outer-borough Jews would now side mainly with former adversaries: their illiberal white ethnic neighbors. Consequently, by the 1970s New York's black population found its political base more severely restricted than ever before. And the left-leaning cosmopolitanism of greater New York City would never be quite the same again.

The greatest strength of this book, though, lies not so much in Podair's explicit arguments. Instead, the biggest contribution he makes is the evidence he amasses of the larger historical context of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville debacle. As The Strike That Changed New York demonstrates, neglecting this background both critically distorts the historical record and alters how the meaning of the strike is interpreted.

For one thing, Podair surveys the socioeconomic landscape of the two decades before the strike, cataloguing the deeply divergent impact on white and black lives of postwar New York's transformation from "a thriving working-class city" into "the corporate headquarters of the world." These same decades coincided with the second great black migration to New York; the percentage of African-Americans in the city more than tripled between 1940 and 1968. In Brooklyn during this period, the black population increased more than sixfold.

Yet this vast new pool of black workers moved to a city where the available employment options for unskilled or semiskilled labor were rapidly vanishing. In the quarter-century after 1945, New York lost nearly half of all jobs in the manufacturing sector. Meanwhile white-collar employment opportunities grew exponentially. And these jobs required a high school education at a minimum. Success in the public schools became the ticket to economic and social mobility. The options available to a high school dropout just a generation earlier no longer existed. As Podair writes, "The crucial role education would play as a means of advancement--as a commodity--in the city's new economy was lost on neither blacks nor whites."

Perhaps most significant, Podair also details white resistance to school integration in the first half of the 1960s. It is this immediate prehistory to the demands for "community control" that Jacoby's and Traub's versions so disturbingly leave out. Podair underscores how the very idea of "community control" that would so divide New Yorkers in 1968 actually originated in a white middle-class neighborhood in Queens four years earlier. It was then that a citywide grassroots movement of 300,000 people united to block the first-ever New York public-school desegregation plan. Citing the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, this white coalition argued that it was unconstitutional to "force" white students to attend a school outside their own neighborhood solely on the basis of their race. And although they would lose the lawsuit, they won a more substantial victory, successfully pressuring the Board of Education to retreat. By 1966, the New York City public schools remained as segregated as ever. As Podair wryly concludes: "`Community--white community--had won out."

There are some weaknesses in Podair's book. His hesitation to explain more directly how his narrative of events differs from neoliberal and neoconservative accounts robs his story of some of its inherent historiographical drama. He is occasionally repetitive. And he does not mention how Brooklyn-based Rabbi Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League came to prominence during this moment, fanning the flames of Jewish antiblack hysteria at every turn. And Podair's overarching thesis about the change in New York from one big tolerant place to a city divided sharply along tribal lines occasionally feels strained. But the inherent value of his tale is nonetheless considerable. For we now have a movingly thorough and fair-minded account of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis that neither scapegoats black militants nor slams white liberals. Given how this story still tends to get handed down, that's no small feat.

The 1960s just aren't what they used to be. So much the better.

Michael E. Staub is the author, most recently, of Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (Columbia).

Staub, Michael E.

Hire education
Richard D. Kahlenberg
Washington Monthly. 35.1 (January-February 2003): p56.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Washington Monthly Company
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
THE STRIKE THAT CHANGED NEW YORK: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis by Jerald E. Podair Yale University Press, $35.00

PUBLISHERS USUALLY WANT book titles to overreach. I remember my initial hesitation when my editor suggested a book I'd written on affirmative action be titled The Remedy. (I gave in when he said people looking for the latest John Grisham novel might buy it by mistake.) So it is rare that we see a book title like this one, which undersells its subject, describing the dispute over the firing of white educators by a local black school board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn as one that "changed New York." On fundamental issues of race, education, and labor, the new politics that emerged from Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1968 devastated American liberalism so profoundly that the effects are still being felt 35 years later.

Jerald Podair's new book does an admirable job of telling all sides of the story itself in a clear and compelling fashion. Understandably frustrated with virulent white resistance to school integration, local black leaders in New York sought to establish "community control" over the schools, with the help of the city's white elite, most notably Mayor John Lindsay and the Ford Foundation's McGeorge Bundy. In May 1968, however, the movement turned ugly when the local Ocean Hill-Brownsville board summarily fired 18 white educators (and one black educator mistakenly included) for not supporting community control. The local school administrator, Rhody McCoy, said his ultimate goal was an all-black teaching force in the community.

Albert Shanker, president of the New York City United Federation of Teachers (UFT), protested the dismissals as a violation of the hard-won union contract requiring due process. When the school board balked at reinstating the teachers, the UFT staged a series of three strikes, which shut down the entire New York City public school system. With 1 million students stranded, in one case for more than a month, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute turned into the largest and longest teachers' strike in American history.

Black activists labeled Shanker and the UFT racist for resisting a measure of black self-government. They noted that blacks constituted just 8 percent of the New York City teaching force (compared to 20 percent of the general population) and called for an elimination of the Board of Examiners' test for entry and promotion. They called for a curriculum teaching "black values," which they defined as "mutuality, cooperation, and community." And they rejected standardized testing for students, because it meant, one member of the African-American Teachers Association (ATA) said, "if a [black] wants to succeed, he has to `become white.'"

Many whites resisted these attacks on merit, and pointed to racism in the black community itself. In a reversal of Little Rock, black mobs surrounded white teachers who attempted to enter school, with some activists threatening to "carry you out in pine boxes." Leaders of the ATA, Albert Vann and Leslie Campbell, called for physical separation of black and white teachers in cafeterias and lounges. Appearing on a radio station, Campbell read aloud a student's poem dedicated to Shanker, which began, "Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head/ You pale faced Jew boy--I wish you were dead."

Some liberals like Michael Harrington and Bayard Rustin supported the UFT, but most of the left--including The New York Times, the Village Voice, and New York's ACLU--joined business elites in support of community control. Shanker, who had marched for civil rights in Selma, rejected that approach, saying: "This is a strike to protect black teachers against white racists in white communities and white teachers against black racists in black communities." Because it was illegal for teachers to strike, Shanker later served a 15-day jail sentence.

The UFT eventually prevailed and the teachers were reinstated, but a modified version of community control, in the form of decentralization, took hold in New York, and held sway until very recently. Moreover, many on the left took away a Series of dubious lessons from the controvert: a tendency to view organized labor as backward and primitive; to attack standards of merit as racist; to join conservatives in down-playing the importance of integration.

Podair portrays this story clearly but runs into trouble when he provides an historical interpretation. His main message, repeated throughout. the book, is that the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy showed that "blacks and whites inhabited different perceptual universes," viewing the same events very differently. Podair's rhetoric parallels Bill Clinton's refrain after the O.J. Simpson trial. As president of all the American people, Clinton had good reason to fudge the question of whether or not Simpson was guilty, but an historian's obligation is the opposite: to truthfully render reasoned judgment, seasoned with the perspective of time. A fair reading of Podair's evidence suggests that the path taken by the left, forged in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, has done grave damage to the promotion of equality.

The emphasis on black power and racial distinctiveness over racial integration and coalition-building has hurt progressives on a practical level, by encouraging the huge swing vote in America--the white working class--to practice their own form of identity politics and vote their race rather than their class. More generally, the attack on colorblind merit forfeited the moral high ground to conservatives, who hardly deserve it on historical grounds. In education, the emphasis on "community control" by left and right, has held out the illusory promise that separate can be equal--put to the lie, most recently, by a study finding that predominantly poor schools are 24 times less likely to perform at a high level than middle-class schools. The positing of a separate system of "black values" by black and white adults in Ocean Hill-Brownsville is not unconnected to the cruel phenomenon whereby some black students disparage academic success as "acting white."

Finally, Ocean Hill-Brownsville helped contribute to the decline of American organized labor. Until 1968, when a labor union struck because its workers were fired without due process, liberals knew which side they were on. But in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the left reframed the issue as white versus black, making labor the bad guys in the drama. The irony is that what black activists called "black values"--mutuality, cooperation, and community--are above all union values, which the UFT invoked with great success in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, when the membership said: If you fire 19 of us unjustly, 50,000 of us will strike.

Ocean Hill-Brownsville was a tragedy of historic proportions. Jerald Podair's relativist book is the latest evidence that liberals still have not learned its lessons.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is writing a biography of Albert Shanker.

Kahlenberg, Richard D.

City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of
Modern Los Angeles
Publishers Weekly.
264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p77.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles
Jerald Podair. Princeton Univ., $32.95 (384p) ISBN 978-0-691-12503-9
When Walter O'Malley dragged the Dodgers out of Brooklyn in 1957, he unwittingly triggered a battle over the future
of Los Angeles. Lawrence University historian Podair recreates a protracted conflict that saw the suburbs face off
against an unlikely alliance of unions and big corporations including oil, and the L.A. Times. Frustrated by the
Machiavellian New York urban planner Robert Moses, O'Malley, like so many before him, headed west to a city that
had deliriously morphed from orange groves to a tract-house megalopolis. Eager to shed their provincial status--and
inflate the value of their real-estate--L.A. power brokers offered O'Malley a stadium site in Chavez Ravine, where a
Mexican-American community had been devastated by a failed plan for public housing. The new stadium was a fait
accompli until "the Folks" (mostly white middle-class homeowners) ignited a multi-year conflict that ranged from the
courts to the voting booth and resonated across the country. Podair frames the Dodger Stadium struggle as a collision
between two very different visions for L.A.: one an endless suburb of low taxes and minimal government, and the other
more centralized and hierarchical, with generous state funding for cultural monuments that, not coincidentally, would
make the rich even richer. Careful research and straightforward prose make this an excellent introduction, though
unimaginative repetition of theses smacks of a high-school textbook. The semi-heroic portrayal of the team owner
borders on partisan, but Podair does have a point: O'Malley sweated for his vision. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 77+.
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485971696&it=r&asid=3b1705dfa22fe14f46552a4714e928a8.
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The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional
Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long
Reconstruction
Brian S. Wills
The Historian.
75.2 (Summer 2013): p336.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
Full Text:
The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction. Edited by Orville
Vernon Burton, Jerald Podair, and Jennifer L. Weber. (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. 306.
$45.00.)
James McPherson has long established himself as one of the premier historians of the American Civil War, Abraham
Lincoln, and race and equality. To honor his work, Orville Vernon Burton, Jerald Podair, and Jennifer L. Weber have
compiled a series of essays from scholars, McPherson students, and associates that cover this vast range of subjects.
Presented in three sections, and including specific treatments on McPherson, the volume reflects the inquiry that the
scholar has represented or inspired through his work.
In the prewar period essays, "The Radicalism of the Abolitionists Revisited" by Ryan P. Jordan stands out. He
demonstrates the complications of abolitionism and race with regard to the Quakers in the antebellum period,
illustrating effectively the internal debates that existed concerning emancipation and the level of black participation in
the Society of Friends. Examinations of Union generals James S. Wadsworth and John Meredith Read Jr. note the ways
in which those individuals embraced the personally transformative elements of warfare and government.
In the Civil War section of the volume, Joseph T. Glatthaar offers a fine essay on "Discipline, Cause, and Comrades in
the Relationship between Officers and Enlisted Men in Lee's Army." The popular election of officers in the Army of
Northern Virginia is the central component of the piece, with the author concluding that enlisted personnel generally
performed this responsibility effectively. Although electioneering and personality clashes occurred that allowed some
unfortunate circumstances to persist, midwar reorganization often included officers who had won their constituents'
confidence on the battlefield. Weber assesses the political role of the men who donned Union uniforms and cast critical
absentee ballots to help "save" Abraham Lincoln's reelection chances. Ronald C. White Jr. focuses on the president's
"Last Stump Speech," sent to friend and associate James Conkling on September 3, 1863, and Bruce Dain examines
Lincoln and race broadly. Catherine Clinton provides a colorful deviation from the essays on soldiers and Abraham
Lincoln to tackle three examples of "sexual politics" during the war.
The final section represents the most diverse set of topics in the volume. Among the best of these are the essays that
deal with the subject of race. John M. Giggie's analysis of the alternately competing and cooperating roles of fraternal
lodges and churches in African American life in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South and Jerald
Podair's assessment of Bayard Rustin in the midst of an embattled New York City schools struggle that pitted labor
interests against civil rights advancements are particularly provocative and insightful. Each of the other contributions
offer readers a greater understanding of the rich tapestry of issues people in the United States faced in the often volatile
years of the "Long Reconstruction."
Burton closes the volume with a "conversation" with "America's Historian" in which McPherson provides insights on
his career. The brevity of this discussion constitutes the weakest element of a compilation that will please the teacher/
scholar as well as those who will profit from reading it.
Brian S. Wills
Kennesaw State University
Wills, Brian S.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Wills, Brian S. "The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction."
The Historian, vol. 75, no. 2, 2013, p. 336+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA334277153&it=r&asid=a10c4142bcd23f7da4e80beed71d4c89.
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The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional
Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long
Reconstruction
Wallace Hettle
Journal of Southern History.
79.2 (May 2013): p485.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction. Edited by Orville
Vemon Burton, Jerald Podair, and Jennifer L. Weber. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
Pp. [xii], 306. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-3173-9.)
Reviewing this Festschrift assembled in honor of James M. McPherson presents a question: How can one summarize
the career of this historian adequately? To call him a leading Civil War historian of our time, or even the leading Civil
War historian, would be to understate the case. After all, McPherson's work ranges further around the nineteenth
century than many historians realize. He helped lead the movement to put slavery and race at the center of the story of
the Civil War era, did more than anyone to restore the academic respectability of military history, and played a key role
in returning narrative history to its rightful place at the heart of our discipline. For those things, historians will
remember McPherson.
Just as much, they will remember him for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988). This synthesis
of the Civil War years showed an extraordinary command of existing scholarship, an accessible literary style that could
reach scholars and inspire general readers, and a rare appreciation of the contingency of historical events. Today we are
starting to hear grumbling about aspects of this twenty-five-year-old work, most notably the unjust criticism that
McPherson glorified the war. Someday another historian will write a work that takes Battle Cry of Freedom's place as
the leading synthesis of the Civil War, but those waiting for such a book should not expect to see it anytime soon.
McPherson also taught graduate students, and many of them went on to impressive careers in their own right. The
interests of these students, many of whom focus on the theme of equality, span the early republic to the present day. The
volume discussed here boasts eighteen contributors, and all bring something distinctive to the mix. The biggest problem
with this collection is overcrowding. There are eighteen essays squeezed into fewer than three hundred pages, leaving
the reader feeling that the authors often had more to say.
Still, this collection contains some very good work, defying the general rule that the essays in Festschrifts are uneven.
Ryan P. Jordan's essay on Quakers and the sectional conflict demands attention because its argument is remarkably
critical of the Society of Friends on the subject of race. Jordan could be accused of being a bit present-minded in
holding nineteenth-century citizens to contemporary standards on ideas, but his thorough research and bold thesis make
the piece well worth reading.
Possibly the best work in the collection is an essay by Joseph T. Glatthaar on soldiers and officers in the Army of
Northern Virginia. This chapter examines the election of officers by rank-and-file soldiers. Conventional wisdom says
that such elections undermined discipline and kept incompetents in power. Glatthaar acknowledges problems with poor
discipline but points to bonds between officers and men to explain the extraordinary successes many units won in
combat. Glatthaar's argument leans heavily on the statistical work he did on Robert E. Lee's army, and readers will
finish this essay with renewed appreciation for the author's recent book, Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A
Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee (Chapel Hill, 2011).
Jennifer L. Weber, a more recent McPherson student, examines what she calls the "politicization" of Union soldiers (p.
76). Weber notes that soldiers became a crucial bloc supporting Abraham Lincoln and grew more opposed to slavery as
the conflict continued. Weber's essay dovetails nicely with her book Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's
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Opponents in the North (New York, 2006). This chapter not only tells an important story but also shows how military
and political history can intertwine in ways that benefit both subfields.
Bruce Dain reopens the perennial but still important question of Lincoln's ideas about race. Fortunately, Frederick
Douglass plays only a minor role here. At this point there should be a temporary moratorium on studies of the
relationship between Lincoln and Douglass, as it has been the subject of several recent books. The most original
argument that Dain presents ties Lincoln's views on race to his melancholic temperament. This approach offers a new
perspective, but one that would have been more compelling had Dain not relied so heavily on secondary sources and
Lincoln's collected works.
The prolific Catherine Clinton offers an essay on Civil War prostitution, examining stories about the sex trade in both
the Union and the Confederacy. Owing to Victorian reticence, traditional literary and manuscript sources yield little; it
is astonishing that Clinton turned up as much evidence as she did. Her tales of women impoverished by the war turning
to prostitution, only to face the wrath of authorities, are saddening. Clinton's essay explores women's oppression in the
Confederacy and opens discussion of a topic relatively neglected, even in Stephanie McCurry's monumental and
original Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). As Clinton
acknowledges, the Civil War sex trade needs more study, preferably by a historian ready to hunker down with
disciplinary and criminal records.
The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction contains more than
can be recapitulated in a brief review. Suffice it to say that the scholars featured here offer a collection worthy of their
teacher.
WALLACE HETTLE
University of Northern Iowa
Hettle, Wallace
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hettle, Wallace. "The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction."
Journal of Southern History, vol. 79, no. 2, 2013, p. 485+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA330250108&it=r&asid=d603d8404e5686ddc659b148c8e9c9ba.
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The Strike That Changed New York
Virginia E. Causey
Journal of American Ethnic History.
24.3 (Spring 2005): p106.
COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Illinois Press
http://www.iehs.org/journal.html
Full Text:
The Strike That Changed New York. By Jerald E. Podair. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. xi + 273 pp.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper).
Jerald Podair's The Strike That Changed New York is stimulating and depressing--stimulating as a meticulously
researched portrayal of an event both unique and universal; depressing because it shows in some ways we have not
come very far in four decades. In 1967 the African-American neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, frustrated by
their children's low achievement under the centralized New York City Board of Education and by its failure to integrate
city schools, demanded an opportunity to establish "community control" over its schools. The demands resulted in a
locally elected board that claimed control over hiring, curriculum, and finances, bringing it into conflict with the
powerful United Federation of Teachers. The showdown came when the all-black local board terminated seventeen
white educators for not supporting community control. The board's aim was, if not an all-black teaching force, then
hiring teachers who were culturally sensitive to their lower-class students.
Podair argues the ensuing three bitter strikes changed New York's political landscape from a pluralistic alliance of white
elites, liberal middle-class Jews, and blacks, to race-based solidarity hardened by white middle-class rage over
perceived preferential treatment for African Americans. Ultimately, the union got most of its demands, the state
legislature mandated "decentralization" rather than "community control," and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment
ended in defeat. Over the next thirty years, conservative white neighborhoods used "community control" to exclude
black students, black students' achievement continued to decline, and New York's African-American population became
more marginalized.
Podair illustrates circumstances unique to New York, but the issues are universal. He describes New York's shift from a
blue-collar working-class city to a white-collar middle-class one by 1945--and evokes Atlanta and other cities with
burgeoning service sectors in the 1950s. New York's "civic mantra" of "cosmopolitan humanism" (p. 8) even parallels
Atlanta's motto: "A city too busy to hate." New York experienced "blockbusting" and "redlining" in the 1950s to
maintain segregation of black neighborhoods, as did Southern cities a decade later. New York's ineffective "freedom of
choice" integration plans were just like Southern desegregation strategies of the 1960s.
It is depressing that today black students still achieve at much lower levels than their white counterparts. The Ocean
Hill-Brownsville experiment in the 1960s tried to raise achievement by using culturally responsive instruction, building
teachers' positive expectations, restructuring curriculum away from a Western European focus, and viewing black
children as "culturally different," not "culturally deprived." Those same approaches are current models of effective
teaching from scholars Jacqueline Irvine, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Christine Bennett, Geneva Gay, James Banks, and
others. With an overwhelmingly white middle-class teaching force today instructing more lower-class students of color,
such lessons from the past should be heeded.
A contradiction in Podair's work is his condemning black activists for "Jew-baiting." He blames black leaders for not
taking the moral high ground, and for harsh rhetoric he believes "contributed to what may have been an unnecessarily
sharp divide between 'white' middle-class and 'black' lower-class values" (p. 180). That holds black activists to a higher
standard than white participants. Podair could as easily have argued that huge demonstrations by angry middleclass
whites and epithets by white picketers such as "nigger scab" produced that sharp divide (p. 135). Also, Podair openly
commiserates with Jewish ambiguity over choosing political allies based on race. He implicitly reinforces the notion of
white privilege as he notes many chose "whiteness" over "cosmopolitanism" (p. 209), a choice African Americans
could never have.
On the whole, the book is engaging, well-documented, and provocative, revealing a series of events both unique and
universal that provide a deeper understanding of current racial issues and dilemmas.
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Virginia E. Causey
Columbus State University
Causey, Virginia E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Causey, Virginia E. "The Strike That Changed New York." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 24, no. 3, 2005, p.
106+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA406518717&it=r&asid=91285330caa7e5b5b8b984e1af3cb593.
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The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks,
Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis
Clarence Taylor
The Journal of African American History.
89.4 (Fall 2004): p376.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Inc.
http://www.jaah.org/
Full Text:
Jerald E. Podair, The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. 288. Cloth, $40.00.
In May 1968, an experimental school board was created in Brooklyn's Ocean Hill-Brownsville section by the New York
City Board of Education, with funding from the Ford Foundation, to give parents greater input and control over schools
in that community. This action set off a storm of protest when the local school board removed nineteen teachers and
administrators who were accused of "sabotaging" the experiment. Albert Shanker, president of the United Federation of
Teachers (UFT), responded in the fall by calling a teachers strike that paralyzed New York City. Shanker's action and
the response of the school board led to one of the most racially divisive events in New York City's history.
With the publication of his new his book, The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean HillBrownsville
Crisis, historian Jerald Podair joins a long list of people who have written on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville
conflict. The Strike that Changed New York is a clearly written and carefully researched book that relies on interviews
with several key players in the incident. Podair makes a major contribution to the scholarship on the Ocean HillBrownsville
conflict by focusing on organizations such as the Parents and Taxpayers and the Afro-American Teachers
associations. He attempts to remain evenhanded when writing about a dispute that was (and for some remains) a
political minefield.
Podair's major contribution is his analysis of the impact of the confrontation on city politics. The black community's
distrust of the UFT caused by the crisis, he correctly notes, meant that the union could not turn to African Americans
for a coalition against the devastating 1975 budget cuts that hurt both teachers and poor minorities. White ethnic
communities refused to create an alliance with black communities because they believed the cuts were aimed directly at
African Americans. Podair distinguishes himself from other scholars of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville incident by
contending that the heart of the school battle was a clash of cultures between African Americans and whites over the
meaning of racism, equality, and pluralism.
Podair argues that on one side of the cultural divide were outer-borough Jews and white Catholics who embraced what
he describes as "middle class values," such as individualism, equal opportunity, "color-blind merit," and "civic culture."
Podair also believes that these groups accepted the notion that African Americans and Puerto Ricans were enmeshed in
a "culture of poverty." On the other side of the divide were black intellectuals and activists, white liberal elites, and
New and Old Leftists who, according to Podair, "were deeply ambivalent" about those middle class values. This latter
group embraced Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward's "opportunity theory," which viewed the values and behaviors of
the poor, with their emphasis on cooperative values and group identity, as valid "currency for black advancement."
Included among the supporters of opportunity theory and black cultural unity were such black intellectuals and activists
as social psychologist Kenneth Clark and civil rights activist Rev. Milton A. Galamison.
For Podair the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict was not a clash over improving education for black children or a
struggle over resources, the central debate was over whose cultural values would prevail in New York City. However,
Podair's emphasis on a clash of cultures ignores the core element in the dispute--power. To argue that either side did not
understand the other, or were just speaking different languages, is to ignore the larger political dynamics of the
confrontation.
For decades African American and Puerto Rican parents complained that their children were not receiving an adequate
education. Attempts at reform, including a decade-long fight to integrate the school system led by Milton Galamison,
had failed due to the intransigence of the central Board of Education, and opposition and lack of meaningful support
from the UFT and other proponents of liberalism in New York City. Poor African American and Puerto Rican parents,
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who for decades had little power and control over educational policy, decided that community control was the only way
that they could ensure that their children receive a decent education. The parents and activists of Ocean Hill struggled
against some of the most powerful institutions in the city, including the then 57,000 member UFT and the extremely
insular and bureaucratic Board of Education, for control of the public schools in their communities.
It was in the interest of opponents of community control to present this as cultural dispute and Podair too readily
accepts this perspective. According to this view, white parents and teachers represented individualism and traditional
middle class support for educational ideals. Black parents represented a collectivist ethos and the desire to impose black
cultural nationalism and control on the school system. However, simply placing this confrontation into the context of a
cultural war and not one of power is a misreading of history. African American and Puerto Rican parents were not
fighting over culture; they were fighting to ensure their children a quality education.
Also, to assert that Milton Galamison and Kenneth Clark's criticisms of the city's educational system were culturallybased
is to misconstrue the major arguments of these important figures. Central to Galamison's argument was the issue
of power. He wanted to empower parents to participate in a new system of community control because the current one
had failed to educate African American and Puerto Rican children. Galamison did not view his support for community
control as an attempt to assure that black cultural values would be dominant in the dispute. In fact, Galamison remained
dedicated to integration while struggling for community control. "It is my conviction," he was quoted as stating "that
the current stream of Black consciousness is not a rejection of racial unity as a desirable goal nor is it a negation of
unity as an ideal. It is not an abandonment of wholesome objectives. The current Black consciousness is one important
aspect of the search for a better way. It means community empowerment."
There are similar problems with Podair's attempt to place Kenneth Clark in a coalition opposing New York's "civic
values" and supporting "opportunity theory." Clark did not criticize traditional teaching techniques; he argued that these
practices were not being properly directed to African American and Puerto Rican children. In Clark's seminal work
Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1965), the psychologist asserted,
From the earliest grade, a child knows when he has been assigned to
a level that is considered less than adequate. Whether letters,
numbers, or dog or animal names are used to describe these groups
within days after these procedures are imposed the children know
exactly what they mean. Those children who are relegated to the
inferior groups suffer a sense of self-doubt and deep feelings of
inferiority which stamp their entire attitude toward school and the
learning process. Many children are now systematically categorized,
classified in groups labeled slow learners, trainables, untrainables,
Track A, Track B, the "pussycats," the "Bunnies," etc. But it all
adds up to the fact that they are not being taught; and not being
taught, they fail.
Clark was not making an argument for opportunity theory, but pointing out that the public schools were not providing
children with adequate educational resources, and that teachers were not performing their duty as educators. Clark's
argument focused on the psychological impact that institutional racism had on minority children.
While others have written on the Ocean Hill crisis before, Podair's is the first book-length study in several decades to
focus solely on this controversial incident. Whether or not one agrees with all of his conclusions, he deserves praise for
recognizing the continuing importance of this subject and its contemporary legacy.
Clarence Taylor
Baruch College, CUNY
Taylor, Clarence
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Taylor, Clarence. "The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis." The
Journal of African American History, vol. 89, no. 4, 2004, p. 376+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA127054616&it=r&asid=d8b51c52fe9dedf2ca81fcea2bc315af.
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The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks,
Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis
Deborah Dash Moore
American Jewish History.
91.1 (Mar. 2003): p176.
COPYRIGHT 2003 American Jewish Historical Society
http://www.ajhs.org/
Full Text:
The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis. By Jerald E. Podair. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xi + 273 pp. Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the
Ghetto. By Wendell Pritchen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xi + 333 pp.
Brownsville, Brooklyn is slowly acquiring iconic status. Long in the Lower East Side's shadow, Brownsville has
gradually emerged as a New York City neighborhood with distinctive messages for historians. Unlike the Manhattan
immigrant section, Brownsville has attracted scholars interested in the children of immigrants, the second generation.
Attention began with Gerald Sorin's The Nurturing Neighborhood: The Brownsville Boys Club and Jewish Community
in Urban America, 1940-1990 (1990), a study of adolescent culture and neighborhood change that emphasized cohesive
ties and collective responsibility among the area's working-class population. Carole Bell Ford followed Sorin's lead in
her book, The Girls: Jewish Women of Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1940-1995 (1999), which explored the differences
gender made for this generation of Jews. Both authors tracked their subjects after they moved out of Brownsville,
arguing that their youthful experiences shaped enduring attitudes. Wendell Pritchett and Jerald E. Podair are also
interested in post-World War II Brownsville, but they focus on the decades when the neighborhood became a ghetto for
blacks, not Jews. Nonetheless, Jews are very much a part of the stories that they tell.
Although Pritchett begins his history with an account of Brownsville as a quarter of working-class Jewish immigrants
from Eastern Europe, his real interest emphasizes the years after 1940 when Brownsville gradually changed first into a
working-class residential district for African Americans and then into a black slum. Pritchett's case study is sobering.
He characterizes the 1940s as optimistic years, a time when local left-wing Jews forged effective alliances with their
working-class black neighbors in efforts to rebuild the area's deteriorating housing stock and inadequate social services,
especially those for children. However, he argues that local activism could not overcome the institutionalized racism
and anti-communism prevalent in the city. Pritchett charts efforts to secure decent public housing to replace
deteriorating wooden buildings and observes how local radicals were among the few New Yorkers who actually
agitated for housing projects. But Brownsville was not an island in the city, and coalition activities--boycotts and
protests--were ultimately ineffective against elite desires to segregate African Americans in the poorest neighborhoods.
City bureaucrats under Robert Moses's leadership saw places like Brownsville as dumping grounds for new black
migrants from the South. Brownsville got public housing, but far too much of it and with income restrictions that
doomed the projects as experiments in interracial living.
Pritchett is also critical of black churches and other local institutions, like the NAACP, that failed to meet the demands
of a rapidly expanding black population. In 1940, African Americans were only 6 percent of Brownsville residents. A
decade later, the numbers had almost doubled, and blacks made up 22 percent of the locality. During the 1950s, when
the numbers of blacks in the area skyrocketed due to migration from the South and gentrification of Manhattan, the
NAACP resisted working with left-wing Jewish radicals due to fears of being tainted by association with communists.
Pritchett notes that even progressive labor unions were unwilling to invest in housing in Brownsville. Increasingly
upwardly mobile Jews and blacks both left the neighborhood, unable to transform it into a viable working-class area in
the political context of the 1950s. By the end of the decade, Brownsville had declined in total population even as
thousands of poor African Americans and Puerto Ricans found homes in the district. However, despite popular
perceptions, residents of public housing moved out much more slowly, delaying the increase in very poor tenants.
Pritchett argues that although Brownsville organizations "endorsed racial integration as a positive goal rather than
viewing it as a threat to community viability" (145), they were unable to prevent the section's slide into racial
segregation and poverty. The neighborhood was significantly worse off in 1960 than it had been in 1940. The failure of
local organizations, which Pritchett blames on the city's political elites, revealed the "limitations of postwar liberalism"
(145).
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Jerald Podair, equally concerned with the limits of postwar liberalism, examines events surrounding the Ocean HillBrownsville
teachers' strikes of 1968 to understand liberalism's demise. It is instructive to read his account next to
Pritchett's chapter on the successful hospital strike of 1962.
Pritchett analyzes the efforts of Local 1199, the hospital workers union led by Jews but with a black and Puerto Rican
rank and file, to secure collective bargaining and improved wages and benefits by focusing on one private Brooklyn
Jewish hospital, Beth-El. The story is a model one of interracial and cross-class cooperation, involving Jewish college
students and neighborhood activists, black civil rights leaders and community organizers, as well as Puerto Ricans and
labor unions. The wealthy board members of the hospital, despite their political connections with the Jewish borough
president Abe Stark, who began his political career in Brownsville, eventually crumbled before this coalition. Yet in the
face of success, the interracial and cross-class cooperation characteristic of the strike soon gave way to a new kind of
neighborhood activism nourished by the Community Action Program [CAP] sponsored by the War on Poverty. In a
sense, CAP provides the link to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis because it encouraged a reorientation of black and
Puerto Rican attitudes away from integration as a goal toward nascent ideas of "Black Power." Thus the city elites, who
had frustrated efforts at integration in the 1950s, returned with ideas of community empowerment that would be crucial
in creating the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school demonstration project.
Podair offers a compelling argument for the significance of the 1968 strike (actually a series of three strikes). Not only
did the strike push Jews into an alliance with white Catholics in the city, but it also laid bare competing understandings
of equality, pluralism, community control, and the role of education in a democratic society. Podair argues that the
strike's effects reverberate to this day in New York City politics. The strike helped create conditions that made white
New Yorkers ready to sacrifice the poor and most vulnerable members of society, a remarkable change in attitude from
the post-war decades. Although there have been many books written about the New York City Teachers' Strike of 1968,
Podair's study will become the standard history. In its conceptualization of the issues at stake, it speaks to twenty-first
century concerns about race, politics, urbanism, public education, multiculturalism and unionization.
Podair begins by describing two New Yorks, one black and the other white. Jews inhabit the latter world and Podair
moves rather effortlessly from speaking about whites to discussing Jews. The Jewish postwar world was a promising
one, filled with decent jobs and improved housing. Jews viewed New York as a liberal city, endorsing its commitment
to generous social welfare provisions and imagining possibilities of social mobility for all city residents. As New York
moved to deindustrialize, however, recently arrived blacks did not face economic opportunities comparable to those of
earlier generations of immigrants. Public education, a vehicle of upward mobility for Jews, failed black students. Podair
insists on sharply divergent views of education between blacks and white teachers. The latter, including many Jews,
embraced a hierarchical merit system, eagerly studying for the next exam to move up the ladder from teacher to
department chair to administrator. With ruthlessly pragmatic attitudes, teachers lacked empathy for their AfricanAmerican
students' culture. Teachers wanted their students to follow their model, imagining it as a path out of ghetto
poverty. By contrast, an articulate group of black activists and intellectuals mounted a critique of the individualistic,
materialistic, competitive, middle-class public school culture, suggesting that black working-class students had an
authentic alternative that was cooperative and mutual.
The teachers' strike erupted with such violence because blacks and whites did not share any perceptions. They
understood equality differently; they imagined pluralism and the significance of black history differently; they thought
about work and unions differently. Their views of the world, reflecting their socioeconomic experience, made
compromise impossible. One of the most poignant sections of Podair's book deals with the failure of veteran black
labor leaders, civil rights activists, and socialists to bridge the gulf between black teachers and administrators in the
Ocean Hill-Brownsville Demonstration School District and the largely Jewish teachers in the United Federation of
Teachers. Knowing of the successful hospital strike in 1962 makes painful reading of Local 1199's anguish, torn
between its loyalties to fellow unionists and its sympathies with black parents and administrators. Yet the third and final
strike forced everyone to choose a side; compromise and coexistence seemed impossible.
Podair argues that the strike made Jews white, allies of ethnic Catholics in the uniformed services whom they had
previously shunned as antisemitic. Black antisemitism expressed in the course of the conflict pushed Jews into this new
alliance, one that changed the city's political landscape. The anger and fury of middle-class Jews (Podair cites the
instance where Mayor John Lindsay was booed off the podium of the East Midwood Jewish Center and then pelted
with trash as his car drove off) sent a powerful message to the city's elites. Ocean Hill-Brownsville "clarified the
changes in New York's class structure that had taken place over the past quarter-century. It established the city's white
middle class as an independent force, with a distinct voice of its own and interests that were different from both the
city's poor and Manhattan elites" (132).
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508706772379 13/13
Podair's contention that Jews became white as a result of the conflict carries his analysis to a contemporary conclusion.
It is one of the few false notes in an otherwise brilliant book. Just as scholars now gravitate to the saga of ethnic, facial,
and generational change in Brownsville, so are they fascinated with the moment Jews became white. Did it happen with
Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer? Did it occur two decades later at the end of World War II? Was it a product of
suburbanization? Or did it result from the crisis of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1968? The multiplicity of dates and times
suggests an eagerness to erase Jewish cosmopolitanism and inbetweenness. Nevertheless, Podair has written an
effective and powerful history of competing Jewish and black perceptions. And unlike Pritchett, who was ill served by
sloppy editing (his map of Brownsville is printed upside-down), Podair benefited from a careful editor. Brownsville,
Brooklyn, the neighborhood that pursued integrated housing, turned into a black ghetto and generated a controversy
whose dimensions still invite recrimination. It is a disturbing legacy, but one that speaks both to Jewish dreams of
America and confrontations with the possibilities available even in a city as generous, diverse, and Jewish as New
York.
Deborah Dash Moore
Vassar College
Moore, Deborah Dash
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Moore, Deborah Dash. "The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis."
American Jewish History, vol. 91, no. 1, 2003, p. 176+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA119570020&it=r&asid=6e9bbc9a25aa1a1e0ade712c22818f74.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A119570020

Staub, Michael E. "Death at an early age." The Nation, 17 Feb. 2003, p. 40. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA97200803&it=r&asid=fa4f3d155371e77d4fa9cec884825a8d. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. Kahlenberg, Richard D. "Hire education." Washington Monthly, Jan.-Feb. 2003, p. 56+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA97173637&it=r&asid=4fe18f05ff975eb88c445ae14cbb44f3. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. "City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 77+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485971696&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. Wills, Brian S. "The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction." The Historian, vol. 75, no. 2, 2013, p. 336+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA334277153&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. Hettle, Wallace. "The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction." Journal of Southern History, vol. 79, no. 2, 2013, p. 485+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA330250108&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. Causey, Virginia E. "The Strike That Changed New York." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 24, no. 3, 2005, p. 106+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA406518717&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. Taylor, Clarence. "The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis." The Journal of African American History, vol. 89, no. 4, 2004, p. 376+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA127054616&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. Moore, Deborah Dash. "The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean HillBrownsville Crisis." American Jewish History, vol. 91, no. 1, 2003, p. 176+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA119570020&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.

• History News Network
  http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165803
  Word count: 2045

  4-27-17
  Review of Jerald Podair’s “City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles”

  Books
  tags: book review, City of Dreams, Jerald Podair

  1 4 1

  by Henry D. Fetter
  Henry D. Fetter is the award-winning author of Taking on the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball.

  Rivers of ink and buckets of tears have been spilled over Walter O’Malley’s decision to take the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the six decades since that transformational, and for many traumatic, event. But it has been O’Malley’s failure to find a Brooklyn location for a replacement for Ebbets Field, and his battles with New York City planning czar Robert Moses, that have attracted most of the attention. Remarkably enough, Jerald Podair’s City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles, is the first book length account of the Los Angeles angle on the Dodgers’ move. The essential facts concerning Los Angeles’s wooing of the team and Walter O’Malley's construction “of his own stadium on his own land on his own terms” in Chavez Ravine in the face of considerable political, legal and public relations problems were laid out in the press at the time and in Neil J. Sullivan’s pioneering The Dodgers Move West as well as recent biographies of the Dodger owner by Michael D’Antonio and Andy McCue. Drawing on that material, as well as the papers of Walter O’Malley made available to him by the O’Malley family, Podair has written an exhaustive, thoroughly researched and fair-minded account of what the movie version might call “Walter’s Adventures in La La Land.”

  The book begins with a brief survey of O’Malley’s unsuccessful effort to replace Ebbets Field with a new, Dodger- owned ballpark in Brooklyn. As is now fashionable, Podair targets New York City planning czar Robert Moses as the immovable object standing between O’Malley’s ambitions and their realization. But, unlike others who have singled out Moses as the villain of the story, he understands that Moses operated within a left liberal political environment that was ideologically hostile to the kind of public subsidy for the Dodgers, a profitable private enterprise, that O’Malley required to acquire the downtown Brooklyn location he sought. (And one suspects that many of those who pillory Moses for failing to subsidize O'Malley with public monies would be blasting him for misusing the public weal had he done so.)

  In Los Angeles, O’Malley met with a more receptive welcome for his plans, at least among political and corporate elites, and an “environment," Podair writes, " in which profit seeking was not equated with profiteering.” The city’s leadership approved his proposal to acquire the stadium location he coveted in Chavez Ravine in exchange for the minor league ballpark in south central Los Angeles that the Dodgers had recently acquired from the Chicago Cubs, as well as additional funding for grading of the hillside site and access road construction. But his success on the west coast was not simply due to a political culture that Podair sees as more receptive to public support for private enterprise than in New York but, even more perhaps, to the “fortuitous” (as Podair correctly says) availability of the Chavez Ravine site.

  O’Malley had become aware of Chavez Ravine by January 1957 (not in May as Podair writes) and instantly noted that it lay at the heart of the region’s expanding freeway system. (It may well have been that O’Malley made the decision to move the team at that moment.) Years before the Dodgers arrived on the scene, Podair explains, the property had been almost entirely cleared of its Mexican American residents in anticipation of building a high rise modernist public housing project on the site. That plan had been derailed in 1953 (perhaps nipping a Pruitt-Igoe type fiasco in the bud) when a top Housing Authority official who was a secret Communist refused to answer questions about his political affiliations in a state Un-American Activities Committee investigation into suspected Communist infiltration of the authority. (Sometimes the “red baiters” were right). A coterie of Latino activists may continue to blame the Dodgers for the destruction of the “hidden” village where Dodger Stadium stands but the rank and file of Los Angeles Latinos make up the team’s most ardent fans.

  In Brooklyn, O’Malley’s plans created problems – his plan required not only a sharply discounted land purchase price but also the demolition and relocation of essential infrastructure in a heavily built up area at great expense to the city. In Los Angeles, the Dodgers offered a reasonably priced solution to a problem – what to do with a largely vacant Chavez Ravine – as well as the prospect of bringing major league baseball to Los Angeles, a goal embraced even by opponents of the particular terms of the deal with the Dodgers.

  O’Malley anticipated smooth sailing in Los Angeles but ran into substantial political and legal opposition to a transaction that smacked of what would now be labeled “crony capitalism.” The most immediate, and potentially serious, was a referendum that would veto the deal. According to Podair the referendum was “a battle between two competing visions of LA, that of an ambitious, growth-oriented city and a cautious, fiscally restrained one,” a showdown between “different understandings of civic identity. Did Los Angeles need a downtown similar to those in East Coast cities, a center of activity around which outlying areas revolved like planets around the sun? Or could a collection of satellite communities themselves constitute a viable urban structure?”

  But this may be an overly schematic rendering what was at stake in a battle the Dodgers narrowly won with the aid of a sophisticated PR campaign and overwhelming support from the city’s African-American and Latino voters.

  Podair recognizes that the contending sides in the referendum cannot simply be reduced to the downtown establishment versus the “Folks” (Podair’s term) out in the neighborhoods. Voters in the San Fernando Valley opposed the contract (although by a fairly narrow margin) but those in other “peripheral” areas supported it. The minority voters who supported the Dodgers were certainly not part of any elite, corporate, downtown or otherwise. Nor can one readily ascertain “fiscal restraint” or opposition to “siphon[ing] resources from outlying neighborhoods that needed roads, schools, sewer lines and other essential infrastructure” by the downtown corporate elite when opponents advanced their own ambitious visions for Chavez Ravine, including the construction of a city owned baseball stadium and other civic improvements (including an auditorium and a zoo) all at taxpayer expense. What seems to have driven the opposition was less a clash of values - or resistance to the downtown power structure – than the not unreasonable belief that the Dodgers had struck too good a deal with a compliant bunch of politicians and that the city had been taken to the cleaners by a slick carpetbagger from Babylon on the Hudson.

  As to the proponents, they were less interested in pursuing a vision of a "revitalized " downtown that would mark the emergence of a "modern" city than in doing what was necessary to bring not just big league baseball, but one of the sport's most successful and historic franchises, to Los Angeles.

  The book then traces the litigation over the deal that was only resolved in favor of the Dodgers by a ruling of the state Supreme Court, the acquisition of the balance of Chavez Ravine property needed to house of stadium, the televised evictions of the few remaining holdout property owners on the site, controversies over property taxes, zoning and access road construction, and the complex process of building the stadium itself, all of which came to a triumphant, if much delayed, culmination with the opening of Dodger Stadium on April 10, 1962. O'Malley, may have lost a showdown with titans in New York but in Los Angeles he comes off as a Gulliver, beset by a ragtag band of Lilliputians who were never quite able to trip him up.

  Podair's earlier book about the 1968 New York City teachers's strike was titled The Strike That Changed New York. In City of Dreams, he argues that the move of the Dodgers and the building of Dodger Stadium was a similarly decisive moment in the history of Los Angeles, marking its transformation from the proverbial fifty suburbs in search of a city to a cosmopolitan metropolis, built around a central core, of the kind associated with traditional city centers. The completion of the stadium signaled the triumph of an elite committed to growth and “modernity” over neighborhood oriented penny pinching “Folks” who were satisfied with the humdrum status quo. According to Podair, “ Dodger Stadium made downtown Los Angeles possible” and “Downtown Los Angeles made modern Los Angeles possible.”

  Rather curiously, making Los Angeles “modern” apparently means making it like older, established east coast cities. But that urban model simply does not fit the distinctive reality of life in sprawling Los Angeles. About a decade after Dodger Stadium opened architectural historian Reyner Banham dismissed downtown with "a note...because that it is all downtown Los Angeles deserves" in his classic Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Banham decried the failure of "pueblo-centric historians ” who insisted "that downtown has got to be important because downtowns are significant and important places in all self-respecting cities” to embrace the novel reality of Los Angeles. Aside from the inconvenient fact that Dodger Stadium is not really downtown at all but is instead located on an isolated hilltop two miles from City Hall, surrounded by acres of parking lots, cut off from the city’s ‘core’ by a network of intersecting freeways and without any practical public transit connection, Podair puts too much weight on Dodger Stadium as the engine of “the birth of modern Los Angeles."

  The city actually had a traditional downtown in the years before the Dodgers arrived, with corporate headquarters, courts, government buildings, prominent law firms (one of which would represent the Dodgers), train and bus stations, exclusive social clubs, a central library, newspaper offices, banks, a stock exchange, theaters, a symphony hall and department stores, even streetcars. By the 1950s, it was ripe for the renewal and redevelopment which was underway before O’Malley came calling and would have been pursued in any event. Even as downtown was being redeveloped, alternative business and entertainment centers were being built, notably Century City in west Los Angeles and their numbers have proliferated ever since. O’Malley himself chose to live in Lake Arrowhead, eighty miles from downtown.

  More than half a century after the Dodgers arrived, downtown Los Angeles remains a remote afterthought to most inhabitants of the region except perhaps when summoned to jury duty in the civic center’s courthouses. The author concedes "that downtown Los Angeles is less than it could be today" and that "downtown Los Angeles remains a work in progress." If downtown has – at long last – been somewhat revitalized in the last decade or so, with a wave of residential construction, a "Grand Park," hip hotels, art galleries and vibrant (in places) street life, coexisting, however, with a large homeless population, it has nothing to do with the erection of Dodger Stadium.

  The making of a “modern” Los Angeles may have required that major league baseball arrive but it did not require the relocation of the Dodgers or the building of Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine. It is true that Los Angeles is fortunate to have that team and that ballpark in that location. And there is no denying that Walter O’Malley’s meticulously designed bespoke home for the Dodgers continues to be a wonderful place to watch a baseball game even as the cookie cutter, multi-purpose publicly funded stadiums of similar vintage elsewhere have fallen to the wrecking ball. But Los Angeles would be what it is today even if Brooklyn’s “boys of summer” were still playing in Ebbets Field.

• Los Angeles Times
  http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-cm-dodger-stadium-book-20170403-story.html
  Word count: 1612

  Just in time for opening day, a new book on the (complicated) history of Dodger Stadium
  Dodger Stadium
  Dodger Stadium photographed in 1962. (file photo / Los Angeles Times)
  Christopher Hawthorne Christopher HawthorneContact Reporter
  Architecture Critic
  Distrust of elites and their backroom deals. A severe housing shortage in Los Angeles. Ballot measures testing Angelenos’ appetite for change and large-scale development. Controversies over public subsidies that help the wealthy owners of professional sports teams move from one city to another.

  Sound familiar? Quite a few of the themes at the heart of a thoughtful new book from Princeton University Press on the history of Dodger Stadium, which celebrates another opening day Monday afternoon, have also been generating a steady supply of headlines in 2017. They’re central to ongoing arguments about density and the construction of new housing in Los Angeles, the role of patrons like Eli Broad and the relocation of the NFL’s Rams and Chargers to Inglewood and the Raiders to Las Vegas.

  ADVERTISING

  “City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles,” by Jerald Podair, a professor of history at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., in that sense makes an implicit argument that the fissures opened up by the fight to get the stadium built have yet to close.

  That fight was a tougher and more complex one than even many longtime Dodger fans likely know. The decision to give city-owned land in Chavez Ravine to Walter O’Malley as he considered moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957, in exchange for his willingness to finance a new stadium there, is one that has been much analyzed since. Infamously, that land had been aggressively cleared of its longtime residents, most Mexican Americans, to make room for a public housing project that was killed by red-baiting attacks.

  Podair makes clear that the struggle over that housing project, designed by the leading modernist architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander, was virtually over by the time O’Malley accepted the city’s offer to use the land. He notes that the “city of Los Angeles, not the Los Angeles Dodgers, destroyed Chavez Ravine.”

  He lets O’Malley off the hook a bit for not looking more deeply into the process that had allowed the land in Chavez Ravine to be handed to him by the city as essentially a tabula rasa, with only a handful of residents remaining from what had been a tightknit neighborhood.

  “When he arrived in Los Angeles,” Podair writes, “O’Malley was only vaguely aware of the controversy over public housing in Chavez Ravine and of the impending eviction battle there.”

  Less known is the extent to which O’Malley had to struggle, once he’d decided to move West, to get his planned stadium approved and built. Even as O’Malley was sketching out plans for a modern ballpark in Chavez Ravine with Emil Praeger, the architect and engineer who had already built the team’s spring-training complex in Vero Beach, Fla., the owner was mounting a legal, political and public-relations effort to win a permanent home for the franchise. Meanwhile the team was playing on a temporary basis at the Coliseum.

  The twists and turns of that debate make up the heart of Podair’s book. He writes that the competing arguments about the deal the city had made with O’Malley, with councilmembers like Edward Roybal and John Holland opposing it and Mayor Norris Poulson and the downtown establishment in firm support, stood in for competing arguments about the character of Los Angeles and its future.

  “Dodger Stadium divided Los Angeles in deep and profound ways,” Podair writes. “The questions it raised about the relationship between public and private power, the respective roles of urban core and periphery, and the modern identity of Los Angeles itself would remain long after” it opened on April 10, 1962.

  The debate, he adds, “pitted the small-property-owning middle class, the working class, and the poor of Los Angeles’ margins — geographic margins, economic margins, racial margins, sometimes all three — against a civic class located closer to the loci of political, economic, and cultural power. One group’s dreams were localist and limited, the other’s national and global.”

  After a bruising victory for O’Malley at the City Council, the deal went to the voters in June 1958 in the form of a ballot measure called Proposition B. It won a narrow victory for the Dodger owner, earning 52% of the vote (including surprisingly strong support from Latino voters). Next was a trip through the courts, where O’Malley finally won a conclusive verdict at the California Supreme Court in early 1959. When the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the decision in the fall of that year, O’Malley was finally able to move forward with Praeger in earnest.

  That hard-fought victory stands for Podair as an endorsement of the idea that the private gain of an owner like O’Malley might be compatible with the public good, that there could be a distinction, as he puts it, between mere "profit-making” and the more objectionable “profiteering.”

  It also marks, he argues, the moment when Los Angeles decided it did in fact need and want to invest in a downtown in a traditional sense. If the “battle against the construction of Dodger Stadium symbolized the revolt of the margins … against perceived centers of power and, indeed, the idea of a center itself,” as he writes, then the center had won. The completion and the success of the stadium, he argues, changed the relationship between center and periphery in L.A. for good and “set the arc of its civic trajectory.” The redevelopment of Bunker Hill and the construction of the Music Center, along with the later additions of Walt Disney Concert Hall and Staples Center: all of this follows in Podair’s telling from O’Malley’s achievement in Chavez Ravine.

  I certainly don’t disagree with him about the appeal of the stadium itself, which Times sports columnist Jim Murray memorably called “a gorgeous triumph of high-rise architecture in living Technicolor with levels of ocher, aqua, coral and sky-blue, with umbrellas of concrete escarping a perimeter that looks on the mountains of San Gabriel.” Podair notes, rightly, that Dodger Stadium was “a ballpark built not just to house a team but also to embody an atmosphere.”

  But when he calls it “the first baseball stadium in a modernist form” he is not only overlooking San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, which opened in 1960, but also misreading the great architectural appeal of Dodger Stadium, which lies in the way it combines modernist features with more flexible, democratic and site-specific ones.

  Dodger Stadium has all the forward-looking optimism of the best modernist architecture and none of its dogmatic insistence on universal solutions, its tendency to ignore or run roughshod over local conditions. Its “atmosphere” is entirely the product of design details in combination with the flexible and generous way it opens itself up to its tricky, hilly site and those views.

  It helped of course that unlike Candlestick — and, again, in defiance of modernist architecture’s tendency to believe it could and should be all things to all people — Dodger Stadium was designed only for baseball, allowing Los Angeles to sidestep the disastrous trend in the 1960s and 1970s of building multipurpose concrete bowls shared by NFL and major-league franchises.

  The larger question, when it comes to testing Podair’s thesis about the relationship of Dodger Stadium to L.A.’s understanding of itself and the role downtown would play in its postwar development, is how much the ballpark is really of as opposed to merely near downtown. Podair stashes in a footnote the fact that Dodger Stadium, built for a car-centric era and surrounded by oceans of parking, has never been connected in any meaningful way to the city’s transit system.

  That is not the only sense in which it has stood apart from the life of the city. Sunk into a hillside, all but invisible from downtown itself, Dodger Stadium was built as an enclave, an oasis whose charm derives in no small measure from its detachment from the city around it. It is not quite emblematic, in political, cultural or architectural terms, of L.A.’s “urban core.”

  Podair is right when he observes that Dodger Stadium has always been “one of the rare patches of common ground for a city stratified along lines of class and race,” thanks in part to the stadium itself but also to the franchise’s unusually egalitarian history, including but not limited to Jackie Robinson.

  But the truth is that we reach that common ground by removing ourselves from the rest of the city; it is that sense of separation, of viewing both the hills and (in the other direction) the downtown skyline from a remove, that gives Dodger Stadium much of its appeal. Its curious and particularly Southern Californian mixture of urban and suburban amenities — a stadium with a giant parking lot and lush, even Arcadian landscaping in the geographical center of the second biggest city in the United States — has always allowed it to stand out.

  The paradox of Dodger Stadium is the paradox of Los Angeles. It’s a ballpark where we find a much-needed civic communion in the middle of the city by leaving the city behind.

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