What’s it all about, anyway? Why is it springing up so stridently right now? And how long has this anti-urbanism been a key element of our political discourse? The answers may come as a surprise.
You may remember from long-ago history courses that Thomas Jefferson didn’t care for cities or city life. More than that: Jefferson wrote that “the mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of good government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.”
What you may not recall is that the virulence of anti-city sentiment has been central to American political thought all the way from Jefferson to the present moment. I learned that from a perusal of a stimulating and underappreciated work of a decade ago: Americans Against the City, by the historian Steven Conn. I’m going to draw on Conn’s research to document just how pervasive this sentiment has been.
It flourished most dramatically, he writes, in the closing years of the 19th century, when rural voters and their populist tribunes blamed the rise of the big city for their economic misfortunes. Leonidas Polk, the ideological father of populism, lamented that “towns and cities flourish — and yet agriculture stagnates.” Tom Watson, the agrarian rebel congressman from Georgia, said that urban images of the countryside “are no more true to real life than a fashion plate is to an actual man or woman.” And William Jennings Bryan, in winning the Democratic nomination for president in 1896, thundered that urban politicians could “burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”
More recently, historian T.J. Jackson Lears summed up the populist resentments very succinctly: “From their standpoint, the city was the source of corruption, dissipation, extravagance and deception, a devil’s playground. Swarming with painted women and confidence men — no place for a plain-spoken Protestant.”
The populist movement essentially died out at the beginning of the 20th century but anti-city virulence remained a fixture in much of American journalism in the years that followed. A diatribe in World’s Work magazine in 1906 typified the persistence of the attitude. “Life in cities and towns is not the normal life for any large proportion of our people,” it told its readers in 1906. “Nor is it the best or most wholesome life.”
ALL OF THESE RESENTMENTS were being expressed at a moment when millions of European immigrants were flocking to urban areas throughout the country and young people were leaving the farms to seek a more fulfilling urban life. That only made anti-city views more strident and anti-city politicians more resolute. When the 1920 census showed cities overtaking small towns in population, states refused to reapportion their congressional and legislative constituencies to reflect the change.
Anti-urban sentiments only seemed to burn more brightly in the prosperous 1920s and the Depression-wracked 1930s. The best-known critic of cities in the '20s was the consumer advocate Ralph Borsodi, forgotten now but hugely popular in his heyday. In 1929, Borsodi published an angry book called This Ugly Civilization, in which he proclaimed that the urban world “is a civilization of noise, smoke, smells and crowds … the crowds and discomforts of the cities of which it proudly boasts.”
A whole cadre of prominent American intellectuals was saying roughly the same thing at the same time. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright declared that “the modern city is a place for banking and prostitution and very little else.” The painter Grant Wood opined that the cities were “far less typically American then the frontier area whose power they usurped.”
At the World’s Fair in New York in 1939, many thousands of visitors were shown a film whose narration insisted that “year by year our cities grow more complex and less fit for living.” And even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, justly praised as a leader who bailed big cities out of their worst difficulties, really didn’t like them, at least in the opinion of some of those closest to him. FDR’s attitudes reflected his background as a country squire in rural upstate New York. His senior adviser Rexford G. Tugwell explained that Roosevelt “always thought people would be better off in the country.”
The journalism of the 1930s was replete with interest in alternatives to city life: new towns, New England villages and small settlements in Appalachia. Roosevelt himself had a longstanding belief that the indignities of city life could be remedied by the creation of brand-new towns. Several of these were created and largely financed by the federal government; most have evolved into conventional suburbs rather than the self-sufficient garden communities the New Dealers envisioned.
THE POSTWAR YEARS brought a new anti-city phenomenon of sorts: the movement of American families from city to suburb. This migration had many causes: a desire for more space, a search for better schools, an exodus from mean streets. It was fundamentally, however, a flight from the urban life those families had experienced for generations.
The flight to the suburbs had its elite defenders, through the 1950s and into the 1960s. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his retirement from the presidency, proclaimed that “the first essential of any realistic housing plan is to reduce the density of population by encouraging large numbers of people to relocate in new, more wholesome communities.” The prominent urbanist George Sternlieb insisted that “the problem of the city is a crisis of function. What is left to the city that it does better than someplace else?” The Chicago Tribune lamented that “too many people are crowded into big cities, where they breathe polluted air, pay high prices for everything they buy, fray their nerves in a daily battle with traffic congestion, and generally get in each other’s way.”
By the end of the 1950s, however, the beleaguered city had begun to attract a new cohort of defenders. In 1958, the sociologist William H. Whyte published The Exploding Metropolis, charging that “most of the rebuilding on the way and in prospect is being designed by people who don’t like cities. They do not merely dislike the noise and dirt and the congestion. They dislike the city’s variety and concentration, its tension, its hustle and bustle.” Two years later, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs made essentially the same point to a broader audience, praising the energy and vitality — and even the safety — of crowded urban streets.
And so the anti-city ideology entered upon a period of relative quiescence, in which intellectuals and political leaders began to talk more about how to save cities than what to do to replace them. But the urban antipathy never went away: A Gallup poll asked respondents beginning in 1966 where they would rather live — a big city, a small town or in the countryside. The city came in third in the first survey, and it still does. “We are a nation reliant on the engines of our cities,” Conn concludes toward the end of his book, “populated with people who do not like cities very much.”
SO IT REMAINS RELEVANT to ask what so many people find repellent about city life, even as they seek it out for culture and tourism. There are a few plausible answers to that question, even if they don’t explain the phenomenon completely. Here’s an admittedly anecdotal list:
Americans fear crowding and congestion, as many of the preceding passages should make clear. They want to be close to other people — just not too physically close to too many of them. They feel this way even as millions continue to flock to cities for transient pleasures.
They crave familiarity, and cities through their history have been havens for newcomers, immigrants and diversity, to a degree unsettling to millions of Americans, even — or perhaps especially — to those who have never had much direct exposure to urban life.
They have never lost their suspicion of big government or their distaste for graft and corruption, and they have long associated both with big-city machine politics, even though it has been repeatedly shown that corruption is a small-town problem as well as an urban one.
And perhaps most important, Americans have never abandoned their longing for the sense of community they believe has been lost over the centuries, and they blame the anonymity of the city for a never-ending decline in community feeling.
All of this is a backdrop to the political events of the past year, in which politicians at all levels have built on anti-city sentiments to cultivate a constituency and score political points.
Having said this, I can’t help reflecting on a couple of opposite trends. Young Americans have not lost their attraction to living in city centers, despite the decline in city population ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic. Downtown populations in many places have been going up in the last couple of years. Meanwhile, developers have been engaged in urbanizing the suburbs, designing Main Streets and re-creating many of the elements of central-city residential and commercial life in communities that began as refuges from that life.
We may not be fond of admitting it, but we are drawn inexorably to cities, even as we like to complain about them. That has been true since Thomas Jefferson’s day, and it is not going to change anytime soon.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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