Big cities so often appear to have terrible problems, and Americans have a long history of convincing themselves that urban areas are in crises and that the federal government must do something to improve matters.
Edward C. Banfield argues the conventional wisdom is incorrect. In The Unheavenly City Revisited, he presents rigorous analyses showing that “by any conceivable measure of material welfare the present generation of urban Americans is, on the whole, better off than any other large group of people has ever been anywhere.” He furthermore argues that there is little evidence that the billions of dollars of government spending is improving matters. Indeed, well-intended government actions have proved harmful in some instances.
The Unheavenly City Revisited cautions policymakers that their biases may affect their perceptions of America’s metropolitan areas. Improving the lives of people in cities through government action is an exceedingly complex enterprise. Government officials and citizens alike must be realists about what government action can achieve.
AEI Press republished Edward C. Banfield’s classic book, Government Project, in late December 2023. Copies of the book may be purchased at https://amzn.to/48S4nV2. The new edition retains Banfield’s original text, Rexford Tugwell’s original introduction, and a new preface by Kevin R. Kosar. Government Project tells the story of an attempt by the US government to remake the lives of some of its citizens by establishing a cooperative farm in Pinal County, Arizona, in 1937. These individuals were among the most desperately poor and disadvantaged in the nation. The farm financially succeeded for a time, but the inhabitants shuttered it in its seventh year of operation. Many of them walked away with hardly anything, to the shock and dismay of the government officials overseeing it. Government Project deftly explains what went wrong at Casa Grande. In telling this story, Banfield illuminates larger truths about human nature and the limits of governance.
AEI Press has brought back this classic book, which has been out of print since the 1950s. The new edition retains Banfield’s original text, Rexford Tugwell’s original introduction, and a new preface by Kevin R. Kosar.
Government Project tells the story of an attempt by the US government to remake the lives of some of its citizens by establishing a cooperative farm in Pinal County, Arizona, in 1937. These individuals were among the most desperately poor and disadvantaged in the nation.
Casa Grande Valley Farms was an elaborate venture that provided the Americans who volunteered to settle there with housing, work, and the opportunity to earn income. For five years, the farm succeeded. The revenues from the sale of its crops gave the Casa Grande settlers material comfort and wealth far beyond what they had ever possessed.
But in the farm’s seventh year of operation, the inhabitants shuttered it and walked away with hardly anything, to the shock and dismay of the government officials overseeing it.
Banfield’s Government Project deftly explains what went wrong at Casa Grande. In telling this story, Banfield illuminates larger truths about human nature and the limits of governance.
“It is not a nice story.” -Rexford G. Tugwell, administrator, United States Resettlement Administration, from the 1951 introduction
“Devotees of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Dreiser will understand this book. With the relentlessness of a Greek tragedy, the story of this Resettlement Administration project… moves forward from relief and destitution… through hope, then security, to the very brink of success, only to disintegrate.” -Howard J. McMurray, American Political Science Review
“Sociologists will find much meat in this book for the purposes of illustrating the processes of social interaction—conflict, co-operation, and attempts and failures at accommodation.” -Lowry Nelson, American Journal of Sociology
In November 2023, Daniel DiSalvo, authored an essay titled, “The Unsolvable City” in City Journal. He notes that “[r]evisiting the still-controversial work of urbanist Edward Banfield can help put race relations, education, housing, crime, and other policy debates into a broader perspective.”
Importantly, Banfield’s book reminds us that American cities have always been raucous places, and their problems may be managed but cannot be solved. “The foundation of Banfield’s urbanism is an interconnected argument: most of what we view as urban ‘“’problems’ are not really problems at all, and the genuinely serious issues are not amenable to ‘policy solutions’ that are technically feasible and morally legitimate in a democratic society.”
“The Unheavenly City leaves the reader in little doubt that only one of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s two “truths” is actually correct. Culture—the habits of mind, conduct, beliefs, and values—“determines the success of a society,” and that politics is far too limited an enterprise to change the deeply ingrained cultural orientation of those who comprise it. That is a lesson it is never too late to learn.”
“In The Unheavenly City, Banfield suggested, like Plato did, that we judge society ‘“’by its tendency to produce desirable human types.’” He grounded his analysis of urban decay in the primacy of culture over bureaucratic edifices, government tinkering, and liberal do-gooderism. Unlike today’s Ivy League professors with their Ph.Ds and New York Times subscriptions, Banfield grew up on a Connecticut farm where common sense trumped an academic CV. As such, he could distinguish a muddy pigsty from an urban slum, which he defined not by the decrepit nature of its housing but rather by its “squalid and vicious” style of life.”
Thomas Sowell has a short essay in the Fall 2020 issue of the Claremont Review of Books titled “The Unheavenly City at 50.” Sowell, who turned 90 years old this past June, is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.
He writes:
“Somewhere Winston Churchill said that all wisdom is not new wisdom. That is certainly true of Edward C. Banfield’s landmark book, The Unheavenly City, published 50 years ago. Many, if not most, of the people discussing urban problems today have not yet caught up to what Banfield said half a century ago.”
Riffing off Banfield’s observations on dropouts, Dr. Sowell also add this personal note:
“While many people today may simply dismiss what Banfield said, it is impossible for me to dismiss it. As a personal note, I happen to have dropped out of high school at age 16, and took a full-time job as a messenger delivering telegrams for the Western Union telegraph company. But the law required me to also spend some time in what was called a ‘continuation school.’
“It was a time-wasting farce. I informed the teacher that the law could force me to be there, but it could not force me to participate, and I had no intention of participating. I was indeed angry ‘at the stupidity and hypocrisy of a system’ that used me like this. Fortunately, Western Union had its own continuation school for its messengers, and I transferred there, where I learned to type, a skill that would be of some value to me in later years—instead of being used to justify some teacher’s job in a public school.’
Fifty years ago, Edward C. Banfield published The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis at a time much like our own, with poverty, crime, and racial unrest seemingly ascendant. It was also a time in which both Left and Right engaged in a great deal of hyperbolic commentary about these problems—a tendency Banfield’s book sought to address.
The Unheavenly City is one of those rare academic books that became a bestseller, marked by Banfield’s characteristic straight talk and satirical passages, such as when he muses on whether the burdens of impoverished, unwedded mothers might be lifted by authorizing them to sell their babies. The book also outraged the Left—particularly the political class and intelligentsia, which had invested a great deal of time trying to solve America’s urban crises.
They damned the book as “reactionary,” “ignorant,” “dangerous,” and “tasteless.” The New York Review of Books ran an unflattering caricature of Banfield alongside a scathing review by a young Richard Sennett. For years after the book’s release, radicals disrupted Banfield’s classes and public lectures, calling him a racist and a fascist—neither of which was true.
Many of the critics missed the point of the volume, which was at its core Socratic. America was worked up about cities, with some fearing a national race war and a collapse of civilization. The “war on poverty” was in full swing, and more policies aimed at saving cities were in the works. Banfield saw good reason to ask tough questions and consider all possible solutions, no matter how unfashionable…. (Read more)
More than 60 years ago, an American family arrived in a seemingly idyllic town in Southern Italy. Stone buildings resembled “a white beehive against the top of a mountain.” Donkeys and pigs idled in the ancient, winding streets. A town crier tooting a brass horn announced “fish for sale in the piazza at 100 lire per kilo.” There were two churches, two bars, and a movie theater. Shops offered locally made shoes and olive oil, and locally-sourced meat. Nearly everyone farmed and tended animals and knew one another, at least by name or reputation.
Yet Chiaromonte’s 3400 residents were anything but content. They were crushingly poor and simmered with resentment. Why? In great part, as the Americans learned during their stay, because they were too family-focused.
Political scientist Edward C. Banfield went to Italy in 1954 to better understand poverty. Researchers then tended to assume people were poor due to lack of education or because they were victimized by the government or capitalism. Banfield himself had been a reporter and had traveled across the United States during the Great Depression, so he knew the reality was more complex. In order to understand why people are as they are and do what they do, Banfield believed one needed to learn how they viewed the world and their place within it.
This may sound self-evident, but it cut against the academic grain of the day. The University of Chicago, where Banfield earned his doctorate and had a teaching appointment, was known for its shoe-leather sociological research. Its Prof. William Foote Whyte, for example, wrote Street Corner Society in 1943 after four years studying a slum in Boston’s North End.
In 1956, Banfield and his wife Laura (who spoke Italian) spent nine months in Chiaromonte and interviewed dozens of residents. They pored over census data and official records, enlisted some residents to keep diaries, and conducted psychological surveys on others. Two years later, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society described what they had found and concluded that Chiaromonte’s poverty and grim melancholia (la miseria) were rooted in its people’s “amoral familism.”
A hat tip to Robert Schadler for telling me about this review. Schadler had Banfield for a one-on-one reading course at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. He also was managing editor of Political Science Reviewer for a decade. These days, Schadler is a Senior Fellow in Public Diplomacy at the American Foreign Policy Council, and the President of Educational Enrichments, an information service based in Washington, DC.
As the neo-progressive wave in politics rises higher and higher, Banfield’s Government Project provides a cautionary tale of the challenges that well-intended policymakers and public administrators face in tackling social problems.
It is an easy reading book that nearly anyone can read and enjoy. (Dry, academic treatise it most certainly is not.)
So what’s the book about? Well, it describes and analyzes one of the federal government’s attempts to help poor farmers during the Great Depression.
But that’s not all it is about. As Banfield put it:
The most characteristic feature of modern society, perhaps, is the great and increasing role of formal organizations of all kinds. Primitive societies were (and are) held together chiefly by the nonlogical bounds of custom and tradition; in modern society the relations of individuals are to a large extent consciously and deliberately organized by the use of intelligence, and the rules of logic. . . . This attempt to organize society along rational lines is a stupendous experiment. Nothing in history promises that it will succeed. But like Faust we are bound by our bargain, and so the study of formal organization and planning—of the techniques by which control may be exerted deliberately and intelligently—is a matter of profound importance. If it is placed in the widest possible framework, then, Government Project may be regarded as a study of one of mankind’s countless recent efforts to take command of his destiny.
Edward C. Banfield, An Online Resource 