Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (17 page)

That’s from the first page of Feldt’s book, but it’s not certain he wrote this, or any other particular line. For in 1945, Jane was asked by Feldt’s publisher, Oxford University Press, to take what she’d call “a huge, chaotic mass of data” and shape it into a book. “He was not,” Jane would write of Feldt later, “a professional writer.” She ought to know, because by now she was one. It was why she had landed this job, and why she’d have no trouble landing others.

The jobs Jane took on all through 1946 could scarcely have been more varied. She wrote press releases for a public relations firm about leather footwear. She wrote about Christmas customs. She edited a book of puzzles. She edited a textbook on powder metallurgy, a gig likely the product of her
Iron Age
contacts.

Jane wrote one article about the coastal islands of New England, Virginia, and North Carolina. “Some look like neatly cut
Christmas cookies. Some are like drop cakes that spattered too much, and some are old-fashioned golden caramel sticks. They are dotted all along our Atlantic coast—the green and brown islands which are the fringes of a continent,” like Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay or Ocracoke off North Carolina. The article was for
Harper’s Bazaar
, a fashion magazine; it almost had to be charming, and it was. But it was substantive, too; she selected the islands to highlight, researched their history, stepped into the lives of their inhabitants.

As was true all her life, she found herself drawn to invention, innovation, and ways of making a living: “For years,” she wrote of Tangier Island,

the crabbers have been making their own chicken-wire crab traps after a simple but ingenious design. A few years ago, a man from the mainland turned up with the news that he was the son of the trap’s deceased inventor and was now asking an annual royalty of four dollars from each user. Each spring since, he has appeared and collected his fees. The crabbers see nothing remarkable in the fact that this homespun transaction takes place without benefit of agents, receipts, lawyers, or other mainland furbelows, and they cheerfully pay up every year. “It’s the best trap,” is their comment. “Good thing his father thought it up.”

When Jane totted up her income at the end of nine months of freelancing, it averaged out to
$88 a week—much more than she’d made at
Iron Age
or the OWI. Still, in October she applied for another federal job, as a writer for the magazine
Amerika
, published by the U.S. State Department for readers in the Soviet Union. Jane was a propagandist once more.

—

With the war over, so was its vast uniting impulse, the need to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But now the world split in two all over again, this time across the fault lines between the Soviet Union and the U.S., East and West, Communism and capitalism. During the war, the United States had been allied, if uneasily, with the Soviets. But the postwar division of Germany into Soviet and Western spheres, the Soviet
takeover of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other Eastern European countries, the brandishing of nuclear weapons, rhetorical feints, jabs, and angry mutual recriminations, all left the world on edge—sometimes, as in Berlin in 1948, Hungary in 1956, and Cuba in 1962, with cold war threatening to boil over into hot.

Amerika
, the big, glossy publication for which Jane went to work late in 1946, and its dowdier counterpart,
Soviet Life
, embodied this geopolitical divide. Given the fractious relations between the two sides, it’s a wonder an agreement to publish the paired magazines ever came off. But it did, through a deal worked out between the U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman and his Soviet counterpart, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in 1944. The two countries maintained the arrangement, troubled but more or less intact, over the years Jane worked at
Amerika.
Certainly, both publications were peddling propaganda. But looked at through rose-colored-enough glasses, they were being a little more civilized about it, maybe making the world a little safer.

Between
Amerika
’s offices in New York and Moscow, ideas for articles shuttled back and forth, some of them destined for print, some not: an article on summer leisure in America; one on Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist; one devoted to a city high school. (This last was “
a particularly fine job,” the assistant cultural officer at the U.S. embassy in Moscow wrote to New York in early 1948, “and a lot of credit is due Jane Jacobs,” its author.) There was a piece about a typical American small town. Others on the World Series, the American optical industry, the Kansas heartland, modern art. Jane suggested a piece on dictionaries, which shape-shifted into an idea for one on the American language. “We think it can be done without creating insurmountable
translation problems,” wrote the
Amerika
editor Marion Sanders; “the idea is to convey some notion of the wealth and flexibility of our language.” Of course, words like “
juke box,” “short-order cook,” and “swing band” were already causing trouble enough for the magazine’s Moscow-based translators.

The logistics of putting out
Amerika
were formidable. It was written in one language for readers of another. Its two offices were halfway around the world from each other. Soviet censorship was always a concern. In June 1947, editor Sanders, a Wellesley graduate who’d studied also at the Columbia School of Journalism, “a dynamic,
hell-for-leather New Yorker,” as one colleague remembered her, tried to help the U.S. embassy in Moscow understand just how the New York side worked. In a
four-page memo she told the
“life history” of a single article, about American cafeterias, by Jane Jacobs.

Jane, one of three writers on staff, had submitted a written outline. At a Monday editorial meeting, she was told to go ahead with the idea. In a week she produced a manuscript, which was sent to the embassy in Moscow for review; a copy also went to a cafeteria manager, to catch any technical slip-ups. Jane had identified possible illustrations, and now she wrote captions for about two dozen of them. When translations of text and captions came back from Moscow, a Russian-language editor in the New York office went through them to pick out any infelicities of expression that had crept in. Soon the whole job was off to the typographer, and thence through the endless back-and-forth rigmarole the era’s pre-digital technology required.

Amerika
’s writers and editors were acutely mindful of their Russian readers. “
Reader comments,” an in-house memo noted, “indicate that the magazine should not present too concentrated a dose of the more remarkable (to the Soviet reader) facets of the American standard of living. They simply aren’t believed.” Modern kitchens? Ordinary factory workers with their own wristwatches? Private
airplanes
for recreation? To write for
Amerika
meant seeing every word through the eyes of a reader in Moscow or Leningrad. An account of her duties Jane prepared in the late 1940s suggests she well understood this psychological side of her work. Her task, she wrote, was to “
create the precise impression desired upon a Russian readership…much misinformed by its own press regarding America.” Touchy subjects, like the American economic system, had to be “treated with discrimination and judgment, to convince rather than to antagonize.” Here was the propagandist at work. Here, too, was a writer determined to reach her readers.

In September 1948, Bob Jacobs’s first cousin, John, not long back from service in the South Pacific, dissatisfied by his flirtations with law school and advertising, came to work for
Amerika.
He recalls himself as “a personable young man,” but footloose, living with his wife, Katia, in the Village near Jane and Bob. “
Why don’t you come here and work?” Jane suggested, referring to
Amerika.
He came for an interview and got the job; he could rightly say there were no Communists in his family because his brother, Edward, who
had
been a Communist, a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, had been killed in the Spanish Civil War.

“It was the most marvelous job,” John Jacobs says of his time with
Amerika
, “with wonderful articles to write and a month to do them in.” He did one on modern art, got to know one of the de Koonings. “I was happy as a clam.” He and his colleagues “were doing God’s work, giving the poor Russian people” information useful and true. As for Jane, she was “the best editor I ever had.” One time he was supposed to be writing “a moody New York piece in the E. B. White mode, and I knew it wasn’t working.” He took it to Jane. By the time she was done with it, it was all he had wanted it to be but hadn’t been able to bring off himself. “When Jane took something on,” he says, “that something was dead,” finished, you never had to worry about it again.

Back at the OWI, Jane had gotten a brief, unrewarding taste of being a supervisor. But by now, a few years older, she was better in that role. Government employee efficiency ratings were typically arranged in two columns—on the left for the work itself, on the right for any administrative or supervisory elements of it. Now, in August 1950, for the first time Jane was being rated—highly—on these administrative measures. She was still a writer, but now had five junior writers under her. Freelancers reported to her, too. All in all, she estimated, the supervisory side of her work took up
three-quarters of her time.

—

Beginning in mid-1948, the geopolitical conflict that led to the founding of
Amerika
and
Soviet Life
in the first place touched down on Jane’s personal life.

Communism had come to be seen in America as not only an external threat but also an internal one, with spies and “fellow-travelers” seen or imagined everywhere; patriotism and loyalty were to be proven, not assumed. Responding to the Republican sweep in the 1946 congressional elections and trying to counter criticism from the anticommunist right, President Truman in 1947 issued Executive Order 9835, requiring a loyalty review of most federal employees; should it yield “reasonable grounds” to believe you were disloyal to the government, you were out of a job.

Under Truman’s order, Jane, a State Department employee, had to fill out what might have seemed a routine enough form, “Request for Investigation Data,” giving the government the tools to investigate her loyalty and political correctness: list where you’ve worked, where you’ve lived for the past ten years, give names and addresses of friends, neighbors,
and colleagues. This led to a series of FBI field investigations across three months in the late summer and early fall of 1948 that included reports about Jane—thirteen of them—from agents in Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., Newark, Boston, and other cities.

Most of
those the FBI interviewed called Jane loyal, respectable, patriotic, or, in the language of one report, “of good character and reputation.” But, inevitably, she had rubbed some people the wrong way. And some of her free-spiritedness had not escaped the eyes of neighborhood busybodies. The FBI learned that at one point Jane and Bob had put in for visas to visit Siberia. It cited one or more of Jane’s ex-colleagues at
Iron Age
to the effect that she was a troublemaker. It pictured Jane’s first employer in New York, Robert Hemphill, as a “
sugar daddy,” the Butzner women reputedly his mistresses, the three of them observed from nearby apartments sitting inside on hot summer days
half naked. FBI informants describing Jane as “liberal” were sometimes further queried as to just what they meant by that. One said that “she had a complete mind of her own and would not be swayed by the opinion of others…[and] had no interest in the Communist Party or Communist front groups and that she was a person who would not have her thoughts dictated by any party whether it was a Communist or Fascist group.”
Got that right.
Another said that to him “liberal” meant Communist leanings—though he admitted “
he had no reason for making this statement” except that Jane lived in Greenwich Village, where Communists were said to live, and he’d heard her say things, though he couldn’t remember what.

—

Years later, amid the acrimony of the Vietnam War, critics seeing the United States as behaving like a police state took to calling it—alive to the German spelling’s totalitarian flavor—“Amerika.”

—

On July 19, 1948, a letter from Carroll St. Claire, acting chairman of the State Department’s Loyalty Review Board, went out to Jane, requesting answers to a number of specific questions. The letter probably reached her on Wednesday the 20th. By Friday, she had written
a three-page reply. No, she’d not been a union organizer while at
Iron Age
, but simply a member of the union. She had indeed, with Bob, put in a request to visit Siberia. She hadn’t followed the Communist line during the war.
She had never subscribed to
Daily Worker
, the Communist Party U.S. newspaper. And she’d never been a member of the Communist Party, nor ever been affiliated with it, nor ever been a member or participant in any “sympathetic associations” of the CP.

The final word on Jane, as of February 1, 1949, was that the FBI had uncovered some “unfavorable information relating to character or suitability of subject,” but that she had been “cleared for loyalty and security.” As most of the troubling information went back to before 1943, this was “not considered significant at this time.”

And that seemed to be that.

—

Around the time Jane’s loyalty to America was being investigated, she got hit hard, from the other side, by the Russians:

It has long been known that the lying little magazine “Amerika,” published in the Russian language, pursues the goal of deceiving readers, of creating in them a false impression about the contemporary situation in the United States, of disguising the imperialist policy of Wall Street, and of extolling in every way possible the “achievements” of America.

It was September 16, 1949, and V. Kusakov of the Academy of Architecture of the USSR was using the pages of
Izvestia
, which represented the views of the Soviet government, to tear into two recent issues of
Amerika.
Both featured articles about American architecture, and both were written by Jane Jacobs.