Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (19 page)

Its asking price in 2009 was $3.5 million.

In June 1950, a few months before the slum article appeared in
Amerika
, Jane’s brother John and wife, Pete, had their only son, Decker. Five days later, Jane gave birth to her second son, Edward Decker, or Ned, as he would be known. For six weeks, she was on maternity leave, returning to
Amerika
early in August.

—

In March 1952, Jane heard from the Loyalty Board again.

Two and a half years had passed since she’d been judged, despite residues of “unfavorable information,” loyal enough to keep her job. But all through the late 1940s and into the 1950s Red Fever spiked: the first Soviet atomic bomb, revelations of Soviet spying, the accusations against
Alger Hiss, the “Pumpkin Papers” affair and the rise to prominence of Richard Nixon, the Hollywood blacklist, the Korean War, the investigations of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, of course, that opening salvo of full-blown McCarthyism at the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950. There, the zealous junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, produced a paper he claimed was a list of known Communists working for the State Department: “I have here in my hand a list of 205— a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” Sprung up from legitimate concerns—real enemies, real danger, real traitors—had grown, out of all reasonable bound, a new Red Scare, drenched in suspicion, accusation, and mistrust.

The house at 555 Hudson Street, in New York’s West Village, about 1950, a few years after Jane and Bob bought it
Credit 7

In April 1951, under intense partisan pressure, President Truman signed a new executive order lowering the bar to dismissal to mere “reasonable doubt” of loyalty. Of more than 9,000 government employees cleared under the earlier standard, the cases of more than 2,500 were reopened. Jane’s was among them. In September, Conrad E. Snow, chairman of the State Department’s Loyalty Review Board, requested that the FBI
assess Jane’s case; he wanted to know now about her voting registration, her union membership, and just when she’d changed her views about American entry into World War II. A report coming from the FBI’s Baltimore office cited an informant who perceived “
a degree of immorality and disloyalty about the applicant and her group.” It was something “she could not put her finger on.” She had “no concrete evidence that applicant is disloyal.” Still, on March 14, 1952, Snow wrote Jane, demanding more answers to more questions.

This time, Jane rose up in righteous wrath. Her 1949 response had been confined to three single-spaced typed pages. This time, within a week or so, she had drafted an
eight-thousand-word missive that constitutes as extraordinary a statement of one particular strain of patriotic feeling as you’ll find anywhere.

“Enclosed are the notarized answers to your interrogatory,” she wrote Snow on March 25. Her answers were going to be long, she explained, and she would not try to fit them into the limited space allotted to them. What was more, since she was “addicted to editor’s notes and prefaces and the like,” she’d taken the liberty of “enclosing a foreword to my answers”—
a foreword!
—
even bothering to explain
why
she needed to do that: she had concluded that she was “probably suspected of being either a secret Communist sympathizer or a person susceptible to Communist influence.” If Snow or others questioning her sympathies were to understand her answers, she would need to put herself, her life, her family, and her most deeply held values in context.

A representative page from Jane’s 180-page FBI file, 1948
Credit 8

“It still shocks me,” she wrote her inquisitor, “although we should all be used to it by this time, to realize that Americans can be officially questioned on their union membership, political beliefs, reading matter and the like. I do not like this, and I like still less the fear that arises from it.” And yet, she understood that it might be necessary for some government employees. “I am not answering the enclosed questions in a spirit of sparring with you or trying to get away with anything. I want you to know how I feel.” And so she began.

“First of all I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment. I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas.”

She went on to talk about some of her freethinking forebears, on both sides of her family. Like some on her Virginia side who had opposed secession or slavery on the eve of the Civil War and became Republicans in the then staunchly Democratic South. She was proud, too, “of a remoter relative, a Quaker, who, believing in women’s rights and women’s brains, set up her own little printing press to publish her own works without a masculine nom de plume.” The American tradition of freedom to deviate from accepted viewpoints, she declared, was no cliché to her. It was a lived and sacred value.

There were, she said, two great threats to the security of the American tradition. One was the power of the Soviet Union and its satellites. The other was “the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them.” As to the first, she felt that in her work with the State Department, she had done her bit. “In the case of the second threat, that of McCarthy—or of the frame of mind of which McCarthy is an apt symbol—there is little practical that I could do other than take a stand in assertion of my own rights.” That, of course, was precisely what she was doing now.

She believed, she said, in the right of Communists to speak and publish their ideas in the United States. But neither they nor anyone else had the right to spy or sabotage; those who did should be prosecuted.

As for herself, she had the right to criticize the government or Congress, but would never aid another country or act against the interests of the U.S. or for those of the Soviet Union.

All in all, she felt her views aligned best with those of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, among the most committed civil libertarians ever to sit on the Court.

“This is how I stand,” Jane came near to wrapping up, or at least to wrapping up her foreword; she hadn’t gotten to Snow’s questions yet. She realized that her views might represent a minority position, she wrote. “But the fact of being in a minority does not, in itself, trouble me…The only guide which I feel that I can follow is not the fluctuating dicta of those who are victors in the battle for popularity at a given moment, but my own understanding of the American tradition in which I was brought up.”

And with that, Jane Jacobs, age thirty-six, finally turned to Snow’s nine questions. Here, in its entirety, was the first of them:

1. Please discuss fully, for the information of the board, your membership and activities in the United Public Workers of America including (a) dates of membership and present membership status; (b) the nature and extent of your interest and activities and offices held, if any; (c) your attitude toward the Foreign Policy Resolution adopted by UPWA at the 1946 convention at Atlantic City, New Jersey, and other positions reportedly taken by the union leadership indicating adherence to the Communist Party line such as opposition to the American plan for the control of atomic energy, opposition to the Marshall Plan, support of Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party in 1948, opposition to the Atlantic Pact, support of the Communist dominated World Federation of Trade Unions, etc. and (d) your attitude toward UPWA’s expulsion from the CIO in 1950.

She was asked, too, about any involvement she’d had with the American Labor Party; about delivery to her apartment of the
Daily Worker
, the Communist Party newspaper in America; whether she’d ever subscribed or received the
American Review on the Soviet Union;
whether
she was acquainted with two particular people of apparently questionable political sympathies; and, in several forms, about any relationship she may have had with the Communist Party—in particular, of course, the classic question, the one that, in its indelible cadence, would come to define the era:
“Are you now or have you ever been…”
a member of the Communist Party, or a front group to it, or affiliated with, “or in sympathetic association” with such a group?

She was not, nor had she ever been, a Communist, she replied. Nor had she supported its ideologies. Nor had she “made a contribution of time, talent, or money,” in the words of the loyalty board’s question, to its activities. She believed that to the extent it engaged in espionage or sabotage, the American Communist Party was dangerous and needed to be thwarted; but that to the extent it was merely a purveyor of propaganda, it was not dangerous. As for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, she saw it as “an apparatus for political tyranny. I abhor the Soviet system of government, for I fear and despise the whole concept of a government which takes as its mission the molding of people into a specific ‘kind of man,’ i.e. ‘Soviet Man’; that practices and extols a conception of the state as ‘control from above and support from below’; that controls the work of artists, musicians, architects and scientists; that controls what people read and attempts to control what people think.”

On all this, Jane was unambiguous, clear, and impassioned. On that long, detailed first question, however—her involvement with the United Public Workers of America—a sympathetic reader could watch the nuanced, shifting course of Jane’s sympathies play out on the page, her personal conflict palpable. She had joined the union, then known as the Federal Workers Union, in the late fall of 1943, soon after she started at the Office of War Information. She’d paid her dues. She’d attended meetings of the OWI branch of the union. She’d written a few routine pieces for them, sold raffle tickets to raise funds. She believed in unionization and collective bargaining. She felt the union did a good job in settling grievances. This, at least, was how she felt until about 1947. She was not long in her new State Department job, however, “before I became aware that the union was now very politically minded,” and concluded that it hewed to the Communist Party line and seemed unduly critical of the United States.

What to do? She didn’t like the union’s Communist leanings, differed with much of its political line, but still felt strongly “that it was a good
thing to have a union”; and the union
did
, she felt, concern itself with “useful and legitimate functions.” So she stayed. Her conviction to do so grew only stronger as public and congressional attacks on it mounted. “I resented the implication that it was dangerous to continue to belong to the union.” She remained until the fall of 1951, at which time “I just became too unhappy about it. I had always been in conflict with myself over it, and my objections to the union in the concrete reached a point where they outweighed my feelings for a union in the abstract.”

There was more like this, more thoughtful weighing of a difficult issue, more painful personal conflict exposed and expressed, pages of it, with regard to both the union and the American Labor Party, in which she was registered as a member until 1949. Early on, she admitted, she’d realized that the party had “a strong Communist element, as did virtually all liberal organizations of the time”—though, she emphasized, she “certainly and definitely did not think of it as tantamount to the Communist Party.” She was attracted to it in part, she wrote, out of affinity for third parties generally, going back to her grandfather’s participation in the Greenback Labor Party of the nineteenth century. “Third parties,” she wrote, “have a valuable function in needling popular opinion and putting forward and familiarizing new ideas. It was a lively and militant third party which, I felt, a third party ought by rights to be.”