Word: urbanize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Johnson's Great Society is in large measure based on belated governmental recognition of the complex needs of an urban nation. Indeed, the President himself, as James MacGregor Burns points out, has become the "Chief Executive of Metropolis." Not for 50 years has the heartland of America been the physiocratic demi-Eden of American myth, the pastoral paradise hymned by Jefferson and Thoreau, limned by Eakins and Wyeth. The ganglia of history's richest nation lie today in the inchoate, intermeshed agglomerations of city, suburb and country that have become Megalopolis americanus. Such is its present rate...
...metropolis even approaches the appalling anarchy of far-off cities such as Calcutta, Hong Kong, Rio or Tokyo, the worst areas of urban America have in varying degrees almost every ill to which the industrial society has fallen heir: unemployment, disease, crime, drug addiction, poor education, family disintegration-and slums. The middle class, the bulwark of good government in any community, continues as a result to migrate to the suburbs, helping to create the problem of proliferating racial ghettos. Almost every major U.S. city must fight advancing physical decay and increasing squalor, particularly for Negro populations, which within 15 years...
Predictably Unpredictable. In March 1965, President Johnson made it clear that it was time to invoke federal ac tion. "Our task is to put the highest concerns of our people at the center of urban growth and activity," he told Congress. "For this is truly the time of decision for the American city." The 89th Congress approved Johnson's request for a new federal agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to give Cabinet representation for the first time to the 130 million metropolitan Americans. The President appointed Robert Clifton Weaver, a Negro, as HUD's first...
...Negro have been somewhat ameliorated. I would like to feel that I was appointed not because I was a Negro, but maybe in spite of that fact." One of Weaver's most welcome qualifications is that he himself is a lover of cities and a connoisseur of urban living. "The American city is like a beguiling woman," he says with gusto. "Each woman has her own attributes, and each man, thank God, can make a choice." Weaver raves about such cities as New York ("You can get the best cheap meal and the lousiest expensive meal in the country...
Short Shrift. Urban needs have historically been given short shrift in state capitals and in Washington, largely because legislators are elected from districts based on the farm-heavy population ratios of 40 years ago. Reapportionment of state and congressional election districts has already begun to help balance the scales for the metropolis, but the suburbs, rather than the city, will get most of the benefit...