THE REVOLT OF THE CITIES
Meyer, Karl E.
the REVOLT of the cities by KARL E. MEYER If you are a city dweller, a major political issue in the coming years may be as close as the faucet in your kitchen, the patrolman on the beat— and the...
...it is an infection that steals easily past archaic political boundary lines...
...Thus, in Georgia, the city of Atlanta (population 487,-455) elects one state senator—and so does the least populous rural county...
...But in the House the voice of the city is stifled by a series of arrangements that give the most power to those who represent the fewest...
...Kennedy may increasingly find that the real frontier for American government lies as much in the crowded hearts of our great cities as it does in the emptiness of outer space...
...and fifteen and one-half per cent in the free state of Maryland...
...Kennedy does not make a doctrinaire fetish of states' rights and does not view the Federal government as a suspicious institution...
...In a speech before the U.S...
...The system most flagrantly cheats suburban America...
...In the rush for taxis, he cannot board a Maryland or Virginia cab for a downtown Washington destination...
...The sunny suburbs, spacious and green, are reserved for whites in conformity with the unwritten laws enforced by the real estate profession...
...Thus the all-powerful committees of Congress are in vast disproportion controlled by rural and small-town politicians who are insulated from the urban tumult...
...thirteen and one-half per cent can do the same in Rhode Island...
...Tennessee's state constitution obliges the state legislature to redistrict after every census...
...On February 21, the House of Representatives defeated a proposal to create a new Department of Urban Affairs and Housing...
...Members of Congress can view the problems of megalopolis—literally—from their windows on Capitol Hill...
...It may be that one signal achievement of President Kennedy will be to perform the same service for two-thirds of a nation that is ill-represented, ill-treated, and ill-understood...
...The Census Bureau is more abreast of the time than the Constitution in speaking of a standard metropolitan area—longhand for megalopolis...
...The legislatures and state courts refuse, for the most part, to do anything at all to enforce the clear requirements of law...
...Members of this fortunate bloc control about one-half of all the committee chairmanships in the House— thanks to the seniority system...
...About ninety districts in the South, most of them rural, are secure one-party fiefdoms that send the same Democrat back to Washington election after election...
...But never, it can be confidently KARL E. MEYER, editorial writer for the Washington Post and Washington correspondent for the New Statesman and Nation, is the author of "The New America," published by Basic Books...
...In 1946, the Supreme Court held in the Col-grove case that the problem was essentially political and therefore not a proper matter for judicial determination...
...Washington, the home of our national government, is a perfect example...
...Years ago, there was an agrarian revolt that saw farmers rise up in order to seek justice from legislators that were dominated by urban business interests...
...the seniority system is another...
...Whatever the Supreme Court does, the revolt of the cities is sure to be one of the dominant themes in the Kennedy era...
...yet the last reapportionment was in 1901...
...The average size of a predominantly rural district, Congressional Quarterly found, is 364,920...
...They also are given to delivering pious lectures on states' rights and telling city partisans to look less to Washington and more to the state capital...
...Paradoxically, the House of Representatives—in theory the "popular" chamber based on districting by population—has been the most ex-asperatingly apathetic to urban needs...
...Sometimes this is achieved by ignoring reapportionment law, sometimes it is structured into the political system by giving each county or township the same representation regardless of size...
...In Connecticut, ten per cent of the people can elect a majority of the lower house...
...Concerning Congress itself, Mr...
...Malapportionment is one way in which the House is rigged against the cities...
...The Washington visitor who arrives at Union Station immediately encounters one practical result of this balkanization...
...A vacuum exists in our political system...
...Congressional Quarterly, a non-partisan reference service, has made some interesting calculations based on a detailed study of Congressional districting...
...the Federal courts have the power and the duty to fill this vacuum...
...indeed, at bottom, the question concerned majority rights—the rights of seven out of ten Americans whose needs too often have been brushed aside by legislatures, state and national...
...During the New Deal, the TVA was considered a right and proper instrument for helping the Tennessee Valley to help itself...
...The right to fair representation can be of no less importance...
...One study found that in California, twelve per cent of the people can elect a majority of the state senate...
...The same pattern prevails in most of the country's fourteen major metropolitan areas: The more prosperous whites flee to the suburbs, leaving behind a central area that is increasingly inhabited by non-whites...
...in practice, the constituencies are frequently mal-apportioned by rural and small-town dominated state legislatures...
...This would mean a constitutional turn-about of major significance and would open the way to enforcement of reapportionment by ordering balky legislatures to elect all members at large until a fair districting system has been passed in accordance with the requirements of state law...
...To urban voters, this is a wry and grotesque joke because state legislatures not only refuse to give urban areas a fair shake but in the process often violate the law in order to maintain rural and small-town predominance...
...More than that, the President is in a position to foster a regional approach to the problems of megalopolis...
...Cities across the country need similar help from the Federal government...
...the average size of a suburban district is 548,370 and that of an urban district is 431,960...
...But what Lewis Mumford calls "megalopoli-tan elephantitis" is no respecter of jurisdictional quarantine...
...But in Florida, for example, the district around Miami includes 982,000 people while the back-country Eighth District comprises 239,000 persons...
...wagered, has any political system groped with the problem of city living on so vast a scale as the United States...
...It the 1960 census findings were used to divide the districts evenly, each member of the House would represent about 410,000 constituents...
...Voters in Memphis maintain that their ballot is worth one-twentieth as much as those cast in rural areas—although urban residents pay far higher taxes...
...President Kennedy is now in a strategic position to make good on his pledge, and there are strong indications that he intends to do so...
...But times have changed and the feeling is that the Court may assert jurisdiction in the Tennessee case...
...One explanation is that our national legislature gives pitifully inadequate representation to urban interests...
...In thirty states it was possible in 1955 for fewer than one-third of the voters to elect at least one house of the legislature...
...But the Washington visitor may also pass the vast southwest district of the city, where acres of slums have been razed to make way for a redevelopment project, spaciously situated in an area within sight of the Capitol itself, that ultimately will permit both whites and Negroes to live in modern apartments...
...His proposed legislation, consistently ignored, is based on the power of Congress to alter state rules for the election of the House of Representatives...
...Surely similar multi-state authorities are also desirable to help Americans who are coping with the afflictions of urban overdevelopment...
...The problems of highways, land-use, water resources, police protection, and urban renewal are all too important to be left to the haphazard caprices of a dozen jurisdictions in a single metropolitan area...
...The reason the Supreme Court should act has been compellingly set forth by Anthony Lewis, the thoughtful reporter for the New York Times who covers the Court: "The evidence is overwhelming that neither Congress nor the state legislatures can be relied on to ensure equitable representation, indeed there are virtually insurmountable, built-in obstacles to legislative action...
...If the tendency is not arrested and reversed, our great megalopolitan areas will come to resemble the doughnut—dark at the hollow core and ringed by white suburbs...
...Its metropolitan area sprawls over two states and a Federal district, embracing two counties in Maryland and at least four in Virginia...
...The future may well forget the color of Robert Weaver's skin and instead remember the episode as one of the first skirmishes in the revolt of the cities—a revolt that seems to have found a leader in a President who is himself, fittingly enough, preeminently a product of the city...
...One reform that would give urban areas a better break has been vainly pressed by Representative Emanuel Celler of New York...
...Put another way, Franklin Roosevelt once sought to direct the attention of his countrymen to the plight of one-third of a nation that was ill-used...
...The southwest redevelopment project was made possible by Federal assistance...
...another is the fact that the Solicitor General of the United States backed up the arguments of aggrieved city voters in the Tennessee case now before the Supreme Court...
...Under an "ideal" reapportionment, the suburbs would have eighty House seats instead of sixty, the cities would rise from 126 to 134, and the rural areas drop from 250 to 223 seats...
...Kennedy is bound sooner or later to collide directly with what ought to be called the House of Unrepresenta-tives...
...City planners talk about the doughnut and the hole in referring to this phenomenon...
...This system automatically elevates to eminence those Representatives who have the safest seats—and more often than not, the safe seats are backwoods constituencies with little two-party competition...
...The founders knew cities that were tidy entities that fit into the compartments marked out by the Constitution of the United States...
...The Supreme Court has found special justification for judicial intervention to preserve basic liberties—of speech, press, assembly...
...yet we are governed by a political system framed in the era when that figure was more than reversed...
...What makes the problem of rural over-representation especially frustrating is that the avenues to reform are blocked...
...The urban explosion has only begun to touch politics, and Mr...
...Unlike his predecessor, Mr...
...More often than not, the response is one of massive indifference...
...Seven out of ten Americans, according to the last census, live in urban areas...
...The Supreme Court is weighing the plea of the voters of Memphis, Tennessee, in a case that dramatizes a familiar problem...
...In driving along, the visitor may notice that policemen wear different badges, because each of the area's jurisdictions has a separate force...
...Taken together, the political, sociological, and economic strains induced by the growth of megalopolis make imperative a national effort to save the cities from blight and strangulation...
...Conference of Mayors in 1958, Senator John F. Kennedy said accurately, "Our urban citizens are grossly short-changed in their representation in the House of Representatives," and, "In at least eighteen states the city dweller's vote is in effect worth less than his rural neighbor's...
...Most Senators must cater to some degree to the city voter because members of the upper house are elected on a statewide basis, and of the fifty states, only eleven remain predominantly non-urban...
...In 1958, Senator Kennedy said it was "time for an urban Magna Carta—a statement of our principles in this battle for equality" of representation and treatment...
...Democracy, born in a city-state, is being tested in what can be called a nation-city...
...In theory, after each national census, the House is reapportioned along strict population lines...
...our legislators frequently look but do not care to see...
...But there was much more than minority rights involved in this controversy...
...In backing up these generalizations, I would like first to discuss the plight of the city and then to examine the political system that appears to conspire against metropolitan interests...
...Until recently, Maryland police would communicate with their brethren across the river in Virginia via the state capitals rather than directly...
...In Vermont, which has not been reapportioned since 1793, one rural vote is worth 600 city votes in electing a stale senator...
...They often tend to view city problems through the restrictive bifocals of courthouse politics...
...Once in a cab, the visitor may see the polluted Potomac River, darkened by sewage in part because there has been no effective regional authority to keep industrial and human effluent out of the river...
...Large neighborhoods adjacent to the central district of Washington consist of grimy slums inhabited primarily by Negroes...
...More distressing and fundamental is the housing pattern the visitor would discern...
...To be sure, the President did signify, in response to a question, that a Negro would be appointed as the first Secretary of the new Department...
...Celler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, would allow no more than twenty per cent variation from the theoretical average-sized district for a state...
...What has been the response in Congress...
...Kennedy...
...Proposals like this, long lost in limbo, may become more attainable as indignation increases over the discrimination against cities...
...Suits brought by outraged urban voters are pending in eleven other states besides Tennessee...
...the REVOLT of the cities by KARL E. MEYER If you are a city dweller, a major political issue in the coming years may be as close as the faucet in your kitchen, the patrolman on the beat— and the traffic snarl only a few blocks away...
...The President's advocacy of a Department of Urban Affairs is one example of his concern...
...For all their genius, the founding fathers did not foresee the development of megalopolis—the super-city made possible by electricity, the automobile, and the sewer pipe...
...These are superficial symptoms of megalopolitan elephantitis...
...Today we may be witnessing the birth of the opposite phenomenon—a revolt of the cities against legislatures in which rural and small town interests have a disproportionately influential voice...
...Too much attention, I believe, has been centered on the narrow political aspect of the defeat for Mr...
...A district in Michigan that covers part of Detroit has 802,000 inhabitants, while a rural Upper Peninsula district includes only 177,000 persons...
...Since the days of the Greeks, urban living has brought with it political problems—indeed, the words politics, police, and polity all derive from the Greek polls, a city...
Vol. 26 • April 1962 • No. 4
