Charles Abrams vs. Robert Moses: Contested Rhetorics of Urban Housing

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Charles Abrams vs. RobertMoses: Contested Rhetorics ofUrban HousingPaul Walker aa Murray State University

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Rhetoric Review, Vol. 31, No. 3, 289–308, 2012Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 onlineDOI: 10.1080/07350198.2012.684000

PAUL WALKER

Murray State University

Charles Abrams vs. Robert Moses: ContestedRhetorics of Urban Housing

Charles Abrams and Robert Moses engaged in a decades-long rhetorical skirmishregarding urban housing and planning in New York City. Despite Abrams’s stylis-tic efforts to alter the physical permanent plans of Moses, his efforts for the mostpart failed to overcome institutionalized power and its ability to cement the pub-lic terms of debate, especially slum. Yet Abrams’s sensitivity to multiple factors ofurban use illustrates his valuation of collective discourse for perceived socialproblems and provides a reminder of the importance of approaching complexissues with an orthos logos perspective.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.––Henry B. Adams from Education

In 1952 Robert Moses, the powerful New York City Coordinator, was joinedfor lunch by one of his critics, the urban activist Charles Abrams.1 We don’t knowwhat was said at this meeting except that Abrams reported being invited so thatMoses “could make known the position of the city to his ‘critics’” (“Gazzalo”).At the time, Moses was arguably near the peak of his power and influence.Cleveland Rodgers’s complimentary biography had just been published, help-ing to solidify Moses’s reputation as a populist man of action. Moses had alsosuccessfully brokered Stuyvesant Town, a significant example for the FederalHousing Act of 1949’s encouragement of private/public partnerships in urbanrenewal and slum clearance projects. With the federal endorsement and fundsthat the Act enabled, Moses was ready to expand the urban renewal projectsthroughout the city, and the gentlemanly thing to do was to share his ideas, over anice meal, with those who had opposed him in the past.

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Not long after that lunch meeting, Abrams had the opportunity to critiqueMoses through a review of Rodgers’s biography. Abrams refused to submit hisreview for publication, however, saying that the allowed length was insufficient togive justice to either the real Moses or the written-about Moses. The unpublishedreview, titled “Robert Moses v. ‘Robert Moses,’” praises and damns Moses indoing “great things for this city, and terrible things.” Abrams gives Moses creditfor his ability to accomplish behemoth and worthwhile projects, while at the sametime taking him to task for his lack of vision: “Thanks to Moses, New YorkCity now has more parks and playgrounds. Thanks to him, too, children mustoccasionally cross his broad highways to reach them. For Moses never believedin master planning––he was the master and it was his planning that ruled thecity” (“Moses v. ‘Moses’”). Like the stylistic contrasts in this passage, the occur-rence of their lunch meeting is representative of Abrams’s and Moses’s physicalproximity compared to the distance between their discourse on urban housingand development. Moses, an internationally known figure, favored a top-down,developer-friendly prioritization of action and order, with appearance as the jus-tifying measurement. Abrams, whose ideas are known to relatively few, vieweduse as the most important determiner of policy and utilized his studied rhetoricalresources to oppose Moses for thirty years. Bringing them together in this articleemphasizes the difficulty in resisting, let alone reversing, the power of institu-tionally defined terms upon which subsequent debate depends. Further, the powerof constructed space in rhetoricizing daily living patterns highlights the rarity ofchanging those visibly signified terms. Abrams’s life implies that speaking truthto power rarely diminishes the establishment, physically and rhetorically, of truthby power.

Nevertheless, Abrams’s activism demonstrates a semantic sensitivity to thediscursive intersections of economics, nature, land, shelter, architecture, andeveryday life, and his words exemplify consideration for the social and rhetor-ical consequences of urban housing policies. Herein I frame Abrams’s sensitivitywith the notion of orthos logos, by contrasting his ideas for a use-based planningprocess against Moses’s “official” rhetoric and reality.

“Truth” in Urban Housing and Policy

Moses’s and Abrams’s rhetorical conflict is an example of variable human-measured verities––the uses of truth––that exist in a society engaged in adialectical search for absolute order––the appearances of truth––amid the chaosof nature. The quest for the origin of that truth reflects what Patricia Bizzell callsa yearning for something beyond our own conceptions: “Our nostalgia for theself-evident and absolute prevents us from accepting as legitimate the authority

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Charles Abrams vs. Robert Moses: Contested Rhetorics of Urban Housing 291

created by collective discursive exchange and its truths as provisionally bind-ing” (“Beyond” 664–65). Collective discourse, which relies on social constructsframed by use, requires patience and often appears messy, as opposed to theperceived clarity and aesthetic of immediate action. Moses had the authorityand power to quickly carry out projects in response to urban “problems,” whileAbrams advocated thoughtful, delayed action to allow collective discourse a partin shaping urban reality. Abrams wasn’t against pleasant appearances, but he rec-ognized beauty in the natural use of a large city. The diversity of people, places,and events were not only flavorful but also naturally interesting and made the citya pleasant place to live in and look at. Moses’s vision, in which beauty neededto be imposed, posited that the imposed aesthetic would influence its use. Thisis not incorrect, as noted by Paul Davidoff, who said, “all public planning mustbe considered social planning” (126). The flaw, identified by Abrams, is priori-tizing a monolithic version of beauty and appearance that dismisses the naturaland organic appeal that develops from human settlement and interaction. Physicalplanning is necessary; form and function both have social value, but for Abramsthe social realities and their diversity must be considered in the formation of oursurroundings, not just as functional ends.

At the time of their lunch meeting, Abrams had been engaged in a quixoticattempt to hamper Moses’s and others’ brandishing of the word slum. Abramsunderstood the rhetorical power of slum––he himself tried to legally define it earlyin his career (Henderson 56). When it became an institutional weapon, Abramsnoted that “it is a distasteful four-letter word as any in the dictionary [, giving]its meaning the moment it is uttered” (City 19). He lamented urban living condi-tions for minorities and the poor, but as their advocate, he realized that glowinginstitutional terms like slum clearance and urban renewal would not likely bene-fit them. The industrialization in the late nineteenth century brought to the citiespeople with little or no money and therefore little or no choice in housing. As thepoor areas “worsened,” urban policies were motivated by fear, sympathy, equality,or disdain. The slum label ignited fervent action to check the declining condi-tion of housing in the early twentieth century, priming Moses’s rise to powerthrough an active riddance of designated slums. While New York retains much ofMoses’s vision, the cost of his projects, as identified by Abrams, was more thanfinancial.

Interestingly, a 2008 New York Times article reports that calls are heardfor “another Moses” (Powell). Such calls must be surprising for Robert Caro,whose epic biography of Moses, The Power Broker, frankly criticizes Moses,blaming his projects and methods for the city’s financial turmoil of the 1970s.Perhaps the call for a powerful leader is part of what Bizzell was referringto; despite what we know about strong individual leaders, we are hesitant to

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trust collective discourse as equally or more competent. The lesser-known wordsof Abrams show how Moses’s power, perceptions, and philosophies served asrhetorical provocation for his contemporary critics who questioned his unilat-eral progressivism––specifically as it related to sheltering the urban poor. JoiningJane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and others in opposing Moses, Abrams’s rhetoricalstyle attempted to draw attention away from the action of powerful individuals tothe meaningful interactions of language, space, policy, and shelter. In this way,the rhetoric of Abrams prefigures the work of recent scholars in recognizing themutual relationships for rhetoric, civic discourse, space, and urban design whilealso reflecting a classical model of human interaction that illustrates what Bizzellviewed as rhetoric’s challenge: moving beyond the essential, self-evident truthsto trust in the wisdom of collective discourse in producing not just oppositionalstrong or weak arguments, but orthos logos, or circumstantial correctness.2

The importance of orthos logos to this analysis is evident in both Moses’s andAbrams’s concern for the poorer residents of the city. Moses’s abstract solutionsto poverty rested on the awareness of one’s wretchedness motivating improvementin one’s life––that individual autonomy is assisted by bureaucratic categoriza-tion of housing structures. Abrams, in contrast, considered the built environmentand taxonomy of planning as insurmountable obstacles for individual autonomy,and therefore a less visible and abstract approach was necessary to deal withhousing conditions. Abrams’s positive conceptions of the city, along with hisassociation with Jacobs and Mumford, drove his persistent criticism of Moses’sconflation of urban housing with the character of the poor and minorities duringthe transitory 1940s and 50s. With Moses as city commissioner, Abrams’s effortswere overshadowed by the tyranny of the very images and words that brought“squalid” living conditions to the attention of the general public. Ironically,Abrams’s legal justification for the establishment of public housing authoritiesin 1934 enabled Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to wrest power from the New YorkCity Housing Authority (NYCHA) in 1937 to clear slums, ignoring Abrams’sadvice to also insist on additional low-income housing and peripheral land devel-opment (Henderson 62). The reformers’ visual and verbal evidence of urbanpoverty’s “wretched” status, along with the power grab of LaGuardia, providedMoses license for the actions that made him such a powerful figure in his lifetimeand left a permanent legacy that continues to influence daily life in New York.According to biographer A. Scott Henderson, Abrams’s “rose-colored thinking”prevented him from anticipating how nonelected officials such as Moses woulduse the housing authorities for “questionable purposes” (59). The purposeful per-manence of Moses’s large-scale housing and transportation structures, enabled tosome degree by Abrams’s legal work for the NYCHA, reflect what Harvey callsthe “immobility” of “fixed capital in the built environment,” causing people to

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commit “to certain patterns of use for an extended time within the particularity ofspatial location” (83). Acknowledging the necessary chaotic nature of city life andplanning, Abrams later complicated the institutionalized and abstract urban ter-minology that Moses utilized, yet without any physical permanence, his sociallyconscious rhetoric had ultimate limits.

That Abrams and Moses had different senses of slum does not mean it isa relative term that can’t be defined; rather, the definition varies according toframeworks that proscribe reality for each individual (see Bett). Moses’s life andideas led him to view slum as fixed and definitively negative, while Abrams’slife instilled an unwillingness to rely on words abstractly, and thus saw value inthe slum independent of its pejorative connotation.3 Terms used in public debatesare rarely examined beyond their perceived-as-fixed properties. If they are, it isoften mockingly, as Socrates demonstrated by stating in Theaetetus that if wordshave no fixed meaning, no one possesses any wisdom worth sharing or teach-ing. Yet Brian Donovan credits Protagoras for understanding that the measure oftruth creates the perceptive elements for determining the usefulness of any “true”statement (41). As Bizzell notes, the majority of us have yet to adopt this view;instead we are hoping to discover and export our objective wisdom, virtue, andother “good” individual qualities outside our discourse community. This is whyinstitutional definitions like Moses’s slum are supremely powerful; most of us areinclined to accept the institutionally defined term because it is difficult to showaction when collective discourse measures “truth.” But that is exactly what orthoslogos represented to the Greeks: a rhetorically determined measure for decisionsrather than the more fixed, objectively determined truth, or what is correct in adefinitive sense. Moses’s insistence on slum-clearance as absolutely beneficial isunderstandable given his aversion to the rougher elements of the city; Abramsstands as an example for resisting that popular position.

Moses: From Parks to Power

Understanding Robert Moses’s fixed and orderly view of correctness in urbanhousing begins with acknowledging his distaste for the city. Born in 1888, hespent his early years in New Haven, Connecticut, before moving to New YorkCity when he was nine years old. With clear memories of the smaller town ofNew Haven, he told biographer Rodgers:

I didn’t like New York at all. It was too big; the crowds, the noiseand confusion were terrible. I wanted to go back to New Haven, togo to Yale, and to become governor of Connecticut. I felt that way allduring my years in New York until I finally went back.

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Rodgers surmises that Moses’s move from a “pleasant, leisurely small town” to acrowded city could have been a major motivation for many of the “country in thecity” projects that he implemented during his years as a Parks Commissioner andCity Coordinator (2).

Another motivating factor likely stemmed from his early affinity for thereforms and muckraking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Caro59). During Moses’s formative years, photographer Jacob Riis, journalist LincolnSteffens, and other progressives were making the upper classes aware of theteeming conditions of tenements and slums in American cities. As Moses beganworking as a city researcher during World War I, he, like Riis, favored “gentlercapitalism,” indicated through his efforts to give the lower classes respite andescape from the confines (and residual corruption) of city life (Carter 127). Riis’swords, Christopher Carter states, reflect the fear of the “rising sea” of the poorpopulation that is “held in galling fetters” and “heaves uneasily in the tenements,”and if that sea of humanity rises, “no human power may avail to check it” (119).Moses seemed to answer Riis’s call for a “proliferation of green spaces to dis-place or else beautify the tenements” (Carter 120); when Moses was appointedpresident of the Long Island State Park Commission and chairman of the StateCouncil of Parks in 1924, he began planning for hundreds of parks and play-grounds. Likewise, undeveloped forests and beaches on Long Island that Mosesviewed on frequent train commutes invigorated his imagination for public recre-ation away from the city (Caro 231). In his 1956 book, Working for the People, hechampions the move “toward the rus in urbe or country in the city,” arguing “forpreserving what we can of unspoiled nature, and for multiplying open spaces”because of the “crowded, overbuilt cities” (133).

Evident in Moses’s rhetoric is the commonplace of the reformers: that citiesare crowded and confining and residents need space to escape. Drawing on DavidFleming’s work, Carter posits that Riis mingled the two prevalent views of thecauses of poverty and crime: the character of the people versus their physicalsurroundings. “By mingling the arguments,” Carter writes, “Riis flattered theessentialist perspectives of much of his audience while persuading them to seethe urban environment as a form of rhetoric” (139). Moses similarly attributedessentialist character defects in general populations that wouldn’t change with-out alterations to their normal conditions. Portrayed as benevolent to minoritiesby Rodgers, his ambivalence to discrimination in housing belies the paradox ofthe progressive era––that individual improvement has cultural limits. Caro andRodgers both describe several instances of Moses’s prejudice and essentialism;one example came in the building of ten city swimming pools during the 1930s.Moses promoted segregation by keeping the water colder at pools meant forwhites because “Negroes . . . don’t like cold water” and whites weren’t bothered

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by a pool not heated to seventy degrees (Caro 514). Reflecting Harvey’s identi-fication of the permanency of the “built environment,” Moses’s reforms beyondcity pools left behind immobile structural and social edifices. Fleming, echoingthis view, notes the rhetoricizing of public housing problems in 1990s Chicago:“The United States has not always been marked by racially segregated residencepatterns. In fact, over the course of the twentieth century, our cities, and especiallyour large northern ones, were made that way” (221).

The essentialist and escapist strands in Moses’s rhetoric and policy exemplifythe nature/civilization dichotomy with which twentieth-century America wasgrappling since Theodore Roosevelt began a conservation crusade.4 “Nature” wasdesirable as a place to escape the awfulness of the civilized, human-constructedcity and its unnatural problems and laws. Moses’s constructed segregationemerged from a nature framework––people are naturally divided, and civilizationshould be constructed to improve their natural inclinations and characteristics.From controlling the temperature of pools to constraining how residents spentleisure time, Moses identified catalytic elements: People needed adequate hous-ing, people needed big highways, housing developments needed walls, racesneeded separation––and he doled out this benevolence.

Like Riis, Moses believed the crowded and dilapidated city environmentexacerbated the essential problems of people, as shown when he makes the casefor the “parklike” town: “Man is the creature of his environment. His outlookon life is conditioned by what he sees from his windows” (Working 133). Theframe of the window, like the framing of a photograph, alludes to the confine-ment of the city and the limitation of human perspective. The built environmentshapes our perception of the world and our actions, and because of its confin-ing character, we “need” to escape. Yet it was through this built environmentthat he purposed to strengthen upper-class conventions of the “better life”––beginning with parks, or imitations of nature. In his descriptions of what stateparks should be, Moses favored “large reservations where many people can gowithout elbowing each other,” and these areas should be within driving distanceof cities, centered with natural features that encourage recreation and overnightor longer stays (134). Aldo Leopold, forester/conservationist and contemporaryof Moses and Abrams, notes, “Recreation became a problem with a name in thedays of the elder Roosevelt, when the railroads which had banished the coun-tryside from the city began to carry city-dwellers, en masse, to the countryside”(165). Moses was enabling people, in Leopold’s words, to return to the wilder-ness that begat their civilization and “revive, in play, a drama formerly inherentin daily life” (168). Moses’s feelings for his small-town upbringing and the per-ceived stifling atmosphere of the city prompted his effort to make it easier forpeople to get outside. He was acting as a professional who strived “to give [the]

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nature-seeking public what it wants, or to make it want what he has to give”(Leopold 167). Moses’s evocation of nature and civilization built an urban ordereven as he encouraged people to escape its unnatural reality.

Abrams: From Lamps to Language

In contrast, Charles Abrams notes the irony of the escapist trend amongAmericans:

When the American breadwinner decides to spend his earnings on avacation in his own country, he generally points his auto compasstoward the exurban mountains, lakes, or national parks. When thesame vacationer has saved enough to go abroad, his ticket will readParis, London, or Rome. . . . In the United States a domestic vacationis generally an escape from the city, not to it. (City 300–01)

Based on his writings, one wonders if Abrams ever left the city’s environs.He emigrated with his family to Brooklyn from Poland in 1904, when he wastwo years old. His early jobs as a lamplighter and Western Union clerk seemedinfluential in his development as an “unabashed lover of cities” (Taper, “I” 40).Henderson notes that “the text for Abrams’s knowledge about urban life was notbooks, museums, or lectures, but the city itself” (19). Armed with this organicurban education, Abrams graduated from law school and began his own legalpractice in 1923. He settled in Greenwich Village, where he became part of acommunity that relished the diversity that the neighborhood offered. In 1934 hisburgeoning interest in housing and urban affairs led to his appointment as generalcounsel (and legal founder) of the NYCHA until he resigned in 1937 in protestagainst LaGuardia’s attempt to control it, and to subsequent affiliations with uni-versities and organizations as an expert in urban studies. His legal practice wassoon overshadowed by his urban policy and reform work, and thanks to soundinvestments in Greenwich Village real estate, for the rest of his life he was finan-cially able to function as a visionary urbanist and critic, government administrator,and part-time faculty member at several institutions.

Utilizing the official positions he held from 1934 to his death in 1970,he wrote several books, scores of articles and newspaper columns, presentedhundreds of speeches, and spoke on many radio and television programs.Furthermore, when a formal forum was unavailable, he disseminated his ideasthrough a high number of letters to the editor at The New York Times andother publications. His core messages were generally straightforward and stylis-tically memorable, but he admitted to being stymied in the attempt to capture

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the complexity of housing policy when countering the oversimplification of theissues that his official opponents rendered. Over thirty years, his ideas developedfrom insistence on New Deal housing legislation to the recognition of the complexescalation of civil and social unrest because of discrimination in housing policiesand practices. The City, both as concept and living thing, served as his inspirationfor his rhetoric and his aspiration for human interaction and social equality. Hissensus communis (Mooney 84) is reflected in this rich, visual description of thecity in 1967:

A city, even an American city, is the pulsating product of the humanhand and mind, reflecting man’s history, his struggle for freedom,his creativity, his genius––and his selfishness and errors. [The city] isthe palimpsest on which man’s story is written, the record of thosewho built a skyscraper or a picture window, fought a pitched battlefor a play street, created a bookshop or bakeshop that mattered. It isa composite of trials and defeats, of settlement houses, churches, andschoolhouses, of aspirations, images, and memories. A city has valuesas well as slums, excitement as well as conflict; it has a personalitythat has not yet been obliterated by its highways and gas stations; ithas a spirit as well as a set of arteries and a voice that speaks the hopesas well as the disappointments of its people. (City 16–17)

This passage is an excellent indicator of Abrams’s style, wherein he utilizesalliteration and onomatopoeia, acute metaphors, contrasting disparities, and thepersonification of the city with its “spirit,” “arteries,” and “voice.” Further, thisexcerpt from his book, The City is the Frontier––its title brazenly reversingMoses’s escapist rhetoric––also expresses distrust of oversimplified categoriza-tion. The human-built civilization was full of contradictions, yet it is natural inthe sense that it survives and grows to continually represent the “hopes and dis-appointments” of many generations. In this way, Abrams’s description does notfully differentiate between nature and civilization, but looks at the city as a living,breathing, evolving organism.

By invoking the spirit and life of the city, Abrams looked deeper than thephysical structure of shelter to other environmental factors that were causal, ratherthan symptomatic, of urban problems. He said often that planners must avoidthe limiting and dismissive “one pattern of living that the planner himself mightprefer,” reflecting an independent, institutional, and objective standard of correct-ness (Taper, “I” 61). He was critical of housing reformers who believed they hada strong sense of substandard housing, and he was frustrated by societal normsand subsequent structural reforms that deceived people in need of housing. For

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example, after convincing the government of Ghana to implement a corrugated-iron roof-loan program for people in need of shelter, Abrams was disturbed thatpeople in the northern regions were participating, because their plentiful and tra-ditional roof material, thatch, provided weather-proof shelter and was better atcooling a house than iron. But the people viewed an iron roof as a status symbol,leading Abrams to implore in vain, “How can I restore the prestige of thatch?”(Taper, “I” 58).

The Slum: Reform and Reality

Such a mix of social theory and pragmatics was influential in Abrams’s standon all things slum––from its definition to the carrying out of slum demolition.Rather than let himself be caught up in the power and connotations of the worditself, Abrams advised that at times slums were necessary and desirable. If theright conditions for slum clearance do not exist, he advised, then persistent slumclearance will only create deleterious effects. “The slum,” Abrams wrote, “whichhas been called the shame of the cities, is also the sperm for the public housingand urban renewal concepts.” His purposeful style here alerts the reader to thelexical and rhetorical qualities of the word itself:

Slum gives its meaning the moment it is uttered. Since a word canbe a repellent as well as a persuader, and since slum is both, it hasspurred emotions on the hustings, the pulpit, and the bench. From theday slum entered the language of social reform, its mere mention wasenough to revolt the good citizen, win the support of the crusadingpress, and dedicate official action to its extinction. (City 19)

Abrams’s analysis of slum is a modern example of the ancient Greek questionregarding the correctness of names. The word itself is onomatopoeic, “revolt[ing]the good citizen.” For the reformers, the word represents and captures the essenceand concept of what they framed as inadequate housing. Yet Abrams identifiesthe word as a rhetorical tool that proliferates in use but always for the benefitof the powerful. In light of Fleming’s statement that humans have made thingsthe way they are, the use of such terms misleads the citizen by implying thatthe word is simply a label for its natural reality. Abrams does not accept thatslum accurately describes what exists in any neighborhood, especially when thestandard of measure is assumed objective because it is derived from a differentframework. “The slum,” he said, “is easier to revile than to remedy,” becauseliving conditions, being human constructs, are necessarily relative in the deep,Protagorean sense: Their value is dependent on the measuring framework (20).

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Without extolling conditions in so-called slums, Abrams dismissed a generalstandard for classifying a dwelling as a slum and decried the unending desire toeliminate them. A slum may be substandard in the eyes of a wealthy or middle-class official, he noted, but “you can’t necessarily tell whether a family is happilyor wretchedly housed by using a standard that takes account only of the physicalattributes of the building it’s living in” (Taper, “II” 86). Furthermore, Abrams saidthat the slum is necessary in times of housing shortage. If slum clearance becomeswhat he terms as “a lawful undertaking by the government and a moral obligationas well,” it ignores the necessities of housing in the first place by justifying anobjective view of living conditions (City 22). He noted often that slum clearancemerely moved people to slums on less valuable land. Abrams illustrated that inthe majority, if not all, of urban renewal plans, after the initial decision for slumdemolition occurs, the moral obligation is easily dismissed because it is basedon supposedly objective measures. Rather than addressing core factors that canimprove the lives of poor people, the buildings are targeted, turned over to pri-vate companies, which are rewarded by nonpoor tenants in the new buildings.As Abrams states, “Urban renewal tears down slums to make way for higher-rental projects while the slum dweller is relegated to the residual supply andforced to pay higher rents” (City 24). Even if the slum-dweller is allowed intoa new subsidized building, Abrams points out that the increased rent-to-incomeratio, along with possible transportation costs to work, or even a loss of a jobthat thrived in the slum environment, would make a family worse off in termsof basic needs than before. Housing at all levels hinges on the market, not oncharacter. Abrams’s solution to the realities of urban life and social behavior pur-posely ignored moral underpinnings of poverty. “People who live in slums,” hesaid, “like people elsewhere, defy all classifications” (City 35). Thus:

Clearance of a slum should mean clearance of bad conditions (in thesame sense as clearing one’s throat––one eliminates the condition butdoes not throw out the throat). It should mean more space and morechoice of dwellings from a varied inventory, not less. Slum demolitionis authorized only when there is a substantial surplus of cheap housingand when it will not aggravate slum conditions. (City 28)

Again, Abrams emphasizes the importance of a choice of dwellings and pro-vides a metaphorical reminder in the clearing-the-throat analogy that “almostevery aspect of city rebuilding has emphasized the physical, while the socialaspects have been viewed as incidental or have been overlooked entirely” (City30). So in relation to alleviating the problems of slums, clearance of bad condi-tions “may be achieved not only by better housing but by better income, better

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neighborhoods, and better opportunities in life” (City 28). Social issues, like thesituations of individuals, are not static, yet the thinking of many planners anddevelopers stems from a static idea of adequate and standard physical housing thatis irrevocably tied to the economics of the marketplace. Abrams’s orthos logosheld that the physical structure was an important aspect of housing but that otheraspects sometimes trump substandard shelter, especially if such factors contributeto contentment and life opportunities.

For Abrams a place to eat, sleep, and have family privacy is not a quanti-tative value that can be measured accurately by city evaluators. John Ackermannotes that “society oscillates between representations of space such as the doc-uments, graphics and models that assist in the origination of [development],and representational space, the beliefs and values signified by those designsand [the completed project]” (101). Abrams’s advocacy for minorities and thepoor was representational––counter to the “representations” of housing languagethat rhetorically benefit a dominant group or institution. As expressed by AlbertGuttenberg, “planning terms direct the imagination along lines favorable to thosewho produce and define them, and in this way they function as instruments ofclass policy” (9). Likewise, Fleming notes that the representations of slum, ten-ement, low-income, or urban renewal are “disseminated across time and space,developing into argumentative topoi that exert considerable influence on pub-lic belief and action,” and they “disempower” people who are directly affected,giving “rhetorical and political agency” to those who will directly benefit fromthe limiting of less-privileged “self-determination” (“Subjects” 210). Moses’sManhattantown slum-clearance project provides an example of the shock thatthe public encountered when facing the city’s representations against the repre-sentational space of home. Caro describes how Manhattantown was compared to“bombed-out” Berlin with bricks and broken glass lying everywhere. But apart-ments were still occupied, and he tells the story of a group of volunteers whovisited those dwellings:

The people living in the ruins of Manhattantown taught the goodladies of the Women’s City Club something about slums that theyhadn’t learned in their textbooks. In the textbooks, “slums” were syn-onymous with “dirt” and “blight.” But, recalls Mrs. Black, “the thingthat hit me was that most of the apartments you went into were wellkept, clean.” Time after time, City Club volunteers would walk offthe filthy street, up the filthy stairs, down a filthy hall, and knock onthe door of an apartment––and when the door to that apartment wasopened, behind the frightened face peering out . . . was a room neatand clean. . . . It is possible to read through scores of textbooks and

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tracts on housing conditions written in the 1940’s and early 1950’swithout finding even a hint of the fact that many of these women vol-unteers, who had read the textbooks, now learned for the first time: tothe people who lived in them, slums were home. (Caro 970)

Abrams’s frequent insistence on options for people affected by fixed represen-tations of built environments was grounded in such rhetoric of everyday life,illustrating that he understood that “space itself functions discursively” via thepower in daily, homely activity (Ackerman 113). With echoes of the importanceof the agora to rhetoric, discourse, and everyday life, Abrams was continuallyattempting to connect diverse choice in housing to social and urban health.Rather than sending people to the woods to revive a former daily life, he rec-ognized the inherent power and discourse in situated, everyday living. The ideathat the city and its streets and neighborhoods and apartments provided themeans for well-being was antithetical to Moses’s policy, which was to pro-mote well-being outside the city or in pockets of leisure away from the teemingtenements.

But the objective authority of Moses appealed to the policymakers more thanAbrams’s pragmatic sensitivity. The passage of the 1949 Federal Housing Actculminated Abrams’s long concern that private enterprise would control publichousing. “If public welfare and private welfare were to find common cause in acommon effort, it could be justified politically only if it also brought some divi-dends to the common man” (City 75). But Abrams knew such a policy would failthe common man. In 1954 the Commissioner of Urban Renewal reported that inthe five years since the Act was implemented, no more than four of the fifty-twoslum-clearance or urban-redevelopment sites had been made available for publichousing (City 83). The legislation, according to Abrams,

was only one of the many examples of how legislation passed withthe best of intentions is ultimately perverted during the administra-tive process. In the long run, the profit motive somehow operates asthe undesignated but effective legislator while the public obligation ispushed under the rug. (City 84)

“Why is the public not awake to this danger?” Abrams asked. “Because thehousing issue is so complex that the average citizen is not able to distinguishthe true substance of housing laws from the nobly worded but meaningless pro-nouncements of their preambles” (“Homeless America II”). He was well awareof the difficulty of competing for the attention of the “average citizen” when“noble” and rhetorically powerful words were spewing from their legislators’ and

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appointed officials’ mouths. His metaphorical illustration of that difficulty showshis frustration:

Many officials, who should know better, speak very fluently abouttearing down the tenements. Such talk touches the imagination of apublic unfamiliar with the many technical problems involved. A leg-islator or public official can win the applause of an unreflecting publicmore easily by loosing a tremendous blast at the tenements than hecan by the prosaic method of working out and recommending a lessstriking though more practical plan. In most cases, to use the blue-print and the slide rule will prove to be an easier and sounder wayof obtaining the answer [to housing problems] than to consult theemotions. (“Slum Clearance”)

Because slum sparks emotional responses that would support extraordinary stepsto eradicate anything so designated, such words are the first “blast” at build-ing destruction. As his lament shows, Abrams was adamant about removing thepathetic weight of slum clearance and urban redevelopment so real work couldbe done.

However, Abrams was not able, like Moses, to transfer his rhetoric to action.Moses simply held the power for urban development and design in the city, and hehad already allowed the publicly popular social reforms to “degenerate into toolsof the dominant class” (Abrams, “Myths”). Abrams spent years in a disappointingstruggle to persuade officials of the contradictions in urban redevelopment/slumclearance practices, where slums were merely moved elsewhere while privatehands benefited from the urban land left behind. Abrams’s faith in the social inten-tions of legislators was dashed frequently, primarily because the hard lessons ofthe free market hindered his optimism: “When the entrepreneurial and the gen-eral welfare are bracketed in the same legislation, it should not be surprising thatthe social purpose was subordinated” (City 85). The Progressive obligation to theunderclasses, whatever its morality, was susceptible to economic compromise.Though Abrams’s words and ideas remain accessible, they, unlike the immobileenvironments that Moses built, are overlooked in subsequent situations, as evi-denced in Fleming’s account of the rhetorical aspects of Chicago’s Cabrini-Greenurban housing development (“Subjects”).

Urban Use vs. Urban Appearance

For Moses and the Progressive reformers, Riis had “shown” them the trueconditions of the city through his photographs, and something needed to be

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done. Quantitative and abstract housing standards were set, and dwellings werelabeled and destroyed according to classification. There was no alternate measure.Abrams, from his work in the state housing authority, recognized the contextualrealities and resisted any fixed meaning of housing terms. He avoided objectiveaccuracy or correctness in addressing the “problem” that the muckrakers madevisible. Instead, he encouraged what could be called a Protagorean “straight-ness” in housing policy and urban planning, an orthos logos approach comprisedof “propriety, conventionality, obligatoriness, rectitude, and fairness” (Fleming,“Streets” 22).

Achieving this straightness, or orthos logos, requires participation in “col-lective discursive exchanges.” Tellingly, Moses was not a proponent of the openand diverse discourse encouraged by the agora. Moses was averse to the free-for-all that an agora-like space might produce, reflected in the separateness ofnot only the state parks but also his building projects within New York: TheUnited Nations, Lincoln Center, Flushing Meadows, and Stuyvesant Town areeither blocked by walls or recessed from the street or neighborhood to discour-age activities not included in the purposes of their charter. Further, as a broker ofpower, Moses never participated in open debates or situations that did not clearlydefine the power structure of the participants.

Abrams, on the other hand, relished the external and internal discourse thatthe city and diverse neighborhoods provided. Abrams’s city perspective valuedthe chaos arising from diversity, believing, in fact, that too much order numbedperception. He seemed to be an urban version of Leopold, who as an advocate ofwilderness and ecological perspectives, countermanded the prevalent recreationmodel put forward by Moses and others by advocating the development of humanperception to recognize beauty where nature wasn’t “landscaped”:

It is the expansion of transport without a corresponding growth ofperception that threatens us with qualitative bankruptcy of the recre-ational process. Recreational development is a job not of buildingroads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the stillunlovely human mind. (176–77)

Abrams encouraged receptivity for the unlikely places within the natural “love-liness” of the city environment––the chaotic agora rather than the austere anddivisive beauty of the Acropolis. He realized that the city street is the natural anddiverse gathering place, where urban life and culture emerge:

A city street is the main scene of urban interest. Here one is freeto look and be seen. It is the landscape of humanity revealing the

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houses people live in, the clothes they wear, their probable sta-tion, their smiles and frowns, and the wares of tradesmen luring thepasser-by. It is the living room of the overcrowded poor, the play-ground of their children, the Louvre of living art for all walks oflife. Interesting streets should be among the city’s best assets––forwalking, recreation, and diversion. (City 303)

Along with his Greenwich Village neighbor Jane Jacobs, Abrams advocated walk-ability and mixed-use neighborhoods, and he saw the street as the social andcommercial agora of the modern behemoth city. Jacobs was skeptical of the pos-itive “abstraction” that Moses ascribed to parks, saying a park can add value toa neighborhood or add to its “dullness, danger, and emptiness.” The importantaspect is use: “The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of usesand users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economi-cally) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus giveback grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity” (111).

For Abrams and Jacobs, the street as the central indicator of use, as a gath-ering place, as a place of attraction rather than the place to escape, is an essentialsite of human interaction. For them parks are not “boons conferred on the deprivedpopulations of cities” but rather need “life and appreciation conferred on them,”and simply building parks or public housing will not “renew” the neighborhood(Jacobs 89). Abrams believed housing to be an organic development that origi-nates in the neighborhood. While the government should do all it can to ensureadequate housing, several levels of housing possibilities must exist so that adweller has multiple choices for shelter depending on individual circumstances.Rather than upper-echelon planned-housing developments that might be architec-turally praised or sought after, Abrams thought housing policy should begin in theneighborhood and be built or renovated or retained based on the knowledge of thelandscape and values of the people already there––an idea further developed byJohn F. C. Turner in Housing by People. The rhetoric of slum clearance, accord-ing to Abrams, was impractical, unfair, and improper for the postwar housingshortage and civil rights conditions. Despite the reformers’ evidence and efforts,the reality ensured that the displacement of slum dwellers would result in moreslums elsewhere. Therefore, as Abrams’s city street brought out the multiplic-ity of humanity, housing policy must enable “a diversity of diversities” to matchsociety’s needs and wants for housing choices and, by design, lifestyle (City 204).

Moses’s escapist and renovative rhetoric and projects did not alter societyin order to alleviate the ingrained urban problems. Rather, those projects onlychanged the “looks of things” (Carter 139). Throughout Moses’s projects, eventhose subsequent to his work on the Parks Council, there are intertwining strands

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of escapism and promotion of areas that offer separation from the urban envi-ronment and people. Highways were built as parkways, allowing city residents toleave the city and recreate in parks he built. The slum-clearance, or urban renewal,projects that Moses initiated began with the idea that people are products of theirenvironments and that the city shared responsibility with private organizations forchanging “bad-looking” environments. But, as Abrams’s rhetoric shows, urbanrenewal as a way to improve social conditions instead maintained status quo underMoses’s direction by morphing into economic boons for the city and developers.

Moses was able to take action when public sentiment encouraged it. Hishousing standards were fixed and independent of context, appealing in their clearcategorization. As the “man who got things done,” Moses worked according tohis own “integrated plan,” openly defying any sort of visionary or master plan. Hedismissed collective discourse as the “driveling of uplifters and beady-eyed, long-range urbanists” (131). Seemingly surprised by public protests, Moses’s reactionto them was anger, even malice, as evidenced by his spiteful attempt in 1956 tobuild a parking lot for Tavern on the Green by eliminating a portion of CentralPark loved by a few artist families.5 The protests were reactions to the increas-ingly secretive and developer-friendly manner that grew in Moses––broking forpower had become less necessary as more power was gained. The reformer inMoses was still alive, but the reforms were no longer Progressive or gently capi-talistic. Rather, they were firmly based in his own orderly vision and its economicexigency while posing as social reform.

Resisting the Action of Power

Moses’s complexity, Abrams wrote, was so innate that “one never knewwhether he favored bridges because others favored tunnels, or tunnels becauseothers favored bridges” (“Moses v. ‘Moses’”). However, Abrams recognized thatall of his own words and knowledge could not compete with the “important con-tributions of men like Moses,” including, sardonically, Moses’s ability to inspire“the young, the visionaries, the castle-builders, the frontier-breakers, the menwe need most today in this timid, troubled time; the very men Moses so often[tried] to impugn, frustrate, and discourage” (“Moses v. ‘Moses’”). Abrams tookno delight in the kind of “order” that Moses’s vision of urban renewal created:displacement of the poor, rampant discrimination against minorities, and homo-geneity of neighborhoods. Abrams and his fellow activists lobbied for greatervision in the management of the city’s housing programs––an approach thataccepted degrees of chaos in maintaining social health. The organization andpolicies he rejected originated in government committees and Moses’s mind,whereas the vision he called for originated in the diversity of neighborhoods,

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developed organically––even chaotically––and proliferated gradually to maintainthe palimpsest nature of the city.

Like Riis’s innovative flash bulb, Abrams’s purposeful rhetoric illuminatedthe paradoxes of top-down urban policy with stunning cogency. Unlike Moses,Abrams’s rhetoric enlightened the substance of urban everyday life, choosingto address the complexity of the city’s spirit underneath the surface––not justthe “looks of things” (Carter). But his own long-term vision was hamperedby what Henderson calls his naiveté; Abrams helped create the apparatus thatMoses used to undermine substantial urban reform––the housing authority andits power to declare dwellings unfit and partner with public and private organi-zations to “renew” housing (59). Because of his lack of institutional authority,Abrams’s discourse remained marginal to the economic and political interestsof city and government leaders and rarely made a significant policy difference.In over thirty years of opposition, Abrams was overtly influential in one majorresistance “victory”––keeping Washington Square Park from disappearing under-neath Moses’s planned extension of 5th Avenue. The paved surface of WashingtonSquare still represents the diverse aesthetic of use over planned “park” appear-ance, and its use in the decades since has cemented its permanence. Yet this lonevisible success confirms that the rhetoric of action more often trumps the thought-ful rhetoric of the public square. Moses knew this, and said so with echoes ofPericles’ funeral oration:

In one way or another the good citizen builds for the future––his own,his family’s, his country’s––and his actual accomplishment is whatthe Recording Angel enters indelibly in the Golden Book. If there isnothing to enter but words, as in the case of Kipling’s Tomlinson,there is no place for the departed in either heaven or hell, for the greatend of life, as Huxley said, is not knowledge, but action. (Rodgers339, my emphasis)

The tumult of the twentieth century is marked by the actions of the powerful.The differing perspectives of Abrams and Moses demonstrate our need to rec-ognize how rhetoric underlies our material interaction with the world, in bothwhat is said and what is built. Abrams’s persistent, but mostly ineffective, effortsto foreground contextually fair policies illustrate the power’s interest in denyingcollective discourse a role in determining the meaning and value of our surround-ings. The collective discourse of Moses’s era was limited by the terms of debatecoopted by Moses from reformers as he secured and increased his official power.No matter how stylistically or cleverly Abrams ameliorated Moses’s projects,top-down policy always had the rhetorical advantage.

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Notes

1I thank RR peer reviewers Richard Marback and David Fleming for their helpful critiques andsuggestions.

2I draw on several similar interpretations by Bett, Guthrie, Fleming, Kennedy, de Romilly, andSchiappa to arrive at this sense of the meaning of orthos logos.

3My focus in this section is influenced by one of the “stronger” arguments discussed in DissoiLogoi: that “as the name differs, so likewise does the reality,” where surety lies in the language andlabels ascribed to objects (Bizzell and Herzberg 49). Dissoi Logoi’s “weaker” argument, the supposedrelativism, has misled readers away from the Sophists’ interest in the mechanics of language andorthotes onomaton, or the “correctness of names”––whether objects have a natural, essential label(Bett 154)––and wrongly creates a binary between the two views (Schiappa 130).

4The Greeks identified this struggle, more philosophically, by the antithesis of physis/nomos.5A portion of Central Park popular with West Side artist families was slated for a parking lot,

and when those families found out, they protested. Women attempted to get newspaper coverage bythreatening to lie down in front of the bulldozers but failed until Moses bypassed their daily watchsystem and sent the bulldozers in at night. The next day, the women’s outcry brought the newspapersand public sympathy that ultimately kept the parking lot from being built. Caro believes this was thefirst time Moses’s actions were questioned by the public at large and was the beginning of his descentfrom power (see Caro 984–1004).

Works Cited

Abrams, Charles. The City is the Frontier. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.––––. “Correspondence with Dorothy Gazzolo.” June 1953. Charles Abrams papers, #3086. Division

of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Reel 29.––––. “Homeless America.” Part II. The Nation 28 December 1946: 753–55. Charles Abrams papers,

#3086. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Reel 26.––––. The Language of Cities: A Glossary of Terms. New York: Viking, 1971.––––. “Public Housing Myths.” The New Leader 25 July 1955: 3–6.––––. “Robert Moses v. ‘Robert Moses.’” Review of Robert Moses: Builder for Democracy, by

Cleveland Rodgers. June 1953. [Not published]. Charles Abrams papers, #3086. Division of Rareand Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Reel 29.

––––. “Slum Clearance or Vacant Land Development?” Shelter (Feb. 1939): 23–24. Charles Abramspapers, #3086. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Reel 26.

Ackerman, John. “The Space for Rhetoric in Everyday Life.” Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life.Ed. Martin Nystrand and John Duffy. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. 84–118.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton, 1918. Web. 4 Feb. 2009.Bett, Richard. “The Sophists and Relativism.” Phronesis 34.2 (1989): 139–69.Bizzell, Patricia. “Beyond Anti-Foundationalism to Rhetorical Authority: Problems Defining ‘Cultural

Literacy.’” College English 52.6 (1990): 661–75.Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,

2001.Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Vintage, 1975.Carter, Christopher. “Writing with Light: Jacob Riis’s Ambivalent Exposures.” College English 71.2

(2008): 117–41.Davidoff, Paul. “The Role of the City Planner in Social Planning.” Proceedings of the 1964 Annual

Conference. Cambridge: Conference of the American Institute of Planners, 1964. 125–31.

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De Romilly, Jacqueline. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York:Oxford UP, 1992.

Donovan, Brian. “The Project of Protagoras.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 23.1 (1993): 35–47.Fleming, David. “The Space of Argumentation: Urban Design, Civic Discourse, and the Dream of the

Good City.” Argumentation 12.2 (1998): 147–66.––––. “The Streets of Thurii: Discourse, Democracy, and Design in the Classical Polis.” Rhetoric

Society Quarterly 32.3 (2002): 5–32.––––. “Subjects of the Inner City: Writing the People of Cabrini-Green.” Towards a Rhetoric of

Everyday Life. Ed. Martin Nystrand and John Duffy. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. 207–46.Guthrie, W. K. C. The Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971.Guttenberg, Albert Z. The Language of Planning. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.Harvey, David. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge, 2001.Henderson, A. Scott. Housing and the Democratic Ideal: The Life and Thought of Charles Abrams.

New York: Columbia UP, 2000.Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random, 1961.Kennedy, George. The Art of Persuasion in Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1963.Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1949.Mooney, Michael. Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.Moses, Robert. Working for the People: Promise and Performance in Public Service. New York:

Harper & Row, 1956.Powell, Michael. “A Tale of Two Cities.” The New York Times. 6 May 2008. Web. 23 Jan. 2008.Rodgers, Cleveland. Robert Moses: Builder for Democracy. New York: Henry Holt, 1952.Schiappa, Edward. Protagoras and Logos. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991.Taper, Bernard. “A Lover of Cities, I.” The New Yorker 4 February 1967: 39–91.––––. “A Lover of Cities, II.” The New Yorker 11 February 1967: 45–115.Turner, John C. F. Housing by People. New York: Pantheon, 1976.

Paul Walker is an assistant professor at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky, where heteaches composition, rhetoric, professional writing, and environmental literature. His areas of researchinclude environmental and urban rhetoric, first-year learning communities, and writing assessment.His work has appeared in Composition Studies, Composition Forum, and Writing on the Edge, and heis currently completing a manuscript titled Teaching in Context: Composition in First-Year LearningCommunities forthcoming from Hampton Press.

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Documents

Charles Abrams vs. Robert Moses: Contested Rhetorics of Urban Housing