It is time someone said a good word for our cities. With unmentionable slum conditions, snarled traffic, architectural anarchy and mounting air pollution, they are incontrovertibly appalling. Living in a city block that can hold its own with almost any for visual disarray and stylelessness, and within a city area where the air-pollution index is reckoned the highest in the nation, we editors are unlikely to indulge in fantasies of urban eulogy. But on sober reflection, we wonder if things are really so much worse than they used to be.
Sighing for the good, clean, prewar days, our oldish friends affirm that things are really much worse. Yet, as we look over stacks of impartial photographs, we see evidence that such days were neither specially good nor at all clean. True, while city smells may be less nauseating than not so long ago, noise and noxious gases are surely at an all-time peak. Statistics show, however, that today's slums are less crowded and are probably less inhuman than they were two generations ago.
A good deal of demythologizing about our cities is gathered in the lead article of the January 22 New York Times Magazine by Irving Kristol, co-editor of the quarterly The Public Interest. In the past 50 years, for example, the percentage of Americans living in large cities has remained just about stationary. As in 1910, roughly one-tenth of our population inhabit cities of over one million, while less than a third live in what are cities by any definition. The great growth is in suburbs, where, more than ever in the past, people now work as well as live. Further, New York, often thought of as the typical city, is really the least typical. For even in as large a city as Philadelphia, 70 per cent of the homes are owner-occupied. Moreover, traffic congestion, claims Mr. Kristol, is no worse than it was in 1900 or 1850. We do have more vehicles, but (save for poor, untypical New York) we also have a corresponding improvement in thoroughfares.
Meanwhile, while most of the rich live in suburbs, as they always did, thus avoiding many city taxes, the cost of keeping up our cities mounts steadily. Thus, the central city continues to be inhabited by the poor, especially the newly arrived poor, who haven't yet managed to escape to the suburbs. The problem today, however, is not simply the same old problem. It is exacerbated by the "revolution of rising expectations."
This phrase is, of course, anathema to those who prefer to believe romantically that the "good old days" were just about the best of all possible worlds. Today, instead, the poor are no longer reconciled (if indeed they ever were) to living in subhuman squalor. Thanks to the mass media, which make the advantages of American standards so obviously desirable and apparently accessible, no housewife can be satisfied to cook, clean or wash in the same old way. Needs that were
Final Curtain in Indochina?
The swift and total collapse of South Vietnam's military forces, the consequent political upheaval in Saigon and the departure of Lon Nol as head of government in neighboring Cambodia are brutal reminders, if any are needed, that an era in U. S. foreign relations has ended. It is ending with a massive defeat for the policy pursued in Indochina over 15 years, under four Administrations and several styles of political rhetoric, from the brave summons to a New Frontier with which John F. Kennedy sent his Green Berets to fight a new kind of war to Richard M. Nixon's doctrine of Vietnamization that claimed to have accomplished a "peace with honor." Peace, of course, never really came for the people of Indochina, and there was little honor in the rout of the South Vietnamese military. In Washington, even Administration spokesmen found it hard to continue their criticism of Congressional refusal to fund increased military aid to Saigon when South Vietnamese soldiers were reported to be abandoning weapons and other expensive hardware in their headlong flight from the enemy.
