Cities: The Bonfire of Discontent

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Men have been city dwellers for 50 centuries, but barely two centuries have sufficed to bring U.S. cities to a desperate crisis. With seven out of ten Americans now living in cities, the U.S. is the world's largest urban society. The growth of the cities has been so swift that it has spawned some of the nation's deepest and most pressing problems. Throughout the U.S., the big cities are scarred by slums, hobbled by inadequate mass transportation, starved for sufficient finances, torn by racial strife, half-choked by polluted air. The nation's urban population is expected to double by the beginning of the next century—and so are the cities' problems.

Last week the cities, which have long complained of indifference at the hands of Congress and state legislatures, held the center of the stage as an immediate national concern. In Washington, a Senate subcommittee met to investigate what can be done about the worsening plight of the city and its poor, whose frustrations and resentments have erupted in a succession of bloody riots every summer since 1964. And Lyndon Johnson, who is acutely aware that his Great Society can hardly stand on a foundation of urban decay, took up the cry for action during a threeday, five-state trip through the populous U.S. Northeast.

Tattered Dollars. The President talked as usual about the Viet Nam war, his chief preoccupation for many months, and did a little politicking in favor of Democratic Congressmen who need his help in November. But he kept going back to the theme of the cities' problems. In Buffalo, he studied with obvious distaste a bucketful of sludge from a river that feeds Lake Erie, vowed that he would press the fight against pollution—mostly a result of the cities' industrial waste—so that "this great inland sea will sparkle again." In Syracuse, he scored those who "line their pockets with the tattered dollars of the poor"—and promised to "take the profit out of poverty" by preventing slum landlords from exploiting their tenants. "Not all the answers are in," he said. "Not even all the questions have been asked. We need constant study and new knowledge as we struggle to cure what plagues the American city."

Noting that he had sent to Congress "a broad program to help solve the problems," the President put the legislators on the spot by presenting an extraordinary litany of requests. "Give us action, give us progress, give us movement, and American cities will be great again. Give us funds for the Teacher Corps. Give us more resources for rent supplements. Give us the civil rights bill. Give us the means to prosecute the war against poverty. Give us the child-nutrition act. Give us the hospital bill. Give us the money for urban mass transit." And so on, through a list of bills that, if passed, said Johnson, "will give us the power to move ahead. This is no time for delay."