- I'm Jim Kirchherr, and
Living St. Louis's showing of our "Decades"
series this summer really shows how
decisions made in one era have consequences good
and bad down the road. I think this really hits home in this next episode about what
the city and the country did in the 1950s and
why they did it. (jazzy band music) This time on "Decades", St. Louis faces the second
half of the 20th century with energy, a booming economy, growing suburbs, and
the determination to save the city.
(rubble collapsing) (nostalgic piano music) - [Announcer] "Decades"
was a co-production of the Missouri History Museum and the Nine Network
of Public Media. - So much of what comes to mind when we think about the 1950s has to do with pop
culture and youth culture, the cars, the
drive-ins, the music, things people like to remember. But the 1950s gave us Dwight
Eisenhower and Joseph McCarthy, ranch houses and public housing, backyard swing sets and
backyard bomb shelters. This is not the
innocent, simple decade it is sometimes made out to be. (car engine starts) (crowd applauding)
(swift marching drums) President Harry Truman
came to St. Louis in June of 1950 to
attend the annual reunion of his World War
I army division. But local officials saw
this as an opportunity to give a shot in the
arm to their plans to build a giant arch
as a national monument. The riverfront had been
cleared before the war but it was now
just a parking lot. And on this day the
President dedicated the area as a national park. - This is indeed
a great occasion. I'm happy to participate
in the dedication of this historic site to the
memory of Thomas Jefferson and the early
pioneers and settlers of our westward expansion. - [Jim] There was
hope that if Congress would vote the money, the Arch
could be completed by 1953, the Sesquicentennial of
the Louisiana Purchase. It would be much
longer than that, but the 1950s saw a city
aggressively promoting itself and attacking its problems. As the second half
of the century began, the St. Louis Post Dispatch ran a series of articles
that examined a wide range of problems
and issues facing the area. It was called
"Progress or Decay? St. Louis Must Choose". - And it really was a
challenge to the city, almost throwing down a gauntlet, saying, "Can we prevent decay? Can we have progress?" Mayor Darst, who was
mayor at the time, and then Mayor Tucker,
who comes in in 1953, they took up that challenge. - [Jim] Mayor Joseph
Darst turned to the
business community, hoping to form the
kind of partnership that had once brought a
World's Fair to St. Louis. When Raymond Tucker
took office in 1953, he brought even more business
leaders into the new group which was named Civic Progress. They were powerful men who
were committed to downtown, who called the city home and who called the shots
at their companies. - If they made a decision, their company came
along with them. They didn't even have to go back to their board of directors in order to make
the commitments, and so some of them just
built buildings downtown. - [Jim] And one business leader simply decided to
buy a baseball team so that he could keep his
hometown in the major leagues. (crowd cheering) In the 1950s, baseball, like the rest of the
country, was on the move. The Browns were in trouble and looking around
for a new home, but it was the Cardinals
that almost got away first. The team's owner was
heading to prison for tax evasion in early 1953 and had to sell the team fast. He nearly closed a deal that would have sent the
Cardinals to Milwaukee. That's when August
Busch stepped in and had his brewery
buy the team. A year later, Boston's
Braves were in Milwaukee, the Browns were in Baltimore, but the Cardinals were at
home in Sportsman's Park, which had been spruced up
and renamed Busch Stadium. All the old billboards
and advertisements were gone, except one. In 1955, Civic
Progress put its muscle behind a huge bond issue that would go into improving
streets and highways, to slum clearance, to hospitals, and parks, and museums. When the campaign was over,
every one of the 23 ballot items was approved by the
voters by a wide margin. - And so these were
the kinds of things that indicated the kind
of confidence people had in the city of St. Louis, that you could bring it back if you had the right
kind of people in charge and if you got the right
kind of commitments, and here you had the commitments from the economic elite and you also had the
commitments from the voters in voting this extraordinary approximately 100
million dollar bond issue to redo all kinds of
things concerning the city. (rubble falling) - [Jim] People
were talking again about the new
spirit of St. Louis. There were new apartments
being built downtown, streets were widened,
and new expressways built for the growing
number of commuters. St. Louis received
national attention for its commitment
and its leadership. And by 1959, work
was finally underway preparing the riverfront for construction of
the Gateway Arch. But the decade would also
bring the city something that would become
a lasting symbol of misjudgment and failure, the Pruitt-Igoe housing project. And yet it too was the product of the same confidence
and spirit of progress. - We were very proud
of those buildings when we built them and when
we saw people moving out of buildings that were rat
infested, and those families were moving in to
these new buildings, I was very, very happy for them. - [Jim] Substandard
housing, slums, they'd been considered
a serious problem at the turn of the century and now, in the age of
television and atomic power, there were people who
were still using outhouses in the heart of St. Louis, living in buildings
without central heat or hot running water. St. Louis's first government
housing projects opened during World War Two to
replace rundown neighborhoods. On the Near South Side for
whites was Clinton-Peabody. Carr Square Village was built on the Near North
Side for blacks. - Everyone that we talked to, a lot of the people
that we talked to were some of the
earliest residents. They lived there in
the 40s and the 50s when it first was constructed, and they felt that
they were moving into a place that was a
showplace of St. Louis. Most of the families they
described as working families, two parent families that
didn't have the stigma, I think, that it has today. - [Jim] In the 1950s,
new public housing became a top priority. The biggest project of all was Pruitt-Igoe
on the North Side, 33 buildings, each 11 stories
tall, segregated by race. Architects praised
their modern design, but others worried
about concentrating so many poor families
into one area. When the buildings
were integrated, most of the whites moved out, and many of the poor who
were supposed to use this as just the first
step out of poverty never got any further. The maintenance, and
management, and crime problems at Pruitt-Igoe would
become so great that 20 years later, housing
officials simply gave up. (deep rumbling) - I was there when
Pruitt-Igoe was still just had its foundations
being poured. I think I put it
in one of my movies as, "This is the
future for St. Louis. Look what we're doing." - [Narrator] No
one could pretend that public housing would
solve all the problems of people inside, but
at least the buildings would not mock their poverty
or corrupt their hopes. In their own way, the American
people built a revolution and expressed the determination that whatever its income,
the next generation would not grow up in a slum. (lighthearted orchestra music) (somber piano music) (marching band playing drums) - [Jim] After Harry
Truman dedicated the site of the Jefferson National
Expansion Memorial in 1950, he got down to the real
business of his speech, the Soviet Union's
threat to world peace and America's resolve to
stand up to that threat. - Countries like
the United States, which have responsibilities
for maintaining peace and security outside the
North Atlantic Treaty area will of course
continue to maintain whatever defense
forces are needed to meet those responsibilities. - [Jim] Truman would
have to back up his talk sooner than he thought. Two weeks later, North
Korea invaded South Korea, and America's days of a small
peace time military were over. It would go on a war footing and stay that way
for a generation. The economy of this
decade combined 1940s wartime mobilization
with 1920s consumerism. There was now a market
for swords and plowshares, or in St. Louis's case, for
fighter planes and sports cars. Unions were gaining
strength, pay was going up. These were the jobs that
were sending workers into the middle class and would send their
children off to college. There was a time
not too long before when boys and girls would
go from 8th grade graduation straight into the factory. Now it was more
common for education to continue through high
school and even beyond. Adulthood was delayed. There was a whole
new stage of life. This was the age
of the teenager. - After the war, the general
prosperity for everybody rises, and what a lot of manufacturers
of different goods realized is that teenagers, you
know, high school kids, maybe college,
have a big increase in their purchasing power. And so, people who make
clothing, for example, start coming out with junior
lines of clothes for girls, or they come out with maybe
a little bit different look for young men or for boys, makeup for young girls. And so a lot of what is
formed in the youth culture is very commercial. It's like, "What
products can we sell to this group of young people?" - [Jim] They had
their own music, their own clothes,
and movie stars, radio stations, and TV
shows like "St. Louis Hop". Many had money to spend and
the freedom of the automobile. They may have gotten
tired of hearing about it, but the children and the
teenagers of the 1950s did have so many things
and opportunities their parents had not had. But this was also
the first generation to grow up with the
constant unseen threat that it could all
end in the flash of a nuclear explosion.
(air raid siren wails) There was great hope
for this generation, and it was the young
people of the 1950s who would carry out the
decade's great experiment in social change, the end
of school segregation. The Supreme Court in 1954
ruled that segregation under the doctrine
of separate but equal was no longer legal. And while some cities
defied the ruling, St. Louis's school district
began immediately to comply. It combined its white and
black teachers' colleges, Harris and Stowe, into one. The high schools
were integrated, and then the grade schools, but they remained mostly
black or mostly white, depending on the neighborhood. St. Louis would end up in court over the issue of
desegregation in the 1970s, but in the 1950s it was praised for its willingness
to follow the law, even though in other
ways St. Louis continued to earn its reputation
as a segregated city. - Jackie Robinson,
the baseball teams coming into the
city of St. Louis, those black baseball players
couldn't stay in the hotels. They had to stay in homes of individual African-Americans. So with that Supreme
Court decision of 1954, there were still
many, many areas in which we had to demonstrate, had to force persons
to open the doors. - [Jim] Norman Seay had
been just a teenager when he helped form the
local chapter of CORE, the Committee of
Racial Equality, right after World War Two. They spent many years trying
to get local movie theaters, hotels, and restaurants
in St. Louis to serve black customers. African-Americans were
welcome to shop downtown, but there were few places
that would let them come in, sit down and eat lunch. CORE's tactic was
the peaceful sit-in. Their efforts received
little news coverage and brought only
very slow progress. - We would just walk up,
go into the cafeteria area, and take a seat. I remember three or
four different places. We went to Stix,
Baer and Fuller. We stayed at that
department store for approximately 18 months, trying to get served. We were never served,
there was nothing to force the restaurant
owner to serve us. - [Jim] St. Louis's
Board of Aldermen finally passed a public
accommodations bill outlawing such
discrimination in 1961 after most businesses
had already complied. By then, civil rights activists had moved on to other issues like employment discrimination, and now these kinds of
local demonstrations were seen as part of a
national civil rights movement, in large part because
it was getting the kind of national
television coverage that 10 years before, even the President of the
United States couldn't get. (crowd applauding) Harry Truman's 1950
speech in St. Louis was broadcast
nationwide on radio. Television could
not do that yet. There was still only one
television station in town, and most programs were local. But the following year,
Americans saw the future, the very first
live coast-to-coast
television broadcast of the Japanese Peace
Conference in San Francisco. It was a technical
achievement so amazing it was captured on home movies in a living room
in Granite City. In the mid-1950s, there
would be more TV stations and more national
programming on the networks, and television began to
take its central place in the American home. Those who used it
effectively realized the power of the
television image. Politicians knew it, civil
rights leaders knew it, and so did appliance salesmen. - I wanna show you,
I'll light it up, and it's something,
look at that. It's all porcelain and
it's showing you that this porcelain, it'll last. Detergent or anything
won't eat through it. Isn't that something,
getting too big there. (man shouting) Put it out, wait a
minute, all right. Look at that, lead the way. (somber piano music) (gentle piano music) - [Jim] At the time of
the 1904 World's Fair, confident St. Louis
boosters set their sights on becoming a city with a
population of one million. By 1950, it has reached
850 000, its highest ever, but it was clear that it
would be downhill soon after. The head of the U.S.
Census in 1950 said that if older cities were
going to continue to grow, they would have to
get physically larger by annexing suburban areas, and that was something
St. Louis could not do. - Those people, those
ancestors of St. Louisans who separated the city
from the county drew that border around the city to enclose 61 1/2 square miles, thinking that's all
we're ever gonna need to be the Paris
of the new world, you know, we can do it. But what they didn't foresee is that by the end
of World War Two, St. Louis was largely filled in. There wasn't much room within the city of
St. Louis to develop. - [Jim] Twice in the
1950s, there were efforts to reunify city and county. They didn't come
close to passing, and most of the area's growth was now beyond the city
limits and out of reach. This was the age
of the automobile, wider roads,
expressways, and in 1956, the beginning of the national
interstate highway system. It would all make it easier for home buyers and
factory builders to spread out, and the
city couldn't stop it. - We saw it coming and
we participated in it. We didn't cause it but
we participated in it by building the roads,
by buying the land. We owned lots of ground
in St. Louis County. People were now
talking about three, four or five hundred thousand
square foot buildings and three, four times that
amount of ground for parking. There was no way that
that could be in the city. - [Jim] St. Louis city
officials didn't give up. They used a new legal tactic to take control of
large chunks of land and they brought
in the bulldozers to create an area big enough to meet the developer's
need for space. It was called urban renewal. (rubble falling) One of the largest
urban renewal projects in the whole country was
in Mill Creek Valley, a predominantly black, and poor, and working class neighborhood that stretched west of
Union Station to Grand. It had a rich and
colorful history and had some of St.
Louis's worst slums. The city moved everybody out, and Mill Creek was leveled. - Well, for me it was sad because I liked my neighborhood. I didn't know
anything different. In a way, you're sort of excited 'cause you're gonna get to move, and my mother was saying we're
moving to this nice house, but at the same time,
this is where I grew up. This is where my friends were,
and I could see them moving one by one by one, and I didn't
know where they were going, I lost touch with
all my friends. - [Jim] In a 1960 article,
the St. Louis Post Dispatch showed the two-flat her
family had owned in Mill Creek and their new nicer home in a better neighborhood
on the north side. So many did not
understand the anger and the resentment in the
African-American community about what had
happened to Mill Creek. - For a long time, you couldn't
live anywhere but there. (chuckles) You made a decision
that we would live here, now you're making
a decision that we will no longer live here. And like you said, it's
a matter of choice. Can I make the
decision where I live? - [Jim] The milk crate
project never really met its expectations for residential
and commercial development but it did have a lasting
impact that wasn't planned, because even as city officials were trying to stabilize
the neighborhoods, they were uprooting
thousands of people. And on top of that, a lot
of poor blacks and whites continued to come to
the city from the south, and they all had
to live somewhere. When the new people moved
in, others moved out. It happened in the
white neighborhoods and the black neighborhoods,
like the Ville. - It's almost like
we moved in waves. There's this sort of stable
middle class neighborhood, it opens up, more
working class people, lower working class
people start moving in, middle class people
start seeking what they consider to be
a better neighborhood, and I think that does happen. I think class is a factor for sometimes middle
class black people moving out of a neighborhood, just like race is a factor when sometimes white people
move out of a neighborhood when black people move in. - [Jim] There had
always been waves of movement, and
change, and growth. Very few old St. Louis
families or businesses, churches, or synagogues
had stayed in one place. Salem Methodist Church
was typical of that. It had been started
near downtown in 1841 by German immigrants
and had been moving every 20 or 30 years ever since. In 1903, when the neighborhood around 15th and
Cole was changing, they sold their building
to Jewish immigrants and built a new church
at Page and Pendleton, which they sold to a black
congregation in 1925. Now in the 1950s, the church was at Kingshighway
and Cote Brilliante, and the neighborhood
was changing again. But this time, many of
the old church members had moved out of
the city altogether and they weren't coming
back on Sunday anymore. - Well, your members are
constantly moving west, and we lost that core of German
people that was in the city. Now where they all
went to, I don't know, but they scattered and they
didn't all come to us anymore. - [Jim] And so, the church
building was sold again, and Salem Methodist Church moved to its sixth location, not
just a little further west as some wanted, but far
west to the intersection of Highway 40 and
Lindbergh Boulevard, in 1956, the very edge
of suburban development. By the end of the century, it would be in the
middle of things. The move here saved
the old Salem church, but really in name only. As it grew again, few members
would have any connection to the old city church, or even an awareness
of its ethnic roots. Earlier in the century, church,
ethnicity and neighborhood were often all tied together. But over the years and
generations, that would change. The old languages and accents
wouldn't be heard as much, people inter-married,
and they moved around. (polka accordion music) In the 1950s, while
blacks and Jews were still excluded
from many areas, it seemed that just about
everybody else was integrating. Few suburban developments
had any specific ethnic or religious identity. What defined these
new neighborhoods was the price
range of the homes. - These ethnic groups, if
you were a fairly recent second or third
generation immigrant, becomes less important than if you can afford to buy
this house and you're white, that's how we're
gonna look at you, and even less than occupation, so that if you look in a lot of the
housing developments that were going
up in the county, sort of say middle
middle class areas in Crestwood, or
Florissant, or Creve Coeur, you might have very
highly paid union workers from McDonnell Douglas living next to accountants and lawyers. - [Jim] St. Louis
city would continue to try to stabilize,
to slow or halt the drain of people, businesses
and jobs to the county, but it all just kept leaving. Even in safe, stable,
convenient city neighborhoods, people were looking west
and feeling the pull. - I mean it seemed like
that was the thing to do, and boy, there were times
when I wished to heck I had never done it because
I didn't have a car. I rode a bus from
Kirkwood downtown to 12th and Washington every day and I wanna tell you something, I missed that bus more
often than I caught it. (chuckles) I almost
got fired over that. But, no, I was looking forward to the move out
because I thought that's where our
future lies, suburbs. The city just wasn't what
it should have been anymore. - [Announcer] Benefits
that give them the pleasure and the comfort
of living in well-planned, well-constructed,
well-organized homes that are built to be homes for the average American family. Your boys and girls and my boys and
girls, growing up into healthy and vital
manhood and womanhood as the citizens of tomorrow. (somber piano music) - It's impossible to overstate
the impact of television. It had a huge impact on
how we saw the world, how we saw our community,
how we saw ourselves. But keep in mind that
TV was a business, and for a lot of
reasons, a lot of things were kept out of the picture. Sometimes when people talk about the 1950s,
they're really talking about how the decade
appeared on TV. For "Decades",
I'm Jim Kirchherr. - [Harry] The people
of the world look to the United States of America as the strong force of freedom. To them, to the
people of the world, we pledge that we
shall work side by side with other free nations in order that the
men the world over may live in freedom and peace. (applauding)
