ABSTRACT
In their new Foreword to the 1977 edition of The Intellectual Versus the City (1962), Morton and Lucia White point to the deepening crisis of the American city as further evidence of the “ambivalence or antagonism” toward the city that their research had attempted to demonstrate had always existed in American arts and letters. But a re-reading of the Whites’ text today does not necessarily have to lead to the same conclusion that they reached in 1962, when the process of American post-war de-urbanization was still being expedited with maximum dispatch, and with the resultant urban degradation and suburban dispersal still fresh in people’s eyes and minds. Indeed, as we move into another era it is possible to see the Whites’ exercise in a somewhat different light, cast by a new historiographic understanding of the enormous scale and intensity of the de-urbanization strategy from the New Deal onward, tempered by our having moved from this first post-industrial crisis to a second or even third today. Now we can more clearly see that by the end of the 1950s, de-urbanist revisionism had penetrated the academic world, such that urban historiography began to devalue the role of the city in the development of our national culture.
