A President Visits East St. Louis: The Racialized Politics of Market Talk, Enterprise Zones, and Abandonment, 1980–2010
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/23283335.116.1.05
ISSN2328-3335
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoBILL CLINTON WAS THE ONLY US PRESIDENT to visit East St. Louis. Clinton made two trips, the first in 1992 and the second in 1999. Clinton was alert to East St. Louis's visible place on any list of American cities that suffered high unemployment, shuttered factories, deadly pollution levels, profound poverty, widespread drug usage, and violent crime. Still more, as Clinton acknowledged and as any routine newspaper reader would have recognized, deep racial animosities informed virtually every aspect of residents’ lives and politics in East St. Louis and in cities like it. Profound economic distress and ingrained racial anger animated politics in similar places such as Camden, New Jersey, and Youngstown, Ohio. Like in East St. Louis, bankers, corporate executives, small retailers, repair shops, and white, middle-income households had abandoned those cities’ neighborhoods and schools starting after World War II and extending to the end of the century and beyond.During both trips, journalists included in Clinton's entourage wrote positive reports focused on promises to revitalize the local economy. In fact, however, each visit lasted only a few hours, and each comprised one part of multi-city tours. Local officials had played no part in formulating Clinton's economic development proposals. The brevity of those stops suggests that Clinton never ranked East St. Louis or its leaders at or near the top of his legislative agenda. Nor in fact did Clinton bring immediate financial resources to hard-pressed residents or the city's treasury. During his first trip, Clinton promised restored economic growth for the nation including places like East St. Louis. During his second, Clinton had legislation pending in Congress that promised a modest amount of cash alongside tax benefits for business leaders willing to invest in the nation's depreciated cities. Under those austere circumstances, not one or even a dozen presidential visits could have restarted East St. Louis on a path toward revived investments, additional jobs, fewer buried pollutants, cleaner air, or a modicum of racial harmony. Once the president departed for the next stop, moreover, the city's mayors such as Gordon D. Bush (1991–1999) and Debra A. Powell (1999–2003) lacked the cash, credit, political networks, and administrative capacity that were prerequisite to launching East St. Louis's mostly impoverished residents on a path toward a modest prosperity.Clinton and other political leaders valued East St. Louis and similar cities as model workshops for the idea that markets could be made to substitute for direct financial aid. President Ronald W. Reagan and Representative Jack F. Kemp had bequeathed that idea to Clinton, who took it up as his own. Our study of Kemp and Reagan's innovative policies and Clinton's visits to East St. Louis focuses attention on a once-thriving Illinois city during the decades that political leaders directed the nation's political economy away from old-fashioned pursuits such as steel and aluminum manufacturing, hog packing, and heavily unionized railroading and trucking and toward internationalizing bank corporations, financial derivatives, soaring office towers, corporate takeovers, and weekend holidays devoted to shopping, travel, and leisure. Reagan, Kemp, and Clinton, however, explained these developments as natural extensions of markets at work, which clearly was never the case. Saddled with that language, however, policies aimed at creating markets had to produce measurable outcomes in places like East St. Louis. They failed to do so.To explain these developments, we start with Clinton's two visits. Next, we direct our attention to President Reagan, Representative Kemp, Illinois governor James R. Thompson, and to the East St. Louis mayors who inherited the task of converting endless talk about markets and innovative policies into investments, jobs, and the provision of basic urban services such as police and sewage disposal. Presidents Reagan and Clinton and other top officials such as Kemp and Thompson spoke as the state's and nation's chief economic officers. One theme that emerges clearly is the vast disjuncture between their uplifting pronouncements and soaring policy goals and problems such as inadequate revenues that neither market talk nor modest, market-oriented policies could remedy in forlorn East St. Louis. And as such, we are not studying the triumph or failure of markets but the way in which presidents, federal officials, and an Illinois governor shaped an industrial policy that took little account of the dire circumstances under which East St. Louis officials and ordinary residents labored each day.On August 6, 1992, as candidate for president, Clinton and Senator Albert A. Gore, his choice for vice president, spoke and replied to questions in front of an audience gathered at the East St. Louis Senior High School gymnasium. A reporter described the audience's size as “smaller-than-expected.” Still, Clinton urged audience members to adopt the high school football coach's motto, “Get it Done,” which at that moment meant voting for Gore and him to lead the economy out of the economic downturn. Larger numbers of potential voters appeared as Clinton and Gore and fifteen buses loaded with journalists headed north for campaign stops in modest-sized cities such as Hannibal, Missouri. (Hannibal was best known as Mark Twain's boyhood home.) By 1992, however, Hannibal, like East St. Louis, was another Mississippi River city that had expanded decades earlier only to experience a prolonged period of decline as part of the shuttering of manufacturing firms and an accompanying slowdown in railroad and river barge traffic. Residents of cities like Hannibal and East St. Louis were more likely to experience economic hardship than their fellow citizens. In August 1992, as millions of Americans endured unemployment, wage reductions, and a frightening sense of economic uncertainty, the national unemployment rate stood at 7.6 percent. East St. Louis's rate that same month remained at a whopping 12.5 percent. That downturn and a promised return of jobs and an improved economy, even in cities like Hannibal and East St. Louis, created an opportunity for Clinton to return to his campaign's main theme. President George H. W. Bush's economic thinking, Clinton told members of his Hannibal audience, “is that it could be worse,” and “our whole idea is that it could be better.”1Seven years later, on July 7, 1999, Clinton, now in his second presidential term, made another trip to East St. Louis. This visit contained elements similar to the first. Journalists, local officials, and excited citizens turned out to hear Clinton's remarks or simply to observe the president of the United States. Unlike in 1992, however, well-known corporations such as Bank of America and Walgreens assigned top executives to Clinton's entourage, signaling their commitment to invest in desiccated places like East St. Louis. Yet the developer of Walgreens’ new store in East St. Louis described the city as a “diamond in the rough,” surely a cautious evaluation. Similarly, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, an East St. Louis native, Olympic medalist, and successful businesswoman, joined Clinton and other dignitaries for the visit. Joyner-Kersee's presence, according to a Clinton staff member, represented a “glimmer . . . of hope” for local residents. Not even Eugene B. “Gene” Sperling, one of Clinton's top economic advisers, expressed confidence regarding East St. Louis's growth prospects. Sperling characterized the president's trip as “an economic mission in our own backyard,” much like the trade missions that federal and state officials made to non-white, impoverished nations.2 By anyone's set of calculations, East St. Louis's economic recovery appeared a longshot.Clinton was undeterred. Like his 1992 visit, Clinton's stay in East St. Louis totaled three hours including a brief speech to hundreds of seemingly adoring East St. Louisans on a stage located in that new Walgreens parking lot. No doubt, Clinton's image as the nation's first “black” president contributed to his enthusiastic reception among the area's mostly African American residents unaccustomed to attention at the hands of office holders and business executives, black or white. One of Clinton's observations that day—that East St. Louis residents spent 40 percent of their wages outside the city—surely resonated among persons who routinely shopped out-of-town, often across the bridge in St. Louis. Clinton also called for the elimination of the “blind racial hatred” that had fostered two shootings a few days earlier in Illinois and Indiana. No one needed to remind East St. Louis residents about the pain of those who suffered racially inspired anger and violence. Nor did they need another reminder that in recent decades local business executives opened few restaurants, groceries, beauty salons, or video rental stores. A fast-declining population comprised part of that background for this economic distress. In 1950, the city's population peaked at more than eighty-two thousand, but fell below fifty thousand in 1990, two years prior to Clinton's first visit. During the 1960s and 1970s, one third of the city's residents moved away as manufacturers closed their doors. Starting around 1970, East St. Louisans, particularly those who were white and recently unemployed, did not seek new jobs in the local economy; they joined an exodus to the suburbs that extended up to Clinton's visit, and beyond. By the early 1990s, East St. Louis was an impoverished city—one more island in what historian Joseph Heathcott characterizes as a black archipelago composed of impoverished black residents clustered in similar cities and towns throughout the United States.3In contrast, seven years after Clinton's first visit during the recession of 1991–1992, large numbers of Americans were experiencing a solid economic boom. By August 1999, the national unemployment rate had fallen to 4.3 percent; and across the Mississippi River, St. Louis's rate was 3.2 percent. Yet, none of that prosperity extended to East St. Louis, where unemployment remained stuck at 10.6 percent, a mere 1.9 points lower than in 1992. Whether in 1992 or in 1999, the plain and continuing fact of East St. Louis's sunken and deeply racialized economy stood at the center of each Clinton visit. “I have been looking for East St. Louis to come back,” a local resident told a journalist, and Clinton's “visit is the first move in getting something done.” Perhaps Clinton's magnetic personality and his call to end racial hatred sated the crowds’ desire for immediate and tangible improvements in their lives and livelihoods. In the near future, however, audience members wanted Clinton, or any politician, to carve out a prosperous and secure place for them in the economic sunshine.4During that one afternoon, Clinton's well-choreographed visit and brief remarks included no promise of vast federal spending earmarked for East St. Louis. The reverse was actually the case, with Clinton emphasizing private investment rather than public spending. For example, the Bank of America officer accompanying Clinton announced plans to create a five-hundred-million-dollar “catalyst fund” to invest in profit-making malls and similar projects scattered throughout the United States. Those investments, ran the reasoning, would lead to additional spending and another round of growth nearby. As far back as 1991, however, the president of NationsBank (the company that purchased Bank of America in 1998) had promised to invest ten billion dollars over ten years in low-income areas where the firm conducted business. Massive investment in economically depressed districts was a price that executives willingly paid in exchange for federal legislation leading to the right to create bank supermarkets that underwrote stock deals, sold insurance, and routinely traded in derivatives and similarly complex financial instruments.5 More to the point, however, five hundred million dollars spread among multiple cities and towns could never finance a large number of new business loans, and resulting jobs, in cash-starved East St. Louis.In similar fashion, during that afternoon in East St. Louis, Clinton touted his administration's stringent enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). In 1977, members of the US Congress and President Jimmy Carter approved the CRA. The act's authors required bankers to make loans in cities and towns where their offices were located. And again, Clinton's top bank regulators placed extra pressure on bank executives to approve those CRA loans. More than “95 percent of the money loaned,” Clinton boasted to his East St. Louis audience, “ha[d] been loaned since the Clinton-Gore administration has been in office.” Support for the CRA was another price that large bankers such as the head of Bank of America judged a sound investment with a view toward completing their drive to create world-spanning supermarket banks.6 Unsurprisingly, bankers had financial and political motives for supporting the CRA and other programs that mandated investments in cities like East St. Louis. Clinton and the nation's top bankers shared additional goals.Clinton had a lengthy history of favoring bank loans as a fundamental component in accelerating economic growth. In December 1992, only a few months after his first stop in East St. Louis, the president-elect held a pre-inaugural meeting with several hundred of the nation's top economists, bankers, and business leaders in Little Rock, Arkansas. A federal stimulus program that spent thirty billion dollars, Clinton told members of his influential and mostly wealthy audience in Little Rock, amounted to “peanuts” compared with the economic growth that would follow increased bank loans. For practical purposes, Clinton's late 1992 message to bankers in Little Rock was similar to his remarks to East St. Louis's hard-pressed residents in July 1999. “There is no magic wand,” he plainly asserted, and in fact neither the government nor anyone else “is going to put any money here if they think they're going to lose it.” “Clinton's market-based poverty policy,” historian Brent Cebul determines, “conceptualized the poor as unrealized entrepreneurs and impoverished communities as untapped ‘new markets.’”7 That approach, brought down to the local level, made it clear that profit-oriented investors and bootstrapping residents were principally responsible for lifting East St. Louisans out of decades of poverty.In practice, Clinton never intended to abandon bankers or East St. Louis's mostly poor residents to the vicissitudes of disruptive and often harsh marketplace economics. In Bill Clinton's America, market talk, at least as routinely spoken among the president, top aides like Gene Sperling, and Bank of America's senior executives, served as a ritualized invocation—Americans in their everyday speech imagined a wide range of activities as self-interested transactions. American urban politics was surely not about markets. Yet, bankers and politicians like Clinton infused their rhetoric with market talk. They did so to signal their willingness to negotiate the rules and the cost-sharing arrangements intended to guide steady and upward growth into the future. In its urban setting, this type of market talk led to discrete industrial policies that blended public and private funds and authority. As one example, known to every Illinois and mid-America leader, in 1991 the State of Illinois completed the financing of a new stadium for Major League Baseball's Chicago White Sox. In a similar fashion, Clinton and his top administrators advanced growth programs aimed at accelerating high-tech development.Ideas about big league cities and high-tech developments simply did not cohere with the political and cultural situations in East St. Louis. Mayors, council members, and remaining business owners could never realistically invoke images of their city as, somehow, hosting a major league sports club, securing a place in the popular imagination as a “big league” town, or bringing software firms like Microsoft to town. Consequently, refining that market talk into new, urban industrial policies aimed at places like East St. Louis was never a straightforward process. East St. Louis business and political leaders (like their counterparts in Flint, Michigan, Camden, New Jersey, and similarly situated cities throughout the US) lacked financial resources and secure spots in national and regional political networks. In contrast, leaders in Charlotte, Phoenix, Chicago, Seattle, and New York enjoyed access to the cash and clout that were prerequisite to creating specialized districts composed of entertainment zones, sports stadiums, immense hospitals, software giants, and towering skyscrapers filled with bank headquarters and major law firms. Even in St. Louis, with its visible Gateway Arch and skyscrapers across the river, city officials and business leaders had to scramble each decade since the 1950s to convince voters to approve bond issues leading to a new baseball stadium, a hockey arena, and a convention center. With those undertakings, St. Louis's always hard-pressed leaders hoped to attract corporate offices, slow the pace of outmigration among higher income white households, and retain an increasingly tentative hold on their standing as a “big league” city. Consequently, in making plans for East St. Louis's redevelopment, proponents of market talk had to take account of main street's abandoned stores, boarded-up houses in every neighborhood, and black politicians who lacked connections with white deal makers in Chicago, Houston, St. Louis, and other large cities.8In his East St. Louis remarks, Clinton's market talk emerged as his “new markets initiative.” Atop that platform in the Walgreens parking lot, Clinton provided audience members with a personalized example of the way those markets were to operate. A hypothetical member of the audience would invest one hundred dollars. Clinton at the same moment would give that investor a tax credit valued at 25 percent. The investment might still go bad, Clinton explained, but, taking account of the tax credit, this investor remained on the hook for only $75. Clinton's new markets initiative looked strikingly like other federal programs such as mortgage guarantees intended to make homes more affordable to low-income citizens. During a few days in July, the new markets initiative returned the attention of journalists and perhaps a small number of Americans to the plight of fellow citizens located in the nation's most depressed areas such as East St. Louis. Yet, as Clinton made clear to his rapturous audience, the ballyhooed new markets initiative did not actually exist in approved congressional legislation.9Clinton had stopped in East St. Louis to bring national publicity to his new markets initiative.10 In the tense climate that surrounded any Clinton legislative recommendation, a burst of favorable media coverage just might prove useful in gaining support among hard-nosed legislators. Without saying so, Clinton was also promoting his wife's recently announced candidacy for a US Senate seat representing New York. As well, Clinton surely intended his national poverty tour to promote Vice President Gore's impending presidential campaign. We cannot know whether press coverage of Clinton's speeches benefited one or both campaigns. Yet we must not doubt Clinton's desire to highlight the substantial prosperity that emerged during his time in office and his often-repeated desire to keep that growth going forward on a still more inclusive basis. All in all, Clinton's tour of impoverished areas created an opportunity to tell Americans about his now tried and seemingly true formula for economic growth based on indirect subsidies, government-business partnerships, and a vague idea about preparing Americans for the twenty-first century. In plain fact, however, Clinton's new markets was a proposal in front of Congress and not a bundle of tax credits awaiting delivery to hyperactive entrepreneurs. Still more, Congress had not funded another Clinton program, called Empowerment Zones, in which East St. Louis was supposed to participate.11In fact, Clinton arrived in East St. Louis with an empty wallet. During the late 1990s, congressional failure to approve the new markets initiative and fund the empowerment zones comprised only two examples of the inability among leaders in East St. Louis (and again, similarly situated cities) to capture a larger share of the federal budget. That inability extended back to 1982, when not even President Ronald Reagan's market talk was sufficient to secure legislation to start East St. Louis's steep climb toward a modest prosperity. Like Clinton, Reagan had focused on the creation of special districts where capitalism could thrive largely free of regulations. As another incentive, companies that located operations in these districts would secure a 75 percent federal income tax reduction. Thereafter, the market's magic would promptly allow businessmen and women to create profits, jobs, and a sharp reduction in hardcore poverty. Based on a British program Parliament approved in 1980, Reagan followed the UK's lead and adopted their name for these districts, that of enterprise zones. Under the Reagan proposal, each year, top officials in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would select between ten and twenty-five areas for designation as enterprise zones, based on criteria such as population losses, worsening economic conditions, and the degree of poverty. In Reagan's iteration of the idea, enterprise zones came with an official designation but without direct federal cash. (The proposed tax credit was a tax expenditure, which few Americans understood or perceived as spending.) East St. Louis was already on Reagan's list of likely first sites alongside Camden, New Jersey, Cleveland, Ohio, and Illinois cities such as Cicero and Rockford. Sociologist John Walton characterized Reagan's list as “grim.” In 1983, Reagan resubmitted enterprise zone legislation, but members of Congress and business leaders remained unenthusiastic about the idea. Much as historian Teal Arcadi observes, “presidential proclivities cannot fully explain legislative development.”12By that point, the enterprise zone idea had won adherents among state and urban politicians with an interest in identifying policies to reverse a decades-long pattern of factory closures and job losses in their cities and towns. In January 1982, mayors of Chicago, Kansas City, and other cities flew to Washington, DC, to meet with Reagan and promote his pending enterprise zone legislation. Chicago's mayor, Jane M. Byrne, promoted enterprise zone creation in southeast Chicago, an area that, like East St. Louis, large manufacturers were abandoning. During the next months, Illinois business and political leaders, with numerous empty plants and unemployed workers in their areas, embraced the enterprise zone idea. Fifty Illinois business executives visited Reagan administration officials in May to promote enterprise zones and other federal programs. Enthusiasts, of whom there was a growing number, spoke about steel plants and dress shops opening inside enterprise zones. In October, to boost participation in what many judged a sure thing, staff members of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs held a meeting in East St. Louis to explain the enterprise zone concept to area business leaders. In December 1982, a Chicago Tribune writer, noting the emerging enthusiasm, asked whether enterprise zones represented the “light at the end of the tunnel” for troubled cities. That same month, leaders of ten cities with especially high unemployment rates sought their own meeting with Reagan to promote creation of enterprise zones. One reporter characterized those cities as the “bottom 10,” and naturally, East St. Louis ranked among that ten. The race was on to create enterprise zones.13 Ultimately, however, not even President Reagan was able to prevail upon recalcitrant members of Congress to approve his prized enterprise zones.In December 1982, without waiting to learn Congress's decision, members of the Illinois General Assembly approved creation of enterprise zones in eight cities, with another eight to be selected in each subsequent year. Like Reagan's proposal, the Illinois version of enterprise zones provided state sales tax reductions and fewer regulations in the eight cities that qualified. The new legislation promptly set off a scramble among local political leaders to secure the state's designation as one of the eight. The East St. Louis proposal mapped most of the city's downtown and surrounding districts, an area of some nine square miles and encompassing two-thirds of the city. In nearby and tiny Venice, Illinois, where the unemployment rate had risen to 25 percent, planners included the entire city in their proposed enterprise zone. In the mad chase to secure an enterprise zone designation, with its presumed path back to economic growth, local officials and politicians invoked any argument that was readily at hand. Decatur, Illinois, officials cited the importance of a “continuous partnership between government and the private sector.” An East St. Louis official cited the area's desperate plight. “There isn't another city in the state that would be more qualified than East St. Louis,” announced an economic development specialist located in the city. With the federal program held up in Congress and with details about both the federal and state programs still murky, the East St. Louis Aldermanic Council designated their enterprise zone. “We have to have a designated zone by the 31st of this month,” Mayor Carl E. Officer announced, “in order to . . . qualify once the legislation comes out of Washington.” “It puts us in the ballpark,” Officer added, once again invoking the stadium and big league metaphors so favored among urban leaders. In the short run, council's approval of the enterprise zone idea added one more item to Officer's reelection campaign that also included a promise to buy new police cars and firetrucks and opposition to riverboat gambling casinos. In April, the thirty-year-old Officer, who owned a funeral home and held two college degrees, including one in mortuary science, won reelection by a four-to-one margin. Only later did Officer tell council members that the city lacked forty-five thousand dollars to remove aging traffic lights as part of a program, financed by the federal government, to install modern signals and create one-way streets. By the early 1980s, East St. Louis officials relied on federal funds in the form of Urban Development Action Grants to pay the expenses of cleaning and renovating downtown theaters. Mayor Officer—like such recently elected African American politicians in depressed cities as Richard G. Hatcher in Gary, Indiana, and even Harold Washington in Chicago—inherited a city wracked by business failures, hateful levels of racism, increasing unemployment levels, and a budget that was inadequate to maintain police and fire services.14 In those dire circumstances, an enterprise zone, or any government program, loomed large in Officer's plans for East St. Louis's future redevelopment.In June 1983, Illinois governor James R. Thompson announced East St. Louis's selection as one of six cities to receive the first round of enterprise zone designations, with two additional zones in Chicago, including the former centers of the city's meat packing and steel industries. In only the past three years, more than fifty-four thousand jobs had disappeared from the area housing steel corporations, pushing unemployment above 20 percent. Among the nineteen cities that applied, Decatur also made the final cut, but Venice did not.15 In a perverse contest, East St. Louis joined the winner's circle in a race among the state's left-behind cities and two of Chicago's highest unemployment areas.At this halcyon moment, few in East St. Louis and elsewhere stopped to examine problems that the early years of enterprise zone enthusiasm had unearthed. In retrospect, the reported fact that leaders among Illinois's many small cities were encountering problems completing detailed state application forms might have highlighted the modest capacity of a limited number of officials to launch and guide large programs over extended periods of time. As well, the East St. Louis council's haste in approving plans without detailed knowledge about how these zones were to operate should have called attention to their failure to evaluate pending legislation considering local circumstances. Nor did the state's enterprise zone legislation provide financial relief to East St. Louis and the other chosen cities for the factories, clothing stores, and appliance dealers that simply folded up shop and walked away, leaving stranded employees, aged and abandoned buildings, unpaid rents, and uncollected garbage.16The city's insistent racial animosities comprised yet another overlooked dimension in assembling the city's enterprise zone. Representative Wyvetter Younge (D-East St. Louis) worried about the exclusion of African Americans from enterprise zone planning. Altogether, neither months of talk about the market's boundless capacity to restore growth nor the general assembly's approval of enterprise zone legislation proved capable of subduing what was essentially the racialized, zero-sum politics in which East St. Louis politicians (and counterparts among bottom ten cities) engaged every day.17In following months, reports about the fight for a place on Governor Thompson's list of approved enterprise zones disappeared from public discussions. In their place, outside writers, not local business and political
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