Miss Harlean James Sells the City Beautiful
From the Kansas City Star, May 21st, 1923:
A Dodge Sedan, with dust stains of cross country travel, entered Kansas City from the East at about 9 o’clock last night. Two women and a varied assortment of luggage occupied the car, which, in the next four months will rest in strange garages in most of the larger cities of the country
The younger of the two was on a mission. The Executive Secretary of the American Civic Association, Harlean James was pitching the City Beautiful. The older woman was her mother, Jennie. She was just there for the ride.
They stayed a day, speaking to a crowd of 50 civic and business leaders, including the influential developer J. C. Nichols. Harlean stood in a club room and argued that every American should take pride in their capital city, and really, it was a national embarrassment they were paying for:
Foreign visitors praise the many beauties of the Capital, but are critical of the settings, such as the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue, with its many huge signs, and the fact that many public buildings are next to shacks.
With the help of the humble citizens in the room, she said, Washington could become not only a work of civic art, but model city to guide the nation. What a bargain.
The following morning, she and her mother drove on.
Make no little earmarks.
In planning Washington, two big visions dominate the discussion: Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 grid of streets and radial avenues, and the 1902 Beaux-Arts plan that reimagined the mall after the gardens of Versailles.
Trouble is that even stirring visions stick to the paper they’re printed on. To have more than a city of magnificent intentions, you need magnificent appropriations.
Getting the funds and authority to build the city required the political vision of Harlean James. She’s mentioned in a few histories, but the way most retellings have it, the artists painted the McMillan plan right onto the Mall.
No, twenty one years after James McMillan’s dream team published, Washington was a city of red brick, Black slums, and scattered federal buildings. Most of the single-family neighborhoods were empty fields. Their playgrounds weren’t even thought of. The City Beautiful vision was unfunded; public opinion soured as monuments replaced beloved amenities.
Beyond The Mall, residents of the District of Columbia were impatient with the lack of progress. Developers and homeowners in the booming suburban sections of the city realized that large swaths of the city would be left without parks and schools.
The government did little because DC residents had no control over their money. Not only did they not have Congressional and Presidential representation, from 1874 to 1967, DC was run by three presidentially appointed commissioners. One was always an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers who served as city manager. The other two men usually came from the Board of Trade, a business group. Poorer and Blacker residents got nothing.
Wherever the executive power lay, Congress set the budget. And nobody on Capitol Hill was eager to spend where they’d get no votes in return.
On the other hand, Progressives saw in this undemocratic structure the chance to try their big idea: “comprehensive planning” of aesthetics and land use by professionals, free from machine politics.
It was a big ask and all a bit modern. They needed the right advocate.
A woman making herself modern.
People talked of Miss Harlean James as a powerful activist and lobbyist for the American Civic Association (later adding Planning to the name), and the National Conference on State Parks. In an oral history, one of the founders of the modern Forest Service, Leon Kneipp, described her like so:
Q: “Didn’t she have something to do with the National Parks Association?”
A: “She was it.”
Miss James was born in 1877 to a well-to do Indiana family. Her mother Jennie was herself an independent woman: a suffragette who caused a scandal at Butler University by enrolling her feminine constitution in a business class. Jennie married well and older, setting her up to widow young and comfortable. She and her never-married only child, Harlean, would live together for the rest of their lives.
Harlean graduated from Stanford University in 1898, going on to take graduate classes at Columbia University and the University of Chicago.
Afterwards, the pair moved to Hawaii. Harlean succeeded as a manager in Hawaiian sugar and produce companies, rising to be the corporate secretary of Castle & Cooke, a predecessor of Dole Foods. Jennie became, among other things, a probation officer. There, they seem to have invested well.
The Jameses came east in 1911. Harlean transformed the Baltimore’s Women’s Civic League into a progressive City Beautiful group. When the US entered World War I, she rose through the wartime housing bureaucracy, eventually taking charge of the boarding houses built around the Capitol.
According to reports at the time, she turned the failing hotels into models of modern efficiency. Her management caught the attention of Frederic Delano, a railroad man and Federal Reserve vice chair with a lifelong interest in grand plans. Before coming east, Delano was a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago, the business organization that published Daniel Burnham’s watershed Plan of Chicago. In Washington, he did well through family connections, particularly his nephew, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
After the war, Delano hired her to work at his new interest, the American Civic Association. James moved to the Woodland-Normanstone neighborhood with her mother and settled in for the task at hand.
How do you work for voteless people?
The progressive campaigners were willing to work with the undemocratic government, but they still needed to secure funding and authority from politicians who represented every American except the beneficiaries.
Sure, the businessmen and socialites who shared private clubs with Congressmen had influence. The Board of Trade maintained a cozy relationship with the relevant committee members. But the lack of a means to plan, acquire property, and develop public lands meant going to congress every time they wanted a park. A planning board with broad authority and fixed appropriations would give local interests new control.
In 1921, the Board of Trade wrote a bill proposing a “National Capital Park Commission” or N.C.P.C. that met those needs. In 1923, it was stuck in committee. Senators on the District Committee like, say, Arthur Capper weren’t hearing demand for this kind of thing back home in Kansas.
“What is chiefly needed is an appreciation back in the districts from which come the members who constitute Washington’s legislature… that the government’s equipment must be improved and enlarged.”
The American Civic Association realized they’d have to change that. They’d get people with representation to demand the authority and funding needed to transform Washington. They would “sell Washington to the Nation.”
My research here is preliminary, but it appears Harlean James envisioned this plan and did the work, down to the dusty road trip.
I’ve found three legs in their strategy:
First, the ACA created a local organization with the Board of Trade, adding clergymen, professionals, and women. They called this city planning lobby “The Committee of 100 on the Federal City.”
Second, they began a national mass media campaign for City Beautification. James, Delano, and sympathetic politicians penned features in papers across the country. In them, they emphasized that Washington could be a point of pride and a model — an investment as safe and noble as a Liberty Bond.
Third, they created clubs, called “Federal City Committees” across the country to do the essential Congressional lobbying. Harlean’s aim was to set up 50 on her trip. It’s not clear if she met her goal, but by 1926, there were about 75.
To get things started, James would sell the plan in person.
The Washington Evening Star, April 14th, 1923:
Organization of the country will be effected by a possibly unique manner. At 6 o’clock in the morning on May 1st, Miss Harlean James, Secretary of the American Civic Association, will board her prancing sedan, with her mother and driving herself, will begin a tour… clear through the Pacific Coast.
Think about it: an unmarried woman in her forties drove herself cross-country, was recognized as an expert, and got citizens to push an increase in a distant government’s power. What she did would have been inconceivable a few years before.
Let’s break down the new ideas her trip brought to the cause:
1. Modern Persuasion
James’s involvement in the First World War seems to have presented her with new approaches to propaganda — or as practitioners were starting to call it, public relations. She used American identity to foster a sense of satisfied responsibility for the character of the “Federal City.”
Previous campaigns had sold the idea of investing in Washington on the abstract value of civic beauty. Some, like old money Richard Floridas, tauted building regulation as the only thing that would retain the sophisticates of Washington’s growing leisure class.
No, James made it about the people she was talking to.
She told the San Jose Mercury News, “Small groups far removed from Washington may lend a hand in keeping the federal city and special and different city, a model of efficient and dignified beauty.” She sold mundane healthfulness as much as the McMillan Commission’s grand symbols.
Going further, she flattered voting midwesterners, telling the Kansas City Star that she picked the conversations with small groups to “broaden her own knowledge of the country.”
Even the term “Federal City:” it’s a rebranding. As Americans, it’s our city.
2. Modern Travel
“Organizing by automobile,” The Washington Evening Star called it:
Miss James is an experienced motorist, and already has driven from Washington to Michigan, and expects to complete her almost unprecedented trip without accident.
In 1923, driving was unusual. Cars were not great. Roads were terrible. Federal road aid was limited; states and motorist clubs maintained a handful of routes. Road trips were a faddish diversion for people ready to rough it. Out west, where James focused her efforts, things were the shabbiest.
As a point of comparison: just four years earlier, an Army detachment going branded as the Federal Motor Transport Corps drove cross country to demonstrate how poor road quality was. With motorcyclists scouting for a convoy carrying mechanics, it took three months and they lost nine vehicles.
Driving across the west, from Pittsburgh to San Diego to Spokane to Chicago, James and her mother were taking on something serious which demanded planning for all contingencies.
For women, taking these daring trips may also have been a statement of independence. The most interesting precedent for the Jameses was the similar trip etiquette queen Emily Post took in 1915, following her divorce.
3. Modern Women
Finally, the method she used that was most novel was her appeal to women. Because of the long campaign for equal suffrage, women’s groups were well organized and eager to flex their full power as congressional constituents.
Plus, I suspect that the advocacy for clean homes protected by zoning, playgrounds, and beautiful parks were sufficiently domestic and close to charity work to not be a dramatic step out of social norms.
Irrespective, James’s choice to target garden clubs and social groups alongside the male-dominated business and political groups expanded the American Civic Association’s ability to lobby Congress and spread the idea of comprehensive planning.
Harlean James’ road trip cultivated the national support the ACA and the Board of Trade needed to pass the dormant Park Commission bill. The original NCPC was ineffectual, but with the network James helped create, they passed further legislation to expand its power, the power of the Commission of Fine Arts, and the power of the Public Buildings Commission.
Over only 15 years, these agencies cleared away brick Washington to build the stone Federal City that seems so inevitable today. Without them, and without the cross-country organizing of Miss Harlean James, the city-wide vision the of McMillan Commission would not have happened.
Regardless of whether those results are good or not, the story of how they turned the renderings into a public realm is telling.
Let me propose that Daniel Burnham’s supposed adage “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood,” is greedy. It allows the designer to take credit for the hustle of the people who execute it.
No, Harlean James’ work reveals is that what follows grand plans is not a spontaneous outpouring of spirit, but its own grand effort.
This post is adapted from a lecture given to the Welcome L’Enfant Dinner, March 9th 2017. Many thanks to Don Hawkins, its organizer, as well as Kim Bender and Jennifer Ezelle of Heurich House Museum. Thanks also to the staff of George Washington University’s Special Collections library, where I found Harlean James’s trip in the Peter S. Craig papers.
