By the day's end, Mitt Romney's fate in Michigan, and possibly the Presidential race, will be sealed. A loss to Rick Santorum may not destroy his campaign. But it will sting particularly hard. For Romney would be losing in the state where he grew up, the state where his father, George, manned the helm of industry, as Chairman of American Motors, and state, as Governor.
Forty years ago, the elder Romney arrived in South Carolina to a far warmer reception than his son recently had in the state. George was finishing his fourth year as President Richard Nixon's HUD Secretary, tucked into the former opponent's fold after his failed presidential bid. According to one report from that year, over a thousand gathered in Myrtle Beach to cheer on Romney's announcement of the arrival of general revenue-sharing, a policy that swapped out big Federal grants for more discretionary local authority. It was one of several sweeping domestic initiatives that the Nixon Administration launched as it tried to navigate the teeming social upheavals of the era.
(The program, Nixon's pet project, sputtered once he left office, laying to rest in 1987. The housing economist Robert Shiller recently pitched a revival of the plan to rejuvenate states and cities.)
At Myrtle Beach, Romney praised the program for its ability to "cut out all this red tape" and hand over decision-making to local governance. But the project was Nixon's, not his. By then, Romney's signature initiative at HUD---spurring housing integration across major U.S. cities---was dead. The Nixon White House had roundly rejected it. The decision marked an end to Romney's political career and, with it, an expansionary national approach to urban policy.
Stepping into office, Romney, a liberal Republican, moved to continue several of the initiatives set under President Johnson's Great Society. He tried to keep up the "Model Cities" plan, which Nixon summarily squashed as Federal overreach. He tried to implement Johnson's birthing of mortgage-backed securities, to mixed results.
But Romney also took HUD in new directions. He brought in Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a political chameleon, to sit on the newly formed Council on Urban Affairs. More importantly, he brought a deep concern for, almost obsessions with, racial segregation. In his 1968 book, The Concerns of a Citizen, he asserted that "economic and social distance is increased by racial distance." At one point, in language reminiscent of Saul Alinksy (an acquaintance), he warns of
the mounting danger of hostile confrontation between an achieving society and a dependent society---suburb against slum, prosperous against poor, white against black, brother against brother.
And that would be the death of America.
His objective was to bridge this "racial distance" by sweeping black residents into suburbs, using HUD's powers of benevolence. At rough glance, Romney was an urbanist pioneer. (So, at one time, was his son.) He was said to prefer that people live close to their work and homes, a contrarian stance during the height of suburban sprawl. And he pushed for a broader approach to urban governance. "To solve the problems of the 'real city,'" he once said, "only metropolitan-wide solutions will do."
The political scientist Charles M. Lamb writes that Romney felt he could translate the mass production techniques from his time in Detroit to the national policy stage. That is, he envisioned a policy mechanism that would, like an assembly line, open up suburban housing to poor minorities. A persistent roadblock, in Romney's mind, were local buildings codes and zoning laws. After white flight, suburbs would draft up laws to keep themselves as lily-colored as possible.
Operation Breakthrough, one of two major HUD initiatives Romney created, aimed straight for these codes. Localities that committed to relaxing zoning restrictions based on race were rewarded with housing subsidies or, more enticingly, HUD funding prioritization. That was the carrot. Romney, Lamb writes, was also adamant about the stick. He wanted to include provisions that cut or revoked HUD assistance for localities that refused to get on board.
Naturally, localities did not get on board. White suburbanites revolted. Odd that the man in the Michigan statehouse during the '60s would not see this coming, but, reports from the time suggest, he did not. Rep. Fletcher Thompson, a Republican from the Atlanta region, called Romney's proposal "socialistic" in a 1971 letter to Nixon. HUD was turning "totalitarian" and "dastardly," he wrote, according to Lamb.
The Nixon focus on urban fixes swiftly withered with Romney's plans. Part of this may be attributed to his sideline role. To the left of other Republicans, Romney apparently had difficulty getting access to the President (a Christina Romer of his time, it seems). HUD reportedly stitched together plans for Operation Breakthrough and Open Communities, the sister integration program, for eighteen months without the White House knowing a thing about them.
But the marginalization of Romney's HUD was almost certainly political, its isolation befitting an agency dealing with race while the Presidency embarked on his infamous Southern strategy.
Lamb digs up a journal entry from H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's pugnacious Chief of Staff, in 1970 [sic throughout]:
George won't leave quickly, will have to be fired. So we have to set him up on integrated housing issue and fire him on that basis to be sure we get the credit.
Five months after his welcome reception in South Carolina, Romney was gone.
Certainly, there is far more to say about the sea changes in national policies toward cities since then. The contraction and controversies in Reagan's HUD was just, if not more, significant as anything under Nixon. Section 8, the recent HUD program to instigate racial and economic integration through vouchers, mirrors Romney's attempt in some ways. It lacks the stick whacking zoning restrictions. (Of course, there's a little less racial animosity these days.) And Federal agents directing urban policy are consciously moving away from the top-down, industrial approach Romney envisioned.
Yet, Romney's tenure at HUD did mark a stark reversal. In a review of the decade's national urban policy, published in 1982, the National Research Council's Royce Hanson detailed the sharp pivot from the first Nixon presidency to the second:
From an initial interest in developing an urban policy, as such, in order to solve urban problems, the administration had moved to a position that urban problems were not solvable---at least by federal action or leadership...
Romney's interest in the "real city" was firmly rejected. Clearly, the notion that metropolitan areas should be viewed as single entities for policy purposes was not consistent with the administration's opposition to "forced integration" of housing or schools, and with the New Federalism's intention, as expressed in proposed legislation for special revenue sharing, not to impose so many national objectives on the local use of federal funds.
It was Romney's departure that calcified the shift:
Once reelection was won, George Romney was replaced as HUD secretary by James Lynn, who, like other cabinet replacements, was selected to work more closely with the White House and to carry out its initiatives and directives. The 1973 State of the Union Address contained little on urban issues.
Four decades later, the man George's son is now vying so desperately to replace, delivered a speech that contained little on urban issues as well.
