Optimism is the liberal's credo. Guian A. McKee's The Problem of Jobs is an exhaustively researched exposition of industrial retention, job training, job creation, and affirmative action efforts in postwar Philadelphia. It argues that, in spite of the enormous obstacles faced by liberals in and outside of city government, Philadelphians managed to come up with programs that mitigated the harmful effects of deindustrialization from the 1950s through the early 1980s. Yet these programs were not as effective as they might have been because liberals tended to treat the problems of economic and job development as distinct from that of racial justice. In showing concretely where these projects were and were not joined together, McKee ultimately comes down on the side of optimism and a defense of moderate liberalism, concluding that joining economic development and racial justice is possible within the framework of a globalizing capitalism. McKee—consistent with the current political moment—sees liberalism's hope in addressing persistent urban problems as resting on liberals' being motivated by a more activist left, but also being able to craft pragmatic solutions within the constraints of a conservative political culture.
The Problem of Jobs takes up six case studies in which liberals tried to develop jobs and to open up existing jobs to African Americans, from the victory of liberal Democratic reformers in 1951 through the 1980s: (1) the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), which, beginning in the 1950s, used federally tax-exempt municipal bonds to subsidize the redevelopment of factories in an effort to retain industry; (2) the civil rights leader Rev. Leon Sullivan's use of selective boycotts to force Philadelphia's companies to hire more African-American workers; (3) the Opportunities Industrial Centers (OIC), Sullivan's training program for inner-city African Americans that sought to combat the problem of skills mismatch in a community dealing with increasingly chronic unemployment; (4) the OIC-Progress Movement, Sullivan's effort at creating community-controlled capitalist enterprises, which depended on technology transfer and subcontracts from better-established companies and on military contracts; (5) the Philadelphia Plans—affirmative action programs mainly targeting the construction trades and their unions—that, while opening up a few jobs to African Americans, also exacerbated tensions in the liberal coalition; and (6) the Johnson-era Model Cities program, which, when coupled in the early 1970s with PIDC, provided the kinds of federally funded, locally driven programming that, if generalized and implemented earlier, could have put the problem of jobs at the forefront of urban policy.
Federalism and its sometimes-ironic effects on the problem of jobs is a leitmotif of the book. McKee highlights the importance of federal funding in urban economic development, whether in the form of tax subsidies or programmatic grants. He argues that federal funding, rather than federal mandates, was most effective in aiding local liberals. For example, he indicates that the Great Society's funding was crucial to the successes of OIC, but that its emphasis on community participation actually undercut the potential of comprehensive planning that had begun to show promise for tying together Philadelphia's problems of deindustrialization and economic segregation by prompting local struggles for control.
McKee skillfully probes the fragility of postwar liberalism and its coalition, indicating differences and contradictions between commercial and social Keynesian strategies and between a labor- and racial-justice liberalisms. Both sets of tensions were real, and clashes between these visions extended—as did all the issues in this book—far beyond Philadelphia. He also probes the relationship between radicalism and militancy on one hand, and moderate liberalism on the other. McKee approvingly cites Leon Sullivan's brand of “build, Baby, build” black power, which sought pragmatic solutions and business partners rather than transformations in social and political power. Nevertheless, in spite of his reliance on Sullivan's autobiography in several key chapters of the book, McKee is forthright in his assessment of Sullivan's failures and those of the other efforts he studies. Though McKee clearly prefers moderate styles, militants still supply moderates with a radical flank effect that they needed to remain moderate and, often, to win the day.
The Problem of Jobs can be difficult going. The level of detail is impressive, but the prose might have been enlivened with more summary statements or a stronger authorial voice. The organization of the book as a series of temporally overlapping case studies can get confusing, as the reader is forced to circle back several times and piece together what is happening in Philadelphia and when. Further, McKee often tries to cast an optimistic light on policies that only forestalled the worst effects of deindustrialization. Though this trains our focus on the real potential immanent in some liberal policy interventions, it also tends to magnify the larger contradictions of urban liberalism under a rapidly globalizing postwar capitalism, and thus begs the question of whether liberals' failure to embrace more radical positions interfered with more transformative politics. McKee does not think so. But in his concluding assessment that a “political culture that is fundamentally conservative” is the main obstacle to liberal solutions to poverty and urban problems (pp. 288–89), he risks mistaking the lessons of his own research. Liberalism was beset by its own contradictory stances toward capitalism, its own factions, its own indecision about federalism, and its own hesitancy about race. These weakened its political power in the face of conservative opposition, whether this came from chambers of commerce in the early 1960s or from federal disinvestment in the 1980s. McKee never defines conservative political culture, and so cannot clinch the case.
But these are mainly arguments I have with the book, rather than criticisms of its quality, and even these also indicate the book's strengths. McKee's careful case studies and historical reconstructions put The Problem of Jobs in the company of some of the finest recent work in urban and policy history, adding each genre's strengths to the other. The Problem of Jobs will be important in any assessment of liberal policy successes and failures, and of liberalism's future prospects. It should be featured prominently in any graduate course on economic development, urban policy, and race and public policy. The book's combination of historical rigor with sober political argument should provoke further research on other cities' experiences, and further dispute about what lessons we should draw from them.
