BOOKS
The Idealist
Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World
(Belknap, 2020)
August 1942:
World War II hangs in the balance. Europe is occupied. Nazi armies have pushed deep into Russia. In North Africa, they threaten Cairo. U.S. forces fight in the Pacific, but the world waits for the Americans to fully join the conflict. Hoping to shore up morale and reassure the Allies that help is on the way, Franklin Roosevelt permits Wendell Willkie, his rival and opponent in the 1940 Presidential campaign, to launch a world-circling flying tour. Covering 31,000 miles over seven weeks, with stops in thirteen countries on five continents, Willkie’s journey was a great wartime adventure, but also a forgotten episode in Americans’ longer struggle to come to grips with their place in the world.
Willkie visited the front in North Africa just as the tide of battle changed in the Allies favor, debated a frosty Charles de Gaulle in Beirut, almost failed to deliver a letter to Stalin in Moscow, and allowed himself to be seduced by Chiang Kai-shek in China. Through it all, however, he discovered the true world war: a global upsurge of hope that the conflict would bring racial equality, an end to empire, and freedom everywhere. Willkie made it his unofficial mission to bring this message home to his fellow citizens.
In One World, the runaway bestseller he published on his return, Willkie challenged Americans to resist the “America first” doctrine and warned of the dangers of “narrow nationalism.” He urged his fellow citizens to end colonialism and embrace “equality of opportunity for every race and every nation.” His call for a more equitable and interconnected world electrified the nation—his radio broadcasts regularly drew over 30 million listeners—as he tried to get the country to accept a more democratic set-up for the new United Nations. With his untimely death in 1944, America lost its most effective globalist, the man FDR referred to as “Private Citizen Number One.”
At a time when “America first” is again a rallying cry, Willkie’s message is at once chastening and inspiring, a reminder that “one world” is more than a matter of supply chains and economics, and that racism and nationalism have long been intertwined.
Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
Critical Acclaim:
“Exhilarating and timely… a story of media, technology, and a critique of empire that proved to be palatable—if only for a short while—for midcentury America …. The Idealist makes the case for a return to Willkie’s thinking about interdependence and international cooperation. Fighting the reassembled forces of America First and the existential threat of global warming requires it…. Zipp’s book has appeared amid a global pandemic that has both highlighted the need to transcend nationalism and its intractability.” – The New Republic
“If isolationist slogans such as ‘America First’ drive you to despair, The Idealist might be the book for you….[Zipp] has captured Willkie’s ‘brief, blazing moment,’ a little-remembered interlude when America was at war but already worrying about the postwar order.”—Wall Street Journal
“This insightful and nuanced portrayal successfully elucidates Willkie’s globalist politics and America’s emergence as a world leader.”—Publishers Weekly
“This deeply researched and wonderfully written book leads us to wonder how the twentieth century might have unfolded if the United States had embraced Wendell Willkie’s ‘new world idea.’ It’s not too late, because Willkie’s wisdom rings through The Idealist and speaks urgently to today’s America.”—Stephen Kinzer, Boston Globe columnist, and author of All the Shah’s Men
“The Idealist is a powerful book, gorgeously written and consistently insightful. Samuel Zipp uses the 1942 world tour of Wendell Willkie to examine American attitudes toward internationalism, decolonization, and race in the febrile atmosphere of the world’s first truly global conflict. By showing that Willkie’s wartime tour offered a preview of globalization, Zipp challenges now-dominant interpretations of World War II.”—Andrew Preston, author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith
“This is a beautifully written, ambitious, confident, and capacious book that does a wonderful job of situating Wendell Willkie and his vision for ‘one world’ in a historical context. Its breadth is truly impressive. The reader has a sense of being a participant on Willkie’s journey, seeing the world as it stood in 1942. An outstanding book.”—Melani McAlister, author of The Kingdom of God Has No Borders
“Zipp’s breathtaking account of Wendell Willkie’s wartime world tour centers on the transformational concept of One World. Tackling Willkie’s idealistic, often maligned push for an independent and profoundly interconnected world, this riveting tale speaks to some of the most pressing concerns of our present age.”—Christopher Nichols, Director, Oregon State University Center for the Humanities
Manhattan Projects
The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York
(Oxford, 2010)
New York City at mid-century:
American cities were transformed by the policies of “slum clearance” and modern planning customarily referred to as urban renewal. Manhattan Projects sheds new light on this oft-told tale by moving beyond the usual story that pits master planner Robert Moses against neighborhood advocate Jane Jacobs.
Focusing on four iconic "Manhattan projects"—the United Nations building, Stuyvesant Town, Lincoln Center, and the great swaths of public housing in East Harlem—the book unearths a host of forgotten stories and characters to recapture the complex, rich worlds from which both Jacobs and Moses emerged. Showing how these projects were pitched and then received, Manhattan Projects reveals how they remade the cityscape of New York, and how the struggles over these places made and unmade urban renewal itself.
Manhattan’s renewal boosters hoped to make the city the capital of modernity and a symbol of American power, but even as the builders executed their plans, a chorus of critics revealed the dark side of those Cold War visions, attacking urban renewal for perpetuating deindustrialization, racial segregation, and class division; for uprooting thousands, and for implanting a new, alienating cityscape. Cold War-era urban renewal was not merely a failed planning ideal, but also a crucial phase in the transformation of New York into both a world city and one mired in urban crisis.
Honorable Mention, Ellis Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians
Honorable mention, Spiro Kostof Prize, Society of Architectural Historians
Critical Acclaim:
“Compelling...challenge[s] readers to rethink what are fast becoming standard misconceptions of New York City's history."—Next American City
"Richly detailed and thoughtfully written."—Times Literary Supplement
"Zipp argues that urban renewal cannot be measured merely by the number of structures that were bulldozed or built. Rather, he makes a convincing case that the policy also transformed 'the terms by which cities were understood' and recast debates over 'the impacts of modernism, progress, public and private power, and cold war ideology on culture, politics and social life.'"—New York Times
"In prose that balances academic rigor and storytelling Mr. Zipp makes his case with a compelling re-creation of the postwar historical moment. Manhattan Projects takes long strides toward rescuing urban renewal from today's regnant discourse, which brushstrokes the monolithic towers that are now our visual touchstones for poverty as the work of hubris at best and, at worst, anti-poor and anti-urban."—New York Observer
"Zipp offers a fresh perspective on this dispiriting tale. Unlike many of his scholarly predecessors, who regarded the anti-urban agenda of policy makers as a given (why else would they have so destroyed our cities?), Mr. Zipp tells his story from the point of view of policy makers who loved cities and who thought they were making a 'benevolent intervention'...compelling...[An] absorbing account."—Wall Street Journal
"Zipp's rigorous, thoughtful, and careful argument is a guide out of the intellectual dead end represented by the conventional narrative of urban renewal. He both reframes much of our existing knowledge of the subject and then adds to it with details that directly and indirectly cast the planning history of twentieth-century New York in a fresh and convincing light. This is a masterpiece of research, synthesis, and persuasion."—Journal of Urban History
"Manhattan Projects is a significant and welcome contribution...[A] rich, detailed, and well-documented historical analysis."—Journal of American History
"Samuel Zipp's gracefully-written Manhattan Projects offers detailed, well-illustrated case studies of famous urban renewal schemes to make a larger point about urban planning in modern America."—Contemporary Sociology
"Beyond his capacity for detailed research, Zipp's greatest talent as an historian may be his ability to pursue the various threads of his arguments to their conclusions, leaving the door open to the many ironies that have typified New York's conflicted history."—New York History
Vital Little Plans
The Short Works of Jane Jacobs
(Random House, 2016)
From New York’s Greenwich Village to Toronto’s Annex:
No one did more to change how we look at cities than Jane Jacobs, the visionary urbanist and economic thinker whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities started a global conversation that remains profoundly relevant more than half a century later.
Vital Little Plans is an essential companion to Death and Life and Jacobs’s other books on urbanism, economics, politics, and ethics. It offers readers a unique survey of her entire career in forty short rarely-read or unpublished pieces, following Jacobs from her young writer’s life in New York in the 1930s and 40s, to her attacks on modernist planning in the 1950s and 60s, to her iconoclastic writings on economics and ethics in Toronto between the 1970s and her death in 2006. Introductions and annotations by the editors put the writings in context, revealing how her thinking evolved and how she reflected on her life and times.
Readers will find classics here, including Jacobs’s breakout article “Downtown Is for People,” as well as lesser-known gems like her speech at the inaugural Earth Day and a host of other rare or previously unavailable essays, articles, speeches, interviews, lectures, and even one poem. Some pieces shed light on the development of her most famous insights, while others explore topics rarely dissected in her major works, from globalization to feminism to universal health care to the joys of urban cycling.
At a time when urban life is booming and people all over the world are moving to cities, the words of Jane Jacobs have never been more significant. Vital Little Plans weaves a lifetime of ideas from the most prominent urbanist of the twentieth century into a book that’s indispensable to life in the twenty-first.
Critical Acclaim:
“In Vital Little Plans, a new collection of the short writings and speeches of Jane Jacobs, one of the most influential thinkers on the built environment, editors Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring have done readers a great service.”—The Huffington Post
“A wonderful new anthology that captures [Jacobs’s] confident prose and her empathetic, patient eye for the way humans live and work together.”—The Globe and Mail
“[A timely reminder] of the clarity and originality of [Jane Jacobs’s] thought.”—Toronto Star
“[Vital Little Plans] comes to the foreground for [Jane Jacobs’s] centennial, and in a time when more of Jacobs’s prescient wisdom is needed.”—Metropolis
“[Jacobs] changed the debate on urban planning. . . . As [Vital Little Plans] shows, she never stopped refining her observations about how cities thrived.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Vital Little Plans gathers an excellent range of Jacobs’s thinking for both new readers and those who haven’t picked her up since being assigned The Death and Life of Great American Cities in college. . . . These short essays and lectures present a startling breadth of ideas, and an unflagging advocacy not just for the built environment, but for the human struggles within it.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Jane Jacobs saw the city like no other, and her observational genius, practical wisdom, and moral courage are on full display here, making this brilliantly curated book essential reading. With our cities facing unprecedented sustainability and affordability challenges, we need to listen to Jacobs more than ever.”—Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted
“In these stirring pages, Jane Jacobs shows herself once more to have been the keenest observer of the urban condition. Her vision of people-focused cities that are places, and not merely spaces, remains both prescient and relevant for planners, policy makers, and ordinary people today.”—Janette Sadik-Khan, former NYC transportation commissioner
“It’s one thing to bring important ideas to the world, quite another to do it with such wit and subtlety. This volume reminds us what a crackling great writer Jane Jacobs was.”—James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere
“This might be the very best of Jane Jacobs’s books. The articles and speeches collected here are terrific summaries of her thoughts about the marvelous complexities of cities and how we might respond to city challenges to our best advantage.”—John Sewell, former mayor of Toronto