He was a Yale professor who served on New Haven’s Board of Aldermen, and wrote a book about it.
His name was William Lee Miller. When he taught “social ethics” at Yale, in the mid-1960s, the 15th Ward was in East Rock (where Miller lived). And New Haven was at the epicenter of a national experiment in saving cities. In turn, the nation was undertaking an experiment in building the “Great Society” based in part on the experiment in New Haven.
If you were William Lee Miller, wouldn’t you run for office and then write a book about it?
Miller died Saturday. He was 86. After his stint in New Haven, he went on to teach at other universities and write other books, books that received more renown than his New Haven book, which was entitled The Fifteenth Ward And The Great Society. (Read about his career here.)
But his New Haven book was worth reading as a way of understanding what it was like to be idealistic, smart, and living here in the era of then-Mayor Dick Lee, the nation’s “model” mayor when it came tearing down slum housing to build concrete towers and trying out poverty-fighting programs like legal aid and Head Start.
In other words, Miller swooned. He idolized, or at least idealized, Dick Lee. And he saw New Haven’s destined-for-triumph anti-poverty crusade writ large in Lyndon Johnson’s White House. His book sang the praises of Lee’s efforts. It wasn’t as famous as Alan Talbot’s The Mayor’s Game. It wasn’t as influential as another Yale prof’s paean to Lee, Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? But it was more readable (real-life anecdotes about governing in back rooms) without losing its broad view of the hopes people were pinning on bulldozers and social engineering.
“Like many another liberals,” Kirkus Reviews wrote at the time in reviewing Miller’s book, “he is still rancorously titling at the bugaboos of the 1964 Presidential campaign, particularly in the field of civil rights. Miller himself is not unintelligent, and he professes to support the two-party system, so it is uninspiring to find him lumping all the Goldwater supporters into ‘the unintelligent right.’”
With the benefit of post-euphoria hindsight, future generations of idealistic Yale scholars would take a more skeptical view of those experiments and the machine politics undergirding them. (Dahl too developed some doubts about the democratic jewel he beheld in his younger years.) But that’s not the point. The point was that you couldn’t help believing back then. And not every scholar finds himself caught up in the most interesting urban experiment of his time in the streets right outside his door.