Читать книгу Summer of Shadows - Jonathan Knight - Страница 15

The Best Location in the Nation. It was a term that not only rolled off the tongue with a confident cadence, but also fit the city it described like a smooth leather glove.

The bold, iconic aspect of the phrase originated by accident. In 1944, the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company launched a marketing campaign to attract new businesses to the area. Its slogan, cooked up by executive Frank Ryan for full-page ads in national publications, proclaimed Cleveland and northeast Ohio to be “the best location in the nation for many industries,” with the subhead, “No other area in the U.S. offers this unique combination of advantages.” The New York Times originally refused to publish the ad on the grounds that no area could support such a claim. The Illuminating Company provided the Times with its research and invited the paper to further investigate the statement. The Times did, and then published the ad.

Ironically, the campaign gained more attention in Cleveland than in the targeted cities. Editors at the Cleveland papers quickly adapted and modified the slogan in their copy. The final portion of the phrase was neatly omitted, leaving just “the best location in the nation.” The words made Cleveland feel proud of itself, providing a verbal emblem for what its citizens already believed.

The initial purpose of the campaign was to mirror the city’s dramatic population growth. In the last half of the nineteenth century, Cleveland had grown from a Midwestern wagon stop to one of the largest cities in the country. Then, as immigrants flooded across the ocean at the dawn of the new century, Cleveland’s population again quadrupled, launching it from the nation’s tenth-largest city to the fifth. Though the social and economic scars left by the Great Depression were still evident, as what would soon be remembered as the golden decade of the 1950s reached its midpoint, Cleveland, now the seventh-largest city in America, could lay claim to such a term and defend its position. The post-war economic boom of the late 1940s had helped Cleveland rebound, and a flurry of civic projects led by Mayor Thomas Burke had resulted in the construction of a new lakefront airport and an efficient rapid transit system. It seemed also symbolic that Cleveland earned notoriety as the best-lighted metropolitan area in the world in the mid-fifties, with more than a thousand miles of well-lighted streets and highways. After all, it was in Cleveland in 1879 that the first public electric street lighting was activated. As the Saturday Evening Post declared, Cleveland was “the city that forecasts the future,” further exemplified that summer when it became one of the first cities in America to see its postmen use automobiles to deliver the mail.

For all its innovation, however, Cleveland still mirrored the past.

By the 1950s, Cleveland remained one of the most culturally segregated cities in America. From the outside, it gave Cleveland a European, cosmopolitan flavor. Its neighborhoods were still lit up by religious parades and social events, and the spires of countless churches and synagogues were sprinkled along the Cuyahoga Valley. Yet unlike the melting-pot neighborhoods created out of necessity in New York, Cleveland was splintered into very clear communities: Jewish or Catholic on religious grounds, or Italian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, or Irish on ethnic ones. Early in an initial conversation with a new acquaintance, the natural question would inevitably come up: “What are you?” These communities often co-existed side-by-side—Germans flocked to Lakewood and Rocky River, Poles to Garfield Heights and Parma, Jews to Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights, Czechs to Brecksville and Seven Hills, and so on. But rarely would they cross their invisible boundaries. A Polish girl bringing home an Italian boy, for example, would create a family scandal that would be whispered about for decades.

The suburbs were generally more mixed, but remained just as steadfast as the neighborhoods in the city in their intolerance for allowing blacks, who were essentially quarantined in a tremendous cluster of poverty on Cleveland’s East Side. If word trickled into a suburban neighborhood that a black family was considering buying a home, many white families pulled up their stakes and moved elsewhere. Property values would instantly drop, leading to the unspoken agreement for anyone selling his house to not post a “for sale” sign in the yard. Realtors would spread the word and market the homes to the “right kind of people,” and the entire neighborhood could rest easy.

It was one of the industrial capitals of the world, supplying steel, textiles, and other fossil fuels of manufacturing. More than 750 Cleveland companies were engaged in foreign trade, and exporting brought in more than $500 million to the city annually. And Cleveland’s strength was in tune with the robust economy around the United States. In January, U.S. Steel reported its most profitable year since before World War I. General Motors announced a $1 billion expansion program—a total more than the entire net worth of the city of Cleveland. That spring, the stock market hit peaks not seen in nearly a quarter-century, a drive spearheaded by the success of railroad companies, and would remain lofty throughout the summer. The nation’s jobless rate was at a record low and the American dream was never more vivid. There were plenty of good jobs in industry and sales for men, who went off to work knowing that their wives would handle everything on the homefront. One of the few domestic debates that surfaced was reflected by an article in the Plain Dealer’s Sunday magazine that spring: “Should Wives Cook Breakfast?” followed by another a few weeks later: “Should Women Let Their Brains Show?”

Overseas, the conflict between North and South Korea had finally come to a close after American intervention. Still, the threat of communist domination hung over the globe like a shadow. Americans opened their newspapers in April to the first photographs of the test detonation of a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean. Official government films of the test were broadcast on television—the latest breakthrough in domestic technology. The images sent a shudder down the spine of America, particularly when the magnitude of the weapon was put into context. If a hydrogen bomb were dropped above the Terminal Tower downtown, the Cleveland Press helpfully speculated, the total destruction would cover a diameter of eight miles. The Press included a map of Greater Cleveland to outline the precise parameters of doomsday: eastbound to East Boulevard, westward to West 117th Street, and as far south as Cuyahoga Heights.

It was this kind of crackerjack reporting that had made the Press the greatest newspaper not only in Cleveland, but the entire state—evidenced by its catchphrase printed below the banner of each issue: “The Newspaper That Serves Its Readers.” In 1954, its readers numbered better than 311,000, giving it the largest circulation in Ohio and among the top fifteen in the United States. Every weekday, seven out of ten families in Cuyahoga County bought a copy of the Press. And the prince of the paper was its longtime editor, Louis Seltzer, a strong-willed, self-made pillar of the community who channeled so much power among the city’s movers and shakers that he’d earned the nickname “Mr. Cleveland.”

It had been a remarkable journey for Seltzer. Born in 1897 in a three-room house behind a fire station on the western bank of the Cuyahoga River, he once described himself as “a bald-pated, dried-up little dude at whom nobody might be apt to look a second time.” Short and slender, his outward appearance may have been ordinary, but inside he was as unique an individual as Cleveland had ever seen. High-strung and constantly energetic, he would vacuum his entire house late at night in an attempt to tire himself out to the point that he could sleep. He spent little time behind his desk, often hovering through the newsroom like a vulture, reading stories over his reporters’ shoulders as they typed them while nibbling on candy and jelly beans they’d leave out for him.