Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (15 page)

She didn’t formally apply for her next job until November 27, 1943, but it was apparently
all but hers by the time she did. The day before, in Scranton, she’d seen her father’s old colleague, Dr. Ernest Kiesel, and gotten the medical exam a government job required: blood pressure 104 over 82, no venereal disease, no deformities, normal in every respect—except for her nearsightedness, which was worse than 20–200 in both eyes but correctible to near normal with glasses. She set $2,600 as the lowest annual pay she’d accept—a bit more than what she made at
Iron Age.
She preferred work in New York, but said she’d consider an appointment outside the U.S., including Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, or South and Central America; sounds like twenty-seven-year-old Jane was up for an adventure. But
not
in Washington, D.C.; she wouldn’t move there. She signed the form. She swore to defend the Constitution and not to overthrow the government, and by the 29th was on the payroll of the U.S.
Office of War Information.

Formed six months after Pearl Harbor, the OWI employed thousands. It designed posters, produced radio series, such as
This Is Our Enemy
, about Germany, Japan, and Italy. It showed off the country’s war mobilization through newsreels on aircraft factories, women in the workforce. This was for the home front. Foreign audiences heard from the Overseas Branch. From it came documentaries and newsreels; radio broadcasts tied to the news; leaflets, newsletters, and booklets; a cartoon biography of FDR;
Victory
magazine—lavishly illustrated, slickly printed, which went to readers in neutral and friendly countries; matchbooks, with the Four Freedoms inscribed inside; “soap paper” bearing messages like “Wash off the Nazi dirt” that, dipped in water, became soap. “By the middle of 1943,” according to one account, the New York staff “worked twenty-four hours a day on hundreds of productions in scores of different languages.”

James Reston, the future star
New York Times
journalist, was part of the OWI. So were the photographer Gordon Parks and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. So was Milton Eisenhower, the general’s older brother, the OWI’s associate director. And the poet Archibald MacLeish, its assistant director. So was Jane Butzner, working out of offices of the Overseas Branch, in the stylishly ornate Argonaut Building, at the corner of West Fifty-seventh Street and Broadway, once used for automobile showrooms.

Jane wrote little biographies of American personalities in government, business, and culture. She prepared accounts showing off, as she’d write, “the magnitude of America’s war production, and vignettes illustrating the achievements, efforts and way of life of the American people.” At one point, for its Indian troops, the British needed a pamphlet about America, its history, the place of its women, its system of government. Jane did it. During her second year with the OWI, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, Iceland, and the Soviet Union became part of her beat.

In a way, her work was not unlike what she’d done at
Iron Age:
gather information, facts, and raw data, and, aiming at a particular readership, wrap it up in neat editorial parcels. Jane’s title was feature writer. She was that, all right, but just as her aunt Martha matter-of-factly listed “missionary” as her occupation during the 1930 census, so Jane, if she’d cared to, could have set down “propagandist” as hers. The word itself, which goes back to a board of cardinals that a seventeenth-century pope founded to help propagate the faith, bears a stigma, of course. It’s sinister and derogatory when it refers to an enemy, like Dr. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, spewing falsehood and hate. The stain vanishes when it’s one of our guys doing it, offering American truth, countering the lies of enemy propagandists; this, certainly, is how the men and women at the OWI saw their jobs. Moreover, that Jane and her colleagues on West Fifty-seventh Street fashioned “propaganda” doesn’t mean they made things up. Yes, noted a 1978 study of the OWI, American propagandists made selective use of the truth, shaping it to their own ends; but in their own eyes, they were “honest and forthright” about it. The playwright Robert Emmet Sherwood, director of the OWI during this period, testified before a House committee in 1942 that “the truth, coming from America,
with unmistakable American sincerity, is by far the most effective form of propaganda.” The
“strategy of truth,” you’d hear it called.

But twisted by the cruelties of war, “truth” needed special skills and sensibilities to convey forcefully. Whatever Jane wrote was being read
(in translation) not by the sort of people with whom she’d grown up in Scranton, or by friends and colleagues, but by foreigners. She had to learn to see through their eyes, as well as her own, to think herself free of the myriad assumptions she held as an American, a Pennsylvanian, a Presbyterian, a Greenwich Villager, a middle-class white person.

It was necessary for me to have gained an insight into misapprehensions concerning America current abroad; a basic understanding of which common facets of American life are totally unfamiliar abroad; facets of the American scene likely to elicit the greatest interest and admiration; and methods of giving foundation and background knowledge without becoming pedestrian.

She was describing this in uncharacteristically flat and abstract language (for a job application, later), but these were high-order skills that came easily to few.
Must I explain America’s bicameral Congress? Does my reader know what a subway is? Do I need one more apt example to drive the idea home?
As at
Iron Age
, there was always a reader before her eyes, with his or her needs, prejudices, and blind spots as central to the writing as the information itself—the two, audience and subject, locked in intimate embrace, competing for Jane’s attention—
that
was her work.

Ten months into the job Jane was tapped for what the government called “
rapid promotion”— up a civil service grade, with a 23 percent bump in salary. “Miss Butzner has developed into one of the mainstays of the feature-writing staff,” her boss Fritz Silber wrote in October 1944. He credited “her quick grasp of the propaganda job to be done, and her ability to do a fast, efficient and well-handled piece of work with any assignment given to her.” In her efficiency ratings, the familiar one-page evaluations given government workers, she earned mostly “outstanding” marks, with only a few “adequate”s. “She now handles many of the top assignments, including special psychological warfare articles for European outposts, a weekly column which is air-pouched to Lisbon, and features requested particularly for use in Spain.” Her work had received numerous plaudits. She was earnest, dug “hard and well for her stories,” took suggestions willingly, and was “exceptionally easy to work with.” The request went in on the third, and was approved by month’s end.

In wartime, things happened fast. Whole factories shot up overnight. Officers ascended through the ranks. As Jane herself would realize, the
wartime world gave her and other women opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Social constraints on women, and the Depression’s economic constraints on everyone, diminished. Much that might otherwise have hidden Jane’s abilities or hindered their flowering during these years did not. Even one of the FBI’s
Iron Age
informants had to admit that she was “
a very brilliant, intelligent young lady.” Her talents, her bristling intelligence, were plain to see.

Plain to see, at least, in her little world, at the office, or among her friends. Jane was twenty-eight. She worked for a government agency—doing fine, yes, but all within the context of an ordinary job, in an ordinary office, keeping ordinary hours for ordinarily good pay. She was still invisible to the great world of literature and ideas.

—

Later, while working for another magazine, Jane would be
dragooned into service as a model for maternity clothes that, readers were assured, could be flattering—and on Jane were. More typically, though, she wasn’t much caught up in clothes—or as her son Jim puts it, “sartorial exuberance.” Her mother was forever and always trying to get her into prettier, more stylish outfits, to pay more attention to her appearance; Mrs. Butzner’s surrogate, Betty, fretted over Jane’s choices in hair, shoes, dresses. As Jim says, “they were right” to worry, Jane being devoid of fashion sense. Her hair was light brown with glints of red, perfectly thin and straight, and mostly she left it that way. How, then, to explain the letter that Jane, one day in 1939, wrote her mother in which she noted that, while she hadn’t bought that new hat, she did “have
a new permanent wave”? Jim’s theory: “Her mother must have bribed her.”

Back in high school, Jane Butzner had been a serious swimmer; Jim remembers her from the 1950s as a beautiful diver whose swan dives from the high board riveted onlookers with their grace. She was tall, about five-nine, a real presence—“so much taller than all the women and most of the men that
the children here gawk at me,” Jane observed years later on a trip to Denmark. During the 1940s and 1950s she was slim, even svelte, hovering around 140 pounds. Much later, especially when health problems slowed her down, she grew fat and dumpy. But photos and accounts from her young and middle adulthood radiate a poised self-possession that, all by itself, can transform and elevate even ordinary looks.

Jane was not a beautiful woman, nor had she been when young. Most often, even among those who knew and loved her, the verdict was delivered as simple, straightforward fact—that, to use the formula I heard repeatedly, Jane was “not a beauty.” One of her children described her face as like a bird’s beak. She had prominent cheekbones, the unmistakably prominent Butzner nose, a receding chin, wide mouth, and eyes that, behind the glasses she always wore, were squinty and small. In a half smile masking some private joke, Jane’s face could remind you of the Mona Lisa. With scant provocation, it could dissolve into a geeky teenager’s giggle. It was a cruel fact that women were so reflexively judged by their looks, but fact it was, and the readiness with which both men and women commented on Jane’s attests to the truth of it. Of course it didn’t much matter. For once rendered, any unwelcome verdict would then almost instantly be submerged in other truths: her personality took over so immediately, her strength of intellect, her antic humor, her eloquence, that any failings of appearance were swept away—swamped, obliterated—by the proverbial “things that matter most,” and that in the case of Jane really
did
matter most. “She was not what you’d call a beautiful dame,” a friend and distant relative summed it up, “but she was
a handsome, impressive woman.”

Jane’s recollections of her years with Betty in the Village bear no whiff of loneliness—emotional, social, sexual, or otherwise. She had a good job and, beginning in late 1943, a better one. She was ten years in the city by now; she knew lots of people—editors, Columbia professors, metallurgists from
Iron Age
, friends from work or whom she met through her sister, people she knew in the Village. She and Betty lived in one of the city’s most flavorful neighborhoods, one known for relaxed social and sexual mores. Her son Jim won’t precisely characterize the relationships she had with men during these years, except to say that both his parents had what he takes care to characterize, within spoken quotation marks, as “a variety of attachments.”

One Saturday night in March 1944, Jane and Betty held a party at their new apartment at 82 Washington Place (where Willa Cather wrote her first novel in 1912). Betty was working at the huge
Grumman Aircraft complex in Bethpage, Long Island, where thousands of men and women, in ten-hour shifts, seven days a week, turned out Wildcats, F6Fs, and whatever next generation of Navy fighter plane was in the works. For Jane, getting to work was easy—if she wasn’t cycling, a straight shot
on the subway up to Columbus Circle. For Betty, it was a haul out to the Island, first the subway, then the Long Island Railroad. The lengthy commute and long work hours didn’t leave much room for socializing. For Betty and her friends at Grumman, Saturday evenings were it.

On this particular evening, one of the guests was another of Betty’s coworkers, Bob Jacobs. “
I walked in the door,” he said later, “and there she was,” Jane, “in a beautiful green woolen evening dress, and I fell in love.”

   CHAPTER 7   

AMERIKA

B
OB
—
ROBERT HYDE JACOBS JR.
—grew up in northern New Jersey, son of an engineer for the New York City subway system; at age ten, he got a chance to ride on a new subway line before it opened. In 1936, when he was nineteen, he took a bike trip through Europe, saw Nazi Germany up close. Just now, meeting Jane, he worked for Grumman, helping design aircraft components, and lived in a spare room in a house out on Long Island. It was the depths of the war. During one span of intense nonstop work—up before dawn, leaving work after dark—he never saw the sun.

He was a handsome fellow with a full head of curly dark hair and a winning smile. His father, a Cornell grad, was active in the local suburban church, and always careful to drive a fine car, which Bob was driving, sometimes too fast, by age sixteen. His first cousin, John Jacobs, who grew up on an apple farm in upstate New York, remembers Bob, in his tropical fiber suits, as effete, not sissyish, exactly, but somehow
pickier
compared to his, the gritty farmer side, of the family; he’d tease Bob, “a gentle boy,” for learning French. He was later surprised to learn that, before Jane, Bob had been romantically involved with a young artist said to be “a regular hell on wheels,” a source of consternation to Bob’s conservative family.

Now, though, it was Jane with whom Bob was abruptly and irredeemably smitten. After meeting her at the party, he asked her out for the following weekend. They wound up on the roof deck of the
Sutton Hotel on East Fifty-fifth Street east of Second Avenue, eighteen stories above the East River. There Bob proposed to her.