Herbert J. Gans, who upended myths on urban and suburban life, dies at 97

Boston Globe

23-04-2025

His writing was a tour of Americana from the postwar years into the new millennium, exploring race relations, economic problems, highbrow and popular cultures, nostalgia for the rural past, and a plethora of provocative questions: Why do the poor get poorer and the rich richer? Can Jews and Italians get along in Canarsie? Is landmarks preservation elitist? And what's to be done about the New York Yankees?
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He was also a liberal activist, opposing the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration's efforts to muzzle the press, testifying for comedian Lenny Bruce in his 1964 obscenity trial, campaigning for the release of imprisoned sociologists in communist Hungary, and serving as a consultant to antipoverty programs and city planners.
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When racial riots racked urban America, he drafted part of the Kerner Commission's 1967 report on the causes and testified that the uprisings were due, above all, to segregation and unemployment, and that only a national jobs program, desegregation, and income-redistribution efforts could solve the crisis.
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As president of the American Sociological Association in 1988-89, he urged colleagues to get closer to their subjects and to write more intelligibly. Sociological studies had long been academically insular, dense with statistics and scientific jargon. But Dr. Gans set an example by inserting himself into the communities and institutions he studied, becoming what he called a 'participant-observer,' and writing lucid prose for ordinary readers.
During a bad stretch for the Yankees in 1984, for example, a colleague might have intoned: 'Available evidence would tend to indicate that it is not unreasonable to suppose that a professional athletic entity domiciled in the Bronx, with an ownership in large part under the aegis of a powerful individual, might be elevated to its previous status by transference to the very municipality in which its activity takes place.'
Dr. Gans, in The New York Times, wrote: 'New York City ought to take over the New York Yankees.'
His findings were often surprising. For his first book, 'The Urban Villagers: Groups and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans' (1962), he immersed himself in the life of Boston's working-class West End. The area was later bulldozed for 'slum clearance,' and he lamented the destruction of a vibrant community. A half-century later, the book still stood as a classic statement against indiscriminate urban renewal.
Similarly, Dr. Gans challenged conventional wisdom about postwar suburbia in 'The Levittowners' (1967). For more than two years, he lived in Levittown, N.J., later renamed Willingboro, and concluded that the residents had strong social, economic and political commitments, and that notions of suburbanites as conformist, anxious, bored, cultureless, insecure social climbers were wrong.
Dr. Gans, a regular contributor to the Times who also wrote for The Washington Post, Commentary, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, and many professional journals, explored in 'Deciding What's News' (1979) how television networks and newsmagazines determined what to cover. Over a span of 15 years, he spent many months with journalists at 'CBS Evening News,' 'NBC Nightly News,' Newsweek, and Time.
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He found that America's news was more about politics than government and personalities than issues; that deadlines left little time for context or accuracy; and that beat reporters often censored themselves to protect sources. He recommended larger staffs, wider perspectives and, to cover the extra costs, federal subsidies such as those given by the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.
In 'The War Against the Poor' (1995), Dr. Gans scathingly attacked attitudes of the affluent and middle classes and words used to stereotype and stigmatize the poor by questioning their morality and values. One culprit, he said, was 'underclass,' with its connotation of permanence, and its presumption that all the men are lazy, all the women immoral, and all the poor too undisciplined to escape welfare dependencies.
Returning to the media in 'Democracy and the News' (2003), he argued that traditional journalism and an informed citizenry had been weakened by proliferating internet and cable news outlets, the growth of big corporations and special interest groups, and media monoliths obsessed with profits. He prescribed greater newsroom diversity and stiffer walls between editorial and business sides of news organizations.
In his 2008 book, 'Imagining America in 2033: How the Country Put Itself Together After Bush,' Dr. Gans depicted a utopian future that had overcome many economic, military, and social problems with progressive ideals and a more humane approach to democracy.
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Herbert Julius Gans was born May 7, 1927, in Cologne, Germany, to Carl and Elise (Plaut) Gans. As World War II enveloped Europe, he and his parents fled to England in 1939 and to America a year later. He joined a generation devoted to radio series such as 'Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy' and to entertainer Jack Benny, as well as Saturday afternoons at the movies: a double feature, two serials, and six cartoons for a dime.
'My interest in American popular culture grew out of coming from Nazi Germany, where there was no such culture,' he told the Times in 1985. 'We came in 1940, moved to Chicago, started out poor. I remember reading a year's comic strips in newspapers the landlady had in her basement.'
He became an American citizen in 1945 and served 14 months in the Army. At the University of Chicago, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1947 and a master's in 1950, he studied under sociologists Earl Johnson and Everett Hughes, who stressed the importance of urban field work, and began a lifelong friendship with David Riesman, a Harvard University sociologist whose 1950 book, 'The Lonely Crowd,' was a classic study of postwar conformity.
After several years as a planner for public and private agencies, in which he planned two towns in the Mesabi Iron Range of Northeast Minnesota, he taught urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania from 1953-64 and earned his doctorate there in 1957, studying primarily with Martin Meyerson, a prominent scholar of urban design.
His first marriage, to artist Iris Lezak, ended in divorce. In 1967, he married Louise Gruner, a lawyer, who survives him. In addition to her and their son, David, he leaves a grandson.
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Dr. Gans taught sociology at Columbia Teachers College from 1964-69 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1969-71, then joined the Columbia University faculty. He became professor emeritus when he retired in 2007.
His letters to the editor were often published by the Times. In 1986, he took issue with an editorial, 'Dear DC Comics,' suggesting that Clark Kent's future in journalism might be as an editorial writer. No, no, no, Dr. Gans wrote, Superman would soon be caught in conflicts of interest -- battling villains supported by the newspaper.
'Better make him a movie reviewer,' he suggested. 'Or how about the obits?'
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