(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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Alfred Bettman was born on August 26, 1873, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States, the first of four sons of Louis and Rebecca (Bloom) Bettman. His youngest brother, Gilbert, became attorney general of Ohio and a justice of the Ohio supreme court. Both parents were Jewish: the father, a clothing manufacturer, had emigrated from Germany; the mother, daughter of an emigrant from Alsace, was born in Cincinnati.
After graduating from the local Hughes High School, Bettman continued his education at Harvard, receiving the A. B. degree in 1894 and the LL. B. in 1898.
Bettman served as assistant prosecuting attorney of Hamilton County, 1909-1911, and as Cincinnati city solicitor, 1912-1913. During World War I he was appointed special assistant to the Attorney General of the United States, working in the War Emergency Division of the Justice Department. Though responsible in this position for the drafting of many wartime restraints, notably those dealing with aliens, he was deeply concerned with the protection of personal liberties and was outspoken in his denunciation of the "Red Raids" of A. Mitchell Palmer. Bettman was also concerned with improving the efficiency of criminal prosecution agencies, in order to benefit both the accused and society. In 1921, for the Cleveland Foundation Crime Survey, he pioneered in the use of "Mortality Tables, " which traced individual cases from arrest to final disposition. By showing how frequently prosecution failed at the pretrial stage, the tables exposed the lax and often corrupt administration of criminal law. Bettman made a similar study in 1930 for the National Commission of Law Observance, and his methodology was widely adopted in the reform of criminal administration.
From his success as a lawyer Bettman moved to greater prominence in another field, city planning. The leaders of the American planning movement, a coalition of landscape architects, housing reformers, and community workers, early recognized the need for legal and institutional weapons in their battle and turned to lawyers for aid. Bettman had first become interested in planning while serving as city solicitor, and in 1917 he joined the United City Planning Committee. That year the committee successfully lobbied for an enabling act, drafted by Bettman, which allowed cities in Ohio to create planning boards. Bettman was chiefly responsible for another Ohio statute which in 1923 gave cities with master plans the right to regulate subdivisions within three miles of their boundaries. Appointed to the advisory committee on housing and zoning of the United States Department of Commerce, Bettman, along with Edward M. Bassett, the younger Frederick Law Olmsted, and others, helped prepare its influential Standard State Zoning Enabling Act of 1924, which encouraged the establishment of zoning commissions, and its Standard City Enabling Act of 1927, which suggested that the powers of zoning be transferred to city planning commissions and emphasized the need for a closer relationship between long-range planning and zoning.
Of more importance, however, was Bettman's role in upholding the constitutionality of zoning. When a federal district court declared a zoning ordinance unconstitutional, in the case of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company, Bettman volunteered to prepare a brief as amicus curiae when the case went before the Supreme Court in 1926. His argument that a zoning ordinance which barred the conversion of residential property to commercial and industrial use was an extension of the common law doctrine of public nuisance, rather than an exercise of the power of eminent domain, helped persuade the Court to declare zoning a legitimate expression of the police power, a decision that paved the way for the widespread adoption of land-use regulation. Though the resulting zoning ordinances served mainly to enhance property values and protect the homogeneity of respectable suburbs, Bettman always stressed that zoning should be used as a constructive instrument in the implementation of a comprehensive plan.
Bettman participated in almost every phase of planning and at all levels of government; he became chairman of the Cincinnati Planning Commission in 1930 and of the Ohio Valley Regional Planning Commission in 1936, served on the board of directors of the American City Planning Institute, and was president of the National Conference on City Planning (1932) and first president of the American Society of Planning Officials (1934). He also served in 1937 as the United States representative on the executive committee of the International Congress for Housing and Town Planning, and he spent many of his summers at the Town and Country Planning summer school in England. Bettman envisioned official planning agencies as largely research and advisory organizations, detached from the administrative and legislative spheres of government. Their major task was the preparation of an advisory master plan, which would coordinate and adjust the various interests of the community.
Bettman was a member of the City Planning Committee of President Hoover's Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership (1931), legal consultant to the TVA, regional chairman of the National Resources Planning Board, and, for many years, counsel to the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Washington, D. C. In 1945, while returning to Cincinnati by train from Washington, D. C. , he died of heart failure at Altoona, Pennsylvania. He was buried in the United Jewish Cemetery, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
Despite this somewhat static view of the public planning function, however, Bettman was himself flexible, undogmatic, and action-oriented. Patient, tolerant, vigorous of mind, and with a self-deprecating humor, Bettman never allowed his involvement in preparing legislation to hide his enduring concern for the individual citizen.
On June 20, 1904, Alfred Bettman married Lillian Wyler; there were no children.
