When America Became Suburban

6. Ways of Life

122 The consumption that drove the postwar economy was, in style and content, distinctly suburban. Its novelties included greater individual mobility, increased leisure, higher rates of product obsolescence, and a tighter bond between status and consumption. As the famous housing developer William J. Levitt noted about postwar suburbanization, the suburban homebuyer is “not just buying a house, he’s buying a way of life.”1 Much as it had in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the United States was undergoing a profound transformation, not from a rural to an urban society, as then, but from an urban to a suburban one. The country’s dominant identity was in flux. Of course, no distinct boundary divides that which is urban from that which is suburban.2 Correspondingly, no unequivocal distinction can be made between a city-based and a suburb-based way of life. Yet a new way of living was spreading throughout the country. Its roots were in the suburbs, and its qualities shaped by the people who lived there. Cities were also included. Their residents adopted similar buying habits and even a few “suburban” daily activities. The transition from an urban to a suburban way of life is the element that connects parasitic urbanization to national identity and to claims about American exceptionalism. No longer shaped by its industrial past, America would now draw its identity from the suburbs. The claim that the dominant way of life in the United States changed from urban to suburban, however, might well seem disingenuous. The famed ambivalence toward cities, at times becoming dislike, would 6 Wa ys o f L i fe 123 Ways of Life seem to undermine any such assertion. If an urban way of life was never embraced, how could it subsequently have been cast aside? Americans never so loved their cities that they celebrated city life with fervor. Neither was there a specific and unique urban way of life to be defended as the suburbs rolled across the landscape. What changed were tastes and habits, consumer preferences, social norms, political ideas, forms of business organization, and varieties of popular culture. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these were all centered in and associated with the large industrial cities. How people lived, at least how the largest grouping of people lived, was anchored there. Prior to World War II, cities dominated national life. They were the sites of popular and elite culture and the sources of news and ideas, and they had a major influence on politics. These cities were also the engines of growth and prosperity for the countryside. If one wanted fame and fortune, if one wanted to be successful, one went to the city.3 How this way of life was interpreted in any particular place varied widely. People far removed from the city—living relatively isolated in the hills of North Dakota or in the marshlands of Florida—crafted an existence whose connection to a city was tenuous at best. Those living in the streetcar suburbs of Boston could hardly avoid it, while residents of inner-city neighborhoods were urban to the core. The nation was inseparable from its cities. It was in this sense that the postwar era transformed the country’s identity by establishing a “suburban ethos.” The transition was neither sudden nor complete, neither sharply de- fined nor indiscernible, neither immutable nor endlessly malleable. Yet it would be wrong to assert without any doubt, as one observer did, that “there are no grounds for believing that suburbia has created a distinctive style of life or a new social character for Americans.”4 Suburban Life In the early twentieth century, small-town life challenged rural life for the position of preferred alternative to living in the big cities. The countryside held fewer and fewer opportunities. Notwithstanding, Americans retained a strong attachment to rural-agrarian ideals and a sense of themselves as free, unhampered by legal constraints, and independent . For such people, the city represented closure and restraint. Rural life, by contrast, allowed Americans to own land and to insulate themselves from the institutions of society. By the early twentieth century , however, rural life was simply untenable for most people. A half century later, Americans began another struggle to reconcile the places 124 Ways of Life available to them with the pursuit of the good life. In the postwar period, one observer commented, Americans wanted “the economic...