California and the New Suburban History

Becky M. Nicolaides. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xviii + 412 pp. Notes and index. $65.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper).

United States labor and urban history have of late enjoyed a compelling relationship. Each has drawn from the other, and though at times the borrowing has felt unsatisfying, it has also produced moments of deep mutual engagement. Becky Nicolaides's My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 embraces the best of this scholarly trend. Nicolaides raises the bar in the dialogue between urbanists and labor historians by combining a study of working-class culture and economic life with a study of city building and suburbanization. The result is a dense and provocative local history of suburban California politics that illuminates the origins of the rightward turn in postwar national political culture. Nicolaides goes where few urbanists have yet to tread—into the suburban bungalows of the nation's housing boom in the fifties and sixties—to recover the ideological and material foundations of suburbanization as a place-centered process. At the same time, My Blue Heaven raises a set of questions about the historiographical boundaries that divide labor, urban, and African American history. ¹

Nicolaides joins two historical literatures that have developed independently and have rarely spoken to one another. The first is the culture and community scholarship that emerged alongside the new labor history in the 1980s and early 1990s. These works—James Barrett's Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 (1987) and Kathy Peiss's Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in New York City, 1880-1920 (1986), to name two representative examples—emphasize non-workplace-centered strategies of economic survival and the relative weakness of a coherent working-class identity among the nation's laborers. ² The second literature follows Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985) and Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988) in crediting homeownership with drawing many of those same workers into a bourgeois ideological consensus, particularly after World War II. Nicolaides thus offers a familiar story of American working-class voluntarism and conservatism in a rich new setting with important insights for twentieth-century historians.

My Blue Heaven focuses on the development of a single suburban California city, South Gate, in Los Angeles County's Alameda Corridor. Stretching from the southeastern edge of downtown L.A. to the city of Long Beach, the Alameda Corridor landscape confounded midcentury American suburban clichés. Here were working-class suburbs—including South Gate, but also Watts, Bell Gardens, Huntington Park, Lynwood, and Compton—that in the 1920s and 1930s had few of the markers of bourgeois ornamentation that characterized the nation's garden city aesthetic. These were places where working families built their own homes, grew vegetable gardens, tended chickens and goats, and lived in their garages. Here, too, by the 1920s was an industrial world of sprawling factories, assembly plants, mills, foundries, and machine shops, belching forth smoke into the L.A. sky and workers onto the streets and parking lots at shift change. By World War II, the Alameda Corridor was one of the principal industrial districts in the nation, helping to make Los Angeles County a manufacturing center on a par with Detroit and Chicago. Spatially suburban but industrialized, South Gate and its neighboring communities were not the oases of white-collar commuters idealized by American opinion-makers, booster imagineers, and cultural critics. ³

What South Gate lacked in middle-class decoration and romantic pastoralism, it made up for in working-class functionality, according to Nicolaides. Working families, largely WASP migrants from the upper South and Midwest, valued suburban land in the 1920s and 1930s for its "use value" rather than for its "commodity value." Homeownership, especially on...