When America Became Suburban

7. America’s Global Project

144 Not only was the suburban way of life essential to America’s postwar prosperity, it also contributed to the crafting of America’s global dominance. Suburbia’s consumer-based lifestyle epitomized the freedom and prosperity that figured prominently in the ideological construction of the United States as an international power. The urban way of life held much less appeal. Cities were vulnerable to atomic-bomb attack, conjured up images of socialistic public housing, and harbored cells of communist subversion. The spreading slums and growing numbers of poor African American families combined with the seediness of industrial and commercial districts to lower cities’ propaganda value even further. By contrast, the suburbs figured prominently in U.S. global projections that were designed to create a “better world abroad and a happier society at home.”1 One consequence was to further entrench the parasitic urbanization that was undermining the industrial cities. The global dominance of the United States after World War II, a dominance that remained intact until the mid-1970s, was not about subjugation or territory. Neither colonialism nor expansion was the goal. Rather, the United States hoped to establish itself at the center of an international economy based on free trade. It would occupy the position of world political leader with distinction, and it would spread democracy and publicize the American way of life. “More than ever before—or since—Americans came to believe that they could shape the international scene in their own image.”2 The key was the casting of the country as a model to be emulated. Desire rather than fear would drive global dominance, with the United States portrayed as a 7 A m e r i ca’s G l o b a l P ro j e c t 145 America’s Global Project place of freedom, democracy, and economic opportunity. To achieve legitimate status in the eyes of the world, the nation needed to ground its values in a distinctively American way of life. The suburbs were the solution. They stood for achievement at home—the realization of the American Dream—and American exceptionalism in the world. Manufacturing had elevated the United States to the commanding heights it enjoyed in the postwar era. Industrial prowess enabled the country to triumph in foreign wars while reaping the benefits of economic growth at home. Yet when the postwar era began, the industrial cities were in poor shape, rundown and increasingly abandoned by factory owners and well-to-do, mostly white households. Heavy manufacturing eventually collapsed, and light manufacturing moved to the suburbs along with even more white families, retail stores, and, later, office activities. With African Americans flowing to the inner cities and with slums more and more the dominant image of urban life, the industrial cities were unworthy of foreign envy. How could the country’s industrial cities—polluted, shabby, and chaotic—ever compare with such capitals of Europe as Paris, Madrid, and Amsterdam or compete with the history and civilization they embodied?3 The industrial cities were additionally tainted by America’s racial dilemma. African American ghettos and entrenched poverty anchored the stigma of urban decline and eliminated the older cities as candidates for international publicity. In addition, contemporary African Americans brought forth memories of slavery, the Civil War, and the decades of institutionalized discrimination that had followed emancipation . During the Cold War, Soviet propaganda “delighted in publicizing news of American racial discrimination and persecution.”4 Racial inequity was the country’s shame, and it was not easily dissociated from the large, industrial cities. In 1954, the editors of a national magazine commented on the spreading slums of Washington, D.C. Their ruminations led them to the intersection of urban decay, race, and Cold War ideology. After noting the lack of heat, lights, and toilets in the homes and the overabundance of rats, the editors noted that “a favorite Communist propaganda picture shows some dirty Negro kids playing in a yard of garbage against a backdrop of the sharply focused Capitol dome.”5 Such irony, visual or otherwise, made Americans uncomfortable. Their vision of the nation was one of prosperity, freedom, and tolerance, and it was this vision that they hoped to project to the rest of the world. Another commentator, trading on the prevailing Cold War vocabulary of the 1950s, asked whether cities were not, in fact, un-American.6 146 America’s Global Project His question was...