When America Became Suburban

Preface

ix P re f a ce In the decades after World War II, America’s identity was radically altered. Spurred by the return of economic prosperity, the extension of the nation’s global dominance, and—most importantly for the story I will tell—the simultaneous decline of the industrial cities and the rise of the suburbs, Americans reimagined their country and what it meant to be an American. The United States and the world had changed. In the process of disengaging from its industrial past, manual work was becoming less valued. Office buildings displaced factories as the era’s dominant urban image; consumption surpassed production. The industrial landscape receded from view as people abandoned the large, central cities and small towns for new bedroom communities, embraced more leisure-oriented lifestyles, and rearranged their daily existence around a conspicuous and status-conscious consumption. Living differently, Americans began to think differently of themselves. In that special period between the end of World War II and the recession of the mid-1970s, what I call the short American Century, the United States became the most prosperous of nations, the first suburban society, and a global power. It also discarded its industrial cities. At the root of these changes was a rupture in previous patterns of urbanization. This rupture triggered consequences that redefined the dominant way of life and eventually changed the nation’s global image. The decline of the industrial city set in motion a series of events that led eventually to a reimagining of the national identity. A reinvented America, now anchored in the postwar suburbs, was x Preface projected globally. Domestic prosperity and suburbanization figured prominently in the ideological contest known as the Cold War. The United States mobilized its suburban lifestyle and consumer culture to tout the superiority of capitalist democracy over communist dictatorship and thereby widen the ideological divide between itself and the Soviet Union. Less often noted is that this narrative enabled the country to distinguish itself from its European origins. Rejecting the old-world culture associated with European cities, Americans forged a unique identity out of the suburbs, the consumption that made suburban life both desirable and possible, and the abandonment of the industrial centers. Positioned in relationship to Cold War rhetoric and juxtaposed against the country’s European heritage, the new national narrative added another argument to the cultural artifact of American exceptionalism . In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, freedom from religious persecution and feudal autocracy had set the United States apart from the societies of Europe. In the late nineteenth century, with industrialization rampant, opportunity and the absence of socialism were the ostensible markers of its uniqueness. In the twentieth century, a reluctant “welfare state,” persistent racism, and an “American way of life” separated the nation from its European counterparts.1 These many claims to exceptionalism are all rooted in the vastness of the nation’s territory and the riches it contains. The great size of the United States has acted as a political safety valve and a spur to waves of investment and economic growth; it has also enabled the country’s inhabitants to discover frontiers on a regular basis. Westward expansion , industrialization, rural depopulation, and mass suburbanization are only a few of the innumerable ways in which geography has shaped the country’s politics, served its economy, and harbored its social diversity . The frequent reconfiguration of human settlements strengthened the conviction that America was different from other nations. Yet in certain ways the industrial cities were unexceptional. Other countries—England, Germany, France—had similar experiences in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, experiences that often preceded analogous developments in the United States. And their industrial cities faltered after World War II, though the scale of their plight was not as great. What they did not suffer was the mass suburbanization that occurred as industrial cities declined after World War II or the challenge that such wrenching events posed to national identity.2 The industrial cities had brought the United States to commanding heights. After World War II, the global economy had little use for xi Preface them. Novel forms of real estate investment and new types of suburban communities further contributed to their redundancy. Developers, households, retailers, and commercial investors turned their attention to the bedroom suburbs. There, on the peripheries of the older cities, they created a unique way of life, one independent of the constraints but...