Abstract
In 2002, Robert Beauregard published Voices of Decline, a brilliant examination of the gutting of U.S. cities during the postwar decades, and more specifically the rhetoric surrounding this fate. When America Became Suburban serves as a companion piece to that volume, exploring the flip side of center city decay. The immediate decades following the Second World War, which Beauregard identifies as “the short American Century,” were characterized by a prodigious expansion of the suburbs, which became the signature spaces of a newly constituted postwar American “way of life.” As with Voices, Beauregard is covering ground very familiar to most urban scholars; what he adds in both books is a remarkable breadth of observation and flair for synthesis, most evident in his deft bridging of the standard divide between cultural and political economic analyses of urban process.
It is significant that Beauregard titled his book When America Became Suburban rather than How. Downplaying issues of process (and for the most part intentionally ignoring key actors), the book addresses the significance of suburbanization in the context of its historical moment, seeing it as a central component of broad social outcomes including the unprecedented economic expansion of the postwar decades, incipient globalization and deindustrialization, and the ideological struggles of the Cold War. Beauregard is specific in his periodization of the short American Century, which begins with Bretton Woods and ends with the onset of the economic recession of 1973–1975. The designation American Century derives from Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce's diagnosis of the postwar global circumstance, with the United States establishing itself as the leading economic power of the capitalist world, as well as the military and ideological bulwark against the encroachments of the Soviet Union.
Beauregard notes that the social forces spurring population and investment decline in the cores of old industrial cities were not limited to the United States, since similar patterns appeared to varying degrees in major cities throughout Western Europe. Nonetheless, “the suburban way of life was ideologically and substantively ‘clean’ and uniquely American. No other country engaged in mass suburbanization. Some… had ‘new towns’… but none had Levittowns” (p. 146). The forces spurring this suburban expansion included postwar affluence that allowed for a far more robust consumer economy than could be found in the still–wounded countries of Europe, a balance of government policy favorable to sprawling development, and most especially patterns of racial exclusion peculiar to the United States, with center cities increasingly racialized and thus stigmatized.
Before the Second World War, industrial cities were the core spaces of U.S. prosperity. Moreover, urban expansion followed a pattern that was largely distributive, that is, “most cities and towns had benefited from steady increases in population and geographical expansion prior to [World War II]” (p. 19). During the short American Century, conversely, the suburbs (and their associated new consumer requirements, from automobiles to patio furniture) became the new engines of economic growth. Moreover, expansion patterns shifted from distributive to parasitic. Suburban growth came at the expense of the core city, and sprawling Sunbelt cities grew at the expense of the industrial powers of the Northeast and the Midwest. A collection of factors drove this parasitic dynamic, including housing policy (particularly via FHA mortgage subsidization), the arrest of immigration dating back to the Depression era (to be resumed in the 1970s), white flight, and industrial redistribution (particularly via defense contracting). Left behind was a core city increasingly bereft of capital and social resources, stigmatized as derelict and disorderly. Beauregard argues that increasingly abandoned as well were the pluralist and cosmopolitan dimensions of the American identity, erased by the class and racial homogeneity of suburban subdivisions.
More and more, the suburbs would become the whitewashed face of the postwar American dream, in which “‘suburbia would serve as a bulwark against communism and class conflict’ blocking subversion and dissolving any lingering class divisions” (p. 169). As Beauregard presents it, the suburbs were the site of the constitution of postwar hegemony, both at home and abroad. The particular style of consumer affluence—scorned by intellectuals wedded to the metropole but hungered for by a middle class scarred by depression and war—was a powerful force for social integration of the white population. Suburban ranch homes provided a buffer against powerful postwar anxieties, including the looming threat of nuclear attack (which would after all most likely target dense urban cores) and the specter of civil rights and race mixing. Moreover, the affluence of the suburbs was promoted as the latest proof of American Exceptionalism (“No man who owns his own home and lot can be a Communist,” insisted William J. Levitt), leveraged to demonstrate the manifest superiority of U.S. style capitalism, most famously in Nixon's “kitchen debate” with Kruschev, a watershed that Beauregard revisits incisively.
Like Voices of Decline, When America Became Suburban opens up fresh perspectives on what might have seemed a thoroughly exhausted topic. of course, much of the material will be familiar to serious urban scholars, and there is some unnecessary redundancy within the text itself. Still, Beauregard's clarity of thought and exceptional talent for synthesis will reward even readers thoroughly immersed in the topic, while providing what may well become a new standard for classroom instruction.