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Rethinking the Consensus Suburban History the Suburbs As America’S Political Battleground

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Rethinking the Consensus Suburban History the Suburbs As America’S Political Battleground Rethinking the Consensus Suburban History The Suburbs as America’s political battleground Scott Plencner Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL (11 Dec 2014) The American memory of the 1960s and 1970s is one of rapid, often violent, change. A story is told to our history students of cities racked with the violence of racial strife made all the worse by stagnation and deindustrialization. The scene of the calamity is most often the city core, a once gleaming place full of promise now abandoned and troubled by the flight of an emigrant White middle class. The suburbs fit into the story in an important way: as the destination of that White upwardly mobile class. It is a story of migration and decay, but here the story of the suburbs usually ends; or better said, here the story of the suburbs has stalled in the historiography. What is left on the fringes of the shells of the abandoned cities? If one believes critic Lewis historians have decided to put aside the tried story of Mumford, the result is “an asylum for the preservation economic and social mobility and construct a more of illusion.” He rebuked the suburbs as a childish political narrative. The suburbs, from this perspective, place, where “one might live and die without marring become less a place of refuge and ignorance, set apart 1 the image of an innocent world.” On the contrary, the from the problems associated with the cities of the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, in his The 1960’s and 1970’s and more an extension of the urban Disappearing City saw in the suburbs freedom and the political battleground. These proponents of “the new fulfillment of democracy in the realization of the suburban history,” led by Kevin Kruse, Thomas individual. It was the city which was “a fibrous Sugrue, and Robert O. Self, contend that one cannot 2 tumor.” His idealized suburb ‘Broadacre City’ was tell the story of the suburbs without telling the story of 3 “the only possible city looking toward the future.” Its their urban cores, and vice versa. Setting aside critics’ parking lots, malls, multi-lane highways, and spacious worries about uninspired cookie cutter houses and yards offered residents a chance to exercise their full sterile sub-divisions, these historians see a diverse, citizenship in American democracy. Wright’s complicated suburban landscape. These are not the manifesto on the suburbs actually ruined his long- childish asylums of Mumford’s imagination, but a 4 standing friendship with Mumford. battleground of democracy and citizenship. It is these contradictory images of the suburbs and its residents that have fueled recent studies in the A Review of the Literature of Consensus Suburban subfield. Are the suburbs a place of White consensus, History as described by Mumford, where every house is the Accounts of the origins of the suburbs are same, and whose residents are awash in blissful legion. The subfield was opened by historians of the ignorance of urban problems? Or are the suburbs as built environment such as Sam Bass Warner whose Wright described a place for self-actualization: a 1962 study of Boston’s bedroom suburbs described space for individuals to assert their citizenship? To decentralization afforded by modern transportation answer this question, a new generation of American 1 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (NY: Mariner, 1961), 494. 2 Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York: Wm. Farquhar Payson, 1932), 26. 3 Ibid., 33. 4 An engrossing chronicling of this debate can be read in R. Wojtowicz & B.B. Pfieffer, eds. Frank Lloyd Wright & Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001). 1 technology.5 In the 1970’s Barbara Posadas did Jackson goes further than his predecessors similar studies of Chicago’s Jefferson Park and Irving though, and carries the story all the way through the Park subdivisions’ late 19th century development as 1950’s, painting a complicated multi-causal picture of bedroom suburbs.6 While Posadas and Warner rightly the genesis of suburbs. The advances in transportation focus on the role of light rail in decentralization, they were met with advances in building such as balloon took cursory looks at the social impacts of the earliest frame construction12 and aided by New Deal suburbanization. They mirrored the theories of Frank structures in the federal government like the Home Lloyd Wright and find evidence that freedom was Owners’ Loan Corporation, a predecessor of the FHA. afforded by owning real estate as evidenced by the Of the FHA, Jackson says that “no agency of the US eager attempts at gardening ornamental and vegetable government has had a more pervasive and powerful gardens. (Even more recent historians such as that by impact on the American people.”13 Jackson’s suburbs self-proclaimed “landscape historian” Dolores Hayden are the result of a series of messy decisions. Jackson sees these gardens as sources of class self-identity in concluded that the result of HOLC and FHA redlining, the suburbs.)7 corresponding real estate ethics, and restrictive Warner concluded that the suburbs were covenants was an artificially White suburbia. African homogenous zones, where ethnic differences “melted Americans were doomed to drown in the swirling away” in a place made safe by its distance from the waters of decaying urban cores, while Whites found mess of ethnic labor strife which plagued the Gilded respite in their homogenous miniature kingdoms. Age city.8 This last point is driven home by Joseph Jackson’s careful narrative of the origins of Bigott whose studies concluded that the notoriously American suburbs, stitched together with qualitative radical pro-labor Germans who made the move to and quantitative data, opened a new subfield for urban Chicago’s Bungalow Belt went through a process of historians and made the case for further serious “Americanization” which found them participating in treatments of the suburban topic. It was followed by a tax strikes and the ousting of pro-labor liberals they, whirlwind of studies that came to similar conclusions as working class people, traditionally would have about the suburbs’ place in history. Notable in the supported.9 field was Robert Fishman’s Bourgeois Utopias, which Although Kenneth Jackson’s seminal took many of Jackson’s ideas and applied it on an Crabgrass Frontier is generally considered the international scope, concluding that suburbs no longer foundational work of the Suburban subfield, he builds really exist.14 Fishman’s suburbs were populated by on the much earlier work of Warner.10 Jackson’s people using transportation technology to escape the suburbs are also made possible by light rail and tumor of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “disappearing city.” further expanded in space by the freedom afforded by Like Jackson, Fishman wrote of restrictive covenants Henry Ford’s accessible Model T.11 Soon the and of a resulting insulated homogeneity. Fishman suburban landscape was dotted by chain stores, concluded his study with the description of culturally parking lots, paved roads, and garages. void “technoburbs,” each like the next, surrounding 5 Sam Bass Warner, Jr. Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.) 6 Barbara M. Posadas. “A Home in the Country: Suburbanization in Jefferson Township, 1870-1889.” Chicago History 7 (Fall 1978), 134-149. & “Suburb into Neighborhood: The Transformation of Urban Identity on Chicago's Periphery: Irving Park as a Case Study, 1870-1910.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 76, no. 3 (Autumn 1983), pp. 162-176. 7 Delores Hayden. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000. (NY: Vintage Books, 2004.) This discussion of gardens is also made by New Suburban historian Andrew Wiese. Places of their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004.) 8 See these other works for cogent discussion of the streetcar suburbs of Chicago: Donald Miller. City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 273-294. & William Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. (NY: Norton, 1991), 346-350. 9 Joseph C. Bigott. From Cottage to Bungalow: Houses and the Working Class in Metropolitan Chicago, 1869–1929. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 10 Kenneth T. Jackson. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. (NY: Oxford University Press, 1985.) 11 Ibid., 160-163. 12 Ibid., 124-128. 13 Ibid., 203. 14 Robert Fishman. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. (NY: Basic Books, 1987). Fishman studies suburbs of Manchester and London, as well as those of Chicago and Philadelphia as case studies. 2 the hulking burned-out inner city, an image that affluence, and conformity. It is everything Mumford satisfies Mumford’s predictions. reviled when he criticized the void of a land where “a The ex-burbs depicted by Fishman lead to a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up pessimistic dystopia articulated best by social critic inflexibly, at uniform distances on uniform roads... Joel Garreau in Edge City: Life on the New inhabited by people of the same class, of the same Frontier15.Garreau applies Fishman’s ideas about income, the same age group...” 22 There is nothing identity in the “technoburb” to what he calls “the edge here to contest. There is no struggle and no need for city,” a place where every door must be no more than change. Christopher Shea of the New York Times 600 feet from a parking space. The urban core is wrote that the suburbs are depicted in popular culture completely decayed out according to Garreau as many ways, but concludes that “what the suburbs businesses like Sears make the move from the never seem like is a setting for history.”23 towering skyscrapers of the Loop to spacious and Then what accounts for the firebombing of the unimposing office parks in Hoffman Estates.
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