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Sub-Urban or Post-Rural: Suburban Development as a Two-Way Street in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2024
Abstract
This article argues that because a center–periphery model has dominated our understanding of postwar suburban growth we have failed to fully understand the rural dimensions of that growth. That misunderstanding resulted from the urban orientation of sociologists who studied the suburbs. As a consequence, we have also not appreciated the extent to which rural political outlooks shaped the postwar backlash against New Deal liberalism in the suburbs.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with British Association for American Studies
References
1 Take, for example, Golden Valley, MN, a near-western suburb of Minneapolis. There the city government is sponsoring a racial-justice project called Just Deeds which, among other things, encourages homeowners to examine their deeds to see whether they contain racially restrictive language. If so, the city then offers help to have the language removed. See www.goldenvalleymn.gov/equity-and-inclusion/restrictive-covenants.php.
2 Needham, Andrew and Dietriech-Ward, Allen, “Beyond the Metropolis: Metropolitan Growth and Regional Transformation in Postwar America,” Journal of Urban History, 37 (2009), 943–69, 944Google Scholar. In their article, Needham and Dietriech-Ward offer a model of analysis to consider dynamics more regionally. They provide two examples, the upper Ohio river valley and the Phoenix area, to demonstrate this kind of work.
5 For a very useful discussion of Census categories see https://mtgis-portal.geo.census.gov/arcgis/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=49cd4bc9c8eb444ab51218c1d5001ef6. In 1958 sociologists Kurtz and Eicher were already complaining about a definitional confusion between “suburb” and “rural fringe.” They reviewed a variety of definitions to underscore their point. See Kurtz, Richard and Eicher, Joanne, “Fringe and Suburb: A Confusion of Concepts,” Social Forces, 37 (Oct. 1958), 32–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Castle, Emery, “The Forgotten Hinterlands,” in Castle, ed., The Changing American Countryside: Rural People and Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995), 3–11, 9Google Scholar; and John Fraser Hart, “‘Rural’ and ‘Farm’ No Longer Mean the Same,” in ibid., 63–76, 76.
7 See https://theconversation.com/the-us-has-become-a-nation-of-suburbs-101501#:~:text=Since%201970%2C%20more%20Americans%20have,residents%2C%20suburbanization%20continues%20largely%20unabated; www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/07/29/prior-to-covid-19-urban-core-counties-in-the-u-s-were-gaining-vitality-on-key-measures/#:~:text=By%202018%2C%2025%25%20of%20the,urban%20cores%20remained%20at%2031%25.
9 There are excellent studies of the development of Sunbelt and western suburbia and among the best are Kruse, Kevin, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lassiter, Matthew, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Nicolaides, Becky, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and McGirr, Lisa, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. Darren Dochuk has contributed importantly to this discussion with his study of the religion that rural southern migrants brought with them to southern California in the mid-twentieth century. In his view, central to their religious convictions were antistate attitudes and a loyalty to localism that helped shape the New Right. See his From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). For a nice overview of some of this discussion see Chappell, David, “Did Racists Create the Suburban Nation?”, Reviews in American History, 35 (2007), 89–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Thompson, Warren Simpson, Migration within Ohio, 1935–1940: A Study in the Re-distribution of Population (Oxford: Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, Miami University, 1951), 82, 93Google Scholar.
11 Amos Hawley, Intrastate Migration in Michigan: 1935–1940 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1953), 193. Christopher Clark, “The Agrarian Context of American Capitalist Development,” in Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 13–38, 37.
12 “The Decline of Rural Population,” Outlook, 96 (19 Nov. 1910), 615.
13 Donald Bogue, Metropolitan Decentralization: A Study of Differential Growth (Oxford: Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, 1951), 10, 14, 16, original emphasis.
14 Census numbers cited in Walter T. Martin, “Ecological Change in Satellite Rural Areas,” American Sociological Review, 22, 2 (1957), 173–83, 178. The percentages of Black residents in older industrial cities continued to rise in the 1950s and 1960s, a function of both in-migration of Black southerners and the exodus of white residents out of the city. The Census recorded that the number of whites living in central cities decreased by roughly 2.6 million during the 1960s while the number of Blacks residing in central cities grew by over 3 million. See US Bureau of the Census, Social and Economic Characteristics of the Population in Metropolitan Areas and Nonmetropolitan Areas: 1970 and 1960 (Washington, DC: US Bureau of the Census), Table 1. The only group of rural white migrants who moved into central cities during the 1960s were Appalachians who created what journalists called “hillbilly ghettos” in Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit. See “Okies of the ’60s,” Time, 20 April 1962, 31; “Wanna Go Home,” Newsweek, 5 Aug. 1963, 30; Gerald Johnson, “Denizens of Rural Slums,” New Republic, 23 May 1960, 14. See also James Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 85. Glotzer, in her study of the Baltimore area, has shown that suburban developments were structured to be racially segregated even before New Deal redlining policies. See Paige Glotzer, How the Suburbs Were Segregated (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). Suburbs themselves were never as lily-white as they have often been portrayed, and in different regions of the country they have seen different mixes of nonwhite residents. See, for example, Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).
15 Myles Rodehaver, “Fringe Settlement as a Two-Directional Movement,” Rural Sociology, 12 (1947), 49–57; E. H. Moore and Raleigh Barlowe, Effects of Suburbanization upon Rural Land Use (Lansing: Michigan State University Agricultural and Applied Science, 1955), 5.
16 Nathan Whetten, “Suburbanization as a Field for Sociological Research,” Rural Sociology, 16 (1951), 319–29, 321.
17 That popular understanding is probably best encapsulated in the phrase “white flight,” which had begun to circulate in the 1950s and neatly explained both suburban growth and urban population decline in older cities.
18 Harlan Paul Douglas, The Suburban Trend (New York: The Century Co., 1925), 3–4.
19 Stuart Queen and David Carpenter, “From the Urban Point of View,” Rural Sociology, 18 (1953), 102–8, 108.
20 Dobriner, vii.
21 See Joseph Hickey, Ghost Settlement on the Prairie: A Biography of Thurman, Kansas (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995), 13.
22 C. E. Bishop, “The Urbanization of Rural America: Implications for Agricultural Economics,” Journal of Farm Economics, 49 (1967), 999–1008, 999.
23 William Friedland, “The End of Rural Society and the Future of Rural Sociology,” Rural Sociology, 47 (1982), 589–608, 590–91.
24 Herbert Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982; first published 1967), 180.
25 Ibid., 378–79.
26 Ibid., 31–32.
27 Ibid., 166.
28 Ibid., 418–19.
29 See the 2007 survey of the state of the field in Ruth McManus and Philip Ethington, “Suburbs in Transition: New Approaches to Suburban History, Urban History, 34 (2007), 217–337. They call for studies of how suburbs have evolved over time. Likewise, none of the essays in The New Suburban History, for example, tackle the rural transformation brought on by the suburbs, and the word “rural” hardly even appears. See Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).
30 Andrew Needham and Allen Dietriech-Ward, “Beyond the Metropolis: Metropolitan Growth and Regional Transformation in Postwar America, Journal of Urban History, 37 (2009), 943–67. William Whyte, The Exploding Metropolis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958).
31 Ronald Solove, “Problem on the Fringe: Conflict in Urban–Rural Transition Areas,” Ohio State Law Journal, 31 (1970), 125–39, 125.
32 Gans, 17. Thomas Brademas, “Fringe Living Attitudes,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Spring 1956, 75–82, 77. Andrew Highsmith picked up the story of the Flint area in his recent study Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). Highsmith sees the development of “suburban capitalism” as triumphing over more metropolitan solutions to questions like schools and infrastructure.
33 Moore and Barlowe, Effects of Suburbanization, 25, 29.
34 Frederick Johnson, Richfield: Minnesota's Oldest Suburb (Richfield, MN: Richfield Historical Society, 2008), 72, 75.
35 Charles Sargent, “Urbanization of a Rural County,” Research Bulletin (Lafayette, IN, Purdue University Research Station), Sept. 1970, 1.
36 Mark Friedberger, “The Rural–Urban Fringe in the Late Twentieth Century,” Agricultural History, 74 (2000), 501–14, 504–5.
37 Moore and Barlowe, 29.
38 See Solove, 136–38.
39 Eva Dombrowkie and Mary Brabazon both came from tiny towns in Schuylkill County, PA, part of the state's coal country that was by the 1950s played out. For these details see Eva's obituary in the Pottsville Republican, 2 Dec. 1981; and “Brabazon–McMenamin Wedding at Mayfair,” Pottsville Republican, 3 Aug. 1948. I have not been able to track down several of the others arrested so the number of rural Levittowners on this list might well be higher. Less well remembered too is that Howard Bentcliff was arrested and charged with vandalism and threats against three white Levittowners who wanted to help the Myers move in, including Lew Weschler, a Jew who found “KKK” spray-painted on his house and a Molotov cocktail in his driveway.
40 Efforts to create segregated rural space pre-date World War II, as Herbin-Triant has shown in her study of early twentieth-century North Carolina. Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant, Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods(New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
41 Alma Nieland, “Brooklyn Park's Fields Growing Houses Now,” Minneapolis Star, 17 June 1977.
42 Walter McKain and Robert Burnight, “From the Rural Point of View,” Rural Sociology, 18 (1953), 108–17, 111. University of Pennsylvania, Institute for Urban Studies, “Accelerated Urban Growth in a Metropolitan Area: A Study of Urbanization, Suburbanization and the Impact of the Fairless Works Steel Plant in Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania (critical Defense Housing Area)” [Philadelphia], 1954, ix.
43 Rodehaver, “Fringe Settlement as a Two-Directional Movement.” As with so much of the sociological research about rural areas and the suburbs, discussions of the “fringe” quickly revealed definitional conundrums. For example, “An examination of studies of the rural–urban fringe indicates that major problems have been created by the lack of a concise definition of the area.” See Kurtz and Eicher, “Fringe and Suburb,” 32–37.
44 Sheridan Maitland and Stanley Knebel, “Rural to Urban Transition,” Monthly Labor Review, 91 (June 1968), 28–32, 29.
45 There is a set of faded snapshots of Yesenosky's wife Bertha and their children in their new Levittown house. Bucks County Historical Society, Levittown Community Collection, Box 11, Folder 11.
46 “Mayor Zaininger Tells Aims of Administration,” in “Naperville: First in DuPage and First in Progress,” Naperville Clarion, Dec. 1960, insert.
47 “What's Happening to Our Town?”, Newsweek, 15 Aug. 1988, 28–31, 28.
48 Ibid., 29.
49 Perhaps not in Naperville but the fantasy persists and no place more so than in California. See Sandul, Paul, California Dreaming: Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.
50 See Archer, John, Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)Google Scholar. Archer sees the postwar suburban house as a particularly fraught place where “all the demands and expectations” of postwar culture were focussed. Ibid., 257. Hayden, Dolores, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 2003)Google Scholar.
51 Sociologist Peter Muller, writing about different phases of suburban growth, believes that “the so-called rural ideal … ‘pulled’ Americans toward the outskirts.” Muller, Peter O., “The Evolution of American Suburbs: A Geographical Interpretation,” Urbanism Past & Present, 4 (Summer 1977), 1–10, 1Google Scholar. Rome, Adam, The Bulldozer in the Countryside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has described how this foundational irony of the suburbs helped generate the environmental movement and efforts at land preservation.