American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  A desire to escape overcrowded, dirty city neighborhoods fed suburban growth. The protagonist of the title story in Philip Roth’s collection Goodbye, Columbus (which won the National Book Award in 1960) quips that it was “as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those of us outside, regulated with a dial the amounts of moisture that were allowed access to their skin.”

  Some suburban residents were attracted by the very newness of the communities into which they moved. One pioneer suburbanite in Northern California’s Santa Clara Valley recalled, “We were thrilled to death. . . . Everyone else was moving in at the same time as us. It was a whole new adventure for us. For everyone!”

  Most people, though, moved to the suburbs not in search of a lifestyle but because there they could find the best and sometimes the only opportunity to get more living space at a price they could afford. With urban houses or large apartments difficult or impossible to find and expensive when available, suburban homes represented a cheaper and more obtainable solution to the housing needs of new and growing families. Often mortgage payments, taxes, and other expenses for a modest suburban home were below the cost of renting an equivalent size city apartment. And suburban homes were more adaptable. Many suburban dwellers added second stories to ranch houses, built porches and additions, and tacked on carports, making modest homes more livable. Where there were affordable urban alternatives to suburbanization, like the modestly priced, nonprofit cooperative housing built by unions and veterans’ groups in New York and a few other cities, families lined up to get in. But in most of the country, no such alternatives could be found.

  Government policy tilted both house builders and house seekers away from the cities toward the suburbs. No law or document announced that it was the policy of the federal government to promote suburban development as the preferred mode of living, but various statutes and administrative decisions worked together with that effect, reflecting a largely assumed rather than argued consensus among politicians and power brokers.

  The mortgage guarantee programs of the VA and the Federal Housing Administration (set up in 1934) were critical to suburban development by making it possible for millions of families to buy homes that they otherwise would not have been able to afford. The federal income tax deduction for interest payments on borrowed funds provided a massive subsidy of homeownership. Government-backed mortgages and mortgage tax deductions were not statutorily restricted to the suburbs, but FHA and VA policies heavily favored single-family homes in white, middle-class suburban settings over multi-unit dwellings, urban locales, or nonwhite or racially mixed communities. From the beginning of the FHA through 1960, the agency guaranteed mortgages worth $730 per capita in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburbanizing community adjacent to Washington, D.C., but only $87 per capita in the capital itself. Similarly, New York’s Nassau County, home of Levittown and other suburban developments, got $601 per capita, while the Bronx got but $10.

  Federal infrastructure support also aided suburbanization. The interstate highway system made automobile commuting from bedroom communities to city centers more practical. When, in the 1960s, it became clear that suburban septic tanks had created a major water pollution problem, the federal government began funding suburban sewer systems, spending $30 billion during the 1970s alone. Even when it did not directly appropriate money, by allowing tax-free bonds to be used to finance infrastructure projects, the federal government made rapid suburbanization more practical, lowering the cost of government for suburbanites while forgoing public funds that could have been used in other ways.

  While federal aid flowed to the suburbs, Washington provided little help to the cities. Millions of urban renters got no direct benefit from the tax code. And as urban housing aged, the massive federal involvement in private home financing did little to renew or replace it. Relatively little public housing got built either. The 1949 Housing Act authorized the construction of 810,000 units of public housing, most put in urban settings, but it took twenty years, not the intended six, to build all the units. In 1955, a peak year for housing construction, 277,000 units got started with FHA loan guarantees, 393,000 with VA guarantees, but construction began on just 20,000 units of public housing. In 1980, public housing accounted for just 1 percent of the national housing stock, compared to 46 percent in England and Wales and 37 percent in France. Federally funded urban renewal often ended up hurting rather than helping poor city residents by financing the replacement of worn but still vibrant neighborhoods with commercial centers or housing for wealthier residents. Transportation policy also put cities at a disadvantage. The federal government provided no funds for urban transportation systems, standing by as subway, commuter rail, and trolley systems deteriorated or were abandoned.

  In moving millions out of central cities, the government-supported process of suburbanization reinforced and extended the barriers that maintained racially homogeneous communities. Some African Americans had long lived on urban outskirts, but after World War II blacks were much less likely to relocate to suburbs than were whites. In 1960, African Americans constituted less than 5 percent of the suburban population. Furthermore, they lived almost exclusively in all-black communities, including new subdivisions put up in the South abutting existing African American urban neighborhoods. Very few African Americans moved into the majority-white suburbs springing up across the country.

  Suburban developers, real estate agents, banks, government officials, and homeowners deployed an arsenal of weapons to make sure that they didn’t. Until 1948, it had been a common practice to exclude undesired groups through legally binding covenants on deeds, which forbade the resale of a house to people in designated categories, usually nonwhites or non-Christians. Following a campaign led by the NAACP, in 1948 the Supreme Court, in Shelley v. Kraemer, ruled public enforcement of racially restrictive covenants to be unconstitutional. But in practice the ruling did little or nothing to open up white neighborhoods to other groups.

  Many suburban developers, like William Levitt, openly refused to sell new homes to nonwhites, resisting legal and political pressure to do so. In the early 1950s, Levittown, New York, was the largest community in the United States without a single black resident. In 1960, it still had but fifty-seven AfricanAmericans among its 65,276 residents.

  Federal policies made it difficult for builders to develop integrated communities even if they wanted to. Federal agencies ranked the risks entailed for mortgage lending in neighborhoods across the country, automatically assigning black neighborhoods the lowest grade and giving the highest ratings only to “homogeneous” areas. Private lenders used the ratings to deny loans to areas deemed high risk, which effectively included almost all integrated neighborhoods. Though federal practices became somewhat less racist over the course of the 1950s, the FHA and VA continued to promote segregated housing and steer a disproportionate amount of loan guarantees to whites.

  Local governments and real estate agents more directly enforced racial barriers. Many suburban communities used zoning and building codes and their discriminatory application to keep out low-income and nonwhite residents. Some suburban towns used urban renewal programs to eradicate existing black neighborhoods. White real estate agents, as an accepted national practice, refused to sell African Americans homes in white areas.

  If an African American family did manage to buy a home in a white neighborhood, threats, harassment, or violence were often deployed to try to force them to move and discourage others from coming in. When in 1957 Daisy and Bill Myers and their three small children became the first African Americans to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, relocating from a nearby com
munity to a small pink house on Deepgreen Lane in search of more living space, they had to suffer through demonstrations outside their home, complete with Confederate flags, rock throwing, and cross burning, not an uncommon experience for black “pioneers.” In cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago, the resistance to racial integration at times was even fiercer, as homeowner and neighborhood associations, often in conjunction with real estate agents, mobilized residents against nonwhite newcomers. The support that government authorities gave to residential segregation served to legitimate resistance to housing integration, which was stronger than resistance to workplace integration and more likely to move beyond legal boundaries.

  A Nation on the Move

  Suburbanization constituted one part of a series of large-scale postwar population movements. In addition to outward movement within metropolitan regions, overlapping population flows included rural to urban migration, migration from the South to the North and from the East and Midwest to the West, and an influx of Spanish-speaking people to the continental United States. These demographic shifts helped sustain economic growth in an era of low immigration by bringing workers to expanding areas, while contributing to a process of national cultural homogenization.

  In 1950, 36 percent of the population still lived in rural areas. By 1970, that had fallen to just 27 percent. Many people left rural areas because of the allure of city life and urban job opportunities in the expanding postwar economy. Movies, radio, mass circulation magazines like Life and Look, and eventually television brought images of city living into even the most isolated parts of the country. Many young people eagerly exchanged the hardships of rural living for life in the city. But the drastic decline in rural employment opportunities probably played a more important role in the flight from the countryside. Before World War II, agriculture and mining together supported one in four American families. After the war, consolidation and mechanization radically reduced the number of jobs in these industries. By 1970, agriculture engaged less than 4 percent of the workforce (with many of those workers also holding nonfarm jobs). Mining employment likewise dropped sharply, largely as a result of mechanization. Continuous coal mining machines, a rarity in 1950, accounted for half the underground coal mined in 1967.

  The greatest rural job loss occurred in the South. The rapid decline in coal mining employment contributed to a massive exodus from southern Appalachia. Between 1940 and 1970 well over three million people left the region. Some counties in Kentucky and West Virginia lost 40 percent of their population during the 1950s alone. Changes in farming had an even greater effect. During the 1950s, some five and a half million families in the South gave up farming, with three and a half million departing the region entirely.

  The most dramatic transformation took place in the Mississippi Delta, where a way of life based on the labor-intensive cultivation of cotton by sharecroppers and tenant farmers, which emerged out of the Reconstruction era, began to disappear. During the 1940s, the possibility of mechanized cotton picking became increasingly attractive to planters, who saw many of their male workers leave for jobs in the North or in southern cities or for the armed services. Women and children who remained behind, getting money from men receiving military pay or working elsewhere, were often no longer willing to toil in cotton fields. The first self-propelled cotton-picking machine went into service in 1947, and within just a few years a substantial part of the southern cotton crop was being harvested by machine. The use of sprayed chemicals rather than hand-hoeing to control weeds complemented the picking machines in drastically reducing labor needs. So did crop diversification. Between 1950 and 1960, the farm population of the Delta fell by half. Elsewhere in the South, too, capital-intensive agriculture replaced labor-intensive agriculture, facilitated by federal subsidy and farm extension programs that favored large-scale operations, mechanization, and the use of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. Tractors replaced mules, sharecropping disappeared, and small farm owners, tenants, and sharecroppers moved on in search of work and a new way of life.

  White southern migrants tended to move to the Midwest. By 1970, two and a half million southern-born whites lived in the region, where they made up 5 to 10 percent of the populations of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. Overwhelmingly blue-collar, they tended to gravitate to factory, transportation, and service jobs that did not require much formal education. At a time when economic expansion and union strength were pushing up wages and benefits, such jobs offered upward mobility. Some migrants clustered together in urban communities like Uptown in Chicago and Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati. Others chose to live in rural areas, suburbs, or urban neighborhoods without a distinctive southern feel.

  White southern migrants brought with them an intense religiosity, a fervent, expressive Protestantism that contributed to the postwar spread of evangelicalism. In the Midwest, fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches became widespread as newcomers, not finding churches of their denominations, began founding new ones. During the 1940s, the Southern Baptist Convention decided to disregard a half-century-old agreement with the Northern Baptists that set territorial limits for each group. By the early 1970s, the midwestern states had hundreds of Southern Baptist churches, with thirty-three in Wayne County, Michigan (which includes Detroit), alone. Southerners also brought to the Midwest and California forms of entertainment, like country music and stock car racing, that gradually won national audiences. Yet even with their distinctive cultural orientation and close links to the regions they came from—traveling back frequently for visits, vacations, and temporary work—white southerners generally blended in with the rest of the population in the communities to which they moved, not appearing as a highly visible subgroup.

  African American migrants from the South did not have that luxury. Most moved to the same midwestern cities as white southerners or to East Coast cities like New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The severe discriminatory bars in the housing market meant that once there they generally could find homes only in inner-city black neighborhoods. With whites moving out to suburbs, the African American proportion of the urban population shot up. In Chicago it went from 14 percent in 1950 to 40 percent in 1980; in Dayton, from 14 percent to 37 percent; in St. Louis, from 18 percent to 46 percent; in New York, from 10 percent to 25 percent.

  Residential segregation diminished the economic opportunities for African American newcomers because, just as the southern migration peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, good entry-level jobs, especially in manufacturing, were becoming harder to find in northern central cities. Some were lost to automation, others to new factories being built in suburbs where African Americans could not live or in other parts of the country. Many employers systematically set out to reduce their workforces in the major industrial cities, hoping to undermine the power of the union movement and lower their taxes and labor costs. Manufacturers who wanted to stay in urban locations often found it difficult to get enough land to build the kind of sprawling one-story plants that had come to be seen as more efficient than older-style multistory facilities. RCA began shifting production of consumer goods out of Camden, New Jersey, to Bloomington, Indiana, even before World War II. General Electric began building a series of midsize plants in the South to lessen its dependence on its huge production centers in the Northeast and Midwest, hotbeds of union militancy. The big automobile companies similarly decentralized, building parts and assembly plants in suburban Detroit and other parts of the country, contributing to a drop of 147,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit proper between 1947 and 1963. Nationally, during that period, manufacturing employment in the twenty-five largest cities fell, but in the suburbs that surrounded them it grew by well over 50 percent. Residential discrimination thus contributed to the divergent trajectories of white and black southern migrants, with the latter failing to achieve the same degree of economic mobility and social integration as the former, even though they shared rural backgrounds and low levels of educational achievement.


  At the same time that population flowed northward, it also flowed to the West Coast and Southwest. The transplantation of professional sports teams acknowledged the growing wealth and population of the West, as baseball’s Dodgers and Giants left New York for California in 1958, followed two years later by the Minneapolis Lakers, which became the West Coast’s first National Basketball Association team. Federal spending spurred westward migration. Western politicians often denounced government spending in the abstract, but they courted federal dollars to develop the region. Federal money kept the defense industries humming; helped pay for the huge public works that provided water for agriculture and burgeoning cities; allowed West Coast universities to develop into major centers of scientific research; paid for highways; and, through the Social Security system, made it possible for people from other parts of the country to retire to the warm climates of Southern California and the desert states.

  Air-conditioning made the Southwest attractive to newcomers. The technology was developed early in the twentieth century for large commercial and industrial buildings. Small home units only began to be sold in significant numbers after World War II. In 1952, builders began incorporating air-conditioning into tract houses. The FHA encouraged the practice by allowing, from 1957 on, the cost of appliances to be covered by home mortgages. Builders liked air-conditioning because it allowed them to dispense with features traditionally used to promote cooling and ventilation—overhanging eaves, good insulation, attic fans, movable sashes and screens, shady landscaping—which were expensive to provide. By 1960, six and a half million air conditioners were in use; ten years later, twenty-four million, including seventeen million room units.