Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened

Held up as postwar dream communities, the suburbs have since come to represent a conformist, antisocial and emotionally stultifying life for their residents. Baxandall and Ewen, both professors of American studies at the State University of New York-Old Westbury, revisit the 'burbs and place their conception and growth in a broad political, cultural and economic context, tracing the many changes that have occurred since the '50s. Based on new historical research and interviews with more than 230 suburbanites (many have been residents since the 1920s, '30s and '40s), Baxandall and Ewen present a detailed overview of how the interplay between urban populations and outlying areas produced the suburbs. They are at their best highlighting instances of racial and class tensions (i.e., in the 1920s one in eight residents of the new suburb of Freeport, Long Island, alarmed by the influx of immigrants and blacks, were members of the Ku Klux Klan). But the most enlightening part of their study details how postwar conservative Republicans, working with the building industry, assailed the concept of public housing in the first stage of their all-out attack on the domestic policies of the New Deal. At federal hearings on public housing led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1947, the senator essentially scuttled federally financed public housing by calling it a ""breeding ground for communists."" While Baxandall and Ewen never quite shake off the charges against 1950s suburbs, they do make a convincing case that economic, racial and ethnic diversity as well as new opportunities for women make contemporary suburbs substantively different from their predecessors. (Feb.)