Suburbia and American Exceptionalism

Abstract

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and showed how the Cold War was fought over the commodity gap as much as the missile gap. Most importantly, she argued that renewed commitment to strict gender roles as well as a consumption-driven economy fueled by desire for suburban homes, appliances, and other appurtenances of postwar affluence was greeted by leaders and popular commentators as evidence of the country's fitness for its global contest with the Soviet Union. Political and military containment of the Soviet Union abroad was strengthened by social containment on the home front in the form of an investment in home and hearth necessary to quell possible domestic disturbances on the part of women dissatisfied with their lot. May's yoking of domestic and international concerns, while quite familiar to a whole generation of scholars, remains revelatory reading today. Strangely, however, few historians of the suburbs have chosen to follow her lead. Most accounts stick closer to the ground, tracking transportation, land use and building patterns, federal housing policy, ideals of home and homeownership, the spatial elaboration of consumer society, the fall of liberalism and the rise of conservatism, regional clashes between city and suburb, and divisions of race, class, and gender.1 Now, however, Robert Beauregard has seen and raised May, writing a synthetic essay that manages to coax suggestive conclusions from a range of familiar materials. He hopes to bridge the divide between cultural analysis and political economy by investigating the knotty relationships between transformations in place and national identity and the rise of the United States as a global power in the postwar era. The rise of the suburbs, he suggests, provoked a fundamental recasting of American identity and forged a new form