Suburban Politics Research Articles

“People Drive Automobiles”: Esther Shiner, the Silent Majority, and the Popular Case for the Spadina Expressway, 1971–1987

This article examines pro-expressway politics in Metro Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on Esther Shiner, a North York housewife and later councilor who led a 16-year battle to revive the Spadina Expressway after it was canceled by premier Bill Davis in 1971. Shiner founded an advocacy group, Go Spadina, and became a beacon for what one journalist called the “Spadina revivalists”—groups of (mostly) suburbanites, inside and outside municipal government, who articulated a popular rather than a technical case for building the expressway. I argue that Shiner’s campaign was an early example of the “auto populism” now common in Toronto politics and also one expression of a much broader “silent majority” politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Although Shiner’s campaign was ultimately a failure—the expressway was never completed—her Spadina revivalism should be understood by historians as one early example of a deep and popular impulse in suburban politics.

Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics by Timothy J. Lombardo

Reviewed by: Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics by Timothy J. Lombardo Ian Toller-Clark Timothy J. Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 328 pp. $37.50 (cloth). Donald Trump’s electoral college victory in the 2016 presidential election achieved in part through wins in the so-called Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania shocked seasoned political observers and everyday Americans. However, the political culture of all three states has been shifting for well over two decades. Journalist Dan Kaufman’s The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics (2018) argues that Trump’s Wisconsin victory “merely heralded the final stage of Wisconsin’s dramatic transformation from a pioneering beacon of progressive, democratic politics to the embodiment of that legacy’s unraveling” (4). Meanwhile, political scientist [End Page 183] Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (2016) contends that a “rural consciousness” among Wisconsinites forged a politics of resentment that powered both Walker and Trump to electoral success. She defines “rural consciousness” as “a perspective that is at its core rooted in place and class” and imbued with “a sense that rural folks don’t get their fair share” (12). Cramer’s work underscores an important part of contemporary politics that influences both Rust Belt and national politics: the polarization between rural and urban communities. Still, the focus on rural or even White middle-class suburban politics has obscured the crucial role of urban politics and the “urban crisis” in conservatism’s resurgence across the Midwest and the nation. Historian Timothy Lombardo’s deeply researched and insightful Blue-Collar Conservatism offers a powerful intervention to our understanding of contemporary political culture and the popularity of Trumpism in the city of Philadelphia. Blue-Collar Conservatism traces the political transformation of White working-and middle-class Philadelphians from blue-collar Whites to blue-collar conservatives between the 1950s and 1980s. White working-and middle-class Philadelphians of the 1950s had been foundational members of the city’s postwar reform coalition. Along with African American voters, White working-and middle-class voters powered the rise of Democratic mayors Joseph S. Clark and Richardson Dilworth, who promised to bring the prosperity of the postwar United States to Philadelphia through urban and industrial renewal projects. These projects, however, could not reverse the structural changes to Philadelphia’s economy. Moreover, they reified the racial and class inequalities of that segregated city. These inequalities produced tensions, especially between the predominantly White police force and the city’s burgeoning African American population. The result was a three-day urban rebellion during the summer of 1964. Lombardo, however, is careful to show that Whites did not engage in a simple backlash against the failures of postwar liberalism. From the mid-to-late 1960s, White working-and middle-class Philadelphians, who included police officers and their families, crafted a colorblind argument that “differentiated the right to entitlements by making the clear distinction between hard work and handouts” (132). In their telling, opposition to public housing, school integration, and even “law and order” liberalism was not about keeping African Americans and other minorities out of their neighborhoods but rather about preserving what they had earned for themselves. [End Page 184] This argument obscured the ways that “Blue-collar whites benefited from and cheered liberal plans like urban renewal and federal spending for construction” (131). Meanwhile, Philadelphia police commissioner Frank Rizzo effectively used the argument to win the mayoralty in 1971. As mayor, Rizzo became the champion of Philadelphia’s blue-collar Whites. He made their causes his own, including state funding for parochial schooling and preventing the construction of public housing in Whitman Park. In these ways, Rizzo reflected blue-collar Whites’ selective rejection of postwar liberalism. That rejection was based on a colorblind, racially obfuscating ideology—one divisive to Philadelphians and Americans more broadly—that pitted people who saw themselves as hardworking against those who accepted so-called handouts. As Lombardo provocatively concludes, “Blue-collar conservatives did not view the liberal governance of...

Grid Country

AbstractWhat appears today to rural Americans as the vector of their difference besides the mainstays of farming and ranching? Through what optics do we see our rural and urban senses of belonging? I argue that electric grids provide one answer. Across the contiguous United States, there are groups of rural and suburban citizens who organize against the expansion of electricity's transmission infrastructure, claiming that they are unjustly suffering the consequences of electric grids’ city‐based remote governance. Grid expansion in the countryside might mean property lost to eminent domain and subpar conditions for farming, consequences that rarely factor into projects that overwhelmingly prioritize meeting ever‐growing electricity demand in cities. The unevenness in the governance of our shared grids, and by extension our public infrastructures, prompts citizen reflection on their senses of rural, suburban, and urban belonging. Attending to infrastructures as milieus of emergent political consciousness thus provides an opportunity to understand rural and suburban politics through a wider optic than the “red versus blue” narrative by which politics in the United States is so often understood.

Postcards from the Edge? Setting the Suburban Scene

AbstractThis introduction highlights four themes about the politics of suburbia which are developed in the collection. First, what constitutes suburbia is multiple and constantly changing. This is reflected in diverse and evolving architectures and economic conditions. Second, the idea of the suburb as synonymous with the pinnacle of betterment is taking a battering as suburbs are now looking the worse for wear. ‘Just about managing’ families and the ‘squeezed middle’ are to be found in the suburbs. Third, in post‐2016 Britain, Brexit is the new political fault‐line where regional variations manifest themselves, and this is reflected in distinctive suburban politics, producing strange bedfellows spanning Surrey and Sunderland. Fourth, voting patterns reflect the dynamism of the modern suburb. The social and physical environment of the suburb may shape attitudes to some extent, but incomers have brought their politics with them.

Reluctant Radicals: How Moderates Shape Movements for Social Change

This essay reviews three books within the southern history literature on the white moderate's response to the civil rights movement; Kevin Kruse's White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), Matthew Lassiter's The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006), and Jason Sokol's There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (2006). I examine how white moderates impacted the struggle for African American civil rights, and explore how this dynamic can help us understand the trajectory of the current debate over gay rights in the United States. I argue that while the US public ultimately came to support equal rights for African Americans, and has grown more tolerant of gay rights recently, they have been willing to do so only when these rights claims are framed as benefiting “deserving” segments of these populations. This shows that rights are, to some extent, contingent resources, available primarily to those citizens who fit certain ideal types, and suggests that those individuals who are unwilling (or unable) to live up to this ideal may ultimately fail to benefit from these movements.

‘It's Not Going to be Suburban, It's Going to be All Urban’: Assembling Post‐suburbia in the Toronto and Chicago Regions

AbstractUrban and suburban politics are increasingly intertwined in regions that aspire to be global. Powerful actors in the Chicago and Toronto regions have mobilized regional space to brand rescaled images of the urban experience, but questions remain as to who constructs and who can access the benefits of these revised spatial identities. Local political interests have tended to be obfuscated in the regional milieu, most problematically in the spaces between the gentrified inner cities, privileged growth nodes, and the glamorized suburban subdivisions and exurban spaces beyond the city limits. This article analyses how socio‐spatial changes in post‐suburbanizing urban fringes contribute to the way regions are being reconfigured and reimagined. Guided by current debates at the intersection of assemblage theory and critical urban political economy, our analysis demonstrates how socio‐technical infrastructures, policy mobilities and political economic relations are spatially aligned, sustained and dissolved in splintering North American agglomerations. Particular attention is paid to issues of urban transportation and connectivity in uncovering multifaceted modes of suburbanism that now underlie the monistic imagery of the globalized region. Emergent regionalized topologies and territoriality blur conventional understandings of city–suburban dichotomies in extended urban areas that are now characterized by polycentric post‐suburban constellations. In terms of their substance and functionality, ‘real existing' regions are currently re‐territorialized as complex assemblages that are embedded in a neoliberalizing political economy whose politics and identities are only beginning to be revealed.

Race, Republicans, and Real Estate: The 1991 Fulton County Tax Revolt

A 1991 reappraisal of property in Atlanta and Fulton County, Georgia, corrected systemic inequalities in property taxation that had subsidized affluent whites during a boom period. Many of those homeowners responded to reassessment by initiating a major tax revolt. The tax revolt failed to stop reassessment but won lasting victory in the political arena. Tax revolt politicians successfully linked the economic grievances of taxpayers to resentments against black political leaders and the poor, replaced older, moderate suburban politics with confrontation, and sped partisan realignment and Republican ascendancy in the state. Historical perspective on the politics of the Fulton County tax revolt supports the conclusion that metropolitics were essential to the development of “color-blind” or “laissez-faire” forms of racial ideology that became the dominant mode of American racial discourse in the post–Civil Rights era.

Pushers, Victims, and the Lost Innocence of White Suburbia

This case study of Los Angeles County portrays the war on drugs during the 1950s as a racial and spatial project that combined tough mandatory-minimum sentences for urban “pushers” and Mexican American “gangsters” with discretionary loopholes for white suburban “victims” of the heroin and marijuana markets. State institutions, media scripts, and white middle-class organizations constructed illegal drug use as a suburban crisis through a racialized pusher–victim discourse that collectively criminalized minority youth while decriminalizing white teenage lawbreakers. The escalation of California’s antinarcotics crusade during the postwar decades illuminates the deep historical roots, thoroughly bipartisan policies, and grassroots suburban politics that shaped the rise of mass incarceration and the continuing racial and spatial inequalities of drug war enforcement in modern America.

Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins and the Modern Conservative Identity

Walker Percy's novel Love in the Ruins (1971) reveals the complications of American suburban politics at the height of the Cold War and of the civil rights movement in the United States, a moment during which racial anxieties became disguised as political moderation. Written in the wake of Richard Nixon's successful 1968 run for the presidency, during which his campaign suggested sympathy with white southern suburban segregationists to gain popularity in the South (an area where candidates historically performed poorly), Love in the Ruins portrays a polarized suburban population in the South of a politically fractured United States: a mishmash of southerners and nonsoutherners, conservatives and liberals, living together united in their racism. The novel's suburban Cold War dystopia depicts a post-South in which political ideology, socioeconomic realities, and literary and popular media portrayals of southernness supplant any geographic or cultural understanding of place as the basis for southern identity. (1) Love in the Ruins not only portrays the postsouthern but also forecasts the current red state-blue state political map of the United States in its sheer politicization of nearly every individual and community in the novel, paralleling the spread of conservative politics to the white suburban middle class in the 1960s. This southern identity and politics became suburban identity and politics, uniting communities across the United States not by geography but by ideology, and suburban political moderation morphed into modern conservatism--moral and social conservatism coupled with financial neoliberalism. The novels emphasis on lampooning extreme political viewpoints and portraying racial strife (long associated with the South but present now in suburbs) as merely a symptom of such ideological extremes suggests an attempt to divorce geography from sensibilities and values long associated with the South. In the depiction of suburban politics, the book ultimately points toward Percy's own satirical but quite telling revision of the southern identity, one in which personal connections to ideologies play a prominent role once southern identity has been separated from concerns of place. Ultimately, Love in the Ruins paints portraits of Americans--not necessarily southerners--participating in cultures and practices associated with the United States South through media representations, televised events, real estate developments, and other reproductions of the South. Love in the Ruins satirizes devotion to hyperbolic political views through caricatures of materialistic suburban dwellers, throughout the novel Percy also expresses anxiety about current social trends, exhibiting a realization that the former foundations of the U.S. South are eroding. Michael Kobre argues that Percy really was of two minds and traditions. Percy was raised in the Old South and its traditional mores, yet Percy also recognized that the severe and honorable traditions he had inherited were increasingly outdated in a New South that was, in his own words, 'happy, victorious, Christian, rich, patriotic and Republican (4). Indeed, Percy's own vision of this New South is remarkably in line with historical studies that explore the roles suburbs played in the turn toward modern conservatism in the U.S. South in the twenty-five years after the end of World War II. During the postwar expansion of industry to the region, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Memphis became centers of commerce attracting more and more southerners--white and black alike--to their metropolitan regions, individuals who decided to give factory and office work a go as opposed to remaining to compete with increasingly larger commercial farms. Brown v. Board of Education undoubtedly influenced patterns of suburban growth as did the white flight from urban centers. Particularly relevant to Percy's imagined suburbs is historian Kevin Kruse's exploration of white flight out of Atlanta and the political identity that developed out of the manner in which whites fought to preserve segregation. …

Good Neighbors for Fair Housing

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a fair housing movement made up of white-collar professionals and housewives rapidly emerged in the Route 128 suburbs outside of Boston. The Boston network, which eventually included thirty-five hundred members and thirty-seven chapters, became the largest and most active example of a national phenomenon. Tracing the evolution of the fair housing movement complicates standard narratives of suburban politics, modern liberalism, and the civil rights movement. The movement’s combination of localized and legal tactics played a crucial role in creating the grassroots support and legal means to fight racial discrimination and came to shape state and federal housing policy. Yet its suburban-based and individualist political outlook imposed serious constraints on the efforts to eradicate the root causes of residential inequality and solidified larger patterns of spatial inequality in Massachusetts and the nation.

The New Suburban History edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue

The New Suburban History edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue

Jesse Helms's Politics of Pious Incitement: Race, Conservatism, and Southern Realignment in the 1950s

IN THE SOUTH, A REGION WHERE CULTURAL AND RACIAL CONSERVATISM coexisted with loyalty to the Democratic Party and wide support for liberal economic policies, Jesse Helms became a pivotal figure in constructing the new conservatism of the 1950s and 1960s. Before his thirty-second birthday, Helms, a native of North Carolina, was an award-winning newspaper reporter, city editor of the Raleigh Times, news director for Raleigh radio station WRAL, administrative assistant to Senator Willis Smith, and campaign worker for conservative candidates, including media adviser to Senator Richard B. Russell Jr.'s run for the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination. In 1953 Helms left Washington, D.C., to serve as executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association (NCBA) and edit its magazine, the Tarheel Banker. Helms differed from typical southern conservatives of the fifties. Out of his Washington experience a young Helms developed a national vision for conservative power. He not only recognized that southern Democrats had more in common with western and midwestern Republicans--like Richard M. Nixon or Joseph R. McCarthy--than with liberal Democrats, but he also wanted to build a national conservative party. Although Helms's critics have often painted him as a fringe figure, such depictions represent wishful thinking rather than a serious appraisal of his influence. True, Helms--a polished, well-connected extremist in a banker's suit--expressed views labeled fringe during the postwar decades. He believed the liberal consensus was shallow, mainly an elite phenomenon. Many average voters shared his views. The problem was to determine how, with a moderate to liberal media, conservatives could reach these voters. He found solutions. By the 1970s, no one could doubt Helms's centrality to the conservative movement. He signed a fund-raising letter for the Moral Majority, and the money streamed in. His North Carolina Congressional Club (later renamed the National Congressional Club) supplied Ronald Reagan with money and ideas during his 1976 and 1980 campaigns. In My Life, Bill Clinton charged that Helms was behind Kenneth Starr's appointment as a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton's activities. (1) Helms's influence in recent decades had deep roots. During the riffles, Helms began the work that made the fringe mainstream. He altered southern conservatism to make it acceptable outside the South, pushed for a national conservative party, and developed ways of communicating with common people--not only rural voters but also new suburbanites. Most of all, Helms nurtured the issues like opposition to desegregation that pushed southern whites toward the GOP. Since President Ronald Reagan's victories in the 1980s, historians have investigated the rise of the New Right. Dan T. Carter and Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall posit a top-down model with presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Alabama governor George C. Wallace leading the way. In Carter's view, Wallace's national campaigns exported Deep South politics to the rest of the country; Nixon's southern strategy simply stole the Alabama governor's fire. Carter depicts Wallace as a rock-star politician whose tour forged a new conservative majority. (2) In this standard narrative, the Wallace and Nixon campaigns molded a cross-class white constituency for conservatism that depended on racial anxiety, hostility to the cultural elite, anticommunism, and rejection of big government. This meant not only a new conservatism but also a southernization of American public life. More recently, Matthew D. Lassiter's The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South and Kevin M. Kruse's White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism have challenged this top-down, out-of-the-Deep-South version of southernization. Lassiter and Kruse also complicate southern class relationships, demonstrating that rather than unifying whites, integration debates exacerbated class conflict. …

Cronyism and Creative Destruction in Pittsburgh and Beyond: A Review Essay

January/February 2008 Historically Speaking 39 Alex Uchtenstein is associateprofessor of history at Florida International University. Most recently he coauthored (with EricArnesen) an introduction to a new edition of KatherineArchibald's'Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity (University of Illinois Press, 2006). He is working on a study of kbor, civil rights, and anticommunism inpostwar Florida. ' In Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats, andthe Decline of MiddleClass Prosperity (Random House, 1993) Phillips wrote: "Race was a catalyst of Dixie realignment, but by no means its only one." The others included "small-town and rural values, patriotism, doubts about welfare, religious traditionalism, and a hostility toward bureaucrats, ¡udges, intellectuals and the news media." 1 Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, andthe Transformation of American Politics (Simon and Schuster, 1995), 12; Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 19631994 (Louisiana Sute University Press, 1996). 5Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the NewAmerican Right (Princeton University Press, 2001); Donald Critchlow, Phyla 's Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade (Princeton University Press, 2005); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2005); Matthew Lassiter, The SilentMajority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006);Joseph Crespino, In Search of AnotherCountry: Mississippi andthe Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton University Press, 2007). All have appeared in Princeton's "Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America" series, edited by William Chafe, Gary Gerstle, Linda Gordon, andJulian Zelizer. Interestingly, Crespino (Mississippi ), Kruse (Nashville), and Lassiter (Atlanta), all grew up in the post-civil rights South. * Lassiter, SilentMajority, 226. 5 Phillips, Emerging Republican Majority, 39-40. 6 Lassiter's book, published in 2006, all but predicts the June 28, 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involvedin Community Schools v. Seattle SchoolDistrictNo.1. Interestingly, both Lassiter and Kevin Kruse signed an Amid Curea brief in the case, defending the school district's efforts to use student reassignment to maintain racial balance. 7 Thomas Schaller, Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South (Simon and Schuster, 2006). ! "??????," Citizen's Informer,July-September 2005, http://coverthistory.blogspotcom/2005/10/racism-in-conservative -movcmenthtm, accessed Sep. 17, 2007. 5John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The RightNation: WhyAmerica is Diffèrent (Penguin, 2004), 12. 10Thomas Frank, What's the Matterwith Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan Books, 2004). 11Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty:Aristocracy, Fortune, andthe Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (Viking, 2004), ix. Cronyism and Creative Destruction in Pittsburgh and Beyond: A Review Essay Edward Balleisen It's a propitious time to reconsider the historical significance of the capitalists who oversaw America's emergence as the world's leading industrial economy. A full thirty years has elapsed since Alfred Chandler's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Visible Hand, codified the long prevailing interpretation of American managerial capitalism. Chandler's death at 89 this past spring by no means heralds the demise of his approach to the history of the large-scale business corporation. It's hard to envisage any treatment of business since 1880 that dispenses widi his emphasis on the central role of career managers at oligopolistic firms, their turn to modern research and development, and their refinement of decentralized management strategies. But two generations have produced quite a bit of scholarship probing the limitations of Chandlerian business history.' Perhaps of even greater importance than thirty years of historiography has been thirty years of history . Managerial capitalism has come in for something of a drubbing since 1980, if not before. The ossification of so many one-time corporate behemoths in the United States, first made painfully clear during the stagflation of the 1970s, led to pervasive criticism of professional managers. Long-serving salaried CEOs of poorly performing American companies , critics complained, lacked a sufficient ownership stake to keep them focused on the challenges of maintaining profitability in an increasingly globalized economy. Academic economists helped to lead this charge, calling not only for a thoroughgoing reliance on stock options as a means of executive compensation , but also for vibrant takeover markets. This combination of carrots and sticks would ostensibly encourage managers to make...

The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South

List of Illustrations vii List of Tables ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xv Introduction 1 Part I: The Triumph of Moderation 21 Chapter 1: The Divided South 23 Chapter 2: HOPE in the New South 44 Chapter 3: The Open-Schools Movement 69 Chapter 4: The Strange Career of Atlanta Exceptionalism 94 Part II: The Revolt of the Center 119 Chapter 5: The Charlotte Way 121 Chapter 6: Suburban Populism 148 Chapter 7: Neighborhood Politics 175 Chapter 8: Class Fairness and Racial Stability 198 Part III: Suburban Strategies 223 Chapter 9: The Suburbanization of Southern Politics 225 Chapter 10: The Failure of the Southern Strategy 251 Chapter 11: Metropolitan Divergence 276 Chapter 12: Regional Convergence 301 Epilogue 324 Notes 331 Index 365

Normal Homes

Normal Homes

White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism; The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South

White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism; The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South

The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South by Matthew D. Lassiter

The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South <i>by Matthew D. Lassiter</i>

The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South

The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South

Necrology: Charles S. Liebman (1934-2003)

CHARLES LIEBMAN, one of the most distinguished social scientists of the people, died suddenly on September 3, 2003, in his sixtyninth year. Over the last forty years Liebman significantly shaped socialscience inquiry into both American and Israeli Jews and Judaism. He wrote and edited fourteen books and well over a hundred articles. Though this necrology will focus on his contributions to the study of American Jews, his impact was equally profound on the study of Israel and on comparative studies. Liebman was educated in New York and spent his last three years of high school in Israel at the Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv. He completed his B.A. in economics at the University of Miami and received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from the University of Illinois. He began his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960 with an interest in suburban politics. But his interest in life led to a dramatic turn in his career when in 1963 he took a position at Yeshiva University. In 1969 he and his family moved to Israel, where he founded the department of political science at Bar-Ilan University, from which he retired in 2002. He continued to teach intermittently in the United States as a visiting professor at, among other institutions, Yale University, the University of Chicago, Brown University, and the Theological Seminary of America. Liebman became a pioneer in the study of American Jews and Judaism. He worked with Marshall Sklare, his senior colleague and teacher in this enterprise both at Yeshiva University and in establishing the field. In 1991, when the Journal of American Jewvish Hitory devoted a portion of an issue to his scholarship, he declared himself less a scholar of a particular discipline than simply one associated with Jewish studies.'

Fenced Off: The Suburbanization of American Politics. By Juliet F. Gainsborough. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001. 191p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

By the 1970s—and, some might argue, a decade earlier—America had shed its urban persona and had metamorphosed into a suburban nation. Yet in comparison with research done on cities and urban politics, little work had focused on this transition and ensuing suburban politics. Juliet Gainsborough's work seeks to reduce this deficiency by examining the suburban movement, its motivations, and their linkage to political behavior. Thankfully moving beyond previous discussions of mortgages and work commutes, the author narrows the focus of this short monograph to how living in the suburbs affects voter choice and policy preferences by altering the decision-making calculus (p. 8).