The Roots of Home
(See Cover)
The wreath that rings every U.S. metropolis is a green garland of place names and people collectively called Suburbia. It weaves through the hills beyond the cities, marches across flatlands that once were farms and pastures, dips into gullies and woodlands, straddles the rocky hillocks and surrounds the lonesome crossroads. Oftener than not it has a lilting polyphony that sings of trees (Streamwood, Elmwood, Lakewood. Kirkwood), the rolling country (Cedar Hill, Cockrell Hill, Forest Hills), or the primeval timberlands (Forest Grove, Park Forest, Oak Park, Deer Park). But it has its roots in such venerable names as Salem, Greenwich, Chester, Berkeley, Evanston, Sewickley and Rye.
In those towns and hills and groves last week the splendor of a new summer seemed, as always, to give a new lilt to life. The hills and fields triumphed with fresh green grass. In the old towns, the giant oaks and elms threw rich new shade across the white colonial mansions and the square, peaked-roofed clapboard houses. In fresh-minted subdivisions, sycamore striplings strained at their stakes to promise token cover for the bare houses of glass, steel, stone and shingle that have sprouted (19 million since 1940) as from a bottomless nest of Chinese boxes. School buses headed toward the season's last mile; power mowers and outboard motors pulsed the season's first promise. Fragrance of honeysuckle and roses overlay the smell of charcoal and seared beef. The thud of baseball against mitt, the abrasive grind of roller skate against concrete, the jarring harmony of the Good Humor bell tolled the day; the clink of ice, the distant laugh, the surge of hi-fi through the open window came with the night.
A March for Causes. For better or for worse, Suburbia in the 1960s is the U.S.'s grassroots. In Suburbia live one-third of the nation, roughly 60 million people who represent every patch of democracy's hand-stitched quilt, every economic layer, every laboring and professional pursuit in the country. Suburbia is the nation's broadening young middle class, staking out its claim across the landscape, prospecting on a trial-and-error basis for the good way of life for itself and for the children that it produces with such rapidity. It is, as Social Scientist Max Lerner (America as a Civilization) has put it, "the focus of most of the forces that are remaking American life today."
If Suburbia's avid social honeybees buzz from address to address in search of sweet status, Suburbia is at the same time the home of the talented and distinguished Americans who write the nation's books, paint its paintings, run its corporations and set the patterns.* If its legions sometimes march into frantic activity with rigorous unison, they march for such causes as better schools, churches and charities, which are the building blocks of a nation's character. If Suburbia's ardent pursuit of life at backyard barbecues, block parties and committee meetings offends pious city-bred sociologists, its self-conscious strivings to find a better way for men, women and children to live together must impress the same observers.
Suburbia is a particular kind of American phenomenon, and its roots lie in a particular kind of American heritage. In a casual, ill-planned way it is the meeting ground between the growing, thriving city and the authentic U.S. legend of smalltown life. Says Sociologist Alvin Scaff, who lives in Los Angeles' suburban Claremont: "If you live in the city, you may be a good citizen and interest yourself in a school-board election, but it is seldom meaningful in human terms. In a suburb, the chances are you know the man who is running for the school board, and you vote for or against him with more understanding." Says Don C. Peters, president of Pittsburgh's Mellon-Stuart Co. (construction) and chairman of the board of supervisors of suburban Pine Township: "The American suburb is the last outpost of democracy, the only level left on which the individual citizen can make his wishes felt, directly and immediately. I think there's something idealistic about the search for a home in the suburbs. Call it a return to the soil. It's something that calls most people some time in their lives.'' When France's Charles de Gaulle saw San Francisco's suburban Palo Alto on his trip to the U.S. six weeks ago, he hailed Suburbia as "magnifique."
Hell Is a City. Man has been moving to the suburbs ever since he invented the urbs. "Rus mihi dulce sub urbe est," sang the Roman epigrammatist Martial in the ist century A.D. "To me, the country on the outskirts of the city is sweet." And small wonder, for the towns and walled cities of Europe, from ancient times through the Middle Ages and beyond, were airless, fetid places choking with humanity. The big crisis of the cities came with the Industrial Revolution. In England lonely voices cried out against the grime and stench of the cities. "Hell is a city much like London," wrote Shelley, "a populous and smoky city."
By the early 20th century, middle-class Suburbia was a reality in England, and Social Historian C.F.G. Masterman was perhaps the first of a legion of urban critics to draw a bead on it. Each little red house, he wrote in 1909, "boasts its pleasant drawing room, its bow window, its little front garden . . . The women, with their single domestic servants, now so difficult to get. and so exacting when found, find time hangs rather heavy on their hands. But there are excursions to shopping centers in the West End and pious sociabilities, occasional theater visits and the interests of home."
Flowering Green. Long before England's Masterman had his say, Philadelphians and Bostonians were moving to the outskirts of town. Ben Franklin packed up, left Philadelphia's High Street and unpacked again at the corner of Second and Sassafras, grumbling that "the din of the Market increases upon me: and that with frequent interruptions has, I find, made me say some things twice over." And after all, as one proud New Englander says, "When Paul Revere needed help for the city of Boston, where did he go? The suburbs!"
At first the countryside communities leafed and budded with the homes of the well to do, who could afford to come and go by the seasons. By the turn of the century, U.S. Suburbia was flowering with permanent residents. Freed from the city by the trolley and rapid-transit services, and then by the automobile, hoisted gradually by a strengthening economy, the new middle-income families swept beyond the gates to buy homes of their own, from which they could commute to their jobs. When World War II ended, the sweep to the suburbs turned into a stampede. The veterans came home, the legion of war workers burst out of crowded city quarters, and in battalions they set out to find homes where the land was greener and cheaper. New settlements spread across acre upon acre; small, sleepy old towns were inundated by newcomers, and the suburban way of life became the visible substance of what a hard-working nation was working so hard for. "Eventually," observes Humorist-Exurbanite James Thurber (Cornwall, Conn.) of the steady spread of Suburbia, "this country will be called the United Cities of America. One suburb will pile into another until in New York State there'll only be Albany and New York City; and they can really fight it out in the streets. If they start shoveling in San Diego, buildings will tumble in Bangor."
The Women. The key figure in all Suburbia, the thread that weaves between family and community--the keeper of the suburban dream--is the suburban housewife. In the absence of her commuting, city-working husband, she is first of all the manager of home and brood, and beyond that a sort of aproned activist with a penchant for keeping the neighborhood and community kettle whistling. With children on her mind and under her foot, she is breakfast getter ("You can't have ice cream for breakfast because I say you can't"); laundress, house cleaner, dishwasher, shopper, gardener, encyclopedia, arbitrator of children's disputes, policeman ("Tommy, didn't your mother ever tell you that it's not nice to go into people's houses and open their refrigerators?").
If she is not pregnant, she wonders if she is. She takes her peanut-butter sandwich lunch while standing, thinks she looks a fright, watches her weight (periodically), jabbers over the short-distance telephone with the next-door neighbor. She runs a worn track to the front door, buys more Girl Scout cookies and raffle tickets than she thinks she should, cringes from the suburban locust--the door-to-door salesman who peddles everything from storm windows to potato chips, fire-alarm systems to vacuum cleaners, diaper sendee to magazine subscriptions. She keeps the checkbook, frets for the day that her husband's next raise will top the flood of monthly bills (it never will)--a tide that never seems to rise as high in the city as it does in the suburbs.
She wonders if her husband will send her flowers (on no special occasion), shoos the children next door to play at the neighbor's house for a change, paints her face for her husband's return before she wrestles with dinner. Spotted through her day are blessed moments of relief or dark thoughts of escape.
Auto Nation. In Suburbia's pedocracy huge emphasis is placed on activities for the young (Washington's suburban Montgomery County, Md.--pop. 358,000 --spends about $34 million a year on youth programs). The suburban housewife might well be a can-opener cook, but she must have an appointment book and a driver's license and must be able to steer a menagerie of leggy youngsters through the streets with the coolness of a driver at the Sebring trials; the suburban sprawl and the near absence of public transportation generally mean that any destination is just beyond sensible walking distance. Most children gauge walking distance at two blocks. If the theory of evolution is still working, it may well one day transform the suburban housewife's right foot into a flared paddle, grooved for easy traction on the gas pedal and brake.
As her children grow less dependent on her, Suburbia's housewife fills her newfound time with a dizzying assortment of extracurricular projects that thrust her full steam into community life. Beyond the home-centered dinner parties, Kaffeeklatsches and card parties, there is a directory-sized world of organizations devised for husbands as well as for wives (but it is the wife who keeps things organized). In New Jersey's Levittown, a projected 16,000-unit replica of the Long Island original, energetic suburbanites can sign up for at least 35 different organizations from the Volunteer Fire Department to the Great Books Club, and the Lords and Ladies Dance Club, not to mention the proliferating list of adult-education courses that keep the public school lights glowing into the night. "We have a wonderful adult-education program," says Suburbanite (Levittown, L.I.) Muriel Kane (two children), "where women can learn how to fix their own plumbing and everything." Fighting in the Thickets. Since Suburbia was conceived for children (and vice versa), the Suburban housewife is the chief jungle fighter for school expansion and reform. Beyond that the path leads easily to the thickets of local politics. Only recently, after the Montgomery County manager whacked $11 million from the 1961 school budget, the county council was invaded by an indignant posse of 1,000 P.T.A. members. The council scrambled to retreat, not only restored the cuts, but added a few projects of its own for good measure. The tax rate jumped 5-c- per $100 valuation as a result, but there was scarcely a whimper.
To the north, in New York's suburban Scarsdale, the women's sense of responsibility has the same ring. Says Housewife Rhea Hertel (Woman's Club, Neighborhood Association, P.T.A., League of Women Voters): "If you're receiving benefits and not contributing, what kind of person are you?" Adds Scarsdale's Grace Fitzwater (Hitchcock Presbyterian Church, Woman's Club, P.T.A.): "When we lived in New York City, I roared with laughter at this sort of thing. I never knew anyone in the city who was civic; out here I don't know anybody who isn't." Says Florence Willett, 44, who is the new mayor of Detroit's suburban Birmingham: "Women feel a greater need for taking their share of the work. With husbands away at work and hampered by long commuting, women can share and contribute more. Don't ever say we run the suburbs, though."
Talent. With a little prodding from his wife, the suburban husband develops a big yen to mix in Government affairs at the local level. How can the head of the house, father of the brood, refuse to campaign for school bonds or stand for the board of education--particularly when his firm urges him to be civic-minded? The result is that Suburbia often shines with the kind of topnotch talent that makes troubled big-city fathers wince with envy. In Kansas City's suburban Prairie Village, for example, the $1-a-year mayor is a lawyer with a growing practice, the president of the city council is a Procter & Gamble Co. division manager and the head of the village planning commission is assistant to the president of a manufacturing firm. In Philadelphia's suburban Swarthmore, the town council includes a Philadelphia banker, a Du Pont engineer, the president of a pipeline company and a retired executive of Swarthmore College.
Biggest of the problems that such people face is Suburbia's growing morass of overlapping services and functions, especially in counties that have experienced a big building rush. In the 17 towns that comprise Denver's four-county suburban area, for example, there are 27 school districts, 35 water districts, 59 sanitation districts. The Suburbia of Portland, Ore. embraces three counties, 178 special service districts, 60 school districts, twelve city governments. And the granddaddy of them all is the megalopolis of Los Angeles which is fish-netted with 72 separate governments and an uncounted array of districts, authorities, and floating unincorporated communities.
But suburbanites, more than their urban or rural brethren, tend to want to get things fixed. Lakewood, Calif., 22 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, was just another boondock of 5,000 people ten years ago when the boom thundered. A development group poured $200 million into 17,000 homes ($8,000-$11,000) and a big shopping center. As residents took hold, the sense of frustration that came from long-distance county rule and the absence of locally administered services flashed into a new, self-starting energy. Lakewood, with a present population of 75,000, incorporated itself in 1954, sank its own home-nurtured political roots and fashioned an identity of its own. Then, while running its own affairs, it devised a method of contracting for police, road maintenance and building maintenance to the county government. The "Lakewood Plan" was later copied by many other California communities. So ably has Lakewood fashioned its living pattern to suit itself that many Lakewood families who might have moved on to more expensive, status-setting locales, have decided to stay where they are.
"Anybody Home?" The suburbanite has been prodded, poked, gouged, sniffed and tweaked by armies of sociologists and swarms of cityside cynics, but in reality he is his own best critic. Organized suburban living is a relatively new invention, and already some of its victims are wondering if it has too much organization and too little living. The pressure of activity and participation in the model suburb of Lakewood, for example, can be harrowing. The town's recreation league boasts no boys' baseball teams (2,000 players), 36 men's softball teams, ten housewives' softball teams. In season, the leagues play 75 boys' and 30 men's basketball teams, 77 football teams, all coached by volunteers, while other activities range through drama, dance and charm classes, bowling, dog-training classes, "Slim 'n' Trim" groups, roller skating, photography, woodcraft, and lessons in how to ice a cake. Says Joy Hudson, 35, mother of three children: "There is a problem of getting too busy. Some weeks my husband is home only two nights a week. My little boy often says, 'Anybody going to be home tonight?' " Suburbia, echoed Exurbanite Adlai Stevenson (Libertyville, Ill.) recently, is producing "a strange half-life of divided families and Sunday fathers."
The parental press to keep the youngsters busy has created an image of an Organization Child, or Boy in the Grey Flannel Sneakers. The thriving Cub Scout movement is a wondrous machine of 1,822,062 beanie-capped boys who visit fire stations, make kites and tie knots, all en masse, and the Little League has more than a million little sports who are cheered on by an equal number of overexuberant daddies. "Some kids," says Long Island School Psychologist Justin Koss, "need the Little League. But some need to dig in their own backyards, too. The trouble is that plenty of parents think that if their kid isn't in Little League, there's something abnormal about him." Declares Shirley Vandenberg, 33 (three children), of Portland, Ore.'s suburban Oak Grove: "We don't need Blue Birds and Boy Scouts out here. This is not the slums. The kids out here have the great outdoors. I think people are so bored, they organize the children, and then try to hook everyone else on it. And then the poor kids have no time left to just lie on their beds and daydream." Says Jean Chenoweth (two teen-age children), who moved to a Denver house from the suburbs: "Parents do nine-tenths of the work. I had a Blue Bird Group for three years, and we never accomplished a cotton-picking thing--they just came for the refreshments as far as I could see." Making her choice, Mrs. Chenoweth devotes her spare time to fund raising for a school for handicapped children and making recordings for the blind.
In those suburbs where families, income, education and interest are homogenized, suburbanites sometimes wonder whether their children are cocooned from the rest of the world. "A child out here sees virtually no sign of wealth and no sign of poverty," says Suburbanite Alan Rosenthal (Washington's Rock Creek Palisades). "It gives him a tendency to think that everyone else lives just the way he does." Suburbanite-Author Robert Paul ("Where Did You Go?" "Out." "What Did You Do?" "Nothing.") Smith (New York City's Scarsdale), complains that Scarsdale is "just like a Deanna Durbin movie: all clean and unreal. Hell, I went to school in Mount Vernon, N.Y., with the furnace man's son--you don't get that here."
Den of Conformity. And what of the grownups themselves? For some, the suburban euphoria often translates itself into the suburban caricature. The neighborhood race for bigger and better plastic swimming pools, cars and power mowers is still being run in some suburbs, and in still others, the chief warm-weather occupation is neighbor watching (Does she hang her laundry outside to dry? Does he leave his trash barrels on the curb after they have been emptied?). In Long Island's staid, old Garden City, observes Hofstra Assistant Sociology Professor William Dobriner, "they don't care whether you believe in God, but you'd better cut your grass." In close-by Levittown, a poll of householders some time ago showed that the No. 1 topic on people's minds was the complaint that too many dogs were running unleashed on the lawns. Topic No. 2 was the threat of world Communism.
The all-weather activities often center on frenzied weekend parties in the "den," attended by neighbors, who each in his turn will throw a potato-chip and cheese-dip party on succeeding weekends. Cries a Chicago suburban woman: "I'm so sick and tired of seeing those same faces every Friday and Saturday night, I could scream." In Kansas City's suburban Overland Park, three jaded couples formed an "Anti-Conformity League" to fight groupthink, disbanded it soon afterward because, explains ex-Schoolteacher Ginger Powers (two children), "it was getting just too organized to be anti-conformist."
Though suburban wife-swapping stories are the delight of the urban cocktail party, immorality in the suburbs is no more or less prevalent than it is in the cities. But an adventuresome male commuter does have one advantage: he can pursue a clandestine affair easily in the city merely by notifying his suburban wife that he is being kept at the office. One sign of the times is that Private Detective Milton Thompson of suburban Kansas City is also a marriage counselor, has handled 300 marital cases in the past three years. The usual story: "The husband plays on the Missouri side of the river before he gets out here. Maybe it's just a few extra-dry martinis with the gang from his office. Maybe not. Anyway, Mama has a little more money than average. She has a maid. That gives her a heck of a lot of time to sit around and think. If hubby is late--boy, does she think."
Suburbia's clergymen tend to be most keenly aware of Suburbia's disappointments and Suburbia's promise. "Many people," complains Kansas City Rabbi Samuel Mayerberg, "mistake activity for usefulness." Says Dr. Donald S. Ewing, minister of Wayland's Trinitarian Congregational Church near Boston: ' Suburbia is gossipy. So many of the people are on approximately the same level economically and socially. They're scrambling for success. They tend to be new in the community and they're unstable and insecure. When they see someone else fail, in work or in a family relationship, they themselves feel a rung higher, and this is a great reason for gossip. I think socially we're flying apart--we don't meet heart to heart any more, we meet at cocktail parties in a superficial way. We value smartness rather than depth, shine rather than spirit. But I think people are sick of it; they want to get out of it."
In Chicago's suburban Elk Grove Village, busy Lutheran Minister Martin E. Marty, who writes for the Christian Century, and who devotes much of his time to patching up corroding marriages, sighs wearily: "We've all learned that Hell is portable. I think we're seeing a documentable rebellion going on against the postwar idea of mere belongingness and sociability. We all agree that Suburbia means America. It's not different, but it's typical. Solve Suburbia's problems and you solve America's problems."
Buddhas & Babies. The fact surrounding all the criticism and self-searching is that most suburbanites are having too good a time to realize that they ought to be unhappy with their condition.
At week's end, as they nursed their power mowers down the lawn, Suburbia's men paused here and there to enjoy a spell of nothing more salacious than wife-watching. Tanned, brief-clad women sprawled in their chaises and chatted about babies, Khrushchev, Japan and the P.T.A. In the patios, the amateur chefs prepared juicy sacrifices on the suburban Buddhas --the charcoal grills. Mint-flavored iced tea or tart martinis chilled thirsty throats, and from across hedgerows and fences came the cries of exultant youngsters and the yells and laughter of men and women engaged in a rough-and-tumble game of croquet or volleyball. (In Springfield Township, near Philadelphia, nine couples recently pounded through a rousing volleyball match; five of the women were pregnant, but no emergency deliveries were made that day.)
Thus the suburban counterpoint leaps forward in optimistic measure, creating a new framework for the American theme. True, as in every place, every suburban husband wishes he earned more money, every mother with young children wishes' she had more help, small boys wish there were fewer days of school, small girls wish there were fewer small boys, and babies all wish there was no such thing as strained spinach. Nevertheless, there is scarcely a man or woman living in all those hills and groves beyond the cities who does not sing with Martial: Rtis mihi dulce sub urbe est.
* Among them: Golfer Bobby Jones, Buckhead (near Atlanta); Boston Symphony Conductor Charles Munch, Milton (Boston); United Fruit Co. Board Chairman George P. Gardner Jr., Brookline (Boston); Biographer Richard Ellman, Evanston (Chicago); Ex-Baseballer Bob Feller, Gates Mills (Cleveland); Pediatrician-Author Benjamin Spock, Cleveland Heights (Cleveland); Martin Co. (aircraft) Chairman George Bunk.er, Englewood (Denver); Hockey Star Gordie Howe, Lathrup Village (Detroit); Architect Eero Saarinen, Bloomfield Hills (Detroit) ; Kansas City Star President Roy Roberts, Mission Hills (Kansas City); Douglas Aircraft Chairman Donald Douglas Sr., Rolling Hills (Los Angeles); Caltech President Lee A. Du-Bridge, Pasadena (Los Angeles); Architect Wallace K. Harrison, Huntington, L.I. (New York); Composers Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber, Mt. Kisco (New York); Author John Hersey, Southport, Conn. (New York); Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates, Devon (Philadelphia); Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson, Greenwich, Conn. (New York); Artist Andrew Wyeth, Chadds Ford (Philadelphia); Westinghouse Electric Corp. Chairman Gwilym Price, Carnegie (Pittsburgh); United Steelworkers President David McDonald, Mt. Lebanon (Pittsburgh); National Council of Churches President Edwin Dahlberg, University City (St. Louis); Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa, Mill Valley (San Francisco); Boeing Airplane Co. President William Allen, The Highlands (Seattle); Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black, Alexandria (Washington, D.C.).
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