ABSTRACT

To speak about the “forces” – social, economic, and political – that propelled the outward movement from center city to suburb in the quarter-century after World War II is to cast an overly deterministic light on the changes in America. Suburban growth was, without question, affected mightily by the trends identified in Chapter 2, but it is just as true that the reshaping of America’s metropolitan areas was a matter of choice. The single-family house (and its white picket fence) with a green plot of land on a cul-de-sac was effectively sold as “the American Dream” because it so powerfully appealed to a wide swath of the public.1 The moves were aspirational, widely understood as a search for a better life. If those aspirations were shaped by a powerful marketing machine, the advertisers were tapping into something deep in the American psyche.