Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party
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Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party
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Overview
Don't Blame Us traces the reorientation of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party away from their roots in labor union halls of northern cities to white-collar professionals in postindustrial high-tech suburbs, and casts new light on the importance of suburban liberalism in modern American political culture. Focusing on the suburbs along the high-tech corridor of Route 128 around Boston, Lily Geismer challenges conventional scholarly assessments of Massachusetts exceptionalism, the decline of liberalism, and suburban politics in the wake of the rise of the New Right and the Reagan Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. Although only a small portion of the population, knowledge professionals in Massachusetts and elsewhere have come to wield tremendous political leverage and power. By probing the possibilities and limitations of these suburban liberals, this rich and nuanced account shows that—far from being an exception to national trends—the suburbs of Massachusetts offer a model for understanding national political realignment and suburban politics in the second half of the twentieth century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400852420 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/21/2014 |
| Series: | Politics and Society in Modern America , #109 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Don't Blame Us
Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party
By Lily Geismer
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-5242-0
CHAPTER 1
No Ordinary Suburbs
Political scientist Robert C. Wood began his influential 1959 critique of suburban political ideology, Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics, with a disclaimer. The MIT professor and Lincoln resident deflected accusations that it might be hypocritical that he chose "to live in a place I criticize so strongly." Wood contended that the town where he lived was by no means the typical suburb that his book criticized. "Lincoln is undoubtedly an anachronism and it is probably obstructive to the larger purposes of the Boston region," conceded the leading expert in urban affairs and later undersecretary for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the Johnson administration. "But it is a pleasant and hospitable anachronism and while it exists I am quite happy to indict myself." Fellow Lincoln resident, book editor, and nature writer Paul Brooks used similar language in reluctantly admitting that "the town would have to be called a suburb" after World War II, but only "by accident of geography and economics."
As white upper-middle class professionals with ties to MIT and Harvard, Wood and Brooks embodied the demographic profile and outlook of many of the new residents who moved into single-family homes in the predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods of Lincoln and its surrounding communities in the postwar era. Homeowners in Lincoln and its counterparts shared a view of their communities as distinct from the typical mass-produced postwar suburbs like Levittown or Lakewood, and saw themselves as being different from the average conformist, homogeneous, or ordinary suburbanite criticized by C. Wright Mills, William Whyte, and Wood himself, and represented on television shows like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Owning a home in Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Brookline, and Newton became a powerful marker of residents' socioeconomic status and political values, and assumed a set of cultural, social, and political meanings tied to a sense of distinctiveness. The Newton Chamber of Commerce deployed this self-image in a late 1960s' promotional campaign to attract a particular type of newcomer, proclaiming that the "descriptive terms and phrases that characterize Newton just don't apply to other places." Newton is "no ordinary suburb," with citizens as "socially responsible as they are affluent." It was, in fact, Newton's level of affluence more than the ethos of its residents that it made it least "ordinary," and positioned it and its corollaries as some of the wealthiest and most exclusive suburbs in the state and nation.
The archipelago of communities of Brookline, Concord, Lexington, Lincoln, and Newton and their residents were therefore in many ways far from "anachronistic," "exceptional," or "accidental." The Route 128 area and residents like Wood and his cohort literally and figuratively embodied the deliberate processes of postwar suburban growth and land control, and the major trends in postwar society. These developments included the rise of the postindustrial knowledge and university-oriented economy, the federal government's investment in defense research and weapons buildup, the baby boom, and patterns of economic and racial segregation.
These structural processes, policies, and national trends intersected with the particular history, geography, and reputation of the Boston area to produce the set of juxtapositions—between history and progress, tradition and technology, open-mindedness and exclusivity, meritocracy and equality—that characterized the physical landscape and political culture of the Route 128 suburbs and the political ideology of many of their residents.
Homeowners' view of themselves in rural Lincoln and cosmopolitan Newton fueled grassroots activism on a range of liberal issues. This sense of individual and collective distinctiveness simultaneously made many residents see themselves as separate from, and not responsible for, many of the consequences of suburban growth and the forms of inequality and segregation that suburban development fortified. Exploring the structural and cultural forces that produced the identity and ideology shared by Wood, Brooks, and many of their knowledge-worker neighbors sheds light on the dimensions of this worldview, and its multifaceted and wide-reaching consequences.
The Hub of the Universe
The construction of the Route 128 highway in the 1950s reinvigorated the ethos of distinctiveness in Boston and the rich history of Massachusetts. The city served as the site for many of the key events of the American Revolution. Just across the Charles River in Cambridge stand the ivy-lined walls of Harvard University, while ten to fifteen miles westward along the route of Paul Revere's famous ride sit the towns of Lexington and Concord, first founded around 1640. Further north lies the city of Lowell, whose textile factories were the birthplace of the nation's Industrial Revolution and the famous former whaling port of New Bedford is to the south. Beginning in the nineteenth century, boosters labeled Boston the "hub of the universe," an appellation that captures both the city's central economic and cultural standing and elevated sense of itself. Route 128 revised the meaning of the slogan, as it transformed the Boston area into a major hub of the science and technology universe, and pushed the city's economic and labor centers to its suburban ring.
The high-tech white-collar workers who emerged around Route 128 in the postwar decades represented a major change from the nineteenth century, when Boston had served as an industrial center with a heavily unionized workforce. By 1840, nearly two-thirds of the nation's textile industries operated in Massachusetts, and between 1850 and 1900 metropolitan Boston shifted from a small merchant city of 200,000 inhabitants into a metropolis of more than 1 million people. The rise of industrialization in Boston and its surrounding communities coupled with the region's location on the Atlantic Ocean made Massachusetts a favorable destination for Italian and Jewish immigrants and union activity. Between 1880 and 1920, Massachusetts experienced a large number of strikes and lockouts, including the great Lawrence strike of 1912 and Boston police strike of 1920. Yet by the early 1920s, the Massachusetts textile and manufacturing industry began a long period of decline, and trade union rates followed suit. Over the decade, the Massachusetts industrial labor force shrunk from 695,00 to 481,000. World War II momentarily buoyed industrial production, but after the war the state experienced a string of major textile factory closures. Companies moved south, and the total factory employment dropped in Massachusetts by 9 percent between 1947 and 1955. This loss of manufacturing jobs coupled with the Cold War suppression of labor activism contributed to the continued drop in the state's unionization rate.
The postwar growth of the technology and science sector offered a much-needed infusion into the sagging Massachusetts economy. Since its founding in 1860, MIT had served as a source of scientific and technological innovation for the federal government, but its role magnified during World War II when the university became "the nation's unofficial center for wartime research." MIT received the main contracts for several of the government's largest defense projects, including the development of radar and microwave technology. At the beginning of the Cold War, the bond between the university and Pentagon tightened. Throughout the postwar era, MIT boasted the largest defense research budget of any university, with neighbor Harvard following close behind in third place. With full funding by the federal government in 1954, MIT opened Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington near the Hanscom Air Force Base, which employed nearly 4,000 people. The development of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system at Lincoln Lab represented the largest R & D initiative since the Manhattan Project and led to many key advances in computer innovation. Numerous researchers used the ideas first incubated at Lincoln and other MIT labs as launching points for lucrative private companies. An internal report in the 1960s revealed that just 3 MIT academic departments and 4 laboratories had created 129 companies during the postwar decades. The rapid growth of industry connected to the university proved to one observer that "M.I.T. is Boston's greatest asset." "MIT has spawned more spin-off companies than any other single institution in the country," Susan Rosegrant and David Lampe later remarked.
Most of these spin-offs moved to the research parks along Route 128. Transportation developers in the late 1940s had primarily intended for Route 128 to ease commuting into Boston and vacation travel north to New Hampshire and Maine and south to Cape Cod by connecting a collection of existing roadways. Skeptics initially deemed Route 128 "the road to nowhere" because of its semicircular shape. A key intervention, however, changed the fate of the highway and gave it several more affirmative nicknames, such as the "magic semi-circle," "golden horseshoe," and "ideas road." Gerald Blakely, son of an MIT professor, and an executive at the real estate investment and development company Cabot, Cabot & Forbes (CCF), recognized that the construction of Route 128 opened up new opportunities for research parks that would be ideal for the burgeoning technology industry emerging from MIT, where there was little room for physical expansion. Even before the Route 128 ribbon-cutting ceremony, CCF executives not only lobbied suburban municipalities to rezone land by the unfinished highway for commercial development but also approached Cambridge-and Boston-based technology firms and labs about relocating to these new sites. The company opened its first research park in the suburb of Needham in the early 1950s, and over the next decade CCF developed several others along the perimeter roadway.
The names of the corporations filling the modernist structures along Route 128 sounded as if they came from sci-fi novels. Companies such as Digital, Itek, Trans-Sonics, MITRE, Tracerlab, Dynametrics, Bose, AVCO, High Voltage, and Wang Laboratories positioned Route 128 as the "biggest and fastest growing science-based complex in the U.S." Aware of its client base in the knowledge industry, CCF designed the parks to resemble college campuses with low, detached structures and pastoral landscaping surrounded by trees. By 1967, the number of companies located on or near the highway rose to 729, and collectively employed 66,701 people in manufacturing plants and R & D departments. In addition to several start-ups, established companies like Polaroid shifted their headquarters to land along the highway in Waltham, and national companies such as RCA, Sylvania, and General Electric also opened up corporate branches, labs, and manufacturing plants on or near Route 128. A profusion of other companies and laboratories appeared at sites removed from the actual highway, but the name Route 128, according to the New York Times, came to "symbolize the technological boom in the Greater Boston area."
Many observers cited "Yankee ingenuity" as the key ingredient in the rise of this new industry, obscuring the pivotal role of Cold War federal investment in the expansion. During the 1950s, Massachusetts firms and laboratories rivaled "Sunbelt centers" like Orange County, California, and received more than six billion dollars in US Department of Defense contracts. This funding increased annually by one billion dollars throughout the 1960s. By 1962, the federal government accounted for fully half the sales of Route 128 industry, and Massachusetts ranked third nationally behind California and New York in Pentagon spending. In the 1950s Raytheon, the state's largest beneficiary of defense spending, opened twenty-five additional plants that employed thirty-six thousand people within a thirty-five-mile radius of downtown Boston as well as a large new headquarters along Route 128 in Lexington.
Route 128 boosters confidently believed that the rise of the technology industry would provide the answer to the area's economic problems. Industry advocates optimistically predicted that the new companies would seamlessly replace the shuttered manufacturing and textile factories as the main staple of the Massachusetts economy. In 1961, a study sponsored by a Boston bank even proposed that Raytheon's Hawk missile rather than the textile spindle serve as the symbol of the local economy. Much of the new industry along Route 128 demanded highly skilled nonunionized labor, thereby excluding large sectors of the existing population from new employment opportunities. With few exceptions, the office parks along Route 128 lacked access to adequate public transportation, and likewise most transit schedules served suburban commuters going into the city instead of the reverse. Automobile ownership was virtually a prerequisite, which precluded many poor people in the city from seeking or obtaining employment in the new companies. Corporate decentralization ultimately obscured many of the unsolved negative consequences of deindustrialization even as it intensified the patterns of economic and racial segregation in metropolitan Boston, which the simultaneous process of mass suburbanization further exacerbated.
Route 128: The Road to Segregation
By the 1970s, Route 128 had earned the labels as both "America's Technology Highway" and the "Road to Segregation," each of which connote the array of federal polices and important larger processes of postwar development that led a government commission to dub the area a "bellwether for certain national trends in suburban growth." The titles confirm metropolitan Boston's long-standing history as the pacesetter for national patterns of suburbanization, which contributed to the area's particular spatial, racial, and cultural evolution.
In the nineteenth century, Boston spawned the nation's earliest streetcar suburbs, including Dorchester and Roxbury. In the decade following the Civil War, the city annexed and engulfed the towns, doubling its size and population. This trend of consolidation abruptly ended in 1873, when the town of Brookline, which sat adjacent to Boston, became the first municipality in the country to vote to oppose annexation and remain a separate entity. Brookline's action set off a chain reaction in other communities throughout Boston and the nation that would have profound consequences. For Boston in particular, it meant that upper-class communities sharing as many as two or three borders with the city remained separate entities and exempt from the burdens of urbanization, which established new and long-lasting patterns of racial and class segmentation in the metropolitan area. This decision set Brookline and Roxbury on different trajectories. By the mid-twentieth century, Roxbury contained some of the poorest parts of the city, while separate Brookline with its stately Victorian homes upheld its identity and reputation as "the wealthiest town in the world."
The increasing popularity of the automobile and the building of new roadways in the first decades of the twentieth century quickened the pace of metropolitan development in Boston, while extending the pattern of suburbanization and resistance to annexation to include previously rural towns like Belmont, Concord, Lexington, and Wellesley. Developers and homeowners often placed formal restrictive covenants in residential deeds preventing houses from being sold to racial or ethnic minorities, or used more informal gentlemen's agreements, which served largely the same function. These practices ensured that residents in the towns remained overwhelmingly Protestant, white, and affluent. Like many early suburbs in Boston and throughout the nation, Brookline and Newton did retain pockets of laborers and domestic servants, many of them Irish Catholic immigrants, while the more rural Concord, Lexington, and Lincoln still had clusters of farmers into the twentieth century, creating clear socioeconomic divides within the communities.
Many of the Boston area's wealthier towns during the interwar period exacerbated these divisive patterns by adopting rigid zoning and municipal planning laws to preserve both their physical characteristics and economic exclusivity. By the late 1930s, towns like Weston had implemented a set of lot-size minimums, thereby safeguarding against commercial development as well as new working-class and nonwhite residents. When a developer challenged the town of Needham's zoning code in 1942, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld local zoning power, affirming the benefits of minimum one-acre plots to prevent the "overcrowding of land" and protect the "public welfare." The decision established an important state and national precedent as suburban municipalities throughout the country used the ruling as justification to adopt an extremely subjective definition of the "public welfare."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Don't Blame Us by Lily Geismer. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xi
Abbreviations xv
Introduction 1
Part I Suburban Activism
1 No Ordinary Suburbs 19
2 Good Neighbors 43
3 A Multiracial World 71
4 Grappling with Growth 97
5 Political Action for Peace 123
Part II Massachusetts Liberals
6 A New Center 149
7 Open Suburbs vs. Open Space 173
8 Tightening the Belt 199
9 No One Home to Answer the Phone 227
10 From Taxachusetts to the Massachusetts Miracle 251
Epilogue 281
Notes 289
Index 357
What People are Saying About This
"This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the reinvention of American liberalism since the 1960s. Don't Blame Us reveals how affluent white suburban professionals moved a new set of material concerns—their own—to the center of public life. Surprising and provocative, this story deserves the widest possible discussion."—Nancy MacLean, author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace"Don't Blame Us isolates a crucially important topic and confronts it from a wholly original, richly suggestive perspective. A valuable and original contribution to American political history, the book challenges the master narrative of the rise of the Right and the decline of the liberal coalition, and locates post-New Deal liberalism in particular spatial, institutional, and ideological venues."—Bruce Schulman, Boston University"Geismer recovers an all but forgotten chapter of suburban liberalism in America. Don't Blame Us is an unusually ambitious and compelling book that combines a detailed history of local politics in a way that forces a reconceptualization of broader national narratives of political development."—Joseph Crespino, author of Strom Thurmond's America and In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution"Don't Blame Us is a remarkable piece of scholarship that tells an engaging and multifaceted story about suburban political activism and sensibilities. Geismer's work is incredibly valuable for rethinking the trajectory of Democratic politics in the (long) Age of Reagan."—David M. P. Freund, author of Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America