The Bulldozer Revolution: Suburbs and Southern History Since World War Ii (Essay‪)‬

A GENERATION AGO, A STATE-OF-THE-FIELD FORUM ON SOUTHERN history would have included an entry on cities rather than suburbs. Ever since the World War II era, southern historians have followed the lead of V. O. Key Jr., who in 1949 predicted, "The growth of cities contains the seeds of political change for the South." Key and other contemporaries assumed that urban development would not only modernize but also liberalize southern politics, especially by shifting the balance of power away from "the black-belt whites [who had] succeeded in imposing their will on their states and thereby presented a solid regional front in national politics on the race issue." (1) Before long, however, analysts recognized that "the first fruits of increasing industrialism," as Samuel Lubell wrote in the 1956 edition of The Future of American Politics, had not liberalized the South by empowering the labor movement but were instead fostering "a rising urban middle class, which is virtually Republican in political sympathies." (2) Two decades later, James C. Cobb argued that urbanization represented the driving force behind the weakening of regional distinctiveness and suggested that "[t]he South's cities seem to be the logical place to begin further analyses of southern Republicanism." (3) Earl Black and Merle Black concurred in Politics and Society in the South (1987), which traced the transformations brought by industrial development and metropolitan expansion and concluded that "[t]he main winners in the new southern politics have been the growing middle classes, particularly in the urban areas." (4) Until quite recently, the suburbs had not played a central or often even an explicit role in the historical analysis of southern politics and society since World War II. (5) While an urban-suburban dichotomy took hold in community studies of the postwar North and Midwest, scholars narrated the geographic divisions and political conflicts within the modern South primarily through two pairs of categories: rural versus urban (or sometimes metropolitan) and Deep South versus outer or peripheral South. (6) The Sun Belt framework that flourished in the 1970s and 1980s paid more attention to suburban-style development, especially seen in the pioneering work of Carl Abbott, who traced the growing schisms between central cities and politically autonomous suburbs in fragmenting metropolitan regions. (7) But the "suburban cities" concept that pervaded most of the early Sun Belt literature drew a regional contrast between the sprawling metropolitan centers in the South and West (such as Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, and Atlanta) and the Chicago school of urban ecology that has dominated the sensibilities of urban historians. (8) Political trends and behavioral patterns that scholars specifically attributed to suburbanization in other parts of the country--the rise of white-collar corporate culture, an idealized middleclass domesticity, the upwardly mobile base of the postwar Republican Party, a grassroots outlook driven by quality-of-life concerns such as property taxes and public schools, a defensive localism that maintained social homogeneity through exclusionary zoning--seemed sufficiently captured through a city-centered model for the metropolitan South. (9)