Phil Ethington
University of Southern California

"The Granite Frontier: The Triumph of Metropolitan Civilization in the
United States, 1850-1950 (A brief critique of Kenneth T. Jackson's
_Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States_ [New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986])."

Brief essay to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Organization of
American Historians, Indianapolis, 2 April 1998.

--- --- ---
In my opinion, _Crabgrass Frontier_ is the best single explication of US
suburbs, their cultural and political economic aspects, their
transformations over time, and their distinctive qualities in a
comparative international context, ever published.  The product of at
least fifteen years of research, it is deeply and broadly researched,
and highly readable.  As a study of suburbs qua suburbs, it is simply
superb, very deserving of the Bancroft and Francis Parkman prizes it
received.

    As a study of U.S. urbanism it is of central importance, but also
deeply flawed.  In this short presentation I will first briefly point
out some of the great strengths of this book, and then, for the
majority of my time, I want to explain why I think that this book,
despite its achievements, is deeply wrong about one very important
thing: its claim that the "suburbanization" of the United States should
be dated from the early nineteenth century.  Indeed, the central
message of this very wide ranging volume, sometimes explicitly, often
implicitly stated:  that Americans have always (since the early 19th
century) been a suburban people.  I strongly disagree with this central
theme because it flies in the face of the great metropolitan
achievement of the American people, especially during the century from
1850 to 1950.

    To support his through-line, of "the suburbanization of the United
States" since the early 19th century, Jackson deploys three main
analytic narratives: 1) statistical (demographic geography); 2)
political-economic; and 3) cultural.  Of these I find the
political-economic to be only one which is clearly "right." Indeed, his
political economy of suburbanization has been of great generative value
for scholarship, influencing many, including myself.

  Only in ignorance of Jackson's book can anyone claim that the
dynamics of suburban sprawl are owing to the neutral operation of
market forces or of the growth of transportation technology, from
streetcar through automobile.  On the contrary, Jackson is careful
throughout the book to show how political power or privilege has
enabled developers to take advantage of substantial governmental
subsidies or of conflicting-interest unions of transportation and land
development to push the invisible hand in directions it may not have
gone.   The chapter on the HOLC [Home Owners Loan Corporation] is of
very great importance in this regard, showing in detail how the Federal
government perverted the US housing market to hinge on race.  This
portion of the book alone has been generative of much scholarship, and
much remains to be done to follow-up on Jackson's important analysis.

CRITIQUE: THE TRIUMPH OF METROPOLITAN AMERICA

    The irony of my admiration for this book is that despite the
strengths in it I still see it as basically wrong.  Here I will address
the other two analytic narratives in _Crabgrass Frontier_: the
geo-demographic and the cultural arguments.

    The persuasive force of this book derives from a driving conviction
at its heart: that US suburbanization is not a 20th-century phenomenon.
First as a college student in the late 1950s and then as a graduate
student beginning to reshape the re-emerging interdisciplinary field of
urban studies in the early 1960s, Jackson witnessed experientially the
explosive growth of Levittown-style suburbs.  And, intellectually, he
imbibed the 1950s sociological discourse on the suburbanization of
America: a discourse led by David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and William
H. Whyte, Jr.  This sociological discourse was very shrill, and
urgently suggested that the whole phenomenon of surbanization and its
implications for "organization man" were recent.  Jackson naturally
reacted to this, and in his early forays into the question was quite
adamantly on a mission to demolish that ahistoric approach to US
urbanism.

    He was much more polemical in his early work toward _Crabgrass
Frontier_:  "My purpose," he declares in an essay of 1975, "is to
demonstrate that all the so-called new suburban trends are at least a
century old" (112).  That declaration is from his contribution to Leo
F. Schnore's pathbreaking _The New Urban History_, an essay entitled
"Urban Deconcentration in the Nineteenth Century: A Statistical
Inquiry."  In it, Jackson masterfully marches through "five indications
of deconcentration (which he also calls "suburbanization"[1])"
 -- higher peripheral rates of growth, leveling of densities, absolute
loss of population at the center, movement of upper and middle classes
to the periphery, and lengthening of the average journey to work," to
conclude that all were "present in the largest American cities before
the introduction of the electric streetcar in the 1890s"(140).  By the
time of "Urban Deconcentration," Jackson had already published two
essays with "Crabgrass Frontier" in the title: one that appeared in
Raymond Mohl and James Richardson's edited volume of 1973 boldly
claimed in its subtitle "150 Years of Suburban Growth in America."  That
would take us to 1823.[2]  _Crabgrass Frontier_ is less explicitly
polemical, but no less strident in pursuing this claim that
suburbanization is deeply rooted in the US way of life since the 19th
century.  So, what is wrong with this research agenda that began
probably around 1970 and culminated in 1986, with _Crabgrass Frontier_?
For all his exacting ecological research, for all his research into
cultural values favoring the detached home and yard, Jackson has lost
sight of the obvious: the people of the United States constructed great
urban centers -- metropolises -- during the late 19th century.  This
collective project reached an apogee in the first half of the 20th
century and created an essentially urban, not suburban culture.
Millions of persons from the rural countryside of North America and
from all continents of the globe migrated to work and lived in great
urban centers.  New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston
loomed very large in the worldview of these millions, who daily read
about and spoke about opportunities awaiting them in those nearly
mythical places.  In the form of sheer numbers, this movement is easy
to visualize.  By 1890 a majority of the US workforce was industrial;
by 1920 a majority of the US population lived in urban places.

    The growth of urban populations, which spilled over the boundaries
even of the great cities at their cores forced the Census Bureau to
adopt a new classification in 1910: the "Metropolitan District,"
defined officially as clusters including central cities of greater than
100,000 population plus surrounding jurisdictions within ten miles and
those having populations densities of 150 persons per square mile or
greater.  There were already forty-four Metropolitan Districts by the
first use of the concept in the 1910 Census.[3] This point of view is
not unambiguous.  The United States had still not reached the point of
"urbanization" that Great Britain had reached by 1840, by the criterion
of a majority living in urban places. In 1900 Greater New York numbered
3.5 million persons, but a majority of U.S. residents still lived in
places with less than 2,500 inhabitants.  But this peculiar fact
highlights the contrast between the great cities and the rural settings
understood by most Americans circa 1900.

    Indeed, I think we would do best by taking this big picture approach,
and also to see the United States as organized by regions, each with an
obvious and hugely magnetic metropole: Boston was the metropole of New
England; Chicago that of the Midwest; New York City that of the
Mid-Atlantic; and San Francisco  was the metropole of the Far West.
The South was an essentially non-urban region, although smaller areas
within it had their metropoles, such as Atlanta (the largest Southern
city in 1910 and still only the 31st in size within the US) and its
hinterland.

    Metropolis is Greek for "mother city."  Americans of the United
States flooded into their mother cities during this period, which I
call "The Granite Frontier."  The majority of their population growth
was not from immigration, but from rural-to-urban migration.  And they
looked to their mother cities as producers and as consumers.  A
thorough illustration of this point is made about Chicago and its
hinterland by William Cronon in _Nature's Metropolis_.  As producers,
everyone in the nation could say without hesitation where their
products were headed, where the buyers were, where the creditors were.
They doubtless had mental maps in their heads that traced railroad
routes into and out of the great metropolitan hubs and their
awe-inspiring, neo-classical central railroad stations.

    The White City of the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, not to
mention all the great World's Fairs that attracted millions of
Americans from at least the Philadelphia exposition of 1876 and through
the New York fair of 1939, celebrated the achievements of urban
engineering, commerce, and culture.

    As workers and as consumers, Americans of Jackson's "suburbs"
oriented themselves to their downtowns.  The great department stores,
from Wanamaker's in Philadelphia to Filene's in Boston, Macy's in New
York city, Hudson's in Detroit, were the "sine qua non" of urban retail
life.

    A society's greatest cultural achievements grow from its leading
ecologies.  It is no accident that the US produced motion pictures, the
music of Gershwin and Irving Berlin and all of the Jazz greats, during
the period of the Granite Frontier.

    Let me summarize this overall point with a true story about an
adopted boy and his friend.  The adopted boy's mother told him to put
on his seat belt, and the boy's friend said: "You don't have to listen
to her:  she's not your real mother."  The adopted boy shot back: "what
do you think she is, a cartoon character?"  Jackson's _Crabgrass
Frontier_ has a very clear and central message: we've always been a
suburban people, and conversely, we've never been an urban people.
Are these great urban centers not our real mothers?  Are they cartoon
characters?

    By the time Jackson had matured his preliminary research and
crystallized it into _Crabgrass Frontier_, he stated the central thesis
this way:

"[S]uburbanization as a process involving the growth of fringe areas at
a pace more rapid that that of core cities, as a lifestyle involving a
daily commute to jobs in the center, occurred first in the United
States and Great Britain, where it can be dated from about 1815" (13)

The empirical and rhetorical force of _Crabgrass Frontier_
overwhelmingly teaches its readers that a suburban practice and
mentalite' was the norm in the United States, in a smooth trend
beginning in 1815 and culminating in the more rampant suburbia and
exurbia of the 1850s through the 1980s.  The reader -- and I know this
from using the book for years in my classes -- comes away thinking that
the exception was the great city.  But in fact, all Jackson has proven
in _Crabgrass Frontier_ and the earlier essays is that the United
States metropolises were of a low-density character.  All of his
indicators, including commuting from the fringe, do not negate the
fundamental metropolitan-center orientation of the population and
culture that I have briefly pointed to here.

    Of course it is absurdly ironic for me to have to say this to
Jackson, the editor of the _Encyclopedia of New York City_, quite
possibly the most important urban encyclopedia ever written.  Jackson,
who has taught at Columbia for so many years, is no shrinking
suburbanite who is blind to the achievements of US urban culture: quite
the opposite.  Thus, as I have confronted the serious wrong-headedness
of _Crabgrass Frontier_, I have also pondered the question of how such a
metropolitan could have written these works.

    The key, I think, lies in the third face of this book, its cultural
argument.  The Achilles heel of this book can be found in Jackson's
portrayal of what he calls "a broad national consensus in favor of
suburban living." (third photo caption after page 120).   Despite his
powerful critique of the political construction of suburbs, Jackson
nevertheless strongly argues that the suburbanization of the US must be
seen as largely culturally driven phenomenon.  Early in the book (43)
he approvingly quotes Adna Ferrin Weber's classic 1899 study, in which
Weber claims that "the American penchant for dwelling in cottage homes
instead of business blocks after the fashion of Europe is the cause,
and the trolley car the effect" of the relatively low urban population
densities he found in the US.[4]

    In the last analysis, I think the weakness of this book can be
traced to a particular way of entering urban studies that was typical
of the 1960s and 1970s, where Jackson was formulating his _Crabgrass
Frontier_ thesis.  I have elsewhere criticized Sam Bass Warner for the
same approach, insisting that we look at the "Public City" as often as
we look at Warner's "Private City."  Jackson's and Warner's paradigms
are highly related: Jackson has defined urbanism primarily by
residential, private dimensions, rather than collective, public
dimensions.

    Focusing on what the dominant middle classes in each era sought as
utopia for their private lives, Jackson emphasized the detached home
and yard, and finds indicators of this penchant from 1815 onward.  But
there is much more to urban life than residence.  I suggest that we
look instead to the metropolitan whole, and recover the intense
excitement and enthusiasm that even these yard-owning suburbanites had
for their city centers.  A public perspective would reach quite the
opposite conclusion than that of _Crabgrass Frontier_: for the majority
of the time since the mid-nineteenth century, Americans of the United
States embraced big cities at the centers of their lives.  This embrace
began exactly when _Crabgrass Frontier_ focuses the narrative on the
detachment, in the early 19th century, and it peaked in perhaps the
year 1940.  Contrary to Jackson's consistent argument of continuity,
something did change in the post-World War II era, a serious
qualitative change in the general orientation of our national life away
from these metropolitan centers.  But that is more than I address in
this essay.


***
ENDNOTES
[1] At the beginning of the essay, in footnote #8, he states
"Henceforth, I shall use the terms 'suburbanization' and
'deconcentration' interchangeably."(112)

[2] Jackson, "Metropolitan Government Versus Suburban Autonomy:
Politics on the Crabgrass Frontier," in Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley
K. Schultz, eds., _Cities in American History_ (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1972), pp.  442-462; ibid, "The Crabgrass Frontier: 150 year of
Suburban Growth in America," in Raymond A. Mohl and James F.
Richardson, eds., _The Urban Experience: Themes in American History_
(Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing  Co., 1973), pp. 196-221.

[3] "Population of Metropolitan Districts," _Abstract of the Census,
Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910_ (Washington DC, GPO, 1913),
pp. 61-2;  For the origins of the concept, see Kenneth Fox,
_Metropolitan America_, 27-30.

[4] He is not entirely consistent with this thesis, thanks to his
excellent account of political economy.  Especially in his chapter on
the HOLC, he makes it clear that popular individual choice could only
operate within the parameters of market forces that were highly
structured by elite political choices.  Indeed, much of the strength of
this book is derived from Jackson's multivariate analytic narrative.
He gives no single factor (political economy, technology, or culture) a
primary importance.  Instead, he is a gifted historian who understands
at all points how intertwined each of these factors necessarily are.

Phil Ethington <philipje@rcf.usc.edu>

[Ed:

Philip J. Ethington is the author of _The Public City: the Political
Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900_ (Cambridge
University Press, 1994).

Other citations include:

Schnore, Leo F., ed.
THE NEW URBAN HISTORY: QUANTITATIVE EXPLORATIONS BY AMERICAN
  HISTORIANS
Princeton University Press <1975>

Kenneth T. Jackson, ed.
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NEW YORK CITY
Yale University Press ; New-York Historical Society, c1995.

Weber, Adna Ferrin, 1870-
THE GROWTH OF CITIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: A STUDY IN
  STATISTICS
Cornell University Press <1963>
"Revised Version of the author's thesis, Columbia University
first published in 1899."
                                                                ]

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