Crabgrass Frontier Retrospective

Ann Keating/North Central College

        The critical acclaim and lasting influence of _Crabgrass
Frontier_ are undisputed.  I'd like to share with you some very personal
observations about the book's influence, based on my own experiences
with _Crabgrass Frontier_ since its publication.
        Let me first go back to my first encounter with the work in
this book.  I was a graduate student working on a suburban dissertation
before the publication of _Crabgrass Frontier_.  My work was very much
influenced by Sam Bass Warner's _Streetcar Suburbs_ and Henry Binford's
_First Suburbs_. I was tremendously excited to be working in the
history of suburbs, but I can't help but say that I was nervous about
the big suburban book that we all knew that Ken Jackson was writing.  I
was in fact terrified that the small point of my dissertation would be
irrelevant with Jackson' publication.  I read all the pieces of the
book as they became available and anxiously awaited the publication of
the whole -- I will say that I rushed my dissertation defense as much
as humanly possible so that I would not have to defend my work in light
of _Crabgrass Frontier_.  I beat the publication date by only a matter
of weeks.
   Once published, the book defined my field.  Academics quickly came
to ask me to relate my own work to that of Ken Jackson. I have found
the most understanding audience of my own research among those who have
read _Crabgrass Frontier_. Ken Jackson set up the general contours of a
story which I had a small addition to make, but people better
understood that addition because of his framework. I was stimulated by
_Streetcar Suburbs_, but very much defined by _Crabgrass Frontier_.
        I regularly make presentations on suburbanization to local
historical societies (talking particularly about DuPage and Cook
Counties in the Chicago metropolitan area).  These audiences are always
eager for recommendations on books for further reading and while some
audiences members will inevitably have already encountered _Crabgrass
Frontier_, I suggest it without hesitation, knowing that these readers
will be able to find their suburb's experience in the book and begin to
understand how it is both typical and unusual of suburban stories from
across the country.
        I've also been working on an encyclopedia of Chicago history
for the past several years.  In the course of that work, we have worked
with lots of people doing research on Chicago (or thinking critically
about the Chicago metropolitan scene today).  Many, many are not
historians.  I can't tell you the number of these folks whose reference
point for history is _Crabgrass Frontier_.  I am grateful to have that
as a starting point.

        Let me respond to the book as a teacher of urban history in a
variety of settings since 1985.  Many students see themselves and their
experiences for the first time in history here in _Crabgrass Frontier_.
Their suburban hometowns, drive-ins, train stations and schools are
here.  I will say that the one of the most interesting student comments
came in a discussion to set up their reading of a selection from this
book in a 20th Century survey class.  A student from southern
California did not understand what a suburb was -- the definitions and
descriptions thrown around in class discussion simply described what
was URBAN in her mind!
        I've spent the last 6 years teaching at a small college in
Naperville--one of the edge cities described by Joel Garreau in a book
of the same title.  One of the most important things that I've found
about teaching this book is that Jackson has not divorced the history
of suburbs from the history of cities.  I realize that he tells us this
in his subtitle: _The Suburbanization of the United States_, but it
really hit home as I taught students who saw themselves in the suburban
story which Jackson weaves, but had never considered the relationship
which Naperville has to the metropolitan area as a whole.
        I also find that this book is even more successful with the
adult student.  Like traditional-age students, they are delighted to
find themselves in history.  But they are much more interested in
understanding why their world looks like it does and Jackson is able to
do that for them.  The last adult class I used the book in included
several high school teachers, a local newspaper reporter, middle
management types from area corporations and some unemployed adults
looking to retool.  They used this book to help themselves better
understand current policy questions, as well as more personal decisions
such as where they live and work.
         I'd also like to respond to this book as a text used well
beyond the history classroom.  As I said, I work at a small suburban
school -- with a few historians, a few sociologists, a few
philosophers.  In the last year, the book has been used in at least
three courses as an assigned text: my graduate course on the twentieth
century city, a philosophy course on urban ethics, and a sociology
course on the urban experience.  This book has done something which I
hope many historians aspire to -- certainly I do -- to be read and used
as a context for discussion in other disciplines.
        I am particularly encouraged by the reasons which my colleagues
in other disciplines give for using _Crabgrass Frontier_.  They are
impressed with its clarity and freedom from jargon.  While this book
has been extremely influential in the field of urban history, it does
not bog down in subfield debate.  My colleagues are also impressed and
delighted with its broadranging discussion. Jackson self-consciously
set out to draw a general picture of suburbanization in U.S. history
and beyond ("I have sought to integrate intellectual, architectural,
urban and transportation history with public policy analysis, and I
have tried to place the American experience within the context of
international developments." p.10)  In their estimation, too few books
of urban history speak broadly enough.  Finally, and most importantly,
both my colleagues are teaching courses (as am I) with URBAN in the
title -- but they construe urban to mean more metropolitan than studies
which strictly end at the city -- and that is what they find so
attractive in this book -- it is a book which crosses the boundaries
between cities and suburbs over and over again, because of the central
interrelatedness of this whole.  (In fact, the sociologist and I have
gone around and around about using the word "urban" to describe what we
do.  In Naperville, "urban" means far away in the city of Chicago -- so
when we began an urban studies concentration a few years back, I
suggested we call it metropolitan studies -- to capture the idea that
we will look at the whole of the metropolitan area -- what is familiar
and what isn't.  The sociologist retorted that I called myself an urban
historian, but studied suburbs -- so perhaps I should change my
self-identification to metropolitan historian.)
        While he was giving me a hard time, I have often wondered
whether _Crabgrass Frontier_ could in fact be used as one of the base
texts to transform urban history into metropolitan history.  With its
publication and that of other key texts on suburbs, including Bob
Fishman's _Bourgeois Utopias_, Michael Ebner's _Creating the North
Shore_, and Jon Teaford's recent book on suburban government, urban
history regularly looks beyond the city limits.  Would it make a
difference if we defined ourselves as metropolitan historians, not
urban historians?
        Finally, I'd like to return to the history classroom and think
about the ways in which this book has been influential for the field of
history as a whole.  I stopped to think about the ways in which I use
this material in classes beyond urban history.  Here, Jackson's
chapters 11 and 12 on Federal subsidy of suburban housing followed by a
chapter on the ghettoization of public housing stand out for me.  The
ways in which federal policy has shaped the metropolitan landscape --
making it possible for white middle class Americans to become
predominantly suburban and precluding many African-Americans from
partaking in this dream -- constitutes a chapter in American history
which needs to be told in every modern American history course.  This
is the sort of material which students coming from traditional high
school U.S. history courses do not get, but need to be informed
citizens.
        On a related note, I am reminded of a recent conversation with
the chairman of the social sciences department at one of the Naperville
High Schools.  She has a master's in history and is very much
interested in the field.  She asked me to speak at an area symposium
for high school and grade school teachers.  We talked a little about
the things I could make a presentation on -- including several topics
on Chicago, as well as more general discussions on urban and/or
suburban history.  Her response was a bit off-putting (probably for
both of us).  She said that high school history teachers really had
little use for "local" (her word) history.  She said it might appeal to
5th and 6th grade teachers, but not to high school teachers like
herself.
        I'm dismayed with the notion that studying suburbs and cities
is relegated to "local" studies.  What Jackson's book and others show
is that these are vital stories to American history -- just as
important as those of presidential politics.  Knowing of Ken Jackson's
great interest in preccollegiate history teaching, I would like to get
his response to this encounter.  I know there is room for _Crabgrass
Frontier_ in college courses and local historical societies, but is
there room for the _Crabgrass Frontier_ in the high school history
classroom?


Ann Keating
North Central College
axk@noctrl.edu

[Editor's Note:

Ann D. Keating is the author of BUILDING CHICAGO: SUBURBAN DEVELOPERS
AND THE CREATION OF A DIVIDED METROPOLIS (Ohio State University Press,
c1988) and INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN GROWTH IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
(Public Works Historical Society, c1985; Essays in public works history;
no. 14.)

Other citations include:

Warner, Sam Bass
STREETCAR SUBURBS: THE PROCESS OF GROWTH IN BOSTON, 1870-1900.
Harvard University Press, 1962.

Binford, Henry C.
THE FIRST SUBURBS : RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITIES ON THE BOSTON PERIPHERY,
1815-1860
University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Fishman, Robert
BOURGEOIS UTOPIAS : THE RISE AND FALL OF SUBURBIA
Basic Books, c1987.

Ebner, Michael H.
CREATING CHICAGO'S NORTH SHORE : A SUBURBAN HISTORY
University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Teaford, Jon C.
POST-SUBURBIA : GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS IN THE EDGE CITIES
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.                            ]

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS