Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (49 page)

Growing numbers of Americans identified themselves as premillenarians, people who believed that an apocalypse would bring on the second coming of Christ. The Savior would subsequently cleanse the world of sin. Some of these true believers were so thoroughly alienated from contemporary American culture, including not only materialism (as they saw it) but also capitalism itself, that the word "conservative" scarcely begins to describe them. Often poor and class-conscious, they professed to be horrified by what they considered the immoral secularism of the more affluent middle classes. Their grim and pessimistic view of contemporary American culture confounded optimistic predictions about the withering away of social distinctions and belied the surface homogeneity of American society at the time.
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How profound were these varied manifestations of organized religious activity? The answer is unclear. On the one hand it was undeniable that many Americans—always an especially religious people—were sincere in their professions of faith. Millions joined religiously inspired voluntary organizations to engage in charitable work. Black people drew on religious faith to mount rising protests against racial injustice: no account of the emergent civil rights movement can slight the power of Christian ideals. On the other hand, church membership statistics, as always, remain at best an inexact guide to the depth of religious convictions. Herberg, among others, doubted that theological distinctions or spiritual profundity was very important to most of the people who identified with one church or another. People joined churches, he said, to give themselves clear
social
status in a rapidly changing, mobile culture where class and ethnic boundaries seemed a little less distinct. Church membership satisfied a need for "belonging."

The striking popularity of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale during the 1950s further suggests the fallacy of seeing deep spiritual meaning in all aspects of religiosity at the time. Well before then Peale had been a prominent minister, at the Marble Collegiate Reformed Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Peale downplayed sectarian differences to reach for a mass audience. His book A
Guide for Confident Living
sold well when published in 1948. Peak's fame truly spread, however, in 1952 when he brought out another book,
The Power of Positive Thinking
. As this title suggested, Peale offered an optimistic message about the capacity of Christian teaching to evoke attractive personal qualities. Chapter titles included "I Don't Believe in Defeat," "How to Get People to Like You," and "Expect the Best and Get It."
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Appealingly simple in its message,
The Power of Positive Thinking
essentially argued that self-confidence and faith could work wonders. The book shot quickly to the best-seller list, where it remained for more than three years. This was an amazingly durable record. And it kept on selling, to a total of 3 million copies by 1974. Behind the Bible and Charles Sheldon's novel
In His Steps
(1897) it was the most popular religious-spiritual book in the history of American publishing.

The phenomenon of Peale distressed many intellectuals in the 1950s. A few grudgingly conceded that he may have helped to moderate sectarian narrowness. A certain superficial homogenization and local good feeling may have followed. But they were otherwise appalled at what they considered his oversimplified incantation of "faith." As the conservative philosopher Russell Kirk put it, popularizers like Peale offered a "religion-in-general" that was "evacuated of content." Christianity of that sort amounted to "little more than a vague spirit of friendliness, a willingness to support churches—providing these churches demand no real sacrifices and preach no exacting doctrines."
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Peak's extraordinary popularity, like Eisenhower's superficial piety, indeed exposed the sanctimonious side of the religious "revival" in the 1950s. These phenomena did not cut deep. Still, for many—especially those in the less favored classes—fundamentalist faiths provided an anchor of consolation as well as self-identification amid the floodtides of social and cultural change. More profound than "positive thinking," they not only survived the 1950s but also spread steadily in subsequent years.

S
UBSEQUENT NOSTALGIA
for the mid-decade years of the "nifty fifties"—perceived in retrospect as a harmonious and mostly happy era—has conveyed the impression that social analysts had little to complain about at the time. This was not the case: much about American society in the 1950s repelled them. Intellectuals and others focused especially on the apparent flaws of suburbanization, the vulgarity of runaway materialism and consumerism, and the deterioriation of "traditional American values."

Given the suburban boom that took off after 1945, it was hardly surprising that life in the suburbs evoked considerable contemporary commentary in the 1950s. The roar of bulldozers smashing trees and overrunning farms resounded on urban fringes throughout the land. Of the 13 million homes built between 1948 and 1958, 11 million were suburban. This represented a fantastic building boom: one-fourth of
all
homes standing in 1960 had been built in the previous ten years. Some 83 percent of all population growth in the nation in the 1950s was in suburbs. The trend, already powerful, continued in the 1960s. In 1950 there had been 35 million suburbanites; by 1970 there were 72 million (in a total population of 205 million). Suburbs then housed more people than did central cities or farms, and by 1972 they offered more jobs than did the central cities.
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There was much about this phenomenal growth, however, for contemporary critics to bemoan. One lament was its impact on cities, which saw much of their vitality drained to the fringes. This trend was more pronounced in the United States, where the automobile revolution was by far the most advanced, than anywhere else in the world. Eleven of the nation's twelve biggest cities (Los Angeles was the exception) lost population in the 1950s, most of it to suburban expansion. Urban playhouses, art galleries, and concert halls struggled to attract patrons. Many city newspapers folded. By contrast some suburban papers, notably
Newsday
, thrived; its circulation rose from 32,000 in 1940 to 370,000 by 1960, much of it in suburban areas on Long Island.

Hundreds of downtown movie houses either closed or let their amenities decline. Lobbies, once baroque spectacles to behold, became cluttered with popcorn, candy, and soft drink counters; uniformed ushers, who once had guided patrons down lushly padded aisles, became a vanishing breed. The decline of the movie palaces was not primarily the result of television but of the movement of millions of people to the suburbs. Drive-in theaters flourished in their place: there were 100 in 1946, more than 3,000 in 1956.
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The rise of suburbs badly hurt downtown hotels and retail outlets, which fought a losing battle against motels and suburban malls. The number of hotel rooms in the United States actually declined—from 1.55 million in 1948 to 1.45 million in 1964. Meanwhile, the number of motel rooms increased from 304,000 to 1 million. Malls were among the greatest success stories of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1955 there were already 1,000 malls in the country, whereupon a huge new surge crested. By 1956 there were 1,600, with 2,500 more in the planning phase. Urban public transit, too, shriveled in its near-hopeless struggle against automobile culture: the share of urban passenger miles carried by public buses and subways dropped from 35 percent in 1945 to 5 percent by 1965. Highways increasingly invaded central city areas themselves: by 1956 there were 376 miles of freeways within the nation's twenty-five largest cities. Cities, Lewis Mumford exclaimed, were becoming a "tangled mass of highways, interchanges, and parking lots. "
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The decline of America's railroads in the 1950s was especially precipitous. Undercut by highways and suburbanization, many drastically curtailed schedules. Rolling stock, service, and stations deteriorated. The fate of New York City's Grand Central and Pennsylvania stations symbolized the trend. In 1961 the profit-seeking owners of Grand Central petitioned the city to lower the terminal's ceiling from fifty-eight to fifteen feet and to add three tiers of bowling alleys in the new space. Thwarted in this effort by angry protests, the owners managed to sell the air space over the station, and the dignity of the terminal was soon dwarfed by erection of the fifty-five-story Pan American Building. Penn Station, an architectural monument, was gutted, its mighty columns felled to permit construction of offices, a sports arena, and a cramped commuter terminal.
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Nothing alarmed city officials more than the plight of downtown neighborhoods that decayed when upwardly mobile people left for the suburbs. In the process the cities lost still more of their tax bases. Congress had tried to deal with this problem in 1949 by approving legislation authorizing the construction, with federal subsidy, of 810,000 public housing units. The law also set aside federal money to aid local redevelopment agencies that agreed to purchase "slum" areas and to demolish old buildings. The agencies were then supposed to sell the bulldozed space to private developers, who would erect better housing for low-income people. Thus was born one of the great hopes of the 1950s: "urban renewal."

Some cities, helped by federal funds, erected splashy new areas that seemed to revitalize downtown areas: the "Golden Triangle" of Pittsburgh, the Government Center of Boston. But urban renewal had a very uneven track record insofar as housing was concerned. The process of redevelopment—identifying sites, buying land, relocating tenants, bulldozing, selling to builders, putting up new dwellings—often moved slowly, sometimes in the teeth of resistance by affected residents. In some places old buildings were razed, but new ones did not go up for years. One such area, in St. Louis, was ridiculed as "Hiroshima Flats." Detroit had its "Ragweed Acres." More serious, "urban renewal" often meant "poor removal" or "Negro removal." Development officials tore down low-income neighborhoods only to sell the vacant land to developers who put up more expensive housing. Poor people who had been displaced while the builders tore up their homes could ill afford to move back. All too often urban renewal did two things: it shunted low-cost housing, including racial ghettos, from one part of a city to another, and it enriched builders and landlords.
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Meanwhile most cities, Pittsburgh and Boston among them, continued to lose upwardly mobile residents to suburbs. In their place flocked throngs of poor blacks (and whites). Unable to afford the suburbs (and in the case of blacks racially excluded from them), these people settled in the most broken-down areas of the urban centers. Most of these people were fleeing the farms and the small towns. The depopulation of rural America at the time, accelerated by the technological revolution that was rendering farm labor superfluous, was one of the most harrowing and large-scale demographic developments of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Because relatively few American officials attended to the problems of these people in the 1950s, the mass migrations set the stage for social and racial dynamite that exploded in the cities after 1965.
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If public housing had fulfilled its promise, this crisis would have been less severe. But it did not. Funding was ungenerous. Whites put up often fierce resistance to subsidized housing that accepted blacks. Builders showed little interest in such efforts, largely because public housing was considerably less profitable for them than commercial construction, much of it in the suburbs. By 1955 only 200,000 public housing units (instead of the targeted 810,000) had been constructed; by 1965 only 325,203 had. Some of these worked fairly well; it is wrong to say that public housing always failed. But many "projects" collapsed, and the subsequent reputation of public housing, like that of urban renewal, plummeted.

No public housing project received more devastating publicity than Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. Architects and planners hailed its design while it was being drafted in the 1950s. Its thirty-three eleven-story apartment buildings, containing a total of 2,800 units, had open galleries that tenants were expected to use as communal porches, laundries, and play areas. A "river of trees" winding between the buildings shaded lots of open green space. By the mid-1960s, however, Pruitt-Igoe had deteriorated badly. The open spaces had become scrubby and covered with litter and broken glass. Muggings and rapes in corridors and elevators (when they worked) terrified residents. The architect lamented, "I never thought people were that destructive." Although renovation costing $7 million tried to pump new life into the project, it did not help. Starting in 1975 the housing authority tore down the whole thing.
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Critics offered widely differing opinions about what killed Pruitt-Igoe and other large urban projects. Some said that the projects were too big, too high-rise, and too sterile. Others emphasized that housing authorities needed more money to maintain the buildings and to provide proper security.
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(All these flaws beset Pruitt-Igoe.) Others blamed racial tensions, which often flourished in those places where blacks were allowed. A common dilemma facing housing managers was whether to require upwardly mobile tenants—people who managed to exceed income limits—to move out and find housing in the private market. Telling such people to leave made sense: why subsidize people who were no longer "poor"? But their departure deprived the projects of significant numbers of stable and law-abiding families. Losing "role models," many projects also lowered "screening" regulations that had barred criminals. By the 1960s and 1970s many projects had become dumping grounds for the most troubled of the urban American poor.