Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth T. Jackson

History books, if they stick around long enough, eventually become artifacts of their own eras, history in a double sense: explaining earlier periods with the terms and perspectives of their own time, which look different decades later. In the last chapter of Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth T. Jackson helps the process along by offering his expectations of how the trends he documented in the rest of the book were likely to play out in coming decades. That Jackson can make the attempt is a testimony to the thoroughness of his research and to the durability of the trends that he found. I’m sure the book is no longer the state of the art, forty years after its publication, but I’m equally sure that I learned an immense amount, and that it gave me a solid foundation to build on, if I wanted to expand my knowledge of American suburbia.

The subtitle of Crabgrass Frontier is “The Suburbanization of the United States,” and Jackson tells the story of how American cities came to be so spread out, how, by 1980, more people in metropolitan areas came to live in the communities that ringed the central cities than in the cities themselves. If I had been asked about suburbanization before I read the book, I would have said that some of it came with electric trolleys but most of it came after World War II. I would have been wrong. Jackson goes back to the early stages of American cities and shows how suburbs were already springing up before the Civil War. Indeed, if cities in the 19th century had not aggressively annexed the suburban communities surrounding the urban cores, they might well have been eclipsed by their suburbs in the 1850s. Jackson digs deep, and he shows how, when, where, why, and in many cases exactly who.

One of the book’s advantages is its clear organization, improved by Jackson’s tendency to enumerate factors that contribute to his argument. The introduction features four characteristics that differentiate American cities from those of comparably wealthy countries elsewhere in the world. (Those are low residential density coupled with the absence of a sharp division between town and country; a “strong penchant for homeownership;” the “socioeconomic distinction between the center and the periphery,” with wealth in the US out in the suburbs rather than the city center; and the “length of the average journey-to-work.”) Subsequent chapters have, for example, five characteristics of walkable cities that pre-date the industrial revolution (Ch. 1); two policies of streetcar entrepreneurs that were “especially important in facilitating the outward movement of [the] population” (p. 119); or four factors that explain high rates of homeownership in the US (p. 132), though in Jackson’s estimation they are only partial explanations. Throughout the book his rat-a-tat-tat of theses and examples makes his points clearly, and the guidance that his listing of points provides helps to keep readers from getting lost in a mass of detail.

Another virtue of Crabgrass Frontier is the wide range of comparisons that Jackson brings to bear. As one might expect, he illustrates his arguments with examples from America’s oldest cities in the northeast, and particularly with the country’s largest metropolis, New York. But he draws on a much larger set of examples, and he pays particular attention to when particular cities were having their periods of greatest expansion, or their times of technological dominance. Philadelphia and Baltimore turn up, but so do Chicago and Cincinnati, St Louis and Kansas City, Memphis, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles. The great wave of Sun Belt suburbanization was still swelling when Crabgrass Frontier was published in 1984, but Jackson notes the rise of places like Houston, Miami and Phoenix. He also makes generous use of international comparison, not just with expected cities of Western Europe but also occasionally with what was then communist Eastern Europe and some Asian cities, particularly Tokyo. He also draws attention to developments in Central and South America to show that the US stands out among New World countries, and not just in comparison to the Old.

Further, Jackson shows again and again how developments that might seem like large and impersonal forces were driven by real and identifiable individuals who took specific actions, made specific choices, or advocated specific ideas that then caught on with larger audiences. In the mid-1800s, “Andrew Jackson Downing, Catharine Beecher, and Calvert Vaux wrote of the desirability of a semi-rural lifestyle.” (p. 73) “Andrew Smith Hallidie, a Scottish immigrant who had found wealth in San Francisco as a wire-rope manufacturer” (p. 104) developed the technologies for cable-pulled streetcars, of the kind that is still found in the city by the bay. The tracks were similar to those for horse-pulled streetcars, but there was no manure and no stench; the cable car was also quieter and more powerful than horse-powered competitors. “By the 1890 when cable transportation reached its peak, there were 283 miles of track in twenty-three cities carrying 373 million passengers per year.” (p. 104) The largest such system was in Chicago. Every chapter of Crabgrass Frontier is full of people like Hallidie, trying to make their fortune, to push their favored ideas, and as a general rule, both. Taken together, they give a better sense of the teeming innovation and relentless drive that has shaped more than two centuries of American suburbanization than any collection of statistics could hope to do.

Jackson mostly refrains from editorializing in the main text, letting his selection show his preferences and arguments. He allows himself to be a bit more colorful in the endnotes, which I dipped into occasionally. In a note on Chapter 8 concerning annexation, for example, he mentions “a strident little volume,” which, he writes, “would have benefitted from less passion and more research.” (p. 351, note 21) In a further note on the same chapter, he says that the name of the Memphis suburb Whitehaven “was apt.” (p. 353, note38) My parents grew up there, and he is quite correct. I would probably have found more such nuggets if I had been systematic about reading the notes.

The basic argument of Crabgrass Frontier is that in America successive waves of improved transportation opened opportunities for individuals to have more and healthier space for private living, and that people seizing those opportunities led to suburbanization. Though the call of the suburb answered deep human and personal desires, it was also shaped by people who promoted semi-rural living as an antidote to the ills — always perceived, often real — of city life such as crowding and disease. Once the pattern of transportation-driven expansion was understood, entrepreneurs and speculators made it happen in many more places and on a continuing basis. The ferry across the East River to Brooklyn gave way to the horse-pulled omnibus uptown. Horse-power was overtaken by the steam-powered cable cars, which were in turn overtaken by electric trolleys, and then the automobile arrived. Henry Ford’s affordable mass production put automobiles in the hands of millions, freeing them from the trolleys’ timetables and trains’ limited routes. Along the way, government policy favored suburbanization, whether that was handing out concessions to streetcar companies, connecting suburbs to municipal services, or building the streets that the motorcars needed to get in and out of the city. Financial policy tended to reward new building as well, and Jackson is particularly clear about how post–WWII measures favored suburbs over city cores, and white citizens over non-white. He is very direct about the role that white racism played in shaping suburbs, a perspective that was probably not as common among academic historians as it is now.

Jackson’s description of the omnibus, ferry and trolley suburbs shows how far back into American history suburbanization goes, which was new to me. He also shows how cities of the 19th century regularly annexed the surrounding communities, often with those communities’ enthusiastic consent. Speculators would buy up land at the outer edge of the urban area, build transportation to reduce travel times to the city center, subdivide the farms they had bought, and try to sell to city people seeking more space, fewer neighbors, and a bit of land. As the population near the lines of transport grew, the area would gain more urban characteristics, and eventually either apply to become part of the city or be annexed regardless. In the 20th century, however, American cities mostly stopped annexing their suburbs, for reasons and with consequences that Jackson carefully spells out.

This is, simply, a terrific work of historical argument, marshaling many details to support and illustrate its theses. At just over 300 pages of main text, it’s short enough not to overwhelm a reader, but filled with enough information to convince a skeptic. As noted above, its organization is exemplary. There are plenty of surprises, and the book sketches a great many strong personalities. It conveys the sweep of two centuries but Jackson does not forget the individual scale, not least because the suburban home is, ideally, a single family’s home.

And how did he do looking forward? Not too badly, as it turns out. Reading his descriptions of rising crime and the hollowing out of American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, I thought that he couldn’t know that the peak of crime was just seven years away. Violent crime in America began a long and steady decline in 1991, and most cities are far safer than they were when Jackson was writing. Some of the cities that Jackson took as examples of decay also saw the nadir of their population in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This change has not been as widespread as falling crime; for every Atlanta or DC that has seen inward migration to complement continued sprawl, there is a Detroit or St Louis that has not. I would be very interested to read a follow-up in this area. Jackson posits rising energy costs as a limit to continued suburbanization; that hasn’t materialized, and exurbs continue to spread away from historical cores. One thing that Jackson missed, or mostly missed, was the rise of “edge cities,” suburbs that themselves have populations the size of old cores and many of the characteristics of a characteristics of a fully-fledged city. Joel Garreau’s 1991 book Edge Cities is a good complement to Crabgrass Frontier. Forty years later, the dynamism that Jackson identified as crucial to the development of American cities has not abated.