|
|
|
Book Review
| Suburban Landscapes: Culture and Politics in a New York Metropolitan Community. By Paul H. Mattingly. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xiv, 333 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8018-6680-4.)
|
| Suburban Landscapes focuses on the evolving culture and politics of Leonia, a small New York City suburb in Bergen County, New Jersey. The early emergence of an artist colony made it a distinct if not unique community. Despite its diverse population, Leonia became a middle-class, white-collar, Republican community. The study begins in 1670 with the formation of a Dutch farmstead landscape but concentrates on the area's subsequent transformations into a railroad village, a trolley "country town," and a white-collar suburb by 1940. |
1
|
|
Paul H. Mattingly charges that "suburban history has ... depended on urban-based scholars and journalists" who have not been interested in either "suburbia's changing historical features or its participatory role in urban modernization" (p. 4). He draws on oral history, the works of Leonia's artist colony, community histories, literary works, pageants, and the local press to flesh out suburbanites' role. |
2
|
|
Arguing that "culture preceded politics in American suburban life" (p. 5), Mattingly finds that suburban traditions of nonpartisan consensus and social harmony underlay suburban life. Suburbanites maintained and revised those values through personal networks and voluntary organizations. Yet many Leonians, including artists and white-collar commuters, interacted regularly with the city and introduced additional modernization. |
3
|
|
Leonia passed through several developmental stages, each marked by changes in transportation, population demographics, voluntary organizations, and the artist colony. As a railroad suburb in 1880, Leonia had a population of 226; farmers and unskilled and skilled laborers made up three-quarters of household heads. Prior to political incorporation, the Literary League and Lyceum served as informal government. Local artists produced images associated with rural life. |
4
|
|
The trolley's arrival in 1896 introduced important changes including, by 1920, population growth to 2,979. Managers and professionals then claimed 61 percent of the household heads. Community organizations proliferated, especially religious ones; the Men's Neighborhood Club and the Women's Club proved key for the maintenance of non-partisan consensus and social harmony. Unlike city artists, Leonia's reengaged "their country heritage" (p. 124). |
5
|
|
The completion of the George Washington Bridge in 1931 fostered more sustained urban modernization. Of the 5,763 residents in 1940, professionals had a more significant presence. Voluntary organizations now struggled to maintain the nonpartisan and consensual political culture; artists encountered depression forces while valuing an "uncommercialized natural environment" (p. 235). |
6
|
|
The inclusion of suburban imagery, ideology, and informal and formal organizations provides a significant contribution to suburban history and serves as a model for unraveling the suburban experience. Although not all segments are fully developed, Afro-Leonians, for example, Mattingly's demonstration of Leonia's diverse population (race, class, ethnicity) supports revisionist suburban historians' findings. Leonia's experience, however, seems distant from that of the revisionists' working-class and ethnic or large, diverse, and densely settled suburbs of the same period. Leonia "is not necessarily a 'representative' suburb" (p. 4), but Mattingly implies that its suburban culture is. This lacks adequate discussion. The quality of the illustrations is marginal; there are no maps of Leonia and its four neighborhoods. The author provides no discussion of the oral history methods or selection process or its representativeness. |
7
|
| James Borchert
|
Cleveland State University
Cleveland, Ohio |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|