CHAPTER TWO The Power of Place: Race, Political Economy, and Identity in the Postwar Metropolis ROBERT O. SELF AND THOMAS J. SUGRUE Over the course of the late twentieth century, urban America was a shifting and con- tested terrain of power, politics, and meaning. By the mid-twentieth century, the United States was an overwhelmingly urban nation. Sixty-three percent of Americans lived in cities by 1950, nearly half in places with a population greater than 25,000. Many of the nation’s leading elected officials hailed from urban areas; their con- stituencies were greatly affected by a plethora of public policies that remade the geog- raphy and economy of major metropolitan areas. At the same time, cities were reshaped by two of the most extensive internal migrations in American history: the great migration of rural, southern blacks to the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West, and the mass movement of whites to the suburbs. Accompanying these population shifts was a remapping of American capitalism, as the commerce and manufacturing that drove postwar consumerism grew increasingly mobile. The combination and interaction of political, demographic, and economic change turned cities and suburbs into battlegrounds over the most pressing and unresolved issues of twentieth-century American history: race and economic power. The story of met- ropolitan America is thus central to our narratives of postwar American history. The history of postwar cities and suburbs allows for a stitching of the fragmented historiography of modern America, using place as the thread to sew together grass- roots and top-down political history, economic history, and the history of culture and identity that often are told separately. Bounded communities have given shape to and constrained economics, politics, culture, and identities in ways that have far- reaching consequences for our understanding of postwar American history as a whole. For a full account, we must, as Thomas F. Jackson (1993, p. 407) has suggested, “synthesize the elements of racial subordination, economic relations, political power, and cultural change.” It is a task to which urban history is becoming well suited. The most provocative work in postwar urban history narrates the disaggregation of the urban industrial system of the first half of the century and the simultaneous decline of liberal political culture. Both processes were racialized in ways that shaped political economy, political movements, and life chances. This literature connects the culture and social ecology of local places – cities, suburbs, and their metropolitan areas – with formal and informal politics and the federal state. Such work “brings the Agnew, J., & Rosenzweig, R. (Eds.). (2002). A companion to post-1945 america. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-03-04 17:46:47. Copyright © 2002. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.