Whatever you may think of the politics of the Weekly Standard, they do an interesting job of the kind of cultural investigation that Tocqueville might smile at. David Brooks on Patio Man. And Christopher Caldwell (scroll down), picking up where Brooks leaves off.
The GI generation of the Forties and Fifties spent their time constructing an egalitarian, commercial suburban order, paving over things that stood in the way. Their children seem to have spent their time fleeing from that asphalt egalitarianism, but because we're already a mass society, it's hard to get away from the masses. We always brings them with us, in the form of -- ourselves. What the grandchildren will do is another thing and an interesting question.
Brooks and Caldwell say that gentrification has become a real plague. Once directed at poor urban neighborhoods, it now divides the country. A mob of rich nomads pick up all areas that haven't been paved over and "save" them from middle class sprawl by bringing a different, upscale form of uniformity, destroying the uniqueness that they claimed to value and preserve. How true the picture is, I don't know, but it's another fascinating example of how things work out differently in reality from people's intentions.
In reference to your comments: during the Cold War, American society was likened to a ballbearing rolling around in a wide groove, unstable, but also unlikely to jump the groove. Communist societies were compared to the same ballbearing sitting in a single, narrow hole or notch, rigidly stable for long periods, but likely to be knocked out when a real shock happens. That turned out to be prophetic.
It's also been said that "space" has been the great American solution. While Europeans work out comprehensive "plans" for society as a whole, Americans allow different societies to grow up in different cities or parts of the country and hope that they'll be able to live together. Indeed, space is freedom. Europeans would object that civilities can provide this sort of "space" in a small area, and incivility reduce freedom in even the greatest realm. The premise behind the Culture Wars -- and of course the Civil War -- was that different groups wouldn't be able to get along. But it looks like we are doing just that, perhaps because we do accept some common framework of ideas in spite of all our differences.
The idea of "natural ties" is a stimulating one. In our own day it sometimes looks like the affinities uniting this or that clique or generation are stronger or more natural than the ties which bind families together. What you say about generational ties versus family ties is echoed in the history of our constitutional system. The same proximity, commonality of interest, and affections, which made the family paramount, were presumed to make our cities, towns and states natural communities. Information technologies bring together people with the same interests from different parts of the country together to the point where we may have more in common with someone 3000 miles away than with other members of our "natural community."
If you have time, you might check out our generation's answer to Tocqueville.
Brooks & Caldwell get me laughing on the looks at Mesa, AZ, Henderson, NV, Bethesda, MD (Brooks), Gaithersburg, MD, and the North Shore (Caldwell). I know these places, especially Bethesda, whose now posh streets I once roamed with fellow adolescent fools looking for something to break. I was in college when Bethesda started its ascent to Caldwell's hell, "restaurants with subtitles" and a hometown you won't recognize, and I saw then, as now, that I wished I'd had Sugar Ray Leonard's money and advisers: 'twas a good time to buy.
I spent a couple days in Phoenix on this summer trip; it looks distressingly like Dade County, although I can't figure where all the water comes from (a whole 'nuther matter, eh?). Had that been my only view of Phoenix, driving around, checking out the Capitol, Mesa, & Scottsdale (speaking of: anyone seen "O.C. & Stiggs""? -- still the greatest movie of the post-Animal House period) I'd never understand it. To know Phoenix is to see it from the air (and I'm still convinced that PHX airport has worlds longest taxiing ramps). Btw, Phoenix has a most apt name.
Henderson, NV: best I can tell it's a city of fallen Mormans, I mean the border is smack downtown; the drunken need merely stumble over the line. Perhaps they trip on it. We didn't stop, and I wish we had, but we were late to arrive to Salt Lake, and the cross winds were blowing us all over the desert. Oh, and speaking of managing dissent and creating "space," Utah has done a masterful job of channelling sin into small pockets, like the "private clubs" one "joins" for a drink, and, I'm thinking, Henderson, Nevada.
I wonder when the sprawl crawls across the desert to Lovelock, NV? Hopefully not too soon, for it's a charming place, what with the solitary Exxon with one pump and three slot machines. The unusually pretty girl at the counter gave me a marvelous, toothless smile that I'll never forget. Indeed, I may not ever get over it.
As bad as is the sprawl, and although there's not much room left in the Phoenix valley, there's plenty of room for expansion around Lovelock, Nevada. I'd add most of PA, especially Chester, which could use some serious gentrification.
I get some bad nostalgia, and sad, in places like Chester, or Poughkipsie, NY. Americans just move on, leaving the helpless behind. And so it must be. Tocqueville wrote,
It seldom happens that an American farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies: especially in the districts of the far West, he brings land into tillage in order to sell it again, and not to farm it. He builds a farm-house on the speculation, that... a good price may be obtained for it.Caldwell is wrong about the North Shore. After the Depression and the War and the Income Tax, his kind, the working class, the Boston teachers and professionals took the North Shore from previous invadors who earlier shocked Bostonians the way Caldwell is shocked today. When Henry Clay Frick (and other new-money, "western" undesirables) built his summer palace the turn-of-the-century (1900s) Brahmins shuddered. They also came running whenever he blew a whistle.
Today's Bethesda makes me laugh. (Gaithersburg makes me cry). I can hardly imagine the torture that poor fool Brooks quoted who left Bethesda because it's become too sophisticated. My, my. Bethesda, Maryland, home of the Davis farm, the man who saw the expanding metropolis and -- such a nice man -- gave the county land for a high school and a library. He put the Montgomery Mall next door. His farm is today HQ for Martin-Marrietta and Marriott, among the paying tenants.
I marvel at the nation's concrete, and, coming off this tour, I'm amazed how much more room for it there yet is. If I could predict anything, it'd be that the expansion will return inward as inner suburbia deteriorates. I'm scanning Tocqueville now for advice, and I don't find anything other than the generally good lesson that whatever it'll be, it'll be because someone's making a buck. Tocqueville saw it all, long before anyone realized the business of America is business:
I believe that ambitious men in democracies are less engrossed than any others with the interests and judgment of posterity; the present moment engages and absorbs them. They are more apt to complete a number of undertakings with rapidity, than to raise lasting monuments fo their achievements; and they care much more for success than for fame. What they most ask of men is obedience, what they most covet is empire.Oh: he also predicted the McMansion. He continues:
Their manners have, in almost all cases, remained below their station; the consequence is, that they frequently carry low tastes into their extraordinary fortunes, and that they seem to have acquired the supreme power only to minister to their coarse or paltry pleasures.
Your thoughts on the WWII generation remind me of my treatment of it in my book on limousines [were I able, I'd raise it on my website & avoid the space here, but my webmaster (Mom) is still in Maine, and with her the computer that has all my junk on it...]. From a general review of the meaning of the limousine in culture & the automotive age, & from the section:
"Learning to Drive: the 1950's"I might have framed it by de Tocqueville and thereby better understood it; still, I think, it was on.Following the war, private chauffeurs and limousines were for the remnants of a different world. In Britain the Labour Party tossed out Churchill and focused national attention on the welfare state. One post-War Labour Party envoy to New York felt the British Mission's Rolls-Royce was too "patrician." The Mission's long-standing and impeccable chauffeur, George Tambone, in a sublime backhanded reply dissuaded the man of the Rolls-Royce's expendability. Another type of car "might be suitable for you, sir," Tambone explained, "but we often carry Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries in this car. For them, nothing else would be appropriate."
In the United States the ascendency of the middle class led to a consumer culture that favored self-autonomy and instant gratification over social convention. The aristocracy was out and with it the chauffeur. To the hard working, independent businessman of the age, a limousine, much less a Cadillac sedan, meant that customers would think they're being ripped off. This was ascendency of the Buick, a solid car, solidly in the middle of the GM hierarchy and the American middle class.
The ways of outward extravagance disappeared, like the rides in the park of an earlier day. The chauffeur was killed in Italy, and the Packard now had power assisted brakes and automatic transmission. Still, there were enough hold-outs to the old school and new wealth seeking to join it to continue the traditions of privately chauffeured cars and fuel the ascendency of Rolls-Royce, which became the prestigious make of the post-War world. Albeit quieter (and literally so), extravagance lived on magnificently in the back of a Phantom V. Of American limousines, it was the Cadillac.
1920's extravagance gave way to the self-reliance and self-indulgence of the Fifties. Cars were to be powered by nuclear reactors. Man was master of all he surveyed, including the drivers seat. Triumphant armies returned home, went back to school, and started families. Victorious, self-sufficient, and the equal to any man, the stage was finally set for real equality (an as yet painful journey). Social distinction gave way to merit, and the new meritocracy had no use for chauffeurs.
There was much confusion, though, for things hadn't sorted out. The wartime sabbatical from production left a tremendous gap between the new and the old, manifestly seen by the 1942 and 1946 models that followed one another sequentially. Packard had a novel solution to the problem. The company took its entire pre-War tooling and shipped it off to Moscow, which accounts for the oddly recognizable Zim limousines in which Stalin and Kruschvev were driven. But what was a dowager to do without the old town car? And who was to drive it? The flashy Russian emigre, Maxim Karolik, one quite used to riding in the back seat, drove a group of friends to New York on the way to a Princeton football game. One recalled that Maxim dropped them at Times Square, as "he was completely lost, because he had always been driven by a chauffeur. We caught the next train to Trenton and took a cab back to Princeton."
Ironically, that same leveling of society that placed Karolik behind the wheel marked the growth of the chauffeured, for-hire business. Started in 1921 with the purchase of a limousine concession and its six cars, J.P. Carey's Grand Central Packard Renting Corporation took the notion of luxury for hire and formal livery transportation a step further. The company would soon replace the private chauffeur, and quite literally so. Aside from providing formal limousine service to visiting dignitaries and occasional use for local New Yorkers, Carey's company hired not a few clients' chauffeurs, bought the limousines, and rented both back to the client. Carey's grandson, Paul Carey, Jr., recalls one client who resided at the Plaza hotel and ran about town in her Lincoln limousine driven by her private chauffeur, Tommy. She wanted a new limousine and a secure future for Tommy, so a deal was struck whereby Carey bought the Lincoln, hired Tommy, and provided either the Lincoln or a new Cadillac whenever she required. Carey describes how this lady would instruct the chauffeur: "Tommy, we'll use the Lincoln today..." or, "Tommy, let's use the Cadillac," just as if the car came from her own garage.