The Rise of Suburbia
The population of the United States grew by more than 50 percent between 1940 and 1970, from about 132 million residents to just over 203 million. This growth was not uniform across the country, but varied greatly by region, within regions, and even within metropolitan areas. Generally, the Western states (from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast) grew at a much greater rate than the rest of the country in this period. In addition, rural populations declined across the country relative to metropolitan areas. In the 1950s alone, more than ten million Americans moved from farms to urban or suburban areas.
A substantial majority of the population growth in the postwar era occurred in the suburbs. The proportion of the U.S. population living in suburbs grew slowly in the period between the two World Wars, from 17 percent to 20 percent. However, by 1970 more than one-third of all Americans lived in the suburbs, and the nation’s approximately 75 million suburbanites for the first time exceeded the number of Americans living in cities. The United States had become a suburban nation.
California grew much more rapidly in the postwar period than most of the other regions of the country. Many servicemen who had been stationed at California bases during the war, in anticipation of an invasion of Japan that never came, decided to settle in the state after being discharged, rather than returning to their home states. In addition, job growth sparked by the defense economy brought migrants from across the country to California. As in the rest of the country, the postwar baby boom also played a significant role in the state’s population growth. While California’s population grew by 88 percent between 1950 and 1970 (from 10.6 million to 19.95 million), the number of schoolage children quadrupled during this period.
Critics decried the social homogeneity of the new suburbs, each filled with white families of similar age and similar means. These communities were described as breeding grounds for conformity, consumerism, social isolation, and withdrawal from civic life. Mumford’s condemnation of the postwar suburb went well beyond the lack of planning: "A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold."
The rapid growth of industrial output and employment opportunities during World War II led to an internal migration of eight to ten million workers nationwide, as residents of small towns and rural areas moved to urban centers. California received a large share of this migration, with 1.3 million people moving to the state in the early 1940s. Continuing a trend established in the 1930s, migration from the South-Central states (Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas) made up a large share of Southern California’s population growth.
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