Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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Neither urban nor rural, yet idealized as the prototypical habitat of the American

middle

class,

suburbs stand betwixt and between in both a spatial and social sense. In the course

of the twentieth century, technological and socioeconomic developments have

transformed the function and meaning of

cities

and suburbs, as well as their relations. As

the twentieth century closed, suburban areas were home to more than one-half of all

Americans and much of the nation’s commerce and industry—what was once peripheral

was now central. The “edge cities” that cluster around the juncture of interstate

highways

and orbital beltways are the new multi-functional cores of the sprawling, poly-nucleated

metropolitan regions that dominate American society.

Beginning in the 1830s, transportation innovations facilitated the development o

residential enclaves for urban elites on the rural fringes of

Boston, New York,

Philadelphia, PA, Chicago, IL

and other American cities. Steam ferries, horse cars and

railroads allowed the wealthy to live in carefully landscaped, quasi-

astoral settings and

to commute to work in congested urban centers. Between 1890 and 1929, electric

streetcars and the

automobile

accentuated residential deconcentration and put suburban

homes within the reach of an emergent middle class. Cities frequently responded to the

growth of their unincorporated suburban frontiers by annexing them.

During the roaring 1920s, US suburbs grew at a faster rate than the cities they

surrounded and, for the first time, proved successful in resisting annexation. Unlike the

dense, vertical industrial metropoles of the nineteenth century, cities that experienced

their initial significant growth in the 1920s, such as Los Angeles and Atlanta, were

characterized by a low-rise, low-density landscape more suburban than urban. Although

the Great Depression and the Second World War ended this suburban boom,

decentralizing tendencies would return strongly after 1945.

The postwar period marked a quantitative and qualitative shift in the scale, intensity

and meaning of suburbanization. Twenty years of Depression and war created a

tremendous unmet demand for new housing, the vast majority of which was built on

undeveloped land outside city boundaries. The direction of growth was not merely the

case of the private sector responding to consumer preferences, but was shaped and

artially subsidized by public policy Government agencies, such as the Federal Housing

Authority (FHA) and the

Veterans

Administration (VA), subsidized mortgages for the

construction of new homes in suburban areas, while denying funds for repair or new

construction in many other urban

neighborhoods

. In subsidizing the risk borne by

lenders, the FHA and the VA allowed for long-term, low-cost mortgages that made

home-ownership cheaper than renting for families of even relatively modest means.

Fueled by abundant capital, home builders operating on vast economies of scale used

assembly-line techniques to mass produce millions of standardized, low-cost homes in

hitherto rural areas adjacent to major cities. One of the earliest and best known of these

developers was the Levitt Brothers of New York, whose trio of

“Levittowns”

in Long

Island, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey became a synonym for suburbia during the 1950s

and early 1960s. The Levitts’ approach to home building was echoed by developers in

virtually every metropolitan region in the country. American urbanism was completely

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transformed: between 1950 and 1980, three-quarters of the nation’s largest cities

experienced a net loss of inhabitants, while suburban areas more than doubled. By the

early 1970s, more Americans lived in the suburbs than in either cities or rural areas.

The pale of suburban settlement

While popular with the American home-

uying public, from the 1950s onwards, suburbia

often proved an object of criticism and scorn in scholarly texts, popular fiction and

Hollywood film (

Mr Blanding Builds his Dream House,

1948). Although subsequent

social-science research (e.g. Gans 1976) revealed a multiplicity of suburban forms, many

suburbs imposed an authoritarian conformity of belief, behavior and identity on their

residents. Although most new communities lacked the

restrictive covenants

of earlier

suburbs that banned the sale of homes to members of particular ethnic and racial groups,

discrimination against persons of color was widely practiced in the suburban real-estate

industry. During the 1950s and 1960s, suburbs (and their representations in film and

television) were overwhelmingly

white

domains. The idealized racial character of the

suburban realm was reinforced in the 1960s as school desegregation, riots and fear o

crime prompted working-class and middle-class white ethnics to flee to the suburbs in

record numbers. Thanks to

white flight

and

blockbusting,

by the 1970s, most large

American cities had majority minority populations, and the term “urban” acquired a

distinctly racial connotation, more often referring to someone or something that was not

white.

Federal support for suburbanization was not limited to mortgages. As early as 1916,

the US Government provided financial support for the improvement of major roads

linking the country’s major cities. However, local and state governments paid most of the

cost. In 1956 the Interstate Highway Act committed the federal government to paying 90

percent of the cost for more than 40,000 miles of multi-laned, high-speed expressways

over the following three decades. This system and related roads not only linked major

American cities and their existing suburbs, but also opened up rural land, dozens of miles

from city centers, for speculative development.

As the suburbs grew, downtown

department stores

and other urban retail

establishments followed their customers and, in the process, helped create the built

environments and social institutions of a new “

drive-in

culture” (Jackson 1985). One o

the earliest of the new institutional environments was the shopping strip, a corridor o

disparate retail establishments that opportunistically developed along the main roads

outside the older business districts of suburban communities. A second environment was

the shopping

mall,

which debuted in the late 1950s. The shopping strip and shopping

mall devastated the business districts of large city and small town alike, creating a new

geography of retailing dominated by large national chains.

Industrial production also suburbanized during the postwar period. Suburban

governments lured inner-city factories to new industrial parks with generous packages o

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financial incentives, while fleets of cargo

trucks

freed many industries from locational

dependence on the nation’s railroads. Frequently industrial relocation assumed an

interregional as well as an urban-to-suburban character. During the Second World War,

new defense plants tended to be located in suburban areas of the industrial Northeast and

Midwest, as well as the hitherto non-industrialized South and West. This pattern

continued after 1945 as the

Cold War

fueled the expansion of aerospace and electronics

industries in what was soon to be referred to as the

Sunbelt

. By the 1970s, suburban

locales throughout the country had become significant employment centers in their own

right, in many cases more significant than the cities they surrounded, and had ceased to

be mere bedroom communities.

Office space was the last traditional urban function to migrate to the suburbs, which

offered lower costs, easier commutes and more bucolic settings compared with the

expensive and congested central business districts of most American cities. The first

suburban corporate campus was built outside New York City in 1954, but the move to the

office park by the highway did not begin in earnest until the early 1970s. During the

1970s and 1980s, more office space was built in suburban locales than existed in central

cities:

Silicon Valley

embodied a new suburban economic center. By 1990 many central

usiness districts across the nation had experienced significant disinvestment and

struggled to reinvent a new role for themselves in the metropolitan economy. The new

economic geography of the American metropolis was evident in the change in commuter

atterns. In the early 1990s, more than twice as many Americans commuted from suburb

to suburb than from suburb to city.

The migration of people, jobs and capital to the metropolitan peripheries has produced

a new, unprecedented human settlement, variously called the non-

lace urban realm, the

galactic metropolis and the horizontal, new, or post-urban city. Such sprawl celebrates

the very scale of American land. The new centers of this post-urban world include the

clusters of office parks, shopping

malls, hotels

and residential developments called “edge

cities” (Garreau 1991). Most major metropolitan areas have several of these multi-

functional cores, clustered around the intersections of major highways with the perimeter

or orbital beltways that encircle the center city. Originally envisioned as bypasses for

through traffic, perimeter beltways have instead become the

“Main Street”

of the new

American metropolis. With more jobs than bedrooms, edge cities have also spawned their

own residential suburbs, sometimes referred to as the exurbs. Yet, while edge cities

ossess many of the economic functions of earlier urban centers, they lack many of the

city’s social, cultural and political characteristics. Edge cities do not constitute

legaladministrative units, nor do they possess central public spaces or distinctive

identities. With their replacement of locality by the homogenizing forms of a globalizing

market culture, edge cities seem a-geographic (Sorkin 1992), literally both Anyplace and

o place, USA. Still, the social realities of contemporary suburbia are much more diverse

than its increasingly generic built environments. By the late 1970s, the so-called new

African American

middle class had begun their own suburban exodus, as had middle-

class

Hispanics, Asian Americans

and other formerly characteristically urban

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minorities. Ethno-racial diversity however, has not necessarily translated into integration.

Three decades of federal civil-rights legislation has done little to lessen discrimination in

mortgage-lending practices and ameliorate residential

segregation

in most US

metropolitan areas. While some integration has occurred in housing, contemporary

American suburbia reiterates an earlier urban ecology of territorial separation by

race

and

class

Just as suburbs are no longer prototypically white, nor are they middle class. Poverty is

no longer the monopoly of central cities, it, too, has suburbanized. The suburbanization

of poverty has been particularly acute in those older suburbs whose employment centers

have deteriorated and/ or where the original inhabitants have migrated to the exurbs.

Older suburbs (e.g. Newark, New Jersey) have also attracted the new wave of Latin

American, Asian, African and European immigrants and refugees that have entered the

US since 1965. In Sunbelt metropolitan areas, new immigrants grab the apartment

complexes and strip shopping centers of the suburban fringe. Meanwhile, the wealthy

have responded to the perceived threats of the other by literally walling off their enclaves

behind a perimeter of security devices in

gated communities

In the twentieth century the excesses of suburban sprawl began to generate critical

responses. Architects and planners of the Congress of

New Urbanism

have advanced the

notion of building communities that are both more socially integrated and ecologically

sustainable. Environmental legislation will necessitate either cleaner burning fuels or

transportation alternatives to the automobile. The latter may well encourage higher

density patterns of residence and work. A number of metropolitan regions, such as

Portland,

Minneapolis

and

Denver

have also embarked on efforts to coordinate regional

lanning and limit sprawl through the use of growth boundaries. On a national level,

however, the political influence of major developers combined with popular opposition to

increased government regulation raises serious questions as to whether efforts to plan and

coordinate sustainable metropolitan growth will ever be implemented.

Further reading

Gans, H.J. (1967)

The Levittowners,

New York: Pantheon Books.

Garreau, J. (1991)

Edge Cities,

New York: Doubleday (assesses later changes).

Jackson, K.T. (1985)

Crabgrass Frontier,

New York: Oxford University (a classic

assessment of the history and meaning of suburbia).

Sorkin, M. (1992)

Variations on a Theme Park,

New York: Hill and Wang (provides

architectural and social criticism of new urban and suburban forms).

CHARLES RUTHEISER

suicide

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The ninth leading cause of

death

for all Americans, and the second leading cause o

death for

teenagers

(ages fifteen to nineteen). Clues as to reasons for taking one’s life

may be written in notes for those left behind to decipher. Causes range from revenge

against parents to acute

depression,

to drug and

alcohol

abuse and at times—as mass

suicides of cult followers have shown—the belief in a better afterworld. Romantic

notions coexist with socio-

sychological interpretations, and the Centers for Disease

Control have declared suicide a “serious public health problem.” Copycat behavior o

teens following rockstar suicides, the Supreme Court’s intervention in doctor-assisted

suicides and the condemnation of the Catholic Church make suicide an act of contested

and uncomfortable signification in cultural consciousness.

MARIAELENA BARTESAGHI

Sunbelt/Rustbelt

Since the 1970s, the Sunbelt has agglomerated—and represented—disparate centers o

population and economic growth, generally in the Southern tiers of the US from

Florida

California

. Some of these areas were underdeveloped before the Second World War;

hence the term also refers to a major shift in communities and power in the US. In

contrast, older, declining industrial centers have been labeled the “Rustbelt.” Although

cities like

Los Angeles, CA

and

Miami, FL

long have been models of recreation, leisure

and dreams, the Sunbelt as a new boom region has encompassed both cities and suburbs,

including new financial and government nodes—

Atlanta, GA,

Charlotte (North

Carolina) and

Houston, TX

Retirement

and

tourism

centers also have blossomed,

including

Phoenix, AZ

and Orlando/

Disneyworld

(Florida), whose population grew by

50 percent between 1980 and 1990. By analogy, some stretch “Sunbelt” to include other

areas of new growth since the 1970s, including

Denver, CO

and

Hawai’i

. Rustbelt is

used less as a term, since it does little for boosterism or growth, but taints cities such as

Buffalo, NY, Cleveland, OH

and

Philadelphia, PA

The Sunbelt nonetheless encompasses uneven growth patterns as well as changes over

time. Southern California and South Florida, its early centers, already have faced

roblems of sprawl and racial and ethnic divisions exacerbated during recessions. Smaller

cities like

Santa Fe, NM

and

Nashville, TN

have challenged other Sunbelt metropoles

with their more relaxed lifestyles, while all areas face increasing growth and the insistent

franchising of both

malls

and downtowns. Throughout the Sunbelt, meanwhile, long-

settled populations have complained about intruders. Some—

African Americans

in the

South

and

Latinos

and Native Americans in the

Southwest

and

West

—have fought their

exclusion from new growth. New immigrants from outside the US have also created new

diversity exemplified by Asian strip malls forming part of suburban highway sprawl from

Atlanta to Los Angeles.

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After decades of growth, Sunbelt states have gained a large voice in politics (especially

among

Republicans

), manifest in the mass presidential primaries of “Super

Tuesday” (the first Tuesday in March), when eight Southern states vote together. They

are centers for industry,

services

(including

tourism

) and, increasingly for culture,

whether in research centers, new arts and

museum

complexes, or sports. The Sunbelt

also sets national styles, exemplified in fads for Southwest designs. Yet it faces

competition from other regions that tempt mobile Americans with economic opportunity

and an enhanced “quality of life,” whether the “Ecotopia” of the

Pacific Northwest,

revivals of

New England

towns or the diversity of older industrial cities. At the same

time, the explosion of Sunbelt urban and rural areas also has created gaps in

education,

healthcare

and social services, while new and old citizens search for civic identities that

will build bridges from bucolic pasts into rapidly changing futures.

Further reading

Miller, R. and Pozzetta, G. (eds) (1988)

Shades of the Sunbelt: Urbanization and

Ethnicity in the Modern South,

Westport: Greenwood.

Rutheiser, C. (1996)

Imagineering Atlanta,

London: Verso.

GARY McDONOGH

Sunday School

Sunday School, also known as Christian Education, Church School or Sabbath School,

provides religious education, primarily for

children

and young people. Sunday Schools

have been important in North America, primarily in Protestant churches, to provide

religious instruction because the historic separation of church and state prohibits religious

education in

public schools

. Lay volunteers teach most Sunday School classes, receiving

varying degrees of training, and following denominational Christian education policy,

curriculum and social and theological emphases.

Further reading

Coalter, J.M., Mulder, J.M. and Weeks, L. (1996)

Vital Signs

The Promise of

Mainstream Protestantism,

Grand Rapids: William Eerdman.

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (1998)

Handbook of American

and Canadian Churches, 1998,

66th edn, E.W.Lindner (ed.), Nashville: Abingdon

Press.

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GAIL HENSON

Superbowl (Sunday)

Created in 1967 following the merger between the National and fledgling American

Football Leagues, in which the champions of the leagues would play each other. The

NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle, attached Roman numerals to the games to further

associate the game with a gladiatorial contest. The first contests were easy victories for

the NFL team and not great spectacles (as few Superbowls end up being), but the 1969

game in which Joe Namath’s AFL New York Jets defeated the favored Baltimore Colts

stimulated the public’s interest in this event.

Condensing a season into a single contest has made this game more significant than

baseball’s

World Series and the NBA’s Championship Series, which are spread over a

week or more’s play. The fact that more than 50 percent of American people watch the

game, meeting for parties and

gambling

furiously (adding to the statistical rise in

domestic

violence

on this Sunday), has meant that broadcasters and advertisers have had

a bonanza. The NFL charges the

networks

more than $20 million for the game and this

money is recouped by charging upwards of $1.2 million for each 30-second commercial.

ROBERT GREGG

Superfund

Superfund is the name commonly used for the federal program to clean up hazardous

waste sites, which is administered by the

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

The program was created by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation

and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), which has been copied by many states, which have

their own “Superfund” programs. The program is called “Superfund”

ecause CERCLA

created a special government fund to help pay for the clean-up of abandoned hazardous

waste sites.

The passage of the Superfund law reflected growing public concern with hazardous

waste sites, an issue that had been largely overlooked in the burst of environmental

legislation that Congress had passed in the early 1970s. Public interest in the issue was

brought to a head by the case of

Love Canal,

neighborhood

in Niagara Falls, New

York, from which the state had evacuated 237 families in 1978. The neighborhood had

een built alongside a former industrial waste site, which began leaching the chemicals

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that had been dumped into it for decades, damaging the health of the residents who had

never been informed of the hazard.

Under the Superfund law, the EPA determines whether a hazardous waste site qualifies

for the clean-up program by assessing the threat the site poses to human health and the

environment. Every state has had at least one site on the Superfund list, with New Jersey

having the largest number of sites. Once a site is listed, EPA (or other federal agencies, i

the site is owned by the government) develops a plan to clean up the site.

The Superfund law has been pathbreaking in a number of respects. First, it holds

companies (and municipalities) financially responsible for cleaning up hazardous waste

sites even if dumping the wastes was legal at the time they were brought to the site. The

Superfund law imposes “strict liability,” meaning that if you had disposed of any wastes

at a hazardous site, you are considered liable, even if you did nothing considered legally

negligent. And liability is “retroactive,” applying to wastes that were dumped before the

law was passed.

The second unusual feature of the law concerns the Superfund itself, which is based on

the principle of “polluter pays.” The fund was established to pay for a site clean-up if the

waste had been dumped by a company that no longer existed, or if it was impossible to

determine who was responsible. The Superfund was financed by new

taxes

on the

chemical and petroleum industries and other industries most likely to have dumped

hazardous wastes. In 1995, the year the taxing authority under the law expired, the

Superfund taxes brought in about $1.5 billion.

Congress

has generally appropriated about

$250 million a year out of general tax revenues to cover some of the program’s

administrative costs.

The Superfund program has succeeded at cleaning up sites, but at a slower rate than

originally expected. As of September 1998, EPA had listed 1,370 sites, but clean-up was

complete at only 176 of them.

The Superfund program has become increasingly controversial as debates have

developed over how to make the program more efficient and less costly. Industry has

sought to change the liability scheme in the law, which has produced an enormous

amount of litigation as each entity that dumped wastes at a site tries to limit its own

liability. Industry and some municipalities have also sought to change the standard for

cleaning up a site so that more wastes can be contained—

reventing them from leaching

into drinking water, for example—rather than being removed or treated.

Further reading

Brown, M. (1980)

Laying Waste,

New York: Pantheon.

Harr, J. (1996)

A Civil Action,

New York: Vintage.

DAVID GOLDSTON

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superheroes

Television in the 1950s gave us the image of a muscle-

ound superman standing in front

of the American flag, committed to “truth, justice and the American way.” In the late

Depression, these comic-

ook superheroes reinvented and replaced strong men of earlier

American

folklore

. Superman, Batman and Wonderwoman shared not only extraordinary

strengths and talents but also compelling traits like mysterious origins and disrupted

families, a secret identity concealed by an ordinary position within a complex city

(usually resembling

New York City, NY

), a patriotic devotion to country and justice that

overrode the “letter of the law,” and powerful demonic antagonists who mingled science

and magic in bizarre plots. After going to war, these superheroes spread into television

and cinema; after the mid-1950s, surviving early figures were joined by ever-wider

legions who slowly incorporated more minorities and real-life social problems—drugs,

racism, sexuality—into this mythic world. While television’s

Batman

became camp in

the 1970s, elaborate

Hollywood

productions of

Superman

and

Batman

in the 1980s and

1990s, which also grapple with the heroes’ humanity, have adapted these figures to

changing social mores. The success of 2000’s

X-Men

shows that superheroes still have

American—and global—appeal.

Further reading

Reynolds, R. (1992)

Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology,

Jackson: University of

Mississippi.

GARY McDONOGH

Supreme Court

The paramount court in the federal

judiciary

and the final arbiter of constitutional

matters emanating from the parallel systems of

state

courts. Soon after its inception in

1789, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Marshall, the Court legitimized its own

constitutional authority through a series of decisions which still constitute the foundation

of its power. In

Marbuty

Madison

(1803) the Court enunciated and justified its power

of judicial review and held a congressional statute unconstitutional.

Fletcher

Pec

(1810) concluded that the federal courts could test the constitutionality of state laws.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 1094

artin

Hunter’s Lessee

(1816) recognized the Court’s power to review the

constitutionality of decisions made by state courts and the supremacy of such Supreme-

Court decisions. Finally, in

McCuiloch

Maryland

(1819), the Court validated

Congress’

use of enumerated and implied legislative powers and the supremacy of the

exercise of such national authority over conflicting state actions. As a result of these

decisions the Court established its role as the constitutional monitor of actions by other

ranches of the national government and the delineator of federalism, determining the

balance and interrelationship between national power and that of state governments.

Using the mechanism of deciding specific cases, the Supreme Court interprets the

Constitution and shapes public policy. Most of its decisions do not engage the general

ublic. But it still reaches enough politically charged rulings with broad impact to result

in an institution tinged with controversy. Recurring contentious themes have involved

federalism, the limits of legislative economic and social regulation, construing

civil

rights

and liberties, protecting the expression of unpopular political viewpoints and

preserving the rights of racial and religious minorities and of criminal defendants.

The Court supported the institution of slavery in a decision that eroded public

confidence in its judicial integrity.

Dred Scott

Sandford

(1857) ruled that slave-

owners’

roperty rights enabled them to retain ownership of slaves taken into free states,

upholding a Missouri law over Congress’ attempt to prohibit the spread of slavery into

territories.

After the beginning of the twentieth century, the Court, usingconstitutional theories

stressing freedom to contract and narrow the scope of the federal power to regulate

interstate commerce, curtailed economic and social legislation passed by Congress and

the states to ameliorate child labor, harsh working conditions and

union

organizing. This

approach generally prevailed into the Great Depression of the 1930s which Congress

attempted to alleviate with emergency social and economic programs. In a dramatic shift,

after President Franklin D.

Roosevelt

’s failed threat to “pack” the Court with sympathetic

ustices, the Court suddenly changed course and granted constitutional leeway to federal

and state corrective New Deal programs.

The post-Second World War constitutional era is marked by continued latitude for

legislative control of economic matters and a switch to a focus on questions of individual

rights. Its rulings ushered in the

Civil Rights movement

. It struck down racially

restrictive covenants

in real property transactions, outlawed racially segregated

public

schools

Brown

Board of Education

(1954) and desegregated other public places.

The

Warren Court,

attaining the high-water mark of progressive constitutional

judicial

activism,

struggled with questions involving prayer in the public schools, taxpayer

funding of religious schools, revolutionizing the rights of criminal defendants, gender

discrimination, reapportionment, the death penalty and, in

Roe

Wade

(1973),

recognizing a privacy right for women to choose an

abortion

The Court has been able to maintain its credibility even though eventually it becomes

immersed in all society’s political and moral controversies. It is the most highly respected

and trusted by the general public of all government bodies. It accomplishes this despite a

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