Carry That Weight
I wrote about "the shame of the suburbs"
Dear Readers,
Have you noticed the way some blunt comments tend to stay with you? How they get permanently etched in your brain? Almost everything said to you today will be lost to your memory in a day or two. But every once in a while someone tells you something and it can echo ever after.
This happened to me a couple of years ago when I finally unpacked what seemed like a ton-and-a-half of books, after a long, drawn-out move. Many linear feet of “floating” maple shelves had been installed on a long wall in my new home office. The shelves looked good; the books made them look better. A young friend, then age five, was given a tour of our renovated space while I was out. Later, I asked her what she thought of my new office. “You have too many books,” she said, in her oddly assured five-year-old voice.
Close readers of the D&A newsletter may find that anecdote vaguely familiar. Because I’ve told it before! (In “So Many Words.”)1 But I come back to it because I’m still fighting that accusation off. Too many books! Too many books! You think so? Well how about I tell you a story about one of these books?
Many years ago, I took a trip to Chicago with a college friend. We decided to stop in to visit her brother, who was employed in some corner of Chicago’s urban planning bureaucracy, as I remember it. I noticed a book out on his coffee table and asked about it. It was Crabgrass Frontier, by the historian Kenneth T. Jackson. He spoke highly of it. Not long after that, having jotted the title in my running list of books to buy, I found it at a bookstore and made the purchase. It seemed an important addition to my collection, which at that time was mostly books I was assigned in college, some of which I’d read.
That book by Jackson made every move with me over thirty-odd years. From one apartment to another in Texas. Then to an apartment in Massachusetts. Then back to Texas, then back to Massachusetts. It lived with me for twenty-five years in a house in Arlington, Mass. Then to Northampton, Mass., where it found a prominent spot among books that I wanted to keep an eye on. Which brings us to this spring.
We were planning a new issue of The Baffler around a theme of homes and housing. So I plucked Crabgrass Frontier off the bookshelf. Delving into it, a salvo began to take shape in my mind. The book had been published in 1985, and it seemed to speak directly to the impassioned arguments we hear today about “the housing question.” Many of these arguments are about the shortage of affordable homes, and what caused that shortage, and what to do about it. NIMBY, YIMBY, yada yada yada.
Jackson’s book is a history of suburbanization in the United States—and suburbanization is how the country solved the affordable housing problem for middle-class white families, especially after World War II. The developments created by Abraham Levitt and his sons William and Alfred are the classic example. In 1946, Levitt and Sons began to purchase about 4,000 acres of potato farms in Hempstead, Long Island. They planned a huge housing project, originally called Island Trees but soon renamed as Levittown.
“Ultimately encompassing more than 17,400 separate houses and 82,000 residents,” Jackson writes, “Levittown was the largest housing development ever put up by a single builder, and it served the American dream-house market at close to the lowest prices the industry could attain.” They did it by a new assembly-line process, with twenty-seven distinct steps, resulting in a simple Cape Cod-style box sitting on a concrete slab. “Vertical integration . . . meant that the firm made its own concrete, grew its own timber, and cut its own lumber. . . . More than thirty houses went up each day at the peak of production.”
When you read about those post-war years of suburbanization, you understand how the United States raised the level of home ownership from about 44 percent in the mid-1930s to about 63 percent in 1972. You might also fleetingly wonder why the country couldn’t find some method of mass production of housing that could address today’s needs. (In fact, the rate of homeownership has remained around 63 percent for the last forty years.) And yet, for several reasons, new Levittowns would be a dumb idea. For one thing, that kind of developer-driven project had all the limitations you would expect from narrow-minded businessmen. Leaving aside the lousy aesthetics, Levittown epitomized America’s post-war commitment to segregated housing. The Levitt organization, Jackson notes, “publicly and officially refused to sell to blacks for two decades after the war. Nor did resellers deal with minorities. As William Levitt explained, ‘We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two.’” By 1960, according to Jackson, “not a single one of the Long Island Levittown’s 82,000 residents was black.”
The federal government played a crucial role from the New Deal onward in insuring housing segregation, and how it happened is powerfully laid out in Crabgrass Frontier. That’s what I focused on in my new Baffler article, entitled “The Shame of the Suburbs,” available soon online, or in a mailbox near you.
Two things I did not focus on in that article:
the environmental effects of suburbanization, and
the political effects of property ownership.
The Environment: It was obvious by the 1970s and 1980s that relentless expansion beyond the cities was environmentally costly. The clogged highways, the move to an automobile-centric society, the energy consumption of large single-family detached homes, the endless sprawl. . . . This is one reason to hope that cities find new ways to address homelessness and affordability. Some years ago, Boston environmentalist Douglas Foy was telling anyone who would listen that “If you care about energy efficiency, the welfare of our senior citizens, equitable transportation services, jobs, or combating climate change, cities are the answer.” His point wasn’t specifically about affordable housing, and yet it’s all connected. As Foy was fond of saying, “cities are the Saudi Arabia of energy efficiency. Gigantic energy mines waiting to be tapped — in the form of energy waste in buildings.” His case for cities over suburban sprawl can be found here.
Conservative Burghers: It caught my eye that Jackson referred to an essay by Friedrich Engels from 1872 entitled “The Housing Question.” So I looked that up and considered the views of Engels, who feared that helping workers own their own homes and property was not good for their revolutionary spirit: “Give them their own houses, chain them once again to the soil and you break their power of resistance to the wage cutting of the factory owners.” This could well have been a motivation of New Deal reformers; knowing that expanding property ownership would tend to promote anti-radical attitudes, they generally had a better sense of how to save capitalism than did the capitalists themselves. Yet, William Levitt (unknowingly, I’m sure) shared the viewpoint of Engels, saying in 1948: “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.”
So Many Books: My little story of book-serendipity—finding the right book on my shelf at the right time—doesn’t mean there aren’t all kinds of other serendipities that work for other people. I know one young scholar whose important book collection exists mostly as PDFs on his laptop. He can carry his library with him on the train in Spain, and I can’t. And, it’s also true that I could have found my way to Crabgrass Frontier in any number of ways and could have purchased a digital edition a couple of months ago instead of a paperback book three decades ago.
Trigger warning: If you are currently writing a book, you will want to skip the rest of this section.
Every once in a while I come across a variation of the “too many books” argument, in which authors advise aspiring authors that “no, you do not have a book in you.” Elle Griffin wrote two frighteningly persuasive versions a couple of years ago for her Substack newsletter. The first one was “No one will read your book.” A third of Americans don’t read books at all, she reports, and of those who do, the average reading time per day is sixteen minutes. (While the average Netflix viewer is said to spend almost three hours a day with video content.) She followed that up with “Writing books is not really a good idea.” She cited more dire statistics: “there were 2.6 million books sold online in 2020 and only 268 of them sold more than 100,000 copies—that’s only 0.01 percent of books. By far, the more likely thing is to sell between 0 and 1,000 copies—and that was 96 percent of books last year.”
Her larger point was that book-writing today doesn’t allow authors to make enough money for the two or three years of labor to be worthwhile. She explores whether the “creator economy”—i.e., newsletters, Patreon, etc.—might offer better opportunities for writers to make money and find an audience. But probably the best way to do it is the way Kenneth Jackson did it: He had a professorship at Columbia and he was able to write a book with lasting value—exceptional shelf life, you might say.
The rest of the story. All that is to say that the book publishing industry doesn’t work for most people. I insist, however, that there will always be people who put books at the center of their lives, either as readers or writers. Wired magazine published a profile of one such person recently: Andy Hunter, the founder of Bookshop, the upstart alternative to Amazon. “His Massachusetts town didn’t have a bookstore, but it had a library,” writes Kate Knibbs. “He headed there after school and on weekends. ‘I became a reader, in the beginning, because it provided me solace,’ he says. He read everything; he read all the time.”
One summer, when Hunter was 16, his mother took him and his brothers to a cabin in Maine. While the others swam and sunbathed, Hunter raided the cabin’s library. The owners had shelves of books that astounded the teenager: Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, James Simon Kunen’s The Strawberry Statement. “Those books completely blew my mind,” Hunter says. He went on a countercultural binge, staying up late and reading by the fire.
There was a time when most of us expected physical bookstores would not survive the onslaught of Amazon. But many have, and Bookshop has come along to provide a new revenue stream to independent bookstores. If you’re curious how it works, check out this article in Wired. Pay no attention to the mildly disparaging comments about Baffler employees being skeptical. Skepticism is our job.
Coming Events: The critic Christian Lorentzen wrote a good piece for the Washington Post about the end of Bookforum. He’s another one of these characters who loves books and magazines. “Even now,” he writes, “the arrival of the latest issue of the Baffler or New Left Review feels like an event: a new vision of the world as seen by many minds, wedged between two covers.”
Well, this is just to say we’re on the cusp of just such an “event”: the latest issue of The Baffler is now hitting subscribers’ mailboxes.
Years ago, John Barth began an essay in The Atlantic with the disclosure: “My remarks on this subject have quite possibly been made by me before, in other contexts.” He discussed the “already said” problem. Barth quoted André Gide’s remark, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” Barth continued: “Originality, after all, includes not only saying something for the first time, but re-saying (in a worthy new way) the already said: rearranging an old tune in a different key, to a different rhythm, perhaps on a different instrument. Has that been said before? No matter: on with the story!”
Interesting to learn about the Baffler/Bookshop connection.