(See Cover)
The wreath that rings every U.S. metropolis is a green garland of place names and people collectively called Suburbia. It weaves through the hills beyond the cities, marches across flatlands that once were farms and pastures, dips into gullies and woodlands, straddles the rocky hillocks and surrounds the lonesome crossroads. Oftener than not it has a lilting polyphony that sings of trees (Streamwood, Elmwood, Lakewood. Kirkwood), the rolling country (Cedar Hill, Cockrell Hill, Forest Hills), or the primeval timberlands (Forest Grove, Park Forest, Oak Park, Deer Park). But it has its roots in such venerable names as Salem, Greenwich, Chester, Berkeley, Evanston, Sewickley and Rye.
In those towns and hills and groves last week the splendor of a new summer seemed, as always, to give a new lilt to life. The hills and fields triumphed with fresh green grass. In the old towns, the giant oaks and elms threw rich new shade across the white colonial mansions and the square, peaked-roofed clapboard houses. In fresh-minted subdivisions, sycamore striplings strained at their stakes to promise token cover for the bare houses of glass, steel, stone and shingle that have sprouted (19 million since 1940) as from a bottomless nest of Chinese boxes. School buses headed toward the season's last mile; power mowers and outboard motors pulsed the season's first promise. Fragrance of honeysuckle and roses overlay the smell of charcoal and seared beef. The thud of baseball against mitt, the abrasive grind of roller skate against concrete, the jarring harmony of the Good Humor bell tolled the day; the clink of ice, the distant laugh, the surge of hi-fi through the open window came with the night.
A March for Causes. For better or for worse, Suburbia in the 1960s is the U.S.'s grassroots. In Suburbia live one-third of the nation, roughly 60 million people who represent every patch of democracy's hand-stitched quilt, every economic layer, every laboring and professional pursuit in the country. Suburbia is the nation's broadening young middle class, staking out its claim across the landscape, prospecting on a trial-and-error basis for the good way of life for itself and for the children that it produces with such rapidity. It is, as Social Scientist Max Lerner (America as a Civilization) has put it, "the focus of most of the forces that are remaking American life today."
If Suburbia's avid social honeybees buzz from address to address in search of sweet status, Suburbia is at the same time the home of the talented and distinguished Americans who write the nation's books, paint its paintings, run its corporations and set the patterns.* If its legions sometimes march into frantic activity with rigorous unison, they march for such causes as better schools, churches and charities, which are the building blocks of a nation's character. If Suburbia's ardent pursuit of life at backyard barbecues, block parties and committee meetings offends pious city-bred sociologists, its self-conscious strivings to find a better way for men, women and children to live together must impress the same observers.