The Look of Upward Mobility

As the previous discussion has demonstrated, while postwar mainstream norms associated “progress” and “development” with the urban and viewed anything outside of this space (physically and materially) as behind the times and culturally “undeveloped,” it was a difficult distinction to maintain in a rapidly changing postwar society. A look at revisionary scholarship and autobiographic statements written about the postwar, and postwar journalistic reportage and scholarly studies from the period reveals the means by which the binary was reinforced in postwar dominant discourse: through representations of material forms like housing and the highway, and through representations of WWCPC rural subjects that underscored the difference between their rural-to-urban migration and the valorized mobility of the mainstream.

It becomes difficult to maintain a distinction between “us” and “them” when people

40 For more mainstream examples, see Henderson [1961] in the New Yorker; “Live in the City or the Suburbs?” in Changing Times [1958]; Mitgang and Duffus from the mid-1950s in the Times, and Alexander in American Mercury [1955]. Rurality may also be used to explain the differences between women in the mainstream and their rural cousins; see Hosokowa’s articles from the mid-1950s in SEP.

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across class and geography appear to adopt similar trends such as physical mobility. For the mainstream, physical movement out to the suburbs and towards middle-classlessness becomes a literal indicator of one’s upward mobility. However, this physical movement also places the upwardly mobile in the vicinity of regressed rural locations, hence the need to differentiate the “city yokel” from the plain old “yokel” by foregrounding how culturally evolved the city yokel is in comparison to her/his local neighbors who pre-existed the urban in-migrants. However, actual physical mobility was not limited to the middle-classless sub/urbanite, as there was also rapid rural-to-urban migration towards the economic and cultural center. This WWCPC rural migration could have been viewed as upward mobility, but it was not considered as such within the dominant discourse of the time. Whereas middle-classless mobility towards the suburbs carried valorized associations of fortitude, WWCPC rural mobility of any kind was associated with

“transience,” suggesting this group’s immoral shiftlessness.

Perceptions of mobility were thus colored by the same unsaid assumptions that naturalized middle-classless sub/urbanity in other areas of postwar discourse.

Furthermore, representations of rural-to-urban mobility became part of a discursive web that also included, for example, representations of road building and different types of housing, all serving to reinforce the centrality of the middle-classless sub/urban. The

“look” of upward mobility, then, underscored the cultural divide between WWCPC rurality and middle-classless sub/urbia in postwar America, a point that will be teased out in this section through reference to revisionary scholarship and primary discourses like

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mainstream journalism, the social sciences, and autobiographical statements looking back on the postwar. The middle-classless sub/urban model of upward mobility was reinforced by contrasting it with the negative counterexample of rural-to-urban migration of

WWCPC subjects, focusing on the phenomenon of trailer parks and through the seemingly neutral reporting on postwar road building.

Working our way backward through this list — examining representations of roads, then discourses on trailer parks and ending with rural-to-urban migration — we will see the ways in which material indicators were associated with particular lifestyles and used to devalue WWCPC rural subjects. Thus, even seemingly neutral representations of postwar national road projects discussing the development of a national road network across the U.S. and, later, the Interstate highway system became another site for defining a proper American mobility. Roads both create new opportunities for actual movement and often serve as metaphors to convey larger sociocultural norms of progress (see Jakle for an early discussion). As the following quote illustrates, this duality was not lost on social critics in the postwar period: “A highway is not only a measure of progress, but a true index of our culture” (Bernard De Voto, quoted in Gilbert 112). As we will see, the type of road one travels can become an indicator of where one stands in relation to mainstream society and culture and becomes another trope for upward mobility.

Scholars have discussed the practical need for highway building in the postwar U.S.

due to an increasing car culture (see Gilbert 110-113), but they also note that it became a site for debate reflecting particular views of the American national character (see Seely;

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Rose). For historian Bruce Seely, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 helped realize the Interstate system as a continuation of previous eras where road networks moved from a rural to urban focus (see “Shaping a New Consensus, 1945-1956”). While this focus was reinforced by the ostensibly “apolitical” expert opinion of engineers (Seely 138-139), we can see mainstream publications of the time illustrate the importance of a highway system as an emblem of progress, culturally orientated towards the urban (see Thruelson [1956], “Coast to Coast” for the Interstate system and Ingraham [1954] for the opening of the New York State Thruway).

As both postwar reportage and revisionist theorists illustrate there were practical reasons for this turn towards the urban: an outdated highway infrastructure unable to keep up with increasing automobile ownership; suburban living and commuting; and the general population change shifting from rural to urban spaces. However, these social realities were also invested with a certain understanding of what constitutes culture.

According to Seely, even the earliest policies for road building were motivated by a cultural imperative, the “reforming impulse” of the Progressive Era: roads were seen as central to economic growth but also as “agent[s] of democracy bringing farmers the rights, privileges, and luxuries urban Americans took for granted” (225). This view of roads as “agents of democracy” suggests that the farmer will become as enlightened as the city dweller; the road thus becomes a literal spatiotemporal trajectory that brings

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regressed cultural spaces into modernity as represented by the city⁴¹. The focus on a

“shared responsibility” (Seely 138-139) to uphold (urban) highway development suggests a national character that is becoming socially, economically and culturally more

orientated towards the urban (see also Jakle 164; Rose).

The postwar book U.S. 40, a 1953 work chronicling George Stewart’s travels across this coast-to-coast highway, illustrates the cultural implications behind this developing road network. U.S. 40 was an emblem of progress for the postwar period, although it was eventually replaced with an Interstate system more concerned with direct routes and high speed travel than the landscape and (small) towns that the old highway system served (see Vale and Vale, “Roads and Motoring in America Today” for a brief summary).

Stewart’s U.S. 40 cross-country portrait can thus be mined for the cultural implications of progress in the early postwar period but also for the assumptions surrounding progress carried into representations of the Interstate system later on in the postwar.

Stewart’s observations acknowledge that although U.S. 40 was a new development for its time, it was also a continuing reflection of the needs of a society and a culture, just as dirt roads served the needs of progress at the origins of the U.S. (21). However, for Stewart, roads were not just examples of progress throughout U.S. history but were also instrumental to the development of its society and culture, hence his assertion that roads move not only people and “things” but also “ideas”: “Close the roads, and you block the

41Conversely, these road networks also provided easy access into the past-in-present represented by rural spaces (see Stradling for a discussion on the Catskills 223-224; also, Phillip Terrie on the Adirondacks).

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flow of ideas” (23). As Stewart goes on to suggest, part of the superiority of U.S. society and culture over countries east of the “Iron Curtain” is that the latter are closed off from the roads leading in from the west. Quite literally, Stewart’s roads are “agents of democracy” bringing in information to the unenlightened.

While Stewart does not explicitly claim that remote areas within the U.S. were in need of mainstream enlightenment or “ideas,” the subject matter he chooses to focus on suggests as much. As Vale and Vale point out in their revisionist study, Stewart does not focus on cities along U.S. 40, only on rural places. Stewart acknowledges this omission and justifies it by claiming that the American city is “highly standardized,” a justification he also uses to explain why he hardly mentions any of the people he meets on his travels across the country (34). Given the point made earlier that roads and highways of the postwar period were seen as instrumental to postwar progress as defined by the middle-classless sub/urban, we can see another reason for Stewart’s choice not to focus on cities and, therefore, people in his book. The fact that cities are “standardized” for Stewart implies that rural landscape and small towns are not; that is, rurality operates as an anomaly in relation to mainstream norms that are generated from the (sub)urban.

Regarding geography and progress, for Stewart the urban is not only the norm, it is the norm that is used to measure the anomalous countryside, those places he finds interesting precisely because they deviate from this norm. Early on in the book, Stewart articulates this “traveler[‘s]” feeling of “anomaly” when considering the difference between “busy modern cities” and “run-down, slatternly countryside” (47) or, as with other postwar

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treatments of rurality, the difference between the mainstream (cities) and the

undeveloped rural areas situated outside the mainstream present. This may also explain why Stewart does not focus on people along U.S. 40 either: while his comment on Americans as “standardized” may suggest a critical view of urban mass society, his writing demonstrates that he was not able to see individuality or agency in the people he encountered along the rural U.S. 40.

There are a number of instances where Stewart more explicitly dismisses rurality as spatially, temporally and culturally undeveloped. One such example emerges in his discussion of the New Jersey countryside (see 38 in particular), and it can be even more readily seen when he discusses the flow of “ideas” into the countryside. When Stewart recalls the dirt origins of U.S. 40 as this road enters the Midwest, he notes that pre-Civil War wagon traffic moved from a North-South road (joining the Midwest to the South) to an East-West road (the Midwest joining with the Northeast instead), and reflects:

The road thus must have had an effect in detaching the people of these states from their early southern connections and allying them with the East instead of with slave-power of the lower Mississippi Valley. As we must always remember, the most important freight that a road carries may be neither household goods, nor live-stock, nor munitions of war — but ideas! (117-118)

The South, via slavery, is tied to the worst kind of oppressive rural brutality, while the

“East” (or, Northeast, since the road in question travels along the Mason Dixon line)

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brought a potentially uncivilized Midwest into respectability. This respectability is seen in Stewart’s description of “well-tended and rich farms” and “tree-shaded firmly-founded small towns” (113). Saved from the corrupting South and thanks to the “road” of progress starting in the 1800s and continuing into the postwar, the Midwest, in Stewart’s narrative, materially reflects the true Heartland in its “rich” farms and small towns.

More general circulation journalism also used road metaphors to illustrate what progress consisted of and who was left behind. There were many articles on roads and road development in both left- and right- leaning publications of the time. This is not surprising given the debate at the time on how to improve traffic and road networks, a discussion surrounding the Federal Highway Act of 1956 which paved the way for the Interstate system. In these articles, roads become an “index of culture” serving to mark the difference between the mainstream and what literally remained off-road. One fitting example can be found in the 1954 article entitled “Super-Byway: The Country Road”

written by Hal Borland for the Times, where the distinction between “super-highway”

and “country road” encodes spatiotemporal and cultural difference through the

description of the respective kinds of traffic and speeds native to both. Thus, the person who lives in a world of “violent and sudden change” may want to indulge in a scenic detour on a country road in order to understand “where he came from as well as where he is going” (Borland, “Super-Byway”).

In representations such as those found in Borland’s article, roads are subject to a classification that encodes their relative positioning within the cultural hierarchy. The

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country road may have evolved from its dirt origins to have two lanes to become recognized as a county and then state route, but in the national imaginary these routes pale in comparison to urban freeways and Interstates that connect city to city and only tangentially pass by or through rural areas. Further, these metaphors reinforce an assumed difference between the upwardly mobile evolution of the mainstream and the stagnant backwaters of rurality. This is captured in late 1950s SEP articles like “Turnpike to Nowhere” (Thruelson) and “Our Landlocked Farm” (Stuart). This latter article uses the road as a metaphor for national progress by following the “true story” (Stuart, “Our” 43) of an upwardly mobile son, from his humble origins (a farm with no direct passage) to the eventual building of a primitive road to his father’s house. Although the road was a dirt road, it was an improvement for the family: “It wasn’t a rough road to us. This was road number one. It was the greatest road in America” (57). In this portrayal, these rural inhabitants aren’t quite up to modern civility, and their “road number one” takes on the past-in-present qualities of rurality: the road is a reminder of humble beginnings the better to illustrate how far the postwar has come. The message about ”our” evolution in the postwar is deepened in the accompanying advertisement for Quaker State Oil: the picture of cars on an urban freeway heading towards a downtown cityscape (56). In another article, this time in SR, Stuart directly credits these roads with the cultural progress of his “backward mountain counties”: “The good roads have reached us.

Automobiles have brought, and are bringing, the outside world to us” (“America’s” 5).

By 1967 Landscape, a journal concerned with American geography, can provide its

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readers with a map of hierarchies centering around roads. The “broad highway” is that of the mainstream and is oblivious to the “dirt road” traversing poverty and leading to a

“divided limited access highway”; the highway goes through the sub/urban fringe, through empty land with “For Sale” signs, working-class Levittowns and trailer parks, through “Main Street” in the center of a once small-town business district now just looking quaint, hiding junked cars and the human detritus of minorities and

“unassimilated hillbillies” (“Notes and Comments” 1-2). The author calls on a familiar trope employing physical mobility on a road as an indicator of personal mobility and progress: the mainstream norms are symbolized by the “broad highway” which stands at the top of a geographic and sociocultural hierarchy; at the bottom are the dirt road (i.e.

rurality proper), the “limited access highway” that goes through more populous rurality, and the Main Street of small towns with their marginal inhabitants.

Part of the reason that these rural places and people are left behind, as implied by these articles, is their unwillingness or inability to access the personal mobility that U.S.

society and culture offers for everyone. This valorization of personal mobility through the imagery of roads is a thread that runs across different publications and reflects aspirations of the sub/urban middle-classless (see, for example, Newsweek’s 1962 “On the Move”

and Life’s 1953 “Americans on the Move”). However, while it is clear that people of all classes were on the move in the postwar, it is also apparent that mobility was viewed differently depending on the group involved. In the Times’ 1962 “Portrait of a Mobile Nation,” for example, Boroff offers a side-by-side comparison of mobility between

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classes. While Boroff acknowledges that physical mobility is something in which all classes participate, he goes on to typify the differences between the low-income population who “move more from residence to residence in the same locality” and the middle- and upper-classes who move mostly between counties. Boroff’s observation may be rooted in sociological fact, but the cultural implications behind such a statement for the Times’ reader are also relevant: low-income mobility is hardly any mobility at all as subjects fail to move away from the geography of poverty, in contrast to a bolder and directed upper-class mobility that is reflective of one’s upwardly mobile aspirations.

Having shown his reader the difference between mobilities, Boroff then continues to erase lower-class mobility from existence: “At the very time when mobility — formerly associated with the dispossessed — was becoming less attractive to working-class people increasingly anchored by their new prosperity, it became part of the life-style of the socially aspirant middle class.” Having made this case, Boroff then proceeds to examine

“middle class mobility” exclusively, defining it as modern mobility that is tied to a culture of progress (“life-style of the socially aspirant”) and a level of consciousness necessary to attain such progress. The implication is that while such consciousness is natural for the middle-classless, it is something that rural-to-urban migrants must grow into in order to be successful, for in their case physical mobility alone does not guarantee progress. Thus, in Life’s “The Choice Forced Upon Us” [1965], the rural-to-urban family that is highlighted is portrayed as traveling along a natural evolutionary trajectory from a nostalgically remembered rurality (recollections of childhood tree-climbing) towards a

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civilized urbanity defined in part by having left that rurality behind. And, as we see in a quote accompanying a picture contrasting the Pan Am Building with dried cornstalks, just as rurality is associated with childhood, so urbanity is with adulthood: “Leaving country like that makes a man look like an idiot unless there are compensations. I enjoy the city and I have excitement and responsibility with the company.” One must progress towards the city (“responsibility with the company”) even as the world of carefree childhood beckons.

In these articles, it is the middle-classless sub/urban subject who exemplifies proper mobility through a cluster of associations that include the suburban home, employment with a company and personal maturity. As discussed above in regards to the Life article, such articles at times portray rural inhabitants who have adopted this mentality of progress, but they are shown as the exception to the rule. Generally in these

representations, WWCPC rural inhabitants, even when they are seen to participate in postwar mobility, are shown as inherently limited and degraded. This is particularly apparent in representations of the difference between mainstream and WWCPC rural mobility through reference to housing choices (trailers) and/or to actual WWCPC rural-to-urban migration.

i. Upwardly Mobile Deviance

In the postwar era certain material indicators were seen as exhibiting the effects of geographic origin on one’s character and the degree of cultural devolution based on one’s rural or urban “nature.” One obvious way that the middle-classless of suburbia could

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distinguish themselves from their WWCPC rural counterparts was in the difference between suburban houses and postwar trailers. The suburban house, whether permanent

distinguish themselves from their WWCPC rural counterparts was in the difference between suburban houses and postwar trailers. The suburban house, whether permanent