Suburbia and the Pop Culture Paradox

Probably because it emerged protractedly over the last few decades of the 20th Century, the contradiction between suburbia and popular culture oftentimes escapes more obvious notice. In the 1950's and 60's - and well  into the 70's - suburban growth walked hand-in-hand with popular culture as technology, mass production, and a burgeoning middle class fueled the expansion of both.

The Levittown Historical Society's museum exhibits reflect the growing significance of popular culture and youth-oriented tastes and activities manifest in radios, TV's, sports memorabilia, and mass produced toys of the 1940-70 era; universally- recognized elements of the expanding influence of media. We think nothing, for example, of merchandising a movie under the auspices of a fast food chain before the film has even been released but it was a radical concept before 1970.    

We now have an entire generation reaching adulthood that has no idea what life was like before electronic gaming and the Internet in much the same way that, forty years ago, we could note that an entire generation had come of age with no comprehension of a pre-TV society. (And it's a salient characteristic of our times that we are not merely a society that has mass media but a society centered completely around it). We've traveled light-years from the days when the 1950 Levitt & Sons' Ranch house came with an Admiral television set built into the wall and the first family on a Cape Cod section block to own a television hosted a neighborhood "TV night". Indeed, Stephanie Sigmund, an early Levittown resident on Hickory Lane recalled that in 1948 "our neighbor bought one of the first Motorola television sets in the neighborhood. It was set up between houses so all could view the newest miracle of technology". [A 1994 letter to the Levittown Historical Society].    

The contradiction that's arisen is that the popular culture, whilst standardizing common cultural experience via mass production, rather than generational-transmitted tradition and folkways, has expunged much of the socially-interactive elements that had been enjoyed by older people and seen as typical of "the good old days". Suburbanites now spend several hours a day online or watching TV- or both - whilst local civic organizations have difficulty getting people to volunteer a few hours a month. Not infrequently, I encounter Levittown residents who don't even know there's a museum in Levittown -often on the same week the museum hosts some tourists from out-of-state or from some foreign country. "I didn't know there was a museum here" is the all-too-common refrain and I submit that they would have known it in 1956 had there been a Levittown museum back then.    

Some years ago, a sociologist wrote a book called Bowling Alonein which he noted that membership in fraternal organizations, civic improvement groups, churches, charities, sports leagues, and preservationist societies were in decline and with them the close-knit communities where everyone knows everyone else, parents establish baby-sitting pools, and neighbors attend one another's weddings and funerals. He cited unstable job and housing markets and the need for multiple incomes. However, he was especially interested in the degree to which alienation, apathy, and lack of civic involvement was owed to a cultural paradigm shift as the products of consumerism and popular culture steal more and more time, energy, and attention: churches that have become empty on Sunday mornings while the malls are packed and retail workers manning cash registers at 2:00 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas. People spending less and less time with friends and neighbors.    

"By the end of 1947" wrote Lynne Matarrese in The History of Levittown, New York (1997), "there were approximately 1000 families residing in Island Trees. These new residents were quite satisfied with their new community and so desirous of putting down roots and acquiring some semblance of culture that more than fifty clubs and organizations were founded in Levittown between 1947 and 1951".    

We were a community of joiners, volunteers, doers, and makers. What ultimately made Levittown and suburbia the "American Dream" of a better life was not home-ownership, the Bendix washer, or the Admiral TV, but friends, family, and good neighbors. "Our lives", one Levittowner who grew up in the 1950's, reminded me, "used to be about people and experiences, not things". Indeed, somehow we've let the artificial world that first came to us via that Admiral TV set become more important than reality; we know - and care - more about the lives of sitcom characters than our own next-door neighbors and if we don't know that there's a museum not a block away, it's because it never appeared on an episode of The Kardashians.   

Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org