it was also one experienced in radically different ways by
African Americans in the era of segregation (page 198).
The roads that knit this sprawling nation closer togetheralso brought more homogeneous forms of consumption,
such as chain restaurants, stores, service stations, and
hotels. This emerging mass culture was exemplified by
motion pictures. By the 1920s the American film industry
was dominated by Hollywood, where studios had migrated
to take advantage of California’s congenial climate and
diverse geography (page 194). With an ample supply of water
imported (if not stolen) from the Sierra Nevada mountains,
Los Angeles was poised for unlimited growth (page 186).
Little surprise, then, that after World War II Southern
California became home not just to Disneyland but also to
the defense industry.
The prosperity of American cities in the 1920s alsohighlighted a growing cultural divide between an urban
sensibility and its rural counterpart that was on full display
in the Scopes Trial of 1925. The entire nation, it seemed,
followed the prosecution of a young instructor who defied the
law against teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee. Daniel
Wallingford slyly caricatured these contemporary regional
stereotypes, taking aim at the parochialism not of the country
but rather of the city (page 192). While Wallingford pointedly
skewered the self-centered attitude of New Yorkers, his
map underscores the more general human tendency to
see the world through our individual and geographically
determined experience.
The economic prosperity of the 1920s was highlydependent upon the automobile. That uneven—and
unstable—growth became clear once the evaporation
of consumer demand, the failure of banks, and soaring
unemployment brought the economy to a standstill in the
Great Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had little
sense of how to end the crisis when he was inaugurated in
early 1933, but he quickly convened Congress to consider
a flurry of legislation proposing everything from bank
regulation to direct relief. At the center of this legislation was
the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an ambitious project
designed to bring electricity to the poor and rural South
(page 202). The TVA generated both widespread excitement
and lasting opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal principles of
planning and limited government spending. It was also a sign
of things to come, for the largest expenditure of the New Deal
was on public works: roads, dams, airports, bridges, and
housing projects which put Americans to work and built
national infrastructure.
From public works and the insurance of bank deposits to
the expansion of labor protections and industry regulations,
the New Deal affected every American. Among the many
programs of this reform era was the Federal Housing
Administration, which sought to stabilize the housing market
by buttressing the mortgage and credit business. As shown
on page 200, that program enlisted local housing authorities
to assess the credit worthiness of different neighborhoods
through “security” maps that had lasting, and sometimes
pernicious, effects. There is no doubt that the New Deal
failed to end the depression, but by erecting a limited welfare
state it fundamentally realigned the relationship between
individuals and their government.