In this ambitious effort to provide a new synthesis of the United States’ transformation into a suburban nation, Henry Luce of Time and Life magazines plays the visionary role occupied in standard accounts by automaker Henry Ford and developer William Levitt. In 1941, Luce forecast an ‘American century’ marked by the global dominance of the United States and the spread of the American way of life throughout the world. In When America Became Suburban, Robert Beauregard argues that the ‘export of American ideas, goods, and customs was inseparable from the suburban dream’ (p. 165), while transnational forces simultaneously reshaped American metropolitan regions during the economic boom of the early Cold War. Beauregard reworks Luce's manifesto into the concept of the ‘short American Century’, an era of domestic prosperity and international power that lasted from the end of World War II until the economic recession of the 1970s. During this period, the ‘switch from a distributive to a parasitic urbanization’ ushered in mass suburbanization and the consequent crisis of the industrial city, a ‘rupture’ that transformed American political economy and national identity (pp. xi–xii).

Many scholars have traced the various elements highlighted in this story: the Keynesian policies of post-war growth liberalism, the government programmes that subsidized suburban development and divested from industrial centres, the racial discrimination that created all-white suburbs and segregated urban ghettoes, the military spending that built up the metropolitan Sunbelt, the loss of manufacturing jobs and population in the cities of the Rustbelt, and the ideological projection of American Exceptionalism as a Cold War bulwark against communism. When America Became Suburban is based primarily on secondary sources rather than substantial archival research, and its main contribution is to link international developments to domestic policies and metropolitan trends. This methodological approach emphasizes the ‘transnational influences on U.S. urban development’ and the ‘global dimensions of suburbanization’ (pp. xi–xii). The sustained prosperity of the short American Century depended upon the expansion of economic imperialism abroad and the explosion of suburban sprawl and Sunbelt growth at home. While historically low rates of immigration combined with global economic restructuring to decimate the industrial cities of the Rustbelt, the suburban way of life became the defining feature of American Exceptionalism for both domestic and foreign consumption.

Beauregard's compelling call for the practice of transnational and comparative history nevertheless raises as many questions as it answers. Some of the book's most provocative passages are more asserted than proved, such as the claim that under the Marshall Plan ‘Europeans adopted not simply isolated practices and products but an American way of life that was a suburban way of life’ (p. 165). At times, American Exceptionalism is a cultural discourse ‘of representation and ideology’ (p. xiv) that structures national identity; elsewhere patterns of suburban sprawl and urban decline are concrete manifestations of what ‘made America exceptional’ (pp. 179–80). Despite characterizing the intellectual critics of post-war suburbia as nostalgic and elitist, Beauregard also laments the lost ‘bourgeois urbanity’ and ‘cosmopolitan tolerance’ of the urban-industrial era (pp. 186–7). This thesis of a sharp mid-century shift from distributive to parasitic urbanization is debatable, given the rampant racial discrimination and unequal allocation of resources in the traditional industrial centres, as well as the ability of many newer Sunbelt cities to annex their suburbs and avoid the extreme political fragmentation of the metropolitan Rustbelt. The specified endpoint of the short American Century is less convincing, since the economic crisis of the 1970s actually accelerated the power shift to the Sunbelt and the low-density suburbs, while Henry Luce's dream of a free-market global system enforced by American military power certainly survived into the 1980s and beyond.