Don't Blame Us is a richly researched study of community activism in five towns located around the Route 128 highway (an area known as the Silicon Valley of Massachusetts). Providing an illuminating account of the political, social, cultural, and economic issues that animated the residents of Boston's hi-tech suburbs, Lily Geismer examines the evolution of grassroots activism in these locations and analyses the influence that these predominantly middle-class white communities had in “shaping party politics, public policy, and structural and racial inequality” between 1950 and 1990 (1).

Geismer's closely focussed monograph expands the scope of historical enquiry, providing detail and texture about suburban communities outside the Sunbelt. Suburban history has become one of the most dynamic subfields in contemporary American history, the subject of countless pathbreaking dissertations, articles, and books. In this analytically refreshing and conceptually sophisticated book, Geismer challenges a number of basic and widely accepted assumptions about the political, cultural, and ideological zeitgeist of the 1970s and 1980s.

Geismer opens Don't Blame Us by declaring that she is using the case of suburban activism in the suburbs of Boston to counter “the widely held view that the rise of the New Right and the Reagan revolution led to the demise of liberalism” (1), to dispel the notion that “the growth of the New Right and surburbanization were interchangeable processes” (10), and to demonstrate that “neither the Democratic Party nor liberalism has declined since the 1960s, but instead both have been transformed.” In order to substantiate these bold claims, Geismer attempts to show, throughout her ten thematic chapters, that those who lived and worked within her communities continued to hold liberal principles and identify as members of the Democratic Party throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Skilfully weaving together analysis of a number of different local grassroots campaigns, Geismer documents a variety of traditional liberal causes and politicians that her suburban residents supported, and chronicles the grassroots political campaigns that they initiated and joined. Conscious of demonstrating that her suburban liberals wielded a large amount of local and national political power and helped to decide the direction of the state, economy, and society, Geismer provides a number of moments in which the “federal government and national organizations embraced … the laws, policies, and initiatives first launched by grassroots suburban activists in Massachusetts” (4).

Throughout Don't Blame Us Geismer is keen to stress that the story she is telling is a story of transformation rather than decline. Thus while Geismer illustrates a number of occasions when liberals were able to influence local and national political decisions, she is keen to qualify her analysis by demonstrating the “contours and constraints” of the brand of liberalism that she documents (172). Consequently, in her thematic chapters Geismer highlights a number of different occasions in the 1970s and 1980s when the “individualist and meritocratic outlook” (287) of her middle-class white-collar suburbanites led them to take positions on property taxes, affordable housing, and school integration that placed them in direct opposition to city dwellers and blue-collar workers, constituencies that the Democratic Party had depended on for most of the postwar period.

Having demonstrated the tensions and differing priorities of liberals, Geismer concludes that since the 1950s the national Democratic Party has increasingly shied away from attempts to solve persistent structural and racial inequities and focussed instead on creating “equality of opportunity” and a establishing a society where “individual advancement” is possible through hard work (281). Attempting to explain why this transformation has occurred, Geismer closes by asserting that the liberal agenda and the core values of the Democratic Party have changed so dramatically over the last fifty years not because of the political success of the New Right and the Reagan revolution, but because of the increasing importance of upper-middle-class suburban liberals to the local and national political process.

Geismer might have done more to prove that the five communities she examines are not atypical. However, despite this she provides a highly compelling counternarrative of contemporary American history, one that makes a very valuable contribution towards ongoing attempts to demonstrate the importance of the local. Overall, then, Geismer's book seems destined to become an indispensable work for those attempting to make sense of the protean and confused political world of 1970s and early 1980s America.