On Oct 18, 2006, at 6:03 PM, Jesse Lemisch wrote:
> I always disliked Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes.... all made out of
> ticky-tacky," etc., as contemptuous of people, including
> suburbanites, who
> live in those little boxes. I was therefore quite surprised in reading
> Bettina Aptheker's excellent new memoir, Intimate Politics, to hear
> that
> Reynolds was a Communist. It had been my experience that Communists,
> regardless of their other problems, did not insult potential
> constituencies.
> But there's no doubt that contempt for suburbia was very much a
> part of the
> New Left.
Pete Seeger sang it too, and he was a Communist in some sense, no?
I thought that part of the point of encouraging suburbanization was to break up the urban working class, and make it more atomized and conservative. Is that not true?
Doug