"Bigotry and fear were used to promote and justify the suburban life, but they were only tools, not the founding principles. I think the real driver was simply the energy gradient created by the discovery and development of fossil fuel."

There is also a less insidious reason. Don't forget GIs following WWII: They returned "home" - but they didn't actually go home to the farm. After they'd seen Paree, thousands of people settled in big cities and the newly developing suburbs. It was the "modern" thing to do at the time.

Seldom have I laughed so hard at a statement encapsulating such bitter doom, NLNG. Kudos from a fellow physical chemist.

I think you're right here. During the '30s and early '40s the big propaganda for the idea of mass suburbanization came from progressives who wanted to improve the lives of the workers packed into tenements. They, in turn, could be said to be following in the footsteps of that Nazi, Henry Ford, who built Greenfield Village as his reactionary vision of how the working class should live. Both the left and right were wrestling with the bad conditions of cities at that time because it was turning workers into potential revolutionaries. If gas is cheap, and I want to head off a revolution, I want to disperse the disgruntled masses and equip them with cheap V-8s.

What I found interesting in the New Deal propaganda films is that no one thought that urban neighborhoods could be revitalized by rising incomes. Instead, we've gone through one bizarre urban scheme after another, dispersal, high-rise slums, now back to two-floor buildings. Something seems to be missing in our beliefs about cities.