During the first decades of the twentieth century, Americans
looked proudly upon their great cities, but then, in the post-
World War II decades, Americans started to see their cities as a
problem. Small-town Americans and especially suburbanites
increasingly took cities to have a different culture, one with
troubling “urban” attitudes, styles, and ways of life. In
conjunction with seeing themselves as normal, decent, and law-
abiding, self-styled “mainstream” Americans used the city as a
negative reference point. The scholar Gerald Frug argues that
mainstream Americans built and fortified their own collective
identities by deploring the city. “In the resulting, socially
polarized metropolitan setting representations of cities as
‘landscapes of fear’ and their residents as inherently
threatening flourished.” In Wisconsin’s current recall election,
some of the political advertisements incorporate these anti-
urban sentiments, especially with regard to Milwaukee,
Wisconsin’s largest city and most “urban” place. Mi