In their book American Skyline, Christopher Tunnard and Henry Hope Reed argue that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was what made the modern suburb a possibility -- a fine ironical argument, when you consider how suburbanites tend to vote. The first superhighways -- New York's Henry Hudson and Chicago's Lake Shore, San Francisco's Bay Bridge and its approaches, a good slice of the Pennsylvania Turnpike -- were built as part of the federal works program which was going to cure the depression. At the same time, Roosevelt's Federal Housing Administration, coupled with Henry Morgenthau's cheap-money policy, permitted ordinary lower-middle-class families to build their own homes. Bankers who had been reluctant to lend without better security than the house itself got that security from the U. S. government; householders who had been unable to pick up the burden of short-term high interest mortgages found they could borrow for twenty-five years at 4 per cent, under government aegis.