The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism

Rome, Adam.  The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Efforts to promote American homeownership combined with the extreme post-war housing shortage led the homebuilding industry to adopt assembly-line production techniques to accommodate consumer demand.  Adam Rome argues that the resulting environmental impacts in the suburban middle ground between town and country led to the development modern environmental movement. The new environmental movement incorporated elements of the older tradition of conservation, but focused on quality of life issues for the inhabitants of urban and suburban areas, culminating in Richard Nixon’s call for a new land ethic that recognizing land as a resource, not a commodity.

Herbert Hoover set the stage for the post-war overhaul of the homebuilding industry as Secretary of Commerce during the 1920s.  Believing that homeowners were the solid core of society due to their work ethic, community involvement, and social stability, Hoover wanted to make it easier for more working Americans to purchase homes.  To achieve this goal, he argued that the homebuilding industry needed to increase its efficiency so that it could supply larger numbers of affordable houses.  A more efficient and productive construction industry would also be an engine of growth and prosperity, reducing the boom and bust nature of American capitalism.  Hoover’s initial efforts focused on waste reduction in construction by promoting the adoption of uniform building codes, but others soon focused on more direct action.  Reformer Edith Wood contended that the marketplace would never provide adequate housing for Americans, and the 1931 President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership called for both direct government action to assist workers to purchase houses and for the mass production of houses to meet the demand for shelter.  Rejecting the calls for “socialist” solutions, the editors of Fortune magazine described the housing industry as intellectually bankrupt and argued for it to adopt the principles of mass production.

Herbert Hoover set the stage for the post-war overhaul of the homebuilding industry as Secretary of Commerce during the 1920s.  Believing that homeowners were the solid core of society due to their work ethic, community involvement, and social stability, Hoover wanted to make it easier for more working Americans to purchase homes.  To achieve this goal, he argued that the homebuilding industry needed to increase its efficiency so that it could supply larger numbers of affordable houses.  A more efficient and productive construction industry would also be an engine of growth and prosperity, reducing the boom and bust nature of American capitalism.  Hoover’s initial efforts focused on waste reduction in construction by promoting the adoption of uniform building codes, but others soon focused on more direct action.  Reformer Edith Wood contended that the marketplace would never provide adequate housing for Americans, and the 1931 President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership called for both direct government action to assist workers to purchase houses and for the mass production of houses to meet the demand for shelter.  Rejecting the calls for “socialist” solutions, the editors of Fortune magazine described the housing industry as intellectually bankrupt and argued for it to adopt the principles of mass production.

Rome’s goal is to trace the development of the modern environmental movement in response to the quality of life issues facing Americans as a result of the suburbs, which he accomplishes through graphic descriptions of the result of mass production of housing and builders’ design choices.  Focusing on the main sources of citizen complaint – septic systems, landslides, loss of open space, and flooding – Rome illustrates how a loose coalition of suburbanites, scientists, and government workers combined to address problems created by unrestrained development.  In fits and starts, these groups secured regulations governing the installation of septic systems in large developments, development of steep hillsides, and protection of wetlands to reduce flooding and property damage.  Despite these apparent successes, when Richard Nixon and others argued that Americans needed to rethink their land ethic to recognize land as a interconnected resource that affected the public good, property rights advocates revolted against environmental regulations.  Reformers failed to account for the strong tradition embodied in Fifth Amendment protections against government land seizures that property owners had the inherent right to develop their land as they saw fit.  Farmers who wanted protection against water pollution wanted to retain the right to develop their land after retirement, and fought against restrictions on land use.

When the Nixon administration sought to encourage new regulation of land-use following the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970, Rome contends that the ultimate result was a backlash among property owners seeking to protect their traditional rights to dispose of their land as they saw fit.  The impetus for the backlash was two-fold.  Property rights advocates worried about the promotion of a new land ethic by critics of dangerous land use policies, and court decisions that held that protection of natural resources for the public good competed with the property owners rights to use land, and that land use might be restricted without compensation from the government.  Congressional Representative Steve Symms represented those worried about restrictions on land use when he called it a new type of Feudalism that reduced landowners to vassals of the state.

Despite success at depicting the development of the environmental movement and its failure to change Americans’ land ethic, Rome's most important contribution is his analysis of the economics of post-war homebuilding.  Large builders received governmental incentives in the form of FHA guarantees, which allowed them to finance building projects more cheaply.  Builders determined house design and features based on profitability rather than in response to consumer demands, explaining the installation of septic systems over sewers, the adoption of electric heat over gas or fuel oil, and the installation of air conditioning in homes.  These three builder choices had far-reaching consequences for homeowners and their communities.  Septic systems installed en masse to save the expense of installing sewers and sewage treatment plants overburdened the soil’s ability to absorb effluent and rainfall, spreading disease and causing flooding.  Elimination of regional housing adaptations to enhance cooling and heating in order to save money forced builders to install air conditioning, which then forced homeowners to pay higher electrical bills.  Builders also chose to install electric heat to maximize profits by getting reduced rates for wiring installation and appliances, despite the later increased cost to consumers.  This manipulation of the housing market, funded by the Federal government through various housing programs, created the environmental crises that mobilized mothers, land-use reformers, and Federal officials to create the modern environmental movement that Rome describes.

While presenting the political, economic, and intellectual ferment of the environmental movement and efforts against it, Rome leaves it isolated from the other conflicts of the post-war era.  Missing from his analysis is the relationship, if any, between mass building schemes and Cold War politics.  Did the Federal government see broad homeownership as a means to combat the specter of Communism?  While presenting one challenge to government regulation of land use as “feudal”, the expected critics decrying the programs as socialist are absent.  A question that goes unanswered is whether some of the property rights backlash of the early 1970s is related to a perception that environmentalists and antiwar protesters.  While Rome clearly places his work in the context of post-war economic expansion and the Baby Boom, he ignores the greater domestic political context.

The Bulldozer in the Countryside fills a historiographical niche in environmental history left by earlier scholarship.  While Hal Rothman, Stephen Fox, and Roderick Nash assert that the catalyst for American environmentalism occurred in 1950s efforts to save Echo Park, Rome argues for a more nuanced and lengthy developmental process that shows why Americans’ attitudes toward the environment changed after World War II.  Rome’s work fall more in line with that of Mark Harvey in arguing that the growth of suburbia increased Americans’ awareness of environmental issues, but rather than accepting the idea that environmentalism was the preserve of the upper-middle class, he presents it as a more general phenomenon.  Rome also builds on Samuel Hays’ work, by moving beyond the conservationist-environmentalist dichotomy to bring conservation into the urban context along with environmental concerns.