Book Review

Environmental historians' long-standing emphasis on resource extraction has diverted us from the history of consumption. Nowhere is this inclination more striking than in Sam Hays' influential argument that the most important products of the growing affluence of post-WWII Americans were environmental "aesthetics" and "values." Switching from Hays' emphasis on administration, polls, and "politics" to what was happening literally on the ground, Adam Rome's new book, aptly titled The Bulldozer in the Countryside, offers another view of the postwar spending surge. Turning his sights onto one of Americans' most familiar places and purchases, the tract home, Rome develops an interpretation more in line with the swelling scholarly critique of consumerism over the 1990s. To this chorus, he brings a strong ecological note: Spreading subdivisions ravaged the American landscape.

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Rome has mastered a huge obstacle to doing post-WWII American history below presidents yet on a grand scale: the sheer volume of published evidence. His footnotes evoke mountainous abundance, yet out of this mass he has forged a flowing and coherent narrative. He succeeds in part by looking through the eyes of federal policy makers and investigators, but mostly by focusing on the act of homebuilding. "Master builders" like William Levitt strut front and center as they inaugurate the "mass production" of housing after the war. Beneficiaries of pent-up consumer demand, they were aided by federal support and complicity, lionized by the press, and joined by corporate neighbors in the electric, air conditioning, and building materials industries. They blanketed the edges of America's cities with tract homes; by the mid-fifties, they had brought home ownership to a majority of Americans. More environmentally responsible building practices did occur to some: among them, solar heating, community sewer systems, and regional and climatological adaptations. But whether from profit-minded pressures or paltry consumer demand, these paths led nowhere. At the time, no one reckoned the full environmental costs.

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