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.	1
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.	2
These become crystal clear as the book progresses. Cheap and easy ways of waste disposal like septic tanks spurred groundwater pollution. Builders and developers converged on unbuilt lands that included marshes and hillsides. Their handiwork exacerbated run-off and made homeowners more vulnerable to floods and landslides. Tacking back and forth between federal and other expert reports and local circumstances, Rome weaves these diverse stories into a taut, readable tale about the spread of homes along urban edges, the problems to which this gave rise, and the ways recognition of these problems reshuffled the ethics of land use.	3
Rome's account of this dawning awareness adds much to our understanding of the postwar environmental movement. In particular, he argues the under-recognized importance of the open-space movement led by William Whyte, whose excoriations of urban sprawl stimulated other, more familiar environmental and conservationist causes, from population to parks and wilderness. His sources also enable another innovative argument. Federal government officials had a rousing impact on many environmental concerns independent of any "grassroots," as agencies long devoted to rural problems like the USGS, the FWS, and the Department of Agriculture reoriented toward more urban agendas. The clarity and breeziness of Rome's writing here belie the often sterile and statistical reports and discussions he summarizes. Once federal scientists lent new legitimacy to the problems, and the more benign interventions proposed by open spacers like Whyte proved less potent than was hoped, Rome shows how initiatives over the late sixties and early seventies shifted toward redefining property itself. A "quiet revolution" acknowledged the public dimensions of land use and sought tighter governmental controls over it. While failing at the national level, this impulse brought powerful changes in state laws, which a "takings" movement soon arose to counteract.	4
Rome's greatest contribution is to forge a historical perspective on suburbia that puts in the foreground its ecological dimensions above all others. Virtually unique among histories of suburbia thus far, The Bulldozer in the Countryside also affirms the importance of suburbs to twentieth-century environmental history. Yet for our field, it raises as many questions about suburbs—and environmental history methodology—as it answers.	5
Rome's environmental emphasis comes through choices of evidence and perspective that he himself describes as "top-down." Instead of attempting another of those fusions between environmental and social history increasingly popular in our field, he rivets his perspective more exclusively on official and public pronouncements about "environmental" problems. This book is not the place to go for understanding how the environmental consequences of postwar homebuilding may have intertwined with other "social" dilemmas of the period, from civil and women's rights to affordable housing. Social/environmental history fusionists likely will conclude that the government and trade publications and periodicals on which he relies, without resort to archives, can only carry his story so far. The builders here are exclusively large-scale; we learn much more about them and their handiwork than about homeowners' perceptions and experiences. Rome does cite polls, sales statistics, ads, and published anecdotes, but occasionally slides into the generalizing tics of 1950s mass culture critics, such as that "the nation's consumers were infatuated with the idea of push-button controls" (p. 76). The sketchiness of his "bottom up" history works against his own argument especially in his portrayal of environmentalism's roots. Granted that environmentalists targeted suburban problems, where did they and their solutions come from, within suburbia or without? By emphasizing federal agencies and (mostly) de-localized activists, Rome suggests "without." Yet his method and framing incline him away from the local roots of his "quiet revolution," in public health boards, homeowner associations, and zoning codes.	6
In a time when environmental concerns have been nearly shoved out of the national spotlight, our field could benefit from soul-searching about how best to make the case for nature's role and importance to our fellow historians. Adam Rome's discovery of new turf along our cities' edges may serve as inspiration for a wealth of other environmental histories touching closer to modern American lives. And whatever its drawbacks, his purist unwillingness to compromise with social history lends unmistakable force and clarity to his message. The Bulldozer in the Countryside argues powerfully for the import of nature to a suburban history whose historians, like postwar home builders, have for too long simply written it out.	7
Christopher Sellers is the author of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and teaches at Stony Brook University. He currently is at work on an environmental and cultural history of the urban edge in twentieth century America.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.