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Book Review
| Robert M. Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870–1930, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. 264. $30.00 (ISBN 0-300-10876-1).
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| As we travel through this country's urban and suburban spaces, we rarely think about how the landscape came to be. We simply accept what we see for what it is. We do not see the landscape as contingent, accidental, or the product of a thousand choices. It is simply there, seemingly preordained, a visual fixture in our lives. |
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In this fascinating book, urban historian Robert Fogelson peels back those layers of unconscious acceptance and exposes how the utopian ideals of planners, the greed of developers, and the fears of citizens combined to create the older suburbs that surround our cities. Detailed restrictive covenants, we find, are not new phenomena, invented for today's upscale suburban subdivisions. Rather, they have been used by developers for years to cater to the hopes and dreams of the suburban buyer. By the end of the nineteenth century, aesthetic controls on building placement, types, and materials ensured that subdivisions reflected the proper taste and style (86–95). Use controls governing density, commercial establishments, and other nuisances preserved the "healthfulness" of surroundings, and their value (61–66, 84–86). From a canny assessment of buyers' wants, and the use of restrictive covenants, developers aimed to create a place (in the words of an early sales brochure) "of natural beauty, restful in its quiet peace, and warm in its spirit of easy friendliness and charm" (12). |
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The friendliness of turn-of-the century suburbs was, of course, a selective friendliness—persons as well as buildings were the subject of desirability guarantees. Covenants outlawed not only groceries, livestock, privies, and squirrels (61, 168–81); they also outlawed Africans (also called "Negroes" and "Ethiopians"), Asians (also called "Mongolians," "Chinese," and "Japanese"), Jews (also called "Hebrews," "Persians," and "Syrians"), and a myriad of other people (102–3). Indeed, the sheer range of exclusions that Fogelson has unearthed is astounding; only Caucasians, on the whole, were acceptable—with the exception, of course, of Hungarians, Greeks, Armenians, Austrians, Italians, Russians, Poles, Romanians, and Slavs (103). |
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This study of the first sixty years of residential covenants presents a compelling commentary on the values, aspirations, and fears of early twentieth-century suburbanites. It also explains what might otherwise seem to be a puzzling contradiction. Property rights, at that time, were considered to be natural rights that protected a cherished sense of individual autonomy. Why, then, would residents—particularly well-to-do residents—choose to live in subdivisions that limited their rights in property so severely? The answer, Fogelson suggests, lies in those residents' fears—fears of change, fears of the market, fears of "the dangerous classes," and fears of people like themselves (24). Although restrictions on the size of one's lot, the style of one's home, and the development of one's land were annoying, they were preferable to fear. Just as these residents knew that they might harbor secret desires to subdivide their lots, create a commercial use, or sell (for a profit) to Africans or Asians, so (they thought) might their most immediate neighbors. Faced with such prospects, the desire for freedom in property ownership yielded to the desire for protection from undesirable decisions of others (198–199). |
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This book's illumination of the physical and social engineering that drove the creation of the early American suburbs is compelling reading. In addition, and on a deeper level, this book meditates upon the fundamental role that land plays in the realization of individual aspirations and desires. It also brings home their ubiquitous nature, and their costs. For instance, although today we reject out of hand the blatant racism and xenophobia of early suburban residents, in many ways our goals and the effects of our actions have not changed. For instance, the idea of "exclusiveness" in residential living is certainly as popular now as it was then—and the restriction of desirable places to "desirable" people is not something that can only be achieved through the most obvious of covenants. As Fogelson suggests, covenants of an apparently "benign" kind can just as effectively realize the ideals of some citizens, and destroy the opportunities of others. |
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More sympathetic is the early suburban residents' desire for permanence—in the physical spaces, neighborhoods, and places they called home. However, in this there is also a contemporary lesson. In some ways—for instance, in the preservation of the physical beauty of Philadelphia's Main Line, or New York's Scarsdale—these covenants succeeded in the achievement of their goals. In countless other ways, they failed. Ultimately, in many cases, elegant houses fell to decay, commercial uses encroached, and change came whether it was wanted or not. Indeed, it is in the very datedness of many of the old covenants that their failure is most clear. Yet, faced with this evidence, we persist in this desire. We still attempt to guard our homes, our lots, our communities, and our lives from the danger of change that lurks outside our doors. Now as then, we refuse to accept the evidence—indeed, the living proof—that the human desire for permanence and protection through property is, in the end, simply a mirage that we all seek. |
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| Laura S. Underkuffler
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| Duke University Law School |
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