Crabgrass Crucible

Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America

Christopher C. Sellers

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781469621852, 9780807835432
• eBook ISBN: 9780807869901
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Although suburb-building created major environmental problems, Christopher Sellers demonstrates that the environmental movement originated within suburbs — not just in response to unchecked urban sprawl. Drawn to the countryside as early as the late nineteenth century, new suburbanites turned to taming the wildness of their surroundings. They cultivated a fondness for the natural world around them, and in the decades that followed, they became sensitized to potential threats. Sellers shows how the philosophy, science, and emotions that catalyzed the environmental movement sprang directly from suburbanites' lives and their ideas about nature, as well as the unique ecology of the neighborhoods in which they dwelt.

Sellers focuses on the spreading edges of New York and Los Angeles over the middle of the twentieth century to create an intimate portrait of what it was like to live amid suburban nature. As suburbanites learned about their land, became aware of pollution, and saw the forests shrinking around them, the vulnerability of both their bodies and their homes became apparent. Worries crossed lines of class and race and necessitated new ways of thinking and acting, Sellers argues, concluding that suburb-dwellers, through the knowledge and politics they forged, deserve much of the credit for inventing modern environmentalism.

Chapter 1
Suburban Country Life

The prospect that the expanding city may permanently overflow into village forms and contain cattle as well as men is one of the most heartening evangels of future civilization.

—HARLAN DOUGLASS, The Suburban Trend (1925)

The literary advent of suburbia in America issued from the pen of a nature seeker. Henry Bunner, a reporter and playwright who worked in New York City but resided in New Jersey, in 1896 wrote The Suburban Sage, a book-length, partly fictional paean to his life there. He himself was an avid walker who spent “many good golden hours . . . in well-tracked woodland ways and in narrow foot-lanes through the windswept meadow grass.” His enthusiasm traced back to a childhood in the upper reaches of Manhattan, where “streets and houses were as yet too few to frighten away that kindly old Dame Nature.” There, he remembered drinking up, “in great, big, liberal, whacking drafts,” “my inheritance in the sky and the woods and the fields, in the sun and the snow and the rain and the wind.” “Everyday’s weather” brought “delight” “to a healthful body and heart.” Then, as thirty years later, particular landscapes nourished his experiences: those “of comfortable farm-houses and substantial old-fashioned mansions standing in spacious grounds of woodland and meadow.” Such places and possibilities were very much on the minds of those characters in Bunner’s sketches who moved suburbward. They did so, generally, because they “liked country life.”¹

Most historians of environmentalism have located the wombs of modern American “nature love” in places far from the suburban house lot. From disciplines that are among the environmental movement’s legacies, those seeking its origins have offered three main currents of explanation. First, some scholars have wheeled out universal species characteristics, a human nature that stands, in important ways, outside the eyeblink of recorded history.² These theories, though capturing facets of what environmentalism is, and was, pose more questions than they answer about its timing or geography. A second set of explicators, highlighting heroic leaders, situates environmentalism far more in particular moments. Led by the dueling Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, many have argued, a turn-of-the-century movement for conservation laid the foundations. Then along came Rachel Carson, and suddenly post–World War II environmentalism was born. Among the difficulties with this approach, it splices together two movements whose constituencies and agendas could hardly have been more different. And its top-down focus tends to obscure or downplay just what the more pervasive and popular roots of any environmental movement might have been.³

A third vein of scholarship has moved closer to an experience such as Bunner’s, by homing in on environmentalism’s more collective origins. From its role in the advent of a “risk” or “light-green” society, to its reflection of rising demands among consumers for a higher “quality of life,” to its constitution as a “new social movement,” many of these explanations nevertheless do not reach back much before World War II.⁴ That they make so little reference not just to suburbs but to geography per se reflects the multiplicity of places and pathways that have led the industrialized West toward environmentalism. This book makes no pretense to encompass them all. Rather, by placing some of the most important of these origins in suburban locales, by demonstrating how such places catalyzed environmentalism in the United States, I show how these competing explanations may be rendered more compatible.

Between a risk society or postmaterialism described by European theorists and American scholars’ insistence on the importance of consumerism, as well as between earlier popular constituencies for conservation and later ones for environmentalism, there lay a hidden connection. In the United States, even from Bunner’s time, what nourished the nature love of the more and less scientifically qualified alike was a shared suburban experience. It was one not so much of home buying as home owning. Nor was it reducible to suburban dwellers’ relationship with “the land,” however fraught. What finally secured the breadth of environmentalism’s appeal was how nature love itself had become ever more suffused with anxieties about human health.

For this last reason, we cannot understand the prominence of some suburbs in environmentalism’s making without also situating them, and the movement itself, within a much longer and more unexpected history. Almost entirely neglected by established explanations of environmentalism are its roots in legacies of health and medical thought. Stretching back to classical times, identified largely with the Greek author Hippocrates, a sturdy intellectual tradition had tied the prevalence of disease or health to the natural features of places. Ubiquitous for centuries across Europe, this vein of thinking underwent a revival in the nineteenth-century United States. Settlers assessed the “salubrity” of frontier lands; victims of illness left their homes for spas, sea journeys, and health resorts; midcentury physicians sought to measure the bodily impacts of climate or topography, as their generation’s version of scientific medicine. The ways of thinking about health that proliferated now seem, at least to some historians, to have been proto-ecological, anticipating that commingling of concerns about ecology and human health that in the later twentieth century became fundamental to environmentalism.⁵

One locus of this proto-ecological way of thinking has gone less explored. Long before Carson ever sat down to write Silent Spring, an intertwined pursuit of nature and of physical vitality had already acquired its own collective habitat in the United States. That landscape, shared by millions after World War II, where nature could be sought and vim and vigor sustained on a daily basis, was the urban edge.

Suburbs, of course, have their own historians, who routinely note the centrality of natural settings to a suburban ideal. But they have been as reluctant as their environmental conferees to consider its health-preserving promises; nor have they accorded any longer or larger significance to suburban nature seeking.⁶ A few historians of earlier suburbs do offer more useful starting points, precisely by stepping outside of notions about suburbs and suburbia that evolved after World War II. Resuscitating a nineteenth-century term, John Stilgoe characterized that era’s suburbs as a “borderland” on the threshold of countryside.⁷ The very word hints at just how differently Americans of a hundred and fifty years ago viewed such places. Theirs was a way of seeing and categorizing landscapes in which our modern ideas of “suburbs,” much less “suburbia,” hardly figured in. Before, and to a dwindling extent during, the long period over which modern ideas and actualities of an American suburbia congealed, nature’s and health’s defining roles for other types of places remained far more familiar and established. The city was where both seemed harder to find. In the country, on the other hand, they stayed far easier to discover.

By the time Bunner pursued his nature love, even into the 1920s and 1930s, the notion of urban edges as borderlands was not yet dead. Another intermediate category prevailed as well. Nature was so easy to see and love there, and health was so readily fostered, in part because he and his contemporaries could still view such places as “suburban countryside.”

Through the early twentieth century, the rims of America’s largest cities yielded to this as well as other characterizations precisely because of how up-for-grabs they had become. As the United States caught up to the most developed and industrialized European nations, a new turbulence had dawned in the land usage around its cities. Stirring the new pinnacle of diversity and dynamism was the arrival of factories and industry, as well as new residences. But what enabled so persistent a talk about this land as countryside was the expanding variety of agricultural uses. By the 1920s, the range of urban-edge dwellers who grew their own food, and the flourishing of market farms among them, garnered considerable attention in America’s first nonfiction, book-length survey of The Suburban Trend (1925). Its author, Harlan Douglass, was so impressed with the prevalence of agriculture along urban rims that he speculated how, far into the future, suburbs would contain not just “village forms,” but “cattle as well as men.”⁸

Half a century of further changes would prove him less right, but into the 1930s Depression his projection was more spot-on. Urban-edge land itself and the categories that guided how so many Americans looked at it were a far cry from the perspective of their post–World War II counterparts. True, the subdivisions were accumulating, and authors of books and mass magazines were well on their way toward crafting a more specifically suburban sense of place. But even as industrial and commercial land users vied with residential developers and home buyers for urban-edge properties, in many suburbs the presence, look, and labor of the farm persisted. Moreover, impressions endured that nature as well as health might be met with there, between or among suburban house lots.

Seeking Nature and Health in a Suburban Countryside

Understanding why necessitates that we situate this era within a longer-term trajectory of change in urban-edge land use. Since classical times and before, the typically urban uses of land—for homes, shops, and workplaces—had dropped off rapidly just beyond city edges. There, only hinterland or rural demands prevailed, in which the land’s produce provided livelihoods: farms that grew crops or woodlots that yielded timber. Transitional zones between the rural and the urban remained thin, diverse, and difficult to characterize. They included poorer residents or racial minorities seeking more affordable land, noxious industries, and less reputable trades; farther out or in scenic corners, country homes of the wealthy might arise. But starting in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, and beginning around the edges of the largest and wealthiest U.S. cities some decades later, more citylike demands came to be imposed on urban-edge land. Starting even before Bunner was born, but much more dramatically by the time he wandered back to his childhood haunt, railroads and then streetcars facilitated an erosion of the clarity and discreteness of the boundaries separating America’s largest and wealthiest cities from their surrounding countryside. While most suburban historians have concentrated on the suburbward spread of housing, urban edges over the latter half of the nineteenth into the twentieth century also drew entire factory-centered cities: Brooklyn outside Manhattan; Gary, Indiana, outside Chicago; Scottdale outside Atlanta.⁹ What especially helped make this era’s urban edges less conducive to a later, exclusively residential idea of suburbia, and more so to the notion of a suburban countryside, were the many new possibilities that arose for more traditionally rural and hinterlandish land uses.

Into the early twentieth century, what kept urban-edge farms prosperous even in the East were the many, ever-growing advantages accruing from their proximity to the largest city markets. Intensifying rail connections around cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles enabled a regional agriculture in vegetables, fruits, and dairy products that expanded as these cities grew.¹⁰ And while many of America’s first “wilderness” parks appeared during this same late nineteenth-century period in more distant locations, the beaches and woods closer to urban peripheries drew larger shares of visitors. Around the biggest cities, a tourist trade took shape as hotels and restaurants sprang up. The better-off could join hunting clubs that maintained their own private reserves, or golf and sailing clubs, often with their own dining rooms and lodgings. More cheaply, room and board also became available “in private families, either in the towns or in nearby farms, at from $4.00 and up,” or in “rented cabins,” “with the meat and fish obtained near at hand.”¹¹ That urban edges remained such flourishing sites both for farmers and for those seeking a more natural, wilder outdoors bolstered contemporary convictions that a suburban countryside could be found there.

The new residents who arrived on the urban edges of this period remained socioeconomically so diverse as to defy stereotyping—yet by and large they shared a reliance on cultivated fruits of the local land. A spectacularly visible nature particularly drew those who profited most from the pooling of capital in these cities, often captains of the huge new corporations who sought second (or third or fourth) homes along more picturesque waterfronts or hillsides. Concentrated especially outside the biggest and fastest growing cities, clusters of “country seats” merged into “Gold Coasts.” On Long Island, their owners joined farmers in prizing soil fertility and a long growing season. Also drawn by the hilly glacial moraine, they were willing to pay as much as six thousand dollars an acre to delighted farmers. Investing in the services of architects, landscapers, foresters, and gardeners, they cultivated a local “nature” for its scenic value, while introducing a more urban valuation of their property. At the same time, most estates included their own farmland, flocks, and herds. Cities large and small acquired wealth belts or pockets: around Los Angeles, Pasadena’s Orange Grove Avenue, and Bel Air; and out from Atlanta, the homes of Coca-Cola and textile owners and executives. “Picturesque enclaves” targeting the families of a new upper middle class of professionals and corporate managers multiplied, especially around the most capital-attractive American cities. From Long Island’s Garden City to Los Angeles’s Palos Verdes to Chicago’s Riverside, they featured an elaborate landscape of trees, lawns, shrubs, and parks, and plenty of room for gardens.¹²

Even around the richest cities, these enclaves were far and away the exceptions in urban-edge development. For every one of these lavishly endowed, upper-end projects, scores of other developers bought and subdivided urban-edge lands and sold them with fewer urban provisions and less artful or ornate foliage. Housing clusters and entire towns suddenly appeared over the 1880s and 1890s and were sold to “working” families of modest income. Already, subdivisions and developments could indeed be large, yet customers often had to more or less fend for themselves. They dug their own wells and cesspools, planted their own trees and shrubs, and either hired their own builders or raised a roof with their own hands. Buyers and builders in these brackets became chief customers of a new factory-style production of building materials as well as mail-order homes. Even in the most massive suburban developments, middle-class homeowners often acquired versions of what became known as the “homestead” lot. With narrow urban fronts but with depths of two hundred or more feet, homestead lots allowed for extensive gardens, as well as stables, barns, and chicken coops behind the houses.¹³

For the suburban poor, mail-order kits themselves seemed a luxury. Into the first decades of the twentieth century, a great many of those occupying the least certain footholds in a city’s cash economy also turned to urbanedge land. Their settlements were well known for a partiality to backyard gardens and farm animals, in kinship to the shantytowns and favelas that would spring up around late twentieth-century megacities of the developing world. Bunner had covered one such colony in northern Manhattan for a New York newspaper in 1880. This “gypsy camp of superfluous poor” was about to be pushed out by brownstone and tenement houses. Many of these shanty dwellers were Irish and German immigrants who worked as day laborers or junk men or ragpickers in the city, or who kept their own “market gardens” and “stockyards.” Tethered outside many houses, goats rivaled dogs as “the typical animal of the colony,” joined by pigs, geese, rats, and some cows.¹⁴

Suburban migrants who sought this and other more cut-rate housing often had the strongest incentives to use their surrounding land in more hinterlandish ways—not just for shelter, but for the growing of food and the gathering of supplies such as firewood. The urban-edge poor thereby joined those in Gold Coast estates who grew their own sizable crops and kept their own beef and dairy herds, and those in middle- or working-class subdivisions who tilled homestead lots and kept cows or chickens. These food-producing promises of suburban living, more than any other, provided the linchpin for a new literature that wove residential and agricultural uses of urban-edge land together as “suburban country life.”¹⁵

By the start of the twentieth century, a long tradition elaborating what later historians would term a “suburban” ideal regularly tied it to a place their readers knew fondly and well: the “country.” From the moment those domestic visions that would increasingly be recognized as suburban first began appearing on this side of the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century, their most famous articulators, such as Andrew Jackson Downing, pointedly identified the houses and landscapes they designed as “country” ones.¹⁶ The starting premise of Frank Scott’s 1872 treatise was that “all the finer pleasures of rural life” could be taken on “from a half acre to four or five acres” of suburban ground “as a famishing man should take food.” For these writers, suburban residence only served as a gateway to the satisfaction of a deeper, more meaningful hunger—for a country way of life.¹⁷ By the time a 1910 federal commission sought to promote a “country life” movement, a slew of books and magazines devoted special attention to just how and why the edges of America’s largest and fastest-growing cities were blurring. The country proximate to the largest and wealthiest cities seemed especially ripe for many of their aspirations, for they sought country life not so much as it actually was, but as it should be, as “ideal.”

After a century in which lawns, leafy greenery, and houses like those depicted by Downing and Scott conjure up their own stereotypically suburban way of living, it has become difficult to recapture how differently Americans of 1900 made sense of them. For promoters of a suburban country life, the significance was broadly imaginative and connective, not just to neighboring, rural land uses but to meanings both larger and more personal. American variants of the country owed a heavy debt to British predecessors, the “country seats” of that nation’s aristocracy and merchant elite, but th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Crabgrass Crucible
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations, Maps, and Figures
• Prologue Green’s Suburban Provenance
• Chapter 1 Suburban Country Life
• Part I New York
• Part II Los Angeles
• Part III Environmental Nation
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Note on Sources
• Interviews
• Acknowledgments
• Index