This article argues that the conservation movement provided a conceptual and organizational model for New Deal—era urban professionals eager to motivate federal and local investments in city improvement. During a period when research and policy for the scientific management of natural resources attracted broad support, city planners and real estate appraisers seeking professional legitimacy in a nation recently recognized to be urban saw in conservation new possibilities for articulating the urgency of their professional goals. Focusing on efforts by the National Resources Planning Board, Home Owners Loan Corporation, and Federal Housing Administration to transform ecological theories of cities from the social sciences into a national movement for urban community conservation offers insights into the impact of Americans' enduring preference for nature over cities on urban history during the New Deal.
Amy E. Hillier, "Redlining and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation," Journal of Urban History 29, no. 4 (2003): 394-420; Henrika Kuklick, "Chicago Sociology and Urban Planning Policy: Sociological Theory as Occupational Ideology," Theory and Society 9 (1980): 821-45; John T. Metzger, "Planned Abandonment: The Neighborhood Life-Cycle Theory and National Urban Policy," Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 1 (2000): 7-40; Rick Cohen, "Neighborhood Planning and Political Capacity," Urban Affairs Quarterly 14, no. 3 (1979): 337-62; Marc Weiss, "Richard T. Ely and the Contribution of Economic Research to National Housing Policy, 1920-1940," Urban Studies 26, no. 1 (1989): 115-26; Jeffrey Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Kenneth Jackson, "Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal: The Home Owners' Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration," Journal of Urban History 6, no. 4 (1980): 419-52. Far more has been written about the rise of ecological thinking in American urban studies. Scholars recount how, extending the findings of plant and animal specialists for whom urbanization and human affairs had become topics of increasing interest and concern and whose work itself had borrowed from the social sciences, social scientists set out to define a "scientific" approach to studying the expanding metropolis that could be located within ecology. On social scientists' borrowings from ecology, see Emanuel Gaziano, "Ecological Metaphors as Scientific Boundary Work: Innovation and Authority in Interwar Sociology and Biology," American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 4 (1996): 874-907; Martin Bulmer, The Chicago School of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Matthias Gross, "Human Geography and Ecological Sociology: The Unfolding of a Human Ecology, 1890 to 1930-and Beyond," Social Science History 28, no. 4 (2004): 575-605. On the history of ecology as a "mongrel" field that drew on social science, see Gregg Mitman, The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
2.
For example, if, as Frederick Babcock observed (citing human ecologist Harlan Paul Douglass) "natural selection" guided the siting of urban residents, it made sense that realtors' preference should be to maintain racial homogeneity in city neighborhoods. Frederick Babcock, The Valuation of Real Estate (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1932), 77.
3.
Marc Weiss and John Metzger note the existence of a movement for urban conservation in the real estate community. Yet this excellent study makes no mention of the powerful conservation movement dominating natural resources planning during the period or the links to planners' earlier work. See Marc Weiss and John Metzger, "The American Real Estate Industry and the Origins of Neighborhood Conservation," in Laurence C. Gerckens, ed., Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference on American Planning History (Hilliard, OH: Society for American City and Regional Planning History, 1994).
4.
Ronald Tobey, Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895-1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Randal S. Beeman and James A. Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Christopher Masutti, "Frederic Clements, Climatology, and Conservation in the 1930's," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 37, no. 1 (2006): 27-48. Ecologists of this era were not all professionally identified by the title ecologist but rather worked as biologists, botanists, and zoologists. Thus, figures such as Walter Taylor, who called for agriculture to "become less an art, more a science . . . to place the emphasis on conservation rather than exploitation," worked at the Bureau of Biological Survey at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Walter Taylor, "Man and Nature, A Contemporary View," Scientific Monthly 41 (October 1935): 355.
5.
Wade DeVries, "The Michigan Land Economic Survey," Journal of Farm Economics 10, no. 4 (1928): 516-24; Joint Committee on Bases of Sound Land Policy, What About the Year 2000? (Harrisburg, PA: Mount Pleasant Press, 1929); Charles C. Adams, The Importance of Preserving Wilderness Conditions (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1929); "Henry Chandler Cowles, Physiographic Plant Ecologist," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 30, no. 1 (1940): 39-43; Sharon Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
6.
Proceedings of the National Conference on Land Utilization, Chicago, Ill., November 19-21, 1931, Called by the Secretary of Agriculture and the Executive Committee of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1932); U.S. Great Plains Committee, The Future of the Great Plains (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1936); Victor Shelford and Herbert Hanson, "The Problem of our Grasslands," in A. E. Parkins and J. R. Whitaker, eds., Our Natural Resources and Their Conservation (New York: John Wiley, 1936).
7.
Donald Swain, "Federal Conservation Policy, 1921-1933," in Carroll Pursell, ed., From Conservation to Ecology (New York: Crowell, 1973), 56; Kendrick Clements, Hoover, Conservation and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Worster, Dust Bowl; Masutti, "Frederic Clements"; Donald Pisani, "The Many Faces of Conservation: Natural Resources and the American State, 1900-1940," in Morton Keller and R. Shep Melnick, eds., Taking Stock: American Government in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds., FDR and the Environment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
8.
Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); and J. Leonard Bates, "Fulfilling American Democracy: The Conservation Movement, 1907 to 1921," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44, no. 1 (1957): 29-57.
9.
L. C. Gray, "The Social and Economic Implications of the National Land Program," Journal of Farm Economics 18, no. 2 (1936): 258. While the environmental movement of recent decades frequently has framed its agenda in opposition to economic development, during the New Deal the values of ecological science and economic development were more easily linked. Many conservation promoters, recognizing the two fields shared roots ("oikos"), suggested that ecological principles applied to resource management would offer increased productivity for the long term in the form of "renewable" resources that might be conserved as they were used.
10.
While criticized from its debut, Clements's work was well received in range management, forest management, and soil conservation circles. For example, Clements and his student and collaborator John Weaver became consultants on a number of ecological engineering projects. Hanson, a student of both men, also worked on rural rehabilitation. On ecology's influences in these areas, see Ashley L. Schiff, "Innovation and Administrative Decision Making: The Conservation of Land Resources," Administrative Science Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1966): 1-30; Donald Worster, Nature's Economy (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977); Tobey, Saving the Prairies; David Gibson, "Textbook Misconceptions: The Climax Concept of Succession," American Biology Teacher 58, no. 3 (1996): 135-40; Beeman and Pritchard, Green and Permanent Land; Emily Brock, "The Challenge of Reforestation: Ecological Experiments in the Douglas Fir Forest, 1920-1940," Environmental History 9, no. 1 (2004): 57-79; Christophe Masutti, "Le Dust Bowl, la politique de conservation des ressources et les écologues aux états-unis dans les années 1930" (PhD dissertation, Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, 2005).
11.
Frederic Clements , Plant Succession and Human Problems (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1935), 241.
12.
As Stephen Cross and William R. Albury have argued, this vision of restoring social stability through "the discovery and encouragement of what were held to be the natural, spontaneous, and organic processes of human collaboration" rather than the imposition of authoritarian control was broadly influential during the interwar era. Stephen J. Cross and William R. Albury, "Walter B. Cannon, L. J. Henderson, and the Organic Analogy," Osiris 3 (1987): 168.
13.
Herbert Hanson, "Ecology in Agriculture (1938 Presidential Address to the Ecological Society of America)," Ecology 20, no. 2 (1939): 117. Among American scientists, the federal agriculture department in particular was recognized as a model for the marriage of scientific research and planning in the period to World War II. See Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Richard Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966); A. Hunter Dupree, "Central Scientific Organization in the United States Government," Minerva 1, no. 4 (1963): 453-69; A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); Edward Banfield, "Organization for Policy Planning in the US Department of Agriculture," Journal of Farm Economics 34, no. 1 (1952): 14-34; Margaret Rossiter, "The Organization of Agricultural Sciences," in Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
14.
Land use studies found ecologists' expertise particularly relevant. Techniques such as land use capability mapping, for example, would help to identify a given parcel's phase in its life cycle, pointing to the proper treatment for repair. Christopher Masutti has described how this field's belief that planners should scientifically determine the best use for land as part of a comprehensive plan drew heavily on ecological theories in the 1930s. This was not a totally new role for ecologists; they had participated in early land classification efforts such as the Michigan Land Economic Survey in the 1920s. See Masutti, "Frederic Clements."
15.
What Kendrick Clements has called "managed voluntarism and controlled decentralization," the notion that expert-designed programs should be "administered as much as possible by the people most affected by them," had been a hallmark of Herbert Hoover's approach to conservation during his time in federal service; as the conservation effort expanded to private lands, this strategy held great appear to his presidential successor. Clements, Hoover, Conservation and Consumerism; John Babcock, "The Role of Public Discourse in the Soil Conservation Movement, 1865-1935" (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1985); John Sears, "Grassroots Democracy: FDR and the Land," in Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds., FDR and the Environment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Carroll Pursell, ed., From Conservation to Ecology (New York: Crowell, 1973); Brian Black, "Referendum on Planning: Imagining River Conservation in the 1938 TVA Hearings," in Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds., FDR and the Environment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); U.S. Soil Conservation Service, The Fight Against Erosion, Greatest Enemy of the Soil (Washington, DC: U.S. Soil Conservation Service, 1934); Wilbur R. Mattoon, Stop Gullies-Save Your Farm. United States Department of Agriculture with Contribution from Forest Service (Washington, DC: USDA, 1934); U.S. Resettlement Administration, Helping the Farmer Help Himself (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1936); U.S. Resettlement Administration, Better Land for Better Living (Washington, DC: U.S. Resettlement Administration, 1936); American Association for the Advancement of Science, Conserving Our Natural Resources: A Selected List of Material Useful to Students and Discussion Clubs (Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1937; USDA Soil Conservation Service, Soil Conservation Districts for Erosion Control (Washington, DC: USDA Soil Conservation Service, 1937); Hugh Bennett, "Developing Enlightened Public Opinion in Conservation, 1940" (address before the Assembly on Use of Human and Natural Resources in Education, 78th annual meeting, National Education Association, Milwaukee, WI, July 2, 1940), Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Vertical Files (hereafter VF) NAC 7560; U.S. Soil Conservation Service, Land Use and Soil Conservation Informational Material Available to the Public (Washington, DC: Soil Conservation Service, 1940); U.S. Soil Conservation Service, Publications and Visual Information on Soil Conservation (Washington, DC: USDA, 1941); Effective Operations of the Soil Conservation Districts: A Group of Papers Presented at the Meeting of the Soil Conservation Section, Association of Southern Agricultural Workers, 42nd Annual Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, February 6, 1941 (Washington, DC: USDA Soil Conservation Service, 1941), VF NAC 7560 US. Such efforts were complemented by public relations campaigns from state and local authorities.
16.
W. Robert Parks, Soil Conservation Districts in Action (Ames: Iowa State College Press, 1952); Linda Gordon, "Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist," Journal of American History 93, no. 3 (2006): 698-727; Theresa May, "Earth Matters: Ecology and American Theatre" (PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 2000); Beeman and Pritchard, Green and Permanent Land; Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). These public relations efforts complemented the content of government reports for policy planning such as U.S. Great Plains Committee, The Future of the Great Plains; and Supplementary Report of the Land Planning Committee to the National Resources Board (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1935-1938), which cited the work of ecologists including Adams, Shelford, and Clements. Frederic Clements praised Bennett's work in particular. See Frederic E. Clements, "Climatic Cycles and Human Populations in the Great Plains," Scientific Monthly 47, no. 3 (1938): 193-210.
17.
John D. Guthrie, "The CCC and American Conservation," Scientific Monthly 57, no. 5 (1943): 412. This broad acquaintance with conservation is discussed in Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds., FDR and the Environment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Worster, Dust Bowl; Wayne Rasmussen, "The New Deal Farm Programs: What they Were and Why they Survived," American Journal of Agricultural Economics 65, no. 5 (1983): 1158-62; Pisani, "Many Faces of Conservation"; Phoebe Cutler, The Public Landscape of the New Deal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Cara Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003); Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).
18.
Paul Landis, "The New Deal and Rural Life," American Sociological Review1, no. 4 (1936): 599.
19.
Rasmussen, "New Deal Farm Programs."
20.
Almon Ernest Parkins and Joe Russell Whitaker, eds., Our Natural Resources and Their Conservation (New York: John Wiley , 1936), 18.
21.
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1955); William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper, 1963).
22.
It is important to understand that, as with social scientists' loose borrowings from ecology, these conservation promoters found rhetorical support for their policy proposals rather than an exact model in the natural resources planning field. For a discussion of social scientists' appropriations from ecological thought, see Gaziano, "Ecological Metaphors"; Kuklick, "Chicago Sociology."
23.
Otis Graham, Toward a Planned Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890: A History Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American Institute of Planners (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
24.
This was a general scientific management to be distinguished from the Taylorist approach popular earlier in the twentieth century; as many planners laid out in the early 1930s, it would include a program of demolition and rebuilding for the worst structures and modernization and repair for structures with some useful life remaining. Herbert Swan, "Land Values and City Growth," Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 10, no. 2 (1934): 188-89. Two compilations of ecological studies of many cities include Roderick D. McKenzie, ed., Readings in Human Ecology (Ann Arbor, MI: George Wahr, 1934); and Jesse Steiner, Readings in Human Ecology (Sociology 55 and 155) (Seattle: University of Washington Bookstore, 1939).
25.
Architects Club of Chicago, Rehabilitating Blighted Areas: Report of the Committee on Blighted Area Housing (Chicago: Architects Club of Chicago , 1932), 9.
26.
Ibid., 34.
27.
George Renner, "National Regional Planning in Resource Use," in Almon Ernest Parkins and Joe Russell Whitaker, eds., Our Natural Resources and Their Conservation (New York: John Wiley, 1936), 597. On charges of socialism made against planners see Graham, Toward a Planned Society; Marion Clawson, New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
28.
Harold S. Buttenheim and Associates, Urban Land Policies: Staff Paper for Item 11 of the General Program of the Research Committee on Urbanism of the National Resources Committee. Confidential-Not for Public Release. Preliminary and Incomplete (Unpublished, November 1936; Vol. 2 discusses the history of eminent domain in cities).
29.
Babcock, "Role of Public Discourse."
30.
Harold L. Ickes, "The Place of Housing in National Rehabilitation ," Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics, 11, no. 2 (May 1935): 111.
31.
Ibid., 112.
32.
Here the comparison is between cities and orchards and the need to "prune" both toward effective development. See Joint Committee on Bases of Sound Land Policy, What About the Year 2000?, 137-38.
33.
Planning education reflected these trends, combining social science instruction in human ecology with natural resource planning as students were trained to conceptualize planning for the needs of cities as part of planning at the regional and national levels. "Conservation of Natural Resources" became a bread and butter course across the planning curriculum at numerous schools, as Hugh S. Morrison, Education for Planners (Boston: National Resources Planning Board, Region I, 1942), VF NAC 960 M and American Society of Planning Officials, Planning Education-A Survey of the Curricula in 23 Colleges and Universities, Memorandum, May 1942 (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1942) describe. Notably, regional planning was another field to which human ecologists made important contributions. See J. Paul Goode, The Geographic Background of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926); Fritiof M. Fryxell, The Physiography of the Region of Chicago, Prepared by the University of Chicago Local Community Research Committee, and the Chicago Commonwealth Club, for the Committee on General Surveys of the Chicago Regional Planning Association (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927); Robert Murray Haig, Major Economic Factors in Metropolitan Growth and Arrangement (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1927); Selden Cowles Menefee, Consolidation of Counties in the State of Washington on a Regional Basis; An Ecological Study (Seattle: Washington State Planning Council, Advisory Technical Committee on Public Welfare, 1934); Selden Cowles Menefee, "A Plan for Regional Administrative Districts in the State of Washington: An Ecological Study," University of Washington Publications in the Social Sciences 8, no. 2 (1935): 29-80. Even Ernest Burgess extended his zonal model beyond city limits: At a 1928 meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, for example, he presented a variant on his usual five zone map. This one had seven zones: central business district, area in transition, independent workingmen, better residences, commuters zone of suburban residential communities, agricultural districts, and hinterland. Ernest Burgess, "The New Community and Its Future," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 149, no. 1 (1930): 161-62.
34.
Created in 1933 as the National Planning Board to investigate the possibilities for coordinated national planning and reporting directly to the president for most of its decade-long tenure, the board was charged with making a scientific assessment of U.S. resources and offering recommendations to the president on their wisest use. A study group rather than a unit with the authority to make or implement policy, the organization changed its name several times, originating as the National Planning Board (1933-1934) and continuing as the National Resources Board (1934-1935), National Resources Committee (1935-1939), and National Resources Planning Board (1939-1943). National Resources Planning Board is used here for simplicity's sake. Ickes was chair of the National Resources Committee and Delano was his vice chair as well as chair of the advisory committee to the board.
35.
National Resources Committee, Our Cities; Their Role in the National Economy (Washington, DC: National Resources Committee, 1937), 73; National Resources Committee, Our Cities [brochure version of longer report] (Washington, DC: National Resources Committee, September 1937), 25. Note that Comey, with a degree in landscape architecture from Harvard, had been a student of Olmsted and had worked on park development before turning to city planning. Other National Resources Planning Board affiliates not on the Urbanism Committee, including geographers Charles Colby and George Renner, made similar arguments in their work. As Colby observed at a meeting of the American Planning and Civic Association, "Town and country are so intimately related in modern times that rural and urban planning have much in common." Renner's textual and photographic juxtaposition of ruined landscapes, rural and urban, dramatized how the problems of nature and the problems of cities were urgent matters for the conservation movement to resolve. See Colby in John Black, "The Soil and the Sidewalk," in American Society of Planning Officials, American Planning and Civic Annual (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1939), 79; and George Renner and William Hartley, Conservation and Citizenship (Boston: Heath, 1940).
36.
National Resources Committee, Our Cities; Their Role, vii. Notably, the USDA was beginning to do its own studies of urbanization at this time. O.E. Baler from the USDA participated in the Urbanism Committee discussions.
37.
Ibid., 64.
38.
National Resources Committee, Our Cities [brochure], 1-2.
39.
National Resources Committee, Our Cities; Their Role, xiii.
40.
Cutler, Public Landscape. Building on his experience as New York governor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt joined the conservation of "human resources" with the conservation of natural resources in approving programs including the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Resettlement Administration. Textbooks of the period, such as Renner and Hartley, Conservation and Citizenship, featured human resource planning prominently in their discussions of the conservation movement.
41.
National Resources Committee, Our Cities; Their Role, 73.
42.
National Resources Committee, Our Cities [brochure], 4.
43.
Supplementary Report of the Land Planning Committee to the National Resources Board (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1935-1938).
44.
Richard Ratcliff , Review of Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy, Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics14, no. 2 (1938): 231.
45.
Urbanism Committee of the U.S. National Resources Committee, Supplementary Report of the Urbanism Committee to the US National Resources Committee (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939).
46.
Nels Anderson and Eduard Lindeman, Urban Sociology (New York: Knopf, 1928). Indeed, planners considered real estate speculators to be some of the worst offenders in terms of the pioneer mentality they despised.
47.
Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 13, National Archives and Records Administration.
48.
Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: Columbia University Press); Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors.
49.
J.C. Nichols, "Responsibilities and Opportunities of a Real Estate Board. Proceedings of the General Sessions of the National Association of Real Estate Boards at the Seventeenth Annual Convention, Washington, DC June 3-6 1924" (Chicago: 1924), 21. Also see Richard Ely, "Research in Land and Public Utility Economics," Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 1, no. 1 (1925): 1.
50.
Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors; Jackson, "Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal"; Amy Hillier, "Residential Security Maps and Neighborhood Appraisals: The Home Owners' Loan Corporation and the Case of Philadelphia," Social Science History 29, no. 2 (2005): 207-33; Kuklick, "Chicago Sociology." In fact, it was the same figures from Northwestern University's Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities who created the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) curriculum and influenced federal policies (especially at the Federal Housing Administration [FHA]). See Weiss, "Richard T. Ely."
51.
Herbert Dorau and Albert Hinman recognized as early as the 1920s how "eminent domain, like the police power, is limited only by the opinion of courts. . . . In the final analysis, public purpose is defined by the courts . . . hence, like the police power, it is capable of indefinite expansion as the public, or social, point of view becomes more universal." Herbert Dorau and Albert Hinman, Urban Land Economics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1928), 273.
52.
"NAREB Tackles Problems of Re-Planning Blighted Areas," National Real Estate Journal (April 1935): 44.
53.
Nareb,Neighborhood Protective and Improvement Districts: A Suggested State Statute Authorizing the Creation of Such Districts by Property Owners in Cities, Towns, and Villages (Chicago: NAREB, 1935), 2.
54.
Herbert Nelson , "Rehabilitation of the Blighted District: The Share of the Realtor," in American Society of Planning Officials, Planning for the Future of American Cities (Chicago: ASPO, 1935), 90-94 makes this clear.
55.
Chicago sociology graduate student Everett Hughes's 1931 observation that "the change from white to colored occupancy is said to be as irretrievable as from residence to business" was typical. Everett Hughes, The Chicago Real Estate Board; The Growth of an Institution (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1931), 94.
56.
Babcock, Valuation of Real Estate.
57.
Nelson, "Rehabilitation of the Blighted District," 90-94. Indeed, the proposal's call for 75 percent enrollment and for the collective control of territory by neighborhood property owners extended the use of restrictive covenants already central to NAREB's work. Nathan MacChesney previously had authored infamous article 34 of the NAREB code of ethics, which instructed its members in the use of restrictive covenants so as not to introduce "into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race and nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood." Thomas Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 190. The Code of Ethics is printed in Herbert Nelson, The Administration of Real Estate Boards (New York: MacMillan, 1925). Such earlier measures, widely promoted, had operated with similar provisions for district creation: property owners would divide their neighborhoods "into sections of six to eight blocks with separate covenants for each section; set the agreements to go into effect once 75 percent of the property was signed for, and then drive for total coverage throughout the entire district." Thomas Philpott, The Slum, 191. The real estate community's call to give neighborhood organizations legal status is widely apparent in this period, for example, in Arthur Holden, "Eliminating Block Deprecation by Group Management," Real Estate Record and Builders Guide (March 24, 1934): 6-8; Arthur Holden and others, "Group Action," Land Usage (April-May 1936); Arthur Holden, "Removing the Obstacles to Group Rehabilitation of Real Properties," Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 12, no. 2 (1936): 161-68; Robert B. Mitchell, "Prospects for Neighborhood Rehabilitation," in National Association of Housing Officials, Housing Yearbook (Chicago: National Association of Housing Officials, 1938), 143.
58.
Nareb, The Neighborhood Improvement Act: A Suggested State Statute for the Protection and Improvement of Neighborhoods through Action of Property Owners (Chicago: NAREB, 1937); "The Next Step: Neighborhood Management," Real Estate Record (May 15, 1937 ): 41.
59.
Efforts to encourage individual property owners to maintain housing quality through "repair," "rehabilitation," "modernization," "reclamation," and "reconditioning" date to the earliest years of the FHA and Home Owners Loan Corporation [HOLC]. At the FHA, initiatives included housing improvement loans, a Better Housing Program, and a series of films, brochures, and radio spots directed at homeowners' associations, men's and women's clubs, banks, labor organizations, and other groups to popularize modernization and repair. At HOLC, a mortgage rehabilitation division, a staff of Regional Reconditioning Supervisors, and a Federal Home Building Service Plan that worked on property rehabilitation, as well as encouraging high standards for new construction, worked toward complementary ends. None of these tactics was especially new. As Carolyn Goldstein and Steven Gelber have described, middle-class home improvement has a long history. From the appearance of new hobbyist products and home magazines in the late nineteenth century to the Hoover administration Better Homes campaign and domestic engineering movement of the early twentieth century, the popularity of such measures lay as much in their associations with patriotism, individualism, and productive leisure as in actual changes to living environments. Carolyn Goldstein, Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th-century America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998); Steven Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). The difference between these earlier efforts and their federally sponsored counterparts under the two new housing agencies was the level of systematic investment and analysis involved. At FHA and HOLC, such improvement programs were subjected to intensive study. Early results appeared highly promising, as internal reports and external publicity shared how, in most cases, the value added to a property far outweighed the costs of home repair. See the collected clippings of news reports in Record Group 195, Box 6, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Exhibits, National Archives and Records Administration.
60.
Nareb, "Real Estate Boards Asked to Aid in Federal Real Estate Inventory" (Chicago : NAREB News Service, December 15, 1933), VF NAC 1430.8.
61.
In contrast to city planners, who interacted with colleagues in natural resources planning at a variety of conferences on regional and national planning, encounters between real estate economists working on rural and urban issues were more rare. For this reason, it appears that interactions with planners were the inspiration for the adoption of conservation by members of the real estate profession as a strategy for promoting city improvement. More specifically, as preparations for the experiments in Baltimore and Chicago went on, Miles Colean, Arthur Goodwillie, Jacob Crane, and John Ihlder were recruited by NRPB planners to participate in a study of rural and urban land policies, bringing them into direct contact with the colleagues for whom conservation had become a dominant frame for discussions of comprehensive planning, land assembly, and scientific management for cities. The final document they collaboratively produced offered a range of proposals for expanding the public purpose of eminent domain to cities, framed by a discussion of how in the national enthusiasm for natural resources conservation, Americans now largely had accepted the idea that privately as well as publicly held farms and forests were within the purview of the "public purpose" that defined the legal requirements for usage of eminent domain, yet by contrast with the exception of clearing land for public housing, "public acquisition of urban land is neither as well established nor as well accepted as the acquisition of rural land." U.S. National Resources Planning Board, Public Land Acquisition in a National Land-Use Program (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940), Vol. 2, cover letter to Frederick Delano.
62.
Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), pages, National Archives and Records Administration. This document appears to be a draft of portions of U.S. Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Waverly: A Study in Neighborhood Conservation (Washington, DC: Federal Home Loan Bank Board, 1940).
63.
National Resources Committee, Our Cities; Their Role, 73; Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 10, National Archives and Records Administration.
64.
Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 8-9, National Archives and Records Administration.
65.
Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), National Archives and Records Administration.
66.
Glenn Frank, "The Realtor as the New Pioneer," Annals of Real Estate Practice (Chicago: NAREB, 1928), 3-4. More specifically he charged, "In our rapid urban developments we have too often been exploiters, building houses by the hundreds, reckless of their quality, concerned only with the increase of site values. . . . One is often shocked by a trip through some twenty-year-old American urban development, with its shoddy houses which a few years before were spick and span as, fresh from the mass producer's hand, they were sold to love-blind newlyweds on the installment plan." Ibid., 4. J.C. Nichols, "`Why I Am in the Real Estate Business,' St. Louis, Missouri January 29, 1937," in Planning for Permanence: The Speeches of J.C. Nichols (Kansas City, MO: Western Historical Manuscript Collection) later used the comparison between agricultural and urban development to call for more scientific forms of city management.
67.
Richard Ely, "Research in Land," 4. Also see Dorau and Hinman, Urban Land Economics, 297.
68.
Conservation was a common economic term meaning the preservation of economic value. Economics "might well be called the science of conservation, for the terms economy and conservation, when properly understood, convey one and the same meaning," wrote Herbert Dorau and Albert Hinman in 1928, noting how "zoning laws are usually accepted as valid since they accomplish an object which has been called the `conservation of economic values,' in the sense that land values are stabilized and preserved by a rational, orderly development of a city." Dorau and Hinman, Urban Land Economics, 199.
69.
Clifford J. Hynning, State Conservation of Resources (Washington, DC: National Resources Committee, 1939). Particularly relevant was the work of the Soil Conservation Service, which had organized demonstration programs as a public relations tool to convince states to adopt laws to enable the creation of soil conservation districts. See USDA, Land Policy Committee, A Standard State Soil Conservation Districts Law, Prepared at the Suggestion of Representatives (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1936).
70.
With one of the fundamental tenets of the HOLC's and FHA's approach to real estate appraisal grounded in the belief that area character influenced property valuation, it was increasingly recognized that although DIY-promotion efforts "considerably benefited surrounding properties by increasing the value of the latter and by inspiring neighbors to recondition their homes. . . . Once disintegration and decay have really begun their march in any area, the individual effort of a single property owner, even a very considerable one, cannot alone preserve a district from ultimate destruction." Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 15, National Archives and Records Administration. The soil conservation effort, which called for the establishing of soil conservation districts based on the recognition that land use concerns did not stop at an individual owner's property line, had relevance here as well.
71.
"Waverly: A Demonstration of Neighborhood Conservation; The Most Comprehensive Analysis of a Residential Neighborhood Ever Undertaken Shows That Prevention Can Halt Neighborhood Decay; In the Waverly Area in Baltimore, Where Individuals Have Been Powerless to Check the Spread of Blight, a Coordinated Program Has Been Developed to Accomplish an Effective Cure," Federal Home Loan Bank Review 6 (1940): 330. Note that some of the participants occasionally referred to Waverly and Woodlawn as projects in neighborhood or municipal "housekeeping," a vocabulary choice linking these undertakings to the city beautiful movement as well as to human ecology; like eugenics, so too household management occasionally was referred to as "human ecology." HOLC also used the term stabilization, suggesting how like efforts for agricultural stabilization, so too urban "neighborhood stabilization" would need to be pursued.
72.
Donald H. McNeal , "Waverly: A Study in Neighborhood Conservation ," in American Society of Planning Officials, Proceedings of the National Conference on Planning (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1941), 222.
73.
On the Waverly experiment see Adolf Waterval, The Neighborhood Conservation Program, Waverly Area (Baltimore: Waverly Conservation League, 1940); McNeal, "Waverly: A Study"; U.S. Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Waverly: A Study; Harvey Pinney, "A Blueprint for Urban Conservation: Study of Community of Waverly Suggests Plan for Stopping Social-economic Decay and for Redeeming Existing Sore Spots," National Municipal Review 30 (March 1941): 157-59; "Research on Neighborhood Conservation: Federal Home Loan Bank Board Releases Results of Intensive Study of Waverly District in Baltimore," Real Estate Record Affiliated with Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide (December 28, 1940): 6-8, 12; "Research on Neighborhood Conservation: Federal Home Loan Bank Board Releases Results of Intensive Study of Waverly District in Baltimore," Real Estate Record Affiliated with Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide (January 18, 1941): 7-8; "Waverly: A Demonstration of Neighborhood," 290-93, 330-33, 373-77.
74.
"Waverly: A Demonstration of Neighborhood," 333, 331.
75.
The A to D rating scheme came from HOLC security maps, translating Ernest Burgess's idealized representation of the ecology of cities into a practical guide to specific urban areas. Rated A were "`hot spots' . . . not yet fully built up . . . homogenous" communities. Rated B were "completely developed" areas "like a 1935 automobile-still good, but not what the people are buying today." Rated C were communities that "have reached the transition period," places "lacking homogeneity" or "characterized by age, obsolescence, and change of style; expiring restrictions or lack of them; infiltration of a lower grade population; the presence of influences which increase sale resistance." Rated D were "those neighborhoods in which the things that are now taking place in the C neighborhoods, have already happened." [HOLC] Division of Research and Statistics with Cooperation of the Appraisal Department, Baltimore, Maryland, untitled document, May 29, 1937, Record Group 195, Box 106, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, HOLC, Records Relating to the City Survey File, 1935-1940, Ohio, Maine, Maryland Box, Folder Baltimore, Maryland Area Descriptions and Map 1, no page, National Archives and Records Administration.
76.
Untitled document, Record Group195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 18-19, National Archives and Records Administration.
77.
"Urges Renovation of Old Dwellings: Bank Head Says Thousands of Houses Can Be Modernized for Defense Workers," New York Times, July 6, 1941, RE4; "Research on Neighborhood Conservation: Federal Home Loan Bank Board Releases Results of Intensive Study of Waverly District in Baltimore," Real Estate Record Affiliated with Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide (December 28, 1940): 7. Of Waverly's 1,610 homes, HOLC owned 20 homes and held 122 mortgages.
78.
Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 20, National Archives and Records Administration.
79.
Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 16-17, National Archives and Records Administration.
80.
"Home Sales Spurred by Clean-Up Drive: HOLC Notes Gains in Old Section of Baltimore," New York Times, September 1, 1940; "Memorandum To: General Manager, Assistant General Managers Mr. Blouke, Mr. Charters, Mr. Downie, Mr. Stalling, Mr. Follin, Mr. Ferrens, From: DH McNeal," September 14, 1937, Record Group 195, Box 2, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Charts, Graphs and Maps, National Archives and Records Administration.
81.
"Waverly: A Demonstration of Neighborhood," 330.
82.
The Waverly Conservation League mobilized heads of several existing area groups-the Waverly Improvement Association, Chestnut Hill Improvement Association, and Greenmount Improvement Association.
83.
Paul Healy, "Launch Woodlawn Home Survey: Findings to Aid Entire City in Home Planning, Conservation Major Aim in Study," Chicago Daily Tribune, April 28, 1940, sw1; "WPA to Make Realty Survey in Woodlawn," Chicago Daily Tribune, January 14, 1940; Robert Mitchell, "Neighborhood Conservation in Chicago: Wood-lawn Conservation Project," American City 55 (May 1940): 64-65; Robert Mitchell, "Here's Vital Conservation," Real Estate (April 27, 1940): 19; Robert Mitchell, "Here's Vital Conservation," Real Estate (May 4, 1940): 13, 22-23; Chicago Plan Commission, A Program for Community Conservation in Chicago and an Example "The Woodlawn Plan." Prepared by the Chicago Plan Commission in Collaboration with Woodlawn Planning Committee (Chicago: Chicago Plan Commission, 1946).
84.
Thomas Philpott, The Slum, 147.
85.
Area Description of C-216 from "Security Map of Metropolitan Chicago, Ill.," October 1939, Record Group 195, Box 84, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, HOLC, Records Relating to the City Survey File, 1935-1940, Illinois, Folder Chicago Sec II 2, National Archives and Records Administration.
86.
Area Description of D-78 from "Security Map of Metropolitan Chicago, Ill.," October 1939, Record Group 195, Box 84, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, HOLC, Records Relating to the City Survey File, 1935-1940, Illinois, Folder Chicago Sec II 2, National Archives and Records Administration.
87.
Area Description of D-79 from "Security Map of Metropolitan Chicago, Ill.," October 1939, Record Group 195, Box 84, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, HOLC, Records Relating to the City Survey File, 1935-1940, Illinois, Folder Chicago Sec II 2, National Archives and Records Administration. As Kenneth Jackson and Amy Hillier have described, such racially focused assessments by HOLC appraisers often were at odds with the economic picture of the area. In the case of Woodlawn, as a 1940 study showed, area non-whites were better off than area whites, with higher rates of home ownership and occupancy in nicer units. Jackson, "Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal"; Hillier, "Residential Security Maps"; U.S. Work Projects Administration, Housing in Chicago Communities, Community Area Number 42, Preliminary Release (Chicago: Plan Commission, 1940).
88.
Appendix C: Notes on the Organization and History of Certain Neighborhood Improvement Associations, in Appendices to the Preliminary Report on Conservation of Middle-aged Neighborhoods and Properties. For Internal Use Only, National Housing Agency, Office of the Administrator Urban Development Division, October 16, 1944. 37, VF NAC 1613.
89.
During the 1930s, Chicago was home to the American Society of Planning Officials, National Association of Housing Officials, National Association of Assessing Officers, Institute of Real Estate Management, American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers, American Municipal Association, NAREB, Urban Land Institute, International City Managers' Association, and Society of Residential Appraisers. Many of these organizations shared a single building operated by the Public Administration Clearinghouse next to the University of Chicago, not far from Woodlawn, although NAREB's headquarters were downtown. See Herbert Emmerich, "Cooperation Among Administrative Agencies," American Journal of Economics and Sociology 15, no. 3 (1956): 237-44.
90.
Healy, "Launch Woodlawn Home Survey," sw1; Mitchell, "Neighborhood Conservation in Chicago," 65.
91.
It is important to note, however, that while many portrayals of the university's role in the city's urban redevelopment have emphasized how the institution steeled itself against blighting influences from the surrounding area, in the eyes of HOLC appraisers the University of Chicago was a major cause of area decline. HOLC attributed this to the pressure to convert many homes around Woodlawn into apartment rentals for students. Discussing parcel C-218 in preparing the Chicago security map, one appraiser explained, "The University of Chicago has definitely changed the whole picture of Woodlawn with so many students taking post graduate courses, many of them have to seek employment in the vicinity, and it is changing more and more into a rooming house area." Area Description of C-218 from "Security Map of Metropolitan Chicago, Ill.," October 1939, Record Group 195, Box 84, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, HOLC, Records Relating to the City Survey File, 1935-1940, Illinois, Folder Chicago Sec II 2, National Archives and Records Administration.
92.
Mitchell, "Prospects for Neighborhood Rehabilitation," 141; Mitchell, "Neighborhood Conservation in Chicago," 64-65; Mitchell, "Here's Vital Conservation," Real Estate (April 27, 1940): 19; Mitchell "Here's Vital Conservation," Real Estate (May 4, 1940): 13, 22-23.
93.
Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency; Bates, "Fulfilling American Democracy"; Clements, Hoover, Conservation and Consumerism; Hal Rothman, The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States since 1945 (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1998); Pisani, "Many Faces of Conservation." These historians describe both unstable meanings of the term during a given period and transformations to the meaning of the term over time. As Sarah Phillips has suggested in an account focused on farm policy, "The ideological characteristics that made the New Conservation such a potent political force . . . also reduced its potential for meaningful reform." Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 74.
94.
On these and other interest groups, see Beeman and Pritchard, Green and Permanent Land; Worster, Dust Bowl; and Phillips, This Land, This Nation.
95.
However, while both professions subscribed to ecological perspectives on cities, they were not always in complete agreement as to what constituted natural city growth. Figures in land economics and real estate such as Richard Ely, Frederick Babcock, and Charles Male generally agreed with their academic colleagues in sociology, that cities grew "naturally." As Babcock put it, "In the competition of uses for sites, the highest and best uses tend to win. . . . This competition results in a distribution of uses throughout the city which has been called `natural zoning.'" Babcock, Valuation of Real Estate, 58. By contrast, planners frustrated by the dominance of real estate and other business interests in urban development saw the activities of these communities interfering with cities' natural patterns. "If land were allowed to ripen rationally and were taxed equitably, there would be a steady or orderly accretion to the area of a city," American City editor and American City Bureau president (and NRPB Research Committee on Urbanism participant) Harold Buttenheim explained in 1936. "It would grow, insofar as barriers did not prevent, with few gaps from the center to the rim . . . in successive rings or belts on the periphery of the city and bearing a logical relationship to the city's core." This "natural process," however, had been "upset by wildcat speculation." Harold S. Buttenheim, "Urban Land Policies," in U.S. National Resources Committee, Supplementary Report of the Urbanism Committee, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939), 217.
96.
Nelson, " Rehabilitation of the Blighted District," 90-94; U.S. Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Waverly: A Study; Ruth Berman, "Neighborhood Conservation," Federal Home Loan Bank Review12 (March 1946): 171-75.
97.
In many middle-class neighborhoods, local residents already had some record of participation in nature conservation through garden clubs and other associations. Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Conservation Committee of the Garden Club of America, Conservation Guide (1939).
98.
U.S. FederalHome Loan BankBoard, Waverly: A Study, 58.
99.
"Home Sales Spurred by Clean-Up Drive: HOLC Notes Gains in Old Section of Baltimore," New York Times, September 1, 1940. As Marc Weiss and John Metzger note, even as foreclosures in Maryland were up, Waverly property values rose-and homes on the market sold. Weiss and Metzger, "American Real Estate Industry."
100.
"Factors Are Cited Harmful to Cities; Newton C. Farr Urges Study to Restore Prosperity to Central Areas," New York Times, June 23, 1940, RE8.
101.
"Urges Renovation of Old Dwellings: Bank Head Says Thousands of Houses Can Be Modernized for Defense Workers," New York Times, July 6, 1941, RE4.
102.
"Waverly: A Demonstration of Neighborhood," 330; "Civic Efforts Aid Suburban Center: Plan Aims to Wipe Out Evidences of Decay in Home Area," New York Times, June 23, 1940.
103.
Mitchell, " Neighborhood Conservation in Chicago," 65.
104.
Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 13, National Archives and Records Administration; Research on Neighborhood Conservation, Real Estate Record (December 28, 1940): 6; Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 8-9, National Archives and Records Administration. Despite their difference of opinion about the meaning of conservation, members of the planning and real estate professions shared with figures such as Bennett and Tugwell the belief that solutions to land use problems would have to be long term.
105.
McNeal, "Waverly: A Study," 217.
106.
Ibid., 217. It is important to understand that these results did not suggest that cities' life cycles would forever be subject to human control. With the HOLC acknowledging that "integration and disintegration is a never ending cycle that is common alike to inanimate and to animate matter," conservation's chief spokesperson made clear there were limits to what intervention might achieve. Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 8-9, National Archives and Records Administration. "I do not mean to argue that all residential areas can be made safe forever," Donald McNeal cautioned, "or that we can entirely eliminate slum tendencies." McNeal, "Waverly: A Study," 221. McNeal's comments identified a major distinction separating ecologically inspired conservation in rural versus urban settings: the anticipated timing and the longevity of the optimal system stage. While plant and animal ecologists were confident in the existence of progressive movement toward a near-permanent equilibrium state in natural environments and the possibility of its maintenance through scientific management, cities' highest states came earlier in their cycles and were unlikely to endure. Following from Nels Anderson's observation that "since the slum is a natural resultant of the forces of rapid city growth it will continue despite the mitigating effects of housing reform, zoning laws, and social welfare agencies," conservation enthusiasts came to recognize such forces could not entirely be stopped. Anderson cited in Ernest Burgess, "Urban Areas in Chicago," in T. V. Smith and L. D. White, Chicago: An Experiment in Social Science Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 130. In urban contexts, then, preserving investments for the longer term, rather than attaining stable equilibrium, defined the goal at hand. On how the ecological notion of equilibrium served as a model for natural resources development, see Masutti, "Frederic Clements."
107.
This is also referred to as the Neighborhood Conservation Program in National Resources Planning Board, Federal Aids to Local Planning (Washington, DC: National Resources Planning Board, June 1940), 94.
108.
Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 17, National Archives and Records Administration.
109.
Untitled document, Record Group 195, Box 13, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Federal Home Building Service Plan, Program Subject Files, 1936-1942, Folder Pamphlets and Literature on Housing (Folder 1), 16, National Archives and Records Administration.
110.
This report also noted related legislation introduced, but not passed, in New York: the Urban Redevelopment Corporations Act.
111.
McNeal, "Waverly: A Study," 218.
112.
This was " `State Laws for Better Land Use,' dealing not only with zoning, soil conservation districts, etc. but with more effective tax delinquency foreclosure, reorganization of rural local government, etc." Charles Ascher, "Proposed Program for Urban Conservation and Development, 1942-1943. Confidential. Executive Office of the President, National Resources Planning Board" (Washington, DC: National Resources Planning Board, n.d.), VF NAC 110 As, 1, 5, 6.
113.
Charles Abrams , The City is the Frontier ( New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 242.
114.
Henderson and Woolner, FDR and the Environment; Rothman, Greening of a Nation?; Phillips, This Land, This Nation; Hugh Hammond Bennett, Soils and Security. United States Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1941), 25; Roy Hockensmith and J. G. Steele, Classifying Land for Conservation Farming: Farmers' Bulletin. United States Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC: USDA, 1943), 1, back cover; H. P. Rusk, "The Soil Conservation District as a Democratic Institution for Conservation of Agricultural Resources," American Planning and Civic Annual (1944).
115.
Arthur Goodwillie, Neighborhood Conservation in War-time and Peace-time (Washington, DC: HOLC 1942); Arthur Goodwillie, The Rehabilitation of Southwest Washington as a War Housing Measure (Washington, DC: Conservation Service, Home Loan Corporation, January 2, 1942); Arthur Goodwillie, "Rehabilitation of Blighted Areas as a War Housing Measure," American City 57, no. 3 (1942): 37-38. Urban historians have documented the broader story of how wartime needs shaped the history of U.S. cities as mayors, planners, developers, and other figures sought to benefit from investments in defense spending-often by redefining longstanding aims as national security needs. See Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
116.
These ideas are detailed in Hoyt's Master Plan of Residential Land Use of Chicago, a plan for the postwar period to 1945, which identified conservation areas across the city. See Chicago Plan Commission, Master Plan of Residential Land Use of Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Plan Commission, 1943).
117.
Churches were among the new supporters of conservation. See, for example, National Conference of Catholic Charities, The Pastor and the Conservation of his Parish, A Report of a Workshop Held in Connection with the 37th National Conference of Catholic Charities, Detroit, Michigan, September 4, 1951 (Washington, DC: National Conference of Catholic Charities, 1952), VF NAC 1676 N.
118.
Scholars have described how the American conservation movement reached its height in the New Deal before being replaced by "environmentalism" in the postwar period. The criticisms that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s and the shift to environmentalism are discussed in Worster, Dust Bowl; and Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 28 (1952): entire issue on The Future of Our Natural Resources; Rothman, Greening of a Nation?; Pisani, "Many Faces of Conservation." Wirth's continued advocacy signals the fact that, while the human ecology movement is generally characterized as spanning the 1920s and 1930s, declining with criticisms in the late 1930s, in fact it persisted into the 1940s and 1950s. The classic critique is Milla Alihan, Social Ecology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938). Subsequent ecological studies include Robert O'Brien, "Beale Street, a Study in Ecological Succession," Sociology and Social Research 26, no. 5 (1942): 430-36; and Rose Hum Lee, "Occupational Invasion, Succession, and Accommodation of the Chinese of Butte, Montana," American Journal of Sociology 55, no. 1 (1949): 50-58.
119.
Others using the rhetoric of natural resources in urban discussion include NAREB, Recommendations on Rehabilitation by the Committee on Rehabilitation (Washington, DC: NAREB, 1952), VF NAC 1613 NAREB; Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council, Conservation: A Report to the Conservation Committee of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council, vol. 3 (Chicago: Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council, 1953); Jack M. Siegel and C. William Brooks, Slum Prevention through Conservation and Rehabilitation (Washington, DC: Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs, Subcommittee on Urban Redevelopment, Rehabilitation and Conservation, 1953). These influences are also present at institutions such as Resources for the Future, where Harvey Perloff directed the program on urban and regional research.
120.
States passed enabling legislation to facilitate the Housing Act's implementation.
121.
Notably, Colean's was not the first use of "renewal" to characterize urban lands; Homer Hoyt, borrowing this term from natural resources planners, had employed it in his earlier work, for example, "a city that will be constantly renewing itself, weeding out the unfit and obsolete structures." Chicago Plan Commission, Master Plan, 67. Also see Homer Hoyt, "Urban Decentralization," Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics, 16, no. 3 (1940): 270, 274.
122.
Peter H. Rossi and Robert A. Dentler, The Politics of Urban Renewal: The Chicago Findings (New York: Free Press, 1961), 54. The authors explicitly characterize this study as focused on the city's conservation effort.
123.
Sarah Phillips has suggested how, as the implementation of programs went on, scientific managers' vision was eclipsed by that of the farm lobby and other business interests such that large landowners benefited rather than share croppers or tenants. "The end result would be a form of government intervention that ultimately served to increase the value of private property without requiring much else." Yet, as she notes, "The fallout from these compromises would not be immediately apparent," suggesting why for urban conservation promoters the concept likely held continued appeal. As a result, many of the scientific planners including Bennet and Tugwell, together with ecologists such as Paul Sears and Aldo Leopold, became involved with Friends of the Land as an alternative means of promoting their ecological agenda. Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 82; Beeman and Pritchard, Green and Permanent Land.
124.
David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); R. Bruce Stephenson, Visions of Eden: Environmentalism, Urban Planning, and City Building in St. Petersburg, Florida, 1900-1995 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997); Virginia Jenkins, The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1994); David Danborn, "Romantic Agrarianism in Twentieth-Century America," Agricultural History 65, no. 4 (1991); Blaine Brownell, "The Agrarian and Urban Ideals: Environmental Images in Modern America," Journal of Popular Culture 5, no. 3 (1971): 576-87; Dominick Cavall, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); Leuchtenburg, Franklin D Roosevelt; Martin V. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage, 2004); Kermit C. Parsons and David Schuyler, eds., From Garden City to Green City: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); David Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Rickey L. Hendricks, "The Conservation Movement: A Critique of Historical Sources," History Teacher 16, no. 1 (1982): 77-104.
