John:
The pursuit of freedom from want was something that the nation embarked on following the death of FDR in 1945. This nation was hardly damaged by the war, and cash was flowing, and people could afford homes and cars, which gave them options like moving out of the crowded city.
Speaker 2:
Five years ago, this was a vast checkerboard of potato farms on New York's Long Island. Today, a community of 60,000 persons living in 15,000 homes, this is Levittown.
John:
The famous Levittown suburb was one of thousands of developments that drastically changed America's urban and suburban landscape in the postwar years. An earth-moving mission, carried out by a machine, that we now see as intrinsically American. The bulldozer, a symbol of America on the move. Literally billions of tons of North America moved to make way for a new way to live, houses and yards in neatly organized developments. A new book is all about this, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape. The author is Francesca Russello Ammon, who is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Francesca Russello Ammon :
We think about the postwar period I think as this moment of great construction and growth. Think of the suburbs, the interstate highways, the remaking of cities through urban renewal, but the bulldozer really allows us to see that this growth was underpinned by destruction. The bulldozer cleared away whatever was there before to create these big blank slates for new construction. We couldn't have those dramatic suburbs like Levittown, or the new central business districts and other new building in cities from the postwar period, and certainly not the interstate highways, without these machines that could move dirt and displace buildings and people in the process.
John:
You have this notion that the violence of World War II somehow produced the radicalism of the physical changes that took place in the American landscape. Number one, why do you think that's the case, and how can you draw a line from the yellow bulldozers of peacetime back to the tanks of essentially World War II?
Francesca Russello Ammon :
Well, the bulldozer precedes the war for sure, and it was used in smaller scale ways for construction. But World War II really gave the machine, and not just the bulldozer, other construction equipment as well, a platform to really show what it could do, and spurred manufacturers to innovate to make the machines stronger, faster, bigger, and it showcased those capabilities on an international stage. As the machine was used to clean up the rubble of cities in Europe, or to build bases and landing fields in the Pacific, I think it demonstrated possibility that we could remake cities. We could destroy in large ways and clean, this process of cleaning with the bulldozer, and that this could be a possibility for remaking our own landscapes back home after the war.
John:
Did the bulldozer turn the American landscape into something we viewed as either disposable or completely under our control rather than a natural phenomenon that we should be caretakers of?
Francesca Russello Ammon :
I think there's always been this cultural tradition of destruction, clearing away, and clearance as progress thinking about the westward expansion of the United States. But the bulldozer brought this idea to every geography in the country in the postwar period, and so it wasn't just establishing the frontier, it was coming back in and remaking what we had already built. The bulldozer, combined with federal funding quite importantly, made that possible.
John:
When we think of the developers, the controversial developers of the American urban landscape, Robert Moses, et cetera, did the bulldozer figure into the sense of those urban planners imagining that they could just move people around like pieces on a board?
Francesca Russello Ammon :
Absolutely, and it was minority communities who were the primary victims. About 60% of the people displaced by urban renewal and highways in the postwar period where minority groups. When Jane Jacobs wrote in protest against Moses' way of building, she referred to his bulldozer approach to building.
John:
Who coined the euphemism "urban renewal"?
Francesca Russello Ammon :
Well, urban renewal was officially part of the title of the Housing Act of 1954. But it was the Housing Act of 1949 which referred to urban redevelopment, where the bulldozer was really most important. That act said that the federal government would fund two thirds of the cost of remaking cities provided that you began with this act of clearance, of slum clearance. Then we talk about urban renewal, which officially means that you could do rehabilitation as well as clearance, but colloquially when people say urban renewal, they're referring to that redevelopment, to the clearance approach, Robert Moses and others like him.
John:
It got a bad name. I mean it essentially became a euphemism for the destruction of urban neighborhoods, some of which had been around for generations.
Francesca Russello Ammon :
Absolutely. People started to refer to it as "Negro removal" under another name.
John:
When we think about the bulldozer today, the Army Corps has had to use its bulldozers to fix a lot of the problems that it created. Are bulldozers just as good at fixing as they are in maybe creating some of the predicaments that we see in urban America and in the natural landscape?
Francesca Russello Ammon :
That's really one of the ironies. That some of the destruction that gets caused by overuse of the bulldozer then requires the machine to come back to clean up its mess, so it's kind of a self perpetuating implement. But I don't at all mean to suggest that it's inherently an evil machine or anything like that. There are just ways in which it has been deployed in some instances that have had very damaging consequences.
John:
What would you say is the worst scar on the American landscape that the post World War II period created that we can see today if we want to?
Francesca Russello Ammon :
Well, part of the issue is that we can't see some of the scars, and that's why it's been important to me to look at the bulldozer and excavate this machine that's been covered over. I do think it's the displacement of people, in some cases for new building and in some cases the new development never came. As I said, we can't see that in the landscape, and that's part of the power of the bulldozer, its ability to erase as it destroys.
John:
The bulldozer is one of these things that's, it's recognizable anywhere in the world. It's a sign of either bad news or good news coming. Why do you think the bulldozer has become a very successful American export?
Francesca Russello Ammon :
A kind of unexpected side to this story from when I started the project was the way in which this machine and other construction implements have really been taught to Americans from the earliest days, and thinking about the children's books about these machines. They first started appearing during this exact period in the postwar era, all pretty much celebrating the possibilities of this machine. You can think of books with titles like Buster Bulldozer and Benny the Bulldozer, that children should embrace and think about how they could be deployed, were the messages coming out of these books.
John:
Have you ever driven a bulldozer?
Francesca Russello Ammon :
I haven't. I could go to a theme park that's not so far outside of Philadelphia where I live, Diggerland, and try my hand at this sort of thing, but I haven't done that yet.
John:
Diggerland. Boy, only in America. Right?
Francesca Russello Ammon :
Actually, it started in England, but it came to the United States not so many years ago.
John:
No kidding.
Francesca Russello Ammon :
Yeah. We're not the only country that does this.
John:
Francesca Russello Ammon is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape. Thanks so much.
Francesca Russello Ammon :
Thank you John.
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