Bulldozing the Postwar Metropolis

In our mental constructions of the postwar American landscape, no two objects loom larger than the highway and the suburban tract home. Each is simultaneously the symbol of prosperity, modernity, and success, as well as destruction and conformity. Celebrated as the great wonders of America’s postwar boom in the 1950s, by the 1970s cultural critics and local residents alike vilified them for the destruction they wrought upon both existing communities and the environment. But what is interesting about these critiques, which continue up until the present day among both environmentalists and urbanists and have been chronicled in countless histories, is that they ignore the device that actually committed the physical destruction. Suburban tract homes suck up energy and contribute to our distended, fossil-fuel–dependent metropolises, but they did not actually destroy meadows and hillsides. Highways are conduits for greenhouse gas and stormwater runoff, but limited-access roadways did not tear through urban neighborhoods. Humans did that work with machines, usually bulldozers. Francesca Russello Ammon’s excellent new book, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape, tells the story of how that relatively simple piece of machinery was the engine of the reconstruction of the U.S. landscape in the decades after World War Two.

Ammon’s argument is that the bulldozer became both agent and symbol of a larger “culture of clearance” that infected and fundamentally reshaped rural, and particularly metropolitan, landscapes in the three decades after World War Two. Although the book ostensibly focuses on the postwar period, the story is actually rooted in the war itself. Whereas other histories of urban renewal and suburbanization see the war as an interruption to policies and ideas developed during the 1920s and 1930s, Ammon argues that World War Two was a “critical catalyst that would direct the future shape of the landscape” (p. 12). The book begins in the Pacific Islands with a chapter on the U.S. Navy Construction Battalions, or “Seabees,” that were an integral part of the island-hopping campaign to defeat the Japanese empire. Once each island was conquered, the Seabees would quickly build encampments, loading docks, hospitals, and runways for the launching of further assaults. Central to these efforts was the bulldozer, a crawling (tank-treaded) tractor that pushed a large, retractable metal blade. Developed over the course of the 1910s and 1920s by American and French companies, most famously Caterpillar, the bulldozer was the preferred tool for clearing out forests, villages, and enemy encampments, as well as grading out thousand-foot–long runways for fighters and bombers. Over 325,000 sailors strong by the end of the war, the Seabees did not serve in the background, but were an important symbol of the war effort in the Pacific, celebrated in Coca-Cola advertisements and in a John Wayne movie, The Fighting Seabees. At the center of these promotions and depictions was the tanned, shirtless, white male sailor, earnestly driving a bulldozer.

In this and the second chapter, which focuses on how equipment manufacturers like Caterpillar depicted and prepared for postwar prosperity, Ammon argues that the war was a rehearsal for the postwar culture of clearance. Seabees and tens of thousands of other soldiers and combat engineers learned both the basics of yielding a bulldozer and the specific skills of demolition and grading the landscape, and corporations claimed that wartime technology would have peacetime uses. One advertisement for a hydraulic company argued that, once the “world struggle” was over, “the earth was in for a tremendous resurfacing operation” (p. 84).

Both the technology and the metaphors of combat transferred quickly to the postwar world, as the bulldozer became arguably the most important piece of equipment in remaking the American metropolis. In this second section, which is the core of the book, Ammon details the use and impact of bulldozers building mass suburbia, clearing out cities through urban renewal projects, and tying the two together with interstate highways. The chapter on suburbanization focuses on Southern California and the...