Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape by Francesca Russello Ammon (review)

Located twenty miles outside Philadelphia in West Berlin, New Jersey, Diggerland USA offers a variety of ways for thrill seekers to operate heavy machinery, including earthmoving equipment. The destination's website promotes it as "the only construction themed adventure park in North America where children and families can drive, ride, and operate actual machinery."¹ Modeled after progenitors in the United Kingdom, where four such parks operate, perhaps no place demonstrates better the degree to which machine-driven destruction fascinates both young and old. In Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape, Francesca Russello Ammon investigates the rise one of the most essential tools for this task. In her comprehensive review of archival material, visual media, and cultural products, she demonstrates how nearly fifty years after the close of the nation's postwar building boom—when cities and suburbs coast-to-coast were fundamentally transformed by bulldozers and other powerful equipment—destruction and construction continue to stimulate the imagination of urban progress.

The book opens with an account taken from a similarly titled young-adult novel published in 1951. In Stephen W. Meader's Bulldozer, two young men stumble upon a Caterpillar D2 tractor and resuscitate it with skills that they acquired during the war in the Army Corps of Engineers.² Having succeeded, one of them goes on a series of adventures in bulldozing that catalyze his transition from boy to young man. The coming-of-age tale lays the groundwork for Ammon's investigation of how the bulldozer helped effect an equally remarkable transformation of the U.S. metropolis over the course of the twentieth century. In the chapters that follow she explores the history of the machine itself and also the culture that it engendered, which, she argues, reinforced the destructive practices that altered the American landscape, with profound impacts on both people and place. Throughout, Ammon returns to popular representations—in both literature and visual imagery—to demonstrate the influence of the bulldozer on the collective consciousness of progress. The machine, both as a symbol and in practice, she believes, affirmed a mindset that championed clearance and destruction as necessary processes for social and economic advancement.

The book is divided into three parts. In part 1, "Bulldozers at War," Ammon begins with the adolescence of the bulldozer, whose antecedents date to 1920s-era farm tractors, as its abilities to clear and level foreign terrain were honed during World War II. Rich depictions of the men, machines, and wartime economy demonstrate not only earthmoving potential, but also the possibilities for construction and development applications through manipulation of the physical environment. In part 2, "Bulldozers at Work," these functions pave the way—quite literally—for both rapid suburbanization and grand efforts to remake city centers through redevelopment. Through a technical transfer of knowledge from the battlefield to domestic grounds, cities and suburbs replace foreign landscapes as the sites for clearance and demolition. Evidence presented here establishes that the process and outcome of remaking these metropolitan environments influenced the larger sociopolitical culture of the postwar period and beyond, making projects at the unprecedented scale of Anaheim Hills in Orange County or a national system of interconnected highways seem feasible. Ammon uses part 3, "Bulldozers of the Mind," to dissect the cultural response to all the demolition and construction wrought with the help of the bulldozer.

Throughout the book, Ammon pays special attention to the questions of who benefited from demolition and clearance, and who was excluded. In a particularly engrossing chapter, "A Dirt Moving War," Ammon focuses on the engineers and construction workers who made up the U.S. Navy Construction Battalion (or Seabees) during World War II, a unit celebrated in popular publications such as Life magazine, who were at the forefront of the war clearance and construction effort. This unit alone "cleared land and built structures for more than 400 bases...