Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South by Andrew C. Baker (review)

In Bulldozer Revolutions Andrew C. Baker provides a counternarrative to the old tale of urban imperialism whereby hinterlands and suburbia are rendered faceless. He follows suburbanites in the post-World War II period in order to complicate narratives of suburban environmentalism and to highlight the role suburbanites play in the making of suburbia.

In chapter 1 (“Clearing the Backwoods”) Baker examines the role of rural places in transforming the metropolitan fringe. In Montgomery County, Texas, near Houston, he highlights a mix of state, urban, and local elites and landowners who “reconfigure[d] and redefine[d] rural land use” (15). They took a rural landscape with a long tradition of agriculture, timber, hunting, and free access, and they closed it. In its place emerged a landscape purposefully designed to meet suburbanites’ expectations of the rural and developers’ desires for profit.

In chapter 2 (“Cultivating the Fringe”) Baker describes the romantic narrative of how dairy production prevailed in Loudoun County, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., until encroaching development represented a tragedy for farming. In Montgomery County, Texas, changes in markets, technology, and production mixed with developers’ and landowners’ profit motives to craft an image of the county as a cowboy’s paradise to offset the decline in cotton agriculture.

In chapter 3 (“Damming the Hinterlands”) Baker takes apart the prevailing view of hinterlands as in need of both the metropolis and improvement. He provides case studies of reservoir developments in Loudon (unsuccessful) and Montgomery (successful) to demonstrate how “metropolitan fragmentation dampened the power of cities and their allies to impose on their hinterlands” (81). Baker shows how hinterland locals integrated with metropolises on their own terms by engaging with growth interests.

In chapters 4 (“Settling the Forest”) and 5 (“Enshrining the Countryside”) Baker discusses how residents mobilized to protect the environment. People in Montgomery County, Texas, sought to protect their suburban homes from trash, floods, and sewage while building new local political structures that granted these otherwise anti-statists with relatively powerful, regulatory local governments. In Loudoun County, Virginia, as in Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga’s analysis of Southern California, Protecting Suburban America: Gentrification, Advocacy and the Historic Imaginary (Bloomsbury, 2016), suburban newcomers and others used historic preservation as a vehicle for controlling and mitigating growth and development in their backyards.

Baker corrects “historians’ stories [that] generally leave off just as suburbanites move in” (114), revealing how suburbanites helped craft their own landscapes. He thus joins the more recent wave of suburban history with an intense focus on suburban agency. Indeed, in Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), John Archer and others argued that suburban history needs a more robust focus on the continual reproduction and reassembling of suburbia as an artifact and aspect of people’s lives, emphasizing that suburbs need suburbanites with their own agendas in order to exist. The list of scholarship that includes suburban agency is growing large and includes relatively recent works by Laura Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscapes, Urban Development, and White Privilege (University of Georgia Press, 2011); Matthew Gordon Lasner, High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2012); and Willow S. Lung-Amam, Trespassers?: Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia (University of California Press, 2017).

Baker’s inclusion of Montgomery County will surely excite readers of this journal. He shines a light on Texas suburban development, lifting Texas out of a long tradition of parochial historiography and placing it squarely within broader regional and national narratives. As a suburban historian living and working in East Texas myself, I am champing at the bit to assign this book in my classes.