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expansion of municipal government responsibility for all street trees. Chapter 4 examines the processes, conflicts, and contradictions attending the development of street tree planting and preservation in Chicago during the Progressive Era. Together, chapters 2, 3, and 4 expand our understanding of the process whereby improvements were used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to “sort out suburbanites” before the development of large-scale tract housing after 1920.42 Moreover, as the following history demonstrates, comprehension of this process is incomplete without an appreciation of the changing symbolic, moral meaning that middle-class people attached to improvements such as street trees.
Tree planting represented one of the most transparent NIA expressions of social mutuality and civic engagement, though it also exposed the tensions between the local and citywide reform aspirations of improvement advocates. Moreover, in the minds of grassroots improvers, this relatively altruistic objective complemented conservative aims such as keeping “undesirable characters and places out of our ward.”43 The presence of such incongruous objectives within individual NIA agendas provides further confirmation of what historian Richard Hofstadter described as the “coexistence of illiberalism and reform” in American life, particularly in relation to the traditions of popular reform movements.44 Around 1910, the fine balance between reform and illiberalism underpinning grassroots improvement in Chicago was upset by various structural and social changes. Chapters 5 and 6 explain how these changes fostered illiberalism among NIAs and grassroots improvers, focusing on the increasing professionalism of reform leaders, the conflict between ascendant professional real estate businessmen and independent real estate operators, the “Great Migration” of African Americans to Chicago, and the economic strictures imposed by World War I.
Despite the sense of social mutuality and spirit of civic engagement underpinning NIAs, most associations were founded upon a tradition of privatism that meant they were reluctant participants in wider reform. After 1910, increasingly professional reform leaders such as Charles Mulford Robinson, who became the first specialist town planner in the