| Chapter 1: | An American Ideology of Improvement |
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“central environmentalist assumption” of progressivism.22 Like Peterson and Wilson, Boyer located the early twentieth-century quest to enhance urban landscapes within the City Beautiful movement. Boyer asserted that the heart of this movement
This conviction was an expression of a distinctly middle-class, native-born, Protestant belief in social environmentalism, but more important, claimed Boyer, it was one part of the broader “cycle of urban moral-control.”24
Common to the accounts provided by Peterson, Wilson, Handlin, and Boyer is an overriding attention to the national dimensions of improvement.25 A national perspective does reflect the influential ideas and experience of reform leaders, many of whom sought to unite various improvement associations into citywide, state, and national federations, yet it understates the vitality and influence of diverse local manifestations of the ideology. The idea of improvement appealed to a variety of middle-class residents living in increasingly discrete urban and suburban residential neighborhoods, where they adapted it to local conditions by emphasizing certain dimensions while downplaying others.
The two keenest insights into the improvement ideology were produced by studies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban neighborhood formation. Improvement, declared historian Arthur Evans Le Gacy in 1967, was one of two main themes characterizing the history of Oak Park, Illinois, between 1833 and 1940. Analyzing the physical transformation of Oak Park, Le Gacy argued that the locally coordinated installation of sewers, sidewalk and street paving and the acquisition of community services such as police and fire protection were motivated by “not only physical, but spiritual, moral[,] and cultural” concerns.26 Examining an extensive range of local issues, Le Gacy found the “idea