| Chapter 1: | An American Ideology of Improvement |
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vision of City Beautiful, declared Wilson, was drawn from an array of sources, including “municipal improvement,” an idea whose origins he traced to the antebellum “village improvement movement.” Merged with the park and boulevard planning movement, the principles of village improvement produced a “new notion of civic beauty” around 1900 and increased circulation of a “descriptive yet marvelously elastic word”; “improvement,” Wilson explained circuitously
Wilson's understanding of the rural origins of “municipal improvement” was informed by the work of social historian David Handlin, whose 1979 The American Home provided a substantial outline of VISs and their town beautification projects.20 Without undertaking a systematic analysis of the ideology, Handlin noted the improvement work of VISs was a response to the deleterious impact of Gilded Age industrial and economic expansion on the landscapes of rural towns and the perceived decline of community accompanying this social change. Concerned townsfolk, wrote Handlin, tried to deal with change through a “wide variety of economic, social, religious, charitable, educational, and governmental reforms,” though they were particularly anxious to “upgrade their physical surroundings.” Noting the ideological basis of VIS activity, Handlin asserted townsfolk who “wanted to improve their town's appearance thought that beauty had a strong moral and social value.”21
Handlin's 1979 assessment of VIS motivation echoed the analysis of urban progressivism presented a year earlier in historian Paul Boyer's Urban Masses and Moral Order in America. A distinctive feature of progressive reformers, wrote Boyer, was their conviction that the morality of cities would be most decisively influenced through a restructuring of the urban environment. This view, according to Boyer, constituted the