|
|
a nascent concern over the ascendant cultural and political influence of the immigrant and working-class Americans moving into towns and villages.
The practices associated with village improvement helped establish the foundation for what historian Ira Katznelson described as the understated ideological convergence between business and reform during the Progressive Era.37 Indeed, as early as 1880, Harper's magazine editor Henry Mills Alden observed that the profit and social benefits of village improvement were “different faces of the same fact.”38 Other observers soon noted the connection and praised VISs for simultaneously raising local property values while promoting public sanitation, town aesthetics, and civic spirit. This connection underscored the exploitation of the ideology by an emerging group of professional real estate businessmen, who manipulated it to underwrite a new commodified culture and economy of improved residential landscapes.
After 1880, a growing number of Chicago businessmen eschewed real estate speculation in favor of actively directing urban growth and settlement patterns using a strategy that relied on installing a range of amenities prior to the sale of residential land. As members of the middle class, early real estate businessmen such as Frank Bennett possessed a personal commitment to the improvement ideology. Chapter 2 analyses the nexus between the residential real estate industry and grassroots improvement and explains how real estate businessmen's familiarity with the ideology helped ensure the success of their new sales strategy.
Appealing to middle-class customers, real estate businessmen increasingly advertised their new, commodified residential landscapes using the reformist discourse of improvement. For example, drawing on the environmentalist principle of improvement, one real estate businessman informed potential purchasers in 1912 that children “reared among environments of beauty and culture are surely guided toward the higher ideals and better things in life.”39 Real estate businessmen were among the most active and influential grassroots improvers, often working in conjunction with NIAs in locations throughout Chicago and into the city's emerging suburbs. To be sure, the improved residential neighborhoods created and