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United States, redoubled their efforts to stymie the localism of NIAs by persuading them to affiliate with and defer to citywide, state, and national associations such as the National League of Improvement Associations. The resistance to integration and the alienation it produced among NIAs was particularly evident after the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) coopted numerous associations whose improvement agendas emphasized local prohibition. For example, when one prohibitionist NIA amalgamated with the Illinois ASL in 1907, its most prominent volunteer, Arthur Burrage Farwell, joined the growing ranks of salaried, professional reform leaders, and local imperatives were gradually neglected in favor of state and national priorities. As Farwell diverted local resources into citywide, state, and national reform campaigns, NIA members principally concerned with the moral geography of their improved residential landscapes abandoned the association. The dissatisfaction of members was attributable to leaders such as Farwell eschewing the moral emphasis of early progressivism in favor of a scientism that neglected the enduring moral sensibilities of grassroots improvers. Moreover, disaffection among association directors, many of whom were real estate businessmen, provided confirmation that the amalgamation had undermined the converged business and reform interests central to grassroots improvement.
The ascendancy of professional reform leaders coincided with an increasingly systematic effort by real estate businessmen to formalize their relations with NIAs and incorporate them into the conservative policies and practices promoting homogeneous, separated, and regulated land uses. Professionalism was a shared, central value of progressivism, though as historian Thomas McCraw observed, it “could as easily inhibit reform as promote it.”45 Indeed, professional real estate businessmen repudiated the theory of social ethics, conceiving the city in traditional, anti-urban terms as a place divided by competing, irreconcilable groups and land uses. In developing a system to effect land use regulation in practice, real estate businessmen targeted NIAs alienated by the new direction of professional reform leaders to become guardians of commodified, improved residential areas. In Chicago, the parochialism fostered by the