| Chapter 1: | An American Ideology of Improvement |
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of improvement permeated Oak Park society,” and was understood as a “personal, Christian way of thinking about life.” The “improvers,” added Le Gacy
Adopting a similar perspective on neighborhood formation, historian Alexander von Hoffman offered a more astute analysis of how grassroots improvement informed the course of local development in Jamaica Plain, Boston, between 1850 and 1920. In the context of Boston municipal politics, the “powerful idea” of “improvement,” declared von Hoffman, was usually “a banner under which all interested Jamaica Plainers could march,” and was principally a “neighborhood booster ethos open to all who were interested in growth, respectability, and increased real estate values.”28 In the most original and incisive contribution to the history of improvement, von Hoffman outlined the nonpartisan dimension of the ideology, demonstrating how it helped galvanize neighborhood residents to overturn the traditional philosophy of municipal government in the late nineteenth century.29 Indeed, the ideological strength of improvement and its appeal to middle-class inhabitants of rural towns and emerging urban residential neighborhoods was based on a collection of adaptable principles, such as nonpartisanship and cleanliness.
More recently, landscape historian Bonj Szczygiel identified “civic improvement” as a product of the women's club phenomenon in the context of a City Beautiful movement rigidly divided along gender lines. According to Szczygiel, “[M]en and women acted, for the most part, separately and differently” as contributors to City Beautiful and civic improvement.30 Szczygiel's narrow definition posited women's civic improvement as a derivative of female-dominated village improvement, characterized by efforts to raise money for local tree planting, fountain construction, street cleaning, and other projects that were of “direct tangible benefit