Culture and Politics in a New York Metropolitan Community

Suburban Landscapes Creating the North American Landscape

Gregory Conniff Edward K. Muller David Schuyler Consulting Editors

George F. Thompson Series Founder and Director

Published in Cooperation with the Center for American Places, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Harrisonburg, Virginia Suburban Landscapes Culture and Politics in a New York Metropolitan Community

Paul H. Mattingly

The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore & London This book was brought to publication with the assistance of a Research/Publication grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission, a division of Cultural Affairs in the Department of State.

The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mattingly, Paul H. Suburban landscapes : culture and politics in a New York metropolitan community / Paul H. Mattingly. p. cm. — (Creating the North American landscape) ‘‘Published in Cooperation with the Center for American Places.’’ Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8018-6680-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Suburbs—New Jersey—Leonia—History. 2. City planning—New Jersey—Leonia—History. 3. Landscape changes—New Jersey—Leonia—History. 4. Leonia (N.J.)—History. 5. Leonia (N.J.)—Politics and government. 6. Leonia (N.J.)—Social life and customs. I. Center for American Places. II. Title. III. Series. HT352.U62 N55 2001 307.76%09749%21—dc21 2001000676

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. To Jane,

For All the Reasons

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1 chapter 1 Dutchness and the English Neighborhood 14 chapter 2 The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894 32 chapter 3 Village Landscapes 57 chapter 4 The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 79 chapter 5 Country Landscapes, Bohemian City 113 chapter 6 The Middle-Class Zone 138 chapter 7 The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals 161 chapter 8 The Ideology of the Civic Conference 180 chapter 9 The Modernization of Suburban Realism 210 chapter 10 Recovering Suburban Memory 236

Appendix 261 Notes 275 Index 321

Acknowledgments

his book originated and developed in a classic suburban pattern. TA casual discussion at a residential Sunday brunch at Anthony and Evelyn Scozzafava’s Sylvan Avenue home led to the informal commitment to do something for the old Civil War Drill Hall. Robert R. Pacicco, a local Leonia merchant and then town mayor, provided vigorous moral support throughout and lent his good offices in the successful pursuit of a New Jersey Historical Commission grant. With grant support and the advice of commission staff, especially Howard Green and Perry Blatz, I organized local volunteers—Linda Cirino, Kate Scooler, Lynn Friendly, and photographer Fred Cicetti and in later stages Peter Mecca—into the Leonia Social History Project (1986–87) to interview, research, and retrieve the history of their town. The foundation for this present study owes everything to their ingenuity and camaraderie. There are many other Leonia participants who provided strategic assistance at crucial points, including Anne Williams and Carole Root Cole. None, however, were more central than the several dozen inter- viewees who donated their time and memories. How central their contribution was will only be partly registered in the book’s citations. My warmest thanks to them all for their neighborly cooperation. The Leonia Public Library staff, particularly library director Har- old Ficke with his staffer Linda Braun, deserve special praise for rethinking and reorganizing their schedules constantly to accommodate the Leonia Social History Project (1986–87). Their work has provided a professionally organized repository (thanks to Gail Malmgreen of New York University, financial support from the Leonia Consum- ers’ Cooperative, and the careful recent monitoring of Theresa Wy- man) for the artifacts of Leonia’s history, both previous holdings and x Acknowledgments new material that the project generated. I also want to note the enthusiastic support of Carol Karels and her own several books on Leonia which provided documentary buttressing and pleasurable reading. In spring 2000 we received a substantial grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission to produce and distribute this book. One of the notable products of all these investigations was the VCR-accessible sixty-minute documentary video Village, Junction, Town: Leonia, 1840–1960 (1987), for which Fred Cicetti and Peter Mecca deserve special accolades. Among other places the documentary has been shown was at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in St. Louis, Missouri (April 9, 1989), where panelists and suburban experts—especially Michael Ebner, Kenneth Jackson, and Robert Fishman—offered instructive suggestions. Inter- ested parties who seek copies of the documentary should contact the Leonia Public Library. The New Jersey Historical Society (with special thanks to Robert Burnett and Nancy Blankenhorn) and the Englewood (N.J.) Public Library together provided a nearly complete microfilm copy of North Jersey Life/Leonia Life from 1922 to 1954. No library has a complete copy of this important local source. In addition, the New Jersey His- torical Society; the State Archives in Trenton, especially State Ar- chivist Karl Niederer and Bette Epstein; and the National Archives (Northeast Region) supplied the necessary census material. Special thanks to Robert C. Morris, director of the National Archives North- east Regional Office. Pertinent material from the Johnson Memorial Library in Hackensack, New Jersey, particularly from their Bergen County Collection, was much appreciated. Other repositories and individuals who gave unstintingly of their time and expertise include the New York University Library and staff, the New York Public Library, the Society of Illustrators (with special thanks to director Terence Brown, Norman Blegman, and Nick Meglin), Walt Reed of Illustration House, New York Library of the Performing Arts, Salmagundi Club, and the National Academy of De- sign, all in New York City. Robin Ward Savage showed me the great range of her mother’s (May McNeer’s) and father’s (Lynd Ward’s) work and shared insights that were simply indispensable. Several western museums made their art collections and archives available, including the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney, Nebraska (with special thanks to Gary Zaruba and director John McKirahan); South Acknowledgments xi Dakota Art Museum in Brookings, South Dakota (and the insightful comments of director Joseph Stuart); Stuhr Museum of the Pioneer in Grand Island, Nebraska (and the assistance of Janelle Lundberg and Angela McLean); the Arthur M. Mitchell Memorial Museum in Trin- idad, Colorado (and the generosity of its director, Peggy Weurding); and the staff of the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. During my time at Brigham Young University, Dawn Pheysey of the College of Fine Arts and Communication provided both special research access and commentary on the sculpture and career of Mahonri M. Young. I also greatly appreciated the cooperation of the Sal- magundi Club for access to its archives and to the Archives of Ameri- can Art, Smithsonian Institution, both their New York City branch and the main repository in Washington, D.C. I would like to thank David Voorhees, editor of De Halve Maen: The Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America and a systematic scholar of Dutch culture, for an informed and helpful reading of chapter 1. Thanks also to Charles T. Gehring and Nancy Zeller of the New Netherland Project of the New York State Library, for their helpful suggestions on Dutch history and customs. I extend a special appreciation to series editors George F. Thompson and David Schuyler for confidence and suggestions, as well as to the efficient editorial staff at the Johns Hopkins University Press. Much of the methodology and interpretive stance of this study owes much to the students and colleagues of New York University’s Program in Public History. In countless ways our annual workshops throughout the 1980s and 1990s have opened avenues of conceptualization which I have relied on to carry this analysis of suburban community formation forward. In addition, the critical comments of Mi- chael Birkner, Linda Cirino, Michael Frisch, David Harnett, James McLachlan, Kate Scooler, John Stilgoe, William R. Taylor, and my NYU colleagues Rachel Bernstein and Danny Walkowitz on earlier drafts of this study were extraordinarily helpful. Friends and acquaintances who have assisted this project in so many varied ways will all understand the point of the dedication.

Suburban Landscapes

Introduction

his study concerns a single suburban community, Leonia, New TJersey, just outside New York City in northern Bergen County. The issues explored here, however, are primarily those of community formation and cultural identity, the dynamics of social cohesion and conflicting democratic politics. These issues are important not only because half of the American population now live in suburbs but also because suburbs are so seldom examined as experiments in democratic community building. The dominant social science literature has approached the American suburb convinced that its essential nature has been fixed by self-serving middle-class opportunists escaping the inner city and their basic responsibilities as tax-paying citizens. Few suburban studies begin without an extraordinarily ritualized mind-set, critical or patronizing of suburban culture. This intellectual convention provides the real starting point for this book, since it concentrates on the terms and images that obscure the dynamics of suburban life and its force in American culture. The task of this historical analysis, then, was to reconstruct a changing metropolitan suburb, one that could not avoid engaging city dynamics, and to examine the contrasting viewpoints—call them landscapes—which suburbanites have used to understand and shape their communities. The real topic thus became the complex suburban construct that emerged from these clashing, intellectual conventions, the way suburbanites mediate over time their own and another’s sense of their community development. Landscape thus includes both the material and iconic artifacts of town life, concrete expressions of the emergent social structure and accom- panying cultural conceptions.∞ In the process local knowledge once again demonstrates its fundamental power, namely, its challenge to established representations of people and their pasts.≤ 2 Suburban Landscapes The notion of landscape fits the suburban experience particularly well. As John Brinckerhoff Jackson has helpfully explained, no one sets out to create a landscape. It is partly design and partly other contextual features that produce it; it is a public phenomenon, often combining contradictory values that are held together only because those who operate within it refuse to give up either. Some features, however, are always clearly preferred over others.≥ A landscape can contain both country and city features as well as city and suburban values. It is sufficiently elastic a notion that, in spite of its cohering consequences, few of its adherents follow it like an ideology. Its boundaries are permeable and less clear than its central focus. Landscapes contain many detailed features of history, of politics, of geography, of cultural conventions, without being reduced to them. It is more a construction of public imagination than political reason and comes closer to describing an American suburban middle class than seemingly precise but uncontextualized economic or political delineations.∂ The central issues here concern the place and fit of suburban culture in the twentieth century as exemplified in a specific suburb. The necessity of raising such issues is essentially twofold: first, the suburb represents the prevalent locus for American community life in the twentieth century, yet our basic knowledge of suburbia rests on a few exceptional examples of the genre and social mythology.∑ The 1980 federal census documented that a majority of Americans reside in suburban communities. Yet our basic conception of suburbia, with its lawns, its space, its low population density, have been largely seen as merely negative reflections of the city.∏ Second, the general terms that social scientists, journalists, and others have applied to suburbanization—homogeneous, affluent, middle-class, parochial—have become so abstract and ahistorical that they misrepresent the actual nature and experience of suburban culture.π The polarized conceptions of city and suburb are too conventionally ritualized and distort both phenomena. How did we come to view the suburb this way? At the end of the nineteenth century the convention of ‘‘country versus city’’ strained to explain the processes of suburbanization and urbanization. There were, after all, many different kinds of cities, and those differences influenced the varied communities on their periph- eries. And, although it had not completely shed its rural associations, suburbia had become a peculiar composite, a ‘‘borderland’’ between traditional and modern styles of life.∫ Yet, with surprising slowness, the Introduction 3 nineteenth-century intellectual convention that pitted city against country became in the twentieth century another, different one that juxtaposed city against suburb.Ω This study examines the history of these conventional images of community life. Even if they did not comport with actual realities, they still have important functions in the shaping of a community. It will thus be a central methodological strategy to match the sociopolitical history of this community with its own images of cultural identity. Hence, this particular history of an actual town and place, with all its distinctive and indigenous features, concentrates on the broader transitions of culture and politics generally ignored in studies of suburbia.∞≠ The most authoritative analysis of suburbs to date remains Ken- neth Jackson’s prize-winning book, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburban- ization of the United States (1985). This important study definitively established some of the broad patterns of suburbanization in the United States. His emphasis, for example, on the annexation of the urban perimeter by nineteenth-century cities illuminated at once the process of aggressive urban expansion and defensive suburban resistance. In addition, his careful dissection of such national policies on taxa- tion, home mortgages, and highway subsidy led to his important interpretation of twentieth-century suburbia as a privileged construct of the federal government. As indispensable as these analyses were, they tended to extend rather than question the conventional twentieth- century polarization of city and suburb.∞∞ They also have little application for the numerous suburbs that reached their maturity before the New Deal. The sources of Jackson’s book readily document and shape his approach and outlook. His overview rests on the statistics and docu- mentation of urban planners, architects, realtors, politicians, mass magazine editors, demographers, and social scientists, largely situated in U.S. cities or major research universities. There are no individual suburbanites in Jackson’s study; no testimony or examples of the un- derview, the experienced counterpoint to his skyscraper view of the suburbs; no sense that suburbanites themselves contributed, except passively and reactively, to the larger forces of modernization, that they had special anxieties or political histories apart from city culture, that they succeeded in devising any indigenous responses to problems cities faced differently. The account of suburbia for Jackson and much of the existing secondary literature has reinforced a profound city 4 Suburban Landscapes bias.∞≤ Thus, Jackson concludes that suburbanites’ escapism has substantially contributed to the ills of inner-city life.∞≥ Suburban history has thus depended on urban-based scholars and journalists who have not been terribly curious or critical about suburbia’s changing historical features or its participatory role in urban modernization. Suburbia’s critics have treated their subject too reflexively as an evasion or escape from the city, when actual study of specific suburbs suggests powerful urban interactions as well as some unsus- pected, distinctive features.∞∂ Historical analysis has begun to demonstrate that suburbanization experienced distinctive stages of development and that only one of those stages, the post–World War II period, can accurately be labeled as Levittownish—that is, mass produced and momentarily homogenized by its image and housing. Once analysts take seriously suburbia’s historical stages, one can understand how forceful the existing suburban canon has been in ignoring the historical suburb, even among scholars equipped to ask new questions.∞∑ Suburban Landscapes explores a multifaceted suburb in New York’s metropolitan orbit which has received scrutiny over three generations. The analysis has focused on the forces that shaped or undermined community building. Key assumptions emerged, among which were the following: a twentieth-century ‘‘community,’’ especially a suburb, is not bounded by its geography, is not encompassed or wholly controlled by its formal process of government, is a one-sided portrait without the voices and perspectives of its residents. Geographical terrain, governmental politics, and a collective sense of history and place have contributed strategically to any community’s actual development. All of these ingredients appear here as part of a rein- terpretation of the changing social structure and class mixtures of town life. Leonia, New Jersey, is not necessarily a ‘‘representative’’ suburb, but it does exemplify ignored features that must be considered as important to suburbanization. For instance, the social tradition and configurations of every community filter and reshape the forces of modernization and urbanization; over time suburbanites contribute to these processes rather than receive them passively. These distinctive features complicate the study of suburbia, even were there sufficient studies to make a rough sketch of the ‘‘representative’’ case in any mathematical fashion. Indeed, to raise the question of representativeness borders on the ahistorical. A representative suburb assumes a Introduction 5 static or composite ‘‘fit’’ within a constructed definition rather than focusing upon the changing political and cultural contexts masked by such constructs. Unlike many affluent suburbs that have preserved their records and produced ‘‘middle-class’’ histories, Leonia’s story permits a different window into the discourse. Its middle-class, like most middle- class peoples and cultures in the twentieth century,∞∏ reflected highly varied career trajectories and substantial internal stratifications. This middle-class structure minimized the influence of its affluent residents and provided a range of accesses to town authority for skilled and working-class suburbanites, especially in its first two generations of life. Leonia’s middle class also included immigrant and racially distinct members, often thought by suburban scholars to be the rationale for ‘‘escape’’ from the city. Exactly how did these features affect the nature of community formation, and, if dissent followed, how were cultural and racial differences handled? In trying to discover the basic workings of community life, this study has necessarily begun to explore historical ideas such as the middle class and suburbanization itself. The interpretation assumes that the process was neither linear nor easily conceptualized by any one group perspective. It has become axiomatic here that conception—for example, nonpartisanship as a political value—often oper- ates out of sync with behavior but is equally axiomatic, that the result is neither dysfunction nor illusion. Communities, like individuals, shape an iconography that makes sense to them to take account of multiple, even contradictory, phenomena. Hence, suburban voices provide unique evidence and conceptual blueprints, often unavailable to documentary archives; they also present the strategic memory of community experience. However discordant with reality, social icons and mythology serve as one of the powerful cohesive forces in any community’s experience. In the process one particular aim has been to disabuse the reader’s expectation about ‘‘suburban’’ definitions and images and to show them as problematic, particularly as they reach out beyond a suburban geography and compete for the allegiance of a larger American audience. Culture preceded politics in American suburban life, particularly in the minds of its participants. People’s collective assumptions become thereby a distinctive historical agent in its own right. Rather than studying suburbia from aggregate census and demographic data 6 Suburban Landscapes alone, this analysis proposes to begin at ground level, locating the peculiarities of collective experience before attending to the abstracted statistical profiles of suburbanites.∞π These suburban oral histories have shaped a wider communal swath than demarcated by the agencies of official power. One needs to use the experience of social life before the creation of a governmental process to illuminate how much formal government actually changed a given community’s culture. Residents’ memories help stretch back and contextualize a governmental apparatus, particularly the moment when it became a substantive force. But they also clarify that ‘‘nonpolitical’’ forces, especially the voluntary arrangements of town culture, functioned pivotally before and after the emergence of an elected town government. While much of this study takes place within this town’s formally Republican political framework, Leonia continually sheltered gadfly groups, largely ignored in the study of numerical, election results. Each of these dissenting groups had its own peculiar influences. The margin of Republican dominance did not require an overture to heterogeneous political groups, and yet in Leonia they did. This suburb did not emerge into a homogeneous social unit; a key to this important feature concerns the role and status of its several minority groups. Most of the time vocal critics of town policies arose within Republi- can ranks themselves, raising questions about the relative homogeneity of any national party allegiance at the local level. By the 1930s split voting, and later ‘‘swing voting’’ among ‘‘independents,’’ became a commonplace feature of suburban elections (see table A.12). Thus, Republican political dominance rarely translated into an easy social hegemony, even when that party officially controlled the elective offices of the town. Indeed, a Republican desire for ‘‘consensus’’ over ‘‘partisanship’’ set the stage for non-Republicans entering the local political arena. In Leonia a socialist and later a Democratic minority continued to have considerable influence beyond their numerical size by dint of their control of the town newspaper as well as their activism in many informal, voluntary groups. The diversity of early-twentieth- century suburbia spilled over its formal political boundaries and provided the context for an expansive community-wide appreciation of ‘‘nonpolitical’’ endeavors. These extrapolitical traditions lingered, even after World War II, when local party allegiances began to sys- tematize county, state, and national party priorities into more predictable patterns. Introduction 7 The oral history of this suburb testified strongly to the value of nonpartisan consensus and social harmony as aspirations that often ran counter to their actual realization. Such consensus was neither a romantic ideal nor self-delusion but, rather, in context, became a complicated agent in the shaping of a suburban community. Non- political values became associated with suburbanites’ sense of communal possibility and routine accessibility to power which for many made the suburb a cultural icon itself. Not only were informal (hence, little documented in archival material) organizations invoked, but the dynamics of demography and regular infusions of newcomers virtually insured that a community of commuters would be affected by a range of choices outside politics. The suburban community maintained a constant tension and engagement with forces outside its boundaries. The interaction with the city—in this case, the New York metropolis—registered itself in myriad ways, especially its conscious differences with regular county, state, and national electoral patterns; its resident New York academics; their linkage to national personalities, and their sense of place in the larger metropolitan Regional Plan; among other features. In addition, one of the clearest examples of this suburban-urban interactive process revealed itself through the town’s artist colony. The artists’ presence and contribution to town life continually drew upon the city, reaffirmed the buttressing role of communal roots and implicitly documented the powerful mediating agency of social imagery. In the process the artists also helped emphasize the social power of iconography, particularly when their subjects were not literally drawn from their community or appeared to be definably ‘‘suburban,’’ which for them held no static meaning. In their way they documented the suburb’s continual resistance to parochialism or other clichéd suburban referents while nevertheless cultivating a sense of place. It bears repeating here that the artists both reflected a range of values recognizable to suburbia (such as the primacy of ordinary routine, adaptation to often inhospitable terrain, and the supportive force of traditional family roles), but they also actively promoted and reshaped their suburb’s communal culture, especially the reconstruction of their historical inheritance. Many of these values the artists helped project via their magazine illustrations and public venues into a national consciousness. Thus, the experience of suburban artists and their colonies challenges the easy invocation of the twentieth-century mod- 8 Suburban Landscapes ern artist as somehow reflexively ‘‘bohemian,’’ the antithesis of mass- produced middle-class norms.∞∫ The artists of Leonia provided a special example of suburban development before the full process of professionalization transformed both their work and their community. Their intensified career traffic with New York City only seemed to sharpen their consciousness of the cultural distance between home and work. The early artists used their work to dramatize their allegiances with the dominant skilled laboring classes of the early suburb and the city. Subsequent generations of artists accommodated the techniques of modernization with twentieth- century reaffirmations of remembered civic values. The later interwar generation of artists began to feel the strain, however, of reconstructing cohesive landscapes that would bind diverse social interests into a functioning commonweal. The forces of social division seemed to arise irrepressibly and required some response in their professional images.∞Ω Finally, a third generation of professional artists after the Depression and postwar years began to question the very notion of a cohesive landscape, preferring, instead, multiple styles that reflected the promise and exploitative nature of U.S. capitalism. Oddly, just as one older suburb’s sense of community began to accommodate notions of pluralism, commensurate with rises in housing starts, interstate highway construction, racial integration, and shopping malls, suburban Levittowns fixed the suburb with associations of homogeneity, insularity, and deadening sameness. In any case these three generational responses well serve as iconic structures to the successive landscapes of this New Jersey suburb; they also underscore the inter- play between the real and the imaginary community in any cultural landscape. The urban/suburban interaction was responsible, of course, for dramatic changes during the transformation from an agricultural village to a metropolitan suburb. The mid-nineteenth-century railroad insured the entry of merchants and, even more important, skilled laborers into suburbia, while the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century trolley brought an even greater range of both working- and middle-class residents, increasingly white collar. At times it has been tempting to make these differentiations of technology overly neat, resulting directly in shifts of social structure. While such shifts did occur, they did not follow a precise and predictable course from technological stimuli but, rather, were influenced and at times resisted by Introduction 9 inherited structures and values. This distinctive historical inheritance has complicated the clear delineation of suburban stages of change. Yet there can be no denying the impact of trolley commuters on New Jersey farmland, any more than one could deny the powerful effect of auto and professional commuters once the George Washington Bridge, which opened in 1931 as the longest suspension bridge in the world, made a Hudson River crossing a matter of minutes rather than hours. These devices made the interwar period the era of most rapid suburbanization to that point in U.S. history. Here, however, these sea changes become the starting points of exploration rather than descriptive explanations. Once these new technologies and residents began to exert their presence in a suburban life, activist residents applied both old and new approaches to insure some definable communal fabric. Often at issue was the very external shape of the town, resulting in open debate over the configuration of stores, zoning priorities, and consumer alternatives. It was also no small surprise to discover that the forces of modernization were often advanced by rooted members of the community, while newcomers cultivated the neighborhood’s history in shaping a sense of place. Among several major conclusions, inherited values contributed substantively to both social routines and modernized conceptions of the suburb. The force of history and a sense of place did not, as the suburban canon often assumes, result in conservative reaction. Sev- eral indigenous families produced prominent entrepreneurs in land development rather than atavists favoring bygone, spatial values that were literally a part of their family’s rural history. Newcomers often prized Leonia’s history, which they often doctored and refashioned in their own lights, to project progressive standards. The ubiquitous reference to the community as a ‘‘country town’’ arose distinctively when the railroad and trolley posed challenges to the suburban cultivation of nature and space. The country icon purported to mediate rural inheritances with urban modernism and survived well into the De- pression generation, despite significant strains. Later, as their own priorities challenged local traditions of nonpartisanship, newcomers led the initiative to recover and refashion the town’s history and appropriate a skewed but updated notion of the area’s ‘‘Dutch’’ tradition. This new hybrid seems to have attracted support precisely because it continued a putative link with the locale’s past and challenged virtually none of the non-Dutch inheritances of new or old 10 Suburban Landscapes residents. The artists not only aided and abetted these constructs; they themselves provided support for an additional mythology of town life, a community of cultured and artistic citizens. Like other communities, the mythology of stability and continuity here contained more than an element of historical truth. The rise of new images of Leonia as a country town signaled the passing of the first stage of suburban development, Leonia’s years as a railroad village. Before the 1890s Leonia had no formal local government and was an unincorporated section of nearby Ridgefield, New Jersey. The Leonia Literary League and the town’s Lyceum represented prepolitical organizations of town life. Voluntarism was distinctly spontaneous, mixed in terms of social class and gender (though not race), and it was not terribly distinct from the routines of the area’s agricultural past, still represented by practicing farmers and livestock within town limits. The second stage of growth, marked by the arrival of a new trolley line and the establishment of a trolley junction, introduced newcomers, who were early on predominantly skilled workers rather than professionals (see tables A.1 and A.6). At this second stage, with social class groupings at their most evenly proportioned and arguably most democratic, a new brand of suburban voluntarism developed, now more organized and emanating largely from competing religious denominations. These institutions took on the task of socialization quite consciously and established a clear demarca- tion of gender roles through the formation of influential groups such as the Men’s Neighborhood Club and the Women’s Club. At the turn of the century, roughly between the 1890s and 1920s, these groups monitored the social mores of community life effectively but informally. Even the emergent governmental apparatus took its cues from these groups, selecting political candidates from those who had served voluntary apprenticeships in respected ‘‘nonpolitical’’ organizations. One of the strategic agencies of change at the end of this period was the town planning board, appointed by and responsible to the mayor but operating with volunteers who conceived of their duties expansively. Before the Depression local politics did not drive town life or initiate major departures from established practice; it succeeded primarily in maintaining the established routines of the town’s business. The third stage of suburban development in Leonia arose out of interwar tensions and manifested itself forcefully near the end of the 1930s.≤≠ Particularly pressing in these years was the continuing in- Introduction 11 migration from New York and New Jersey cities and the anticipated expansion of Democratic Party membership. The landmark community event of the period was undoubtedly the creation of the Civic Conference, a thinly veiled political apparatus outside the formal governmental or party structure which aspired to the trappings of an older voluntary tradition of local politics. The tensions that produced the Civic Conference also appeared in the self-conscious reengagement with a version of the area’s Dutch colonial past, complete with both old and new contradictions intact. Both these developments reflected the rising importance of political mechanisms and the open, organized resistance of distinctive groups within the town. No longer was it possible to maintain the older veneer of harmony and genteel disagreement in the shaping of town policies and orientations.≤∞ In no small way the new white-collar community reinforced the sense of division with their town-city commutation but also with their occupational commitments, which often took preference over any local or community activities. The peculiar politicization of this stage opened the way to a distinctively different communal arrangement after World War II. New values threatened to override the older voluntary networks with their rhetorics of informality and consensus; they now featured the political and governmental process as a newly powerful, shaping instrument of town life. Increasingly, town party electoral patterns of the 1950s and 1960s became more closely articulated with county and state party objectives (see table A.12). These particular stages of political and ideological development may or may not fit the experience of other suburbs, but they provide a more complex, historical model of suburbanization and a more instructive set of questions to be asked of future studies of community formation. At the very least future studies need, first, to examine the suburb as an integral and interactive component of urbanization, a process that can only be comprehended longitudinally, that is, a process in which relations between suburb and city change over several generations. Second, the role of oral history offers not only new sources but the crucial authority for discussing cohesive factors like the social imagery of town life. Such testimony and imagery introduce the residential viewpoint, omitted from so many otherwise excellent studies; they also check the temptation to treat the suburb as an antiurban entity. Suburbanites generally offer positive rationales for embracing suburbia rather than the negative caricature of escaping 12 Suburban Landscapes urban problems. Whatever the truth of either, both need to be considered a part of the suburban story. Third, the periodization of American history and its significant points of change have already begun to change in interpretations of suburbanization. Reflexively, for example, earlier scholars and journalists have accepted the role of home ownership as an established feature of suburban culture. Only recently, however, have house renters become a substantive minority, representing less affluent social classes. Through 1920 Leonia home owners without mortgages represented less than 20 percent of household heads (see table A.3).≤≤ In addition, Leonia’s case has established an important racial and ethnic presence from the late nineteenth century to the present, in many cases in percentages of the community population equal to those of nearby New York. Finally, the voluntary networks, which are often treated as premodern and unimportant after the turn of the century, have continued important roles well into the twentieth century. Such features have suggested that the pivotal periods of social change occurred before World War I and World War II rather than during or after those dramatic events. This different periodization also credits as causal some forces not usually thought to have such shaping power in suburbia, as in the role of skilled workers at the turn of the century or cultural imaging in all three periods. Even in analyses that take up such images, few have acknowledged the urban contexts of mass media caricatures or treat images as distinct agents of change in their own right.≤≥ Finally, the very notion of developmental stages can often appear overly precise. If one seeks to delineate the ongoing force of older values and group influences, the moment of novelty can easily be obscured. Stages of suburbanization need to engage the force of inheritance in any socialization process, but, thereby, the ‘‘stage of development’’ itself becomes a continuously problematic and multilayered construct. It is a commonplace notion that every community has its distinctive features. Indeed, historical interpretation arises in an effort to explain the significance of different and similar connections to make larger patterns. For this reason it is dangerous to press the point of ‘‘representativeness’’ too hard, to avoid insisting that one community is average or typical over others. At this stage of research no scholar, in my judgment, has sufficient evidence to make such an argument, even tentatively. At this early stage of maturation suburban studies Introduction 13 will be distinguished and valued for their questions and interpretive reach. With each distinctive case study we seem to be clearer about what the suburb was at a given moment rather than what it actually became over time or at successive times. At the very least, however, we can now understand that most Americans moved to the suburbs to engage and produce something positive rather than merely to escape the city and its ills.≤∂ How these motivations have changed over time and how they have contributed to suburbia as a national experiment in community building become the formative issues we must now try to understand. There is one thing more, and that concerns the special nature of the suburb as a national phenomenon. A suburb within the New York metropolitan ring has a particular claim on an informed public’s attention. Leonia’s special locus underscores the assumption that a suburb by definition is not simply a small social island but a distinctively powerful ingredient within a larger urban orbit. In the twentieth century the suburb holds a middle ground, selectively resistant to the forces of urbanization and modernization, no less than to the forces of parochialism. Variously, it cultivates both avant-garde market forces and a rusticated sense of place, so often misconstrued as atavistic and conservative. Well before the post–World War II period one multifaceted suburb’s experience reworked several times the meaning of suburbanization. Part of that development followed from its response to social class, race, and gender relationships. Its complicated morphology suggests that suburbs themselves, as Americans’ dominant place of residence, invite consideration of the suburban locus as one of the clearest strategic places for understanding the problematic character of a larger American landscape. chapter 1 Dutchness and the English Neighborhood

n 1944 the artist Charles Chapman, best known for his North IWoods landscapes, created a map to celebrate the semicentennial of his adopted New Jersey suburb. There was more than a pretense of accuracy to his effort, since he based many of the details of his drawing upon an 1869 print of the English Neighborhood, a vaguely defined section of northeastern New Jersey which would eventually encompass several suburban towns, including Chapman’s Leonia. In the eighteenth century the area surrounded George Washington’s west bank redoubt on the Hudson River, Fort Lee. Chapman’s principal aim was simply to locate the fifty-two dwellings extant in the 1860s and to recover only that portion of the English Neighborhood out of which his own twentieth-century community of Leonia, New Jersey, would be hewn. With appropriate artistic liberty he recast a dozen or so large and small Dutch-styled homes in cartoonlike balloons on his map. For perspective’s sake Chapman put a larger map in a corner block, orienting any uninitiated observer to the Hudson River’s west bank, to give the English Neighborhood its bearings. Several features of Chapman’s map make clear that his intentions were only minimally historical. There were no scales for measure- ment; there were no communal boundaries; there was not even a studied deference to the year 1869. Directly through the center of his design is another superimposed road, Broad Avenue, which did not exist until late in the nineteenth century but which in 1944 served as the central thoroughfare of the suburb. Chapman did include, however, narrow ribbonlike land plots that corresponded to 1869 farm holdings. He also took care to show the swampy Jersey meadowlands at the western edge of the area and the railroad track through it, completed in 1859. The only other dated buildings were public struc- Dutchness and the English Neighborhood 15 tures: the 1824 mission of the Dutch Reformed Church and the Civil War Drill Hall erected in the year the railroad was completed. Per- haps most important, the names of all landholders appear on their plots or next to the principal structure on the site. While the largest landholders, the Vreelands, sustained the dominant Dutch presence, many other landholders make clear a mixed inheritance: Romaine, Schor, and Allaire (French); Moore and Edsall (English); Goesser (German); Corrigan, Hughes, and Conover (Irish); as well as the Scottish Christies. In important ways Chapman’s effort was as much a document of the 1940s as it was the 1860s. As such, his map went beyond a depiction of place to a reconception that justifies the broader meaning of landscape, an encompassing view, documenting both a multifaceted, social arrangement and some special angle of vision. In this particular case his landscape connoted something more than the painter’s general implications of harmonized nature. Of course, Chapman intended to depict a shaped reality, charming and quaint in its way. But his landscape also seemed to be, as John Brinckerhoff Jackson would have it, ‘‘a concrete, three-dimensional shared reality,’’∞ a sense of something more important and substantive than the map initially intimated. Certainly, the 1940s and a semicentennial celebration expanded the implications of his map, which suggested a continuous, man-made community, an image that purported to improve upon nature. Chapman’s tailored landscape became more than his own private perspective; it emphasized a specific place where people endured, changed, and passed something on; it made the locale in a sense more significant than it might initially have seemed (see fig. 1.1). On the one hand, Chapman’s effort seems no more than the inflation usually accorded booster celebrations of the past. The En- glish Neighborhood insistence distracted attention initially from the ethnic variety as well as the Dutch architecture and Dutch land configurations of ribbonlike geometries. On the other hand, Chapman’s landscape drew special attention to the future suburban community that eventually would arise on the exact site of his 1869 settlement. The distinctive feature of Chapman’s concocted map was its dual momentum, its harkening to bygone days and its projection of a very different present. In no small way his work implicitly demanded a rethinking of such transformations and a consideration of the relative gains and losses of the change. Whether he intended it or not, Chap- man’s reconfiguration necessarily compelled his audience to consider the process of suburbanization in Leonia, the transformation of a farm region into a modern suburb. His map limited his depiction of this process, except for its stark contrast with the 1944 town he lived in: the use of space over nearly fourscore years had so dramatically changed that its 1869 features were barely remembered. Chapman’s artistry indirectly formulated questions about the emergent landscapes of nineteenth- and twentieth- century suburban communities: what essential ingredients and dynamics actually contributed to their construction? Precisely how did residential suburbs arise from rude settlements composed of many Fig. 1.1. Charles Chapman’s 1944 English Neighbor- hood map. Chapman redrew this 1869 map to give a sense of deeper antiquity to his town during its celebration of its fiftieth anniversary as a borough. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

different inheritances and values? Had the American suburb, as the most popular form of American community in the twentieth century, effectively integrated and harmonized multiple and distinctive traditions? Finally, how have suburban communities, particularly those with mixed ethnic and racial populations, sustained both the reality and illusion of a common landscape? In part the answers lay in Chapman’s managed use of the past, in his retrospective conception of the historical English Neighborhood, which formed the taproot of his own community. The historical processes of community formation can be studied by scrutinizing the locale where Chapman began: the eighteenth-century creation, the 18 Suburban Landscapes English Neighborhood. Its initial landscape was more than it first appeared, since the values of the ‘‘neighborhood’’ were predominantly Dutch rather than English. The historical designation English Neigh- borhood, however, obscured the historical Dutch culture and represented primarily a formal, and distorting, cultural assertion. Yet it represented someone’s sense of a definite site and some effort to organize the land. So, what was the landscape of the English Neighbor- hood and how did it, as Chapman suggested, play an ongoing role in the shaping of successive communities? In an important respect Chapman’s twentieth-century reconstruction of the English Neighborhood in Leonia captured one of its singular features: the absence of a center and the dispersal of its citizens’ residences. From the eighteenth to late in the nineteenth century along the entire English Neighborhood Road (which the artist called Grand Avenue) there was no real focal point for the scattered farmsteads. Homes large and small stretched the entire length of the roadway, resisting any concentration. Even the commercial and public facilities were decentralized. The lone mill situated itself where Crystal Creek flowed into Overpeck Creek, the larger tributary of the Hackensack River. Nearby, also on a side path, there was a ‘‘dyeing establishment.’’ Back on the main road one could find a public school separated by several farms from the blacksmith shop. Further on, at a crossroads, was D. Carlook’s hotel, adjacent to the old Dutch Re- formed mission church. Beyond the church another farm created distance between itself and a second hotel, the Knickerbocker, a quaint jumble of one- and two-story buildings. At the southernmost end of Chapman’s map was the 1859 Drill Hall and a small sawmill, then several miles more of farmsteads toward the nascent village of Ridge- field. The only other public facility, several city blocks off the highway, was the train station, first erected in 1859 on the Fort Lee– Hackensack Turnpike, which formed the second artery of the English Neighborhood crossroads. In any formal sense the social forces of the English Neighborhood lacked any semblance of an economic, political, or cultural center. The landscape of the English Neighborhood dated from the Brit- ish takeover and domination of New York City and its environs in 1664. The actual use of the term English Neighborhood appeared as early as 1670 and referred to the Western palisades and the west-sloping strip of land between the Hudson River and Overpeck Creek, encom- Dutchness and the English Neighborhood 19 passing the present-day towns from Ridgefield to Englewood, New Jersey.≤ Yet no settlement in the area provided any concentrated gathering place—political, economic, or religious—until the nineteenth century. Eighteenth-century settlers preferred, instead, the pattern of separated farmsteads which distinguished the Dutch throughout the colonial period. The migration of the New Jersey Dutch from Manhat- tan also underscored the divisions between New York Dutchmen who looked to their trade with the English and those in New Jersey who coveted their distance from English rule and taxes as distinctive cultural alternatives. Eventually, these divisions widened in the evangeli- cal disputes of the early eighteenth century and, later, the political dynamics of the American Revolution. The Manhattan Dutchmen looked to the formal classis and its linkages to Amsterdam in Holland, while the New Jersey Dutchmen tended to prefer the often less formally educated pietists of the Great Awakening.≥ In the English Neighborhood these divisions were explicit with the Tory parishioners. Their clergyman, Garrett Lydecker of the Ridge- field Dutch Reformed Church, criticized congregants who wished to settle doctrinal disputes themselves rather than send them to the Synod of Dort in Amsterdam. The Tory minister left his congregation in 1776 for England and never returned. His critics began to meet in the English Neighborhood north of Ridgefield and eventually built a mission church there (see fig 1.2).∂ Before exploring the peculiar nature of the Dutch landscape, it may be well to acknowledge a strategic caveat about the Dutch tradition in the American colonies. The mixture of ethnic strains of the seventeenth-century ‘‘Dutch,’’ which contained elements of Spanish, French, Walloon, Flemish, Belgian, German, and some Scandinavian lines, have raised questions about any ‘‘pure’’ Dutch tradition.∑ Still, in contrast to the different English traditions in colonial New England and Virginia, imported patterns in the Middle Colonies did account, in part, for the different social and cultural arrangements there. The shorthand referent for these collective patterns has been characterized, however erroneously, as Dutch, and here the discussion will continue the usual practice, cognizant of its oversimplification. Where, then, did Dutch society take place before there was a ‘‘social center,’’ and how did that landscape emerge and then change in the nineteenth century? Historians disagree about the distinctive values of the Dutch to- Fig. 1.2. Revolutionary map of 1776–77. This Revolutionary War military map designates the area known in the eighteenth century as the English Neighborhood as well as the road down which Washington and his men retreated from Fort Lee toward the interior of colonial New Jersey. Copyright Bergen County Historical Society 2000

ward social settlements, but most acknowledge the Dutch assumption that the wilderness would be civilized only by conditions that fostered a mercantile way of life.∏ It mattered less to the Dutch than, say, to the English that they had strangers for neighbors. The contractual proprieties of law and, indeed, the formal political order of a region Dutchness and the English Neighborhood 21 were not for the Dutch matters of small moment, yet they became functionally less important than the perquisites for sustaining Dutch family life and customs. In the English Neighborhood of the Revolu- tionary period, marginally connected by culture to the English commonweal in Manhattan, Dutch farmers looked not to the agricultural town but to individual farmsteads as the center points of their culture. Historians have traditionally employed several colonial models to single out cultural features that underlie early vernacular communities. They have insisted that the Dutch did not design their landscapes on the model of the New England village, which seemingly projected a clear focal center with steepled meeting house and a green bounded by the homes of prominent residents. The New England tradition purportedly elaborated itself with succeeding concentric spheres, first of houses, then planting ground, then grazing pastures, all within approximately a mile to a mile and a half of the town center. Any new households in the area beyond the grazing pastures were situated within walking distance of the meeting house.π The distribution of land reflected the resources of individual residents for cultivation, thereby formalizing the social hierarchy of the consequent settlements.∫ Cultivated land defined civilization and set itself off from swamp, forest, and waste ground. The emergent ‘‘towns’’ accepted class differences, reflecting, as they thought, the Divine Order. This forceful image of the New England town, however, distorted similarities between New England Puritans and New Jersey Dutch. The self-consciously centered icon of the New England town was largely a product of the early nineteenth century, a powerful affirmation of distinct values in the face of emergent industrialization. Seventeenth-century New England towns frequently followed the scattered village pattern of the European (and Dutch) tradition. By the end of the seventeenth century even New Englanders conceded that ‘‘neighborly living’’ within a congregational model had evaded them as a social ideal. Towns were springing up without regard to a semblance of order, and houses could be found scattered among the rivulets and streams with more regard to terrain than to fellowship. A dramatic shift occurred, not during the colonial period but later, as early-nineteenth-century industrialization threatened a community order, more imagined than real. From the 1830s onward the invented New England tradition of the ‘‘village green’’ tried to resist the movement away from shared public commons and toward the land as a pri- 22 Suburban Landscapes vate commodity and surveyed possession.Ω This powerful icon masked the scattered quality of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century community life for academics and nonacademics alike. Still, the New England town image for all its varied configurations remained a sacred space and a welcome, if distorting, component of American history at the end of the nineteenth century. Its iconography shaped a special landscape far more important than its putative harmony with nature. Its imagery of a town common romanticized a well-ordered configuration, self-governing, self-sufficient, a defense against the wilderness. Its space was purportedly distinguished by its central green, its cattle pounds, its spires, its bridges, or, in a word, in its man-made constructs that connoted social rather than individual aspirations. And these artifacts harkened to a seemingly settled past, even though New England town changes had been constant. Most important, as historian Michael Zuckerman has observed, the town was a community of common believers. If you did not share its objectives, you could not live in town.∞≠ The town had become itself a ‘‘way of life,’’ a device for indirect enforcement of collective values. Any dissension between individual aspirations and communal standards was thought to require a separation. This mix of real and fictive features of the New England town serves as a reminder that most community landscapes, then and now, contain comparable dimensions. The colonial Virginia alternative, which often has provided the foil to the orderly New England town in community models, scarcely seemed an alternative way of thinking about community. Indeed, later scholars have wondered why the South, by which they meant the Chesapeake culture of Virginia and Maryland, did not found towns until late in the eighteenth century. In part the answer rests with the nature of the terrain, in part the nature of social sponsorship and preferment. The Virginia Company, which controlled land distribution, intended to use land to attract settlers. The head right system promised a specified number of acres for every man, woman, and child an owner could attract to the colonies. That system became far more important than originally thought, once tobacco became the crop of choice, highly profitable and labor intensive. Tobacco also depleted the soil within four or five years and compelled the ambitious to move inland, which also meant away from the watercourses that served as the highways of trade in the South.∞∞ Soil exhaustion, labor mobility, and a profit-oriented company Dutchness and the English Neighborhood 23 with little investment in land or community undermined the creation of towns in the South. The typical seventeenth-century (usually wooden) dwelling was not built for permanence and seldom with a thought for socialization. The households that acquired more permanence, the substantive plantation houses that began to appear in the early part of the eighteenth century, took on features of town life. Their skilled workmen and slaves replicated the many complex products of any self-sufficient town but with the difference that their market agriculture fostered the fortunes of a single family rather than a commonweal. When they finally arose, one compelling argument has it, southern towns appeared in the backcountry before they arose on the seacoast. Like the case of Baltimore, late-eighteenth-century sea- port cities depended as much for commerce and survival to and from hinterland towns as they did on the coastal and oceanic sea lanes.∞≤ The southern town did not produce a distinctive cultural landscape, as townships eventually did in the New England imagination. Its standard was a commercial entrepot, like Williamsburg, Virginia. It had a prominent political dimension and activated itself seasonally when landowners arrived with self-interests to be served or on market day when farmers delivered produce. A town was a collection of stores and houses that sheltered the merchants. The southern town was an artificial construct, removed in a way from the essential economic life of the colony, which centered on the plantation warehouse and wharf. Its function was as transitional as the common settler’s household. Town life fit within rather than dominated the landscape of the plantation. It is tempting to develop a third, Middle Colony construct that borrows from these two historical models. Indeed, one might even consider invoking the now facile social science abstractions of ge- meinschaft and gesellschaft to force the point of inner-directed and outer-directed communities. Historically, however, most towns and communities have functioned with sufficient mixtures of these two dimensions that such descriptions are serviceable only at the most elementary, initial level of community formation. Colonial Amer- ica produced several other models in the Spanish southwest and in Quaker Pennsylvania which make clear how forceful culture and tradition have been in any community development. These distinctive communal variations also show how the earliest communal efforts seldom produced the harmonized community life that retrospective 24 Suburban Landscapes memory usually suggests. Nor can students of community formation mark the distinctive stages of community change by observing the gradual accommodation of strangers or the ‘‘breakdown’’ of community due to an eventual majority of strangers. Few towns obligingly hold to any single pattern.∞≥ Finally, the formation of a community, one must assume, does not begin with the official founding moment of a town but, rather, out of the distinctive cultural landscapes previously flourishing in a given area. The several standard models of community formation alert one to the observation that New England’s supposed inner-directed and meeting house center of community structure—primarily a nineteenth-century cultural invention—also had its external condition- ing pressures. Similarly, the southern alternative, if we consider the plantation’s pressure on their seventeenth-century ‘‘towns,’’ also had its intracultural dynamics. Strangers were features of most town life from the earliest stage. The real question turned on their treatment and their potential resource for community ambitions. For many of the southerners the ‘‘profit motive’’ became a spiritual principle, a belief that drove all others and rationalized the sacrifice of slaves and land as economic necessity. By the eighteenth century, if not earlier in the seventeenth century, the initial colonial models of community life had either gone unrealized or had eroded. The vast expanse of land to the west of most colonies contrasted intensely with the Europeans’ general inability to own land. The pattern was set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1627, the year many of the first settlers of 1620 had completed their inden- tures and abandoned Plymouth for hinterland farms, in spite of the threat of Indians, weather, and the unknown. Similarly, the early town structures came apart and reformulated from both inner and outer pressures to create ‘‘communities’’ that few could have predicted. One might have expected more generally that a new vocabulary would necessarily evolve, and it did. One of these referent points was the language of ‘‘neighborhood,’’ an imprecise reference to a particular vicinity in which the contours of the land and the character of the people provided a permeable sense of place. If in New England the neighborhood was often coincident with the town, in the South it represented an area, in John Stilgoe’s version, ‘‘measured always from each householding and almost never from some sort of roland, civil or ecclesiastical.’’∞∂ Even more important, especially in the Southern and Dutchness and the English Neighborhood 25 Middle Colonies, the neighborhood had not one but several centers. Those Middle Colony centers, which provided focal points for up to fifty square miles of ‘‘neighborhood,’’ also were as often general stores, hotels, or mills as they were churches. In some cases the farmstead on the local highway, particularly at a crossroads, served the neighborhood as landmark and focal point. The neighborhood communities of the Middle Colonies made trade their benchmark, and the Dutch were particularly adept. During the Revolution the Hessians professed perplexity at the Dutch allegiances. One day they would barter with the British; the next day they traded with patriots’ foraging patrols. Similarly, such a penchant for trade compelled Dutchmen at times to be treated as Tories, even those who had themselves served in the American militias.∞∑ The Dutch confused their neighbors with their political ambivalence. The ensuing confusion of allegiances became a part of the lore of neighboring families of both Dutch and English descent well beyond Revolutionary days. The English Neighborhood’s Dereck Vreeland, one of his twentieth-century heirs recalled, had one of the early New Jersey Supreme Court decisions in his favor. ‘‘Basically the Supreme Court said that the inferior court of Bergen County was in error when they convicted Dereck for aid and comfort to the British Army and all of his chattels taken from him would be restored to him.’’ Softly, his ancestor also acknowledged that ‘‘he was probably on the British side. Everybody was . . . this was a British section.’’∞∏ Vreeland’s British neighbor, Thomas Moore, however, was not only not a Tory but died a British prisoner in New York’s Amos Street jail. In both fact and memory the English Neighborhood of colonial New Jersey was neither clearly a community of like-minded believers nor a conforming way of life. The Dutch in one view were commercial and opportunistic, Tory one day, patriot the next, depending on the barter; in another they were uncommitted to either of the Revolutionary protagonists, indifferent to the political issues of the moment; in a third they were wholly independent of other competing local or cultural orientations, committed primarily to the survival of farm and family.∞π In spite of the mercurial image of the eighteenth-century Dutch farmer, two things were clear: first, farm-based trade was a powerful stimulant for the New Jersey Dutch, so powerful that the trade often disregarded matters of belief on the part of both buyers and sellers; and, second, 26 Suburban Landscapes Dutch neighborhoods were particularly tolerant of non-Dutch traffic and even settlement by persons unlike themselves.∞∫ It was the Dutch, after all, whose commercial drive experimented with slaves in the colonies to solve the problem of labor scarcity. Curiously, these expansive, even cavalier, attitudes toward trade did not seem to threaten the tight clannishness among Dutch family and kin. In part the everyday use of the Dutch language in neighborly exchanges testified to its currency in spite of non-Dutch influences. In certain areas of northeastern New Jersey vestiges of spoken Dutch could be found even into the twentieth century. The Dutch held a special sense of their continuing culture because of their large concentration in the New York City environs. By 1790, 80 percent of the one hundred thousand persons of Dutch birth or ancestry in the new United States still resided within a fifty-mile radius of New York City.∞Ω In part, too, the frequent intermarriage among families provided a deeper Dutch foundation than any formal legal ties that arose from the Revolution and its aftermath. Many English Neighborhood families, like the Scottish Christies, could boast a Brinckerhoff inheritance, and the English Moores intermarried with Vreelands. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the area of the English Neigh- borhood legally remained under the aegis of the eighteenth-century township of Hackensack, New Jersey, several miles to the west and the county seat of Bergen County. Functionally, no nineteenth-century travelers mistook the English Neighborhood for a New England or southern satellite. The key ingredient to the character of any eighteenth-century American community lay in such a cultural landscape. In New Jersey’s English Neighborhood, where the Dutch prevailed, the singular feature, both in fact and in memory, rested not with agriculture so much as with the clash of ethnic traditions. The Dutch had lived in the Hack- ensack Valley for more than a century and retained their language, clothes, Calvinist allegiances, and entrepreneurial instincts as well as their ambivalences to English law and politics. All these features in a sense were encapsulated in their distinctive domestic architecture and building patterns. Their red sandstone walls and foundations, their double-door facade, the kitchen in the garden or the detached kitchen, the extended eaves and their peculiar barns with low-sloped roofs and entryways on the narrow walls, were hallmark features of their landscape. In addition, the Dutch continued the gabled windows Dutchness and the English Neighborhood 27 of their homeland into the eighteenth century. Probably to increase headroom the mid-eighteenth-century Dutch borrowed from the En- glish and introduced the gambrel roof that later generations treated as quintessentially Dutch, though it was not a prototype of the Nether- lands or their seventeenth-century forebears.≤≠ The very shape of the Dutch farmstead provided a distinctive icon for understanding the underlying elements of early Dutch society. The narrow, rectangular farm plots and south-facing house fronts reflect cultural judgments about land and residence which had an ongoing influence on later town development. For years after the colonial period the original farm plots sustained the imprint of the Dutch, even after years of interchange and intermarriage that diluted ‘‘Dutchness’’ to the point of incomprehension. The narrow ribbonlike strips of the Dutch farmsteads, which shaped the structure of the English Neigh- borhood well into the nineteenth and even into the twentieth century, represented more than a mere formal relation to an environment; they reflected a shared cultural consciousness, an identity with neighbors.≤∞ In part these strips served as material representations of the Dutch tradition of land distribution. Three features of this distribution merit special mention. First, in any original distribution of land every Dutch yeoman was to share in the qualitative spectrum of land, which is to say each farmer’s land crossed some portion of woodlot, pasturage, fresh meadow, salt meadow, or swamp. Every farmer shared the desirable and undesirable aspects of a particular terrain. Second, many of these strips abutted either the watercourse or highway to insure trade access. The third feature of the land was the absence of fences, a recognition that the value of the land lay in its producing function rather than in meticulous boundary marking. This land distribution pattern followed from the multiple uses Dutch farmers had for the land. Their habit of crop rotation, manur- ing, and use of salt river mud for fertilization plus many other agricultural strategies required the land variation that their land shapes reflected. The intensively civil dimension of their community life and the permeability of its boundaries, some have speculated, stemmed from their ancient dike-building tradition. The old Holland dikes appeared to be one dramatic manifestation of the Dutch reliance on their neighbors rather than upon their noblemen to fashion defenses against Norman invaders.≤≤ In eighteenth-century America the 28 Suburban Landscapes Dutch retained their traditions selectively but, with the possible ex- ception of some religious groupings, had long since abandoned their emotional ties with Holland.≤≥ The Dutch had not, however, embraced the values of the legally dominant British. The legal framework of seventeenth-century Dutch life, for example, rooted itself in Roman law rather than English common law. One of the many consequences of this difference concerned inheritance. When a Dutch farmer died intestate, the Dutch often apportioned his land, half to his wife, half to his children without regard to sex. Although diminishing amounts of available land forced changes, the Dutch resisted the British practice of primogeniture, leaving an entire property to the first-born male. By the eighteenth century the pattern of Dutch apportionment, if increasingly unequal and progressively male dominant, was still powerfully conditioned by the earlier tradition of equal distribution. Land went to the sons, while cash, slaves, and livestock passed to daughters.≤∂ With the arrival of British general Sir William Howe and the troubles of the Revolution, Dutchmen continued a record of mixed allegiances. These internal and external divisions and allegiances, one interpretation has it, compelled a reinvention of Dutchness to help clarify the disruption to family, church, and community brought by the Revolutionary War.≤∑

The reference English Neighborhood in the colonial period represented a distortion of the actual New Jersey landscape, which contained a growing number of other settlers who were neither English nor Dutch. Still, many of the Dutch family names that played through both American and British dispatches during the Revolution continued to appear on local maps and documents well into the nineteenth century. By 1840 several distinct settlements dotted the En- glish Neighborhood. The center-most settlement, the first that George Washington passed through during his embarrassing retreat from Fort Lee (November 20, 1776), contained in 1840 about half of the farmsteads and public structures that the artist Charles Chapman documented for 1869. The change during the intervening twenty-nine years registered itself with the continuity of seven families (including the largest landholders—Vreeland, Christie, Moore, Riley, Brincker- hoff, and Edsall) and the influx of twenty-four new names, most of which were neither Dutch nor English (see fig. 1.3). The farmhouses faced south, repeating the Dutch precedent that put the winter sun in Fig. 1.3. Carole Root Cole map of Leonia, 1840. This map documents the enduring imprint of Dutch land allocations, the scattered quality of the community’s residences, and the mixed ethnicity of the Dutch, English, Scottish, and French home owners. Courtesy of Carole Cole Neubauer 30 Suburban Landscapes the central sitting room, and most of the farms stretched east-west in their peculiar ribbonlike rectangles.≤∏ But additional structures faced other directions and sited themselves on plots too small for farming. In both 1840 and 1869 this middle section of the English Neighborhood barely qualified as a hamlet, that is, a small village without a permanent church and officially a section of a larger township. Between the Revolution and the Civil War the English Neighborhood landscape had changed only marginally. By 1859 the expansion of New York City and the coming of the railroad initiated a transformation of these environs but without completely overriding older social and cultural traditions. Before the railroad, transportation to the New York ferries involved several days by wagon, a day by barge along Overpeck Creek and the Hackensack River, and a long afternoon by horseback or stagecoach, weather permitting.≤π The elements of nature provided insulating barriers, as in- contestable as the high-cliffed palisades that formed the west bank of the Hudson River and the eastern boundary of English Neighborhood properties. These formidable impediments precluded easy access to the Hudson by either New Jerseyites or New Yorkers. When residents of the neighborhood left the area for business, they were more likely to travel to the Bergen County seat in Hackensack than they were to go to New York, which was a major excursion. In 1944 Charles Chapman’s artistic landscape of the 1869 English Neighborhood did not depict a community in any recognizable, traditional sense. Indeed the features of the English Neighborhood that he made most pronounced were iconic: the narrow rectangular farm plots, the ‘‘Dutch’’ architectural style and the decentralized farm dwellings along the principal highway. To the uninitiated these material features must have appeared rather pedestrian. In context, however, Chapman had imparted the central aspects of Dutch communal life: a consciously shared familial culture, pragmatic and adaptable social designs, self- contained households that welcomed exchange with folks unlike themselves. If his twentieth-century audience grasped only fractions of their historical importance, these features carried other associations that made perfect sense to twentieth-century suburban culture. The connotations of prevailing domesticity, agricultural independence, living space within natural countrysides, and the varied economic resources and needs of their neighbors contained priorities many suburbanites could recite to themselves as a powerful suburban litany. Dutchness and the English Neighborhood 31 Chapman’s twentieth-century map of this area, to repeat the original point, looked selectively both backward to the past and forward to the present. His depiction of a dominant Dutch tradition over- simplified the actual ethnic and racial diversity of both his historic community and his 1944 suburb. The intimation of ongoing traditions obscured the actual organizations and new politics that gave rise to a distinctive twentieth-century suburban community. Still, Chapman’s important contribution to his own present-day community was to enlist the force of history as a value in community formation. When they invoked images of the Dutch and the English Neighborhood for twentieth-century rituals of celebration and authority, suburbanites were seldom experts on the actual histories of such icons. Neverthe- less, their invocations gave voice to the self-conscious uncertainties and ambitions that every community faced in creating its own distinctive landscape. Many subsequent invocations of historical memory, particularly for suburbs that arose in the twentieth century, signaled a particular kind of social crisis or organizational dilemma. The rich heritage of the English Neighborhood not only provided its future communities with actual inheritances; it also generated conceptual resources to reinvent their history and make memory itself an important feature of community formation. chapter 2 The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894

he coming of the Northern Valley Railroad in 1859 reconfigured Tthe landscape of the English Neighborhood and set in motion dynamics that invited residents to reconsider their social identity as a ‘‘Dutch’’ community of scattered farmsteads. Almost immediately, the railroad sparked a reorganization of the land and introduced a concentration of houses, an unprecedented centering of community activity. Even the rudimentary Chapman map of 1869 documented the seeds of this change, the small, close-sited house plots near the crossroads of Grand Avenue and the Fort Lee–Hackensack Turnpike. The railroad, which passed through the Hackensack Valley and along Overpeck Creek, also led to a series of train stations for the delivery of mail and trade goods from the city. The highway crossroads and the railroad station became the east and west boundaries of the new town center, known as the ‘‘Village’’ to local residents. In the twentieth century ordinary Americans would almost reflexively mark the coming of the railroad as the strategic moment when a despoiling machine entered the pastoral garden.∞ Exactly how did English Neighborhood residents respond, and how did their reactions contribute to the shaping of an American suburban community? Initially, English Neighborhood residents met the railroad and its entourage with their usual routines, but their undramatic reactions were ultimately revealing of deeper developments. Few gave any sign of accepting nineteenth-century notions of a romantic, primitive power to the rural, verdant pasture that would make the railroad a reflexive symbol of noisy intrusion and sudden destruction.≤ The railroad first necessitated a further sharpening of the town’s place name, a The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894 33 process that clarified the peculiar continuity of the residents with their past. At the midpoint of the old English Neighborhood the railroad designated one stop ‘‘the English Neighborhood near Fort Lee Road.’’ The official title was cumbersome by itself; it was also unfortunate, since another town and post office flourished at the top of the palisades and was known as ‘‘Fort Lee.’’ The potential railroad village below, which initially shortened its railroad name to Fort Lee, only compounded the confusion. The railroad needed another name to differentiate the two entities. In their deliberations over a village name, residents of the English Neighborhood once again turned to their history. They were loath to abandon the Lee and its associations with George Washington and his nearby Revolutionary fort.≥ Their hesitancy is curious, in retrospect, but underscored two important points: first, they emphatically sought a historical association to sustain the perceived importance of the En- glish Neighborhood to the Revolution. Second, they must have had a very slight grasp on the real historical import of the name Lee. Fort Lee had been named for one of Washington’s key generals, Charles Lee, a professional soldier of Welsh descent rather than the general’s remarkable adjutant, Henry ‘‘Light Horse Harry’’ Lee (1732–1818) of Virginia.∂ The memory of Lee contained in the newly coined name, Leonia, represented more of a commitment to a locus, an affirmation of place, an attachment to a shared landscape, than a grasp of the actual history of Charles Lee’s Revolutionary significance. The usage of Leonia, a town name new in 1865, was just one of several alterations of the English Neighborhood traditions wrought by the railroad. Next came stores and storage places for the goods brought by the railroad, necessitating new land use and the area’s first town center. The cluster of small house plots of 1865 became the seat of a commercial marketplace at the crossroads of the highway and the railroad tracks, providing a nascent center to community activity. The new town center, however, did not overpower the older tradition of scattered, self-sufficient farmsteads. Chapman’s map showed some fifty-three dwellings for Leonia in 1869; in the first federal census (1880) to acknowledge ‘‘Leonia Village’’ there were but forty-eight households (266 persons). The railroad did not automatically or immediately mean profitable growth. ‘‘The evolution of the fringe in the early nineteenth century,’’ Henry Binford has correctly argued, ‘‘involved a basic shift to a more city-oriented economy, but a shift that 34 Suburban Landscapes strengthened and multiplied villages—small, mixed activity population centers—rather than one that extended the dense settlement pattern of the city.’’∑ The point also applied to developing suburbs later in the century. The new merchants and mechanics of Leonia Village in the post– Civil War period were not all strangers, rushing in from New York City. William Moore, whose father had been born in one of Leonia’s old Revolutionary Dutch houses, returned to Leonia from New York and founded his hardware store, but George F. Schor, a native of France, whose substantive farmstead appeared on Chapman’s 1869 map, began the shift to nonagricultural work in the meantime. He listed himself as a retired mechanic in the 1880 census. His son Cor- nelius Schor worked as a railroad agent and a second son, Garrett, as a blacksmith. Emmanuel Gismond, a recent newcomer and native of Italy, conducted a coal business. His son would solidify his village roots with a marriage to Schor’s daughter. Robert J. G. Wood, whose father had cultivated a large farm in the English Neighborhood since 1850, made his principal occupation ‘‘life insurance.’’ The old farming family of Mabies were represented in the 1880 census by James Mabie, carpenter. Similarly, several Vreelands still kept to the soil, but one family member, Richard, took up the role of telegraph clerk. Phillip Cluss, who still registered his occupation as farmer in 1880, would before the end of the century take over Schor’s grocery in the village’s center. Finally, the Christie family with English Neighborhood roots and large landholdings from the Revolutionary period were represented in 1880 by James Christie, age forty-two, a ‘‘retired merchant.’’∏ Farming coexisted with the new market center through the first decades of railroad development. Agriculture was still a major activity of the English Neighborhood in the post–Civil War years of ‘‘Leonia Village’’; indeed, it is likely that several individuals who listed nonfarming occupations still worked the soil in addition to plying their stated occupation. But the railroad had clearly siphoned off younger members of the older families into new fields of work. Older skills, like carpentry and blacksmithing, familiar to every farmstead, now became specialized occupations that could support a family on their own. This central marketplace near the railroad station necessarily forced changes in the self-sufficient character of the older farmsteads. With the coming of the railroad farmers could buy goods at a cheap price rather than make many of the leather, cloth, and iron products The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894 35 essential to their work. The railroad also permitted them a wider consumer market for their surplus crops. Gradually, they began to concentrate their land into specialty produce like strawberries, mel- ons, and dairy products which were valued by New York City.π In fact, as late as 1911, some villagers could also enhance their wages with profits from shipping Overpeck Creek fish to New York City.∫ The railroad enabled them to sell ‘‘freshness’’ along with newly picked vegetables, and the speed of delivery became a new market consideration. Overnight, however, farmers did not reorient their planting. Still, the freshness of country air and country life became attractive commodities themselves and would begin to lure city folk with the promise of ‘‘country.’’ All these features together created a demand for residences, which spawned a quiet and gradual shift in land use. The railroads did not create suburban villages so much as force a reorganization of the land and traditional values. Many crucial decisions for social growth and economic development were certainly made well outside the parameters of village life, but there is no gain- saying the fact that Leonia villagers at the end of the nineteenth century made a set of special choices themselves, however constricted. The most important of these choices was the conversion of farmland into realty in the entrepreneurial spirit of both railroad and city. In the early 1880s Andrew D. Bogert and Cornelius Christie, both descen- dants of families rooted in the area before the Revolutionary period and longtime residents of the English Neighborhood, decided to purchase and develop the farmlands owned once by early-nineteenth- century residents such as Michael Vreeland and David Christie.Ω Local residents with deep English Neighborhood roots rather than outside speculators developed the first plans to build comfortable houses and cottages for the railroad commuters. They offered a model home but tolerated many styles in their development. In 1885 they called their planned community ‘‘Leonia Park,’’ sited it within walking distance of the train station, and sold land for homes in a modest Victorian style, modeled more on the Victorian country cottage than the expandable Dutch style of the English Neighborhood.∞≠ Still, An- drew Bogert and Cornelius Christie’s new development held to the adaptable, rectilinear Dutch farmscape favored by W. P. Richards, a contractor and Leonia Park resident (see fig. 2.1).∞∞ In the center of this early planned community they introduced a winding, country lane, Crescent Avenue. The fifty-six-lot development intended to venue This map embodied the proposal for a planned suburb, with its central a crescent for This map embodied the proposal ig. 2.1. Map of Leonia Park, 1885. Park, ig. 2.1. Map of Leonia F and prospect. No house ever matched the suggested model. Courtesy Boyd the suggested of David matched house ever No and prospect. The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894 37 exploit the enhancements of country life and access to the city; it took advantage of the availability of resident, skilled and unskilled, labor for house construction; it accepted, in part, that future farming enterprise would either adapt to or be displaced by a very different country life. If successful, both Bogert and Christie could expect a very profitable conversion of their native farmland. The Bogert family registered one version of the project’s success by building a spacious Leonia home nearby, designed by New York architect Stanford White.∞≤ The development of Leonia Park signaled the changing value of land, but it still did not produce a homogenized suburb or a distinctively middle-class pattern of domestic life. The new development produced houses for a range of incomes rather than a specialized residential district with fashionable consumer patterns and obvious social preferences. Serially, other farmers, such as the Moores and the Woods, would follow Bogert’s entrepreneurial example. The competitive conversion of farmland into housing would pro- ceed routinely but undramatically into the first three decades of the twentieth century. Bogert’s Leonia Park apportioned lots in many sizes and offered a plan for a model home. His actual model, however, never seems to have been built but was used to suggest architectural features that were realized piecemeal in his tract. It is not clear how stringently his self-imposed codes were enforced, but his prospectus insisted that ‘‘all lots [were] to be sold with restrictions as to improvements.’’∞≥ What is clear is that Bogert and Christie sold lots gradually to individual buyers and builders into the twentieth century and intended to provide some control over the shape of the emergent community to which they had historic and kinship ties. This arrangement virtually insured a heterogeneous architectural standard and a self-screened variety of latecomers. The housing styles varied dramatically from small cottage through multifamily structures to substantial domiciles, and they could be found side by side throughout the community’s development. If residential size reflected social class status, no one section distinguished itself by social class.∞∂ Leonia Park’s projected home model was a decidedly modest structure of about 1,300 square feet for two stories. It was a domestic model that could be readily found in the ubiquitous pattern books of the period, particularly those promulgated by George Palliser and Robert W. Sheppell.∞∑ Such houses sported gables, balcony, bay windows, multiple porches, and idiosyncratic decorations on a landscaped 38 Suburban Landscapes plot, while inside both second and first floor were organized into four sections. The first floor opened from a veranda into a hall that led in turn to a parlor, the two principal public spaces of the house. The remaining two first-floor sections provided a more private sitting room/ dining room and the kitchen work space. Upstairs were four bedrooms ranging in size from 9% — 11% to 11% — 14%6&. Suburban standards of housing and decoration, so popular in the magazines of the period, make clear that the Leonia Park model offered a distinctly modest version of the Victorian suburban home (see fig. 2.2). Its four bedrooms were less than the average number of five to seven rooms of the Victorian style.∞∏ Also, most idealized Vic- torian residences had second-floor bathrooms. Bogert’s model clearly sought to preserve the Victorian preference for separate private spaces but pitched his plans to both affluent and working-class audiences. Most important, the model was regularly ignored and varied designs appeared over the next several decades. Retrospectively, the purpose of the model seemed more suggestive than restrictive of voluntary discretion. The basic initiative for the early planned suburb arose from the ranks of the oldest families, who thereby introduced a powerful force of change rather than a defense of tradition. Andrew D. Bogert began Leonia Park in 1885, when the railroad village numbered about 300 persons; he was well along in the project by 1900, when the village had more than doubled to 804. The numbers are not large but historically represent a solid increase. The distribution of the newcomers attracted by Leonia Park (1885) and later subdivisions bore a remarkable contrast to the groupings that followed the coming of the railroad in 1859 (see table A.1). Between 1880 and 1900 the managerial and professional categories increased from a tenth to a third of the community’s residents, a core that provided the initial root stem of a middle-class suburb. Con- comitantly, the force of the older tradition of farming and manual labor shifted downward from nearly half to a tenth of the population. The increases in the skilled labor category (combined with the farming and unskilled groups), however, meant that well over half of Leonia still earned their livings with their hands. If many of these skilled laborers belonged clearly (because of apprenticeship or basic formal training) in an emergent middle class—especially the jeweler, lithographer, the artists—others did not. The ferry wheelsman, the Fig. 2.2. W. P. Richards’s Leonia Park homestead, 1889. This frame cottage, the home of a principal residential builder in Leonia into the twentieth century, sought to attract residents of solid but hardly affluent means. Photograph by author

pilot, the electric lineman, the mason, and the dressmaker depended on the availability of the season or fluctuating markets. The changing structure of the community also makes clear that any emergent middle-class suburb required individuals from the working classes to realize the promise of community development. During the process of suburbanization many occupations passed in and out of the permeable middle class. Several members of the farming class and likely also some skilled laborers were economically comfortable, if not affluent, by the standards of their day, if home ownership was the measure. In 1900 only 15 percent of this community owned their homes without mortgages, while nearly a third (31 percent) held mortgages on their residences. Emphatically, the turn-of-the-century dynamics of home owning would expand these proportions during the twentieth century. In 1900, however, nearly one-half of the population (47 percent) rented their homes and established a pattern that remained surprisingly large in older suburbs into the twentieth century. Home ownership need not always be automatically considered a permanent feature of the American suburb, even among obviously middle-class groups.∞π 40 Suburban Landscapes Ultimately, Leonia Park’s relatively slow pace of housing development would become a stabilizing resource for the subsequent suburb of Leonia, New Jersey. The process of assimilating new neighbors increased steadily but never surged, as it so often did later. In the 1880s, however, this first, conscious suburban development accompanied other changes that transformed the structure of the railroad village. Within walking distance of the earliest train station in the 1890s, one could find on the old English Neighborhood Road (later changed to Grand Avenue) a limited number of buildings other than private farmsteads, which had appeared on Chapman’s 1869 map. Such buildings included a mill (probably a part of the old Vreeland farm), a schoolhouse (f. 1856), a Dutch Reformed mission church (f. 1824), and a hotel (possibly with an adjacent tavern). These public facilities were not concentrated but, rather, were strung out over nearly a mile, reflecting the older, scattered pattern of Dutch decentralization. They had survived, most likely, on the increasing traffic to the Hudson River ferry docks more than on the neighboring farmers, who were not yet dependent on consumer goods from the city. The coming of the railroad altered this commerce and fostered the development of a marketplace center geared to the residents of Leonia Park and its environs. This railroad market center gave rise to a new mode of land distribution, to plots whose nonfarm size would never support a family. They set individuals thinking about nonfarming uses to which land could be put but without abandoning the value of rural space. Some early arrivals came with motives unspecified, soon began to act like land speculators, but in time settled into the roles of established citizenry. ‘‘In those years [1850, when the Woods arrived from New York],’’ a later newspaper article recalled, ‘‘there was no Leonia. It was but part of the large English Neighborhood which extended from Englewood to Fairview. Bob’s father and mother moved into the little stone house which at the time stood somewhere in the vicinity of the Methodist Church; their nearest neighbor and the only house to be seen was the Schor residence on Grand Avenue [previously the En- glish Neighborhood Road] south of what is now known as Hillside Avenue, with nothing but fields and orchards round about and in the distance the Overpeck where the boys went swimming and where too they baited their nets for crabs and shot wild fowl.’’∞∫ These newcomers, so the retrospective view had it, came primarily for the merits The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894 41 of country life. The underscored values of rural life, however, were only a portion of the original motivation. The Robert Wood family entered the English Neighborhood only partly as farmers. Within a short period of time they were among the largest, if not the largest, landowners in the vicinity and had built a commodious homestead on the other principal thoroughfare, the Fort Lee–Hackensack Turnpike. Some people left the city to invest their capital in land as well as capitalize on the promised stabilizing effect of country life. For others city work actually opened the way to residence in undeveloped portions of Bergen County. The family of Anna Christie had lived in the area for most of the nineteenth century. Her father had been a large landowner. She was related to the first mayor of Leonia, Cornelius Christie, and married to Edward Stagg, a wealthy hardware executive with offices in New York City. With the marriage the old Christie homestead, having easy access to the train station and hence New York City, became the Stagg Homestead at the central crossroads of the area. Stagg’s own family had been associated with the Hackensack Valley since the Revolution, yet his fortune depended on the city. Stagg’s urban success enabled the Christie family to sustain its rural presence and suburban influence for at least two more generations.∞Ω For still other families various combinations of country life and urban opportunity made railroad villages attractive. Doris Faig, for instance, born in 1898, was the product of two families who arrived in Leonia in the late nineteenth century. One grandfather, Alfred Paul Hurd, had left a farm in Canton, Massachusetts, before the Civil War. After mustering out, he was determined to find employment in New York City and did so eventually as a ‘‘stationary engineer’’ (‘‘the one who keeps the boilers going in big buildings’’).≤≠ He moved his residence to New Jersey for reasons both of economy and comfort in a rural culture he understood, but the prevailing reason was likely to have been that by moving to the suburbs he could have his own land.≤∞ In Leonia he met a young woman named Beeching, whose family had arrived from Huntington, Long Island, in the early 1890s. Her father, David Beeching, who was a bookkeeper in New York City, involved himself in town affairs and built first a string of homes, as both residences and investments. For much of the nineteenth century house building was often thought to be a financial alternative to the security of a bank. 42 Suburban Landscapes In spite of country attractions of railroad villages, there was also a substantial mobility back to the city. The Beechings lost two children after their first and began to suspect their locality was responsible. ‘‘My grandmother thought the town was hoodooed,’’ Doris Faig guessed, ‘‘and she wanted to go back where she was from . . . to Brooklyn, New York.’’ Faig’s mother, however, married her neighbor, Alfred Paul Hurd, and remained for the rest of her life in routines that integrated country life, urban work, and family trips to Brooklyn. In sum, the attractions of country living were held more lightly by some than others: some came for the financial and aesthetic incentives of country life; some remained where they had already lived for years, conced- ing new routines to the city and to marriage; some came yet returned to the city and older family associations. For the most part the memory of these motivations stressed the seeking of a special domestic residence rather than an escape from the ills or dangers of city life. The invocation of country mores seemed to encompass the reorganization of town life and the appearance of nonfarming residents as natural courses of progressive development rather than be threatened or dis- lodged by them. The mix of motivations may help explain a broader attraction to many Americans in these years for the widely circulating pastoral images of Currier and Ives. The clash of country memories and city realities tended to transform the very image of country from a description of rural life to a broader cultural expression.≤≤ By the turn of the century the terms rural and country were no longer synonymous, and new town centers along the railroad lines intimated much larger social and economic networks. The railroads not only opened opportunities for longtime resident farmers and New Jersey natives; they provided access for city dwellers who sought a different kind of urban living. In 1880 the U.S. federal census has shown that the railroad had not so much displaced the older residents but, rather, had added opportunities for them and for newer arrivals who provided Leonia with modern skills and services. In 1880, 21 percent of the village householders were still farmers, and an additional 27 percent gave their occupation as unskilled laborers, many of them farm laborers. Yet another 27 percent of the village’s householders were skilled laborers—workers in the nearby dye fac- tory, carriage builders, blacksmiths, bookkeepers, dentists, and especially carpenters—who took advantage of the inexpensive land available for housing in the new area and building their own homes.≤≥ In The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894 43 addition, a small merchant class (10 percent) and a single professional, an engineer, created socioeconomic diversity in the 1880 community of forty-eight households. Yet the stability of these new communal features should not be exaggerated. Almost half (47.4 percent) of all village householders in 1880 were renters, testifying either to their limited economic resources or to their transient status as newcomers.≤∂ In a sense the new town center and residents represented superficial changes; they did not displace the prominent or long-term landholders of the region, some 39 percent of whom in 1880 had persisted as householders since 1869. Newcomers swirled around them, introducing news and ideas from other places, reducing the provinciality of the isolated locales. Latecomers also hesitated to root themselves immediately in Leonia, building smaller wooden homes and stores for the most part, to test the prospects of a new community. Indeed, there was reason to be cir- cumspect about their new locale: 61 percent of the household names in 1880 did not appear on Chapman’s 1869 residential map. If anything, the coming of the railroad introduced not only strangers but a variation on the older commercial propensities of the Dutch and their easy reception of non-Dutch neighbors. The railroad, the principal means and symbol of America’s extraordinary nineteenth-century transiency, may have thrown up a new town center, new residences, and a new name, but it did not automatically produce a functioning community.≤∑ The varied motivations and needs that brought people to this railroad village emphasized the enhanced mobility of modern life. The dynamics of the railroad and the city virtually insured that even nascent suburban communities were distinguished by their constant influx of new residents. In 1840 there were fewer than 15 families in the area that would become Leonia; in 1880 there were 48 households with 288 residents; in 1900 the village would number 179 households and 804 persons.≤∏ The railroad had introduced new elements but did not necessarily displace older English Neighborhood traditions of Dutch agriculture. Although the population increased by a factor of four or five, the rate of increase was sufficiently gradual to forestall any sense of an urban surge or problematic density. The railroad did introduce into this New Jersey village an intensive reprise upon the older, heterogeneous ethnic and racial tradition of the English Neighborhood; it brought not only native-born 44 Suburban Landscapes strangers but also strangers who were foreign-born and of varied social class. Nearly one-third (31 percent) of the residents in 1880 were natives of Europe, predominately German (14.2 percent). In addition, 45 percent of the fathers of householders were foreign-born. Did these new neighbors and their different traditions destabilize the region’s pre–Civil War social arrangements? If a functioning community was to develop in the English Neighborhood, what group would take the initiative and with what impact on the multicultural and multiracial residents?≤π Foreign-born residents supplemented the existing structure in all occupations (see table A.12). The number of unskilled laborers doubled because of this immigrant influx, which also doubled the managerial residents; the foreigners also slightly increased the skilled laborers in the community. Most important, the influx of immigrants did not substantially increase the commuting class of railroad pas- sengers but, rather, introduced into the village a new labor force working in the immediate environs. The nature of the change introduced by the railroad seems to have enhanced immediately the agricultural prospects of the village and well positioned some landowners in developing their land in nonagricultural ways. In the first twenty years of its existence, however, the railroad had not clearly produced a middle- class, urban-oriented community. In spite of increasing numbers of strangers, the older memory of the village sustained the image of a static, orderly town outside the urban orbit. ‘‘The first local grocery,’’ one 1930 reminiscence of early days went, ‘‘was run by Squire Schor and later taken over by P. P. Cluss who also conducted the Post Office. Mrs. Cluss is still living and has many pleasant recollections of the time when hunting on the meadows brought sportsmen to warm their toes at her stove, and the boys came running from the creek, sleek and dripping wet, with basketsful of crabs as the day’s catch.’’≤∫ The tension between the townspeople’s image of a country village and its actual, changing socioeconomic structure would become sharper during the twentieth century, as village ways were clearly left behind. In the throes of the process the mixture of people and values had to present confusions that could not be easily sorted by invoking past precedent or future opportunity. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and even into the early years of the twentieth, residents concentrated on the community they were building, recognizing that they were also leaving behind an The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894 45 older model. Phillip P. Cluss, for example, listed his occupation as a farmer in the 1880 U.S. federal census; he was a native New Jerseyan, like his parents, and a Civil War veteran. Two decades later the census listed him as a merchant and boarding house owner. Yet it was no small feature of the railroad’s impact that people kept their older wood stove, Huck Finn images from inhibiting their hopes for town growth.≤Ω It was a part of the transformation of the village that these traditional images were strengthened and repeated as essential elements of subsequent descriptions of community development.≥≠ Under the shadow of such rural images what kind of suburban village actually emerged out of the old English Neighborhood? One might approach this question by noting that a picturesque view of rural life does not depend on agriculture. It is probably fair to assume that from the beginning people were mindful that a different kind of community was in the offing. There may have been some question of its marginality or economically strategic place, but everyone must have realized a new relationship with the landscape was imminent. John Stilgoe has persuasively argued the value of suburban living was that of a ‘‘borderland,’’≥∞ a zone between rural and urban, a managed rather than a primitive countryside. He further argues that this zone has three characteristics: farms with arable land; mature trees on land abandoned by farmers as unproductive; and country residences of people with urban connections.≥≤ As an existing railroad village, Leonia had all three, but, just as important, it had a core group of residents with deep, historical ties to both the land and to an extensive network of kinship and neighbors. Like its earlier eighteenth-century Dutch tradition, this core of residents continued to face a substantial minority of foreign-born newcomers and the continuing dilemma of social cohesion and assimilation: when do the differences of incoming residents threaten the economic and social order of established citizens? The railroad clearly took Leonia beyond its village status. Gener- ally, an American village was something very different from its English counterpart. English law designated a village as a town too poor to support a church. In the United States a village was a community un- deserving the name of town, which graphically took stock of the variety of town/village standards and the looseness with which they were applied. Like post–Civil War Leonia, most nineteenth-century Amer- ican villages would support a school but not a church,≥≥ an isolated hotel but not a commercial center, a post office but not a hardware or 46 Suburban Landscapes dry goods store. It might have a crossroads and public house where political discussions gathered about someone’s Franklin stove, but there were no formal political groupings, no organization that could turn out a vote. In the early days they voted, as one Leonian later testified, ‘‘a straight ticket—either Whig or Democrat.’’≥∂ Typically, a village had little more than thirty to sixty houses along a half-mile strip of road. By the end of the nineteenth century the development of Leonia Park had converted Leonia village into a budding suburb, introducing substantive changes into the centralizing pattern of land use, commerce, and immigrant residents. By the very fact of new residents in new homes the village expanded, and the authority of longtime residents necessarily needed to account for less rooted viewpoints. By 1900 only 6 percent of the 1880 residents of the railroad village, usually the larger landholding residents, remained in the community.≥∑ Rather than forming an atavistic rear guard, however, the older inhabitants joined the newcomers in land and social development. More important than the sheer quantity of newcomers or the increased fiscal resources of some residents was the introduction of new community services. Leonia Park would not survive by new homes alone. Village residents who had no access to farm or garden plots necessarily assumed a much more frequent dependence on the local market than their farming neighbors. Leonians also required skills they did not have for a range of construction and repair work. In other words, Leonia Park created a regular rather than a seasonal demand for both skilled and unskilled labor. In addition, the shop- keepers themselves provided a new economic (and ethnic) grouping substantially different from the bartering Dutch farmers of the early- nineteenth-century English Neighborhood. They were go-betweens rather than originators of their products. Without this new workforce there could have been no Leonia Park; their activity contributed as substantially to the budding suburban community as its house de- signers and leading citizens. To service these new townspeople a central marketplace arose between the train station and the old eighteenth-century crossroads, a distance of less than a quarter-mile. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century Leonia developed a main street with distinctive storefronts down both sides of its streets. A turn-of-the-century railroad commuter walking east from the train station toward the highway crossroads would pass on his left: Henry Ferdon’s coalyard, Wil- Fig. 2.3. Village center, looking east from railroad station, ca. 1910. This postcard view shows Ferdon’s feed and building supply store, next to the railroad station, in the foreground; then Moore’s hardware store, with apartments above; then a series of residences with storefronts. In the distance there is a mix of automobile and horse and buggy. Author’s collection, courtesy of Judith W. Boudah liam Moore’s hardware store, which shared the same building with P. P. Cluss’s general store, Sam Chin’s Chinese laundry, George Blass- field’s barber shop, a meeting hall known as the Lyceum (which later became Liza Kiphut’s newspaper, stationery and candy store), and the Swedish shoemaker’s shop. On the commuter’s right he would pass Mott Allaire’s livery stable, the blacksmith shop, a multipurpose building that eventually would house the fire company, the police, and the mayor’s office, then Papparelli’s general store, a two-story residence (Gregg’s), and Greenberg’s tailor shop (see figs. 2.3–2.4). A short distance more would put the commuter at the crossroads, a small hotel and John Cowan’s Leonia Pharmacy. Perpendicular to this central marketplace was Spring Street, where several Leonia merchants had built modest, wood-frame homes. The remaining merchants either lived above their stores or rented out rooms to lodgers.≥∏ None of the frame, wooden buildings of this marketplace were built, like the old Dutch farmsteads, out of local red sandstone or brick. The marketplace as a whole depicted, first and foremost, a collage of non- Dutch inheritances and, second, a tenuousness or impermanence, a quality of hedging bets in a risk-taking venture. Both capitalist aspiration and actual investment led to legal over- Fig. 2.4. Leonia railroad station, ca. 1910. The train station represented the central hub of the railroad village. Just behind the station were warehouses for storing coal, feed, and building supplies for the nascent community. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

tures to gain primary control over the fate of the town. Since 1871 Leonia Village had been part of the township of Ridgefield, which had earlier separated from the town of Hackensack, Bergen County’s seat.≥π In 1878 the state of New Jersey passed additional legislation, permitting the organization of boroughs out of large towns such as Hackensack. In spite of Ridgefield’s secession, however, there was little interest among other villages in becoming autonomous legal entities until 1894. In that year New Jersey passed laws making citizens responsible for schools on a pro rata basis for old district debts and all future township expenses. Clearly fearing additional taxes over which they had little control and minimal benefit for their immediate locale, many Bergen County citizens abandoned the old formal town structure centered in Hackensack, the county seat. In 1894 alone, twenty-six boroughs were created, thereby introducing a formal and popular process of community formation.≥∫ This breakdown of an old township tradition and a new commitment to smaller-scale communities signaled a major change in the The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894 49 political fortunes not only of one nascent suburb but also in the political patterns of Bergen County and the state of New Jersey as well. The drama of the change seems numerically revolutionary. In the national elections of 1892 Ridgefield Township (of which Leonia was a part) closely matched the county’s Democratic preference for president: Grover Cleveland over incumbent Benjamin Harrison. The margin of preference was roughly the (8–10 percent) patterns that the town and county had followed in tandem for nearly two decades. The election of 1896, however, would not only put a Republican president in the White House; Republican officeholders would henceforth be voted into office with very substantial margins in the new town of Leonia as well as Bergen County for many years to come (see table A.12).≥Ω The creation of a new borough, Leonia, on December 5, 1894, completed a process that thereafter its citizens depicted as ordinary and natural. No matter that the process actually sought to transform a comparatively sizable township into smaller, more manageable communities. Most later accounts ignored the fact that its creation as a borough reflected dynamics that rippled through the county and the state. From the borough’s viewpoint the principal change simply provided for formal election of local leadership. Second, the creation of the borough further defined the formal boundaries between neighboring villages and towns which had begun with the actual naming of the railroad village Leonia in 1865. Third, the new borough was thought—certainly in the eyes of longtime New Jersey native Corne- lius Christie, who was elected the borough’s first mayor—to achieve a measure of autonomous explicit control over the fate of the community, which was rapidly becoming populated with non-Jersey natives. (The state’s own population had doubled between 1893 and 1910.)∂≠ The literature on suburbanization generally has depicted such legal and political reorganizations as the perceived expedients of anxious antiurban reactionaries. In the face of urban strife, ethnic un- rest, disease, congestion, and even co-optation by the new immigrant hordes, so the literature goes, suburbanites choose ‘‘escape.’’∂∞ The ‘‘borough’’ alternative of local government became one concrete political manifestation of this defensiveness. The continued presence and strategic initiatives of Leonia’s longtime residents, however, suggest a different set of motivations. The Borough of Leonia’s first ordinances addressed problems of modernizing the existing sanitation facilities of the town, which is to say the earliest shapers of the com- 50 Suburban Landscapes munity began immediately to take responsibility for the communal welfare and problems hitherto left unattended. Their own economic self-interests may well have been sharpened by their new neighbors, but there is no evidence of xenophobic restrictions in their earliest ordinances. The early official borough activities have documented a town going about its prosaic business. The very first ordinance created a board of health; half of the first budget ($3,500) was devoted to roads and (nine) street lamps.∂≤ In addition to the appointment of officers and committees, the mayor and council designated one resident as town marshal, who in turn requested four policemen to serve without pay. In addition, he requested two pairs of handcuffs, two revolvers, and a dog cage. Within the decade the marshal and his officers would be cited a number of times for special services, once for the capture and arrest of ‘‘highwaymen’’ on the Fort Lee–Hackensack Turnpike.∂≥ Two of the nineteenth-century arrivals—Mott Allaire as town recorder and Cornelius D. Schor as justice of the peace, both of French descent—became appointed officials of the town. For the first years the minutes of borough activity involved liaisons with gas and water companies, early negotiations for a trolley, consultations with the board of education, and the shaming of delin- quent taxpayers via a public listing in the local newspaper. One of Cornelius Christie’s mayoral successors would be Lorenzo Gismond, the town’s third mayor and a New York jeweler, whose father had immigrated from Italy and had become one of Leonia’s early coal merchants. The suburb’s activity focused on its basic infrastructure, more concerned about the community they were building than the village or city they had left behind. There were, of course, pressures that compelled villages such as Leonia to be defensive in the 1890s. The railroads themselves had reached one of the fiscal nadirs of the century. Nationwide competing railroads had overbuilt through much of the 1880s, ignoring the statistics on ridership and commerce. Those statistics showed the impos- sibility of sustaining even present levels of traffic, yet each railroad company expected to be one of the select survivors when the shake- down finally came. During the Depression of 1893, largely fomented by railroad overbuilding, indebtedness, and bankruptcy, the railroad companies operated at the mercy of their creditors. Bankers, such as J. P. Morgan, proceeded to use the railroad industry’s economic misfor- tune as an opportunity for merger and national monopoly. The North- The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894 51 ern Valley Railroad of New Jersey, a satellite of the Erie Railroad, was one of the survivors, but during the 1880s and 1890s it was in no position to provide increased and cheaper transportation to the villages and towns of the Hackensack Valley. The railroad, so long an economic and cultural icon of American progress, had introduced a new and bracing cautionary note for entrepreneurial Americans by the end of the century. Progress came with its costs, and some of those costs were distinctively beyond the control of individual suburbanites.∂∂ It was in this context that public criticism of railroad and modernizing technology began to draw enthusiastically upon an earlier literary tradition endorsing and inflating pastoral values.∂∑ Similarly, cities themselves, full of the industry and energy of the nation, were fast becoming so densely populated that urban residents by the 1890s began to think more reflexively of the city as a target of ‘‘reform’’ than as a place of ‘‘opportunity.’’ The immigrant ghettos posed far less of a threat to villages on the metropolitan periphery than the city’s novel, ‘‘progressive’’ pattern of expansion itself by annexing adjacent land and towns.∂∏ Nearby New York City provided a singular case of massive expansion without an evenhanded distribution of savings and efficiencies. The maneuvering for the creation of Greater New York began well before 1898, when it actually occurred. In that consolidation of boroughs New York City increased overnight from forty-four to about three hundred square miles, annexing Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and a part of Westchester, the Bronx, to Man- hattan. The city population grew by almost two million due to this single expansion.∂π The massive size of the new city obscured the gains to each entity absorbed. For villages and towns immediately outside this urban ring the lesson of compromised autonomy was not lost. Suburbanites would worry not only about the aggrandizing ambitions of New York City but also the efforts of nearby New Jersey cities to become substantial fiscal and political powers quite suddenly. Leonia was not alone in separating itself from its host community of Ridgefield. Within ten years—the very years in which New York and other metropolises were expanding—towns and villages in the urban orbit broke into progressively smaller units, an ‘‘epidemic of boroughitis,’’ according to one account. These nascent suburbs provided a major counterpoint to the ‘‘bigger is better’’ mania of the 1890s, reflected in both corporate and metropolitan America. It was not an accident that suburbanization 52 Suburban Landscapes and urbanization arose simultaneously and that each entity began to develop new images and iconography to project their priorities. Implicit in the proliferation of suburban boroughs was a powerful and widespread effort to cultivate a different brand of American community, one with urban amenities but without urban social ills, personal dangers, or fiscal and political mismanagement. In part the external pressures compelled both new and old residents to reach for different levels of cohesion and new conceptions of their respective identities. The creation of the formal government entity, the borough, was one manifestation of cohesion. But such legal and political effort alone did not produce a functioning suburban community. Too much can be made of this first governmental organization and an explicit shift from a Democratic to a Republican political entity. Before the creation of Leonia’s town government, citizens shaped a social order voluntarily. The Lyceum, the community’s first consciously social institution, did more than formalize the stove-side discussions of the village’s general store; it represented a conscious effort to include both old and new residents in its proceedings. ‘‘The Lyceum,’’ one earlier participant recalled, ‘‘was used for so many things. We used to have our church fairs there. We used to have church suppers down there. It was the social center. Everything we had was at the Lyceum.’’∂∫ In Leonia the earliest documented suburban institution was an organization formalized as the Leonia Literary League, which preceded the creation of the borough in 1894. In 1885 a number of the ‘‘leading residents’’ organized themselves and met regularly in the members’ homes or in the Lyceum, the frame building in the village’s business district.∂Ω In context the new 1894 office of mayor and council replaced an earlier quasi-political, cultural organization that functionally created the lore and mores of the social order. In other words, the creation of Leonia’s mayor and council came after other internal structures had already been achieved within the village’s country tradition. Most important, the voluntary work of organizations such as the Leonia Literary League provided an informal decision-making body that shaped the direction of the town before and, indeed, after a formal political process materialized.∑≠ The league arranged poetry readings, musicales, dramatic readings, and debates over local and nonlocal issues. Often the lectures and entertainments were products of the citizens themselves. Particularly, the local resident-artists, Peter The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894 53 Newell and his nephew Fred Nankivel,∑∞ entertained their families and neighbors at the Lyceum with charades and amateur dramatizations, but Lyceum activities also included lecturers and entertainers from outside, such as the ventriloquists the Jewel Brothers. These entertainments often paused to consider serious civic discussions. Among other issues the membership debated in the Lyceum whether lynch laws were ever justified and decided the issue in the affirmative. They debated local priorities concerning town services: a lockup, a sidewalk for the town center, or a library and found in favor of the library. They explored emergent gender issues, such as when they posed the question: should husbands consult their wives on business issues? They considered the relative justice of jury decisions that were not unanimous. The league, in addition, arranged funds for local improvements such as a street lamp for the central crossroads. ‘‘Its anniversaries,’’ its official proceedings boasted, ‘‘have been the events of the period.’’∑≤ In addition, it kept a formal record of its work and established one of the earliest ‘‘memories’’ of town life. Membership in the Leonia Literary League was voluntary but not inclusive. There was a committee structure but no league officers. In the proceedings the participants represented old and new male residents—businessmen, schoolteachers, and the minister—together with their wives. It did not, however, include any of the several black Leonia householders in any visible roles or many of the newest working-class arrivals with foreign names.∑≥ There is more than a little reason to believe that such voluntary associations arose to check any decline in social status due to the continual influx of new residents. Many interests would be served by regular lectures and discussions on topics such as ‘‘The Retreat of the Revolutionary Army from Fort Lee.’’ The rootedness of longtime residents as well as the putative patriotism of forebears would be easily underscored in such subjects. Although the numbers attending such events clearly varied, meetings like that of May 1893, with 45 (out of 75) members and 102 guests, documented a central community agency. The power of such an organization lay in its informality, in its cultivation of ‘‘prominent residents’’ without any formal authority to do anything more than socialize. In terms of gender or social class one of the central effects of the voluntary organization in suburb or city was to promote accessibility and mute divisive communal distinctions.∑∂ Whatever distinctions were actually in the offing, American voluntary associations generally 54 Suburban Landscapes carried the outward appearance of democratic harmony and insured the relative efficacy of community culture. Its most important role, however, was to organize a coterie that would take primary responsibility for community formation. The Lyceum, activated by the Leonia Literary League, would continue to spawn other voluntary endeavors through its short history. Despite its brief life into the early years of the twentieth century, the Lyceum’s activity, more than the arrival of the railroad, the emergence of a town center, or the creation of a borough government, represented the process by which Leonia village was transformed into a suburban community. It is well to stress the absence of drama in this transformation. The primary point of the citizens’ collective endeavor was neither ‘‘literary’’ nor ‘‘governmental.’’ The ‘‘leading citizens of Leonia,’’ the Literary League’s secretary wrote, organized themselves in the first place ‘‘with the firm conviction that such an association would be of great advantage to the community in various ways.’’∑∑ In spite of the range of their interests, they seemed to have agreed that a neighborly civility required conscious energy and determination, that a conscious community life would not happen in the natural course of country or commuter routines. The confirmation of their own aims as well as the socialization of select newcomers to compatible values nevertheless had to have the trappings of everyday life: quilting bees, cake sales, village fairs, stereopticon displays, lectures, and songfests generated from the talents of local citizens. Whatever else they achieved, the Lyceum and the Leonia Literary League departed from the routines of nineteenth-century country life. If not entirely literary, the league channeled a new level of social consciousness that arrived with successive groups of newcomers. Its central purpose was to establish a new cultural style that drew in these several interests. The values of country life were not ignored and in various forms—sleigh rides in winter, cow keeping, stagecoach rides, vegetable gardens and orchards, fresh air and winding tree-lined roads—would be sustained and celebrated by townspeople into the Depression years, when they would be upgraded by high school ath- letics, scouting organizations, and artists’ open houses, among many other community-wide activities. By 1900, however, the values of the farm and rural life were no longer central to the functioning of the town. Somewhat paradoxically, the activities of the Lyceum sustained its authority by spawning additional voluntary organizations that kept The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894 55 suburban communities abreast of the latest advances in the city and the nation. This community-shaping institution laid a new foundation for both old and new residents of early American suburbs. Before 1900 the railroad precipitated the reorganization of village culture on the city periphery and a vision of community which integrated the advantages of city and country. If the proportions of resources, physical size, and population varied from community to community, both city and country seemed to have acquired many essential features of each other by the turn of the century. For instance, country life, dependent now in many ways upon urban innovations and technologies, became an essential desideratum of urban residents. Suburbs and cities were treated less as polar opposites and more as ongoing experiments in the construction of an American civic culture. No one made this point more authoritatively or forcefully than Frederick Law Olmsted, the noted nineteenth-century urban planner and designer of New York City’s Central Park. The healing presence of nature convinced Olmsted that his park planning for the city provided the analogy to the new suburbs. In his eyes these new forms did not signal the denouement of nineteenth-century urbanization but, rather, an evolutionary advance. Suburbanization was ‘‘not a sacrifice of urban conveniences but their combination with the special charms and substantial advantages of rural conditions of life.’’ Such communities did not forecast a withdrawal from urban life; they envisioned, instead, a combination of city and country values which represented ‘‘the best application of the arts of civilization to which mankind has yet obtained.’’∑∏ This village stage of suburbanization forcefully promoted a ‘‘natural’’ process of change. Whether consciously or not, the metaphors of nature became powerful agents of socialization which obscured the census-documented ethnic and social class layers of the nascent suburb. The activities of the village’s voluntary associations, especially the Leonia Literary League and Lyceum, modestly formalized the activity of neighborhood culture; they advanced the management of nature and social priorities as if they were but extensions of routine interactions. Neighbors performed entertainments for neighbors; friends discussed the community’s needs for sanitation and social order. The operations of these voluntary organizations began to systema- tize town discussion and behavior without the formal apparatus of elected government, that is, informally, commensurate with the com- 56 Suburban Landscapes munity’s cultivation of a ‘‘natural landscape.’’ When a formal elected process arose, the initial political work of the town strove to imitate the earlier voluntary tradition and to avoid the appearance of drawing sharp social distinctions. These initiatives, often carried out by longtime residents, struck townspeople as maturations of past patterns rather than unprecedented embarkations into a modern present or future. Railroad technology and incoming strangers, of course, challenged older traditions. It was the village image, however, not the locomotive or the alien neighbor, which became the forceful factor in shaping the early suburbs and their relations with the modern city. chapter 3 Village Landscapes

n 1894 one of the three appointees to the Borough of Leonia’s Ifirst board of health was Peter Newell, a thirty-two-year-old householder who had developed a considerable national reputation as an artist and illustrator. In 1883 Newell, a native of Illinois, had traveled east to New Jersey with his wife and three children after studying briefly at New York’s Art Students League (f. 1877). In large part he was self-taught rather than formally trained and had come east to take advantage of the emergent mass magazines and the sometimes lucrative New York City market for popular illustrations. By the time of his board of health appointment he had clearly established a respectable presence in his community and in his calling. His neighbors welcomed his energetic and imaginative participation in the village’s Lyceum culture,∞ and they approved of Newell’s strong family ties. His comfortable Leonia Avenue home had filled with his sister’s three sons until such time as her own life chances improved. The artist accepted his role as an elder in the newly organized Presbyterian Church, served as first president of the locally prominent Men’s Neighborhood Club, and moved comfortably in Republican political circles, which dominated Leonia Village life. Even in the later memory of fellow citizens Newell sufficiently maintained his presence and authoritative figure—‘‘He was tall and thin and had completely white hair’’≤—that some actually attributed the town’s name to his wife, Leona.≥ Newell’s local and national reputation provides a special window on Leonia’s suburbanization process, which had begun as a consequence of the metropolitanization of New York City. His very presence at the center of Leonia’s earliest art colony dramatized the incur- sion of urban influences on town life. His career and those of his fellow artists also clarified the changing nature of interaction with the city 58 Suburban Landscapes which defined this stage of suburbanization. Even more, the artists’ historical legacy represented an accumulation of images that resulted from this interaction. Their artwork introduced visual evidence of community values that were neither distinctly rural nor urban and help explain the origins and dissemination of images that engaged the new suburbanites’ imagination. If artists such as Newell represented unusual suburbanites, their highly popular illustrations and artwork nevertheless responded to the ordinary process of suburbanization at the turn of the century. These artistic images consolidated many of the disparate features of his own New Jersey suburb, while, simultaneously, they created icons of civility which suffused American culture via the mass publications of the early twentieth century. Newell’s national exposure depended heavily on his Leonia town and residence. He and his nephew Fred Nankivel, later a successful artist himself, contributed regularly to the Leonia Lyceum’s charades, shadow shows, skits, and amateur dramatizations. In Newell’s The Shadow Book (1896) and other works he clearly relied on his Leonia Lyceum work. His national popularity derived from his humorous and recognizable characters, sharpened greatly by costume and contextual detail. He himself explicitly argued that a successful illustrator must have an actor’s talent: ‘‘He must be able to project himself into the scene he is drawing. He must identify himself with the characters of the situation.’’∂ In the 1890s his humorous dramatizations channeled themselves into a number of widely read children’s books, such as Topsys and Turvys (1893),∑ which contained witticisms equally attractive to adult audiences. Cumulatively, Newell’s designs began to shape a larger landscape, which drew from his community’s special stage of suburbanization. In 1901 Newell contracted with Harper Brothers to illustrate Lewis Car- roll’s classics, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, for an American audience. In contrast to the widely praised illustrations of Sir John Tenniel, Newell’s distinguishing features were his dramatic animation and an enlarged contextualization of the Wonderland scenes. Newell neither magnified the facial features of individuals nor insisted on an exclusive focus on principal characters. Instead, he invented a different social fabric—more characters, more buildings, more space—more of a distinctive landscape in his illustrations. In their way his images projected important features of a new suburban ideology for his American audience. Village Landscapes 59 In an article for Harper’s Monthly, a year after drawing Alice, Newell explained that he had stressed her ‘‘sweet, childish spirit at home in the midst of mystery,’’ a dutiful girl impressed with ‘‘the priorities of life and a delicate sense of consideration for the feelings of others.’’∏ She represented for him a respectful attitude and self- confidence in the face of grotesque figures and behavior or when confronted with absurd or awe-inspiring things. Newell stressed the young, middle-class girlhood of Alice in her fanciful wonderland rather than the confusions of the original girl/adult and the contradictory world so full of outrageous mismatches and puns created by both Carroll and Tenniel. Newell consciously democratized Alice’s wonderland: ‘‘there is no classification of her friends into their various orders,’’ he insisted, ‘‘but all are real characters on a common plane of human action and interest.’’π Except for Alice, the artist depicted the characters, royal and plebeian alike, as chesspieces with equalizing round head shapes. Ex- plicitly, Newell made his point by describing the stratified line from Frog Footman, Mad Hatter, and White Rabbit to Duchess and Queen as varied by their personalities, ‘‘rather than by an inequality in their ability to entertain.’’ For his distinctly American audience Newell let individual variety overwhelm social class divisions in the projection of Alice’s dream (see fig. 3.1). The differences between Tenniel’s and Newell’s respective landscapes appeared clearly in their depictions of Lewis Carroll’s Jabber- wock. Tenniel cast the unreal creature from the ‘‘tulgey wood’’ in a saurian form, bat wings, reptilian tail, tyrannosaurus feet; his human victim is a youth with ‘‘vorpal sword,’’ much in the style of a diminu- tive Saint George, though horseless and more vulnerable, perhaps, more a David against Goliath. The contextual allusions were extravagantly medieval and mythical. By contrast, Newell cobbled a Jabber- wock out of a farmland pastiche: pig nose, frog eyes, catfish whiskers, bony cat paws. Back spines substitute for reptilian scales. Instead of a monster with ‘‘eyes of flame,’’ Newell’s ‘‘burbling’’ creature blows bub- bles. The final pedestrian touch is the vorpal sword: instead of an outsized, two-handed weapon, Newell’s youth in pageboy garb pre- pares his defense with an enlarged corkscrew. Newell shrinks his de- mons into strangely recognizable forms, rendered by familiar details and tamed by routine devices. Both authors clearly drew on specific features of their respective cultures. Newell’s landscape, in particular, Fig. 3.1. Peter Newell’s Alice for Through the Looking-Glass, 1902. The artist invested his illustrations of Alice with democratizing features easily recognized by residents of early suburban villages. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives has celebrated the prosaic, the accessible, the echoes of farmland memory which equalize any starting point into unprecedented and potentially fearful experience. In later works Newell elaborated more specifically on the peculiar rural-urban amalgam, represented by his turn-of-the-century suburban village. The Hole Book, published in 1908, contained a number of features, readily drawn from his Leonia community, which illustrate the impress of Newell’s suburban landscape upon his artistry.∫ The Village Landscapes 61 composition of his storybook community, for instance, exactly comported with the intensive, multicultural mixture of his actual suburban life. The book’s characters contained a Scotsman playing bag- pipes, a German band, a Russian-born balloon vendor, a silk-hatted Mr. Foozleman, ‘‘Old Hagenschmidt’’ with his Dutch pipe, an Irish kitchen servant, Bridget Quinn, along with the chief protagonist, young Tom Potts. The story’s thread is a bullet accidentally fired from Potts’s gun which traveled through his multiclass, multiethnic community, catching each neighbor or community feature in some characteristic behavior (see figs. 3.2 and 3.3). The situational contexts of the story mixed merchant, civic, family, and country settings as parts of a self-contained social landscape. Potts’s bullet begins its trajectory through a ‘‘fine French clock’’ in a middle-class living room, severs the rope of a back yard swing, ex- plodes the gas tank of a high-backed, open-air automobile, disrupts a pet store, breaks a tree limb and drops a dozen pears to a young man below, tears open a bag of grain carried by a farmer, kills a ‘‘wild-cat’’ that had ‘‘roamed the gardens free,’’ destroys a drum in a marching band, shatters a Dutchman’s pipe, causes the smoking malfunction of a kitchen cook stove, alerts a butler to a burglar, sets off a hive of bees, and otherwise interrupts a young man fishing, another one who is kite- flying, and a young newlywed’s home-baked cake. It also, not unexpectedly, ruins the portrait of an artist, a topology Newell extracted directly from his own suburban village. Such linkages would have been impossible in a genuinely rural village or in a budding metropolis. Newell, of course, was appealing to both country and city audiences, but, more consciously, he was publicizing suburbia itself, an emergent, alternative form of community in which he had invested himself deeply. In Newell’s later stories he continued his descriptive overview of suburbia. He depicted the sequence of scenes as a natural litany of an American community’s features at the turn of the century: benign recognition of ethnic distinctions, tolerance of social class distinctions, dignity of all levels of work, voluntarism over governmental authority, necessary integration of farm values into town life, aspiration of middle-class order and family stability. In his adventure of The Slant Book (1910) a runaway ‘‘go-cart’’ (baby carriage) crashes into an egg-bearing farmer’s wife by the name of Miss Angy Moore.Ω Later, after upsetting a traffic cop, a newspaper boy, and a house painter, Fig. 3.2. Tom Potts fires the gun, from The Hole Book by Peter Newell, 1908. Newell began his story in a living room with middle-class trappings—gilded frame picture, mantel clock, fireplace—then follows the bullet through a multiclass and multiethnic ‘‘suburban’’ community. the go-cart disrupts a farmer hauling a calf. In addition, there appears another German band, a Miss Lucile O’Grady, a pushcart owned by ‘‘a funny Son of sunny Greece,’’ a tennis match, glaziers with plate glass, an advertiser with a sandwich board. Leaving the town, the go- cart plunges into an apple orchard, a watermelon patch angering its farmer-owner, then through a picnic party, a sketching artist, a damsel Fig. 3.3. Old Hagenschmidt, from The Hole Book by Peter Newell, 1908. Newell depicts the bullet breaking the Dutchman’s pipe, one of many ethnically distinct referents in his communal narrative.

milking a ‘‘brindled cow,’’ and a fisherman on ‘‘a rustic bridge.’’ It finally crashes into a stump and propels its small, swaddled passenger into a haystack. Newell’s storybook town projected a community image that made country and city culturally and socially compatible. Many contextual features of his stories, like his ethnic caricatures, readily sug- 64 Suburban Landscapes gested turn-of-the-century city life, but the farmer, fisherman, outdoor sketching artist, picnic party, and haystack clearly referred to a country setting. Newell juxtaposed them with a traffic cop, a German band, a Greek merchant’s pushcart—not features usually associated with a country village. All of these images were interwoven naturally in Newell’s early-twentieth-century Leonia landscape. More important, Newell used both the bullet and the go-cart as forces disrupting a functioning, if not harmonious, multicultural community life that normally connected all these features. Whatever the reality of Leonia Village, Newell’s artistry made an implicit argument about his turn-of-the-century suburban landscape. The first suburban migrants represented all occupations and social classes, each making a distinctive and welcome contribution to their community. If there were manifest differences in wealth and circum- stance, they did not impede neighborly traffic and cooperation. Gla- ziers, sidewalk advertising, traffic police, and indeed pushcarts, so familiar to metropolitan culture at the turn of the century, flourished side by side with watermelon patches, haystacks, open space, and wildlife, axiomatic to country mores. Newell’s fictional community implicitly argued for a desirable, democratic arrangement. He was less concerned with any implicit promise of opportunity or upward mobility but, rather, of a social order in which a range of activity, even the Irish domestic, found respect and contentment. His argument was important in part for its implicit insistence that the mix of ethnicity and class was not threatening but more for its realistic projection of a communal life in which such differences enhanced the possibility of American achievement. It was an image that the golden age of American magazines such as Newell’s employers, Harper Brothers, projected into suburban and nonsuburban homes alike, into the standards of the newly emergent helping professions, into the disinterested politics idealized by Progressive muckrakers, and into a national discourse over civic standards which guided social reform.∞≠ Newell explicitly connected his social values and his artistic skills. At the very moment when New York City’s specialized publishing and cultural expertise gave rise to Greenwich Village bohemianism, New- ell articulated his diametric opposition. ‘‘I never could understand this bohemian business very well,’’ he declared. ‘‘There are some writers and painters who do their work right along, like masons and carpenters. That’s the way I do it. I don’t see any reason why an artist Village Landscapes 65 shouldn’t be an honest, hardworking citizen like anybody else. As a matter of fact, I am inclined to think that these people who sit around waiting for inspiration are lazy. The position they take is nothing but a pose. If they got married and had responsibilities resting on them they’d speedily be cured. . . . some of my best work has been done while I had a baby on my lap.’’∞∞ The coming of the artist to suburbia elevated the voices of Leonia villagers, especially those that insisted on the equalizing force of work and family. In these routine endeavors suburban arrivistes found a compatibility with longtime residents of the rural New Jersey countryside. Newell’s publicly espoused family values not only checked any conventional image of the artists as eccentric but also contributed substantially to the shaping of a distinct suburban culture. Newell’s own domestic arrangements accommodated his extended family of blood relations and also overlapped with the budding Leonia art colony. The artist’s nephew, Fred Nankivel, eventually became a member of his family and artistic circle and extended his artistic standards into the next generation. Nankivel had studied art for a time at the Uni- versity of Illinois, but the example of his uncle did not register immediately. Nankivel channeled his talents into the American film industry, which was in its earliest, formative stage in neighboring Fort Lee, New Jersey. He worked in a range of scriptwriting and filmmaking roles until 1914, when he resigned to devote himself wholly to his art. He began touring New England, his exhibitions in small galleries favoring seascapes and coastal scenes, and finished his career illustrating for popular magazines such as Life, Judge, Harper’s Weekly, and the British Puck. For many years his career remained rooted in Leonia after his marriage to a local girl, Anna Louise Barrett. Around Newell’s family arrangements a nascent art colony developed. His two daughters, for example, married talented artists who settled in Leonia. Newell’s second daughter, Helen Louise, married Alfred Zantzinger Baker, a native of Maryland who later traveled to Paris to further his studies at the Academie Julian as well as the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1898 Baker joined the staff of Puck and illustrated for such magazines as St. Nicholas, Scribner’s, Century, and Harper’s Life. His work was exhibited in the National Academy of Design (1893), Société des Artistes Français (1907), and Salon des Artistes Humoristes (1907), among other places. Baker was especially known for illustrating several volumes of humorous and satiric verse, notably 66 Suburban Landscapes The Moving Picture Book (1911), The Moving Picture Glue Book (1912), and The Torn Book (1913).∞≤ Baker combined elements of Newell’s humorous cartoon work and witty doggerel poems with Nankivel’s fascination for the nearby motion picture industry. Newell’s elder daughter, Josephine, married Howard McCormick, a native of Indiana who came east and studied in New York with William Merritt Chase and later in Paris at the Academie Julian. McCormick worked skillfully in many media but was especially re- nowned for his historical murals and the revival of the early Egyptian technique of gesso painting. This unique mural style he applied to works in the New Jersey State Museum at Trenton, the Museum of Science and Industry in New York City, the John Herron Institute in Indianapolis, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, among other places. After their marriage McCormick and his wife settled in Leonia. Eventually, they took over Newell’s Leonia Avenue home and lived there the rest of their lives.∞≥ Family ties quickly expanded to professional friendships, not to mention the town locus near the Jersey meadowlands, to enlarge the art colony membership. McCormick’s earlier study with William Mer- ritt Chase had resulted in his lifelong friendship with fellow artist and Chase student Charles S. Chapman, who introduced McCormick to Leonia and to his future wife. Through his friends at the Salmagundi Club in New York City, Chapman had also met Peter Newell and was persuaded to come to Leonia to take advantage of the studio space afforded by several empty barns. Sometime about 1907 Chapman made Leonia his place of residence, while he continued his training under Walter Appleton Clark at the Art Students League. He and McCormick set up a joint studio in a barn in Leonia. In 1911, in the home of Peter Newell, Chapman married a local Leonia girl, Ada Ahrens, and had his architect brother design a combined house and studio on nearby Sylvan Avenue, the couple’s home for the rest of their lives.∞∂ Chapman’s artistic school boasted new techniques as well as para- bles of the artist’s profession. Not long before his marriage Chapman had an unusual life-shaping experience on a trip to Bermuda. Accord- ing to a later student of the artist, Chapman saw a man burning paintings out of his Bermuda window. He rushed out and saw the paintings were quite good and did his best to dissuade the burner. The Village Landscapes 67 tender of the fire assured Chapman, however, that he knew what he was doing, since he had painted the artwork. They introduced themselves, and that was how Chapman met Frederic Remington, a fellow New Yorker and the distinguished artist of the American West. Chap- man would later repeat the story to his students as a parable, instruct- ing young artists to keep only their best work and not fall in love with everything they did. On Remington’s advice Chapman decided to make the Canadian North Woods his special metier and went there for a time, working as a ‘‘culler’’ in a logging camp to master the terrain.∞∑ Throughout his distinguished career Chapman became best known for his North Woods subject matter and his experimental technique, known as ‘‘water oils.’’ This North Woods iconography projected terrain far different from suburbia yet articulated the near- spiritual attachment to nature, so prominent in suburban mythology and probably accounting for making him one of suburban Leonia’s most popular artists. In 1917 the National Academy of Design awarded him their Saltus Gold Medal for In the Deep Woods, which was immediately purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this representative work of rich browns and greens Chapman’s motif projected the massive presence of ancient, almost sequoia-like forests. The rare figures or animals in the landscape are minuscule, dwarfed by the towering, shadowy effect of the woods. There is no mistake about the value that the artist placed on triumphant nature and the necessity of respecting the primeval and mysterious order of creation. Man’s role here, if present at all, was very small indeed (see fig. 3.4). The Leonia artists, joined together by marriage and a fraternity of work, drew their inspiration from many sources, one of which was their own community. Their art offered a set of linkages which would increasingly be associated with a distinctive suburban culture, one that buttressed domestic order, acknowledged the resources of different ethnic and historical traditions, and attempted to integrate an encompassing natural order with man’s social inventions. Whatever the ensuing configuration, in their art as well as in their suburban community, the process was experimental, often clumsy and humorous, but resolute in its avoidance of both sentimental and divisive values. Most of all, they never codified their values or articulated them as a set of ideas which might have permitted calling their work a Fig. 3.4. Charles Chapman’s In the North Woods, n.d. In an oft-repeated theme Chapman used the Canadian North Woods to affirm the awesome force of nature as a benign and dominant power. Many suburban Leonians seconded his perception by popularizing his work and hanging it in their homes. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

‘‘suburban school of art.’’ Still, collegially, they provided constant, informal comment on their diverse experiments, strengthening their art colony ties while sharpening their individual styles. These Leonia artists used their suburban community as a primary device for the cultivation and refinement of their artistic skills. If there was further need for mutual support and protection of their sensibilities, they found it in loosely knit voluntary arrangements like exhibits, sketching parties, or in their fraternal organizations in New York City, such as the well-reputed Salmagundi Club, through which they became conduits for disseminating their perceptions and promoting their work well beyond the bounds of Leonia. Their suburban relationships were in no sense introverted or reclusive. Indeed, the artists residing in Leonia regularly became hosts to sketching parties that included artists from New York City. Through these informal routines the suburban art colony efficiently engaged artistic and social currents with both national and international scope. Village Landscapes 69 The experiences of Peter Newell, Fred Nankivel, and Howard McCormick, all from small agricultural towns of the Midwest, replicated the careers and sensibilities of a larger, distinguished group of American artists, many of whom gravitated to New York City via Chicago and its art institute. Chicago itself had produced numerous widely imitated organizations, informal societies, and clubs of artists for purposes of exhibition, art promotion, and socialization. One such Illinois artist, Alexander Shilling, moved to Chicago, where he participated in country sketching parties with fellow apprentice-artists such as J. Francis Murphy and Frank Green. In their apprenticeship years they sketched along the Des Plaines River in Illinois and other sites in the rural Midwest. With his friend and distinguished teacher at the Chicago Art Institute, John Vanderpoel, Shilling founded the Chicago Art League in 1880. For five years the two artists took league members and nonmembers alike to increasingly farther sites beyond Chicago. During some of their summers they went for inspiration to Ontario’s lakes and to the Juniata and Lebanon Valleys of Pennsylvania.∞∏ By 1895 Shilling had relocated to a studio in New York City, but, in spite of the change of scenery, he virtually ignored the cityscape. Once again, he resolutely devoted himself to country landscapes and sketching parties outdoors. Shortly after his arrival in New York, he organized the Country Sketch Club and persuaded his friends to join him in excursions to the nearby rivers and valleys of New Jersey. Shilling was a sufficiently frequent visitor to the Leonia area for artists there to claim him and some of his associates as members of their colony.∞π For a time he actually resided in the New Jersey regions in which he traveled and painted. For many years Shilling refined his mysterious landscapes of the Bergen County, New Jersey, region, in works such as Misty Moon–Hackensack River (1894), which were often compared with the pastorals of his friend Albert Pinkham Ryder. Sim- ilarly, Shilling’s friend and Kansas native Van Dearing Perrine resided in the region of the old English Neighborhood and also participated in the outdoor sketching parties. He, too, spent many years, sketching and resketching for his highly praised oil paintings of the Hudson palisades.∞∫ This New Jersey–inspired art connected formally with the organized art world of New York City but not with urban scenes or subjects. Alexander Shilling, for example, structured his workday be- 70 Suburban Landscapes tween his studio and the Salmagundi Club. His studio was located above Fleischmann’s famous Vienna Bakery (9th Street and Broad- way) in a building that also housed studios of his old Chicago crony, J. Francis Murphy, along with Bruce Crane, Charles Melville Dewey, Theodore Robinson, Ogden Wood, Horatio Walker, and Howard Pyle.∞Ω For all the varied styles of these artists, collectively they appreciated the emotional commitment to country places which the tonalist art of Shilling, Murphy, and Perrine represented. Their Country Sketch Club (836 Broadway) continued operating until 1911 and Perrine’s shift of artistic interests to theories of art instruction for children and to experimentations in color. Like Shilling, many of the New York artists of these years sustained their distinctive, Chicago-trained sensibilities in their relocated eastern settings. Their multiple, increasingly impressionistic styles and country motifs were nevertheless connected in the commitments instilled by the craft-conscious training of their Chicago Art Institute teachers. John Vanderpoel, the most prominent and influential of these teachers, kept a deep appreciation for nature observed in its actual settings. Still, the Holland-born Vanderpoel communicated his belief that no art was worthy of the name which did not master the foundational skills of composition, anatomy, and perspective. These lessons of academic craftsmanship were well reinforced by the late-nineteenth-century French Barbizon school and his own teachers at Paris’s Academie Julian.≤≠ The emotional, experienced quality of landscapes in this tradition always reflected unusual and irregular natural detail within some ingenious, spatial configuration. The management of recognizable details, the orchestration of myriad features within a natural order, and often a mysterious, tonalist subjectivity projected a landscape with both propriety and individuation, valued features among their emergent suburban audience. The wider swath of this artistic world, however informally organized, efficiently channeled friends of Shilling and students of Vander- poel into the orbit of the Leonia artists. Charles Harry Eaton, born in Ohio, received his early training in Michigan before a brief stopover in Chicago. In 1882 he, too, moved to New York and shortly thereafter joined the Salmagundi Club. His devotion to local themes took him whenever possible back to his native Midwest. His monumental work The Lily Pond was but one of many reasons for his national reputation for the paysage intime, a substitution of the sweeping spiri- Village Landscapes 71 tual or scenic landscapes of an earlier generation for closer, more specific natural objects in a seemingly, unforced composition. By 1892 Eaton had built himself a home and studio in the New Jersey development of Leonia Park. There he could also indulge his habit of making numerous sketches before turning to the permanence of a finished oil painting. And he had the advantage of fellow artists who would join him in his frequent sketching trips up to the Hudson palisades or down into the Hackensack meadowlands.≤∞ Until his death in 1901 Eaton was a bastion of the early Leonia artist community and a respected member of its adopted New York City fraternity. This midwestern group of artists in Leonia needed their professional city networks and clubs as much as they did their country locus for artistic inspiration. They exemplified thereby both the suburban dependence on New York City at the turn of the century as well as suburbanites’ resistance to urban dominance. The city was at once a catalyst for talents and ideas from many states and overseas and an incubator for decidedly unurban images of nature and country life. By the late nineteenth century New York City had experienced a major economic transformation and, while still a major manufacturing center, had begun to de-emphasize its older, industrial complex. Its conversion to a communication and professional service economy would increasingly come to distinguish New York nationwide and inter- nationally in the twentieth century. In the 1890s many individuals were attracted to New York City for the new opportunities it offered, especially its art, theater, and its cultural production in general. Ini- tially, the skilled laboring class and the managerial/merchant class, who made New York the focal point of this cultural production, were also among the early newcomers to New York’s turn-of-the-century suburbs. Whatever their economic resources, the new suburban commuter usually could command a decidedly nonrural flexibility of work schedule. In their malleable schedules and their career mobility the small corps of artists—the lithographers, engravers, illustrators, and easel artists—well represented the emergent suburban norm. From the 1890s they began to arrive and remained, sometimes for short, productive periods, sometimes for the rest of their lives. The experience of Leonia artists paralleled that of other skilled laborers who settled in communities where they could work locally. Masons and carpenters sought out the new railroad villages that had already embarked on an expansive program of house construction and 72 Suburban Landscapes town development. In 1900 some 44 percent of Leonia’s residents were skilled laborers, the largest category in the federal census that year. When these individuals commuted to their employment at all, many traveled by trolley rather than railroad and did not venture to New York City for work. They represented a mixture of both native Ameri- cans and foreign-born and a range of social classes (see appendix table A.1). The prevalence of skilled workers did not contrast with their artist neighbors but compelled artists like Peter Newell to identify himself with them, rather than the small contingent of professionals. If his storybooks nevertheless projected a social standard that appeared more middle- than working-class, Newell’s suburban allegiances thereby offered a more problematic and permeable notion of class boundaries. In addition, the population mixture of native and foreign-born, which was also not novel to this metropolitan suburb, occurred among the artists no less than among working-class suburbanites. Even before the development of Leonia Park, the railroad brought foreign-born residents to the town. This influx updated the older heterogeneous tradition of the English Neighborhood and reflected the expanding influence of New York City on its fringe communities. Yet the persistence of the foreign presence was new. In 1880, 31 percent of Leonia’s residents were themselves foreign-born. This figure declined to 21 percent in 1900, but the impact of the turn-of-the-century trolley and its heyday (1900–1920) kept the figure above 25 percent by 1920. To this foreign presence must be added the proportion of household heads whose parents were of foreign extraction. The percentage of fathers of Leonia residents who were foreign-born ranged between 42 percent and 49 percent for the entire period 1880–1920. A sizable minority (18–23 percent) of these fathers were German (see appendix tables A.4 and A.5). The Leonia art colony also reflected multiple ethnic and geographical backgrounds and necessarily introduced ideas driven by its socialist empathies which clashed abruptly with the town’s political (Republican) and social (Dutch/English) values of the area.≤≤ Mid- western artists such as Peter Newell and his associates may have fit relatively snugly into the Republican communal network that had operated throughout Bergen County for the last decade of the nineteenth century. Foreign-born artists, however, became the center- point of different social groupings and help document the degree of Village Landscapes 73 suburban accommodation which Newell’s artwork had projected. One fellow artist who arrived a year or so after Peter Newell offered a special case. Ilona Rado (1865–1935) had begun her artistic training in her native Hungary, received support for further formal training in Vienna, then spent ten years (1882–92) in Paris. There she had the advantage of world-class teachers, such as William Bouguereau, and ateliers such as the Academie Colarossi under the direction of Raphael Collins and Courtois.≤≥ Between 1887 and 1892 Ilona Rado regularly exhibited at Paris’s Société des Artistes Français as well as in exhibitions in Budapest and Vienna. In 1892 a Massachusetts heiress and member of the Havemeyer family, Mrs. Anna Webb, sponsored Rado’s immigration to the United States.≤∂ For several years she had a studio on Central Park South, not far from the Art Students League. She worked in several styles and supported herself primarily by teaching and by portraiture. When she married Frederick West, an architect with the distinguished New York firm of McKim, Mead and White, Rado turned her thoughts quite naturally, according to her family’s lore, to a less urban context for child raising. With the birth of her first child the Wests determined to raise their family outside the city, and locus seems to have played more of a role than the emergent art colony. ‘‘I don’t know,’’ their daughter reflected, ‘‘how they heard of Leonia. Leonia originally was called the Old English Neighborhood but it really should have been called the old Dutch Neighborhood because there were more Dutch families, . . . more Dutch families went to school with me.’’≤∑ West himself designed their home on Grand Avenue and Station Parkway in a modified Dutch style, the first of several houses he produced for new Leonia suburbanites (see fig. 3.5). The house originally reflected the needs of his own and his wife’s work but quickly filled with additional family members. Her extended family eventually became the nucleus of a larger community network that included the town’s newspaper editor and influential newcomers with socialist leanings. Not long after her arrival, however, Ilona West allowed a community project to intrude upon her artistic commitments. ‘‘That’s when [my mother] got into town politics,’’ her daughter explained. ‘‘My brother had to go to the old wooden school down on the marsh- land, down in the hollow. The building was still there but it was not used anymore. My mother was not going to have her son go there. She Fig. 3.5. Ilona West’s Leonia home. This residence, designed by her artist husband, adopted a caricatured Dutch style—especially the gambrel roof, dormers, and asymmetrical add-ons—for their private residence. Photograph by author

canvassed the whole town to have a new school.’’ This successful voluntary effort on behalf of a new, brick elementary school, erected in 1904 on Broad Avenue and designed by her husband, was one of her several civic reforms (see fig. 3.6). After Ilona Rado’s marriage, her relocation and family obligations hampered her commissioned work but comported with the town’s family priorities. ‘‘The only one I knew who came to the house,’’ her daughter recalled, ‘‘was [Eugene V.] Debs. The others . . . she didn’t really have too many commissions in those days. After all she was bringing up my brother who was five years older than I was . . . two children . . . also a paralyzed mother and a younger brother. She was a busy woman and still not very well. She married late, almost 33 before she got married. You know, it was hard for a woman in those days.’’≤∏ Her portrait of Eugene V. Debs and his sittings and dinners with the Wests drew attention not only to her own socialist values but also to those of the small but influential group of fellow townspeople, espe- Fig. 3.6. Leonia’s Broad Avenue Grammar School, 1905. Designed by Frederick West, the school reflected the balance and classicism of the Beaux-Arts style in which the architect was trained and which projected the values of rationality and order, especially in public facilities. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

cially Hungarians and Germans, who supported socialist viewpoints in both local and national elections.≤π If some Leonians viewed the Wests skeptically, there was none of the antiurban hostility to social radicalism that American magazines often associated with suburban culture.≤∫ In part the Wests and their Hungarian/German relatives invited little adverse comment because of her civic work, family priorities, and her own artistry. If she was associated with socialists such as Debs, she also executed portraits of prominent townspeople and associated with affluent capitalists such as the Webbs and the Havemeyers. ‘‘Yes, Havemayer,’’ the artist’s daughter explained. ‘‘I remember that because in 1909 there was a panic in New York. That’s when McKim, Mead and White folded and my father was out of a job. My mother wrote to Mrs. Havemeyer . . . and asked if there was anything she could do . . . My mother took the train up to Suffern [New York] and Mrs Havemeyer met her with her little electric car and she spent the day teaching the elements of draw- 76 Suburban Landscapes ing to her daughters. That lasted until my father got a job again.’’≤Ω During this period the Wests began to use their house as a financial hedge, generating income through room rentals. Eventually, however, their Grand Avenue home became the center of a small chain migration of socialist-leaning Hungarian relatives as well as a haven for cosmopolitan artists from New York City. For several years before and after World War I the Wests rented Ilona’s studio as well as their downstairs rooms to prominent artists associated with a second influx of artists into Leonia shortly before World War I. For a time Harvey Dunn rented Ilona West’s studio, as did Dunn’s students Dean Cornwell, John Steuart Curry, Harry Ballinger, Charles Durant, J. Clinton Shepherd, and William Fisher later on. In addition, after the artist’s brother Arpad Rado married, he, too, boarded artists in an upstairs studio of his Christie Street home, which had also been designed by Frederick West.≥≠ These arrangements did not so much homogenize artistic styles and viewpoints as they expanded the discourse among all these artists about the eclectic adaptations required for New York City magazine illustration and commissions. If the local socialist vote during general elections remained small, Leonia’s socialists generally registered a higher percentage of the town vote than socialists did in the county- and statewide polls. Like the artists, the socialists’ presence was seldom a matter of numbers. For her part Ilona Rado West sustained her own eclectic style through these years. Her remarkable portraits, indeed her self-portraits, take great care with telling detail and, where relevant, nationalist features and costume (see fig. 3.7). She treated her assimilation into an American community as perfectly compatible with distinctively non- American roots and European values. (The family regularly conversed in German, and the artist’s daughter often enjoyed Arpad Rado’s Gypsy music at bedtime.)≥∞ Yet her attractive realism did not preclude a serious engagement with more modern styles. Her award-winning painting of sailboats, Regatta in the Storm, could exploit the abstract effect of sails and eerie seascape, reminiscent of Albert Ryder. Her very eclecticism in artistic tastes had its complement in her civic commitments and the informal networks she also pursued. She belonged to no stylistic school; she adapted her skills to the unpredictable demands of her family arrangements; she experimented with many different approaches to artistic and social organization. One might have applied similar attributes to Peter Newell, mindful that the political ideologies Fig. 3.7. Ilona West’s self-portrait, n.d. Best known for her portraiture, Ilona West nevertheless experimented with a range of both traditional and modern styles. Courtesy of Mrs. Edward Fertig

of the two artists—one Republican, the other socialist—reflected important differences in spite of their functional convergences in the United States’ Progressive period. This newly suburban community and these artists thus not only illuminate distinctive features associated with the dynamics of community formation; their artwork helped fix select images and values at the turn of the century which were not only pleasing to many Ameri- 78 Suburban Landscapes can audiences but also quickly became attractive associations with suburbia itself. The eclectic and adaptive skills, so apparent in the Leonia art colony of the turn of the century, help clarify the permeability of suburbia’s boundaries and dynamics. Many of the features of suburbia also could be found in turn-of-the-century cities, such as New York, where city artists also dwelt on the movement and mixture of persons from different American regions and foreign nationalities, the progressive mastery of recent technical styles and inventions, and the rapid transportation of goods and ideas. City artists, however, diverged from suburban image patterns in their cultivated images of population density, subway and elevated transportation, rooftop leisure, and multistory buildings.≥≤ Similarly, suburbanites developed distinctive image patterns while nevertheless incorporating artifacts of modernism. West’s Beaux-Arts school design and his wife’s sailboat abstractions could be integrated with older, perceived values of country life such as West’s domestic Dutch designs and his wife’s portraits in nationalistic costume. Their projected images of easy tolerance, of individual diversity, of respect for the endurance and perceived tranquility of nature, of the health- ful composure and domestic peace associated with ample household space, generally ran counter to typical urban expectations. Even more, their landscapes comported with the developing dynamics of a country village energized by a commuter railroad; their artistry contributed to the shaping of a suburban culture, even when their subjects were not explicitly scenes from their village. After all, the suburban community they were building had no clear generic definition at the turn of the century. For all their diversity the artists contributed to a suburban fabric that accepted the compatibility of urban and country life and which could not foresee its later-twentieth-century mutations (those that Americans reflexively think of as ‘‘suburban’’). Their artwork and their daily routines gave metaphorical voice to that configuration and experiment in ways that ideological argument could not. chapter 4 The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920

‘‘ t was a quiet, country town,’’ octogenarian Doris Faig remembered Iin 1987. ‘‘One didn’t hesitate to walk at midnight anywhere. We never locked doors years ago, and groups of three or four young people on a hot summer night could walk anywhere just to get some fresh air without any danger. . . . I think that it isn’t the country town anymore.’’∞ Mrs. Faig was speaking not only for herself but for a wide range of people who lived through the changes in suburban living from the early decades of the twentieth century. The townspeople who experienced these years frequently referred to their community as a ‘‘country town,’’ and the tangible sense of loss went beyond mere physical safety. The pervasive and long-term use of this term country town introduced something more than a vibrant cultural symbol for early suburbs.≤ Both the image and its usage clarify how the pastoral biases of the artist’s ‘‘village landscapes’’ were translated into the everyday routines of their fellow citizens’ lives and how together they forged a new suburban culture and consciousness at the turn of the century. The country town metaphor gathers to itself a special configuration of rituals and meanings which, in spite of the twentieth-century erosion of ‘‘countryside,’’ continued to have a powerful cohesive, social force on the communities that sustained them.≥ But this country town men- tality was not only a matter of historical conception; it also reflected changing social circumstances, which compelled community members to adapt such familiar images to unprecedented arrangements. The full social and historical connotations of this country town men- tality make clear why it was so resonant in the process of suburban 80 Suburban Landscapes community formation. Its associations suggest also the suburb’s increasing significance in the modern iconography of twentieth-century American culture. What is most striking about the early-twentieth-century country emphasis in Leonia was the townspeople’s insistence on it at the very moment when most vestiges of country were rapidly disappearing from metropolitan areas. Its invocation, however, contained no sense of impending loss or defensive overstatement, which one might have entertained, given the community’s demographic shifts. By the turn of the century Leonia was no longer a rural agricultural town. Its proportion of farmers in the federal census had dropped substantially from nearly half the population in 1880 to about 6 percent by 1900. By 1920 only one person claimed to work as a farmer within Leonia’s town limits, a stark contrast with the earlier generation. Of course, there were still individuals who kept cows, chickens, and horses but who actually worked at other occupations. As an occupation, agriculture had disappeared by 1920. Still, the country town imagery survived beyond the Great Depression and clearly had a social and cultural resonance beyond its reference to a once rural past. The invocation of a country town for an emergent turn-of-the- century metropolitan community illuminated deeper and more subtle dynamics of suburban formation. Shortly before World War I the extant photographic images of this emergent suburb reveal important peculiarities of a turn-of-the-century country town. There were, of course, still vestiges of a country style: the general ambiance of the central business section had the rustic feel of a backdrop for early cinematic westerns. In actual fact the budding cinema industry in neighboring Fort Lee used Leonia and its citizens more than once for precisely that purpose.∂ Many Leonians incorporated into their family lore the presence of Mary Pickford at Crystal Lake or Charlie Chaplin driving along Grand Avenue.∑ One of the town’s prewar merchants, Mott Allaire, a Buffalo Bill Cody look-alike, had originally come to town to play cowboy parts in these adventures and ended up renting horses to the movie productions.∏ The local blacksmith catered to Tom Mix and other featured actors (see figs. 4.1 and 4.2). The country ambiance of the village’s main street continued to attract such enterprises and to sustain the image townspeople had created for their community. The feed store, which also sold basic building materials, sat prominently next to the railroad station, where Fig. 4.1. The main street of Leonia Village, looking west, ca. 1910. The lone automobile, the telephone poles, the curbed streets, and the storefronts in residential parlors, all evidence the transition of the elm-shaded railroad village into the orbit of urban conveniences. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives heavy feed bags, cement, lime, lath, and coal could be conveniently unloaded for sale. The horse and buggy still served as a mainstay of transportation for those who had not yet invested in Henry Ford’s Model T. Large elm trees rose at streetside as stately sentinels, providing the natural shade afforded by a summer in the country. Even into the 1920s townsfolk would perpetuate this lore. ‘‘I can remember a great deal fewer houses,’’ William Shedd recalled of his 1920s boyhood, ‘‘a lot more vacant lots, a great deal less traffic. . . . Altogether a great deal more rural.’’π The rural image in a sense overrode the manifest process of technical modernization which the community also experienced in the same years. In spite of ‘‘rural’’ features extant photography reveals the new autos, the telephone poles, streetlights, the sewer grates at the corner, the row houses, the storefronts on the sidewalks, not to mention the railroad itself. All dramatized the urban features that the proximity to New York brought to Leonia. The outward expansion of the metropolis, especially after the incorporation of Greater New York Fig. 4.2. Leonia General Store with William Moore, proprietor. Photograph in author’s collection. Courtesy of Judith W. Boudah (Moore’s granddaughter)

in 1898, might have seriously challenged any self-projected image of a country town as a near atavism. As progress increased, however, the use of the country town invocation proliferated rather than lessened. In their way the citizens of Leonia seemed to embrace both the dynamics of the city and the country simultaneously, one of the central features of the new suburbia (see figs. 4.3 and 4.4). In 1894 the town fathers of Leonia rode into their borough on the first Bergen County Traction Company’s trolley car, which further broke down the social class and geographical barriers between city and country which the Hudson River once represented. For a nickel one could travel to close-by Hudson River ferries, which went to New York, or ride west to Hackensack, the Bergen County seat and nearest shopping center. This accessibility made home ownership available to a significant percentage of working-class families, who were often unable to afford city housing.∫ By 1908 newspapers for the town could promote more than economic opportunity. The juxtaposition of modern trolley and undeveloped country permitted promoters to advertise not the historical and demographic features of actual town life but, rather, the comfortable domestic style and possibility offered by their camera land- Fig. 4.3. The Leonia trolley, from the Palisadian, 1908. This denuded farmland held the promise of new trees on wide streets with a range of residential styles and a convenient commute to New York City. Author’s collection

scape. The realtors’ intentions may have been quite different than, say, Leonia’s artists, but in their way such overly cultivated images also projected a country connotation, the value of natural surroundings integrated with modern life. The citizen-generated metaphor of the country town could not have ﬂourished in suburbs built all at once. In towns like Leonia, where population and housing increased steadily but not geometri- cally, the country town seemed to connote something else entirely, the need to ground new communities in the patterns of a manageable past. In part newly arrived Leonians at the turn of the century easily associated their country town image with remembered farming traditions. Indeed, both sets of Doris Faig’s grandparents came to Leonia in the nineteenth century, both descending from farming stock. ‘‘My father’s father,’’ she explained, ‘‘[was] born and brought up in Canton, Massachusetts, and he . . . had been in the Civil War and when he came out, there was a scarcity of jobs . . . too many people and not enough jobs . . . so they moved [and] in 1888 he came to Leonia and was a member of the ﬁrst Board of Education. . . . He was Alfred Paul Hurd. My mother’s parents [the David Beechings] came from Hun- Fig. 4.4. Fred Cicetti’s portrait of Doris Faig, 1986. This longtime resident came from a family of farmers turned small entrepreneurs who helped develop the Junction section of Leonia. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

tington, Long Island.’’ There were ‘‘no apartments then,’’ and people kept chickens and had gardens. ‘‘The Tembusches. The son’s name was Henry,’’ she further recalled, ‘‘and it was a big family. They had a farm on Christie Heights where the present Middle School is and they had an apple orchard there. The children were allowed to pick up the windfall as long as they didn’t touch any of the other apples.’’ ‘‘Now the old library,’’ she continued, ‘‘was also a farmhouse and the farm was in the back where the playground [Wood Park] is now. They kept cows. . . . You could take a container and go to the farm and get milk. I did that as a child.’’Ω But living in a country town implied more than an agricultural or rural inheritance. The image of a country town regularly underscored three major considerations for these early suburbanites: first, a special civic responsibility; second, self-sufficiency; and, third, an indifference to social class distinctions. In a country town people take a personal interest in their neighbors as a matter of ordinary civic habit. ‘‘If somebody is in trouble,’’ Doris Faig explained, ‘‘there is always somebody to help. The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 85 People nowadays live for themselves.’’ Examples of such responsibility were usually graphic, involving a special personal or family crisis. ‘‘When my mother was ill and dying,’’ Mrs. Faig remembered, ‘‘people brought food in, like we usually do when someone has a death in the family. People take food in so the family doesn’t have to worry about meals in the three days before burial.’’ In part these attitudes were a function of people living in the same place for a long while. They were attitudes that followed from a particular communal discipline. ‘‘There were more people who had been here for a long time and they remembered your relatives. If you didn’t behave . . . you couldn’t get away from it.’’ The civic culture of a country town emanated from the community’s collective memory and required the active participation of all citizens. Such continuity and socialization were generally associated with home ownership in spite of the large number of renting citizens. ‘‘Most of them [residents of a country town, like her parents and grandparents] own their own places and that presupposes that they are going to stay there awhile.’’∞≠ The speaker, born in 1898 and the third generation of her family to reside in the town, clearly expected to make the community her permanent home from her earliest days in the suburban village. In her family’s mind personal interest in their fellow townsfolk contained no connotations of intrusion or dependence. Indeed, the second major connotation of the country town was self-sufficiency. Were home owners suspicious of those who rented rooms or homes in town? As a lifelong renter, Mrs. Faig thought not. ‘‘My mother used to tell me, ‘Hold your head high.’ People take you at your own evaluation.’’ There were two features to such self- sufficiency: weathering one’s own problems and neighborly expertise. ‘‘My mother was bedridden several years before she died and she died very young, at age forty. In order to continue with high school, I used to get the children [her brothers and sisters] off in the morning and then go over to the high school on the corner to take a few classes but things got so very bad toward the end—my mother died—so I only finished three years of high school and never graduated.’’ While raising a family of her own, Mrs. Faig also raised her six brothers and sisters. All became responsible citizens of New Jersey, though only she remained in town. Her strong sense of continuity overrode the mobility of her family and the permeability of the town’s boundaries. The metaphor of the country town softened the potential contra- 86 Suburban Landscapes diction between neighborly civility and self-sufficiency. People did not become isolated in their self-sufficiency, nor did civility impose a constricting or homogenizing socialization. Indeed, self-possession actually implied a neighborly sharing of skills, a recognition of distinctive skills as a social resource. ‘‘Everybody had something that they could do better than somebody else. So that . . . whatever you were interested in, you did.’’ How generous were people with such skills? Several women in town were seamstresses and expected to be paid for their work. Yet the sister of the chief of police’s wife ‘‘made all of their girls’ clothes. I had some pretty material that I bought down at the [New Jersey] Shore. And she made something for me and I had a terrible time because she wouldn’t let me pay her.’’ ‘‘So you see,’’ Mrs. Faig concluded, ‘‘people shared the things they did best.’’∞∞ A good deal of women’s work especially began as helping out neighbors, baby- sitting for their children, or substituting in their stores when illness struck. At times these neighborly gestures turned into permanent employment, particularly in the offices of the borough hall. Women whose husbands refused to countenance working wives acquiesced in paid labor for a neighbor. Such labor was seen as help more than work. In addition to civic responsibility and self-sufficiency Faig described a third, important dimension in Leonians’ country town metaphor which was akin to the fine (and frequently crossed) line between paid and unpaid labor: at least outwardly, Leonians suppressed conscious and public distinctions of social status. People expected a rough equality in civic exchanges. Some Leonians who were considered wealthy, such as the Staggs and the Bogerts, readily participated in town activities, both official and voluntary. ‘‘It [their acknowledged wealth] didn’t bother me,’’ Mrs. Faig insisted, ‘‘because I think it was the way we were brought up. There were other things more important than money.’’ People didn’t pay attention to the manifestations of wealth at all? ‘‘Yes,’’ she continued, ‘‘though many people owned their own houses, people never compared sizes. I don’t believe there was any class distinction when you went to school . . . except later on.’’ The suburb was no utopia, nor did anyone expect it to be, but the ornaments of social class, though visible, were subordinated to more substantive individual and civic values. Early on, Leonia Park corroborated her perception by mixing a range of house sizes throughout its development. When individuals of Mrs. Faig’s generation charged The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 87 someone with ‘‘rudeness,’’ a great deal more was at stake than the redress of a minor incivility.∞≤ The image of the country town seemed to draw on the long agricultural history of the English Neighborhood, but actually it elimi- nated much of the agricultural and Dutch roots of that tradition. The implied civility of the country town metaphor actually clashed with the defensive, cultural insularity of the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Dutch residents. It was no accident that the values of a turn- of-the-century country town arose at the very moment the coming of the electric trolley introduced a new sense of technological progress and additional foreign-born neighbors into the heart of suburban villages, such as Leonia. The trolley was simply the most dramatic of many new technologies that freed agricultural communities from their farm-centered routines and produced unexpected consequences in the name of progress. One of these consequences was the threefold increase in the town’s population between 1880 and 1900. This shift was not merely quanti- tative but also qualitative; it meant the creation of fewer large households containing hired and servant labor, fewer households headed by women, and increasing spatial divisions between manual and nonmanual workers (see tables A.2 and A.6–8). The trolley also continued to facilitate the influx of foreigners, reintroduced a black labor force to town life (this time from the South rather than New Jersey natives), and converted native New Jersey residents to less than a quarter of the town’s population (see tables A.4 and A.10). Even though the suburban style of the town’s railroad village could not be sustained in the face of the suburban dynamics of its trolley era, many residents remained unwilling to admit that its older traditions were antiquated and dysfunctional. The metaphor of the country town became more serviceable in reconciling potential conflicts between these distinctive older and newer incoming values and in inventing a special civic style for suburbia. The trolley was not thought to challenge the town’s country tradition in spite of two distinctive, noncountry features: first, the trolley itself presumed a new urban mobility; and, second, it opened the way for travel by individuals without substantive wealth. In these respects it contrasted markedly with the more affluent commuters of the mid- nineteenth-century railroad. The town fathers who formalized the 88 Suburban Landscapes village into a borough in 1894 were the earliest promoters of the trolley. For them new means of transportation represented the pre- requisite for local economic development and expanded the housing markets opened by the railroad. Unlike their later counterparts, early developers did not try to envision or forecast the social impact of their housing (see tables A.1 and A.6).∞≥ For those farmers who sought to capitalize on their holdings and enter the real estate business, not much explicit attention seems to have been given to the kind of people attracted to their community. Led by the first elected mayor, Cornelius Christie, lawyer and real estate entrepreneur, Leonia contracted with the Bergen County Traction Company to run through the town.∞∂ The immediate impact of the trolley was neither demographic change nor economic development but, rather, a fundamental re- orientation of the town’s physical structure and sense of itself. The precipitating event involved the creation, literally and symbolically, of a new town center outside the old railroad village. Ironically, it was not citizen interaction with the traction company which made the trolley so dramatic an instrument of Leonia’s social change but, instead, another competing technology: the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, which had come through the English Neighborhood in the middle of the nineteenth century. After negotiations with the town fathers were well under way, an official of the Erie Railroad queried the mayor and council about the trolley’s right-of-way over the Erie Lackawanna tracks. In particular, the railroad’s policy makers objected to any trolley crossing as a potential ‘‘deathtrap.’’∞∑ The railroad’s objection not only posed a formidable impediment to the town’s aspirations and a threat to its welfare; it potentially precluded the cooperative integration of railroad and trolley into a single transportation system. The problem, however, was quickly resolved by a proposition from the railroad itself: build a trestle over the railroad tracks, obviating the dangers the railroad anticipated from a direct trolley-railroad crossing.∞∏ The trolley trestle, eventually constructed across Overpeck Creek, a half-mile north of the old Village center, made manifest the public impact of the new transportation system. It resolved several of the farmers’ objections to trolley service and, in addition, compelled the town to permit the trolley to follow a parallel line to the north-south railroad tracks but also an east-west access into the New Jersey interior. The north-south tracks—eventually unpaved Broad Avenue— Fig. 4.5. The Trolley Junction, ca. 1915. Hitchcock-Coover’s Real Estate office, left, replaced by a brick structure in 1917, which included the town’s first dentist. Just above the porch roof the steeple of the first Methodist church can be seen. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives would take the trolley through sparsely settled woods and farmland to Riley Avenue, where it would meet the eastbound trolley coming from Hackensack. These two lines, since they were not continuous, required riders to transfer from one to the other. Quickly, a small food shop and waiting area became a new transfer point and nascent commercial center to compete with the older village near the railroad tracks in the meadows a half-mile or so below. The new town center, on an upland, western shelf of the Hudson palisades, became known to Leonians as Leonia Junction (see fig. 4.5). In the main Leonians welcomed the trolley, in spite of some objections from resident farmers, who worried over the speed of the trolley cars in town and the placement of tracks too near pasture animals.∞π Most citizens supported the mayor and council in approving the trolley, which connected the town with New York City in the east and in the west with Hackensack. Increasingly, townspeople commuted to New York City over a large New Jersey network for a fare of five cents, making the cost of commutation to the Hudson River ferry a manageable twenty-five dollars or so annually. The suburb was now open to the city’s clerical workers and to additional members of the working class (see fig. 4.6).∞∫ th to Englewood. Courtesyth to Englewood. Library of Leonia Archives The trolley line begins at the Hudson River ferry line begins at the Hudson River in FortThe trolley crossing Lee and ig. 4.6. Railway and trolley map of northern New Jersey, ca. 1910. map of northern New Jersey, ig. 4.6. Railway and trolley is represented by the thick line that divided in Leonia and went west to Hackensack and nor to Hackensack west line that divided in Leonia and went the thick by is represented F The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 91 Yet there were others, too, such as Mayor Christie himself or later the town magistrate, Judge Jesse Leslie, whose uses of the trolley varied with their work arrangements. ‘‘After we were married,’’ Leslie later explained, ‘‘we lived in Hackensack for a year. By that time we were looking around Bergen County, to see where we would like to live. We had an idea that we would like to live in Tenafly [N.J.]. The difficulty there was when the trolley ran out to the Junction—neither of us could get by the Junction without getting carsick. So we decided on Leonia. You could ride the trolleys in those days [1920s] for a dime if you happened to have a dime. Everybody who came to Leonia from New York used the 125th St. ferry. That was the transportation. You came over and took the trolley to Hackensack, and they ran all the way to Tenafly. . . . My law offices were in Hackensack and I rode the trolley from Leonia to Hackensack. It was [a nice ride]. When I went to law school in Newark—of course, I took law school at night—I used to take the trolley from Hackensack. It was one hour and fifteen minutes from Hackensack to Newark. You got a chance to read your law books both going and . . . not coming home, because I was half asleep.’’∞Ω The trolley represented new urban access and middle-class opportunity that would implicitly and inevitably put serious pressures on the prevailing image of Leonia as a country town.≤≠ Ironically, it was precisely among those newly arrived trolley commuters, who began to build and move into the newly developed Junc- tion area, that the image of Leonia’s country town thrived. The houses that arose, first along the main street, then in smaller lanes perpendicular to it, were not the homes of affluent middle-class families (see fig. 4.7). They were frame houses in a farmstead and cottage style, generally not as large as the prominent homes of railroad commuters in Leonia Park; Junction houses built in the trolley era generally had smaller lawns and house plots. Many of them had ample front porches, from which residents viewed both the trolley and the woods on the other side of the tracks. Some, too, in classic urban fashion, housed workplaces in their front rooms or in a portion of their living quar- ters, such as Lehman’s General Store at the Junction. But, gradually, the Junction produced a different and more specialized brand of commerce than the Village and thereby forecast some of the dynamics that would transform the demography of the suburban community entirely.≤∞ Unlike the Village, the Junction housed no coal yard, no black- Fig. 4.7. Houses north of Junction, sometime between 1910 and 1920. The construction of both solid frame and brick houses documents the stabilizing force of the trolley, even before Broad Avenue was paved. The front porches took advantage of the woods across the street for at least two more decades. The residents were staffers, clerks, and sales personnel in New York’s burgeoning corporate bureaucracies. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

smith shop, no train station with post office. Both centers had a pharmacy and a general grocery store, but, in addition, the Junction boasted a memorable butcher, the one-armed Mr. William Hartmann; a dentist (Dr. Arthur Strennert); and one of the earliest realty offices (Hitchcock and Coover) in the community. These more specialized commercial services before long joined the first town library (1915), initially a private voluntary enterprise. Soon after, the first branch of the National grocery store chain opened a small outlet there. The newcomers at the Junction also erected nearby the first Methodist church, which they eventually sold to the Roman Catholics to become St. John’s, the first permanent Catholic church in Leonia. By 1916 Leonians would use a portion of the remaining farmland in the town’s limits to build their first high school, which, because of the Junction and the trolley, became a regional facility for a number of neighboring towns.≤≤ When the teaching faculty became sufficiently The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 93 large, one of the nearby homes became another town boardinghouse, rooming high school teachers for the most part. Virtually all these new services indicated not only a differently selective consumer; they presumed social, economic, and cultural networks independent of local traditions. Between 1880 and 1900 the population of Leonia increased more than threefold, from 226 to 804, and in the next two decades the population more than tripled again, to nearly 3,000 residents by 1920 (see table A.11).≤≥ Not all the newcomers concentrated in the Junc- tion, but many did. Indeed, some of the older members of the community as well as some of the old Village merchants began to relocate in the newer trolley Junction. The sheer number of new residents, many of them not only foreign-born but also from New York and other states outside the New York region, made the Junction more than a competitive, second center of town. The trolley and its accouterments set the context for new questions about the nature of the developing community. It was in such a context that the self-image of the country town became widely used, both a reaffirmation of remembered values and a critical check against unfamiliar emblems of progress. This country mythology, in part, recognized that even with such an influx the town could not change overnight, and, indeed, some aspects of its earlier society should not be lost. After all, the Village was still the political center of town, where the borough offices and official town business, including voting, continued to be held. And, of course, the daily surge of commuters to the railroad station stabilized the economy of the older Village center. Similarly, many townsmen still kept horses in their private barns and bought both hay and coal at Ferdon’s in the Village. Moore’s hardware, one half of the old general store, still operated with a virtual monopoly on its durable goods. Some people simply used the old Village because it was nearer their homes than the Junction. Nevertheless, during the first two decades of the twentieth century the two competing town centers strained the communal cohesiveness implied in the image of country town. The multiple nuclei of suburban Leonia in these early decades raise important questions concerning the relative homogeneity regularly idealized about turn-of-the-century suburbanites.≤∂ Not all of the older residents of the English Neighborhood became affluent with the emergence of the village borough; similarly, not all the newly arrived residents of the Junction were firmly in the middle class. Both groups 94 Suburban Landscapes contained many working-class residents living in modest cottages, and such individuals would continue to arrive and build in town. Still, the country ambiance was used to gloss the socializing of distinct social and ethnic traditions of newcomers. ‘‘There were a couple of Polish families on Grand Avenue and I would play with those kids,’’ one resident recalled of the 1920s. ‘‘I was so close to the Polish families I could speak Polish or rather I could understand it more than speak it. There was always room around here to play and there was always a bunch of kids who came up here instead of me going there. There were orchards, all kinds of apples, pears, peaches, all those things were around.’’≤∑ Even the expansion of the black population did not lead to outright worries that racial differences would disrupt the country town culture. During these early years of the twentieth century new black families from the Carolinas and Virginia moved into the community and settled first on Schor Avenue with a Polish family for neighbors. Gradually, they concentrated in the Spring Street residences vacated by the early village merchants.≤∏ Some residents could still recall that during these prewar years ‘‘there were some white families down there [Spring Street] and some cases of white-black marriages in Spring Street. I had friends down there, still do . . . [When] I was a kid, blacks—and of course, they weren’t called blacks, they were called Negroes—it was the only permissible term in my family—were mainly doing manual [labor].’’≤π The attractive features of country town life were neither those of a putative homogeneity nor racist escapism. As these multiple differences among suburban residents increased rather than decreased, however, they served to convert the country town image, once an accurate descriptive term, into an established cultural myth. The country town carried connotations of social standards of civic responsibility, self-sufficiency, and indifference to distinctions of social class by which newcomers could be measured. Its invocation early on implied neither nostalgia nor defensive caution in the face of any challenge to older suburban values. The country town image, constructed by suburbanites of Doris Faig’s generation, promoted a civic standard of community cohesiveness which, somewhat contradictorily, would be used to evaluate both the compatibility of newcomers and the differentiating artifacts of American progress. The The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 95 celebrators of the country town image clearly included the citizens with nineteenth-century family histories; they also included newer arrivals, such as the trolley commuters and the artists, representing both working-class and middle-class residents, all of whom sought special access to social space that integrated nature and a supportive, communal environment. Finally, the country town image was not out of place in the eyes of realtors, merchants, and home builders. Its metaphoric coherence provided a common ground among individuals who likely would not have agreed ideologically about other issues. In such a context the widespread use of the image in the suburbanization process made its meaning progressively abstract. But thereby the abstraction, as historian Michael Frisch has cogently argued, did not preclude the existence of community or imply its degen- eration so much as it documented a new self-consciousness on someone’s part that a realignment of social relationships was in progress.≤∫ The attraction to the metaphor, one suspects, was its configuration of harmony among very disparate interests. Thereby one might argue that this metaphorical conception of community life became itself a binding agent in the shaping of a new suburban landscape. Leonia’s country town easily accommodated the influx of artists whose search for the motifs of nature fit well into its web of meaning. While they might help explain the special energy and variation of the country characterization, the artists alone do not account for its longevity or the mythical compass of country connotations in American suburbs. The multiple applications of the country associations only make sense if they fit into the fabric and structure of suburban social arrangements. What exactly happened to the informal, quasi-rural arrangements of the early railroad village once the trolley made its appearance? How great a transformation of the social fabric of the community resulted from an influx of trolley commuters? What were the social consequences of the suburb’s country town imagery? During its Junction development Leonia experienced a mixed influx of both working-class and middle-class residents, both renters and home owners, in unprecedented proportions. The coming of the trolley and the emergence of the country town image occurred at exactly the same moment that the working farmers became a negligi- ble group, 1 percent of the house-holding population by 1910. In contrast to the mixed social class structure in 1900, shaped as it was by 96 Suburban Landscapes Leonia Park dynamics and Literary League voluntarism, the coming of the trolley moved the town by 1910 toward a different social class character (see table A.10a and b). In the 1910 census dramatic changes appeared in the sharp reduction of skilled laborers actually residing in town and the influx of a managerial class (see table A.1). One should acknowledge that the managerial class (43 percent) itself was divided into (18 percent) superintendents, proprietors, merchants, and managers and into (25 percent) individuals with clearly subordinate administrative responsibilities, such as clerks (shipping, bank, court, delivery, and sales), agents, cashiers, tellers, auditors, canvassers, examiners, secretaries, and traveling salesmen.≤Ω In the era of the trolley the new bureaucratic structure of New York City opened up the urban environs not simply to those seeking some aspect of a country town but also to those whose salaries could not sustain city rentals or home ownership. The creation of a second town center dramatized the addition of still other unassimilated middle-class traditions into suburbia. It especially signaled a new and greater distance from the community’s Dutch/British ethnic and agrarian past. By 1910 only 23 percent of the residents had lived in the suburb ten years earlier. The country town image began to serve as a convenient rallying banner for a community in the throes of fundamental change, uncertain of the fate of their country traditions. In addition, new ethnic groups swept into the suburbs as emphatically as they jammed the seaboard cities. By the first decade of the twentieth century 49 percent of Leonia householders had foreign- born fathers, and 27 percent of the householders themselves were foreign-born. Whatever the generational divisions within such households, together the presence of householders born elsewhere or no more than one generation in this country potentially posed a substantive contrast to native priorities. These cultural distances, however, were not considered unbridgeable. Part of the country town legacy, after all, subordinated social distinctions, preferring to take individuals on their own merits. Particularly among the older residents with deep roots in the local past, Leonians began to refashion linkages that distilled portions of that past for their ‘‘modern’’ present. This realignment became dramatically visible in four major inter- locking areas: the creation of religious denominations and permanent churches; the organization of a new generation of studiously nonpolitical, voluntary associations to succeed the Leonia Literary League The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 97 at the Village’s Lyceum; a new set of values about domestic space; and the appearance of a new brand of middle-class suburbanite. All of these features carried different degrees of novelty and implicit change to the village structure of old suburbia. What they shared was an accommodation to changed circumstances that strained but did not undermine the basic public image of Leonia as a country town. One of the principal features of this social realignment emerged from inherited suburban routines. The informality and voluntarism that had structured the life of the country town provided a basic social order before the creation of a formal governmental process. The Bor- ough Council, the official governing body founded in 1894, was not considered the primary mover and shaper of town life. The council, one resident explained, was ‘‘only the tip of the iceberg. I would say it [the driving force of the town] was fairly . . . something that came out of the whole spirit of the town. Politics just followed after it.’’≥≠ The political responsibilities of each citizen were not so much discounted as subordinated to other forces and organizations. Until the actual formation of the town government in 1894, the central social (and political) facility was the Leonia Lyceum.≥∞ Not only were its entertainments and activities the central educational and socializing events of the town; they were also the central communal events of any week or month. In the 1890s the same dynamics that gave rise to the formation of the borough and the consciousness of legal boundaries seem to have occasioned a parallel set of considerations among religiously oriented groups. During the early years of the 1890s Episcopalians, Methodists, and Presbyterians (including older members of the early Dutch Reformed congregation) used the Lyceum building for their different services. Eventually, all three denominations would organize formal sectarian organizations and set up a mission or a church. The common imprimatur of the Lyceum seems to have muted the potentially competitive dynamics of these organizations as they cast about for their constituencies. Virtually none of the extant accounts or later histories acknowledged any overt clash or internecine feuding between or among these Protestant groups. In part all three church organizations seemed to have been mindful of the Protestant inheritance of the region. Through the Dutch Reformed mission that had served the English Neighborhood, New Jersey Protestants shared with their New England counterparts ideas of egalitarian land distribution, fears of conflict as a threat to internal 98 Suburban Landscapes communal life, and a Protestant (generally Calvinistic) interpretation of humanity’s relation to God.≥≤ Unlike New England congregations, New Jersey’s Dutch Calvinism sustained a memory of subjugation to British power and a different relationship between church and state. Their disestablished position had contributed to an overall defensiveness, if not insularity, with respect to both Manhattan and British rule which helps explain, in historian Patricia Bonomi’s view, the dogged sense of ethnicity among the Dutch and their enduring sense of Dutchness longer than many other ethnic groups.≥≥ The Revolutionary dynamics had also divided many Dutch churches as they divided other loyalties. One of the splinter groups from the Hackensack classis had created a Dutch Reform mission in 1822 and functioned for the rest of the century in the Leonia vicinity. The remnants of that Dutch Reform congregation gathered together in 1899 to produce the Presbyterian Church of Leonia, which featured prominently the Dutch heirs of earlier families. Among its first members and directors were the Wyckoffs, the Christies, and the Vree- lands.≥∂ For much of Leonia’s history the Presbyterians would command a considerably larger congregation and resources than its fellow religious organizations. The two remaining, prominent Protestant groups, the Episcopa- lians and the Methodists, with lesser numbers and funds, played no less strategic roles in town affairs. The Episcopalians organized their church in the Lyceum in 1893 but were able to form only an organized mission. They acquired land and a church by 1898, but they experienced a number of short-term rectors until 1906, when a period of stability began. Their facilities housed several important nondenominational voluntary groups, such as the American Legion, the local chapter of the Red Cross and a prominent theater group, the Leonia Players Guild. Similarly, the Methodists in 1890 rented the Lyceum to organize their church and Sunday School until their facility was ready. Their group remained part of a larger mission circuit until 1894, when they erected a church in the vicinity of the developing Junction. In 1914 they sold their building to the Roman Catholics and moved to an imposing Gothic style church at the southern edge of the Junc- tion’s commercial district, where a number of denominational and nondenominational voluntary meetings, musical concerts, and social events were hosted for the remainder of the century.≥∑ The new churches introduced a conscious denominationalism into The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 99 the town which had not existed before. The sheer numbers of incoming residents not only precipitated a new level of organizing but potentially some competitive proselytizing. The prevailing public spirit of the town, however, was the town meeting civility of the Lyceum. When animosities arose, the Lyceum legacy kept most disagreements from becoming openly hostile. Indeed, voluntary groups initially sponsored by one church, such as the Presbyterian’s active Men’s Neighborhood Club, quickly became explicitly nondenominational.≥∏ One particularly sensitive example of this intensified suburban denominationalism with a nondenominational spirit concerned the sale of the Methodist church to the Roman Catholics. One of Doris Faig’s grandparents, Mrs. M. E. Hurd, had the original idea for a Meth- odist church in 1890 and called a meeting to be held in the Lyceum to make her idea public; another of her grandparents, Councilman David Beeching, gave the land on Kingsley and Harrison Street on which the church was eventually built. The Hurds and the Beechings owned several ample plots in the Junction area and named streets, such as Kingsley Street and Harold Avenue, after relatives. The erection of the Methodist church in the midst of their long-standing holdings was more than an expression of their religious commitments. When the congregation sold the church to the Catholics in 1914, the Hurds were deeply affronted. Doris Faig’s mother took the position that ‘‘ ‘Jesus first lived in the fields’ and for some years I was taken out of church and didn’t go at all.’’ Eventually, Dr. John Prentice Taylor, the ecumenically minded minister of the Presbyterian church (himself a former Methodist),≥π called on the Hurds. He was ‘‘everybody’s minister . . . so I think he said something to my mother about ‘It’s too bad the children haven’t a Sunday School to go to.’ So when I was twelve, I was sent to the Presbyterian church, and that’s how I got to be a Presbyterian.’’ Despite the strategic importance of denominational differences and material disputes, nondenominational appeals recognized an efficient strategy for engaging genuine, deeply held religious commitments. The boundaries of these town religious denominations were permeable. ‘‘Of course,’’ Mrs. Faig continued, ‘‘my husband was a Luth- eran. His mother was a Long Island Protestant and his father came from the Black Forest of Germany and he was brought up in the Lutheran Church. But then he joined the Presbyterian Church with me. . . . My daughter married a Lutheran and she left her church for 100 Suburban Landscapes her husband’s church, the little church on Broad Avenue. She’s with Holy Spirit [Lutheran Church] now. So on some occasions I go with her to her church and get completely lost in the service, and they come with me on special days.’’≥∫ If not all citizens reflected this intradenominational traffic in their family histories, such easy crossing of denominational lines set the context for a special sort of nondenominational activity to become a town characteristic. Symboli- cally, no better example of this feature could be found than in the old frame church that the Methodists sold to the Catholics: later, when they were ready to build a new brick facility, the Catholics in turn sold the church to the Lutherans, who moved it several blocks away, to become part of Holy Spirit Church, where it still remains to the present day.≥Ω Out of these principal Protestant churches in Leonia came a new generation of voluntary organizations that expanded and reorganized the socializing activities originally conducted at the Lyceum. These new organizations went beyond the Sunday schools and mission societies attendant upon any congregational enterprise. Most important was the creation of the Men’s Neighborhood Club (1911), originated by Dr. John Prentice Taylor and two supporters, Richard C. Pond and Rev. Dr. Thornton B. Penfield.∂≠ This organization committed itself to community service and eventually drew in members from the entire citizenry, consciously reaching out beyond Presbyterian congregants. Among its more notable activities the Men’s Neighborhood Club was responsible for annual garden shows, artist’s nights (the first president was the noted illustrator Peter Newell),∂∞ the first Boy Scout troop, four hundred shade tree plantings, a large antique show, open meetings, lectures, and special features such as the commissioning of the George Washington Memorial Monument (1916), executed in bronze by town artist Mahonri Young and set into the red sandstone slab that once served as the doorstep for the Moore homestead, one of the earliest Dutch homes in the English Neighborhood (see fig. 4.8). In all its activities those belonging to the club referred to fellow members as ‘‘Neighbor X or Y’’ and took responsibility for neighborly activities in the community. The second major organization of town-wide importance was the Women’s Club, which originated in 1913 from an Episcopal church initiative. Originally formed as a branch of the National Housewives’ League, the group sought to uphold ‘‘the enforcement of laws that Fig. 4.8. Mahonri Young’s bronze bas-relief, Washington’s Retreat from Fort Lee, July 4, 1916. This sculpture, sponsored by the Men’s Neighborhood Club but sited on the grounds of the Leonia Presbyterian Church, represented one denomination’s outreach to the town as a whole. It also connected Leonia to the dynamics of the American Revolution, suggesting that the community’s local dynamics were connected to wider networks of significance. Photograph by author affect food supplies, the family, health, the cost of living and to secure further legislation when necessary to that end.’’ The eighty original founders quickly multiplied in the wake of their town fair, garden and canning exhibits, and the regular ‘‘departmental’’ activities in home economics, literature, and social welfare.∂≤ During World War I they staffed community rooms for traveling soldiers (one of the largest embarkation points for soldiers which arose during World War I was nearby Camp Merritt).∂≥ After the war the Women’s Club focused their energies on ‘‘culture’’: daytime and evening reading groups, college scholarship funding, a lecture forum, the Shakespeare Club, and an annual week-long art exhibit. In conjunction with the Men’s Neighborhood Club the early Homemakers’ Association founded the Leonia Public Library (1915), which opened its doors first in the newly developing Junction area. Even for citizens who were neither 102 Suburban Landscapes Episcopalian nor Presbyterian, one older resident argued, ‘‘the Men’s Neighborhood Club and the Women’s Club were the two leaders in a community-wide sense. I don’t think there were any real political organizations of importance then.’’∂∂ The churches continued to sponsor other voluntary organizations that, in effect, provided the social infrastructure of suburban life. Af- ter the war the Episcopal church proposed the establishment of the American Legion Post, named after the first Leonia casualty, Glen- dennon Newell, the only son of the artist Peter Newell. Their parish house became the first office of both the American Legion and the Red Cross. Its church members were also instrumental in the creation of the Players’ Guild, which from 1919 onward presented some of the central cultural events of each year. In addition, the Methodist church organized the first Girl Scout troops at the urging of Methodist com- municant and school doctor Frances Tyson.∂∑ Finally, the Presbyterian church under the stimulus of New York University educator Herman Harrell Horne (1874–1946)∂∏ organized the Home and School Asso- ciation (1910), whose activities included ‘‘open house’’ nights at the public school, supervision of summer play in Wood Park, annual teas for teaching faculty, child study committees, mothers’ groups, and a ‘‘bulletin’’ for distributing information on educational and civic con- ferences as well as regular school news.∂π Many of these new organizations and activities used the communal space such as the auditorium of the Leonia Grammar School or the meeting rooms of the parish houses, if not the churches themselves. Each major event, however, required many preliminary meetings of subcommittees and auxiliary groups, which took place in participants’ homes. The new homes built about the Junction area were smaller in overall size than many of the earlier houses of the Leonia Park era. Their scaled-down, farmstead designs are somewhat curious precisely because in many of these houses town life interacted more intensively than before, largely because of the expanded network of voluntary groupings. Leonia’s intensified voluntary culture dramatically affected the domestic values of its residents. The opaque and muted boundaries between suburban home and suburban society further illuminates historian Margaret Marsh’s argument that a special suburban value of domestic life emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century. Marsh’s interpretation, however, did not rest upon the voluntary net- The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 103 works that structured the early suburbs’ daily routines. Rather, she found in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia and in the mass magazines of the period a new concern for domestic space which followed from a transformed sense of nineteenth-century domesticity. The nineteenth-century version of domesticity focused on the family as a special entity, a cultural institution that preserved the moral values of society and energized the emotional reserves drained by interaction with commerce and other nonfamilial environments. The family in such a context was a world necessarily set apart from the masculine worlds of wage and business. Although this version of domesticity arose in the antebellum era, at exactly the same moment as the oldest suburbs, the early proponents of suburbs did not necessarily look to them as an ideal environment. With the rise of the city its concentration of people and its mixtures of ethnic and racial traditions, not to mention the concomitant disease and violence that quickly became associated with urban life, women were harder pressed to sustain the pretense of domesticity, so the wisdom of the mass magazines ran, in crowded town houses, apartments, and tenements.∂∫ Nineteenth-century domesticity made the home a special cultural value in the United States. Initially, domestic values appreciated the city and led to the purchase of urban conveniences; the home was emphatically a place where the feminine sensibility remained dominant in matters of child rearing and homemaking.∂Ω If men thought about the home, Marsh has argued, they did so as a haven from the workplace. Similarly, if men thought about the suburbs, they considered them principally in terms of residential space, an acquisition or investment. Deeply embedded in the lore of the nation’s mass magazines, these separate, gendered views—the one cultural and emotional, the other utilitarian and rational—came together by the eve of World War I, Marsh has insisted, largely because of a merger of domestic and suburban traditions. This merger followed from several factors: urban conveniences extended to suburbia, women entering the workforce, and a new masculine appreciation of family domestic life over the conviviality of the (male) city club. All of these factors become even more comprehensible in the context of an intensified network of suburban voluntary organizations. In this context of enlarged suburban voluntarism the companionate marriage required different allocations of domestic space. Private masculine domains such as the separate library or den were replaced 104 Suburban Landscapes with new public rooms: the enlarged, central living room replaced the front parlor, which was generally used only on special, formal occasions. Often in moderate-cost suburban homes the formal entrance hall completely disappeared, and one entered a house directly into the living room. There the family and friends gathered around the living room’s common fireplace each evening, if one can trust the blueprints of the ubiquitous pattern books or of architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright.∑≠ The upper rooms became more private and at times smaller, no longer doubling as sitting rooms but restricted to the needs of individual children or parents. The kitchen, always in the rear of the house, became smaller, a close workspace, usually with icebox, stove, sink, spare cupboards, and pantry with canned goods and homemade preserves. Whether it implied domestic help or not, the kitchen’s efficiency generally required daily shopping or delivery of perishable items for dinner, even when homes had gardens and a vestige of agricultural self-sufficiency.∑∞ The actual ownership of the home was less important than access to housing, and, hence, whether one rented or actually purchased a home, ownership was less important as a social class distinction than it was a new aspiration of American cultural consumption (see tables A.3 and A.8).∑≤ Historians have interpreted the emergence of the central living room at the turn of the century as evidence of new gender relations within the domestic sphere. The creation of a central family sphere instead of several private, often gender-distinct spaces—library, study, parlor, kitchen—supposedly responded to the twentieth-century ideal of a companionate marriage. Once the domestic hearth was no longer primarily the sphere of the female, once the male began to share some of the responsibilities of child rearing and domestic maintenance, there was less need for sequestering genders into their respective private spaces. Also, suburban communities turned the available space for live-in servants to other uses as dictated by their middle-class budgets or the availability of their day servants (see tables A.3 and A.8).∑≥ Late-nineteenth-century capitalist regularization both of work time and salary gave the male workforce both predictable schedules and predictable leisure. Middle-class men no longer necessarily recreated near their workplace or with fellow male workers in their bars and clubs. In addition, with the 50 percent reduction of family size over the nineteenth century and the rise of the divorce rate, the new mass media more urgently projected images of companionable husbands The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 105 and wives and linked them to an essential suburban way of life.∑∂ Home could now be a multigendered social unit in a way all but unthinkable for much of the previous century. This shift of spatial values and architecture, Marsh has observed, looked both backward to a nostalgic (and largely fanciful) notion of domestic order and forward to a new industrial society. But these interactions in suburban Leonia were nowhere as neatly mixed and balanced as that formulation implies. To be sure, the ideal of a companionate marriage did not mean families realized the ideal. Similarly, not all domestic designs closely followed Marsh’s prescriptive trajectory. For all its insight Marsh’s argument has reinforced a somewhat simplified, ‘‘urbanized’’ picture of the turn-of-the-century suburb: ‘‘The new suburbs, lushly landscaped, safe, homogeneous, and purged of the poor, the radical, and the ethnically suspect, offered a seemingly fool- proof environment for the creation of family harmony.’’∑∑ This depiction was incontestably the suburban picture of real estate speculators, nonresident promoters, and the new mass magazines, such as Ladies’ Home Journal (1883), Good Housekeeping (1885), and House Beautiful (1896), upon which many historians (as well as, undoubtedly, a percentage of suburbanites) have constructed their suburban images. Yet many older suburbs, such as Leonia, could not follow the idealized pattern because of their inheritances and their immediate characteristics. The suburb’s voluntaristic structures tolerated a range of persons and material features which belied mass magazines’ romantic imagery. Early suburbs, like Leonia, were neither lushly landscaped at the turn of the century, nor were they homogeneous or purged of the poor. Emphatically, they were not free of different racial and ethnic groups or of the politically suspect. People understood that they had not escaped disease, fire, or theft by moving to the suburbs, as the actual activities of the ubiquitous voluntary organizations attested. Leonia’s Men’s Neighborhood Club, for example, waged campaigns to organize leisure time and reorient individual priorities with gardening committees with responsibility for tree plantings and flower shows. They sought to use their voluntary structure to reshape community activity, precisely because there was no recognizable homogeneity. The multiethnic composition of the population was an inherent part of its entire history and compelled such organizations to plan consciously socializing events. As for suburban crime, early on the Leonia mayor and council recorded in their minutes a special congratulations 106 Suburban Landscapes to the town marshals for capturing the ‘‘highwaymen’’ who had ter- rorized the Fort Lee–Hackensack Turnpike.∑∏ In the face of much too common domestic fires, the 1898 mayor and council authorized a voluntary rather than a paid, professional fire department. The socializing structures of suburban voluntarism, so central to any understanding of the suburb as a community, attempted to institutionalize a different, citizen investment in the management of routine social problems, familiar to city and suburb alike. The churches ministered to their poor in a voluntary, undramatic, but vigorous fashion—and, if ‘‘the ethnically suspect’’ meant a number of foreign-born residents, some with explicit socialist proclivities, Leonia had its share and more, with one-fifth to one-third of householders being of foreign birth from 1880 through 1910. It bears repeating that nearly half of Leonia householders had parents who were foreign-born for this same period. Residents with recent experience of foreign cultures would play an increasingly prominent role in town affairs, soon holding the offices of councilman and mayor. Most important, the public standards of the town continued, as one longtime resident put it, to be those of a country town: ‘‘You took people as they were.’’∑π Suburbanites sought not ‘‘escape from the city’’ but movement toward a different and manageable scale of life which drew upon both urban and nonurban resources. In addition to the shared imagery of a country town, the new residential values of the suburban landscape were grounded as much in the changing architecture of the home as in the pervasive voluntary organizations of everyday life. Leonia’s voluntaristic culture worked with increasing consciousness to foster a sense of unity, in spite of obvious diversities. If its substantial ethnic population and denominational groupings tested the cohesive imagery of a country town, its black residents marked the outer boundaries of the suburb’s culture. Historians have generally assumed that the ‘‘pattern of the ghetto—residential segregation, underemployment, substandard housing, disrupted family life, inferior education and disease—separated the black experience from that of white ethnics.’’∑∫ From the Revolutionary days, however, Ber- gen County, New Jersey, itself contained a sizable black population. The remembered lore of the town generally depicted its black slaves as victims of British kidnapings or as loyal members of particular households. Much of the benevolent, if paternalistic, images of blacks were played out in the historical memory of Old Betty, a one-time slave The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 107 buried in the local eighteenth-century black cemetery. In 1880 the town householders included three black families, all natives of New Jersey or New York. Two of them listed their occupations as laborers, and one specified no occupation. The post-1880 suburban expansion that admitted substantial numbers of new ethnics did seem to displace these earlier black families, since neither they nor any black families appeared in the 1900 federal census. By 1910, however, a new black presence arrived in Leonia from Virginia and the Carolinas. Two families lived among Polish neighbors on Schor Avenue and were homeowners rather than renters. George Mills had a wife and two teenage daughters (one of whom, Margery Mills, was remembered as the valedictorian of the first high school graduating class).∑Ω Mills owned his home free of mortgage and worked as a general contractor. His neighbor Docery Hines held his home with a mortgage. Hines listed his occupation as a laborer, his wife’s as a laundress. There were also three sons and four daughters in the family, along with a boarder, Lewis McLaurin, whose wife of eighteen years was a live-in domestic with the nearby Daly household.∏≠ Several of these families belonged to the Presbyterian church before World War I. During the 1920s Leonia’s black families founded the Mt. Zion Baptist Church near the old Village, where black families had by then concentrated. The white townspeople received the newly arriving blacks into their town, schools, and extracurricular sporting activities, explicitly disavowing in the post–civil rights era any rancor or animosity. Whatever racial barriers arose, white-black relations within suburbia’s voluntaristic umbrella did not replicate the usual urban pattern.∏∞ The general features of this suburban transition to a distinctive suburban landscape played themselves out in the design of Leonia’s turn-of-the-century houses. How different these new suburban values were from those of the older Leonia Park model can be seen by contrasting the sample design of one prolific local builder, Wil- liam P. Richards, with that of the earlier railroad village of the 1880s. Andrew D. Bogert’s Leonia Park created fifty-six lots along present- day Maple, Crescent, Prospect, and High Streets, many irregularly shaped, because of the winding streets, to give a country effect. His model home, which seems never to have been built, nonetheless established his suburban standard: four bedrooms of modest size on the second floor, while on the first a veranda, entry hall, parlor (10.6 ft. — 108 Suburban Landscapes 13 ft.), large sitting/dining room (13 ft. — 15.6 ft.), kitchen (11 ft. — 11.6 ft.), pantry, and back porch. The entire structure (excluding the basement) contained less than 1,500 square feet. The scale model showed angular gables, ornate decorations of eaves and porches, grand bay windows and corner turrets, weathervane, spindles, and lattices. Bogert’s prospectus made it clear that ‘‘all lots [were] to be sold with restrictions as to improvements.’’ Nevertheless, in spite of the assertion of minimum standards and monitored styles on his public plan, the actual structures in his park were highly individuated.∏≤ A generation later Richards’s own twentieth-century model represented more continuity than contrast to the Leonia Park standard. His model home, regularly advertised in the regional newspaper the Palisadian, customized his homes more through interior, spatial arrangements than through external decorations, which were often manufactured and purchased by mail order. At his peak Richards was building five to ten houses a year. His structures generally had eight to nine rooms, and he varied them according to the purchaser’s needs. Although his homes were easily recognized as ‘‘Richards’s houses,’’ few of his homes duplicated the model he advertised. Richards kept an elastic standard. The major differences in the two types of homes draw special attention to Richards’s elimination of Victorian ornamentation and focus upon the living room (with fireplace). Many of the homes Rich- ards advertised in the pre–World War I period did not vary substantially in scale from the Leonia Park model and bore little resemblance to the so-called standard suburban homes projected in the new mass magazines of the period. He was capable of doubling the square foot- age of a home without altering its basic design. Many variations were possible, depending upon whether the living room was on the side or in the front, whether it was full or half-size, whether sleeping porches, parlors, or extra rooms were desired and where, and so forth. His few signature characteristics carried into the twentieth century the earlier Victorian tradition of private spaces, parlors, and pocket porches on both ground and second floors; the dark, chestnut trim on doors and windows; and double entrances to the central staircase. He also preserved the older Dutch tradition of the four-sided eave for shade and protection from the weather and a partiality to the Dutch tradition of having attic dormers. His eclectic design appeared in both elegant and modest variations throughout his community, a combination of both The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 109 progress and traditional pragmatism.∏≥ Richards’s houses geared themselves primarily to a newly expanded and stratified middle class coming to Leonia on the trolley. When he died one eulogist estimated that he had built over 250 homes in Leonia.∏∂ In terms of domestic structure both Leonia Park and Richards’s homes catered to an ethnically and occupationally diverse middle class, which mixed traditional and progressive values. Into the twentieth century Richards’s mixture of tradition and progress defined domestic space for many Leonia houses, but, even more, his standards of workmanship linked him deeply to the culture and suburban esprit of community building. Richards’s houses reflected both the new emphasis upon the family-centered living room and an accommodation to older nook and crannies of private space. At his death in 1943 Richards’s eulogist offered a commentary on a model suburbanite. Richards had come to Leonia in 1907 from his native Utica, New York. He was not only a builder but also one of the founders of the First National Bank of Leonia. He served as a volunteer fireman in the once rural community and acted as town marshal, building inspector, and member of the board of health. He also assisted in the founding (1921) and was a longtime director of the Leonia Building and Loan Association as well as being one of the earliest builders and real estate dealers in the borough. He was incontestably a citizen who had invested himself in his community. If the point were not clear, the moral was made explicit: his building prac- tices and materials reflected his hatred of ‘‘the shams used by other builders.’’ Citing Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the eulogist went on: ‘‘the basic wealth of a community depends largely upon the private enterprises and services rendered by the common citizens for the promotion, the general welfare and for the maintenance of high standards of public morals. When the history of the contributions of the common man to the development of Leonia as a high grade community is written, those made by William Richards should occupy a prominent place.’’∏∑ With no sense of irony or contradiction Richards’s life became a suburban standard both for community cohesion and individualized mores. The trolley newcomers of the early twentieth century entered a railroad village of a few affluent home owners, a small merchant cadre, and a sizable resident corps of skilled laborers. Self-sufficient farmers had formed a portion of the middle class in pre-trolley days. The 110 Suburban Landscapes fragility of tradesmen’s modest frame homes and stores reflected the new sense of risk taking in post–Civil War society. In their worka- day life the tradesmen, the schoolteacher, the lawyer, and the doctor put in time shoulder to shoulder with the coal dealer, the stable hands, the blacksmith, and other skilled and manual laborers. In what leisure time remained, ordinary citizens participated in the Lyceum’s social and cultural events with the wealthier members of the neighborhood. Sharp class distinctions did not obviously pervade town life, although they were present, particularly visible in the range of domestic architecture. By the turn of the century the social relations of New York City had begun to insinuate themselves into the emerging social and cultural morphology of the suburb. The newcomers represented a differently proportioned middle class of clerks and managerial types, spread across a bureaucratic and more stratified social class spectrum. Com- muters’ exigencies of time, space, and economy dictated the kinds of people who would come, the values they would bring with them, and what they would expect of their new neighbors. The trolley implied tighter urban linkages—reduced travel time, more scheduled vehi- cles, fewer noncommuting suburbanites—within the extensive transportation network already in place.∏∏ Trolley and railroad commuters produced a different kind of middle-class organizational personnel and a larger merchant group to keep their suburb updated with modern services. They came to expect operative sanitation and communication systems, schools, churches, and shopping facilities to accompany transportation mechanisms. This restructuring and stratification of the middle class further accelerated another important demographic shift: nationwide, families were getting smaller. Whereas the mid-nineteenth-century Amer- ican family averaged five and a half persons, the early-twentieth- century family averaged four and a half, and many suburbanites had smaller families still.∏π The decline had been precipitous over the entire century and enabled many citizens, farmers included, to invest their time differently in both work and leisure. For the fewer children in their charge families warmed to the new educational literature, which offered tactfulness and social skills rather than obedience and discipline, as in the 1850s and 1860s.∏∫ The role of the home educa- tionally was reinforced technologically by the proliferation of middle- class domestic gadgets. The impact of the new manufacturing con- The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920 111 glomerates at the end of the nineteenth century affected the suburb and the city alike in providing the manufactured products whose preparation previously had consumed everyday household routines. In actual fact they also raised the standard of cleanliness, which in turn increased domestic chores, both of which became components shaping the new meaning of middle class.∏Ω The different groupings of commuters, native and foreign, skilled laborers and clerical workers, blue-collar and white-collar citizens, quickly made middle-class a vague and abstract referent, one that glossed over the different middle-class strata and styles of Leonia Vil- lage and Leonia Junction. The idea of ‘‘suburbia’’ at the turn of the century was rapidly becoming as elastic a category as ‘‘middle-class.’’ The reflexive joining of the two ideas became an important feature in guaranteeing urbanites a welcome to the suburbs as a way of life and acknowledging the suburbs’ necessary and varied linkages to the city. In some ways the amorphousness of language became itself a new middle-class feature, creating the need for graphic metaphors such as country town. If it obscured, for example, the anxiousness many Amer- icans had about their families remaining within even an inflated idea of middle class, the metaphor captured a cluster of values that new commuters sought in their community: civic responsibility, self- sufficiency, and a de-emphasis of social class distinctions. The internal structures of the community reflected these country values in expanded civic voluntarism, concentrated domesticity, a newly em- phatic celebration of middle-class culture. The transformed suburb, however, was not simply the product of new conceptual and linguistic patterns. The mobile residents of the suburbs shared many of the pressures and advantages of their urban neighbors, but the important distinction of residence outside the city did not yet explicitly contain a suburban hostility to urban life. It stressed, rather, the desire for a different relationship to urban modernism. The trolley in its way served as a symbol for at least one older suburb in its accommodation to late-nineteenth- and twentieth- century technological advances. The trolley’s lasting contribution was less to provide another icon of American progress or the possibility of a new democratic mobility, accessible to the majority of the population. Rather, the suburban significance of the turn-of-the-century trolley was that it introduced an alternative brand of community building for multiple classes without obviously prescribing the out- 112 Suburban Landscapes come. When suburbanites insisted that they lived in a country town, they served notice that, without embracing the past or rejecting modernism, they would subordinate technological progress to a genteel interaction with their neighbors. If they saw the city in its way as an alternative—for individual achievement, anonymity, and excite- mentπ≠—Leonians sought a voluntaristic alternative to that brand of urbanism. Their relationship to the great metropolis on the Hudson put other values first. ‘‘The suburb,’’ one longtime suburban resident testified, ‘‘is a shared rationality, where one doesn’t necessarily agree with one’s neighbors, where one is pleased to disagree yet where one cultivates mutual respect.’’π∞ At the turn of the century older suburbs attempted to construct distinctive communities in which they could sustain easy access to the modern metropolis. The images they constructed, such as that of a country town, to make sense of these social orders acknowledged and welcomed the influences of urban life; indeed, such images accommodated progress and modernization while insisting on values that seemed essential for both suburb and city. The country images of older suburban cultures fashioned a conceptual tradition that finessed actual divisions of class, race, and ethnicity in the city’s fringe communities. These suburbanites found common resonance in the imagery of the country town. It was an accessible image precisely because it loosely, even ambiguously, integrated the positive values that made the trolley suburbs attractive places to live.π≤ It was an image that bound the informal layers of town life—the church, grounded voluntary organizations, and their interaction with new domestic arrangements—and supported a new civic sense of suburban culture. The country town, however real or fictive, reformulated for early- twentieth-century Leonia the latitude that the Dutch had earlier granted to non-Dutch farmers in the English Neighborhood. In Le- onia the metaphor became in its way a device for weaving together multiple connotations—namely, that any community culture could have multiple roots, that the roots of suburbia were not controlled exclusively by affluent commuters, that a town with multiple centers did not automatically forfeit its relative social cohesion, and, finally, that the urban dynamics that drove suburban development need not represent elitist, hostile, or destructive forces but, rather, were tempered with both presuburban local tradition and the technological facts of modern life.π≥ chapter 5 Country Landscapes, Bohemian City

n 1920 the young John Steuart Curry, later one of the triumvirate of IAmerican Regionalists which included Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, wrote his parents back in Kansas. ‘‘I like Leonia,’’ he exclaimed. ‘‘It is like a country town. Lots of churches and good school. The people are very nice indeed. There are many artists about. They are real artists, none of this Washington Square, Greenwich Village Bohemianism.’’ ‘‘I am here,’’ Curry’s brother could add reas- suringly, ‘‘and have not seen New York, except from the subway. But we have thoroughly scouted Leonia. It is College Hill with the addition of some mighty fine people. We were around to several studios. No Bohemia here. It is all good clean work. New York is to this place first a place to get supplies. None of them seem bitten by any bugs. . . . No burglar landladies but real home-like care. John is sure lucky out here in the quiet, working hard every day, wearing old clothes. Noth- ing false or pretentious or extravagant . . . the ideal place to work.’’∞ In part Curry’s assurances addressed his parents’ predictable anxieties. But also they register and extend the connotations of a ‘‘country town’’ suburb as a locus of civility, supportive domesticity, and the absence of social pretension. Yet the striking novelty of these descriptions is the use of the country/city dichotomy, a familiar literary and journalistic convention, as a framework for artistic work.≤ The suburban artist, comfortably informal, ensconced in the natural refuge, tranquillity, and de- cency of country life, had begun to think of the city not primarily as an accessible resource but as the antithesis of suburban culture. Curry had begun to distance himself from bohemianism at the very moment that suburbanite careers became more intensively bound to city dynamics. Indeed, the role of the suburban artist illuminates not just an impor- 114 Suburban Landscapes tant chapter in the history of American art; it also sheds light on, through their careers and their artistic perspectives, the suburbanite’s own contribution to a changing suburban culture. The polarization of country and city values serves retrospectively as a central signpost, at the very moment that the nation’s interwar period shaped a new set of mainstream images and national priorities. Curry’s suburb, Leonia, had attracted artists for a generation before his arrival. Their presence had for a time fostered a receptive and inclusive conception of community life, commensurate with the special Dutch heritage of the region. For Curry the artists, not the heterogeneous class, ethnic, and racial demography of the town, captured his imagination. In his enthusiasm Curry converted a conventional distinction between city and country which earlier Leonia artists such as Peter Newell and Ilona Rado West considered compatible variations on common metropolitan themes. Curry’s country/city framework demanded the artist choose one over the other and set new conceptual parameters for the practicing artist. The country no longer encompassed the city but, rather, appeared self-contained, a special world apart, independent of superficial urbanity. Curry’s story begins to tell how and why this transformation took place. Curry had come to Leonia in 1919 and, like a number of other artists, sought instruction from Harvey Dunn at his Leonia School of Illustration. These artists came at the very moment when Greenwich Village and New York bohemianism had developed a distinctive urban, antibourgeois style that served artists such as Curry as an incon- testable antipode.≥ They came to Leonia no less eager than their Greenwich Village counterparts to achieve money, professional distinction, and a currency with New York’s celebrated urban culture and, in particular, the lucrative, illustration work demanded by the flourishing mass-circulation magazines. The suburban artists’ antibo- hemianism, however, compelled them to articulate and, indeed, to reconfigure in their work a new appreciation for the suburban culture that nurtured them so substantially. Their artwork clarified some of the shifting conceptual values of the suburban transformation in the interwar years, but their peculiar dependence upon and ambivalence about city life reflected some of the structural shifts within the process of suburbanization itself. Curry spent only a year and a half in Leonia, but, like many of his fellow artists,∂ the experience was formative. In part the sheer inten- Country Landscapes, Bohemian City 115 sity of Curry’s commitment was a function of his long-cherished ambition to study with the most prominent illustrators of the day and to achieve something of Harvey Dunn’s fame along the way. Curry had been born near Dunavant, Kansas, in 1897, the son of farming parents. After high school he attended the Kansas Art Institute and, more significantly, from 1916 to 1918 the Chicago Art Institute, the transfer point and switching ground for so many of the United States’ early-twentieth-century artists. Early on in his Chicago study, at age nineteen, he wrote his mother, ‘‘When I get a little along in the work, I am going to New York and go the Art Students League and probably take lessons from Harvey Dunn.’’ ‘‘Harvey Dunn,’’ he reassured his parents, ‘‘came from the plains of South Dakota when he was nineteen. He was a big rube. He carried his trunk on his back to the Institute and tried to get in. But he is now one of the best. He is over six feet tall and looks anything but an artist. . . . He looked like a businessman, he wore no long hair, floppy clothes and long fingers. His hands were stubby as most artists are. He painted in a slow business- like way. He didn’t say anything till he had finished and that was, ‘Well, I’m through.’ At the half hour rests he got out of the mob and smoked his pipe in the hall.’’∑ Curry’s continual resistance to popular images of the artist as singular, abnormal, and pretentious matched an intense cultivation of his own conversion from country rube to a convincing exponent of an American middle-class culture (see fig. 5.1). Curry’s temporary postponement of his artistic ambitions, if anything, intensified them. In 1917 he left Chicago not for New York and Harvey Dunn but for army service in World War I. Upon his return he and his brother entered Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsyl- vania, and studied there until 1920. Then he interrupted his college studies to go east and meet Harvey Dunn, who pronounced his work ‘‘good in spirit and rotten in drawing and technical ability.’’∏ Dunn advised him to settle in Leonia among his former students, who along with Dunn would provide the necessary supervision and instruction. Dunn advised him to work for a year before submitting any art to magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. Such diligence and hard work, Dunn promised, would produce careers like those of his other students, worth from two to fifteen thousand dollars annually. Finally, at the end of this first encounter he left Curry with a conclusive piece of advice. ‘‘Mr. Dunn told me in his discourse, one truth,’’ Curry wrote Fig. 5.1. Leonia boardinghouse of Curry and Shepherd. This Broad Avenue home had easy trolley access to New York City and ample space for renting to artists who were attending the Dunn-Chapman School of Illustration (1914–19). Photograph by author

home, ‘‘and this is what he talked about, truth, to read my Bible. You know artists aren’t supposed to be Christians. I never heard a more earnest and real sermon than yesterday’s.’’π Curry, a fervent and lifelong Presbyterian, was genuinely relieved that his career ambitions did not affront his religious commitments. The benefit of his suburban refuge filled his regular letters home. He worked, ate, and socialized, day after day, with Dunn’s former students. ‘‘[Robert E.] Johnston and [Dean] Cornwell,’’ who, Curry reported, worked for magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopoli- tan, Century, and Everybody’s, ‘‘told me tonight that I had the most wonderful chance in the world.’’∫ His fraternization with Clark Fay, Frank Street, and Bill Fisher, regular contributors to the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, only whetted his appetite.Ω ‘‘Corn- well teaches me all I can learn. Dunn acts as a general advisor, teaches his Theology and gives Tone to things.’’ Curry took close heed of all such instruction and literally followed his mentor’s footsteps by renting space in Dunn’s old Leonia studio at the home of artist Ilona Rado Country Landscapes, Bohemian City 117 West. As Dunn’s guest, Curry attended the March 1920 Illustrators Show at New York’s Waldorf Hotel, where he saw Charles Dana Gib- son, James Montgomery Flagg, and Norman Rockwell, ‘‘all the great and mighty.’’∞≠ ‘‘Frank Street,’’ Curry gossiped enviously to his parents, ‘‘is being sent to a lumber camp in Maine by the Redbook. He goes next week accompanied by Clarence Budington Kelland of ‘Sudden Jim’ fame. He’s got a new serial and Street gets the job of making the pictures.’’∞∞ By January 1923, in the same letter in which he announced his marriage, Curry reported home about an equivalent career experience, his own new serial for Zane Grey’s The Code of the West, a ten- to fifteen-week commitment, with an advance and the promise of $125 a set. He also remarked that he would get his pictures back rather than the regular procedure of giving them to the advertisers.∞≤ The foundation for Curry’s life ambition as an illustrator for middle-class consumers had, in his eyes, been set. So, too, was his prewar version of middle-class mores fully equated with his suburban locale. Curry’s intensive and successful apprenticeship owed its ideology and fraternal organization directly to Harvey Dunn’s own mentor, Howard Pyle (1853–1911), and his Brandywine (Chadds Ford, Pa.) style.∞≥ Both Dunn and Pyle, as extravagantly admired for their teaching roles as for their detailed and inventive artistry, felt compelled early in their careers to cultivate an apostolate. Pyle was determined to create a school that did not depend on sheer imitation and sketching of classical models to refine an individual’s skills but, rather, one that engaged the student’s imagination. In addition, he sought to incorporate the inspiration of the countryside into the instructional process, particularly his favored tramping grounds outside his native town, Wilmington, Delaware. For a time Pyle varied his successful illustrating career with Harper Brothers, publishers of both national magazines and books, by organizing sketching parties to the country from his New York City studio. Eventually, in 1879 he returned to his native city of Wilmington, to his Quaker roots and to the landscape of the Brandywine Valley. Then, in 1894 and for six years thereafter, Pyle channeled his pedagogical insights into classes at Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry. In 1900 he began his own school, believing that a different brand of group training in illustration would lead to the production of a new generation of Ameri- can painters.∞∂ For Pyle and his students there was no division between art and 118 Suburban Landscapes illustration, between masterpiece conception and popular appreciation. His school in the rural Brandywine Valley, where artists lived, worked, ate, and recreated together, was central but certainly not a substitute for study of the great masters. There was something about his innovative school, like his art, which carried a near religious immersion and monastic simulation in his enterprise, notwithstanding the fact that several of his prize students were women.∞∑ Pyle bought space in Wilmington, built studios into a colony-like assemblage, and closely screened potential students. After an intensive interview, akin to the grilling Harvey Dunn later gave John Steuart Curry, Pyle admitted candidates tuition free, though they paid for room, board, and supplies. In the summer they collectively hiked, worked, picnicked, and learned through the countryside around Chadds Ford, Pennsyl- vania, and the Brandywine Valley. The central thrust of Pyle’s teaching centered on the force of imagination, the need to re-create the ‘‘picture’’ of the depicted moment, rather than stressing particular techniques or mechanical details. Pyle reveled in the dramatic and histrionic episode, particularly in his rendering of Arthurian tales and medieval stories of his own devising. He drew upon an older tradition of craft and artistry, current impressionistic influences, and the practice of sketching (and teaching) outdoors to meet the future demands made upon art by the mass- circulation magazines. Pyle’s popularity also made him a model of accommodation to Harper’s Monthly and Harper’s Weekly and his other publisher employers: his acceptance of commercial demarcations, especially of size and format, and his willingness to shape content to audience. It was his implicit argument that the true artist could find his insight within these parameters and that being conscious of one’s audience did not necessarily diminish the artist’s vision. ‘‘My objective in teaching my pupils,’’ Pyle insisted, ‘‘is that they should be fitted for any kind of art.’’∞∏ Pyle’s example and artistic approaches set a professional standard that would be continued consciously for at least two generations of artists, many of whom thrived in country town suburbs on the metropolitan fringe.∞π His vivid narrative realism blended an imaginative appreciation of the historical moment with the power of graphic context and convincing social tension. His ability to characterize an instance of conflict (The Charge, 1904), of surrender (His [Robert E. Lee’s] Army Broke Up and Followed Him, 1911), of triumph (The Com- Fig. 5.2. Howard Pyle’s The Fight on Lexington Common, April 19, 1775. Pyle’s historic illustrations often featured ordinary folk in roles that had become surprisingly extraordinary, such as this Revolutionary moment executed for The Story of Revolution by Henry Cabot Lodge. Courtesy of Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

ing of Lancaster, 1908) contained not simply the drama but also the prosaic details needed to re-create an entire social condition.∞∫ Much of his drama occurs in a situation that would be otherwise commonplace, a feature particularly true of his widely disseminated scenes of the American Revolution (see fig. 5.2). His particular brand of modernism in both pedagogy and artistry was one that took his public responsibilities seriously and made him in a special way the rightful successor to Currier and Ives as the illustrator of episodes that spoke to the turn-of-the-century popular imagination.∞Ω Long after his death in 1911 commentators associated Pyle with stirring reconceptualizations and reaffirmations of American patriotic and social values. Pyle appealed to a wide public audience, but in his central preoccupations, especially the reconciliation of history with a vivid present moment, he tried to dramatize for his larger national audiences the values of his self-created art colony: the primacy of imagination, the mastery of craft, the collegiality of workplace, the inspiration of a country landscape. A retrospective trib- 120 Suburban Landscapes ute likened Pyle to William Blake: ‘‘in the representation of life and things, he caught native aspects and meanings.’’≤≠ Harvey Dunn had joined Pyle’s artistic community in 1904 after two years’ study at the Chicago Art Institute. In his two years with Pyle he acquired a major advance in artistic skill and several lifelong friends, such as his fellow students N. C. Wyeth and Frank Schoon- over. With Pyle in Wilmington, Dunn made ends meet by working as a handyman in the home of Hendrick J. Krebs. Krebs’s wealth was based on his pyrites patent, which stabilized white paint and was the basis for the Krebs Pigment and Chemical Company. Krebs’s fortune was made even before he sold his company to the Duponts. On March 12, 1908, with N. C. Wyeth his best man, Dunn married Tulla Krebs, the only daughter of Hendrick Krebs, and began a very successful illustrating career with many New York magazines.≤∞ From these years through the Depression the Saturday Evening Post, for example, seldom appeared without some illustration from the prolific Dunn.≤≤ In 1914 he moved to northern New Jersey to be nearer the New York publishing markets and settled in Leonia, where he rented a studio in the home of artist Ilona Rado West. In addition to his magazine illustrations, Dunn began to teach at New York’s Art Students League (f. 1875). There he discussed with fellow teachers the possibility of summer classes when the league was not in session, a longtime practice of teachers at the Chicago Art Institute and New York’s Salmagundi Club. His league colleague and fellow Leonian Charles S. Chapman encouraged the notion of summer classes, possibly recalling the benefits of earlier Country Sketch Club ventures or the well-known summer school of his mentor, Wil- liam Merritt Chase. In this case, however, Dunn and Chapman produced something more focused and more organized: a summer school based on the principles of Howard Pyle. ‘‘When it was a very hot summer,’’ May Wickey explained, ‘‘he [Harvey Dunn] said it is too hot for you folks [Art Students League students]—[Harry] Wickey [her husband] was one of the students also—and he said that there were a lot of old [barns]—at that time [1914] Leonia was a real country town—it wasn’t as built up as it is now—and most of the big houses had barns. He said you can find the studios in the barns in the village and we’ll do our work out there in the summer. And that’s when the summer school started.’’≤≥ Dunn, who was more ebullient and dynamic than Chapman, provided the energy (and money) to purchase the old Country Landscapes, Bohemian City 121 Civil War–era homestead of the Moore family about 1914. In this large Victorian manse Dunn and Chapman housed artists cheaply, provided paints at cost, and used the old house as a base for the new Leonia School of Illustration.≤∂ In Dunn’s mind the school consciously imitated the structure and procedures he had learned under Howard Pyle and his Brandywine School.≤∑ In fact, the two schools shared an overriding commitment to artistic proficiency, an insistence that art must encompass both graphic conception and realistic detail. ‘‘An artist who is a good artist,’’ Dunn would pronounce, ‘‘should be able to accommodate his skill to the exigencies of the occasion—to fit his work for the use, commercial or otherwise, for which it is intended.’’≤∏ Both schools set great store by the artist’s versatility and simplicity in communication. They were, after all, both driven by the New York publishing and advertising markets, which became highly competitive in these years. The competition left the artist with considerable illustrative discretion, and yet the central reality of producing art for this market was the specification of image size and the production deadline. For Dunn, far more than for Pyle, the organizational and commercial context of artistic production began to raise problems for the artistic integrity of illustrators. For a time Dunn and his instructors held close to the Pyle tradition, denying any essential differences between art and illustration. Leading a discussion during one of Dunn’s Leonia classes, for instance, N. C. Wyeth challenged a young artist who wanted to do commercial art so that he could be free to paint and become ‘‘a real artist.’’ Wyeth spoke both for himself and Dunn when he insisted that the values were reversed. ‘‘The only trouble,’’ Wyeth insisted, ‘‘is that you’ve got to be an artist before you can be an illustrator.’’≤π However consistent the Pyle and Dunn schools were about the artistic primacy of illustration, the dynamics of commercial magazine publishing and the competition with photography made the illustrator’s task increasingly competitive yet increasingly profitable for those pliant enough to survive the competition. Dunn’s own subsequent career, however, indicated increasing reservations about the idea of illustration as art which many of his own students shared. In 1917 Dunn joined the Army Expeditionary Force as a member of an artistic team to record the war for history, both as a means for recruitment and for civilian enlightenment. He left his School of Illustration to Chapman in 1918 and went to Europe, where 122 Suburban Landscapes he produced an extraordinary body of work on the war seen from the soldier’s and civilian’s viewpoint. On the basis of his wartime sketches Dunn expected to return home and recast his war work into art of a more permanent value. Yet the army was disinterested, though his work later in the 1930s became widely popular through the dissemination of his illustrations in the American Legion Monthly.≤∫ Gravely dis- appointed about the initial reception of his war work, Dunn relocated to nearby Tenafly, New Jersey, and concentrated on his own uncom- missioned depictions of the other great national event in which he had participated, the homesteader’s settlement of the Great Plains. Dunn’s substantial work between World War I and his death in 1952 dramatized the remembered landscape of his native South Dakota terrain. It was in this period immediately after World War I that John Steuart Curry sought out Dunn for his advice and tutelage. Dunn’s own shifting sensibilities, plus the dislocations of the war itself, help explain the discontinuation of the Leonia School of Illustration sometime in 1919. By the war’s end, one member of the artists’ circle observed, Dunn’s students ‘‘were all making their own living. They had stopped schoolwork but the artists still went up to Harvey for criticism. He enjoyed that.’’≤Ω The Leonia School of Illustration represented only the most formal aspect of a new artistic and social network that continued in Leonia and outlived the school’s demise. Curry was but one of many artists who continued to benefit from the informal, voluntary network of artists who had formed the Leonia School of Illustration. In the ring of studios, suburban homes, and derelict barns where they lived and worked, Leonia’s artists nurtured and collectively transformed Dunn’s inheritance. In a sense these Leonia artists made their distinctive contributions by following an intellectual trajectory that Dunn himself would have recognized. As their careers matured and succeeded commercially, Leonia artists placed a progressively important stress on the landscapes of their native places. Curry, for example, worked as an illustrator for a number of years before making an obligatory trip to Europe to study the great masters. Upon his return he relocated in another suburban art colony in Westport, Connecticut, but, artistically, he immersed himself in the lore of his native Kansas, producing Baptism in Kansas (1928), The Tornado (1932), and The Line Storm (1934), among other important works.≥≠ In 1936 he accepted the first university artist-in- Country Landscapes, Bohemian City 123 residence position at the University of Wisconsin, where he produced Wisconsin Landscape (1938–39), arguably his finest work, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Thomas Hart Ben- ton, grouped in the 1930s with Curry and Grant Wood as American Regionalists, offered a retrospective rationale: ‘‘We stood for an art whose forms and meaning would have direct and easily comprehended relevance to the American culture of which we were by blood and daily life a part. . . . We hoped to build our ‘universals’ out of the particularities of our own times and our own places, out of the sub- stances of our actual lives as most of the great artists of the world’s past have done.’’≥∞ Such a rationale for this generation of artists more frequently addressed images of country and man’s adaptation to nature than it did urban space in the twentieth century where, since 1920, more than half of Americans resided. In part their choice of subject matter, like their choice of residence, represented the force of an inherited country tradition that held a powerful resonance for their lives and work. Curiously, the attractions of the country landscape and the dynamics of the suburban artist’s immediate locale, if anything, deepened as Harvey Dunn’s coterie achieved admirable national reputations and financial stability. For instance, Harry Wickey regularly returned to his family’s Ohio farm and produced a wide array of farmscapes, particularly featuring pigs, horses, and farmhands, stressing the physicality of country life (see fig. 5.3). Grant Reynard, too, traveled back to his native Nebraska, particularly fascinated with its imposing grain eleva- tors, prairie terrain, and townscapes. At times Reynard accompanied other artists, such as his friends Harry Wickey and Charles Chapman, to their native climes. Lee Townsend, an Illinois native and one-time professional jockey, relished his return to any racehorse metier and portrayed its resonant milieu of stables, horses, and tack. J. Clinton Shepherd, who boarded with Curry in the same Leonia rooming house, never ceased to draw upon and revisit the scenes of his early days as a Wyoming and Montana cowboy. Annually, Frank Street and his wife returned to their childhood homes in Kansas and points west as far as Taos in search of artistic country.≥≤ And Harvey Dunn continually enthused about accumulated material gathered during his trips to Trin- idad, Colorado, and the Southwest with his student Arthur Mitchell and their artistic pursuit of the ‘‘Unhollywoodized’’ American West.≥≥ In the process a remembered experience of country life, nurtured in an Fig. 5.3. Harry Wickey’s Stallion and Mare, n.d. This lithograph captures the drama as well as the technical problems of composition and execution which farm animals always provided Wickey (and his friend John Steuart Curry). Enthusiasm for nature and rural figures characterized a large portion of his sculptural opus and found an appreciative audience with suburbanites. Private collection

emergent suburban culture, became nationalized via mass magazine images into a distinctive iconography of the American landscape.≥∂ Why was the country so important to these twentieth-century suburban artists? In part, whether the subject was the Midwest or the Far West, the country represented the starting point and the measure of their own career trajectories. It also dramatized the autonomy of their professional roles as artists, their ability to select rather than be assigned their themes, as in their earlier illustrating days. Unlike the bohemians of Greenwich Village, the suburban artists reenergized themselves by reengaging rather than rejecting their country heritage.≥∑ Suburbia nurtured this reengagement and provided a supportive, if changing and minimalist, country context. Their country images embodied widely varied terrains, large and small, and projected a twentieth-century version of community life which strove for neigh- Country Landscapes, Bohemian City 125 borly civility and independent choice that westerners and midwest- erners often contrasted with eastern sophistication. Suburban landscapes seldom depicted clichéd images of ‘‘suburban’’ life but, rather, recognized and celebrated ordinary lives and familiar routines apart from the city as the essence of American socialization. The artists themselves would have resisted any categorization of their work as suburban, if only because of its emergent precision in their time. Any artwork that required a title or caption, Harvey Dunn once pronounced, is weak art. Still, he put titles to his work. In his much-admired paintings of the Depression and post-Depression years, such as The Prairie Is My Garden and Buffalo Bones Plowed Under, Har- vey Dunn depicted a different western country from that of, say, Fred- eric Remington. Dunn’s West contained no imminent danger from hostile Indians or romanticization of cavalry and cowboy life (see fig. 5.4). Nor was Dunn taking his cues from the once popular nineteenth- century panoramas of Albert Bierstadt or Frederick Church, who idealized the Rocky Mountains, with their natural, almost spiritual, harmony of the elements: mountains, sky, water, weather, and human habitation.≥∏ Instead, Dunn’s prairie emphasized the homesteading farmer, the spareness of his shelter and the tenuousness of his resources, the harsh realities of basic survival, and the role of both genders in building something durable and satisfying of their own. The sheer physicality of their lives made them unconsciously heroic in their commonplace routines. The essential drama of his paintings rested in the homesteader’s endurance within a distinctive terrain. They were values that implicitly Dunn felt in need of reexamination, if not vivid and memorable reaffirmation, in the face of Depression dynamics and the threat of another world war. They were also exportable values that found particular resonance with the suburbanite’s affirmation of a country town. Dunn’s country images were not entirely a product of his western origins and homestead memories. They were also a function of his artistic orientation to a much wider audience than that restricted to formal museums. In the last decades of his career he taught and exhibited his work at the Grand Central Gallery in one of the most public of urban hubs, Grand Central Station in New York City. Many of his students joined him in both successful instructional and exhibition roles, engaging varied middle-class publics on their own terrain rather than in museums with less public agendas. The wide fraternity ance and protective

eflected such self-possession eflected such tesy of South Dakota Arttesy of South Dakota Museum Collection One of Harvey’s best-known paintings captures the Great Plains dwellers’ endur Plains dwellers’ the Great paintings captures One of Harvey’s best-known , n.d. ig. 5.4. Harvey Is My Garden Dunn’s The Prairie under hard circumstances, which he greatly admired. The female figures in his Pioneer Series often r figures The female admired. he greatly circumstances,under hard which maternity, echoed by female activists in suburban voluntary female organizations. Cour by echoed maternity, F Country Landscapes, Bohemian City 127 of Dunn’s artistic network required both a remembered western landscape and a commercially oriented eastern marketplace of professionals.≥π This peculiar orientation nurtured itself in their suburban communities. Virtually all of Dunn’s students, like Dunn himself, resided in suburbs and seldom during their careers attempted to root themselves in the city, even when they kept studios there. Their collective commitment to country locales became essential parts of their lives as well as their art. Oddly, Leonia’s artist community seldom made its country values distinctly suburban, rarely depicting domestic chores, lawn and garden tending, or the plight of the daily commuter. These artists were in no way apologists for their suburban locales, nor did they often practice their crafts with immediately available suburban neighbors as motifs. Yet they often exploited their immediate environs in much the same way that the early moving pictures had done: they adapted detailed, realistic portions of the suburban landscape or viewed it from partial, ground-level angles to suggest larger contexts and recognizable perspectives. Like the suburban mystique itself, this iconography sought to engage the viewer in a manageable landscape. For instance, Grant Reynard’s watercolor of Lehman’s General Store (n.d.), cropped like a snapshot, nevertheless captured one of the mainstays of Leonia Junction and yet, in his concentration on a central community facility, intimated a broader commercial and social interaction (see figs. 5.5 and 5.6). Similarly, his distinctive etching Wind and Rain (1930) could have as likely been drawn from the few remaining farmscapes of Leonia as anywhere in his native Midwest. The artists used suburbia as a familiar and recognizable resource, one that did not eschew urban scenes or urban commissions, on which their careers often depended, but one to which they returned routinely. Suburbia’s country associations contained their sense of originality, in the sense both of shelter- ing and distinguishing their special sense of landscape. Many of these artists regularly retold stories or episodes of the epiphanic moment when they grasped the meaning of the artist’s role, to draw upon familiar landscapes for their own distinctive styles. Grant Reynard had already established an enviable reputation as illustrator for Redbook, the Saturday Evening Post, and other publications when in 1930, at age forty-three, he spent a summer at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. At the time Willa Cather was a member of the artist colony and asked to see the artwork of her Fig. 5.5. Grant Reynard’s Lehman’s General Store, n.d. The store became a fixture of the Leonia Junction (not far from the artist’s home), and this painting became a reminder of the business’s contribution and routine importance after it was moved and the building became an apartment house. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

fellow Nebraskan. Reynard explained later how he displayed many of his ‘‘arty’’ subject matter for her, such as nude ladies romping with goats. Cather viewed his efforts without comment and over tea talked entirely about herself, about her university work, her experiences in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York, the glamour of her life away from Nebraska’s prairies. She confided that all her attempts at ‘‘fine writing’’ paled against the remembered experience of her early youth in Ne- braska and the immigrant maids who had befriended her. In My An- tonia (1918) and the later Nebraska novels, she claimed, she found her writing voice. Cather left Reynard befuddled and wondering what her real reaction was to his artwork. By his own account he remained befuddled for a year. His awakening came, once again a year later at the MacDowell colony, in beginning ‘‘to make drawings of familiar things, musical people who really interested me, then on to other fields and subjects, landscapes, trips West to my native Nebraska, the prairies, the moun- Fig. 5.6. Grant Reynard’s Wind and Rain, 1930. This lithograph merited a ‘‘Fine Prints of the Year’’ designation for 1938 and probably drew from the artist’s regular return trips to the Midwest and his native Nebraska. Private collection tains in Wyoming, the hills of New England, the characters everywhere in New York City . . . all subjects thrilled me, all mediums interested me, the subject was everywhere, even in my own back- yard.’’≥∫ His encounter with Willa Cather marked the moment when in his mind he removed the pretension from his sense of artistic insight and his differentiation of art from both the confinements of illustration as well as the standards of magazine editors, gallery cura- tors, or exhibition judges. While not precluding urban stimuli, his new artistic identity depended on regular engagements with natural landscapes from his boyhood memories, a trajectory that complemented the country turn taken by Dunn, Curry, and other suburban artists. Perhaps the most crucial feature of the artists’ suburban landscape was the absence of a self-promotional, flamboyantly individualized style so much a part of the bohemianism they now consciously rejected. Their individualized styles were recognizable within the variations of the Pyle-Dunn tradition. The Leonia art colony did not lack for imposing personalities, such as Harvey Dunn or Arthur Mitchell, 130 Suburban Landscapes but the lore that surrounded them was largely a product of the artists’ group as a whole. Their continued socialization and professional sharing of advice, criticism, commissions, and contacts provided the con- duit for an efficient, voluntary network of artistic talent. Just as Pyle’s intensive colony formed many lifelong friendships and close working relations, so did Dunn’s foment a loyal coterie, devoted to their mentor and to one another. Grant Reynard and Frank Street arranged to occupy the refurbished Wragge barn and worked there until they each were married in 1917 (see fig. 5.7). Street then moved down Christie Heights Street into the barn/studio once occupied by Peter Newell and Howard McCormick. Not only did Street live there for the rest of his life, but his Studio-in-the Barn became one of many studio/ residences that was central to the social and professional life of the artists’ community in Leonia. ‘‘They were always getting together,’’ May Wickey recalled, ‘‘about once a week . . . having parties. We often went to studios and visited and looked at other people’s work without having a dinner party.’’≥Ω Reynard’s later watercolor Frank Street’s Studio-in-the-Barn (created before 1940) celebrated the mix of individualized domesticity and professionalism which informed their active community and their special appreciation of the artist’s suburban context (see fig. 5.8). Probably all too consciously, Reynard registered with this interior the centrality of art and culture in the eclectic domesticity of interwar Leonia. The collegial dimension may well have been so treasured because of the erratic and multiple apprenticeships that preceded many of these artists’ successful careers. Even afterward, when they resided elsewhere, Leonia continued to serve as a strategic center for their lives and work. Harry Wickey, for example, recalled in his autobiogra- phy, Thus Far (1941), how after high school he traveled, near penni- less, to Detroit and the John Wicker Art School. After a year and a half’s study he went to the Chicago Art Institute but spent most of his time working odd jobs to pay for his instruction. In 1914 he found himself in New York and on the advice of George Bellows enrolled at the Ferrer School’s anarchistic collective, where he met Robert Henri and Sadakichi Hartmann, both of whom proved very supportive of his talent.∂≠ Again, for tuition reasons, after six months he shifted from the Ferrer School to the less expensive School of Industrial Arts, where he met Arthur Covey, who in turn introduced him in 1916 to Harvey Dunn and the Leonia School of Illustration. After service in Fig. 5.7. John Wragge’s barn/studio. The Wragge family rented this barn to Frank Street and Grant Reynard, who used it as a studio. Photograph by the author

the American Expeditionary Force in France, Wickey rejoined Covey in his New York studio, consciously rejecting the more secure salary of illustrator for that of an independent artist. Nearby lived a student of both Covey and George Bellows, the artist Maria Rother, whom Wickey married. In the early 1920s Wickey, his wife, and Leonian Grant Reynard traveled to Europe together, where they fell under the special influence of Daumier and Cézanne and confirmed their appreciation of Rembrandt.∂∞ But in his return to his native Ohio and the Midwest Wickey’s energetic and physical depictions of country life matured. Finally, in 1929 Wickey and his wife settled down in Cornwall, New York, another suburban country town on the Hudson River. Personal loyalties and friendships solidified the entire artistic network over the years. Through all his serendipitous experiences Wickey professed to be permanently grateful to Arthur Covey and Grant Rey- nard, who had kept him afloat in his early years by providing money, food, and moral support. The artists were also instrumental in introducing one another to supportive New York gallery directors, such Fig. 5.8. Grant Reynard’s Frank Street’s Studio-in-the-Barn, before 1944. This interior captured the informal comfort and stylish living of Leonia’s artists as well as their pragmatic ingenuity in recycling well-crafted structures. Courtesy of Robert Fuller

as Carl Zigrosser and Leonard Clayton, and to the National Academy of Design, to which all three—Wickey, Reynard, and Covey—were eventually elected.∂≤ To help finance John Steuart Curry’s European study, Harry Wickey returned the support shown him by buying his friend’s now famous Hogs Killing a Rattlesnake (1930). He reciprocated later as well when he became the director of the Storm King Art Center and promoted the works of Reynard and other artists he had respected all his life. And, of course, informally all these Leonia artists socialized with one another and regularly exchanged work. For example, Mahonri Young’s 1916 etching Hudson from Heine Cook’s was signed ‘‘To Grant Reynard’’ and Harry Wickey’s drypoint Hudson Palisades (n.d.) was autographed ‘‘To Selbst Bildnis,’’ his name for Reynard from their Paris days. At times some artists executed portraits of group members, such as Harvey Dunn’s impressionistic portrait of May Street or Arthur Mitchell’s Harvey Dunn (n.d.).∂≥ At several points, while serving as illustrator for the New York newspaper PM, Grant Reynard Country Landscapes, Bohemian City 133 promoted fellow Leonians by featuring them in their New York roles: John Bentz restoring city hall portraits and Dean Cornwall at work on his Eastern Airlines Building mural.∂∂ In one noteworthy episode these comradelike relationships evidenced a remarkable durability. After his wife’s death Wickey continued to participate in the Leonia artists’ network, though by then he lived in Cornwall, New York. Nevertheless, he reintroduced himself to the widow of his old friend and fellow Dunn student Frank Street. At one of their dinner parties in late 1958 Wickey announced his engagement to May Street, and the two were married until his death in 1968.∂∑ The loyalties shaped in early adversity proved to be powerful binding agents for the rest of their careers and served to provide a core organization, however informal, to the suburban art colony itself (see fig. 5.9). Such friendly but strategic networking found its parallel in the nonartistic lives and careers of many of their suburban neighbors and made very graphic to recipients the meaning of suburbanization, that is, a graphic example of neighborly civility, country informality, and unpretentious self- possession. Through their personal and professional contacts many artistic colonies extended their networks both nationally and regionally. Arthur Mitchell’s friendship with William Dunton of the Taos (New Mexico) Artists Group provides a graphic example of the remarkable reach of the artists’ voluntary network.∂∏ Through Mitchell’s good friend and fellow Dunn student Harold Von Schmidt, not to mention John Steuart Curry himself, the Leonia artists reached out to the active suburban artist colony in Westport, Connecticut.∂π In these several artist enclaves there emerged an important, graphic tradition of the U.S. landscape and popular values. ‘‘All I am really doing,’’ Harold Von Schmidt claimed, recalling Dunn’s influential ideas, ‘‘is carrying on the Howard Pyle idea. . . . Howard Pyle did not teach Art. Art cannot be taught, any more than life can be taught. He did, however, lay constant stress upon the proper relationship of things. His main purpose was to quicken our souls that we might render service to the majesty of simple things.’’∂∫ The historical role of such suburban artists’ colonies remains an important story of American art in the modern metropolis.∂Ω The mutual instruction of the art colony ultimately meant more to most of these practicing artists than any of the early apprenticeships or even the minimal formal instruction they received. In retrospect Fig. 5.9. Harry Wickey’s Trees in Moonlight, ca. 1935. The versatility of form and texture depicted here by one of Wickey’s final etchings well communicated the value he placed upon energy, composition, and craft. His own failing eyesight due to the acidic baths used in the etching process gave the old, broken tree, struggling to support its leaves and its place, a special poignancy for the author. Private collection these individuals received as much from one another as from the preeminent artists, such as Dunn and Chapman, who initially inspired their relocation to suburbia. In a sense their artwork sought linkages with their fellow citizens, celebrated values, especially independence within a social arc, which they thought were nourished in suburban communities, and, most of all, experimented with vernacular styles and landscapes that their neighbors would readily understand. Many of the Leonia artists, such as Pyle and Dunn before them, distinguished themselves through the creation of distinctive public murals, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. Others flourished in cartoon work, decoration, and advertising, but, whatever their commercial Country Landscapes, Bohemian City 135 commissions, they stayed in contact with one another, attended one another’s exhibits in New York and elsewhere, and provided a solid phalanx against the several phases of criticism which their work increasingly received from European-oriented critics and museum cura- tors who disparaged ‘‘objective’’ realism, particularly art with ‘‘western’’ themes.∑≠ The suburban artists’ community re-created an early-twentieth- century landscape that differed in fundamental ways from that of their urban colleagues and organizations. First, the popularity of their country landscapes among their fellow suburbanites contributed substantially to the increasingly polarized city/country convention. New York City’s Greenwich Village provided the essential milieu for the Ashcan School and momentous events such as the 1913 Armory Show, which, scholars have argued, changed the landscape of Ameri- can art. The New York group of artists had a far stronger eastern influence and, more frequently, urban origins—Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati∑∞—while the suburban group originated from small midwestern and western farming centers. They both embraced a variety of styles, both indigenous and imported, and both emphatically visited and exhibited in the city. The key feature that distinguished them, however, had more to do with their view of the artist’s social obligations than with their artistic proficiency, stylistic innovation, or public acclaim. Rebellious Greenwich Village artists were noted for their bohemian uses of the city but never considered themselves rooted there. Unlike Leonia, the permanent residential population of Greenwich Village, especially their ethnic neighbors, were all but unknown to artists. The urban orientation of the Ashcan School was becoming formally organized and entrepreneurial, in spite of the Village culture’s antipathy to commercialism.∑≤ Even in their protest against established museum tastes and National Academy of Design standards, Robert Henri and his artistic circle (who all were elected to the Na- tional Academy during their careers), for example, created parallel organizations and supported avant-garde galleries, such as the Mac- beth. At the famed Armory Show they celebrated the ‘‘success’’ of large collectors and major museums purchasing primarily European artists.∑≥ Village artists abhorred the notion of an artistic school, thrived in a new enthusiasm for ‘‘being free,’’ and promoted an ‘‘indi- vidualism’’ whose indebtedness to European experimental styles was 136 Suburban Landscapes patent. Unlike their suburban counterparts, Greenwich Village artists also sought a modernity that valued subjective insight over the artist’s civic role, over his or her grasp of the public’s tastes and quandaries. They initially sought a modernity that equated the rhetoric of ‘‘modern’’ with their newfound, subjective insights. They sought to displace rather than coexist with other mainstream styles such as those of mass market, suburban artists. Both the suburban and bohemian artists of this interwar generation contributed in different ways to a widening sense of separation between country and metropolitan cultures. The Ashcan group promoted its urbanity intensively, quite likely because its disciples were also somewhat older than their suburban counterparts. The experience of the city was in a sense more dramatic, perplexing, and excit- ing to Robert Henri’s circle, since they had experienced the expansion of post–Civil War cities earlier. Urbanization had struck them as a greater novelty than it did their successors, who experienced such cities as a part of their apprenticeship and professional maturation. Henri and ‘‘the Eight,’’ as his associates styled themselves,∑∂ used the city more aggressively as an artistic theme, while the suburban artists seemed more interested in reaffirming the power and details of physical endurance and the energizing force of nature in a progressively urbanized world.∑∑ If the Ashcan group consciously rejected conventional success and critically caricatured middle-class culture as bourgeois, the suburban artists explored those themes as twentieth-century novelties whose significance was not yet established. The actual image of the small town served Greenwich Village artists as a measuring point for the distance some of them had traveled in their own intellectual geography, while the suburbanites continually returned to their rural hometowns or similar communities to ground their engagements with new styles and expressions. Their artistic socialization sought not publicity and self-promoting spectacle∑∏ but, rather, camaraderie and complicity with their fellow artists and their nonartistic neighbors. The landscape of suburban artists which emerged during the interwar period distinguished itself with its appreciation of the multiple realistic styles and everyday subjects that reaffirmed some rapproche- ment between natural and human routines. Their collective orientation made this emergent social space a source of artistic energy and rejected Henri’s conceptualization of modernism in terms of dark tonal portraiture, the often debilitating culture of urban life, or, increasingly, Country Landscapes, Bohemian City 137 the seeming craftlessness of abstract expressionism. Suburban artists approached their tasks, as suburbanites did themselves, with the experience of older agricultural or rural scenes, which nevertheless continued to function into the present age of man-made technology and which endured in the memories of most American publics. There is no explicit hostility to the city in their artistry, only dismay at the indifference to perceived inanities that passed for sophisticated life and art. From an opposite, urban viewpoint the suburbanites also contributed to the facile polarities pitting the city against its rural environs and stressed the values that they thought gave American communities their distinctive substance. Leonia’s artists used their suburban communities with little explicit argument about the increasingly problematic fit of country and city values. Yet by the interwar period they could be found more frequently criticizing their nemesis, bohemianism and modernism, and caricatured them as simplistically as the Greenwich Village artists did bourgeois, middle-class attitudes.∑π Still, in their civic commitments and the memory of inherited landscapes the suburban artists also sought to associate themselves with the confusing dynamics of their historical moment and to inform their artwork with images and values of a country town. Gradually less, however, did they seem to need the specific and detailed locus that their predecessors, the meadowland tonalists, had; more and more, their sense of place drew from multiple locales, fully recognizable but exportable to towns in other national regions. Their art did not privilege images that later commentators would ritualize as ‘‘suburban.’’ Rather, artists who were sympathetic to suburban culture expanded the meaning of the country image to integrate features of the Midwest and Far West with the eastern United States; they thereby sought to encompass a national experience and project a historically distinct suburban iconography into the interwar version of mainstream American culture.∑∫ chapter 6 The Middle-Class Zone

n 1922 a voluntary suburban group, which called itself the Commit- Itee of 100, proposed to buy the nineteenth-century Wood homestead and establish a ‘‘community house’’ in Leonia. The chairperson of the committee, artist J. Rutherford Boyd, not only arranged for an extensive advertisement for the project in the local paper; he also distributed a pamphlet, Community House, featuring an attractive charcoal sketch by his fellow artist Charles Chapman (see ﬁg. 6.1).∞ These promotions contained an elaborate rationale and explanation for their projected community enterprise. The committee particularly stressed the need for a central meeting place and recreational facility as a community resource. The pamphlet began by acknowledging a record number of house sales in recent months by the Leonia Heights Land Company. By 1922 Leonians knew that their town had more than tripled in population over the past two decades, a pattern that showed every indication of continuing. They also were aware that a substantial proportion of their neighbors were foreign-born (25 percent) or had parents who were foreign-born (52 percent). The Com- munity House proposal intended to provide a suburban response to the opportunity and danger of rapid expansion of population, especially ethnically diverse residents, housing, and town services. Chapman’s charcoal sketch made abundantly clear that the shade trees and classic domesticity of the old farmstead would remain intact; it also dramatized the linkages between the town’s country traditions and its modernizing aspirations, and, perhaps most important, it forcefully insisted that the town’s cultural tradition would work to shape its society and politics, and not vice versa. The artwork and its depiction of solid domesticity reafﬁrmed the importance of both tradition and culture in shaping the community and its politics. Fig. 6.1. Charles Chapman’s Community House, 1922. Chapman’s charcoal sketch of the mid-nineteenth-century Wood homestead accompanied a proposal for a community house to concentrate many of the town’s voluntary activities. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

Several important considerations are worth entertaining here. First, this local episode represents a particularly rich instance for understanding how substantive change occurred in the United States’ older suburban culture. Unspoken was the implication that suburban change need not involve the dramatic and histrionic, much less revolutionary, gesture; it could be shaped by a fine-tuning of local customs and familiar structures. Especially suburban communities, such as Leonia, which cultivated country, or ‘‘natural,’’ images, evolved through ordinary routines and informal arrangements. During the interwar years, however, the role of electoral politics itself became increasingly contentious and threatened to make the process of change more revolutionary than evolutionary. When public discussion turned too contentious, politics took on connotations of artificial engineering, self-interested overstatement, and special, staged events, all threatening to its country town inheritance. For a time Leonia’s suburban citizenry continued to treat these attention-getting stratagems as secondary and aberrant. Yet, as the formal political contention rose over issues that were hardly routine, such as the reorganization of town government into a third 140 Suburban Landscapes town center, both the behaviors and imagery for conceptualizing substantive change became increasingly problematic. The apparatus and imagery of the 1922 Committee of 100 paralleled the town’s formal political reorganization; it represented a conscious effort to modify a potential polarization of politics and reaffirm an older, nonpartisan voluntarism. The committee thus showed how a new suburban culture translated its constructed ‘‘images’’ into specific models of suburban government; its harmonizing ‘‘landscapes’’ introduced controlling devices that eschewed any intimation of social control. In the process this suburban episode illuminated how the popu- larized landscapes of twentieth-century suburbanization—its country and natural mentalites—contributed even more broadly to the nation’s middle-class politics during the interwar years. Chapman’s charcoal conversion of a private home into public space carried no implication of a dramatic transformation. His sketch included a couple enjoying the natural grounds, a parent and child leaving the front entrance, and a female visitor coming up the walk. The inference seemed to be that the increased public traffic to and from the house would nevertheless retain a domestic tempo. Chap- man’s exterior view gave no indication that the old six-room house (and one second-floor bath), once remodeled, would house an auditorium for 450 people, which could also be used as a dance floor for 300, for art exhibits, or for other appropriate community functions. Plans for the basement envisioned a billiard room, lounging and smoking room, and possibly later a bowling alley.≤ Like the pamphlet’s prose, Chapman’s sketch acknowledged that the older country town structure was undergoing a basic reorganization. The official rationale for the new facility cited a need for a rein- vigorated socialization process for Leonia. ‘‘The great thing about a Community House,’’ its 1922 proposal proclaimed, ‘‘is that it makes each citizen responsible for making things happen. He begins actually to see that he is a part of the government. Thomas Jefferson expressed this thought a century ago when he said, ‘Let the people be joined in small groups for citizenship and let them do one thing at a time.’ ’’≥ The new facility formally proposed to link many of the existing voluntary associations, which implied that, individually, they were not cur- rently adequate to meet the influx of new residents. ‘‘The great asset of Community House,’’ the argument continued, ‘‘will be the good will and help of local agencies. This will produce a sense of the effective- The Middle-Class Zone 141 ness of teamwork combined with the desire on the part of most citizens to continue doing something for other than private benefit.’’∂ The new Community House, itself a voluntary and nongovernmental project, proposed to incorporate the distinctive features of all the other civic associations to which it would be informally linked. There were additional features that differentiated Leonia’s Com- munity House from an earlier generation of voluntary organizations. Its Committee of 100 was incorporated in order to permit the sale of $25 shares and to be capitalized at $50,000. Each citizen member would purchase four shares, the first in cash, the rest by installment, and in addition each would pay $12 per quarter as dues. Such commitments presumed household income at levels in excess of the national average for urban wages and clerical workers, which was roughly $1,500 in these years.∑ As such, the Committee of 100 expected little more than one-third of Leonia’s seven hundred or so householders to enroll. Still, funds raised would permit the purchase of R. J. G. Wood’s centrally located family farmstead and property for $27,500 and its conversion to a community-wide facility.∏ The specific financing device permitted each citizen literally to invest in the community and to participate with those who could afford membership in socializing members outside the aegis of formal politics. The result would be a more inclusive type of suburban voluntarism in the interwar years, one that would obscure the distinction between genteel socialization and outright elitist control of suburban priorities. The stimulus for the Community House extended beyond the mere availability of the farmstead in an undeveloped section of Le- onia. The county newspaper, the Bergen Evening Record, had already begun a drum roll of editorials and articles on the ‘‘progress’’ implied by a new bridge across the Hudson and additional ferry service.π In addition, more expansively, the Committee of 100 reported that the Russell Sage Foundation, solidly endorsed by statesmen Elihu Root and Herbert Hoover, proposed to survey greater New York City and its nine million residents in order to plan a rational future. Commu- nity House in Leonia associated itself with these enlarged aspirations and rather quickly moved the project from one of informal socialization to one of self-conscious community planning in a larger national slipstream. Local citizens cited precedents for Community House in suburban Winnetka, Illinois, and the 1900 movement in New York City, 142 Suburban Landscapes which culminated in the creation of the Cooper Union Forum and the Civic League. The founders of such analogous organizations, Leonians claimed, ‘‘wanted to create in all the people an interest in government which would go beyond partisanship, and an interest in the social order which would go beyond mere economic dogma. They wanted to use public spirit as a means toward concrete action by citizens for the community’s good.’’∫ Within the voluntary tradition but outside of electoral politics, these suburbanites sought a mechanism not only for intensifying civic participation but also for re-creating a conscious sense of the community’s niche in a larger metropolitan world. Al- though it was begun within a local, voluntary framework, the new orientation of the Community House initiative intended nothing less than a new central organization for the design and supervision of suburban development. The activists for Community House drew largely from a special spectrum of citizens who arrived in Leonia after 1900. For the most part they were locally rooted residents rather than daily New York City commuters on the railroad or trolley. Several, such as E. D. Paulin and W. P. Richards, were resident realtors and builders, while others, including Rutherford Boyd, Charles Chapman, and Hungarian-born musician Arpad Rado, represented the suburban-based artists of the town. The first represented the local business and new managerial class, which by 1920 had grown to 52 percent of the town’s residents; the second group consisted of the once dominant but still substantial (19 percent) portion of the town’s skilled laboring population with whom the artisans had hitherto associated themselves.Ω In addition, the Community House’s Committee of 100 contained a new group of suburban professionals, which represented 9 percent of townspeople and which included individuals such as the historian William Haller of Barnard College.∞≠ Community House was one of the first of many Leonia enterprises in which a coterie of incoming professional academics allied themselves with the artistic community to advance the cause of suburban civic culture. The coming of university academicians forecasted an influx of new suburbanites who would take advantage of the completion of the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson; they also anticipated a continuous stream of urban influences that required planning for affected suburban towns. Leonia’s strategic but prominent academic cohort represented one obvious postwar influence on the metropoli- The Middle-Class Zone 143 tan suburb and consciously reinforced the town’s new self-identity as middle-class. The academic influence began with two major urban developments wholly external to suburbia—namely, the relocation of two major universities into the northern reaches of Manhattan island: New York University into its new (1894) Bronx–University Heights campus and Columbia University into Morningside Heights (1897).∞∞ The faculty and personnel of these large institutions began to fan out into adjacent New York and New Jersey towns. One of these was Leonia, made accessible by the combined ferry-trolley service and even more so by the completion of the George Washington Bridge in 1931. This influx had actually begun during the first decade of the century. ‘‘The thing about transportation,’’ one longtime Leonian explained, ‘‘is that it made it possible for Leonia to become a suburb first. When that happened you had two groups of people who came here that became very instrumental in the development of the town as I remember. Probably the most important as far as the town and particularly its government was the academic crowd that came out . . . [because] Leonia was advertised as the ‘Athens of New Jersey.’ You got a big crowd from Columbia and NYU [New York University].’’∞≤ The second significant group were the artists, who, together with the academics, formed a critical mass in the shaping of this suburban community during the interwar years. The image of Leonia as the ‘‘Athens of New Jersey’’ potentially clashed with earlier versions of a country town. Exactly how such a clash was avoided had much to do with the actual originators of the image, no less than the conflicting values that the images seemed to harmonize. Overzealous realty advertisers had first initiated the Athe- nian image in efforts to increase the population, the tax base, and the general economic progress of the town. The owners of the Leonia Heights Land Company, E. D. Paulin, a Canadian-born member of the Committee of 100 and his nonresident partner, Artemas Ward (1848– 1925), designed a poster campaign for the New York subways, boast- ing that Leonia was the Athens of New Jersey. Ward was a New York businessman and principal in the firm of Ward and Gow, a marketing and advertising company operating largely in Westchester County, New York, a suburban frontier similar to New Jersey’s Bergen County. Ward seems to have arranged the capital for the enterprise as well as the advertising expertise, insuring a metropolitan dimension to all Fig. 6.2. Leonia Heights Land Company promotional photograph. The company made special efforts in the second and third decades of the twentieth century to settle the last large undeveloped section of Leonia. Its sample home and its advertising pitch targeted a newer professional class with attractive associations of art and culture with suburban living. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

future community planning.∞≥ In one of its standard brochures the Leonia Heights Land Company refined the Athens image with examples (see fig. 6.2). It displayed new brick and masonry homes and targeted its consumer groups carefully: Leonia residents, the pitch began, ‘‘are exclusively of the better class of people—the type whose acquaintance is a genuine pleasure. Though Leonia has been termed an ‘Artists’ Colony,’ its citizens include as well many businessmen, authors, professors, lawyers and others.’’∞∂ More than one Leonia resident attributed their initial attraction to Leonia to its ‘‘cultural atmosphere,’’ softening the full social class implications of their choice.∞∑ Paulin, however, was the central figure in this development, not only because of his business authority but also because of his local presence. Until the 1920s townspeople had enjoyed picnics and the long sunset views from this woodsy uphill section, a tangible icon of undeveloped country. Other realtors had considered development earlier but had refrained, they claimed, because ice and snow in winter would make the hillside homes less appealing, indeed dangerous.∞∏ But the availability of the automobile after World War I made this hilly section more attractive and accessible than it had been to the trolley commuter. Paulin strategically built a company office on Broad Ave- The Middle-Class Zone 145 nue, where the trolleys passed, and took care to involve the Christie family, with their English Neighborhood roots, as participants in his enterprise.∞π He then constructed solid red sandstone gates at the entrance to his development and named one of the central streets after himself.∞∫ In 1937 his obituary tribute singled out his several philanthropic gestures to his town, one of which was to allow the newly formed library (1915) free rent in one of his company buildings at the southeast corner of Broad Avenue and Fort Lee Road. Early on Paulin and his new academic and managerial clientele found common ground in an emphasis upon a ‘‘residential’’ community. There was, however, no common model for the homes built in the Leonia Heights tract. Most were individualized by private architects and contractors. The houses varied from quite large to modest, although even the smallest were often more spacious brick or masonry structures than the average frame house constructed in the earlier Junction area north of town. Moreover, as these new resident professionals and intellectuals bought houses, the implicit social class tensions became more difficult to subsume under the guise of individual idiosyncrasy. ‘‘Well, the Paulin Boulevard crowd were,’’ one resident reminisced, ‘‘most of them—stuffed shirts. I mean I was very friendly with some of them but I have never had any real connection with a professor about whom I haven’t thought them a little biased about some thing or another.’’∞Ω Other longtime residents were more circum- spect. ‘‘We needed houses,’’ Doris Faig explained, ‘‘but I really never talked about it or thought about it. It was not in my realm of interest. I was very busy taking care of a household and my own affairs. I didn’t worry about what someone else was doing as long as they weren’t hurting the town. Of course, they [the new houses] were supposedly an asset for the people coming in’’ (see table A.6).≤≠ Nevertheless, the academicians, like the artists, introduced a viewpoint and a presence in the community which would translate into a special, shaping civic influence. ‘‘They had more time to be active,’’ one longtime resident explained, ‘‘and they were an energetic bunch of people. They were really going all the time. I remember when we grew up that there was always . . . I mean there was never a Saturday and Sunday you didn’t work. Everybody I knew—all the artists—just kept going through the weekend like it was any other day. College people got really involved in the town and they did a great deal. Some of it, I look back on it . . . they managed to get so much 146 Suburban Landscapes done. They had none of the distractions. They didn’t sit around and look at TV. There were a lot of activities here.’’≤∞ All of the regular voluntary organizations, especially the Men’s Neighborhood Club and the Women’s Club, became particularly energized, eager to finesse any intimation of social class preferences in town routines. The academicians’ flexible management of their work schedules permitted them a different regimen than the nearby ‘‘time-clock towns’’ of Palisades Park and Bogota.≤≤ Instead of reserving their time on evenings and weekends for civic affairs, their involvement in their suburb’s voluntary network, like that of non-wage-earning mothers, could come during regular workday hours. As a consequence, new activities and organizations, such as the Committee of 100 and the proposed Community House, were begun or advanced. Even recreation involved serious time commitments. ‘‘I’ll tell you one thing,’’ a member of the artists’ group confided, ‘‘just a little instance that will give you a sense of what it was like here. My family did a lot of entertaining. My father for most of his life was not on a regular schedule. I remember a party that was given in the studio here that fed 48 people, the entire room was done over in black and silver . . . everything . . . they had waiters who were girls dressed as pages for some reason. I don’t know why because the decorations were strictly a kind of artful moderne. They had a string quartet playing up in the balcony there. Now this party took two weeks to prepare . . . two weeks of physical work . . . and my father and his friends were over here doing this. They had a program of entertainment during dinner. One of the things that happened, one of the local artists who had hair just here over his ears and bald on the back, pretended to fall asleep during dinner; another artist did his portrait on the back of his head. So he was walking around with a face on each head! There was that kind of stuff which took a good deal of time to do.’’≤≥ In both recreation and civic reform the academics and artists came to be seen as a special community resource and catalyst rather than an elitist threat to country town inheritances (see fig. 6.3). Whatever the activity, amusement, or education, citizens realized a special cultural activism had taken hold in the suburb. ‘‘The town . . . the people who were residents during that time,’’ another longtime resident observed, ‘‘were very anxious to retain it as a residential community. And they wanted to . . . it was largely settled and very purposefully by college professors, artists and musicians. My father was Fig. 6.3. Academics/artists in formal attire, ca. 1930s. Artists Ralph Fuller, Frank Street, and Grant Reynard with their wives and academic R. S. Alexander (far left). Courtesy of Robert Fuller

a musician. I don’t like to label them intellectuals, but they were creative people. They were people who wanted to maintain the town as a very delightful, residential community, with a good school and raise their children here. They sought out people . . . there were enough professors from Columbia and NYU and those places to draw friends and people looking for places to live. They could provide the atmosphere they wanted their children to grow up in.’’≤∂ With the academicians’ arrival some Leonians continued to find analogies to the Lyceum and the Leonia Literary League in the old Village; other recently arrived Leonians, who were not aware of such precedents, saw the newcomers simply as a progressive, social resource. Their presence refracted throughout the town’s voluntary organizations, tangibly realizing the ripple effect that voluntarism was always thought to have. Many academics and artists joined their neighbors in the newly organized Players’ Guild (1919). Others had the option of joining intellectual discussions restricted to Leonians on a range of topics. Neighbors could listen to their neighbors talk about areas of special concern, scientific, educational, or professional. Astronomer 148 Suburban Landscapes J. Ernest Yalden, New York University philosopher Herman Harrell Horne, architect and socialist Fred West, lawyer William O. Gantz, and anthropologist Pliny Goddard, among others, created and sustained their Whetstone Club from 1910 onward. This organization, modeled on the informality of a Quaker meeting, attracted a number of individuals, who could inform their neighbors about the recent advances in their fields.≤∑ Like most of the other voluntary organizations, there were no minutes or formalities at the Whetstone gatherings. Membership was informal, guests were welcome, and members’ living rooms served as the forums. ‘‘They were the intellectuals,’’ another resident noted. ‘‘They met every other week in each other’s homes. Later Harold Urey and Enrico Fermi joined. Then David Wainhouse . . . who became Assistant Secretary of State. I mean they were the thinking people in town.’’≤∏ Artist Grant Reynard often returned from such meetings with his head swimming with ideas, amazed at the energy and activity in fields outside his immediate ken.≤π A number of Whetstone members, such as Columbia University chemist Arthur W. Hixson, physicist Harold Urey, and architect Fred West, served terms on the local school board. The principal restriction in the Whetstone Club was that it remain all male. In the 1950s fellow Leonians Alan Alda, the actor, and artist Lynd Ward pushed for the admission of women, but to no avail.≤∫ The Whetstone Club flourished as a male bastion into the 1960s. This network of voluntary organizations, energized particularly by academics, artists, and an expanding managerial class with self- controlled time schedules, set the context for the 1922 Community House enterprise. Yet, after six months of activity, the financial commitments of the Committee of 100 proved too daunting. Only 130 of the projected 250 shares had been sold, and their revenues could not service the indebtedness required to purchase the Wood homestead. By early February 1923 the project had come to an end.≤Ω The Com- munity House effort had nevertheless drawn attention to the need for such a facility as a public resource, and its compelling civic rhetoric had galvanized a coterie of citizens who would advance comparable civic initiatives for more than two decades afterward. The final outcome of their original Community House initiative was not failure, however, but the starting point for a wholesale town reorganization and the creation of a third town center at the crossroads of Fort Lee Road and Broad Avenue, near Wood’s farmstead. The Middle-Class Zone 149 At the end of World War I neither of Leonia’s previous commercial centers in the Village and at the Junction had completely shed their rural inheritances. And Leonia’s governmental apparatus reflected its country town tempo. The mayor and council had devoted themselves largely to the monitoring of short-term, town affairs: disseminating licenses, contracting for road paving, negotiating with county organizations for water and sewage maintenance, purchasing street lamps and fire hydrants, appointing town marshals, and over- seeing the volunteer fire department. Town offices consisted of a few rooms above the Fire Department in the old Village, and town meetings were held in rented space in the Lyceum. The construction of a handsome brick railroad station was paid for privately by the Erie Lakawanna Railroad Company (one of whose executives, Albert J. Stone, lived in town). The earliest ‘‘fire truck’’ was an old 1911 Ca- dillac donated by W. P. Richards.≥≠ Many of the public facilities, except the public elementary school (1904) and the public high school (1916), resulted from private munificence and voluntary initiative. The break in this pattern of local governance came during John Pollock’s tenure as town councilman (1918–20) and as mayor (1920– 23). During his incumbency the town council committed public resources to longer-term projects such as the completion of Station Parkway, a paved approach to the railway station and an entry circle for traffic control, the formal organization of the town’s police department (1918), the reorganization of the volunteer fire department and the Department of Public Works, the erection of a World War I memorial to Leonia veterans, and the passage of a public referendum on the town’s library, which shifted its support from a voluntary into a public expense. Pollock had also been a founding member of the Leonia Republican Club. Yet his most dramatic contributions during his mayoralty were twofold: first, in 1921 the passage of the town’s first zoning ordinance, and, second, the retrieval of the Community House initiative. These two efforts marked the starting point for a new progressive role for suburban politics. Pollock capitalized on the momentum of the Committee of 100 and the centralizing potential of a Community House. In 1923 he revived the idea of buying the Wood homestead but not for recreational purposes. His aim was to create Leonia’s first Borough Hall, centralizing into a single facility the mayor’s office, council chamber, and meeting rooms on the ground floor; the police department in the 150 Suburban Landscapes basement; and on the second floor the public library. The purchase of the Wood homestead also resulted in the conversion of the adjacent farmland into the community’s first public park, Wood Park.≥∞ These initiatives set the stage for the development of a third town center, one that situated itself in the town’s geographical heart and in time provided services for the undeveloped hill section of town, the do- main of the Leonia Heights Land Company. Pollock set more than a local standard for the suburban politician, precisely because there was little in Pollock’s background which would have suggested his political ambitions or the full implications of his centralizing policies. To all outward appearances he had no financial stake in the town development, such as Edward Paulin, nor any inten- tion of making political office a career. Pollock was a native of Wash- ington, D.C., and the son of Austrian immigrants. He had become Leonia’s mayor at age thirty-nine, midway through a highly successful career in New York theater. By 1920 he had lived in the community for five years and had a family and two sons, one of whom was named after his brother, Channing Pollock, a successful Broadway dramatist. Pollock’s particular brand of managerial leadership engaged both the constituencies of academicians and artists, so important to the town’s voluntary structure. Like his brother, Pollock had worked as a journalist and had gravitated into the theater world, as a manager rather than writer. He worked for many years directing the photograph and press department of B. F. Keith’s extensive vaudeville circuit, and he later worked as general manager for the well-known New York drama producer John Golen.≥≤ During his career Pollock was associated with many successful Broadway plays, such as George Ber- nard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), with national tours for Sarah Bernhardt and other personalities, and with the first Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in the United States. He had come to Leonia in the year he became associated with the Orpheum circuit, which shortly afterward became RKO. He was also an authority on one-act plays, a subject that brought him invitations to lecture at many col- leges and universities. Pollock’s urban skills translated into his career as a suburban politician in both his organizational and intellectual abilities as well as in his public style, that is, his unflappability and evenhandedness in responding to multiple views on a given issue.≥≥ Yet the transformation of the suburb in the 1920s was not the function of a single individual with effective managerial skills. It The Middle-Class Zone 151 ultimately emerged out of the development itself and the complex dynamics of the town’s traditions. Unlike the Village and Junction centers, which were driven by distinct technologies of railroad and village, Leonia’s third center appeared to be the product of a natural evolution. The time had come to formalize the community’s priorities and to rationalize its activities and resources. The capstone of Pol- lock’s legacy was the creation of a zoning law that, unlike in the previous centers, differentiated residential from commercial properties. If some considered the law a natural outcome of progress, others began to view it as an intrusion into inherited traditions of voluntarism. Leonia’s zoning law of 1921 emerged out of the Committee of 100’s familiar voluntarism and resulted, years later, in a different town image and a more consciously politicized structure. This community transformation, so central in retrospect, obviously affected the older town centers first. The transfer of the borough’s office from the Village into the relatively undeveloped eastern uplands of the town reduced the Village economy to providing services for the twice-daily surge of railroad commuters. During the 1920s other mainstay stores of the Village, such as Moore’s Hardware, soon relocated into the new Wood Park vicinity, indicative of the emerging centrality of a third commercial center. Wood’s property had abutted the crossroads corner of Broad Avenue and Fort Lee Road, which was destined to become the permanent town center. In 1923, however, the property contained a lone frame house on the corner, which later became a pharmacy for the Broad Avenue trolley traffic. The field behind the pharmacy and the Wood homestead had been used by local boys as a ballfield. A hit to the Broad Avenue cattails, one resident recalled, was a home run, and there were special ‘‘field rules’’ for baseballs that struck Wood’s tethered cow.≥∂ One city block south of these crossroads was the town’s first public elementary school. Its setting had been sufficiently idyllic until the post–World War I period so that tramping through the nearby woods startled deer and other woodland creatures.≥∑ The town center’s move into this woodsy setting set the stage for a building boom and classic suburban confrontation between two factions, one endorsing a residential community, the other favoring commercial development in the name of ‘‘progress.’’≥∏ Initially, businessmen endorsed Pollock’s design emphatically by building in brick instead of wood in the Broad Avenue area. Their 152 Suburban Landscapes confidence seemed to be matched by the introduction of specialty shops of consumer goods as well as branch stores of new commercial chains. The old wood-frame pharmacy was lifted and moved several plots west, making way for new business structures. A branch of the Daniel Reeves regional grocery store chain appeared where once there were cattails. The town’s first clothing store opened at the crossroad in the 1920s, and across the street at Ferrara’s grocery citizens could buy for the first time not only fresh vegetables but homemade pasta with Italian sauces. ‘‘It seemed,’’ one Junction resident recalled, ‘‘that most of the residents from the southeastern section of town shopped there [Ferrara’s].’’≥π The first beauty parlor in town opened at the new town center along with the town post office from the Village. Unlike the Village, the Broad Avenue crossroads quickly commanded the attention of shoppers all day long due to the complex of stores and goods. In addition, 1920s developers began to build commercial estab- lishments that eventually would connect the Junction center with the new crossroads, thereby creating a continuous commercial district along the main trolley line, Broad Avenue. The town’s commercial progress, however, began to alarm certain citizen groups, especially those concerned with insuring the residential future of the town. This group gave vigorous support to Pollock’s zoning ordinance of 1921, and its activity made it clear that the usual routine resolutions of mayor and council were about to change dramatically. ‘‘Up to this period,’’ the long-serving borough attorney observed, there was ‘‘no zoning at all. . . . Of course, there was a certain element that thought it was the proper thing to have stores on Broad Avenue, all the way from Palisades Park to the Junction. There were others of us that thought that was completely wrong. So there were very bitter battles to make Leonia residential as it is now. It would have been a very different town if they had accepted the broader zoning. To my mind it is what made Leonia the town that it is. We fought . . . I can remember meeting in the old borough Hall, in the [Village] firehouse, at 3 o’clock in the morning, sitting around Harry Moore, who was our mayor, and members of the council. We fought hard to maintain the proper zoning in Leonia. There would have been apartment houses everywhere. All along the east side of Broad Avenue would have been businesses. . . . Back in the 1920s, that’s when Leonia decided really what kind of town Leonia wanted to be.’’≥∫ This particular memory obscured somewhat the emergence of Mayor Harry Moore as leader of The Middle-Class Zone 153 the realty and builders’ faction, which equated progress with apartment houses and commercial development.≥Ω Whatever else was clear, Leonians recognized that at times their older voluntary tradition was not adequate to guide and guarantee suburban development. But, if suburbs tolerated open political divisions, would they also necessarily forfeit their voluntarism and country image? Pollock’s centralization of borough government and creation of a zoning board did not begin as a revolution but as an attempt to lock in the prewar features of the country suburb. During the 1920s Leonia established distinctive characteristics that would persist through the 1960s. In spite of the steady and substantial increase in its population, Leonia, like many other suburbs, continued relatively stable in its socioeconomic and educational profile.∂≠ In terms of occupations by 1910 the community sustained remarkably constant percentages in its managerial and professional classes but witnessed the decline of its skilled and unskilled laboring residents. By 1920 farm laborers had virtually disappeared from the town. From the viewpoint of actual zoning board policy such changes invited optimism. Most zoning rhetoric of the period promised growth and transportation development as well as increased property values from planned changes.∂∞ The result in Leonia’s case was not homogeneity but, rather, the socialization of a still diverse ethnic and racial community into a newly expansive middle-class community. By 1920 Leonia’s black population, for example, had expanded modestly, while families native to Japan, China, Syria, Armenia, and Australia each had their representative residents (see table A.3). Unlike many other suburban communities, Leonia’s town fathers used their zoning ordinance neither as a weapon against ethnic or racial diversity nor as a foil against economic progress (see figs. 6.4 and 6.5).∂≤ The primary purpose of the zoning board under Pollock’s guid- ance was a clear delineation between commercial and residential districts. The central issue focused attention on a commercial center rather than scattering stores throughout the town. The mayor hoped to restrict to that center a modest number of multistoried apartment buildings, leaving the remaining space for residential homes. The zoning rationale for suburban Leonia was the same as that for New York City, which produced one of the earliest such zoning strategies in 1916—namely, to provide a mechanism for enforcing community priorities. In suburbia’s case the first order of business was to Fig. 6.4. One of the central town corners at Broad Avenue and Fort Lee Road, 1989. The building on the left, built in the last third of the twentieth century, sits side by side with structures from the 1910s and 1920s. Borough Hall (center), once the telephone exchange, and the Donald Hanson Realty Co., once the First National Bank, continue to anchor one corner of Leonia’s main intersection. Photograph by author

stabilize the value of single-family homes. In particular, the board regulated commerce so that ‘‘nuisance’’ enterprises—usually interpreted as stables, laundries, factories, machine clatter, and chemical smells—would not relocate in residential areas and drive down the value of the home owner’s hard-won investment. Pollock’s Republi- can values largely coincided with those of the Committee of 100, which invoked the views of Herbert Hoover and viewed the postwar single-family home, owned not rented, as the United States’ surest defense against postwar socialism. The protection of the single-family residence had become not simply a private economic speculation but by the early 1920s was approaching a civic responsibility akin to patriotism.∂≥ By 1920 Leonia renters actually declined to 30 percent of householders, from 47 percent in 1900, while home owners rose to 67 percent, from 46 percent in 1900 (see table A.3). Even before the 1921 zoning ordinance, however, there had begun a distinctive socioeconomic segregation from neighborhood to neighborhood. In the 1900 federal census the main streets of the Vil- lage and Junction registered a two-thirds majority of manual workers Fig. 6.5. One side of Broad Avenue’s central business district, 1989. With little having changed since the 1920s except external ornamentation and internal remodeling, the town structure sustains an important visual continuity with the past. Photograph by author against one-third nonmanual. By 1910 the trolley had changed both centers, producing a remarkably egalitarian balance (roughly 40 percent each) of manual and nonmanual workers in both the Village and the Junction. One decade later, in 1920, the central thoroughfare of the Junction remained evenly balanced, while the Village’s manual laboring population had increased to 72 percent and housed the majority of Leonia’s black population. At the same time, both older sections such as Leonia Park and newer neighborhoods such as the southeastern development of the Leonia Heights Land Company contained predominantly professional and managerial home owners. While all sections still reflected mixed social and ethnic classes, racial division and social class stratification had rapidly materialized in graphic neighborhood sorting by the interwar period (see esp. tables A.6 and A.7).∂∂ The keyword that powered the 1920s suburban discussion over zoning, planning, and community reorganization was residential, rather than the older, popular language of country town. To some extent the term merely confirmed a multifaceted process of home building which 156 Suburban Landscapes began in the nineteenth century. But residential also recognized the emergence of another counterforce that appeared to undermine the basic domestic ethos of the residential suburb. That counterforce was business expansion. In both the Village and the Junction neighborhoods the businesses had for the most part been local enterprises and strictly concentrated geographically because of the railroad and the trolley. The auto had introduced a new set of dynamics which had facilitated the settlement of areas distant from the train station and the trolley line. At this third commercial center the new stores sparked discussions about the impact of business growth and expansion upon the whole community. The zoning ordinance sought to prevent the commercial sprawl that had overtaken some of Leonia’s neighboring towns and had eroded their residential character. In one sense the residential values of the zoning ordinance sought to reassert the values of the country town imagery. Indeed, the selection of Rutherford Boyd as chairman of the Committee of 100 probably had as much to do with the dramatic mark he had made in the town since his arrival in 1916. Although he was a relative newcomer, Boyd had been introduced to the town by his friend and fellow artist J. Scott Williams. His 1911 visit to Williams coincided with one of Leonia’s many sketching parties in the Hackensack meadows. In 1916 Boyd had purchased one of the remaining Revolutionary War homes in the community and converted it into a distinctive Dutch-style residence and studio (see fig. 6.6). His studio was regularly used for both social and civic affairs and had become a smaller version of the resource that the Committee of 100 projected for a Community House. The home (which the artist called ‘‘Boydsnest’’) embodied in the most public fashion a merger of the perceived traditions of English Neighborhood days, the joint independence and social activism of a country town, and the values of suburban residence which postwar dynamics made problematic.∂∑ Boyd’s participation in the Community House project sought a broader structural confirmation of those suburban traditions; the subsequent zoning ordinance and centralization of town services in the Borough Hall provided administrative and legal devices to guarantee them. The latecomers to Leonia—particularly the later artists, academicians, and some of the new managerial class—became the prime mov- ers of a new middle-class sensibility that supported the zoning measure. Their organized response attempted to craft a selective blend of Fig. 6.6. David Boyd’s pen-and-ink of Boydsnest, n.d. Lifelong resident of Leonia David Boyd here captures his home and longtime center of many social gatherings. The oldest portion of the home dates from the eighteenth century and the English Neighborhood era. The artist’s father, J. Rutherford Boyd, designed and constructed the twentieth-century extension in a gambreled ‘‘Dutch’’ style. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives civic culture and residence. Their communal power was enhanced considerably by the founding in 1922 of the town’s first newspaper, Leonia Life, which became a central chronicler of events such as the Community House proposal and the zoning debate. The paper’s founder and editor was Martha Rado, who had by marriage joined the small socialist clique surrounding her Hungarian-born sister-in-law, the artist Ilona Rado West. From 1922 until 1937 the Rado family edited the paper and reported not simply on Leonia but on the range of issues that affected the several towns of the Overpeck Valley, the region once identified as the English Neighborhood. Rado’s coverage of elections and other controversies always presented multiple interpretations, but she left no doubt where her reformist proclivities lay. ‘‘She said,’’ one of her nieces recalled, ‘‘anything she wanted.’’∂∏ There was no question that all cultural events, all art exhibits, all educational and civic affairs, and, in general, all events that related to the region’s development, especially its political campaigns, received full 158 Suburban Landscapes reportage. The Rado summer camp at Watch Hill (Rhode Island) frequently appeared in the paper’s ‘‘personals’’ column, particularly when her Leonia friends—the Hallers, the Pattersons, the Boyds, the de Barys—came to visit. This group represented one of several pro- zoning groups of Leonia’s professional artist/academics.∂π Gradually, the zoning ordinance began to affect the town’s political alignments. Despite the socialist leanings of some prominent Leonians, town organizations, formal and informal, included mostly Republicans, the party of official dominance until the late 1960s. The actual range of politics, dramatized by the gadfly socialist perspective, may well have driven a number of suburbanites to appreciate, more than they might have otherwise, the language of ‘‘nonpartisanship.’’ As one witness testified, ‘‘the academic people by far were most of them on the democratic or liberal side. Oh sure. Some of them were socialists . . . Fabian socialists, if you know what that means . . . a very polite socialism, which I read somewhere somebody described as, it isn’t that you don’t have a butler anymore, it’s that he sits down and eats with you.’’∂∫ Still, there was sufficiently frequent crossing of party lines that any socialist might be found—on the local level at least— allied with both Republicans and Democrats. ‘‘The funny thing is,’’ one Leonian explained, ‘‘that in most of my life, excluding the last several years, when I voted, I would pretty much vote Democratic nationally and where I knew the people I voted Republican locally.’’∂Ω Later, during the Depression, socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas got as enthusiastic an audience while campaigning in Leonia as New Jersey banker and Republican senator Dwight Morrow.∑≠ At the local suburban level many voluntary enterprises operated with very muted political allegiances, in part because of the town’s political heterogeneity. Split voting became an established suburban pattern and led to a growing ‘‘independent’’ voting bloc that in a given election year could swing, particularly on the local level, as naturally to the Democratic slate as to the Republican (see table A.12). In what way did this formalizing ‘‘middle-class zone’’ differ from earlier ones? Most important, the zoning ordinance and ensuing discussions about it developed both a conscious set of town priorities and sharpening political divisions. Its immediate impact on real estate development and town geographical reorganization was patent. Less obvious were the new values and assumptions that accompanied the new professionals and academics. First, the focus on home ownership The Middle-Class Zone 159 stood at odds with the duplex houses of old Leonia Park, the apartments in the Village, and the multifamily residences in the Junction. An earlier indifference to renters now translated into an explicit concern for transients and others uncommitted to suburban life. So important had the value of rootedness become that borough supervision became formally organized and legally supported. Such backing for the single-family home was a principal cause of new housing built of bricks and mortar, which was intended as a different and more substantial commitment to permanence and longevity in a particular locale. This commitment to residential community made residence more difficult for older working-class residents and favored not only more affluent professionals and managers but particularly those willing to plan and participate in a newly activist governmental apparatus. In addition, the boundaries of the middle class widened and stratified internally. The zoning ordinance favored lot sizes that insured space, light, and trees and guaranteed such specifications that newcomers could increasingly be screened by their higher incomes. Still, many pre-1920 cottages sheltered both unskilled and skilled members of the working class. These suburbanites continued to send their children to the public schools and parks and to participate in the volunteer fire department and other organizations alongside their white- collar neighbors. During the 1920s especially, many working-class incomes rose into a middle-class range, further muting clear social class divisions.∑∞ Moreover, although the zoning ordinance narrowed the passage into Leonia for some blue-collar householders, the very groups that took the organizational and political initiative during the 1920s—the artists, academicians, and managerial classes—all experienced occupational trajectories that took them from apprenticeship and clerkship wages, comparable to many working-class salaries, into a successful middle-income group. Their own careers embodied a kind of social class bridge that, for those who chose to do so, helped mute or mask existing social class sorting in suburbia. Leonia’s new suburban zoning apparatus in the 1920s originated in a voluntary initiative, the Committee of 100’s project for a Com- munity House. For all the novelty that population and housing increases brought by the 1920s, suburbanites had not set aside older habits of voluntary response or their remembered images of satisfac- tory domesticity and country town socialization. They had no inten- tion of replicating city patterns in their town but, rather, introduced a 160 Suburban Landscapes new centralization and standardizing process to recover an older notion of neighborhood. The crucial feature of their initiative was the introduction of a zoning standard in 1921, when the town numbered slightly under 3,000 persons, or 727 households, about a third of its ultimate capacity (see table A.11).∑≤ From this point onward Leonians clearly projected an image of a residential suburb that contrasted dramatically with city life and substituted a sharp distinction, city and suburb, for the older usage, city and country. Still, as clear as that new image was, the meaning of the image had to be redefined regularly during the interwar years and most notably by a formal political contention that suburbia regularly insisted it wanted to avoid. chapter 7 The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals

any American suburbs shared Leonia’s experience in creating a Mdistinctive middle-class zone during the 1920s and projecting it well beyond the suburbs. The interwar suburbs’ new mass of commuters to the United States’ cultural and commercial metropolis, New York City, became the strategic ingredient for exporting a middle-class style to the nation as a whole. For many suburban communities, already experiencing substantive growth in the early decades of the twentieth century, the 1920s were a boom period, doubling the growth rates of their core cities and the largest single decade’s expansion until after World War II (see table A.11).∞ The image of genteel socialization, home ownership, professional camaraderie—or, in a word, a managed and harmonizing country landscape—oversold the reality of suburban life after World War I; it masked emergent political divisions, social class sorting of neighborhood and domestic space, the graphic presence of ethnic and racial diversity, and, increasingly, a centralization of governing arrangements by self-appointed cadres. Most remarkable in this dramatic and rapid transformation of an older, more democratic social network was the survival of country town images, now connoting endangered values rather than a physical environment of social accommodation and easy self-sufficiency. The 1920s witnessed an unprecedented expansion of suburbia and laid the foundation for progressive expectations, which made the attractions of suburbs seem to be a blend of both remembered pasts and plausible aspirations. But the social class sorting and privileging of social groups that had actually developed did not surface as a full-blown public or political tension until the end of the 1930s. Exactly how did the 162 Suburban Landscapes catalytic role of a new professional class in the suburbs sustain the peculiar middle-class culture of the interwar period? How did it set the context for a new generation of American suburban landscapes? Commentators have frequently treated suburbanization during the 1930s through the prism of the Depression and the New Deal. In part this filtration of experience is understandable because of the sheer cultural impact of both those economic and political processes. The history of particular suburbs has demonstrated, however, that existing suburban traditions of voluntarism and socialization screened the impact of economic deprivation and federal intervention. For all the increasing politicization of suburban routines the images of natural and civil ‘‘country’’ interaction kept the full conscious dimension of political competition and social class bias at arm’s length. The images themselves played important historical roles in shaping suburbia’s distinctive political behavior. The sense of voluntarism and individual self-help clashed with external, centralizing controls both within suburbia and in its reactions to broader government initiatives. These tensions reached the breaking point in suburban culture at the end of the 1930s. Here seen, as it were, from below, Depression dynamics prodded one metropolitan community to reconsider its cultural and political priorities. Its resistance to political ideology and its attendant social divisions initially seemed a natural extension of its constructed country image. As political division mounted, first locally then nationally, Leonia struggled to salvage the landscape of the ‘‘American middle class.’’ By the end of the 1920s some Leonians realized that the passage of their 1921 zoning ordinance did not necessarily guarantee them their vision of a residential town. A local builder, John Boyd, constructed Leonia’s first major apartment building on the trolley line at 250 Broad Avenue. The multistory apartment house failed to conform to the zoning ordinance mandating setbacks for apartments facing Broad Avenue. When the town council insisted on conformity, Boyd relocated his apartment entrance to a nearby side street and evaded the letter of the zoning law. The episode made clear that the 1921 ordinance needed stronger enforcement powers and prompted the passage in 1927 of Ordinance no. 334, which created the Leonia Planning Board. In 1927, however, it remained to be seen whether the Planning Board would result in a broad, disinterested regional perspective or, The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals 163 like comparable organizations nationwide, it would devolve into pro- tectionism of local socioeconomic interests.≤ The Leonia Planning Board represented a formal, nonvoluntary response to new internal and external threats to the suburb’s residential values. The Boyd episode made clear that even Leonia residents could undermine such values with their business enterprises and independent voluntarism, but other external events also made ‘‘progress’’ problematic. Widespread newspaper coverage of the projected George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River had begun well before the official groundbreaking ceremonies in 1927 and had produced considerable debate over the nature of progress for Bergen County’s residential suburbs. Moreover, since the passage of the 1921 zoning ordinance the town’s population had increased 63 percent, to 5,350 residents, slightly behind the county-wide expansion of 73 percent (see table A.11).≥ The Planning Board’s implicit mandate was to insure that the town’s growth rate would not explode once the bridge made auto access to New Jersey’s hinterland possible. Leonia had faced no comparable external challenge since 1894, when it incorporated as a borough to guarantee its own fiscal autonomy and to fend off county and state schemes for expansion. Many other suburban towns, such as the Chicago suburbs described by historian Michael Ebner, awakened similarly to the need for special policy and planning, when a major city threatened suburban absorption by annexation or when rapid building and population surges set the stage for political clashes.∂ The Leonia Zoning Board measured its success by seeking a manageable, country pace to its suburban growth. For Leonia the George Washington Bridge became cause for both alarm and anticipation. Small towns, the Leonia Life would subsequently caution, could awake one morning to ‘‘find themselves part of a big city, instead of the intimate and neighborly community in which they basked so securely.’’ The potential consequences were both political and social, particularly if one proposal for professional town managers succeeded: ‘‘we fail to see where there is an improvement in changing from unpaid local citizen administrators, over whose work there is considerable local scrutiny, to a system of control exercised by paid officials. Inevitably the local communities must lose contact with their government, and are gradually robbed of the very things which years of self-sacrifice have built up.’’∑ Bridge construction prodded 164 Suburban Landscapes the town toward a new consciousness and self-examination, which prompted them to probe the future earnestly and which also made its citizens more conscious of a past that they could not wholly preserve. The town newspaper, aware that Leonia was steadily increasing its population, put the matter succinctly: ‘‘many of our communities are growing like mushrooms.’’∏ In response, Leonians engaged in open political contention and partisan organization that many still strained to reconcile with their traditions of country town voluntarism. The peculiar politics of American suburbs, however contradictory it may seem, strove to preserve much of an older voluntary culture while recognizing the press of modernism. After its 1894 incorporation as a borough, Leonia’s electoral patterns rarely mirrored state or county patterns (see table A.12). One manifestation of this tension was the continual practice of vote splitting between local and national parties; another was the regular reliance on voluntary associations to accomplish objectives that larger cities increasingly incorporated into their formal bureaucracies. To be political in suburbia increasingly took on the cachet of abandoning a desirable middle ground, of opting for city or country as if they represented two distinct cultures. Political campaigns and, indeed, political offices were to be held lightly, a form of voluntarism itself with quick turnover and without permanent or higher career ambitions. Ideally, suburban politics ranged beyond the formalities of mayoral elections and council deliberations; they extended to a broader dimension that included all formal and informal organizations; their ultimate purpose was to address problems of cohering the community in spite of social differences. It was this broader connotation that made suburbanites seem somewhat dismissive of the formalities of political parties elsewhere and look to the shaping forces of culture, represented in encapsulated forms by their academic and artistic neighbors. The construction of the George Washington Bridge divided Leo- nians into two camps: on the one hand, it forecast an influx of new citizens, a broader economic base, and the prospects of a prosperous future. On the other hand, a new population surge into a town of roughly one square mile raised the specter of planned (not natural) controls and official regulation. In Leonia regulation did not become a code word for ‘‘discriminatory restriction’’ the way it did in Scarsdale or White Plains, New York, across the Hudson, or later in Levittown.π Ideally, a regulatory policy would itself become a blueprint for growth The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals 165 within the resources of the community. The problem of regulating growth, however, began to drive a wedge through the local Republi- can majority, and both sides of the issue began to compete for the definition and interpretation of regulation and residence. The mayor of Leonia, Harry Moore (1928–29), and his council represented a viewpoint that argued for the strategic development of Broad Avenue as a direct response to the expanded economic and business prospects of the George Washington Bridge. Indeed, in typical suburban fashion they created a voluntary group, the Broad Ave- nue Association, organized to disseminate their side of the argument. Their position began with the premise that the original zoning law had been interpreted too narrowly and had restricted the commercial development of the town. The old Village, west of Broad Avenue at the bottom of the palisades, was of less concern to this group than the new crossroads and town center at Broad Avenue and Central Avenue (later Fort Lee Road). The mayor sought to connect the new town center to the Junction and, in effect, construct an uninterrupted commercial district for about a half-mile along the trolley line. A major corollary to this design was the construction of apartment buildings along Broad Avenue to guarantee sufficient consumers for the new commercial district, which would have doubled in size. Moore, himself a real estate agent, represented the broad-based citizenry to whom the bridge represented an economic opportunity. Existing homes would be more valuable in the short term because of increased demand. In the long run the value would continue to rise because the increased population would be absorbed, less by a boom of single-home construction than by the building of apartment houses. The impediment lay in the zoning commission’s refusal to zone Broad Avenue for apartments. Older towns such as White Plains, New York, had used their zoning ordinances to level older areas near the railroad or transportation lines to claim ‘‘commercial improvement’’ where the aim was often the removal of blacks or immigrant groups that had supplanted earlier groups of whites.∫ In Leonia the older Spring Street area, which had begun to house a new group of southern black families during the war years, was never the principal target of zoning regulation. Not only were the Spring Street houses well maintained; many were still owned by resident white Leonians, who often had close personal ties with the black community.Ω ‘‘We never had any racial questions,’’ one town lawyer has insisted. ‘‘Spring Street was the only 166 Suburban Landscapes part of Leonia where there was any colored population, and they kept pretty much to themselves. Of course, in those days you had maids and I would think that they lived on Spring Street. Some of them were very fine people. I had Anna Capers [from] down there. She was my maid for twenty years. I know all those people down there. Most of them were [my clients].’’∞≠ Zoning was not always perceived to be a defensive racial strategy. Even into the post–World War II period the tensions that blacks experienced were of a special cultural sort. As one member of the growing black professional class of the 1960s put it: ‘‘I think one’s culture is inherent and you can’t escape it, no matter what. Even though, when they [the Sullys’ children] came . . . in the primary grades . . . color was not a primary issue. It wasn’t an issue here in Leonia, because we were welcomed with open arms. But for them [the Sullys’ children] there was . . . even though a lot was fulfilled, they didn’t have enough of their culture and enough of the quality of their culture here. They did not come into it until they went to Howard University. We let them make their own decision as to what college they would go. . . . They could have [gone anyplace they wanted] but they chose a black university. They wanted to be well-rounded, to know both sides. We feel fortunate . . . that’s how Leonia played a big part here . . . because they learned this side. As a matter of fact . . . I think more people know about us than we know about them.’’∞∞ The mayor, Harry Moore, also a longtime resident whose family roots went back to English Neighborhood days and whose father had served as mayor before him, sought to apply his commercialization plan mainly to the new center of town.∞≤ His initiatives promoted a strategic maneuver around the Leonia Planning Board. He and his council invited a distinguished zoning expert to advise the town. They selected Edward M. Bassett, former U.S. congressman from New York and a nationally recognized authority on zoning. Bassett’s expertise came largely from his work on New York City’s Heights of Buildings Commission, his advisory work on zoning to Herbert Hoover’s De- partment of Commerce, and his presidency of the National Con- ference on City Planning (1928–30). He was, in addition, one of the principal participants in the Russell Sage Foundation’s Regional Plan of New York City and had been an active participant in drafting the New York City Zoning Act of 1916, a precedent-setting law for urban zoning nationwide.∞≥ The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals 167 Moore clearly anticipated that Bassett would endorse his version of suburban modernization. Yet, unexpectedly, Bassett’s views revealed how easily different political interests could exploit the suburb’s purported social harmony. In a speech that he had delivered nationwide for ten years or more, Bassett explicitly denounced the construction of apartments that ‘‘peppered’’ towns. While he argued for the necessity for apartments to sustain commercial development, he insisted they be used, like his model, Flatbush, in Brooklyn, to buffer single-family homes from the commercial district. Their heights, he predictably added, must be specified well in advance. The parklike residential core would uphold the property values of both houses and apartments and function harmoniously with the business district. But he insisted that the zoning regulations must not be ‘‘discriminatory,’’ that the zoning power must be rooted in ‘‘fields of original jurisdiction of the Board of Adjustment,’’ and that board powers must be linked to police powers.∞∂ Bassett believed Leonia could remain a ‘‘hometown’’ with up to 8 percent of its housing in apartments but doubted whether it could ever sustain the envisioned commercial district the entire length of Broad Avenue. Bassett’s advice lent ammunition to both sides of Leonia’s residence question. His argument qualified the approach of the mayor and council in several ways: first, Bassett suggested a ceiling on apartment development and proposed concentrating such construction in demarcated areas. Second, he made the home town feature his central priority, recommended Leonia remain a ‘‘single-family borough’’ and subordinated apartment construction to it. Further, he deflated some of the more ambitious visions of economic development associated with the construction of the nearby George Washington Bridge. On the other hand, Bassett’s remarks could be interpreted as criticisms of the zoning board’s restrictive history. His own expectation was that the bridge would compel some sort of apartment construction. Apart- ments, he argued, did not automatically undermine residential values. He also took for granted the ‘‘complementary uses’’ of apartments with single-family homes. The mediating advice of the national zoning expert had two immediate consequences: first, it galvanized a group of ‘‘home owners’’ into action, which they explicitly insisted was ‘‘nonpolitical’’ because both Democratic and Republican citizens were involved. They called a meeting ‘‘to protect the town from premature extension of the apart- 168 Suburban Landscapes ment house zone,’’ which would turn Leonia into ‘‘another Bronx,’’ and to field a set of candidates for the upcoming political primary.∞∑ The second consequence of Bassett’s speech was Mayor Moore’s an- nouncement for reelection on a platform of ‘‘liberalizing the present zoning law.’’ In this endeavor he proposed to be guided by experts. No apartments would be extended into side streets; height restrictions and fire regulations would be enforced on all buildings over two stories; and the costs of Broad Avenue improvement would be determined fairly at a later time.∞∏ Moore’s slate included citizen/candidates who were both urban managers and suburban commuters—an executive from the Third Avenue Railway Company of New York, the president of the Champion Dish Washing Machines Company of Hoboken, New Jersey, and the general sales engineer of Western Electric Company in New York City. The socialist-leaning editor of the Leonia Life quickly branded them the ‘‘real estate candidates’’ and in an open letter questioned Moore’s entire track record as mayor.∞π In response, former mayor John Pollock came out of political retirement to oppose Moore in the election. The paper Leonia Life immediately endorsed his candidacy, reminding Leonians of his staunch Republican values and his formative, four-year service as mayor ‘‘during the critical years of rapid expansion at the end of the war. During his [Pollock’s] administration, Leonia, from being more or less a country village, became what it largely is today.’’∞∫ The town’s transformation from an idyllic country town into a well-managed community was his legacy. His accomplishments, the town newspaper editorialized, included the ‘‘reorganization of the police and fire departments, reorganization of the borough finances and system of accounting, collection of many overdue taxes, municipal garbage collection, transformation of the then unsightly Station Park, the moving of the municipal administration from the old fire house to the present Borough Hall, [and] the purchase at very advantageous terms of Wood Park.’’∞Ω Pol- lock’s ticket included the sitting president of the Town Council, who was a chemist at Brooklyn Edison Company, a clothing executive from DePinna and Company of 5th Avenue, and an electrical engineer at Bell Telephone Labs. Equally important as their professional reputations was the involvement of each of these candidates in several of the town’s major voluntary associations: the Men’s Neighborhood Club, the American Legion, and the Home and School Association. Pollock’s opposition platform insisted that the question was not The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals 169 whether ‘‘Leonia is going to remain a country village’’ or be overcome by the city dynamics that the bridge represented. Rather, the real issue was whether the impending urban development would be a ‘‘high class progressive type or of the cheap and chaotic variety.’’ The real risk, the Pollock group argued, was overbuilding, then indebtedness, then bankruptcy. Impaired credit at the banks would translate into a ‘‘scramble for any sort of tenants,’’ rapid deterioration, ‘‘a cheap town.’’≤≠ The present commercial district was sufficient for the town’s needs. If further building were needed, the town should see to it that ‘‘high-class resistive buildings’’ were constructed and that a building code be enforced. Expansion should be on a block-by-block basis. The Pollock group then played their final card, a public airing of an issue that had remained latent throughout the preliminary discussions: they arranged that the paving of Broad Avenue be paid for by a direct assessment on the business and apartment owners who would benefit most by the improvement. Residents’ taxes should be adjusted according to their relative benefit. In addition, on a platform similar to Pollock’s a small contingent of Democrats fielded the first full slate of that party’s candidates in Leonia’s history.≤∞ In the June 1929 primary Pollock beat Moore by 925 to 789 votes. Although the issue was far from decided, the vote clearly divided the dominant Republican vote and opened the way for political recon- figurations that made nonpartisanship a code word for unorthodox political alliances.≤≤ In the November election, however, Leonians were generally clear about their party allegiances and voted 1,243 for Pol- lock and 229 for Democrat Paul Hoyler, who seemed to have benefited from some Republican crossover. Moore received a write-in of 31 votes and the socialists received 11.≤≥ In a series of editorials the editor of the Leonia Life tried to smooth over the past acrimony, praising especially Democratic councilman R. S. Alexander for his policy expertise in the production of an eighty- six-page zoning report and Harry Moore for his ‘‘outstanding service’’ as mayor. The newspaper also praised the ‘‘builders’’ who had opposed Pollock, noting their work now centered on ‘‘residential homes and harmony in town.’’≤∂ By the fall of 1930 the paving of Broad Avenue had been completed. To cement the newfound harmony the board of trade hosted a gala celebration, and the Leonia Life devoted a full issue to the history of the town, its emergence from a rural village to a ‘‘residential town,’’ which ‘‘this week . . . is bursting out of its somber 170 Suburban Landscapes chrysalis, a fine, handsome business thoroughfare of which large cities might be proud. It is the birthday of the Leonia shopping center. Henceforth, Leonia will boast, not only of its fine homes and its interesting citizens, but also of the fact that it has a fine shopping district.’’≤∑ In spite of the outward harmony the divisions among Republicans did not disappear. Yet Pollock’s political success and, indeed, his fiscal conservatism bore immediate fruit as the effects of the Depression set in. Neighboring Teaneck and a number of other New Jersey towns went bankrupt, largely due to their overly ambitious building and improvement program during the 1920s.≤∏ The real estate contingent and the builders were virtually compelled by the larger economic forces into compliance with the strengthened zoning code.≤π The town’s Democrats and socialists mirrored the position of the town’s newspaper editor, who devoted extensive and regular space to every development of the New York Regional Plan and to the need for both aesthetic and political considerations in any future development. Re- markably little commentary in either the Leonia Life or political ora- tory reflected the political turmoil of state or county politics, particularly the rising force of democratic political machines which had given New Jersey three Democratic governors during the 1920s yet consistent Republican majorities in both state legislative houses.≤∫ During the 1920s town politics operated in a sense independent of the battles of party machinery. Leonia’s political distance from county and state party organization helped contain the sense that the community had settled a major disagreement en famille. The third town center of Leonia, unlike the previous two, became a product of indigenous dynamics. The successful 1930 debut of the Broad Avenue shopping center completed the transformation of the third town center into the center of town and invited another change, which was neither accidental nor ornamen- tal. In November 1930 the board of trade successfully organized a gala community celebration, an ‘‘Artists’ Week,’’ which matched every business in town with a town artist who took responsibility for an ‘‘artistic’’ window display. Business and art, money and culture, epito- mized the new unity of Leonia’s residential life. ‘‘No one has proved their public spirit in town,’’ the Leonia Life intoned, ‘‘more than have the artists and professors and at last they have won over also the confidence of the plain business man.’’≤Ω The business community had in a The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals 171 sense caught up with and laid its imprimatur on the artists and academicians’ priorities, which had been maturing since the Committee of 100 in the early 1920s. In turn, the artists applied their talents to the demands of a residential over a country image, without explicitly acknowledging the broader political dimensions of their collaboration.≥≠ This harmony was not entirely veneer. John Pollock himself embodied the town’s ambitions. He had designed the governmental structure immediately after the war and at the outset of the nation’s great economic crisis had returned like an old general to reassert the value of residence itself, especially its connotations of single-family domesticity and home ownership. In his career and outlook Pollock easily served as a mediator between both business and culture. He had been born to German immigrants in 1881 and had worked in the West with the U.S. examiner of Indian surveys, where he had contact with the Navajos, Utes, and Piutes, familiar subjects for several of Leonia’s prominent artists. Before relocating to the New York metropolitan area Pollock had served in the army during the Spanish-American War and later as a reporter in South Dakota and Nebraska. His theatrical career and connections were well-known and admired, not to mention his organizational skills. In New York he founded the Friars Club and was a founding member of the Press Agents Club. His brother was the playwright Channing Pollock, with whom he worked as a director of Channing Pollock Productions, the Excelsior Amplifying Company, and the Photograph and Press Bureau.≥∞ Fi- nally, his college and university lectures on one-act plays endeared him to his academic neighbors. His credentials as a father of two, his ethnic heritage, his managerial skills, his public and theatrical experience, his appreciation of artistic talent as economic and cultural resources, integrated many features of Leonia’s new middle-class suburban lifestyle. Pollock lived on Paulin Boulevard in the Leonia Heights section, which catered to the new managerial and academic class. His successful opposition to the real estate and business forces that often controlled zoning boards and suburban governments compounded the need for a special cultural strategy. Certainly, he endorsed the special emphasis that the town newspaper accorded the artists’ role in town, and his entrepreneurial instincts must have applauded their voluntary decoration of the new shopping center. His own political strategy seems to have derived from his professional experience, which made 172 Suburban Landscapes politics a form of theater: he participated at every public ceremony and major initiative of his two terms as mayor. His common sense and accessibility went far beyond merely quieting potential critics; his efforts also seemed to capture the new suburban spirit enunciated by the Leonia Life shortly after his term began. ‘‘The problems of Leonia,’’ the paper had insisted, ‘‘cannot be settled overnight. They cannot be settled by a direct or indirect attack on the zoning ordinance. They cannot be settled by merely turning out one set of competent borough officials and putting in another. They cannot be settled in a political campaign. They can be settled only in the best interest of all concerned only in the way the Planning Commission has pointed out. They should be taken out of politics, and kept out.’’≥≤ Facing a sustained tension within the community, Pollock had to confront a long- standing conundrum of U.S. politics: how does one effect a ‘‘nonpolitical’’ stance to achieve one’s political goals? The divisions within the Republican Party illuminated differences that had been brewing in Leonia since World War I. Indeed, the widening, internal differences among Republicans since World War I made the town’s diversity visible (see table A.12).≥≥ So, too, did the gradually increasing membership in the Democratic Party as well as a still influential socialist minority. This variety of political difference set the context for all appeals to nonpartisanship and gave a familiar commonality and power to the political rhetoric of disinterestedness.≥∂ In this context the language of harmony and common values took on a special cachet. The suburb, many distinctive viewpoints could agree, attracted individuals who publicly put respect for others and their property at a premium. Generally, the purchase of a home was not only the most substantial economic transaction a person would make; it served as the anchor for their present and future well-being. ‘‘Leonia is,’’ one Leonia Life editorial ran, ‘‘very largely a community of people who own their own homes; who want to guard against de- preciation in the value of home property, in many cases representing the chief result of many years of thrift and self-denial.’’≥∑ Suburbanites had come to agree upon the centrality of property and the importance of residential zoning without, however, agreeing about the means for achieving it. Mayor John Pollock drew substantial support from the minority political groups in his defense of the zoning codes. If he did not always adopt the ‘‘regional’’ views of the Leonia Life, he certainly applauded The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals 173 the dissemination of information and the effort to coordinate planning between county and town officials. His concern for government efficiency followed the familiar path of progressive Republicans, who (at least rhetorically) measured success by a balance of investment and social benefit. His supporters put great stock in his ability to keep the ‘‘profiteers’’ and ‘‘speculators’’ at bay. In one theatrical episode played out in the town’s council meeting, then in the town’s paper, William Haller, a Columbia University professor, confronted realtor Osbourne Bowles. ‘‘Leonia knows,’’ Haller insisted, invoking the dreaded suburban domino effect, ‘‘that once you seriously weaken or remove zoning regulations, you get overcrowding, con- gested streets, inadequate schools, insufficient light, air and space for decent healthy human living. These conditions breed corrupt government, juvenile delinquency, crime, disease and ever increasing taxes and expense.’’≥∏ He concluded by invoking the specter of the over- extended cities and by endorsing John Pollock. Such political support sustained Pollock for another term in spite of continual sniping by his fellow Republicans. The situation in Leo- nia was exactly the opposite of other suburbs such as White Plains, which put the realty interests in political office and withdrew power and support from its planning unit. The immediate impact in suburban White Plains was a ‘‘beautification’’ crusade that masked discrimination against racial and ethnic groups.≥π Such blatant exploitation of resources was kept in check longer in Leonia due to Pollock’s conservative Republican progressivism, which received the backing of a heterogeneous amalgam of Democratic and Republican artists and academicians. The Depression itself served as a substantial brake on suburban development everywhere. During this fallow time Pollock attempted to put greater emphasis upon bipartisan uses of the town’s resources. He labored to include the numerous voluntary groups in the policy- making process. Pollock was well disposed to his planning board’s recommendation to form a special ‘‘advisory board’’ to examine the basic statistics of the town. Accordingly, in 1931 Columbia Professor Arthur W. Hixson offered a proposal with special implications for the political history of the town. His proposed advisory board included twenty-four members, two each chosen by organizations with a special investment in ‘‘civic improvement’’: the Leonia Board of Trade, Leonia Women’s Club, Men’s Neighborhood Club, Leonia Chapter of 174 Suburban Landscapes the American Legion, Home and School Association, Leonia Board of Education, and three members each from the four election precincts. Their charge would be to make proposals for unimproved land when future conditions permitted.≥∫ Pollock also worked to have several distinguished citizens who were New York bankers serve as council members in order to keep all planning within the town’s resources. His two immediate successors as mayor would be these bankers: George S. Mills, a former mayor who had also succeeded Pollock after his first mayoralty tenure, and Joseph Foley, who followed Mills in 1936–37 and became the first Roman Catholic mayor of the town.≥Ω The town’s older voluntary network virtually insured the formal involvement and interaction of different interest groups; it also effectively prevented the dominance of realtors and speculators in town development. In addition, the political manipulation of this voluntary network bridged many of the obvious social class clashes that occurred elsewhere during the Depression years and set the context for a long- standing pattern of bipartisan political behavior at the local level. In spite of Pollock’s mounting criticism of New Deal policies, the political infrastructure of the town allowed him to embrace measures that his national politics might have precluded. The first was a response to the needs of unemployed neighbors which resulted in the creation of a Central Relief Committee, composed of town officials, representatives of the churches, and the Leonia Women’s Club.∂≠ The committee would serve as a ‘‘clearinghouse’’ for those who needed ‘‘help, provi- sion or work’’ during the winter months. ‘‘Although no real crisis exists in Leonia,’’ the town newspaper reported, ‘‘it is known that 73 heads of families are out of work.’’∂∞ The committee asked that any citizens anticipating repair or remodeling consider hiring Leonians. As the Depression deepened and unemployment worsened, citizens pressured Pollock to fire employees of the town who were not Leonians. Pollock refused but had to worry about the increasing number of suburbanites out of work. ‘‘The unemployment bureau,’’ the newspaper noted, ‘‘has received 50% more calls for work this fall [1931] than last year. Eighty-five are listed as unemployed and wanting work. Of these, over ten are white-collar men and women and many are skilled expert workers who have been forced out of work.’’∂≤ Still, the borough found work for twenty-five neighbors. These numbers are deceptively small. The work ethic in suburbia was strong and kept many from acknowledging their family needs. Also, a large number of The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals 175 women entered the workforce, even though, in retrospect, they did not consider themselves ‘‘workers’’ even though they were employed; they simply thought of themselves as ‘‘homemakers’’ who ‘‘helped out’’ during tight times.∂≥ A number of such stratagems were used to keep suburbanites from the embarrassment of making formal requests for welfare and burnished the image of a functioning ‘‘neighborhood.’’ Although strained, the neighborhood standard prompted Leonia’s Republican local government to follow the New Deal lead and hire some of the town’s unemployed citizens. ‘‘When my husband’s trade [stonemason] went bad during the Depression,’’ Doris Faig explained, ‘‘he took any kind of work around and ended up on the road department, working for the town. The borough engineer called him in one day and asked him—Sam had been doing all kinds of odd jobs to keep us going because we never went on relief and a lot of people did—he called Sam in and offered him a job working for the borough. He said go home and talk it over with your wife and see what she says. And so I told Sam, if you can do the dirty work, the least we can do is stand by [you]. And he did. He went on the garbage trucks.’’ In this particular case the dislocations of the Depression transformed a mason into one of the most memorable public works foremen the town ever had, and, in addition, it allowed him to become one of Leonia’s volunteer fire chiefs.∂∂ Still, the dislocations took their toll. ‘‘Some people were kind,’’ Mrs. Faig continued, ‘‘and some were not. When my daughter was going to high school, and she was walking with some friends one day, she waved and said hello to the laundry man who did my heavy sheets and things. One of the girls said, ‘O my goodness, do you talk to the laundry man?’ Harriet said, ‘Yes, and what’s more, I kiss the garbage man.’ ’’∂∑ In spite of the voluntary networks and the increasing political reliance on them, social class prejudices continually broke through suburbia’s official neighborly harmony. In addition to the Central Relief Committee, the second major political initiative of Pollock’s Depression years involved the ‘‘region- alization’’ of education. Here Pollock’s imitation of New Deal centralizing tendencies would founder on economic localism, which established the limits of his suburb’s neighborly rationales. Since 1915 the trolley had insured a special role for the Leonia High School as a receiving district for other adjacent New Jersey suburbs. Yet between 1915 and 1930 Leonia’s own population more than doubled, from 2,132 to 5,350 (see table A.11).∂∏ The issue for townspeople was 176 Suburban Landscapes whether the high school should become a local facility or remain a regional resource.∂π Some citizens felt Leonia was being exploited financially, even though the neighboring towns paid tuition; others, led by the Leonia Life editor, asserted a regional responsibility, the possibility of a broader and more varied curriculum with larger student bodies, and thereby the possibility of educational leadership for Leonia. In addition, facing school costs alone, it was argued, would increase taxes. In meticulous detail Pollock discussed the issue in open meetings with representatives from all the requisite interested groups.∂∫ The supervisor of schools, Nelson Smith, argued for an extension to the high school of twenty rooms at a cost of $575,000. The junior high school students would shift from the grammar school to the high school, and space would be available for 250 high school students. The additional space, it was argued, would permit Leonia to become a regional model for the increased student body which the bridge and New York’s Regional Plan had forecasted. Probably because of the mounting economic threat of the Depression, the voters turned down the bond issue that would have made the school expansion possible.∂Ω The vote immediately signaled other New Jersey towns, such as Ridge- field and Palisades Park, that their students soon would not be accommodated by Leonia, and they began plans for construction of their own high schools. The older divisions in Leonia between localists and regionalists thus reappeared in another guise: ‘‘Does Leonia,’’ the town paper asked, ‘‘want to finance a small school system of its own and mainly along academic lines—or will it entertain the thought of developing a larger, more rounded academic and commercial system with the help of the State and the guaranteed outside tuition students?’’∑≠ Ultimately, over the objections of many citizens, an extension was built later in the 1930s with a $184,000 subsidy from the Works Prog- ress Administration (WPA) but not in time to salvage the plan for a regional educational facility.∑∞ Against the town’s political grain and self-image, major pressures of the 1930s had arisen out of dynamics outside the town: the completion of the George Washington Bridge in 1931, the Depression, and the New Deal welfare programs, including the WPA. There were, of course, a number of constituencies within the town which welcomed these ‘‘interferences,’’ especially the liberal-leaning editorial page of the town’s newspaper. While he cooperated with these programs, The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals 177 Pollock’s lasting contributions came with his enforcement of the town’s planning code and his sponsorship of banking expertise that restrained the town within its fiscal resources throughout the Depres- sion. He kept the realtors and speculators at bay, projecting instead the vision of a residential town without a peppering of apartments, industry, and faddish commercialism. In 1934 Pollock tried to export his suburban vision to the national stage by a run for the U.S. Congress.∑≤ His special argument in the 1934 campaign was not simply criticism of the New Deal’s centralized bureaucracy, fiscal inefficiency, and unconstitutional initiatives but also his fears of ‘‘more class distinction during the past two years than ever before.’’∑≥ In the actual election his fellow Leonians stood resolutely behind their Republican neighbor.∑∂ His defeat followed more the disruptions of state and county politics than it did his criticisms of the New Deal. The specter of bossism, which the county newspaper, the Bergen Record, had regularly fixed to Frank Hague’s Democratic political machine in Jersey City, now extended in the 1930s to Repub- lican bosses in Passaic, Atlantic, and Bergen Counties.∑∑ Normally staunchly Republican, the newspaper openly campaigned against the regular Republican ticket in both 1934 and 1936 on issues of fiscal discipline and honesty. The result was party disorganization and ram- pant vote splitting. In the process there were some surprising state and county-wide Democratic victories, one of which resulted in Pollock’s loss in a close race. At a farewell celebration representatives of both the Democrats and the black community publicly boasted that ‘‘men like Pollock help make Leonia ‘home.’ ’’ The community raised a fund to have Leonia artist George Hausmann paint Pollock’s official portrait for Borough Hall.∑∏ His Leonia legacy was an intensively residential and neighborly image. If he translated that image into a Re- publican version of local political autonomy, Pollock also sustained a broader tradition of nonpolitical bipartisanship which would flourish locally beyond World War II. John Pollock’s managerial politics had fashioned the last substantive compromise between an older voluntary ethos and a new political intervention to adjudicate social differences. Suburbia’s interwar citizenry, reflecting, like Pollock, a mixed trajectory of affluent and non- affluent middle-class careers, employed the rhetoric of residence and nonpartisanship to reduce the social class preferences embedded in its zoning apparatus. In spite of novel forces of the interwar period—New 178 Suburban Landscapes York’s skyscraper concentrations, new top-down federal initiatives, and coercive advertising techniques, to name only some features that impinged on all local awareness—this suburb’s experience suggests that a new suburban consciousness continued to draw upon older historical forces. The ensuing tension between old and new nevertheless tempered the force of modernization: resident jobbers actually continued to build individualized homes; ‘‘exclusivity’’ did not preclude the continued influx of ethnic and racial minorities; and town politics, though more formally concerned with zoning plans and lim- itations upon apartment and commercial construction, still took its authoritative cues from an inherited, informal, and voluntary network. Suburban politics worked to occupy a fuzzy middle ground apart from explicit ideology, party machinery, or intimations of ward heel- ing. Whatever the reality of national, state, and county politics, some suburban town leaders thought they gained authority by representing a locally diversified community rather than a homogeneous, or ‘‘pro- tected,’’ middle-class environment.∑π This third generation of suburban images and behaviors neatly capitalized on the interwar proliferation of the American automobile. Historian Steven Hoffman has correctly insisted that the automobile no longer necessitated residential proximity to trolley line or railroad station and reduced the use of rectangular grids and paved streets.∑∫ Much more significantly, the auto technology now began to extend the consequences of the single-family home: the separated business district; the specialized consumerism; the larger, spatial residences; and the substitution of the owner resident for the renting commuter as the characteristic suburban icon. Yet new transportation modes necessarily contended with, rather than caused, the internal transformation of suburban social class arrangements. Far more important than the automobile in the interwar phase of suburban development was the interaction of inherited traditions of social accommodation with new selective forces of urban modernism. The ethnic and social class heterogeneity within the community insured that political leadership needed to account for mercurial coali- tions of independent voters. The rhetoric used to foster such coali- tions, however temporary, necessarily recognized nonpartisanship as something more than a rhetorical flourish. However much appeals to nonpolitical harmony glossed the realities of suburban power, these values under Republicans such as John Pollock became resonant The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals 179 touchstones in the theater of local politics, symbolic slogans that some suburbanites still sought to make more real than they had been. The emergence of the new tensions implied by Leonia’s planning board and Pollock’s own nonpartisan politics underscored both a precarious- ness and possibility that the suburb held for those seeking a different social and cultural construct within the American democratic system.∑Ω After the Depression and war years Pollock’s compromise could no longer contain the social differentiations of his suburban community within a landscape of voluntarism. Sometime near the end of the 1930s a new political culture arose, introducing more consciously ideological political divisions without fully displacing the older rhetoric of political nonpartisanship. This problematic mixture of images and behaviors constitutes the historical meaning of the American construct middle-class suburb during the interwar period. chapter 8 The Ideology of the Civic Conference

The Power of Nonpartisanship

merican society experienced the Depression and the New Deal Aas distinct national events, the first as a pervasive problem, the second as a delayed response. Together they constitute one of the United States’ galvanizing cultural episodes. In a remarkably short period the 1930s swept away most complacent vestiges of American exceptionalism and national confidence in the country’s democratic tradition. When Americans of all political persuasions witnessed the stock market debacle and the specter of 25 to 30 percent of their fellow citizens unemployed, the promises of industrial capitalism, so glit- tering only a few years before, appeared groundless. Suburbanites could take cold comfort in the fact that they did not face the proportion of unemployed that their urban neighbors did. Ultimately, forces that dislocated people in such numbers had their destructive impact everywhere. The widespread suburbanization of the 1920s had achieved a new and distinctive national presence by its geographical expansion. If it stopped suburbia’s extraordinary material expansion, the Depression only solidified its social authority. Even more important, as the experience of Leonia, New Jersey, showed, the collective disaster muted many of the suburb’s emergent social class divisions into a national experience and subsumed them into an abstractly inclusive middle class. The Depression thus exacerbated social division and at the same time offered an encompassing notion of middle-class nationhood.∞ In suburbia federal government intervention and assistance became pitted against a historically distinct landscape of neighborly self- sufficiency. The Depression at once halted suburban growth and raised The Ideology of the Civic Conference 181 questions about the potential distancing and defensiveness involved in some brands of self-sufficiency. People in suburbs such as Leonia initially hung on to their tangible sense of a neighborly voluntarism past the presidential election of 1932 and, unlike their county, their state, and their nation, gave their votes to Herbert Hoover. Yet by the election of 1936 Leonians saw the federal role in a different light and momentarily cast an uncharacteristic number of votes for the Demo- cratic candidate. Bergen County and the state of New Jersey broke from their long-standing Republican tradition and voted majorities for Franklin Delano Roosevelt (see table A.12). This impact of the Depression was neither direct nor linear on the suburban landscape; it did not easily or immediately displace local autonomy with centralized government intervention or New Deal values. Yet in a curious reversal of fortune this national cataclysm produced a powerfully binding cultural inheritance, the sense of a commonplace national endurance in the face of financial tragedy and economic want. The subordination of so many social biases and personal interests to national recovery seemed initially to elevate the putative images of neighborliness and nonpartisanship which had come to represent one important version of the suburban culture of the United States. In spite of the social class and political divisions that the Depression laid bare, one of the least noted achievements of the New Deal was its exploitation of familiarly local and suburban images, such as FDR’s ‘‘fireside chats,’’ to disseminate its unprecedented, centralizing designs. Concomitantly, as suburban communities necessarily relied on national assistance, the New Deal seemed to confirm as well as belie the suburbanite’s inherited notions of neighborhood and voluntary communal interaction. Nowhere were the consequences of this new interaction of old and new more obvious than in suburban politics, which, until the 1930s, was thought to be a secondary and episodic dimension of its social life. In suburbia, as in the nation as a whole, political ideologies were rarely invoked or criticized as the cause or the cure of the Depression.≤ The absence of political ideologies did not, of course, mean the absence of ideological conflict or of political partisanship; it meant only that public protocols distanced themselves from blueprints for rapid, wholesale change. In the 1930s Americans had cause to be both suspicious of -isms and increasingly hopeful about the awkward, ideological pragmatism of the New Deal. Roosevelt’s mastery of the radio 182 Suburban Landscapes and of popular symbols in his programs—the NRA’s Blue Eagle, for example—introduced a communal dimension of public engagement in the nation’s democratic process. FDR’s metaphors, such as the citizen passing a hose to a neighbor with a house afire, domesticated national communication and gave at least a sense of unprecedented national inclusion in the policy-making apparatus of the country. In the context of the Depression the president’s gestures were received as something more than symbolic. Within these larger dynamics suburban political structures, which were grounded in older voluntary networks, struck many citizens as a confirmation of their traditional democratic goal, only now in some unspoken way raised to a national standard of performance. In its effort to recover or confirm its older communal traditions, however, suburban politics of the 1930s transformed its self-image and integrated them into expansive national abstractions of democratic civility. Like national politics itself, suburban political practice had begun to narrow its institutional structures to targeted negotiations, explicitly self-serving electioneering and campaign success.≥ The ensuing dilemma—an encompassing rhetoric of civility yet a sharply focused partisan politics—became a shaping problem for the suburban middle class during and after World War II. Leonia’s experience offers an important clarification of how the American suburban landscape from the 1930s to the 1950s became a major cultural agent of this national tension and made it the special dilemma of its twentieth-century middle class. Before the Depression suburban politics were free neither of conflict nor partisan dissent, as the example of Leonia in the 1920s and early 1930s has demonstrated. Yet the political polarizations that had been building through the 1920s did not follow strict party lines. In some older suburbs national politics seemed almost incidental to the power struggles of the town. In some ways the situation reflected an older rhetoric about country town politics—that it operated independent of party ideology and focused on individual candidates and issues apart from political allegiances. As many knew, however, one could sustain the country town imagery in a 1900 town of 804 more easily than in a town of 5,350 citizens in 1930. Leonians ritually marked their political independence with the formation of their borough in 1894. Usually, this historical memory did not specifically acknowledge that the 1894 event resulted in a dramatic, partisan transformation in both town and in Bergen County to The Ideology of the Civic Conference 183 Republican Party dominance. Until 1912 Leonians voted with their fellow Bergen Republicans but always by margins of 10 to 15 percent or more above the county’s Republican averages. In 1912 the country and Bergen County favored Woodrow Wilson, while the state preferred William Howard Taft over its former governor. Leonians that year preferred the Progressive Party candidate Teddy Roosevelt (with 2.2 percent of its electorate favoring Eugene Debs, almost double the state and county percentages for the Socialist Party). Thereafter through the 1920s and early 1930s local politicians worried publicly not about an emergent Democratic presence so much as a bipartisanship that assessed candidates on their merits, one that would, if necessary, cross party lines to favor deserving individuals. If it functioned as a value honored more in word than in the breach, Leonians worked to make nonpartisanship their expression of political independence after World War I. The ongoing power of Leonia’s country town image should be measured by the actual passing of the last farmland, prosaic but graphic moments in the town’s collective memory. Citizens could still recall more than seventy years later the old Tembusch farm, replaced by a new high school in 1915, and the Tembuschs had to shift to nonfarm employment, in the local hardware store and elsewhere. Sim- ilarly, Wesley Vreeland, whose ancestors had been farmers in Leonia since the eighteenth century, made a conscious decision to be the first salaried member of his family. ‘‘I am the only one I know who went to work. I was the first Vreeland who ever went to work. And my grandmother had a fit . . . I started with U.S. Rubber Co. down in North Bergen. I was an electrician’s helper in the first job I ever had . . . 1934, Thursday, November 15, 1934. I don’t know why I remember that. I don’t remember what I had for breakfast but I remember that.’’ ‘‘All of the other Vreeland men worked the farm,’’ his wife added, ‘‘No one ever left home to get a job. His grandmother was going to have a stroke!’’∂ The farms that were a part of the youth of the previous Leonia generation were now gone; residents made do with the town’s Shade Tree Commission (1917), with the vestiges of old hillside orchards (now in plotted backyards), and, indeed, with the town’s streetscape, which marked many of the ribbonlike Dutch farmsteads. But the memory of country life continued to affect both social and political activity in the town. Even before the Depression Leonians had ceased to take people 184 Suburban Landscapes on their own terms with a country town affability. The interwar suburban style began to sustain a public skepticism that had only been episodic in earlier times. During World War I some citizens had gone public with their aversion to the high school German teacher. The firing of this popular teacher for pacifist views resulted in the first organized student protest of its kind, challenging the authority of principal and Board of Education members during the 1917 graduating exercises.∑ The German teacher boarded with the socialist-leaning Rados, and the leader of the student insurrection was the son of artist Ilona Rado West. The dynamics of wartime nationalism could not override critics of xenophobia or sustain an expansive pluralism in the policy and curriculum of a democratic school. Even in the heyday of country town neighborliness there had been limits to the rhetoric of neighborhood civility. The ferment over these and other issues died down but not out during the 1920s. Indeed, the manifest independence of the town newspaper, edited by Martha Rado, voiced a number of innovative and unorthodox views in the interwar years. Her regular support for the projections of New York’s Regional Plan, sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation, and her celebration of the artists as a town resource were familiar themes to Leonians through the late 1920s and 1930s. Still, her support for Republican mayors John Pollock and George Mills was unwavering, as was her appreciation for the speeches of Norman Thomas and the policies of the New Deal. Republican Leo- nians undoubtedly puzzled at times over her politics, but they would hardly have been surprised by her special commitment to town improvement projects. Hence, her early endorsement of a new enterprise in 1934—the Leonia Community Association—must have struck some as one more of her enthusiasms, one more experiment in the voluntary, nonpolitical traditions of Leonia life. The Leonia Community Association represented one more effort to resist the forces of partisanship, a pattern that stretched in the town’s history from the Leonia Literary League to the abortive Com- mittee of 100 in the early 1920s. It certainly echoed the spirit of that tradition stressing the uplifting force that would enhance the educational and cultural life of all its citizens. But it also clearly had the mark of national New Deal initiatives connected to it. The new organization was established to administer a grant awarded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, fostering a study of adult educa- The Ideology of the Civic Conference 185 tion in the metropolitan suburbs. Through its adult education department Teachers College at Columbia University had supplemented the grant, since the study assumed that ‘‘the interests and abilities of [a community’s] residents’’ determined the nature and success of adult education.∏ This new local initiative had formal connections to outside money and national academic discourses. The planned activities of the Leonia Community Association began immediately with a series of local volunteers discussing various ideologies of social change. The discussions probed the nation’s economic downturn and its causes. The topics specifically invited assessment from the perspectives of socialism, communism, and pacifism. The Leonia Community Association petitioned to use the Leonia Grammar School in the evening for intellectual exchange. Imme- diately, forty citizens, including prominent members of the American Legion, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, and the anti-zoning realtor block, signed a protest against such a ‘‘public’’ use of the school. A counterprotest by 241 Leonians—among them the editor of the newspaper, Martha Rado, the artists Rutherford Boyd and J. Scott Williams, together with other activists—immediately registered their support. Then a second petition against this use of the public school was circulated, and the number of signees escalated to 600. In the midst of this emergent confrontation the school board, which had final jurisdiction, voted against the Leonia Community Association’s request. The vote broke cleanly along gender lines: the two female board members endorsed the Leonia Community Association’s position; seven male members opposed it.π These fault lines also set the stage for an emergent ideological split along conservative and liberal values. The controversy not only spilled over into subsequent issues of the newspaper; it dramatized how politicized the town had become. The larger state and county divisions of party set a new context for the town’s own divisions of power. The public interest in community-wide discussions of ideology seemed to follow both from the intraparty Republican factions and a new Democratic insurgency. The opposition organized itself into the Leonia Citizens’ League, whose prominent members included realtor E. D. Paulin and banker/councilman Joseph Foley. ‘‘We believe,’’ the protestors declared, ‘‘that we have evidence that the Leonia Community Association is being unwit- tingly used as an instrument by these fanatical and breadwinning 186 Suburban Landscapes pacifists. The League is for peace and propaganda for peace but we find a wide difference between peace and the kind of pacifism sponsored by . . . the Leonia Community Association.’’∫ Tarring one’s opponents with the brush of nonlocal and noncommunal priorities—not to mention outdated World War I animosities—had now begun to appear as a systematic feature for politicizing suburban debates. Nonpartisanship became one of the casualties of the town’s newspaper editorials. Not only did the newspaper give the beleaguered association space to defend against opposing viewpoints (which were also published); the editor also used her editorial column to attack a history of ‘‘conservative’’ opposition to town policies. ‘‘The misin- terpretation [of Leonia Community Association purposes],’’ her editorial fumed, bringing to bear her historical memory, ‘‘developed primarily among the same conservative groups which Leonia has had to meet in the past whenever it undertook something apart from the strictly accepted and conservative. It is this same conservative group which undermined a progressive educational program in our schools some fifteen years ago. It is the same conservative element which blocked the establishment of a Community House about twelve years ago; it is fed by conservatives who opposed Leonia’s planning and zoning proposals; it is upheld and sustained by those taxpayers who oppose expenditures of any kind which they consider unnecessary.’’Ω The controversy galvanized the Leonia Community Association’s support into taking a lease on an actual facility, Community House. The house was a former residence, merging in its architecture the outward veneer of an older domestic civility with the partisanship of active political agency.∞≠ This polarization simmered into the congressional by-elections of 1934, in which Leonia citizens had voted solidly for their hometown candidate, Leonia mayor John Pollock, who ran for national office on an anti–New Deal platform. Yet Leonians split their votes for councilmen. The winners were Republicans, with 1,222 and 1,169 votes, respectively, while the Democrats—in their best showing to date— registered 1,055 and 1,016, a division unheard of only a decade earlier.∞∞ Also, Pollock’s total Leonia support, almost 300 votes over other Republican victors, indicated that some of his Democratic neighbors had crossed party lines between their federal and their local choices. In addition, the liberal-leaning town newspaper endorsed the election successes of the Republican council. Not only had council members The Ideology of the Civic Conference 187 kept the town fiscally sound, but, under the direction of Republican banker Joseph Foley, the account books registered a $5,000 surplus for 1934. The New Year’s editorial for 1935 sounded a very different note from its midyear broadside against the Leonia Citizens’ League: ‘‘In Leonia,’’ the paper pronounced, ‘‘harmony prevails as usual. Leonia has always had its battles in the committee meetings and then presented a united front at public meetings. . . . Leonia has long learned to accept the fact that party lines have no business in local affairs and measures are passed on their merit solely.’’∞≤ The overstated rhetoric of civic harmony had worn impossibly thin, but the vote-splitting supported a shred of local bipartisanship and seemed to give life to an older landscape of country town independence. Clearly, the dynamics of the New Deal were trickling down to the smallest communities. The outward veneer of local social harmony did not always coincide with the actual divisions within, but citizens worked to defend the veneer nevertheless. Thus, the suburbs reflected the confusions of the 1930s, and, like other communities and cities, they listened to and debated the range of criticisms and panaceas. Indeed, it was not only the Leonia Community Association that entertained the discussion of national issues. A young socialist group reached well outside the community to invite Norman Thomas to speak not simply about his recent unsuccessful bid to be U.S. senator from New York but of the New Deal as a ‘‘socialist’’ beneficiary.∞≥ Similarly, the Leonia Women’s League invited Bruce Bliven, the editor of the New Republic, and later Mary Simkhovitch, founder of Greenwich House, the well-known New York settlement. Both provided spirited defenses of the New Deal and Democratic policies.∞∂ During the 1930s there was a basic realignment of parties on the national level which spurred the traditional vote splitting on the local level. Locally and nationally, the star of the Democratic Party was rising, even in the 1920s, due to the shifts of urban Democratic voters into the suburbs as well as from the New Deal experiments in behalf of ‘‘recovery.’’∞∑ Both local and national dynamics produced widening political divisions within suburban communities of the 1930s, culminating in an across-the-board Democratic victory in 1936 in the nation, the state, and the county. Leonia, however, continued its independent Republican preference in spite of Democratic increases. The extensive reportage on Mary Simkhovitch’s address clarified 188 Suburban Landscapes further the still contentious perceptions of the New Deal by several town constituencies. Town critics of the New Deal must have had short sympathy with the settlement house leader’s liberal focus on the necessity of ‘‘social welfare’’; yet, beyond her enunciated goals and Greenwich House examples, Simkhovitch began to describe a political methodology that even conservative Leonians recognized and applauded. ‘‘No neighborhood house can hope to become a part of the community,’’ Simkhovitch explained, ‘‘unless it takes onto its Board of Directors all the elements connected with the conduct of such an institution. The financial directors, the teachers and the people themselves must be represented if such a venture is to succeed.’’ In a sense she offered a general characterization for Republican John Pollock’s nonpartisan methodology while mayor but cast it in communal terms that outstripped progressive Republican ideology. Simkhovitch’s remarks had special resonance for those members of the Leonia Women’s Club who also held memberships in the Leonia Community Association’s new Community House. ‘‘I have a special message,’’ Simkhovitch concluded, ‘‘for you ladies: In your efforts at self-culture, do not lose sight of the social and economic progress of your community. ‘Our neighborhood,’ if truly democratic, will be the strength of the nation. Never mind if there are clashes of opinion; never mind if heated controversies arise—thus only can we learn of the aims of our neighbors and our fellow citizens.’’∞∏ In spite of her federal-level work for the New Deal, Simkhovitch nevertheless retained a powerful belief in the small town and neighborhood as a central, operative metaphor of American cultural life. It was a sentiment widely shared by her Leonia constituency and by other suburban advocates nationwide.∞π

A New Political Mechanism

In spite of their election inroads in Leonia, the Democratic Party was not organizationally strong through the 1930s. But, clearly, their 1936 electoral gains, plus the regular squabbling within the Republican organization, had set a number of minds thinking. For the Democrats’ part their minority interests were served by maintaining an alternative presence and by recruiting the newcomers from Hudson County in mid-New Jersey and from New York City.∞∫ A few key people played strategic roles. Mrs. Eugene Vann, one longtime Leonia Democrat The Ideology of the Civic Conference 189 explained, ‘‘was one of the ruling presences in the Democratic party. Every year she would have to go out and get petitions. I will say this: the Democrats always maintained a presence and put up a ticket. But that’s about it. She would get her husband’s signature and her own signature on the petition and then she would come up to our house and get my mother, my three aunts and myself, that was five. Then she needed just three more. But things were that difficult. They used to have three categories of political life in town: there were the Republi- cans and Democrats and suspected Democrats. We could always poll a great many more in the general election than showed up on the party rolls or registration.’’∞Ω Vote splitting and mercurial local allegiances undoubtedly diluted political party influence in town affairs; they may also have made party invocations in local affairs appear unnecessarily divisive; but they also drew attention to an important pattern in suburban political behavior: national allegiances were far more consistent than local. Throughout the early New Deal years the county newspaper the Bergen Evening Record exemplified this political independence with regular criticism of state and county political machines and even outright support of Democratic candidates and pro–New Deal Republicans.≤≠ The pattern would go far to sustain notions of local nonpartisanship in spite of national debates and maneuvers (see table A.12). Such political discrimination helped suburbanites resist making local politics an ideological mirror of national party or even state and county priorities. By the end of the 1930s the Leonia Democrats’ increasing sense of possibility compelled the local Republicans to implement a variation on Pollock’s older successful stratagem and, in a sense, on Simkhovitch’s recommended political methodology. In late summer 1939 Harry E. A. Forstoff, a manufacturing executive and banker, initiated a call to the principal organizations of the town to send delegates to a planning meeting. After a vigorous discussion the meeting’s representatives voted 28–27 to create the Civic Confer- ence, which narrowly came into being on August 7, 1939.≤∞ Officially, the initial meeting sought to establish a procedure for keeping Leonia elections fixed on local matters and finding a democratic means for attracting able, if not expert and professional, talents to address local issues. The five representative, ‘‘civic-minded’’ organizations initially included the Leonia Republican Club, the Leonia Democratic Club, the Leonia Men’s Neighborhood Club, the Leonia 190 Suburban Landscapes Women’s Club, and the Leonia Home and School Association. Later the American Legion and the Junior Women’s Club would become organizational members. Of the original five, one citizen perceived, ‘‘the Republican association represented the first among equals and what they suggested usually prevailed.’’≤≤ The Civic Conference represented an effort to sustain an old voluntary response to new political pressures and yet at the same time to influence more directly and systematically than older voluntary organizations did the preferred outcome at election time. Because of prominent dissenters—former mayor and Republican John Pollock himself later became a most vo- ciferous critic—the Civic Conference came into existence in 1939 by a close vote of the town’s organized representatives.≤≥ The espoused goal was to keep town government ‘‘nonpartisan’’ and to permit individuals of talent, whatever their party, to contribute to good ‘‘town- housekeeping.’’≤∂ The actual historical record of the Civic Conference did not quite match the promise of ‘‘rewarding merit’’ and sustaining nonpartisan accord. In any election there would only be as many candidates as vacant offices, both parties would be represented, and candidates usually ran uncontested. The Civic Conference worked unofficially but within the legal machinery of political elections; its contribution was to prescreen candidates to insure a ‘‘democratic harmony.’’ The arrangement worked only so long as the tacit agreement against ‘‘insurgents’’ held. For a period of years the actual record of the Civic Con- ference roughly reflected the organizational politics of the town, and Democrats and Republicans were represented (disproportionately) on the council. Invariably, the Civic Conference candidates had substantial, previous involvement in one of several voluntary civic organizations before their actual nomination for political office.≤∑ The Player’s Guild, the Recreation Commission, the Board of Education, the Men’s Neighborhood Club, the Boy Scouts—all official, civic- oriented groups—became potential apprenticeship organizations for Civic Conference preferment. The Civic Conference thus became the most ambitious attempt to keep partisan politics subordinate to this suburb’s long-standing voluntary traditions. If its organizational history was somewhat exceptional in comparison to other suburbs, the work of Leonia’s Civic Conference documents a process and a tension that other suburbs faced as they moved beyond their country town stage of moderniza- The Ideology of the Civic Conference 191 tion. First, the new organization set the rhetorical parameters for the town’s policy-making process between the conference’s founding in 1939 to its formal dissolution in 1972. Second, it embodied for many, if not the majority, of Leonians an ingenious mechanism for sustaining a long-standing commitment to civic harmony and residential values. The widespread view of Leonians was pride in a distinctive strategy: ‘‘Here in Leonia,’’ a longtime resident has testified, ‘‘we had developed a rather unusual cooperation between the two major political parties. In the fact that we had designed a Civic Conference method, somewhat like the town meeting in New England where people who were representatives or delegates from all the organizations in town, including the political as well as the cultural organizations, had representation so that they could discuss and put into action some of the progressive theories and developments that were essential for our continuation as a homogeneous and pleasurable community.’’≤∏ The power of an older, historical model maintained a continuing force to resist the political pressures of divisive, national politics. Third, the creation of the Civic Conference recognized that newly arrived auto-borne citizens did not bring an automatic deference to the established traditions of suburban life. The town’s own sense of self-preservation required some effort to acclimate newcomers but within acceptable parameters. Some of the earliest Democrats in the Civic Conference had been academicians. In spite of their political differences they established compatible relations with their Re- publican neighbors. ‘‘[Some councilmen] were members of the Whet- stone Club . . . but were too scholarly and too decent apparently for some of the unruly people who had come up from West New York and Jersey City and who were becoming neighbors and members of our community. I don’t know whether this will tread on some people’s toes but there has been an increasing dissension between Democrats and Republicans. This used to be a very fine friendly community. But there has been so much unpleasant rumor and innuendo in the past few years [1970s and 1980s] . . . and more contention than there used to be. It bothers me that people who have differing political opinions can’t be friends any longer, that they become vehement and even vicious about their accusations and actions. I’ve never been interested in what a person’s politics was. I was always interested in whether he or she was a decent honest citizen.’’≤π By maintaining the spectrum of political viewpoints, the Civic Conference was more than a new polit- 192 Suburban Landscapes ical strategy in the guise of an older voluntary tradition; it attempted to sustain the powerful mythology of suburban civility and make it as attractive to newcomers as it purportedly was to the suburb’s oldest residents. Once in existence, a surprising cross-section of political ideologies supported the Civic Conference, using the language of an older civility. Leonians could still invoke the terms of the 1911 constitution for the original Men’s Neighborhood Club: ‘‘A community which has not the power to absorb its members and unite them for high common purposes is like an individual with no personality. It has no power or influence. It is the duty of every community to integrate its members. The extent to which a community succeeds in this is the real measure of its worth. . . . The value and usefulness of the club . . . depends upon every man in Leonia—his attitude and willingness to become a part of the community,’’ to participate in ‘‘training in citizenship’’ and for advancing ‘‘sociability.’’≤∫ The Civic Conference appeared to others to recall the efforts of the 1920s to create a community house or Leonia’s own Community House of the 1930s, with its strong New Deal sympa- thies.≤Ω Both of these earlier designs sought to strengthen community ties by concentrating social, cultural, and civic activities within these voluntary organizations. Local politics was to be the beneficiary rather than the designing force. The striking feature of this 1930s ferment was the unanimity of all sides in behalf of a residential community and local, civic harmony. ‘‘What Leonia wants from its local government,’’ one Leonia Life editorial ran, ‘‘is as plain as a pikestaff. Year after year, election after election, Leonia made it emphatically plain that it intends to remain a community of homes. It wants adequate police and fire protection. It wants sound zoning, strictly enforced. No waste. No extravagance. Reduction of public debt. A balanced budget. A dollar’s worth of value for every dollar of taxpayer’s money.’’≥≠ Even more, the paper voiced the town’s commitment to a distinctive civic culture, one that would realize both social harmony and enlightened leadership. Ritu- ally, all political protagonists in Leonia also praised the high educational and cultural level represented by the influx of New York academicians and nationally known artists. The efforts to realize the image of their town depended, most Leonians felt, on a new resolution of the ‘‘problem of self-government.’’ It was in its way the suburban response The Ideology of the Civic Conference 193 to the basic pressures of the Depression: not unemployment, home- lessness, and social dislocation but, rather, the deeper dilemma of a basic democratic order, at once representative but efficient in the face of both routine and extraordinary threats to the commonweal. Could a small suburban community succeed where large cities and, indeed, the federal government itself seemed to fail? There was another striking feature to Leonia’s suburban turmoil of the 1930s, namely, a bipartisan character flourishing side by side with expanding political party allegiances. New voluntary enterprises of the 1930s not only arose but also experienced heightened expectations of cumulative benefit from bipartisan cooperation. In the 1930s the creation of a vigorous Boy Scout organization and a concerted emphasis upon the Women’s Club to foster cultural events such as the Artist Exhibit in the public schools or the network of reading circles aimed to take citizens, young and old, and elevate their social and political consciousness. One effort that arose from the Girl Scout troop produced a substantial collection of scientific artifacts, then a Youth Museum of Leonia with a wide volunteer staff, eventually producing the town’s Little House and later evolving into the Bergen County Museum of Science and Art.≥∞ All of these voluntary efforts involved citizens who were formally aligned with one of several political parties. The political ideology of citizens was dramatically down- played, however, except in the self-congratulation of bipartisan ac- complishment. Implicitly, the emotive insistence on bipartisanship also drew attention to suburbanites’ worst political fears. Such explicitly conscious subordination of political allegiance had long been the role of voluntary social organizations in the Ameri- can republic. In an important ritual of memory one longtime citizen and former mayor, Wilbur Osler, could insist in the 1940s that in the early days Leonia’s elections were decidedly informal affairs. ‘‘A few people in town who knew that somebody would have to do something about it [political service], used to gather together, look over the village for likely men of ability to manage Borough affairs, hire an empty store, set up a polling place. . . . No attention was paid to party affiliation as Borough affairs did not take on a political complexion.’’≥≤ During Osler’s tenure as mayor (1913–15) he claimed to know one of his councilmen, Thomas Low, was a Democrat and that ‘‘there may have been others.’’ One of these others had actually been George 194 Suburban Landscapes Powell, a Democratic councilman and New York banker, who became in 1927 the appointed mayor for a short time to fill out an unexpired term.≥≥ This studied political memory extended into the 1930s, buttressed by both Republicans and Democrats (and socialists) liberally mixing in the Community House experiment as well as in the creation of the Civic Conference. In a sense at the local level the national ideologies did not apply. Largely latent and diffuse, local ideologies became dis- connected from formal political commitments and substituted distinctive rationales for newly conscious political behavior. The bipartisanship that was so readily endorsed when non-Republican adherents fielded small numbers began to become more problematic when their numbers could actually swing elections and threaten control of elected offices. The rising Democratic presence in New Jersey and the nation from 1928 through 1936 and irregularly thereafter clearly served as a cautionary tale to Leonia’s politicians (see table A.12). The influx of non-Republicans into Leonia remained a growing political worry through the 1930s and was a driving force in the creation of the Civic Conference. This worry did not stem from numerical increases in population alone. Indeed, the actual population of the town grew negligibly in the Depression years, as suburban growth stalled nationwide. Leonia’s 1940 population stood at 5,763, a mere 413 persons higher than the 1930 figure.≥∂ Such increases contrasted markedly with the 1900–1920 period, when the population more than tripled, from 804 to 2,979, and indeed not quite doubled again in the 1920s, to 5,350.≥∑ In some ways the stasis of the Depression provided an opportunity for an intensive socialization and a preparation for additional population increases once the crisis had passed. The political worry stemmed, instead, from the nature of the pre- Depression newcomers, an intrametropolitan influx largely introduced by trolleys. ‘‘There were,’’ one longtime resident remembered, ‘‘two great migrations into Leonia. . . . The first was from Hudson County [N.J.] north; the other was the Jewish migration from the city. I can’t say that it created any great trauma in the town, either one of them. Although I suppose it can in a sense explain the gradual rise of the Democratic party in town.’’≥∏ Leonia’s town fathers correctly assumed that expansion was likely to resume in the 1940s and 1950s, and that meant more newcomers who would have to be integrated The Ideology of the Civic Conference 195 into town routines and traditions. Indeed, all the activity to insure ‘‘proper integration,’’ whether it was the Community House, the Civic Conference, or the range of other voluntary and church groups, evidenced a bit more ‘‘trauma’’ about the social cohesiveness of the town than its citizens actually remembered. Another example of political confrontation and local anxiety arose from Leonia’s experience of the 1936 election. The political clashes of the 1930s only heightened the town’s apprehension. One contingent of the Civic Conference’s critics originated from the newly energized Democratic organization, which, until the middle 1930s, had little organizational presence or political clout in town. Their charge of ‘‘machine politics’’ was an understandable misstatement of the long-standing dominance of Republican leadership. (It was also a charge advanced by some disgruntled Republicans.) Particularly given the profound impact of John Pollock’s effective residential policies, the Democrats provided little more than a gadfly role. There was no evidence that they disagreed ideologically with the developing shape of the town, yet they began to devise a self-protective argument that would have a long-term attraction for later political campaigns: they asserted that local Democrats should adhere to local rather than national issues in town elections. In part the stratagem drew upon a deeply traditional Democratic refrain; in part, also, it was an effort to downplay the Republicans’ momentum from John Pollock’s 1934 congressional campaign on an anti-Roosevelt platform. In the 1936 elections Leonia Democrats chose to press for ‘‘minority representation.’’≥π The 1936 local election demonstrated, as Leonia Life editor Peggy Rado noted, how narrow the political gap had become between the two parties. Republican Joseph Foley defeated Democrat Frank Smith by only 298 votes: 1,205 to 907.≥∫ ‘‘It was not many years back,’’ the editor mused, ‘‘when a Democratic candidate in Leonia was lucky to poll more than 50 votes. And on the presidential level Leonians gave Roosevelt 1,119 to Alf Landon’s 1,781 votes.’’≥Ω Again, the vote splitting raised questions about the conflict between national and local allegiances. In 1938 one of two local Democratic candidates, although unsuccessful, continued dramatically the narrowing of party vote margins. ‘‘I would like to think,’’ William Shedd, one of the Democratic hopefuls, later recalled, ‘‘I so scared the Republicans [that they went] into the Civic Conference the next year.’’ The Civic Conference 196 Suburban Landscapes strategy may well have endorsed civic harmony as its primary objective, but its creation also reflected additional concerns about the discipline of Republican voters and the threat of Democratic competition. In effect participation in prominent voluntary organizations, prior to political candidacy, became a special apprenticeship. ‘‘You see,’’ a former mayor, John Stencken, has observed, ‘‘the various organizations had representatives on this Conference. So they would really recommend people they knew from their organizations. At times the wife of a man would be recommended by the Women’s Club and the Men’s Neighborhood Club would recommend her too. But you really came through these organizations.’’∂≠ Stencken’s own trajectory into politics bears out his testimony. He and his wife came to Leonia in 1937, seeking a distinctively residential area close to New York City. He had served as vice chair of the Leonia Boy Scouts, president of the Leonia Players’ Guild, president of the Men’s Neighborhood Club, and also headed the Couples Club of the Presbyterian Church. Profes- sionally, he was an architect with the firm of Moore and Hutchins and had himself recently completed the design for the extension of the Leonia Elementary School. Later he would also design the remodeling of the Old Telephone Building as it was converted to use as the town’s Borough Hall.∂∞ Over time some comparable civic pedigree could be replicated for many candidates whom the Civic Conference endorsed. The test of the organization became delivery on its putative bipartisanship, which would distance Leonia party members from their county and state organizations. In the very first set of mayoral and council elections that same year the Civic Conference successfully backed a Republican mayor, Wilbur Osler Jr., and one councilman each from the two official political parties: Edward B. Miller from the Republicans and Joseph Galland from the Democrats. The next year the conference repeated the strategy, persuading its fellow citizens to elect Paul Bogert (Republican) and Eugene Vann (Democrat) to the town council. ‘‘The pattern was,’’ explained William Shedd, a lifelong Leonia Democrat, ‘‘that they would nominate over the years the Dem- ocrats to provide for . . . to keep a more or less standing membership of two Democrats on the council and four Republicans and of course the mayor was always Republican.’’∂≤ The Civic Conference rearranged entirely the regular voting process. Quickly, nomination by the Civic Conference was tantamount to election. In the minds of some, however, it was ‘‘a shadowy presence in the background which said this The Ideology of the Civic Conference 197 man should run on the Republican ticket and this man should run [on the Democratic ticket].’’∂≥

The Role of Political Criticism

A generation later few could recall precisely the names of Democrats nominated by the Civic Conference or the important developmental stages of the Civic Conference. The specific details of the Civic Con- ference’s history, however, document the peculiar transformations of suburban political culture and the post-Depression suburban landscape which endured for the remainder of the twentieth century. Al- though much else was obscure, most citizens who were residents in the 1940s were certain that the Civic Conference was bipartisan because at least they successfully promoted some Democrats. The historical record bears out their memory. In 1943 Eugene Vann was reelected, in 1945 Frank S. Smith, in 1948 John J. Kennedy.∂∂ As compelling were the elections in 1943, 1946, and 1950 of Democrats to the presidency of the Civic Conference itself.∂∑ Such bipartisanship and the Civic Conference’s complete election success in its early years prompted the new editor of the local paper (whose name for a time changed to the East Bergen Express) to extol the uniqueness of Leonia’s political system. ‘‘Every citizen living in the community,’’ the editor argued, ‘‘is at liberty to suggest a person to be considered for any given office. In fact, they are urged to submit the name of any person whom they feel is capable of filling an office. If a person is properly qualified to fill an office he is given every consideration, his recommendation is read to the full membership of the Con- ference, and comments or further information is asked for by the chair. The result of this impartial selection of candidates for the various borough offices is demonstrated by the quality of men to be found serving on our Council, the Board of Education and other elective offices.’’∂∏ The editorial continued by characterizing Civic Conference candidates ‘‘as the highest type of office-holders as a whole that I have ever seen.’’ Its paean went on to commend the absence of ‘‘any serious criticism of any of them’’ or of any organizational opposition to the conference, ‘‘although it endorsed men who vote the Republican or the Democratic ticket with equanimity.’’∂π The self-congratulation was premature. In 1942 there appeared a broadside from a Leonia citizen which forewarned of a major politi- 198 Suburban Landscapes cal reaction. The Civic Conference, Edward Fertig declared, was un- American, undemocratic, and ‘‘unfair to the major portion of the residents of the Borough of Leonia.’’ The grounds for his charge lay with the multiple memberships possible in the several constituent organizations of the Civic Conference. Since an individual could have memberships in more than one of the constituent bodies, one person could, in effect, vote more than once in behalf of a preferred candidate. The Civic Conference, the inference ran, moved the town toward a ‘‘one- party system’’ and ‘‘absolute control by a minority party,’’ which, the author insisted, was the ‘‘foundation of Fascism and Naziism.’’∂∫ In addition to the charge of multiple memberships and its dangerous potential, Fertig questioned the representation of the constituent clubs. Two did not hold regular monthly public meetings. The most powerful and largest of the clubs did not even elect its representatives democratically, since the Men’s Neighborhood Club had its delegates selected by its executive board and the membership had the role of ratification, and even that had not happened in memory. Finally, all of the organizations of the Civic Conference were ‘‘restrictive’’ groups: not everyone could belong to the American Legion or the Home and School Association, and some of the groups required dues. The author did not advocate a return to the ‘‘old setup’’ but preferred ‘‘contested elections’’ that stiffened self-expression. The critic’s alternative was the town meeting, thought to be the embodiment of an open, public, and representative political process.∂Ω Initially, this criticism had little political effect, but it contained the seeds of mounting political opposition to the Civic Conference. The Civic Conference continued successfully to promote elected officials for mayor and council as well as for the Board of Education. Two developments began to signal problems for the Civic Conference, however, which arose from within the Republican ranks themselves. The first was the ritual insistence, in political season and out, that the Civic Conference was a special, if not unique, device for insuring a democratic but depoliticized electoral process. Particularly after the editorial torch was passed in June 1943 to Mildred de Bary, a one- time journalist for the Bergen (N.J.) Evening Record and a former associate of the founding editor, Martha Rado, the readership might have expected a shift away from her predecessor’s bias on behalf of the Republican-dominated Civic Conference. De Bary’s early and explicit endorsement of her fellow Iowan Henry Wallace, FDR’s contro- The Ideology of the Civic Conference 199 versial and Progressive vice president, might have readied Leonia citizens for a defense of ‘‘representative’’ democracy and criticism of the Civic Conference. Yet the opposite happened. Progressive-oriented de Bary found in the Civic Conference a marvelous engine of ‘‘self- government,’’ and throughout her editorship she regularly lauded the conference’s work.∑≠ The second important development was the increase of Civic Conference critics, largely at the initiative of ‘‘independent’’ Republi- cans. In 1944 a ‘‘GOP bolt’’ followed from a meeting sponsored by the Republican County Committee.∑∞ The actual motivation for the political break may not have originally been criticism of the Civic Con- ference. One of the breakaway candidates had successfully addressed the mounting sewage problem of the borough by effectively curtailing local dumping into Overpeck Creek and by arranging for the building of a dam at the county line. It is not known whether these trans- borough activities gave the candidate a different perspective or not.∑≤ Later some suspected the Republican County Committee of trying to regain control lost to the local Civic Conference organization. Func- tional bipartisanship eroded party discipline and the authority of state and county political organizations. But, increasingly, the local autonomy touted by the Civic Conference could be construed as a liability for county-wide issues affecting Leonia. Initially, the insurgent groups fared poorly against the Civic Con- ference candidates, but their opposition provided a forum to debate the nature of the conference. In 1944, for example, critics charged that the Civic Conference positively stifled legitimate political opposition. The only two politically opposed groups in the conference were the Republican and Democratic organizations. Until elections rest on those formal differences, the criticism ran, the Civic Con- ference prevented a clear, representative expression of views. In effect the conference’s effort to seek appropriately talented people (a goal the insurgents did not dispute) resulted in a political ‘‘preselection’’ of candidates. The insurgents insisted that the essence of all government arose from local government outward and not the reverse. ‘‘Under the Civic Conference,’’ the insurgents concluded, ‘‘voting has been dis- couraged to an alarming degree. The voters have no direct interest in civic affairs and remain home rather than cast an uncontested ballot. This result unchecked will destroy Leonia politically.’’∑≥ The Civic Conference did not sit idly by in the face of such 200 Suburban Landscapes challenges. Their candidates won the 1944 election. Yet, using the local newspaper and its participating organizations, the conference decided on a great ‘‘educational’’ outreach to ‘‘new members of the community.’’ Such education would apprise everyone of the organization’s purposes and mitigate the charge of preselection or ‘‘un- American’’ subversion. Second, in addition to its regular delegates from member organizations, the Civic Conference constitution, its leadership noted, would accept as a delegate any citizen of the borough who had collected twenty-five signatures to qualify. To emphasize the point of representation the elections of 1945 fielded one Re- publican and one Democrat on the Civic Conference slate. Still, an insurgent Republican again entered the lists and was defeated by the Civic Conference candidates, a consequence achieved only by some Republicans voting against a Republican to elect a Democrat. The Civic Conference thus appeared to be an effective organization, one able to convince especially its Republican members to vote for Democratic endorsees over other Republicans. The editorial in the local paper before election day tallied the Civic Conference’s successes thus far: since 1939 nine councilmen, three mayors, and four- teen school trustees ‘‘about whom there have been no complaints.’’∑∂ The fears of the local Democratic Club that their cooperation with the Civic Conference would fail to elect their councilman proved unfounded. Whatever ideological differences the Democrats had with the Republicans remained en famille. Given the heated political contests of the early 1930s, not to mention the volatile Republican intraparty struggles of the late 1920s, the Civic Conference realized in its earliest years a substantial alternative and produced a tangible example of outward suburban civility and efficiency. In the wake of its success and in spite of its detractors, the conference elected Demo- cratic delegates to its presidency for 1946 and 1947. The political tradeoffs certainly worked in the short term. Given the novelty of the Civic Conference structure and the opposition’s criticism, its political contribution to Leonia’s process of community formation was crucial. The Civic Conference represented more than a political process; it embodied fully the tradition of voluntary organizations, a suburban ideology that was wider and deeper than a commitment to electoral politics. It did not turn its back on political necessity, as if suburban life were beyond politics and the complexities of The Ideology of the Civic Conference 201 modern life. Rather, it attempted to fit democratic politics into the sleeve of voluntarism and to keep the worst aspects of campaign in- vective, slanderous sloganeering, and other forms of incivility at bay. Without question the Civic Conference was a Republican device, and with no small amount of shrewdness it offered Democrats a ‘‘bone’’; officially, it was a device for getting the talent of both parties into local government. Functionally, the Democrats swapped outward community harmony for a minority portion of political power.∑∑ The Democrats cooperated with alacrity, and, as criticism mounted, they went to the barricades in defense of the conference. In 1950 Eugene Vann, a two-term Democratic councilman (1940–44) and in 1950 president of the Civic Conference, tried to stem the mounting opposition to the conference with a series of articles that directly confronted the criticism. The Civic Conference improved, Vann insisted, two features of the ‘‘traditional’’ system: first, town meetings were appropriate only for small communities; second, in the traditional system, Leonia included, a few men in all parties designated candidates in an unrepresentative fashion. The Civic Conference, which drew upon the strengths of existing town organizations, produced a ‘‘delegated town meeting,’’ or a ‘‘community caucus.’’∑∏ There were, he admitted, two basic weaknesses to the organization: first, factional opposition, which was evident even in the traditional political system; and, second, individual political motivation, which often became mere self-seeking in the climb to higher office. Since its incep- tion, he pointed out, the Civic Conference had permitted delegates without organizational affiliation to become conference delegates by gathering twenty-five signatures from their electoral district. Only one delegate in 1950 gathered the requisite signatures, suggesting to Vann that the Civic Conference was not culpable of the ‘‘faction’’ charge. Second, the sponsorship of the Civic Conference, Vann argued, meant its candidates had a special nonpolitical motivation: they were thereby ‘‘not going into politics’’ by agreeing to be conference nominees. It is therefore ‘‘a solution to the problem of self-government.’’ The town receives the ‘‘talents of the best citizens’’ without socially disruptive political scrapping, a feature that often deprived the town of talented citizen expertise.∑π In retrospect one former mayor has insisted: ‘‘What helped to break up the Civic Conference [was that] . . . out beyond the borough, at the county level, you were either a Democrat or a Republi- 202 Suburban Landscapes can. Neither [county] party wanted anything to do with the Civic Conference . . . if you were a Republican and wanted to go beyond the borough into the county, you had to have their support, and they weren’t too interested in having you run as a non-partisan.’’∑∫ The ideological limits of Vann’s argument became clear in events that had been building since the late 1940s. In 1946 the Civic Con- ference, still sensitive to the charge of factionalism, passed a regulation that it would support any candidate for no more than two consecutive terms. In 1948 the Civic Conference withdrew its support from a highly effective two-term member of the Board of Education. In a heated election process the town elected the official for a third term, anyway, by an overwhelming majority and applauded his further election to the board presidency. It was the first official defeat of a Civic Conference candidate since its founding.∑Ω Without resort to any political apparatus, Republican or Democrat, the town overrode its synthesizing political machinery. What kind of authority did the Civic Conference have, people surely wondered after this defeat, and what was its relation to town opinion? Further events sustained the questions. Councilman Joseph A. Walsh’s tenure, from 1947 to 1953, catalyzed a number of issues before the conference and the town and made all Leonians aware that ‘‘local issues’’ were not only not restricted to the town boundaries but were decidedly political (see fig. 8.1). First, as councilman in charge of veterans affairs, Walsh argued that even in 1947 veterans still desperately needed housing, an argument begun earlier by Leonia veterans Rich- ard Law and Donald Dey.∏≠ His proposal for low-cost housing required reconsideration of the sacrosanct residential values of the zoning board. Initially, Walsh received the support of both Mayors Forstoff and later Dudley Allen to reexamine the zoning regulations and to accommodate ‘‘garden apartments’’ in unused land along heavily traf- ficked Grand Avenue. Patriotism temporarily superseded tradition. Second, as town police commissioner, Walsh stiffened the ticketing power of Leonia police officers and concomitantly developed a formalized process for screening police candidates.∏∞ One of the first consequences of applying impartial testing to police applicants was the hiring of the first black policeman in Leonia. Private reaction might have become more public had the precedent-breaking black not been himself a Leonia native from the Spring Street neighborhood.∏≤ Patriotic and racial policies set the background for a transforma- Fig. 8.1. Campaign poster for 1953 local election. Three candidates for local elective office—John G. Wragge, Joseph A. Walsh, and Edward R. Miller—ran on a platform opposed to the Civic Conference political organization. Private collection

tion of the town relationships with county and state political organization. Local independence and bipartisanship, extolled in the 1930s by the county newspaper, became problematic for the party organization in the 1950s. First, Walsh’s stricter police enforcement resulted in the surprising arrest of a bookie and the discovery of a gambling ring in the midst of respectable suburbia. Even more, evidence in the bookie’s arrest seemed to implicate a Bergen County freeholder, who also served as chairman of the State Republican Com- mittee. The plot thickened when the Bergen County prosecutor arrived at Walsh’s office demanding the implicating evidence.∏≥ Walsh refused to turn the evidence over to him. Instead, he preferred to confide in elected state officials, especially the state attorney general. His resistance to the county prosecutor preceded closely the burglary of his business office and serious threats to his family. The issue might have gone unnoticed had not U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver made congressional hearings on organized crime a national event via the new medium of television. Kefauver’s eventual interrogation of local gang- 204 Suburban Landscapes sters, such as Willie Moretti (Cliffside Park) and Anthony Anastasia (Fort Lee), who were Bergen County residents, raised the question of criminal complicity with the dominant Bergen County Republican organization.∏∂ The escalation of the issue in political campaigns of the early 1950s drew the national attention of investigative radio broadcaster Robert Montgomery, who implicated the county freeholder and state Republican chairman, John J. Dickerson, in illegal activity. During Dickerson’s 1952 reelection campaign Montgomery quoted the Ber- gen County prosecutor, who stated in regard to Dickerson’s tenure that ‘‘everything was for sale from low numbered license plates on up.’’ Dickerson then sued Montgomery for libel for over a half-million dollars.∏∑ Dickerson’s 1952 opponent for county freeholder, running on a platform opposed to political corruption, was Leonian councilman Joseph A. Walsh. Dickerson won that county election, but Montgomery’s program highlighted the state investigation into Ber- gen County gambling and set the context for a major political change in 1953 with the election landslide of Democratic governor Robert B. Meyner. A later state attorney general publicly commended Walsh for his independent action in the affair.∏∏ While these public dramas were taking shape, the county free- holders requested that a number of towns, Leonia included, donate land adjacent to Overpeck Creek for a ‘‘marine park,’’ a project earlier proposed in the Russell Sage Foundation’s New York Regional Plan.∏π The county’s request condensed all the Civic Conference issues of expert leadership, political motivation, and the ‘‘best interests of the town’’ into a single problem about the suburb’s future: what sorts of discretion and autonomy should a borough retain with respect to county and state development? On the one hand, the mayor and council felt that the park land would add a material advantage to the town’s residential priorities. On the other hand, as Walsh argued from the outset, Leonia’s residential priorities would be no more jeopardized by using the land as taxable resources for town development than for some other use. The budgets of the late 1940s had been rising, with teacher salary increases and other civic necessities. The designation of 130 acres, 20 percent of the town, for this single park was potentially excessive. Why not designate a smaller portion for park land and the rest near the railroad tracks for light industry? Such a plan, Walsh argued, could generate $50,000–70,000, equal to that recently gener- The Ideology of the Civic Conference 205 ated by taxes from the garden apartments, which were, like the projected light industry, outside residential zones.∏∫ Without some such plan county park land would not generate revenue, and resistance to development necessarily connoted higher taxes and a special burden to less-affluent citizens. Local leaders rejected Walsh’s argument and chose to close ranks with the Republican county leadership. The emerging political question for all Leonians then became whose residential values would be favored. After considerable debate the Leonia council approved granting the entire requested acreage by a vote of five to one. Walsh’s lone negative rested not only on his stated grounds but also on the need for a public referendum on so weighty a matter. After the council formally deeded the land to the county, Walsh took the unprecedented step of hiring a local lawyer to sue the mayor and his fellow councilmen over the nature of their ‘‘public interest.’’∏Ω This upshot did not change the council’s action, but it convinced some citizens that the conference’s elected candidates operated too much out of the public’s eye. The earlier criticisms of factionalism and lack of representation in their decisions seemed to take on greater weight.π≠ In the midst of this brouhaha and an anti-conference slate in the 1951 elections, President Vann of the Civic Conference offered in serialized form in the local newspaper his defense of the organization and its history.π∞ But the conference’s bipartisan leadership had consistently deferred to county initiatives. The larger pattern thus aligned the town with partisan Republican priorities and eroded a pattern of independent split voting in both primaries and regular elections.π≤ These internal dissensions gave rise to several additional voluntary organizations in town—the anti-conference Leonia Taxpayers Association and the Regular Republicans of Leonia, plus the pro- Conference Civic Association—all largely staffed by Leonia Republi- cans.π≥ Such organizations provided the political variety and electoral contest that increasingly citizens felt belonged in the overtly politicized process of government.π∂ In addition, the Civic Conference’s recent effort to avoid the charge of factionalism and accept floor nominations now produced a nomination: for the first time (1953) a citizen nominated a fellow citizen in ‘‘open session,’’ and the political candidate was Joseph A. Walsh for mayor (see fig. 8.1). The citizen was quickly apprised of the fact that Walsh was a Civic Conference candidate in 1947 but in later elections had refused conference en- 206 Suburban Landscapes dorsement.π∑ The issue was closed when in October the local paper, claiming one thousand names on a supportive petition, ran the headline: ‘‘Walsh to Run for Mayor in Opposition to Allen.’’ In a hotly contested campaign the conference candidate, Dudley Allen, won, receiving 57 percent of the vote to Walsh’s 43 percent.π∏ The margin of victory, a county newspaper observed, was ‘‘less than those of two years ago.’’ππ A ‘‘showdown’’ occurred the next year, according to one longtime political observer. The Civic Conference needed to find some stratagem to bridge the growing dissidence in its own ranks while keeping the Democratic Club placated with its minority role. Instead, the loose configuration of voluntary organizations within the Civic Con- ference, often considered a model of genteel civility, became its nemesis. The Leonia Democratic Club put up Bill Hayes for council, and the Civic Conference also endorsed him. In addition, the conference itself proposed Edward Peterson, its current president. At the same time, the Leonia Republican Club nominated George Payne, an espoused opponent of the Civic Conference. An independent Republi- can, Edward Miller, also opposed to the Civic Conference, declared his candidacy and in effect worked with Payne to form an opposing slate. The largely Republican Civic Conference now again faced the awkward proposition of recommending a Democrat over Republicans to its primarily Republican constituency. The real contest, as one newspaper noted, was not a traditional interparty fight but, rather, a contest over the legitimacy of the Civic Conference. ‘‘Well, the upshot,’’ one Leonian later observed, ‘‘was Bill Hayes got snowed under and the two Republicans [Payne and Peterson] got just about the same vote, which meant in effect that the Civic Conference was a completely impotent organization.’’π∫ Not only had it deferred to county Republican priorities; the Civic Conference could not control its membership under the aegis of bipartisanship.

The Partisan Landscape

The Civic Conference had became unable to guarantee the political variety and representation it formally espoused. In addition, the internecine struggles within the conference continued, although in subsequent years members were able to close ranks at election time. For their part the Democrats perceived the weakening effect of the Re- The Ideology of the Civic Conference 207 publicans’ differences and began to organize themselves along regular party lines. ‘‘As long as the Republicans on the Civic Conference nominated Republicans of their own stripe,’’ one participant has recalled, ‘‘there was not an ostensible purpose to the Conference. . . . The conference feeling was strong enough with them [the Democrats] to keep them in but finally they went out and were in the wilderness for three or four years.’’πΩ Not until 1972 would the Democrats elect their first mayor and introduce a landscape with a different political rhetoric. ‘‘Had the Conference not been in operation for all these years,’’ a former conference president has argued, ‘‘there never would have been a Democratic representative on the Council and that was attested to after the Democratic party dropped out of the Civic Con- ference in 1957. For the next ten to fifteen years there were no Demo- crats on the Council.’’∫≠ The Civic Conference formally went out of existence in 1972, marking both the end of one political landscape and the beginning of another, one that was more consciously partisan and contentious. One might ask why it took so long, nearly two decades, for a different political landscape to emerge. The answer rests, in part, with an epilogue crisis more formidable and unprecedented than any of the dilemmas associated with the demise of the Civic Conference. In 1955 Leonia’s mayor and council were informed that all affected towns would have an opportunity to comment upon the proposed extension of the East-West Bergen Expressway, ultimately the east- ernmost leg of Interstate 80.∫∞ When they realized that the Federal Bureau of Roads actually planned to bisect Leonia along one of three routes, officials backed by the Civic Conference achieved their most effective call for citizen solidarity. This solidarity resulted in an ongoing political commitment of the town to Dudley Allen and his reelection to an unprecedented four consecutive terms, from 1950 to 1957, as mayor (see fig. 8.2).∫≤ During 1955–57 Allen worked in the state capital at Trenton and in Washington, D.C., and with a range of public officials. Ultimately, his successful proposal of a highway ‘‘button-hook’’ around the town, rather than through its center, won him permanent accolades from his fellow citizens. His leadership provided the most graphic and dramatic realization of the Civic Con- ference’s promise of leadership via preselection of talented candidates. Allen’s achievement did not forestall the old criticism of the Civic Conference permanently. Yet it extended the life of the organization Fig. 8.2. Fred Cicetti’s portrait of Mayor Dudley Allen, 1987. Allen’s unprecedented four-term tenure as mayor galvanized a bipartisan effort in the 1950s to prevent the splitting of Leonia by Interstate Highway 80. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

and energized an older tradition of suburban voluntarism and nonpartisanship. That inherited landscape sought a residential community that would perforce overcome the most undesirable aspects of the democratic political process: social contention and ideological division. The endurance of the Civic Conference made clear how powerful those suburban priorities of voluntarism and civility—Leonians The Ideology of the Civic Conference 209 insisted it was neighborliness—were with both its supporters and its critics.∫≥ Both political parties had earlier sought to shape a local community distinguished for its cultural landscape more than its political structure. By the time of its demise, however, the Civic Con- ference had ritualized the rhetoric of civility, just as ﬁrmly as it had shepherded into local affairs distinctive political divisions of the larger state and county Democratic and Republican organizations. This ele- vation of the community’s political culture dramatically shifted the process of community formation into a wholly different and more consciously partisan ideological landscape than that of the interwar years.∫∂ chapter 9 The Modernization of Suburban Realism

he transformational event in suburban culture during the inter- Twar period was the rise and fall of a tangible sense of local community and social autonomy. During the 1920s older suburbs thrived and used the upsurge of new housing to celebrate their rooted voluntary organizational networks. Suburbia’s communal arrangements trans- mitted a combined sense of both social order and individual possibility which had begun to inform the very meaning of the term middle-class nationwide. The special images of a manageable and naturally evolving community kept at bay the less appealing features of suburbia’s metropolitan interaction. Still, some critics used the same features to argue the dependence and artificiality of community mores as standard suburban features. The irrepressible intrusions of the Depression and the New Deal, particularly the spur to Democratic Party objectives and a strong interventionist role for government design, forced a rethinking of suburban voluntarism and its vulnerabilities, both locally and nationally. With surprising speed these external forces politicized the suburban landscape. Political differences, which were once muted by suburban voluntarism, became consciously public, threatening the carefully crafted image of a country town harmony. The modernization of suburban culture made the organs of politics more rather than less important in post-Depression years. Postwar suburbanites extolled a different set of values and icons which seemed to cultivate imported influences on their community. This process had its parallels in the increasing dependence of suburbs upon electrical appliances, technological inventions such as the automobile, and the instructional cues of mass advertising.∞ All of these interwar innovations derived their attraction and power from advertisers’ ability to separate consumers from their social and ideological allegiances. Col- The Modernization of Suburban Realism 211 lectively, they introduced a process of social change which seemed to have less and less to do with the routine contexts of social life. The decontextualized sense of individual freedom and professional career mobility which would become almost a national emblem for the United States in the postwar period found substantive roots in interwar suburbanization.≤ To view this historic change from the viewpoint of its suburban protagonists illuminates their complicity with metropolitan forces such as mass advertising; it also documents the problematic nature of professionalization vis-à-vis the suburbanite’s sense of place. The work and experience of suburban artists during and after the 1930s tightened the suburban-urban relationship and yet provided resistance against certain desocializing features of both the modern city and modern art. The career lines of several Leonia artists document features of both American art history and American suburban dynamics in this period. In 1915 Mahonri Young (1877–1957) faced the dilemma of many American artists who had received their formal training in the French academies of Julian or Colarossi but who returned to adapt their skills to American tastes and themes. On the one hand, the formal museums of art in the United States remained predominantly Eurocentric and largely ignored artwork produced by Americans; on the other, the publishers of mass magazines, which supported many lucrative artistic careers and distinctly ‘‘American subject matter,’’ had so commercialized the artist’s sense of craft and imaginative freedom that artists often had the sense that they must commit their careers either to their easels or to their wallets. This conundrum arose as a central feature of the professionalization of artist/illustrators’ craft and their occupational stratification in an emergent metropolitan culture.≥ Mahonri Young kept vividly in his mind the fate of the distinguished French artist Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), whose diverse work as caricaturist, satirist, illustrator, lithographer, painter, and sculptor he had studied and admired with such benefit. He had, Young enthused, ‘‘more power, more vehemence, more go’’ and yet, in spite of his extraordinary ability, ‘‘[Daumier’s] world did not want his best; it was pleased with his second best; the thing he could do for a living and so it chained him to the wheel of his caricatures. This is not entirely to be regretted, for though we are not allowed to gorge our fill on the richest viands of his feast, we are allowed to sample them, and our only regret can be that these richest viands are not there in greater quan- 212 Suburban Landscapes tity. . . . We regret that with a Rubens-like power of output we should have been cheated of his full portion.’’∂ At age thirty-eight and mid- career Young continued to face comparable tensions in his own artistic work. Young’s commentary took him past the conventional notions of artists in garrets pursuing their muse with impractical abandon. His commonsensical aesthetic found an artist’s capability constructed by his ‘‘world.’’ Even more, he recognized that, in a time not too distantly past, institutional and cultural barriers could drastically impair artistic potential. Young’s musing on Daumier’s dilemma could have served as a thinly veiled warning to his entire artistic generation. Implicitly, Young had explored desirable and undesirable support systems for American artists, including the place of both city and suburb in his own artistic world. Young’s arrival in suburban New Jersey in 1915 represented not only the widespread influx of a new middle class in suburbia; he also brought the artist’s ambivalence toward his own modernizing, twentieth-century world. Through an analysis of several suburban artists’ work and careers one can observe how wider metropolitan dynamics of the interwar period contributed to both artistic invention and suburban culture. Particularly in their invented images, Leonia artists drew upon collective values that were reinforced by the peculiar interaction of city and suburbs during the interwar period. In spite of the perils of commercialism, few twentieth-century artists with genuine ambition could afford to be far from New York City and its artistic communities. Mahonri Young had left his native Utah after working as a newspaper artist on the Salt Lake Tribune. He had come to New York to study at the Art Students League once he felt he had exhausted the tutorial of a prominent Utah instructor, J. T. Harwood. When his savings and a small inheritance from his grandfather, Brigham Young, ran out, he returned to Salt Lake City to husband his resources for advanced study in France. Before long Young was studying at several noted Paris academies, especially the Aca- demie Julian, where he strengthened his determination to be an illustrator but also found himself leaning toward sculpture and away from color media. Upon his return to the United States in 1905 he set up a studio in New York and began teaching at the Art Students League. Although never one of the ‘‘independents’’ associated with Robert Henri and Greenwich Village bohemians, Young acquainted himself with the Ashcan circle, becoming particularly good friends The Modernization of Suburban Realism 213 with William Glackens. In 1913 Young, a founding member of the Association of American Artists, helped arrange the now famous Ar- mory Show in New York and himself contributed plaster casts of the sculptures for The Seagull Monument recently commissioned by the Mormon church.∑ The centrality of New York City in Young’s entire career did not preclude either his suburban residence or the experimentation with western themes, which would ultimately constitute a quarter of his entire career output.∏ In 1915 he shifted his family from rural Balm- ville, New York (near Newburgh), ‘‘at the end of the trolley line,’’ to Leonia. By that year his reputation rested far more on his remarkable Sea Gull Monument than his fraternity with American modernists. His own artistic temperament continued to prefer Daumier, Millet, and Delacroix to Courbet, Matisse, or Cézanne, each of whom he considered superficially modern. In his sea gull bronzes one sees Young’s lifelong fascination with the role of labor and physical exertion in the creation of both beauty and a commonwealth. In Shaping the Common- wealth particularly, the stark muscularity of men and animals literally reaches out to implicate the viewer in a historic and national enterprise. Young’s 1913 modernism consisted of a reaffirmation of pioneer fortitude and communal solidarity in a historic locale, hardly the stuff usually thought of as components of modern city culture. The unified composition of his artwork, however, masked the disruptive forces of the art world, especially the nagging division between his illustrating aspirations and his artistic values. Young both coveted and deplored the affluence and success of illustrators such as Harvey Dunn, doubly so when he finally settled in Leonia, where Dunn had created the Leonia School of Illustration. His removal to the New Jersey suburb, however, came about as a consequence of his affiliation with New York City’s cultural network rather than Dunn’s school. His old friend and studio companion from Paris days, How- ard McCormick, arranged a meeting at the Salmagundi Club with a Leonia neighbor, Dr. Pliny Goddard of the Museum of Natural His- tory. Goddard explained that the museum was seeking skilled artists to prepare dioramas of Native American culture. The meeting resulted in a commission for both McCormick and Young to execute the artwork, beginning with Hopi Indian lore. By 1915 Young and his family settled in McCormick’s suburb to expedite the collaboration, which eventually included dioramas of the Navajo and Apache Indians.π 214 Suburban Landscapes The commerce of the city contributed centrifugally to both its suburban environs and to public conceptions of the Great West. Upon his arrival in Leonia, Mahonri Young began to experiment with the new distinction between fine art and illustration.∫ It was an odd shift of allegiances and must have contained considerable ambivalence, given Young’s own early aspirations to become an illustrator himself. The principal target of the distinction was Young’s nemesis, Harvey Dunn, but not so much because of Dunn’s artistic skills or motifs but, rather, Young’s suspicions of contract work corrupting the artist’s vision. Dunn’s boldly colored dramatizations certainly shared an affinity for impressionistic painting styles with many of Young’s standard-bearers such as William Glackens and J. Alden Weir, and Dunn’s commitments to a new western realism was certainly seconded by Young himself. If Young’s western landscapes were more studied and reflective whereas Dunn’s were tense and grizzled, the substantial values associated with both artists’ western roots were similar, an unromanticized view of prosaic western routines. In addition, the grand old man of Leonia’s civic life and artistic culture, Peter Newell, was a nationally reputed illustrator and a regular presence in Young’s social life and career. Newell was not only his friend McCormick’s father-in- law but also the subject of one of Young’s finest bronze busts of his Leonia years. What did the subordination of illustration to ‘‘fine art’’ clarify about Young’s particular brand of artistic realism? About the time of his arrival in Leonia, Young completed a remarkable etching of a Hudson River perspective that displayed the distinctive features of his landscapes (see fig. 9.1). The organization of the view is minimally panoramic. In the six textured planes of nature the first three are foremost, a privileging of the foreground and the proximate locale. In the distance, separated by a dark line of woods, is a conventional conception of Hudson river and highlands, below which one can discern a steamboat, a schooner, and a barely distin- guishable river city with a few working smokestacks. But the foreground, nearly two-thirds of the landscape, appears initially to be the representation of a small farm and orchard, on a linear trajectory that clashes rather than blends with the implicitly encompassing Hudson. It is possible at first glance to misconstrue the human figures as literally features of the landscape. Close inspection reveals a woodchopper approached by a woman and child and off in the near center, with legs like tree trunks, a second farmer bent to weed or sow. The preeminent Fig. 9.1. Mahonri Young’s Hudson at Heine Cook’s, 1916. Although it is featured in the title, the Hudson River had become subordinate and background to the caretaking routines of a highland farm. Private collection

values of the landscape are no longer harmony but division of family members, of country and city, of nature contending against itself. One can witness here Young attempting to incorporate into his landscape features of early modernism which were associated increasingly with nonobjective art, particularly the minimalizing of context, reliance on texture and form as expressive agents, and a simplification of realistic detail. Young seemed to be reworking and simplifying familiar constructions of landscape with the avant-garde experimentation of his New York acquaintances such as William Glackens and Robert Henri. The same values of foreground dominance, of discordant landscape, of unromanticized locale valued more than distant perspective, appeared in Young’s western conceptions with equal force. About ten years after his field trips (1912–15) to the Southwest he produced a synthetic etching that drew from literally hundreds of field sketches for New York’s Museum of Natural History dioramas. The result was Walpi in Fig. 9.2. Mahonri Young’s Walpi in Sunlight, ca. 1922. This western scene contains different topography but similar values to Young’s eastern landscapes. Courtesy of Mahonri Sharpe Young

Sunlight (ca.1922 [see fig. 9.2]).Ω Like his Hudson River landscape, here the Walpi adobe, emphasized in the artwork’s title, remains in the background; the prominent natural feature becomes subordinate to the prosaic routines in the foreground and hence elevates their significance. The activity of the Hopi Indians of northeastern Arizona here includes sheepherding, animal skinning, corral tending, and movement such as a walking mother with children and travelers on burro and horse. Adobe houses spot the middle distance, and the far cliffs with adobes that are nearly indistinguishable parts of the mountain are relegated to the upper quarter of the landscape. The hilly foreground and centerpiece corral dominate the lower half of the picture and leave the Hopi following out the essential routines that sustain their life and culture. The overall value concerns the labor of survival in a dry and inhospitable terrain whose harmonies are broken by craggy formations and strange geometrics. The full effect was, like his museum dioramas, to make a distinctive culture comprehensible, to view it on an analogous and unthreatening plane, to insist more broadly on existences that were discontinuous and fragmented.∞≠ Young’s formal training in an academic tradition had grounded The Modernization of Suburban Realism 217 him well in the merits of landscape, and he had not abandoned his lessons in these and other compositions. For all this mastery the landscape of country mattered less to him as a subject than it did to many of his contemporaries. It would matter even less as he concentrated on sculpture. His subordination of illustration as a career, however, did not project him into the growing ranks of the nonobjective, avant- garde artists, with whom he sometimes socialized. Still, there is a reductionism in many of his major sculptural works, an effort to capture the import of a collective moment with a few figures. His 1916 bronze relief for Leonia’s commemoration of Washington’s Retreat from Fort Lee exemplified one of his attractions to sculpture: the concentration on essential physical form and significance of characteristic motion and telling detail (see fig. 4.8). Increasingly as he shaped his reputation as etcher and sculptor, he drew upon his study of Auguste Rodin and the Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier.∞∞ Ultimately, major collections would contain his sport and labor sculptures, while his permanent reputation rested substantially on the public and historical figures he executed for the Mormon church. His masterworks came in the last years of his life with his expansive This Is the Place monument (1947), in Salt Lake City, and his statue of Brigham Young (1950) for the nation’s capital.∞≤ The strains between fine art and illustration clearly went beyond the personalities of artists such as Mahonri Young and Harvey Dunn. Young’s preoccupation with Daumier’s dilemma rested upon deeper tensions, in the stratification of the artist’s world, in a progressively divided national network of art and artists which did not confine itself to any formal city boundaries. Mahonri Young’s own career routines document a strategic hedging of his bets. All the while he worked and socialized in suburban Leonia, he also kept a New York studio, trying to hold together in one career values that increasingly seemed divided. His city workplace was as often cluttered with visiting friends and fellow artists as was his Leonia home. While he worked on particular commissions during the 1920s in Paris and Hollywood, Young kept his studio and often allowed students to work and live there rent free.∞≥ Also, in the 1920s, as former students came east, especially his Utah protégés such as John Held Jr, they put up at Young’s Leonia home.∞∂ Young’s network of artists, like Harvey Dunn’s in the same period, no longer readily accepted the coincidence of art and illustration 218 Suburban Landscapes which had been axiomatic for an earlier generation. Indeed, Young’s reservations had much to do with several of Dunn’s finest students, notably Harry Wickey and Grant Reynard, striking a course away from illustration after their European travels together in 1922.∞∑ The postwar institutions of American culture worked to distinguish fine art from illustration, and artists, such as both Dunn and Young, found means of response by reengaging their past—one through a conscious depiction of his boyhood prairie culture, the other through sculptural commissions of his Mormon forebears and early western explorers. Both men’s careers, of course, would be affected by mass magazines’ use of photography and the declining need for illustrators in the interwar period. Still, artist/illustrators continued their commitments to realism broadly defined, resisted narrow specialization of subject or style, and cultivated public audiences and recognizable themes. In spite of the tensions and divisions of their increasingly professional sphere, such American artists avoided explicitly didactic or overtly political statements in their artwork.∞∏ All were values that the artists’ fellow suburbanites readily endorsed. The interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s imposed new restrictions on the artists’ self-styled ‘‘freedom’’ to follow out the implications of ingenuity and insight. Indeed, the new divisions within the artist’s world injected themselves both into their careers and in some cases into artistic conception as well. For instance, Mahonri Young’s fascination with laborers, especially skilled craftsmen as artistic subjects, nevertheless did not lead him to the ideological causes of the laboring classes in this period. He had, his son has recalled, ‘‘an emotional feeling for and admiration of men who worked with their hands. He liked to quote the Middle Ages: the gates will be closed at sun- down [to all] except for a workman carrying his tools. . . . He was always pro-labor, though it was not political but admiration for the craft and skill of workmen.’’∞π Like his friend Peter Newell, Young undoubtedly identified the practicing artist as a skilled laborer in spite of the inroads of specialization and professionalism. Like so many of his fellow suburban artists, Young’s artwork projected an unromanticized realism of daily life which carried no intimation of social criticism or reformist propaganda. His imposing images comported well with the nonpartisan ideology that his suburban neighbors were finding increasingly troublesome to sustain. The city thus provided both stimulus and variety, but the suburb The Modernization of Suburban Realism 219 provided something else, something basic for the context of the artists’ work, a collective confidence in the value of craft for its own sake. ‘‘There was the general feeling at that time,’’ a later Leonia artist has reflected, ‘‘in that crowd of artists, and I would apply it to the whole milieu here, that a very talented person could do anything. And you know there is a good deal of truth to that in this country . . . they accepted that you could do anything if you just worked at it.’’∞∫ Ma- honri Young remained permanently amazed by his friend Howard McCormick, whose woodcuts, Young judged, were ‘‘as fine as any being done at that time.’’ ‘‘There was,’’ he later observed, ‘‘one pecu- liarity of Mac’s I never found in the same degree in any other artist. He had, all his art life, got jobs and then learned how to do them while he worked on them.’’∞Ω Virtually none of Leonia’s illustrators or artists restricted themselves to a single style, theme, or medium. The mass magazine insistence on continuous innovation compelled most illustrators, even those with distinctive styles, to sustain an adaptive and experimental posture, a readiness to put their own variation on any popular artistic fad.≤≠ In fact, many bristled as commentators and journalists tried to formulate categories to group the artists together in a school or tradition. The term realist came into parlance in the early 1920s only because of the challenge posed by the incoming tradition of abstract expressionism from Europe. But within the tradition of ‘‘American realism’’ there flourished numerous distinctive styles.≤∞ Among suburban artists this realism began to downplay the mystery and power of natural landscape for the routines of unheroic, daily situations, an appreciation for the physical exertion in everyone’s experience, in a style that savored locale neutrally and without intimation of parochialism. There are here parallels between this broadening artistic realism and the emergent suburban structure of American social life. The suburb did not insulate the artists from urban or national currents any more than it insulated other suburban residents. But the artists, like many Leonians up to the Depression years, did not think sharply about the politics of their work—that is, in their case, of creating and marketing their art. ‘‘Yes, they were very much aware of what the others were doing,’’ the Leonia artist David Boyd has explained: ‘‘Of course, they showed their stuff and went on circuit. If it sold, it was nice, recognition is nice and so forth. . . . I don’t think they thought of it as being done . . . they wanted to do something that was a fine piece of 220 Suburban Landscapes work and it was as simple as that. And they were very conscious, in a very real sense individualistic, which was another American thing to do. It wasn’t that anyone told them that this would make it good or that they were following the school. So you had people going off in different directions. A lot of them never came to the surface or were noticed particularly because of this. Particularly as long as they had a way of making a living or getting by doing something else.’’≤≤ There was about these suburban artists a genteel, collective assumption that good work would find its own level. It was in its way a prewar sentiment premised upon a peculiar self-possession, an individualized ex- perimentalism that both required and distanced itself from the body politic.≤≥ Mahonri Young represented but one response to the dilemma of Daumier which he had once pondered—how to sustain one’s artistry within a city that seemed increasingly indifferent—and how to use the suburb as a basic device in remaking their world. The very self- possession and respect for craftsmanship which these artists espoused should suggest that there was more than one model response. J. Ruth- erford Boyd and his wife, Harriet Boyd, represented another variation to the reworking of their skills as illustrators. In their case they tailored artistic skills to New York’s world of mass magazines and commercial advertising. Since their studies together at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, both had worked for the large mass magazines, yet both had actually begun with ambitions for something other than illustration: Rutherford Boyd as a woodcarver like his father and several preceding generations in his paternal line; she as a sculptress, a decided break from the expectations of her banker father and her family’s Walnut Street traditions in Philadelphia. In spite of his poverty and her relative affluence, both cultivated their talents before they came under the tutelage of Thomas Anshutz, the distinguished artist and successor to Thomas Eakins at the Penn- sylvania Academy. Harriet Boyd would subsequently illustrate for the national children’s magazine St. Nicholas, the city newspaper’s fashion section, and some private advertisers. Her husband followed the nor- mal course of peddling his and his wife’s work to magazine editors and advertisers until someone bought it. Then, as his reputation developed, Boyd began to commute from Philadelphia to New York to cultivate his prospects. While working for magazines such as Mc- Clure’s, Success, and Delineator, among others, he also illustrated ad- The Modernization of Suburban Realism 221 vertisements for major manufacturers such as Interwoven Socks and Gorham Silver Company. For a time he attended evening classes on illustration at the Art Students League.≤∂ Finally, in 1909 Boyd ventured into the art offices of Curtis Pub- lishing to show his drawings and get some work. The art director and his staff, however, were preoccupied with a fundamental shift in the format of their magazine—their typefaces, the makeup, the headings and framing. ‘‘He had a lot of energy and a lot of ideas,’’ Boyd’s son recalled. ‘‘He also couldn’t keep quiet, standing on the edge of this discussion. He looked at the magazine, and although he was not very assertive as a person, he said I think it would be a good idea if you would do this and this and this . . . and he started lining out a whole remake of the magazine from one end to the other as far as the visual, the heading and everything else. So I guess to get him out of there they said ‘why don’t you go and put some of this in visual form and come back. Maybe there’s something useful in the ideas you have.’ He had no training or connection with magazines prior to this episode, aside from doing illustrations for them. But he went back and created a dummy magazine; he designed a lettering for them, which he made samples of, a complete alphabet, large and small plus italics, the whole works and things like borders and end pieces which used to be quite elaborate, headings and a logo, etc. He did all this and prepared it all very elaborately and took it back to them and they hired him then and there as Art Director of this magazine. He knew absolutely nothing about the magazine. . . . But anyway the next thing he knew he was working for them. . . . Whenever a good story came through that he liked the idea, he would decide to illustrate it himself. He did a number of things in there, developing a style in pen and ink that was completely realistic.’’≤∑ The magazine that benefited from Boyd’s talent was the Ladies’ Home Journal, and between 1909 and 1915 he served as its art editor. Much of his early work in these years followed from his admiration for Howard Pyle, with whom he once planned to study: intricate decoration and craftsmanlike design. In 1915 Boyd accepted a three-year offer from Squibb and Company to do all their advertising illustration, including their package design, which was an Art Nouveau style.≤∏ Boyd’s versatility and experience well reflects the artist’s career at precisely the moment when city institutions and specialization restructured the nature and practice of art in the United States. 222 Suburban Landscapes During his years with Ladies’ Home Journal Boyd kept a New York studio, which he shared with his friend and fellow artist J. Scott Wil- liams.≤π There he and his wife both worked between commissions on problems of design, creating different furniture forms, experimenting with architectural features and the like, ‘‘not because he was working at that time but because he was full of ideas.’’≤∫ One of their collabora- tions took Boyd into the suburban town of Leonia, where Williams lived with his wife, the illustrator Clara Elsene Peck. Williams said to Boyd: ‘‘Would you like to go down into the meadows? We are having a kind of sketching group down there this afternoon . . . painting. He went down with him. There were about seventeen down there because there were a considerable number of artists around. . . . They were all local people.’’ ‘‘My father,’’ David Boyd emphasized, ‘‘was a little surprised at this.’’≤Ω On his return from the meadows to Wil- liams’s home Boyd noticed an old eighteenth-century Dutch farmhouse, which he would eventually buy and reside in for the rest of his life. Boyd’s career as a commercial artist differed substantially from what might be called his suburban career and his other artwork. In Leonia, for example, he operated under no contract or deadline and experimented with a range of styles from landscape to abstraction. One might well consider his home itself one of his architectural and, indeed, social creations. The Boyd house—known to the family wryly as ‘‘Boydsnest’’—became a central institution for Leonia artists (see fig. 6.6). Its Dutch reconstruction and extended east wing for a studio, plus the outer stone walls with Boyd-designed wood decoration, became not only a delightful workplace but also a showcase home and town resource in Leonia itself. The house often served as a social gathering place for a variety of activities not only for artists but for many of Boyd’s fellow citizens and friends. The couple involved themselves in many of the town organizations, such as the Players’ Guild and other civic enterprises.≥≠ One of the key activities centering on Boyd’s home was a regular series of ‘‘open houses’’ in which Leonia artists acquainted their neighbors with their latest productions. In their ample studios, many of which had once housed horses and carriages, the artists exhibited the complete range of their work, professional and experimental. First, irregularly on Saturday afternoons friends and neighbors would gather to view ‘‘work-in-progress.’’ The afternoons proved to be both sup- The Modernization of Suburban Realism 223 portive and at times profitable for the artists. Their neighbors acquired both an appreciation and gradually a substantial collection of their artistic neighbors’ work in their homes. Many of the values embedded in these works of art helped shape and reinforce the smaller, manageable communities in which they sought to live and raise their families. ‘‘It was a very cohesive group, I think,’’ one witness to the period has observed, ‘‘not just the artists but all these creative people. They were all terribly interested in one another. . . . I am sure we had a lot of eccen- trics, too, and they just fit into this. They were all well respected. . . . I think they enjoyed the town because they could feel comfortable in it and people enjoyed them because they were comfortable.’’≥∞ The suburbanite’s interest in buying original artwork instead of reproductions opened up new opportunities for artists and led to a mutual appreciation among suburban citizens and their artist neighbors. In the 1930s the Leonia Women’s Club further institutionalized the ‘‘artists’ open house’’ tradition and began to sponsor art shows in the Leonia Grammar School. Eventually, an entire week would be devoted annually to view and buy the art as well as meet and socialize with their artist/neighbors and their fellow citizens. The artists’ studios became strategic organizations for the suburban community itself as well as the production of images that made sense to Ameri- can suburbanites. The Women’s Club Annual Exhibit introduced one more voluntary network that centralized in its way the ad hoc studio open houses of previous years. Before long the Leonia Art Show became itself an expression of an expanding suburban culture, a regional event with formal judging, chamber music, nonalcoholic refreshments, and memorable entertainments. In 1936, for example, a front-page headline in the North Jersey Life/Leonia Life advertised that the Leonia Artists’ Exhibition for that year and under the direction of artist Harriet Boyd boasted more than two hundred paintings, watercolors, etchings, and sculptures by resident artists (see fig. 9.3).≥≤ Such organizational networks make it possible to argue that suburbs like Leonia became central sponsoring structures and supporters of representational art in the twentieth century. If they were not sufficient substitutes for the museums that increasingly sacralized nonrepresentational artwork, the suburbs provided public exposure, an economic market, and a source of collective inspiration in ways established museums exercised only for their favored practitioners. Fig. 9.3. Leonia Art Exhibit, ca. 1940. The driving force behind the exhibit—by the 1940s a highly popular, county-wide event—was the Leonia Women’s Club. The exhibit evolved out of the weekend studio tours and became a way for much of Leonia artists’ work to remain in their town, in the homes of their neighbors. Author’s collection. Courtesy of Peg Trapani

Boyd’s remodeled eighteenth-century home, however, had an additional importance beyond that of town showplace and resource; it became itself the object of Boyd’s growing fascination with design as an art subject itself. Not only in the domestic artifacts of his own home but also in the private artwork of the studio he began to work through experiments in purer design. ‘‘There was this Jay Hambidge,’’ David Boyd explained, ‘‘who was an early mover in this Dynamic Symmetry business. He was giving some talks and he [Rutherford Boyd] went to one of those and he was kind of hooked. The early work of everybody there is similar to the kind of elaborate, Pre-Raphaelite decorative borders on pages, and friends of his like Edward Edwards who was also involved in this movement, did the covers for Schirmer Music Publications.’’ ‘‘Now my father worked for years with this design thing,’’ Boyd’s son added, ‘‘without doing a thing with it. I mean he started writing some articles in the late twenties. As far as I know none of his non-objective work, not one thing was sold. And he never made any effort to sell it in his entire life.’’≥≥ The Dynamic Symmetry group, searching for deeper, mathematical principles as the basis of artistic form, made explicit many of the ideas Boyd had been exploring The Modernization of Suburban Realism 225 at least since 1917. After that year, principally on his own, Boyd became Leonia’s first and for many years its only notable abstract artist, an outcome of his peculiar, homegrown turn of his illustrating career rather than any obvious influence from European modernists. The coherence and integrity of Boyd’s art rooted themselves in his design concerns. In terms of context, however, his career has a decided bifurcated quality, one in the city and one in the suburbs (see fig. 9.4). His abstract work had limited outlets, except perhaps in some of the Art Deco work so popular in the 1930s; it sought a new streamlined blend of beauty and utility (see fig. 9.5). In the early 1930s Rutherford Boyd contributed some futuristic automobile designs to Motor Maga- zine. In addition, some of his new artistic ideas began to appear in his public work, after a trip to Europe in the early 1930s, such as the sculptural sundial for the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts (1934–35), which was produced at the behest of astronomer and fellow Leonian J. Ernest Yalden. One might also point to Boyd’s abstract movie Parabola (1938), which premiered at New York University’s School of Architecture in 1938 and about which he lectured widely. In these highly specialized circles his work was sufficiently respected that the German emigré Josef Albers invited Boyd to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Car- olina.≥∂ Yet in the main the artwork Boyd submitted for annual exhibitions in the Art Institute of Chicago and elsewhere followed a traditional objectivist bent.≥∑ What was becoming abundantly clear, however, was that the terms individualist, experimentalist, and realist began to confuse artistic discussion for their reference to both representational and abstract art. The very meaning of the words took on a quality of abstraction. In the face of these changes some artists of the interwar period, including Thomas Hart Benton and Ben Shahn, developed styles that tried to reconcile the tensions of objective and nonobjective art. Many of them, however, such as Rutherford Boyd, simply divided their lives, like suburban commuters, into the public and private spheres. Suburban art colonies of the interwar period remained sharply cognizant of the coercive force of fine art and its disparaging impact on illustrators and their careers. Yet, in practice, artists in the suburbs ignored such distinctions and continued to be receptive to a wide range of format and styles. The increasing proclivity of established city Fig. 9.4. J. Rutherford Boyd’s Parabolas Descending, 1934– 36. Boyd’s woodwork represents an artistic divergence from his professional advertising work, an experiment in the affinities of mathematical rationality and aesthetic conception. Courtesy of David Boyd

museums for nonobjective art seemed to spawn in the suburbs numerous styles and responses for a range of other public venues. More and more artists seemed intent on finding a special medium and place in which their particular style would be distinctive and their format a specialty. While many in their spare time worked as ‘‘generalists,’’ their public styles, like so much else in the period, increasingly favored specialization, such as sculpture.≥∏ Other artists gravitated out of mass magazine illustration due to the inroads of the camera. Instead, they moved into art that was more public still, such as wall murals in post offices and other public spaces, or more decorative, such as stained glass, or into specialty spheres such as portraiture, advertising, or cartoons.≥π In 1938–39 the versatile Keith Williams and his Leonia-born Fig. 9.5. J. Rutherford Boyd’s Whirling Diamonds, 1948. One can see here the influence of the artist’s fascination with mathematics and design. Taking the measure of forms thought to be inherently incompatible—squares and curves—Boyd turned conundrums into playful and intriguing patterns. Courtesy of David Boyd wife, Ruth Moore, both distinguished students of Charles Chapman, completed a six-panel mural commission for the New York Historical Society. One of their six large panels on the state’s colonial past, all executed in the Leonia studio of their mentor, reconstructs the end of Dutch control in New York, while another provided the image for a U.S. postage stamp of Washington taking his oath as president. For several murals Williams used J. Rutherford Boyd as a model.≥∫ John 228 Suburban Landscapes Bentz, himself a student of Kenyon Cox and William Merritt Chase, became both a portrait miniaturist and painting restorer, working for many organizations but most notably for the National Academy of Design.≥Ω Ralph Fuller, one of the mainstays of the Leonia artist colony during the interwar years, was the creator of the highly successful, nationally syndicated comic strip, Oaky Doaks. Privately, he continued to practice his landscape skills in watercolor and other media.∂≠ Indeed, many who were known for one style would still on occasion try another or over an entire career experienced stages of success in one artistic medium before moving on to another. To cite one further example, David Boyd, Rutherford Boyd’s son, spent part of his career in advertising illustration before a highly productive period as portrait artist. At the end of that stage he found himself intrigued with wood- carving and skills that his father and family forebears had cultivated for generations (see figs. 9.6 and 9.7).∂∞ By the end of the interwar period the different career structures of the Leonia artists reflected more the realities of the city-oriented art world than their own proclivities. Yet in suburbia they sustained the high standard of their artwork through artistic collegiality, through their suburban studio exhibits,∂≤ and, indeed, through studio teaching. Frank Street followed the well-established tradition he inherited from Harvey Dunn and opened the Frank Street School of Illustration in Leonia. During the 1930s Street and Howard McCormick repeated the precedent established by Charles Chapman and held periodic ‘‘appreciation’’ classes. For many years they used a studio in the old Dutch Vreeland house on Lakeview Avenue. They charged one dollar per lesson and often filled their classes with members of the Leonia Women’s Club.∂≥ Just as informally but with greater regularity, artists would hire a model and invite fellow artists and citizens to an evening of sketching or practice. Henry Lankenau, who spent a career in New York’s advertising market, felt the special advantage of the artists as a suburban resource: ‘‘There was a sculptor by the name of Hammergren. He lived on Christie Street and every Thursday night they had a life class. At that time 50 cents [covered the fee for the model] and you would pay for the marble. A lot of the principal artists in town came in and when the model rested from the pose, everybody would walk around and see what everybody was doing, naturally. I was working with charcoal in anatomy. And I would get people like Charles Chapman standing Fig. 9.6. David Boyd’s oil portrait of J. Rutherford Boyd, n.d. J. Rutherford Boyd, one of the central figures of the Leonia artist community, divided his ingenuity between inventive design for mass magazines and commercial advertisers in New York City and, in Leonia, subjective experimentation, especially in abstract art which owed little to European influences. Courtesy of David Boyd behind me and Harriet Boyd . . . they would never bother you . . . they would never say a word unless you turned around and said, ‘Mr. Chap- man, would you please make a suggestion?’ He’d say, ‘Let me see your charcoal.’ He’d talk and in five minutes . . . as far as anatomy was concerned, he was great.’’ Lankenau noted that Grant Reynard and Enos Comstock also regularly attended such sessions, and he credited these evenings as equal to his concomitant instruction at the Art Students League and the Cooper Union.∂∂ During the Depression a younger generation of artists began to transform the tradition of realism practiced by Leonia’s art colony. Themes of country life, already abbreviated by artists such as Young and Boyd, seemed too tame for the social and economic dislocations of the Depression years. The younger artists’ world demanded a more Fig. 9.7. Fred Cicetti’s portrait of David Boyd and wood sculpture, 1987. Boyd shaped a career upon advertising and portraiture. In retirement, however, his artistic bent gravitated to a familial tradition of wood carvings. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

explicit engagement with the issues of social justice and the symbols of political activism than most of the artwork that had preceded them.∂∑ If not all suburban artists were as politically explicit, artists such as Lynd Ward illuminated in his 1930s work and afterward the realist transformation perpetrated by the Depression.∂∏ Even though he remained within the objective tradition, Ward resisted its older political neutrality. He consciously opposed the social values of commercial capitalism, which had resulted in the Depression and rejuvenated one of the oldest artistic media, book illustration, and raised it to a higher art.∂π His extraordinary woodcut novels expressed graphically many of the issues and problems with which most of his fellow artists were grappling: how to adapt or salvage his hard-won realist craft in a society whose arbiters seemed progressively indifferent to them.∂∫ Lynd Ward had developed his critical orientation in his native Chicago. He operated out of a viewpoint that took the existence of the big city for granted rather than discovering it in his migration from the midwestern heartland, as had many of his predecessors. He had a The Modernization of Suburban Realism 231 great deal more formal training in school and university than his predecessors and, after graduating from Columbia Teachers College, went directly—that is, much earlier than they—to Europe. There he went to Germany and did not fall under the influence of French artistic standards. In Leipzig at the Staatliche Akademie fuer Graph- ische Kunst he studied the entire range of skills in the three basic media: etching, lithography, and woodcut. He gravitated quickly to the woodcut and the more demanding techniques of wood engraving.∂Ω He chaffed against the subdivision of work which much artistry had come to experience. His exposure to Hogarth, Daumier, Goya, and others convinced him of a basic principle of resistance: there were art traditions that did not fit neatly into the ‘‘circles of the elect,’’ and ‘‘there was a long line of artists to whom subject matter was important, to whom the ‘what’ was just as important as the ‘how.’ ’’∑≠ Ward became fascinated with artistic traditions in which a single artist produced the whole work rather than merely illustrating someone else’s narrative. He was especially struck by the European tradition of pictorial narrative, largely foreign to Americans, in spite of the popularity of comic strips and advertising. Through the examples of Belgian artist Frans Masereel and the German artist Otto Nuckel, Ward conceived the possibility of producing pictorial narratives for an American audience.∑∞ In such an enterprise the wood engraver did not simply append visual images to someone else’s story. The artist created, designed, and executed the entire narrative, and the test of public engagement would be an audience who would ‘‘read’’ a story without words. This innovation required another, a premise at the heart of modern art: ‘‘there is the further demand that a single image must convey not only what it literally is but must also give some understanding of what, by virtue of the associations and meanings the cultural matrix has given it, it symbolizes. It is to this duality of meaning that the best of pictorial narrative aspires. It must communicate on both levels.’’∑≤ This complex but holistic approach to creativity was a conscious reaction to many of the commercial influences upon American art. Ward combined this methodological resolve with his equally conscious ideological assessment of social realities and of the artist’s relation to them. Ward’s first pictorial narrative, God’s Man (1929), made explicit his rather bleak expectations about what might be done by artists and workers in general to remedy the exploitative course of 232 Suburban Landscapes American industrial capitalism (see figs. 9.8 and 9.9). His first ‘‘novel without words’’ explored the plight of the artist and the corrupting commodification of artwork. His images, like the depiction of the police suppressing protesting workers in Wild Pilgrimage (1932), however, demonstrated his remarkable integration of modern innovations in the European mode with an older American tradition of representational art. The powerful and explicit political message of his woodcuts made abundantly clear how far Ward had gone beyond his realist predecessors. There was no question that the older realist depictions of integrated landscapes were for Ward’s artistry at best background scenery with little influence on immediate or subsequent events. Ward’s works not only abandoned political neutrality toward his subject matter but also explored the full tragic impact of the Depres- sion on family and personal relationships. One could not miss his belief that the United States had reached a historic turning point. During the 1930s, he explained later, ‘‘there were some who sought a way out for themselves alone. There were those who fled the urban and industrial wastes and sought a hermit’s refuge in whatever place there was a hint of sanctuary. There were others who, seeing so much hunger and so little work close at hand, roamed aimlessly across the land, hoping that in some far-off place they would find at least some work and less hunger.’’ Then he offered a final category, which made his own assumptions explicit: ‘‘And there were those who, equally disenchanted felt that, while flight might provide an answer for a few, for the many there was no choice but to stay, and that by confronting one problem at a time, dealing first with the closest to hand, a day might come that would be better.’’∑≥ Like many of his fellow artists, including Benton and Shahn, Ward turned his talents toward a critical reexamination of the nation’s economic arrangements and questioned how much of an older, established tradition could endure. In spite of the web of capitalist difficulties, Ward’s art quietly projected a confidence in the merits of a search for democratic rebirth. After the Depression Ward channeled his social and aesthetic ideology into the Society of American Graphic Artists and the reform of the National Academy of Design, to which he was elected in 1958.∑∂ In the course of a long and productive career he worked in many styles and media, particularly with his wife, May McNeer, who wrote more than three dozen children’s books, many of which her husband illustrated.∑∑ In addition, Ward illustrated over two hundred books, Fig. 9.8. Lynd Ward’s Art Auction, from God’s Man, 1929. In the first of Ward’s powerful ‘‘stories without words’’ this woodcut captured the fears about crass commercialism and city exploitation which worried the interwar generation of artists. Courtesy of Robin Ward Savage and Nanda Ward

many of them of extraordinary quality for the Limited Editions Club. The advantage for Ward in this latter enterprise was an immersion in the classic texts of Western and American culture, a fortuitous response in its way to the implicit questions of the Depression years: How much of America’s original democratic promise could be sal- Fig. 9.9. Lynd Ward’s The Artist in a Family Landscape, from God’s Man, 1929. Ward’s antidote to urban capitalism was the intense and supportive com- panionship of family life, a conﬁrmation of the implicit argument of American suburbanites. Courtesy of Robin Ward Savage and Nanda Ward vaged from the Depression? What changes in American social arrangements must be made to forestall any recurrence? What sort of resistance could art and culture make to the most dehumanizing aspects of American capitalism? Such reexaminations were not the special prerogative of suburban artists, nor did a critical assessment of American capitalism become a special historical characteristic of suburbanites. Yet the artists who resided in suburbs did provide one of the most graphic examples of suburban activism. First and foremost, the suburbs were not immune The Modernization of Suburban Realism 235 from the forces of dislocation and cohesion which also affected the cities. They were attuned and, indeed, were historically distinguished by interaction and interdependence with the city. If those relationships became during the interwar period more hierarchical, more specialized, more professional, the characteristic feature of suburbanites was neither ‘‘escape’’ from the city nor a ‘‘homogeneity’’ of their values. The artists, like their suburban neighbors, held a different set of priorities about domestic space, about the design of their social relationships, about the value of an uncommercialized natural environment. Their images, however, were not those assigned by urban critics but, rather, visual constructions that reached for themes in country and city viewers alike. Like Daumier, they drew upon their artistry and their world to interject at least a portion of their insights into their public images and contracted designs. Ironically, their very effort to ‘‘normalize’’ the role of the artist gave to their suburb one of its most distinctive traditions, its ‘‘artistic culture.’’∑∏ As the force of the original Dutch tradition of the English Neighborhood waned and the turn- of-the-century country motifs were found wanting, Leonians found another, equally vibrant image and tradition in the artistic or cultural character of their suburban landscape. chapter 10 Recovering Suburban Memory

n politics and culture suburban life in the 1930s experienced a Ifundamental change. Voluntary organizations, which had channeled so much of suburban socialization earlier, now appeared to be incapable of maintaining older proprieties of social harmony. Political divisions, if unchecked, appeared destined to disrupt the process of natural growth and nonpolitical maturation which had made suburbs so attractive. Politics had shifted away from a genteel, ritual transition of voluntary stewardship from one citizen to another. Instead of continuity, the formal process of government seemed to tolerate and foster more acrimonious debate and electoral contention. The inroads of modern technology, an ethnically diverse citizenry, often with urban lifestyles, made the image of suburbs as country towns more difficult for suburbanites to sustain, even to themselves. The Depression of the 1930s only exacerbated dynamics that had begun well before the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Both the organization and iconography of suburbia in the 1930s had become acutely problematic. In retrospect, Leonians seemed very sensitive during the 1940s and 1950s that they could accept the new politics or that they could strive to recover and upgrade an older, remembered civility. The emergence of Leonia’s Civic Conference provided a graphic example of the conundrum. The new organization became at once a reaffirmation of an older voluntary tradition and an adaptation to the political realities of ethnic diversity and democratic expertise. Par- ticularly the suburb’s commuting professionals introduced a significant new dimension, which was well exemplified by the town’s suburban artists. Their adaptations to new technical, extra-suburban demands made an older sense of Leonia as a country place appear to be out- moded. In this way suburban divisions paralleled those of the city, but Recovering Suburban Memory 237 the suburban response benefited not only by its manageable size but also by its cultural inheritance. The dislocations of new political, occupational, and ethnic patterns registered themselves in citizens’ careers no less than in their community’s organizations. Again, the plight of Leonia’s artists exemplified a point that went beyond their art. The rise of new technologies for printing camera work substantially undermined an older, privileged role for the mass magazine illustrator. Individuals trained for such craftsmanship found themselves using older skills in combination with newer images and commissions. In portraiture, book illustration, public murals and sculpture, advertising, and teaching, illustrator/artists refashioned their images and their skills to the demands of the modern marketplace. Both voluntarism in suburban social relations and images of country life in expressions of Leonia’s social values no longer carried the persuasive power they had before World War I and the Great Depression. Such divisions compelled a rethinking of the meaning of suburbia, just as the Depression drove all considerations of American life in general. In part the political and cultural history of Leonia illuminated important aspects of the process by which suburbanites reformulated their setting in the interwar period. In many respects this process did not entirely reject the voluntary organization and inclusive country images that suburbanites so carefully constructed at the turn of the century. Many Leonians still sought to view the Civic Conference as one more expression of their long-standing voluntary tradition, in spite of the fact that the new organization contained structural and selective features unknown to earlier voluntary associations. Country landscapes from the Leonia Art Colony still appeared in the art exhibits of the town and the city, however much their conceptions of country had changed and had become subordinate to other visual priorities. Exactly how did this reformation of voluntary organization and country images illuminate the place and conception of suburbia in mid-twentieth-century America? The Depression years raised impediments that earlier suburbanites had not faced. For instance, even sympathetic commentators ritually polarized suburban development within the convention of city and suburb. It was difficult any longer to think of the suburbs as relatively autonomous yet adaptive country towns on the city periphery. The daily commuter experience might well have reminded some 238 Suburban Landscapes that city and suburbs continued to be interdependent rather than separate entities. One longtime resident recalled a major interactive feature that shopping excursions caused: ‘‘Macy’s was a big shopping thing. When my mother would go by herself, she would go all day long. The next day a big red Macy’s truck [came to make a delivery]— and the driver knew everyone in town, he knew all their names.’’∞ Commutation by car, bus, and train also meant that many in the urban workforce accommodated differently the division of home and work. It was then difficult to explain how city and suburb, so interwoven in their daily routines, could become so polarized conceptually. For anyone attempting to assess the suburban experience the question became: Had suburbia become an atavism or a forecast for American society and culture? In 1931 a Broadway play, The House Beautiful, took up the problem of suburbanization and purported to examine its essential worth. The central conflict addressed two views of suburban communities, one by rooted residents who defend the suburb idealistically, another by exploitative outsiders who gain the material main chance. Pro- fessional reaction to the play seemed to exemplify the same issue that the drama sought to explore, namely, how might one understand twentieth-century suburbia. New York critics panned the drama as ‘‘sentimental.’’ While they waffled over its quality, however, they conceded that the drama had its moments. One disparaging reviewer observed that half the audience ‘‘called it trite and BoyScoutish; the other remained after the curtain call drying their eyes. The latter were the pleasanter looking people.’’≤ Most newspapers admitted that the play managed to ‘‘give you the flavor of neighborhood life in a small community.’’≥ The urbanites’ ambivalence measured how distanced their views had become from those of their suburban counterparts, and their difficulty in making definitive judgments about the play documented the increasingly problematic nature of suburban culture. The drama was particularly important for raising the issue of suburban change to the level of a broad-based cultural problem, but it also had a particular significance for Leonia’s actual political turmoil over zoning, partisan politics, and urban-suburban polarization, since the suburb served as the specific inspiration for the drama. The playwright of The House Beautiful was Channing Pollock, brother of Leonia’s influential mayor, John Pollock, and the central theme of his play was the motivation behind a restrictive zoning law passed to preserve Recovering Suburban Memory 239 residential values.∂ Any Leonian in the theater would have had little trouble recalling that John Pollack sponsored the first zoning law in 1921 and sparked the intense politicization of the late 1920s over zoning issues. Leonians also would have little difficulty identifying the actual equivalents of the stage characters. Moreover, any suburbanite would have, as the play’s reviewers admitted, little trouble identifying with the essential features of the drama. It was no small irony that a New York Broadway theatrical offered one of the clearest commen- taries on the growing cultural divide between modern suburbia and commercialized city life. The House Beautiful focused on an unheroic common man, Archie Davis, defending ‘‘life that is beautiful and grand and romantic’’ in his home town. The major dramatic strategy of the playwright was to intermix concrete suburban dilemmas with mythical images and dream sequences of medieval valor. Archie Davis becomes ‘‘Sir Archi- bald’’—‘‘Sir Galahad in New Jersey,’’ as one wit quipped—victorious in contests with Black Knights representing the crass profit-oriented materialism of the ‘‘outside world.’’ The play developed in three chro- nological stages, each act revolving about a turn-of-the century suburban home, a ‘‘Dutch cottage,’’ in West Hills, New Jersey. The first scene introduces the characters as ‘‘quite commonplace young people.’’ Archie Davis is an accountant with a wife, Jennifer, a mutually devoted couple. She insists throughout the drama on the ‘‘romance’’ and ‘‘entertainment’’ of home life, a continual affirmation of expansive perspectives possible within a small locale. By contrast, their realtor and shortly their neighbor, Elmer Baxter, boasts of progress, business development, and houses with a view. His wife, flashy and scatterbrained, is the counterpoint to Jennifer; she favors night life in the city, theater, restaurants, and European travel. Guy Stayton appears as the play’s protagonist and a business entrepreneur, good- looking and ‘‘with a sharp eye to the main chance.’’ The suburbs interest him exclusively as an investment, and he remains permanently baffled at the Davises’ celebration of the suburban domestic esprit: tables, sideboard, wicker things, and homemade bookcases, ‘‘all wonderfully cheap and comfortable and charming.’’ Several other minor characters were clearly modeled on individual Leonians: Dr. Brink, the ‘‘gentle kindly country physician’’; Sam Dreyer, the editor of the local, ‘‘anarchist newspaper,’’ ‘‘a lean, keen young Jew,’’∑ whom the playwright modeled on the actual newspaper editor and socialist, 240 Suburban Landscapes Martha Rado. Rado makes a second appearance as ‘‘Martha Wiley,’’ a confirmed Davis supporter. The House Beautiful presented the transformation of a suburban community as a threat to basic values of sensible comfort and quiet civility. Profitability and rapid development would produce, instead, opportunistic, economic practice, indifference to ‘‘progress’’’s impact upon existing arrangements and superficial sophistication. All issues are essentially personalized, and at no point in the play did political party allegiances of its characters have any bearing. The play begins at the turn of the century with problems of financing home construction which evolved into a debate over speculation (Stayton and Baxter) versus a basic investment of self (the Davises). Archie Davis attempts to achieve both, but incidents continually intrude to sap his savings, compelling him to attend to things that money can’t buy, ‘‘the trick of doing much with little.’’ In later episodes, after listening to the Bax- ters’ account of their vacations to London and Paris, Davis insists that he and his wife travel extensively every evening by getting out maps and reading about other places. His wife concludes the first act defending the ‘‘trumpets [that] sound throughout the world’’ which nobody sees or hears. Regularly, the Davises’ views are characterized by others as ‘‘old-fashioned’’ or ‘‘out-of-date principles.’’∏ In the mind of the playwright the suburb of the 1930s had clearly become an entity more divorced from than integrated with the city yet struggling to acknowledge and adapt to the forces of modernization. Equally important, playwright as well as reviewers could be found groping for language to determine suburbia’s essential contribution to American life, either as reactionary backwater or stabilizing mainstream. The heart of the second act, set more than a decade later, was a town election. Archie has run for town mayor on a ‘‘West Hills for Homes’’ platform and has promised to respect the zoning law that protects residences. Archie’s platform is opposed by Guy Stayton, who bristled at a town that would not let him build anything under ten thousand dollars.π Nevertheless, he has begun to persuade the town to build cheaper, $6,000 houses and (reversing the actual history) to convince the editor of the anarchist newspaper of the merits of increasing both the population and his circulation. Stayton sorely tempts Davis with the lucrative position of sole agent of his suburban subdivision. He argued that people wanted radios rather than roses. But Archie resists, wins the election by nine votes, and makes a speech about Recovering Suburban Memory 241 living and dying in and for the homes they have built to protect them from ‘‘something noisy and vulgar and new’’ in the world of the twentieth century. If Archie’s peculiar heroism gravitated toward quixotic defensiveness of the ‘‘house beautiful,’’ his community nevertheless purportedly engaged its twentieth-century rite of passage with orderly grace and a heightened consciousness of its suburban distinctiveness. The final act opened much later, in 1928, with individuals returning from the cemetery after Archie’s funeral. The playwright thus explored the meaning and legacy of Archie’s defense. He was, one character muses, ‘‘a nice little fellow who wasn’t practical’’; it was a cold cemetery and a cold church, the commentator continues, but who were all those people? Successive scenes depict Archie’s former friends advising Archie’s son, now a realtor himself, to abandon his father’s vision. Ultimately, the son replies by buying out Stayton and investors who refuse to see that there ‘‘were people who’d like gardens—white collar men who couldn’t afford twenty-thousand dollar houses and weren’t going to be satisfied with packing crates.’’ ‘‘This development,’’ Archie’s son claims, ‘‘is the talk of the real estate world,’’ sustaining the distinct hope that profits and principles were not unalterably opposed. For both his son and his wife Archie becomes somehow more real in memory. ‘‘What’s real?’’ Jennifer asks. ‘‘Are the things we feel, and sense, less real than the things we see or touch? . . . Is what’s in your heart less substantial because it never grows old there; never dies, never changes?’’ After a recapitulation of remembrances the play concludes with a mystical rejoining of Jennifer and Archie Davis. The locality of West Hills, New Jersey, the playwright implies, has tran- scended its specific geographic space and has enlarged itself by resistance to the venal commercialism of the city. The drama, which transposed important features of Leonia’s actual history, nevertheless, held to the broad lines of its interwar experience and implicitly to that of suburbia generally: the suburb laid special claim to a spiritual and cultural measure of domestic and social civility. In part the New York drama critics caught a portion of this suburban esprit, if only in reporting the audience’s enthusiastic reaction. Few critics captured the melodramatic quality of the play as sharply as Dorothy Parker. The House Beautiful, she reportedly quipped, is the ‘‘Play Lousy.’’∫ Like so many of Channing Pollock’s other plays, however, his dramas often did better on circuit in smaller towns than in 242 Suburban Landscapes the large cities.Ω City critics notwithstanding, Pollock captured in his dramas a subtler, conceptual problem: the misconceptions that an urbane commentator like Parker had with the suburban landscape. Pollock’s implicit riposte to Parker comes with his own urbane female from The House Beautiful. In reply to whether she is happy late in life, Nina Baxter quips: ‘‘Yes; thrill, kick, excitement! a mile a minute and to hell with the scenery! Clothes, bridge, cocktails and the New Yorker! That’s—if you haven’t anything else. . . . Love and loyalty— damn funny till you’ve lost them.’’∞≠ It was, particularly in the early days of the Depression, lines such as these which struck such a familiar chord in suburban audiences and prevented urbane critics, excepting Dorothy Parker, from dismissing the play’s import entirely. If awkwardly integrated into the drama, the striking feature of The House Beautiful was its effort to give commonplace lives a heroic and historical resonance. Little distinguishes Archie, the play notes explain, except his love for Jennifer and his straw hat. ‘‘There are,’’ Pollock insisted, ‘‘dozens of him in every office.’’ Yet Archie’s heroic fantasies were not rootless illusions but, rather, were clearly meant to connect the local dynamics of a small suburb to far more significant concerns. It was also an effort to give dramatic form to values that were essentially undramatic, to ‘‘eternal verities,’’ as Pollock claimed, which defied easy conceptualization. The playwright directed that act 1 end with Victor Herbert’s march from Babes in Toyland, and act 2 was to conclude with Edward MacDowell’s ‘‘Woodland Sketches.’’ Both musical works explored the possibilities of blending popular lyri- cal melodies with classical harmony and substance. Similarly, Pollock drew from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress for the title of his play: ‘‘And behold there was a very stately palace before him, the name of which was Beautiful; and it stood by the highway side.’’∞∞ The suburb, the drama implied, served as a bridge for ordinary lives to aspire to something more spiritual and lasting. Pollock’s drama made clear how intensely suburbanites clung to an idealized brand of neighborliness, how intensely they felt their locale was bound up with the larger world outside their geographical limits, and how determined they were to connect these old-fashioned notions to modern mores. But, perhaps most of all, The House Beautiful transformed itself with a peculiar realism that never lost sight of its original commitments. The play depicted an idealized suburban community attempting to come to terms with its own memory. The third Recovering Suburban Memory 243 act centers on Archie and Jen’s son, Dick, and the ongoing tempta- tions for quick profits in realty, ultimately thwarted by his father’s example via flashbacks and his mother’s romantic invocation of literary and musical ideals. The New York critics’ facile characterization of the play as sentimental accurately responded to the awkward association of Archie’s suburban values with analogies to medieval hero- ics. Yet the criticism of sentiment too quickly dismissed the force of memory which underlay the attraction to modern suburbia.∞≤ In some respects Channing Pollock’s dramatic insistence on memory in his depiction of suburbanization identified one of the important components of suburbia’s twentieth-century modernization, the elements of continuity and stability in daily communal routines. Channing Pollock, of course, had written a drama rather than a social history of his brother’s suburban community. The play’s community acknowledged a thin Dutch inheritance—the Dutch cottage design of the West Hills suburban homes served as the play’s central stage prop—but none of the particular Dutch heritage of the actual English Neighborhood. The play’s invocation of a medieval heritage masked the particular historical features of John Pollock’s Leonia. Still, the dramatist’s recognition of memory—inherited images of cozy Dutch housing, familial example, classic learning—as a steadying component in capitalist development actually identified an important feature of suburbanization in the Depression years. Out of the town’s collective memory and the metaphors from its actual past would come the strategic images for conveying the social worth of suburban culture. Both images of a Dutch and Revolutionary heritage or older medieval heroes had one feature in common: they imposed an imagined harmonious tradition upon the actual cultural diversity of the suburbs. The Davises’ memories of social coherence and long-standing principle drove the plot of The House Beautiful, and their historical memory has conjured up a ‘‘commonplace’’ community of primarily native-born, white, middle-class citizens, much like themselves. The literal conflict was essentially economic rather than social, educational rather than political: Archie Davis’s mayoral campaign set out to convince his neighbors that cheap housing and apartments undermined the deeper worth of their Dutch cottage community. Archie’s experience did capture the relatively new and politically contentious role of interwar suburban election campaigns. Similarly, the play projected an ideal suburban niche somewhere between affluence and 244 Suburban Landscapes mere subsistence. Pollock offered no intimation, however, that the immigrant presence or non-Republican political values in real-life Leonia had in any way influenced the equation. The real communal fear in the drama seemed to be neither ethnic or racial incursions but, rather, a loss of suburban associations—the ambiance of nature, companionable routines, crafted housing and appointments, productive work, and voluntary community development. To make these points the playwright necessarily simplified not only images of the city but also the actual complex heritage of suburbia. The protagonist, Guy Stayton, is an unsympathetic outsider rather than the actual Leonia protagonist, Harry Moore, a descendant of eighteenth-century English Neighborhood settlers. In fact, the playwright’s brother, John Pollock, was the actual outsider, the son of Austrian immigrants, a late arrival in Leonia only a few years before his election as mayor. The role of editor appeared not only as male but as anarchistic and Jewish, a conscious (and distorted) effort to signal a lone, alien presence. The activist role of the real editor, Martha Rado, became the merely supportive voice of a perceived status quo. The drama, in other words, foreshortened, transposed, and simplified the actual community history with artistic license, but it nevertheless underscored the political and cultural force of remembered tradition in reconfiguring the resonant country and cultural icons of residential communities. Curiously, the suburban professionals who came to suburbia during or shortly after World War I seemed to take this residual memory to heart more than the longtime residents for whom the community’s history was family lore. In their effort to establish a cultural as well as a geographical locus for suburbia, they began in the 1920s and 1930s to research and reconstruct the history of their town. Their work was not entirely academic, since articles on the community’s history began appearing in the local and county newspapers from the 1920s onward.∞≥ But in the 1930s the newcomers, for whom the actual history was not family lore, raised the consciousness of Leonia’s history to a new community-wide level. Historical information became popular- ized through the naming of streets with deep, local associations; Leo- nians ritualized and disseminated the history of their community via town pageants, historical tableaux, and holiday orations. Eventually, in 1944 they synthesized the histories of the interwar period into an official town history, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the town’s Recovering Suburban Memory 245 formation as a borough. One should also add that the production of resident artists often drew inspiration from these activities, and, even when their art did not explicitly depict familiar local landscapes, the values embedded in their work contributed to this collective work of social reimagination. Most of all, the research into the town’s past became the occasion for reconstructing a new collective memory to respond to the vicissitudes of twentieth-century suburban life.∞∂ The 1944 town history Leonia Semi-Centennial represented as selective and time bound a view of suburbia as Channing Pollock’s Broadway drama. For all their differences both the drama and the documented history agreed that deeper values than politics shaped a community, and both produced evolutionary schemas that made older values transform present-day policies. The result was the invention of a suburban past compatible with both its traditional and modern aspirations, one that did not seem impossibly conflicted or dualistic. The actual icons, reorganized by the Leonians’ own collective memory, were not the medieval touchstones of Pollock’s drama but, rather, represented roughly analogous emblems within the particular history of the town. The cover map, drawn by artist Robert Cameron, set nine social structures in a singularly woodsy landscape: seven churches, two schools, and the train station. Iconically, the religious and cultural priorities of the community were not out of touch with the larger world. In addition, the Dutch and Revolutionary images that were re- discovered and reinterpreted during the turmoil of the 1930s illuminated the new conceptual features of the older American suburbs from the Depression years to the present. On Independence Day 1941 A. W. Hixson, a Leonia resident and Columbia University professor, inaugurated a public campaign that he had been constructing over a decade, a campaign to enable ‘‘Leonia to take advantage of its past.’’∞∑ He was particularly well positioned for such an enterprise, since he had served as the chairman of the Leonia Planning Board from its formal creation in 1927.∞∏ Hixson’s vision of his community’s past was not based on grand mythological associations but, rather, on research that he and others conducted on the town’s history. He received the steady support of the local newspaper for ‘‘restoring the original names of Grand Avenue and Central Avenues. For hundreds of years these important thoroughfares were known as the English Neighborhood Road and Fort Lee Road respectively.’’∞π Similarly endorsed was the 246 Suburban Landscapes naming of town streets after distinguished colonialists such as New Jersey governor (1674–75) John Berry, who reportedly had ties to the English Neighborhood area. Although no ‘‘Berry Street’’ materialized, a street was named for the Lenape chieftain, Oratam. Hixson’s campaign extended itself into a series of articles on old Leonia by several citizens and the construction of historical murals for the public school, and it culminated in the 1944 semicentennial celebration and pamphlet history of the town.∞∫ This systematic recapitulation of the town’s past and its promotion in pageants, public ceremonies, and street names made sense to many Leonians because it occurred at a particular moment in the history of the town. The events of the late 1920s and 1930s had incontestably politicized the town in ways that many people felt vio- lated the essence of a remembered suburban life of civility. Indeed, the creation of the Civic Conference had directly responded to the dilemma of democratizing community life without resort to divisive politicization. But the conference represented a town response to divisions that went far beyond the boundaries of Leonia. Many of the town’s artists had experienced professional dislocations and changes like their fellow suburbanites, and their response to the disruptive forces of urban capitalism reflected both a personal and social experience. Their effort to reengage themes from their own historical roots represented an analogous effort to that made by fellow citizens to shape new perspectives for the present out of local history. In its way Hixson’s local history campaign represented a response not simply to the threat of open political conflict in a specific suburban town but, even more, to anxieties about the fate of the American community itself. But was this discovery of the past merely impractical nostalgia or, as Pollock’s ‘‘chivalric heroes’’ insisted, part of a modern miracle play?∞Ω The 1930s contributed several contextual features to these re- engagements with a historical past. First, the dislocations of the De- pression years themselves affected suburbs and cities alike. Leonians recognized the destructive force of unemployment in the lives of their friends and neighbors but nevertheless resisted the multiplying New Deal programs, especially the formal acceptance of welfare funds for the unemployed.≤≠ The town’s sense of self-help and routine neighborliness, rooted in its country town image, seemed abrogated by Works Progress Administration interventions. Was the town no longer Recovering Suburban Memory 247 willing or able to help dislocated fellow citizens? What happened to the community’s purported autonomy if, as it did eventually, it took federal money to employ its citizens in expanding the high school or in constructing a stadium grandstand? Second, the increasingly divisive political situation of the Depression years added to the sense of an eroding, organic community that many citizens had valued. ‘‘It took quite a while,’’ one eyewitness testified about the interwar years, ‘‘for some of them [newcomers from New York and Jersey City] to become Leonians.’’≤∞ Third, the explicit sense of a new communal process, evidenced by the creation of the Civic Conference, required a more graphic image than the country town touchstone so widely employed up to and into the Depression years.≤≤ New external government interventions, an increased influx of urbanized neighbors, and the ending of their old rural culture, not to mention the dislocating force of the Depression, invited critical charges of sentimentality and impractical- ity when suburbanites nevertheless claimed to live in a face-to-face community of neighborly residents. Like many of his neighbors during the interwar years, Arthur W. Hixson was an outsider, a native neither of Leonia nor of New Jersey. After study at Columbia University, from which he received both his bachelor’s degree (1915) and his doctorate (1919), he joined the Co- lumbia faculty in chemical engineering. His professional career had little to do with local history and the detail of Leonia’s past. He had taught for a while in Iowa before the war, worked for the U.S. Army Ordinance labs during World War I, and concentrated his research interests in problems of yeast processing. At the university itself he taught courses in metallurgy and industrial chemistry and in 1937 became department chairman. His interest in the ‘‘advantage of Leonia’s past’’ was not a professional concern, but certainly it was more than amateurish curiosity.≤≥ Hixson had come to Leonia after World War I and had watched the community grow dramatically. So spectacular was the town’s population growth between 1910 and 1920 that some officials projected a town of 14,000 by the 1940s. Such inflated estimates drew heavily on the trajectory of growth from earlier days: Sixty-one years ago, the local paper had reported in 1941, the town had 266 inhabitants. By 1900 the town population was 804; in 1910 it was 1,486. ‘‘The biggest stride of all, however was the one made between 1910 and 1920 when the population more than doubled to a census figure of 2,979.’’≤∂ Hix- 248 Suburban Landscapes son’s interest was not antiquarian, however, but, rather, was grounded in his chairmanship of the town’s planning board, which, he recognized, was an appointed office often more powerful than the mayor’s. The roots of his historical enterprise and remolding of the town’s memory arose out of his overview of the town’s future. In the context of the town’s political strife of the 1920s Hixson clearly saw Leonia’s history as a stabilizing force, an implicit argument for enduring traditions. In the early 1930s he had designed and strategically placed historical markers that underscored the town’s antiquity (‘‘Settled 1666’’), its prominent leaders (Governor John Berry), distinctive aspects (a slave graveyard that bore witness to the large eighteenth-century black population in the county), and dramatic events (Washington’s retreat from Fort Lee). The signs were kept on a human scale, and the stylish lettering could be better read by local walkers than motorized passersby. They differed dramatically from nearby commercial highway signs and were clearly geared primarily toward Hixson’s fellow Leonians. Community life, Hixson’s artifacts attested, had been neither parochial, static, or homogeneous with respect to its residents. His informational signs made no effort to judge how such facts actually influenced the shape of the community (see fig. 10.1). Yet the discovery of history and a collective memory was not Hix- son’s private prerogative but, rather, had suddenly touched a town- wide chord. New businesses, such as the new Dutch Tea Room, appro- priated old Dutch motifs in their name and in advertising.≤∑ The Men’s Neighborhood Club sponsored its own historical events, particularly a gathering in which eight past presidents spoke of their earlier contributions to tree planting, the purchase of the first fire engine, support for the first library, and war work. Its own local historian, Richard C. Pond, combined both information and entertainment in his account of the club’s two decades of town involvement.≤∏ The Women’s Club executed its own historical ‘‘birthday party’’ in which every woman wore the dress of the year she joined and listened to a report on the club’s own history, which had begun in 1913.≤π In addition, the Women’s Club sponsored the creation of a Junior Women’s Club, whose first event was a historical pageant recapitulating the actual history of the town settlement.≤∫ Each of these efforts in its distinctive way selected different aspects of the past for legitimating a view of the present. The town’s history had been employed to forge an Fig. 10.1. One of A. W. Hixson’s town signs, 1930s. Four town signs, strategically placed on Leonia walkways, became one strategy for reaffirming the community’s history. The use of the area’s eighteenth-century history became a conscious device to provide a common ground for a multiethnic and mixed racial suburb, a time when townspeople worried about the cohesiveness of the community. Photo- graph by author

appropriate image of suburban values, especially the accommodation of distinctive ethnic and racial traditions. The Junior Women’s Club pageant, The Legend of Leonia, followed closely the formulaic structure of local pageants so popular since the turn of the century. It opened with the scene of an Indian en- campment, which featured an interpretive dance by one of the Junior Women’s Club members. Scene 2, which introduced the element of actual time-bound chronology, portrayed a colonial courtship and was accompanied by a local harpist. The next scene reinforced the colonial themes with a minuet performed by young members of the community in colonial costume. Scene 4 featured a Dutch song, ‘‘often sung in Dutch colonial homes,’’ and sung by a Leonia singer in Dutch costume. Scene 5, ‘‘The Passing of the Manpower Age,’’ represented this transition with the strange funeral rites that accompanied the 250 Suburban Landscapes burial of the last Bergen County slave. The tableau was embellished by the singing of spirituals by a black, nonagenarian New Yorker, who had attended such ceremonies. The two final scenes rushed through the ‘‘Gay Nineties,’’ with individuals dancing the ‘‘Schottische’’ with ‘‘Flora Dora Girls’’ in period costumes, then to the Jazz Age, with additional dance numbers.≤Ω Unlike many pageants of the period, the Leonia Junior Women’s League tableaux did not stress the difference between past and present Leonia, but they sought to connect the past and the present, to acknowledge their Native American and black heritages along with their Dutch roots, to intimate the compatibility of diverse cultures within traditional domestic family values.≥≠ Al- though selective, the pageant sought to reenact, in the lore of the pageant movement, a ‘‘portrait of the town.’’≥∞ The Junior Women’s League portrait of suburbia, however, differed in important ways from Channing Pollock’s The House Beautiful. The pageant consciously linked the town’s present not only with the local colonial history but also with broadly experienced urban fash- ions and dances of the Gay Nineties and the Jazz Age. Pollock, by contrast, drew divisive lines between ‘‘West Hills’’ and the city, which failed to foster ‘‘love and loyalty.’’ Local women clearly sought roots for their town’s past, but they considered them compatible with the fads and developments of modern life everywhere. By contrast, Pol- lock’s play had assumed that urban values disrupted communities and fostered internal conflicts that sometimes spilled into the political arena. Both images of the town’s past—one (drama) an oasis, the other (pageant) a process of evolutionary maturation—agreed that local community development ultimately proceeded in roughly ordered stages and was prompted by the energies of ‘‘ordinary people’’ rather than town elites or singular figures alone. A. W. Hixson ultimately developed an altogether different vision of Leonia’s past and present. Older suburban towns such as Leonia, he well knew, contained many of the elements that the popular urban press featured as dangerous and repelling aspects of city life: immigrants, racial tension, radical politics, contentious electoral campaigns, crass materialism, and government mismanagement. It was the work of citizens like Hixson and his fellow planning board members to forestall additional deleterious urban features: deteriorating real estate values, faulty social services, high population densities, diminished tax bases. Like some cities, some suburbs of the 1930s did Recovering Suburban Memory 251 not avoid such problems and suffered accordingly. Suburbanites were well aware that suburbia was neither an automatic success story nor necessarily a bourgeois utopia. Hixson’s historical signposts and the pageant that drew from his researches managed an updated version of the suburban landscape: a heterogeneous social and cultural mix reorganized into myriad voluntary associations within a common geographical locale. Hixson’s historical enterprise was, of course, as intent on rein- venting the area’s roots as he was on making statements about the town’s present and future character. In addition to support for The Legend of Leonia, Hixson enlisted the skills of Leonia artist Howard McCormick to construct two large historical murals for the Leonia Elementary School. The themes for the murals exploited the ‘‘colonial potential’’ of their locale and attempted to focus the historical ferment in the community. Hixson was primarily responsible for selecting the subject of Anakajans: a local seventeenth-century Dutch woman, who acted as interpreter between the Hackensack chieftain, Oratam, and New York’s Dutch leader, Peter Stuyvesant (see fig. 10.2). His second choice moved the area’s history from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century and depicted the most important event of the English Neighborhood’s Revolutionary days, George Washington’s retreat down Fort Lee Road on November 20, 1776 (see fig. 10.3).≥≤ Both enlarged murals not only loomed over several generations of children and townspeople but also became centerpieces for the town’s 1944 Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944 history. In the first mural a woman in Dutch dress and hat converses with a man in seventeenth- century European garb while a stately Indian chief, identified as Ora- tam of the Hackensacks, and his fellow tribesmen look on. All of the Indians depicted wear their hair in a Mohawk style rather than in braids or tonsure, which was the usual Lenape practice.≥≥ The historical caption identified the woman as Anakajans, who, remarkably, had learned the Lenape dialect and earned the trust of the Native Ameri- cans. She is the center of the mural, a confident go-between in negotiations, sporting a wide-brimmed hat usually reserved for a man. Before his death Oratam bestowed on Anakajans, the Leonia history explained, 12,000 acres of New Jersey land. In actuality the official deed registered 2,260 acres to Sarah Kiersted, the daughter of Anaka- jans and the actual translator.≥∂ The mural reconstructed the local history in other ways. The Fig. 10.2. Howard McCormick’s elementary school mural Anakajans, ca. 1930s. A reprint of this much-admired mural appeared in the town’s anniversary history in 1944. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives

principal white male in the mural stands firmly on two legs and represents Peter Stuyvesant, who in actuality had lost one leg in 1644, before arriving in New Netherlands. The depicted negotiation in the mural purportedly solidified both Oratam’s and Stuyvesant’s antipathy to alcohol, the supposed cause for the Indians’ destruction of the first Dutch settler’s home along Overpeck Creek in 1643. This semicen- Fig. 10.3. Howard McCormick’s elementary school mural Washington’s Re- treat from Fort Lee, 1936. This large public mural, also reprinted in the 1944 Leonia history, turned Washington’s embarrassing military setback into an orderly and dignified resignation to hard times, a message that was particularly poignant in the face of Depression dynamics. Courtesy of Leonia Library Archives tennial history made no mention of the perennial cultural dissonance over land between the Lenapes and the Dutch, which was more likely the centerpiece of any major discussion and translation. Indeed, the Lenapes’ attitude toward land—that it must be used but could not be possessed by anyone—remained a permanent source of contention and might have raised questions about Oratam’s recorded land bequest 254 Suburban Landscapes to Anakajans’s daughter. The Leonia mural and history also made no mention of the unprovoked 1643 massacre of Oratam’s people by the Dutch, an event that probably overrode alcohol as the cause of the early Dutch settlement’s destruction.≥∑ The harmony of the mural has masked considerable historical conflict and tension. Notwithstanding the historical inaccuracies, McCormick’s mural graphically reinforced the dramatic efforts to bridge multicultural differences in the region later to be Leonia, New Jersey.≥∏ The joint commitment to temperance seemed to offer the legitimacy of several centuries’ habit to Leonia’s nonalcoholic custom at most official functions. However misleading, the peaceful relations between Lenapes and Dutch depicted in the mural also confirmed the idealized image of suburban growth and change as a harmonious process. Finally, the strategic role of the nurturing woman may have intentionally invoked the many activist channels in which modern suburban women could invest their creative energies outside the home. In terms of the invented lore of the twentieth century, Anakajans’s (not Kiersted’s) voluntary service as translator had brought peace to her fellow Dutch and profitable reward to herself. In its way the mural was a far better icon for the twentieth than the seventeenth century. McCormick’s 1930 mural of Washington’s retreat similarly took liberties with the actual history and reconstructed a new image of Leonia’s past and present. The artwork has Washington pause on his horse to survey his passing troops. The soldiers, four abreast and strictly disciplined, march with chagrined faces, matched uniforms, and standard issue rifles on their shoulders. The only variation in military uniform are two militiamen wearing scarves over their hats and around their necks as they slog through snow or slush. In actual fact the retreat was neither neat nor orderly. Washington estimated that two thousand men, many in ragged garments and blankets, had rushed pell-mell down the English Neighborhood Road, some shed- ding muskets and knapsacks along the way, others deserting into the woods. By all accounts resolute endurance on the soldiers’ part, as in McCormick’s interpretation, would have been an ennobling virtue. Actually, a cold, grey November rain made the roads muddy and difficult to portage cannon and carriage, much of which was abandoned in the army’s rush to New Bridge, one of the few Hackensack River crossings that promised escape. The retreat was one of panic Recovering Suburban Memory 255 and complete disorganization, with standing tents and boiling dinner pots still intact, when the British finally entered Fort Lee later the same day. When the Americans finally reached their refuge in Hack- ensack, one eyewitness wrote, ‘‘they marched two abreast, looked ragged, some without a shoe to their feet and most of them wrapped in their blankets.’’≥π The messy context of a failed military strategy McCormick had converted into the tempering but strengthening dis- appointment on the path to ultimate victory. In important ways the mural brought the inflated mythology of George Washington into the realm of the commonplace, projecting recognizable emotions of defeat, shorn of their catastrophic implications. The icon served as a powerful image during Depression days when the country’s current national transformation did not seem to be faring well. However inac- curate and filtered the history, McCormick and Hixson had introduced realistic elements of conflict, sacrifice, and painful perseverance into the process of both suburban and national genesis. For all their differences the drama, the pageant, and the murals collectively contributed to an image of suburban life which required memory as a shaping ingredient in community formation.≥∫ And the dimension of memory not only converted the past to a resource but also connected broad national themes to an immediate locale. Hixson’s efforts culminated in 1944 with his Leonia Semi-Centennial, which publicized the murals alongside photos and other artistic sketches of the town’s past.≥Ω Each department of town government, each church, and every voluntary organization of town life received coverage, from a paragraph to a page, documenting the names, dates, and outstanding events of their pasts. The implicit message was that each organization had contributed in roughly equal measure to the town’s operational structure, which was presented as unproblematic as the town’s Dutch or Revolutionary past. Both the suburb’s diverse past and present were similarly homogenized into a communal image, wholly devoted to civil accord and peaceful domesticity. Whatever his liberties with actual facts and events, Hixson succeeded in reinterpreting for his fellow suburbanites the tenuous and problematic character of the suburban present into an enlarged image of communal harmony as old as tradition, both a cultural oasis and a model of social evolution. Leonia’s suburban image was not a product of local dynamics alone but reflected far broader optimistic dimensions that would pro- 256 Suburban Landscapes pel the nation’s suburbs well into the twentieth century. Still, it was Hixson’s image of a special suburban culture that helped promote those communities as special loci for family traditions, supportive social space, and diverse but neighborly civility into midcentury and beyond. For Hixson’s own part he was instrumental in sending his own time capsule into the future. In the course of his campaign to have Leonia take advantage of its past, he turned to his fellow citizens for both information and support. One volunteer arose from the ranks of the older families, Anna Bogart Gausmann Noyes. Her mother, Mar- garet Van Brunt Moore Gausmann, literally embodied in her name and in her experience a condensed version of the town’s eighteenth- century Dutch/English as well as the later immigrant German heritage. Anna Noyes began by mining her mother’s memory for data on old Dutch customs and for the lore of old Leonia. In the end she reconstructed a historic persona, ‘‘Grandma Gausmann,’’ who was consulted as a local sage in her lifetime and whose collected stories, songs, and sayings created a dramatic personality in the 1940s and 1950s. Anna Noyes, once proprietress of Leonia’s progressive Old Orchard School, ended her career impersonating her mother in cos- tumed presentations to public schools, historical societies, libraries, and clubs throughout the town and county. That persona, fully institutionalized in Noyes’s book, Three Petti- coats (1955), enlarged upon the earlier powerful mythology of life in a country town: Mrs. Gausmann, born in the old English Neighbor- hood, was a sage widow, one with common sense and humor who weathered difficulties large and small and who always had ‘‘good neighbors.’’ She stressed the social skills of sewing for families and friends, innovative use of food, especially leftovers seasoned by road- side herbs, and her constant production of ‘‘rag rugs.’’ Continually, she reminded her audiences of her Dutch core of strength and willpower, in effect redeeming her English husband from the alcoholic patterns of his other siblings. A rhetorical connection of herself—née Margaret Van Brunt Moore and her daughter, Anna Bogart Gausmann—to the seventeenth-century Dutch interpreter/heroine Anakajans, known to the Bergen Dutch as Anneke Jans Bogardus, the purported translator and go-between for the native Lenapes and the early Dutch.∂≠ The layered metaphor of Noyes’s persona projected a different culture grounded in a resilient domestic economy and ingenious craft Recovering Suburban Memory 257 that sustained the family and community. ‘‘God never made,’’ the author moralized, ‘‘Grandma Gausmann,’’ ‘‘a more thrifty, versatile, hard-working, commonsensible Mother. Artist at Sewing. Artist at Cooking. Artist.’’ In the process the book, Three Petticoats, went beyond a mere re-creation of a local personality and sage; Grandma Gausmann became the vehicle for giving select suburban values the special advantage of age and seasoning. The Dutch persona became a strategic device for the recentering of a town image upon a heritage of artistic culture and memory while acknowledging earlier oversimpli- fied images of Dutch tradition and country town values. The presentation of Three Petticoats as theatrical performance received the institutional legitimation of Leonia and other public school systems that welcomed Anna Noyes/Grandma Gausmann for school- children through the 1950s. If they drew extensive attention to the connections of the locale and the American Revolution—Lafayette bivouacking on Fort Lee Road near Gladwin Avenue; the British camping on the grounds of the Methodist church; Major Andre, the British spy, courting in the English Neighborhood at the MacMichael House; Light Horse Harry Lee earning his nickname by riding dispatches through the English Neighborhood between Hackensack and Fort Lee; and, of course, Washington’s retreat—Noyes’s presentations did nothing to clarify either the political issues of the Revolution or the confusing fit of the locale into them. History became anec- dotal, fragmented, a string of loose-fitting curiosities, an entertainment. Much of the presentation’s humor and lore concerned not just Grandma Gausmann’s birthplace in Leonia’s old Moore homestead but also her years growing up in Brooklyn in the middle of the nineteenth century, before returning with her family to her native place. One of the striking features of Noyes’s effort to reengage the past is not so much her stress upon a distinctive eighteenth- and nineteenth- century past but, rather, the collapse of historical distinctions altogether. Three Petticoats projected the curiosities of language, references to past events, forgotten songs, and bits of family lore, all without any specific context. Grandma Gausmann’s memory tends to meld remembered events of the Revolution with those of the Civil War. These ahistorical mergers became virtually complete when her daughter adopted her mother’s character and portrayed her wearing a 258 Suburban Landscapes costume that her mother had made for her mother. The pageantry and material of Three Petticoats literally begins and ends with an aphorism the author supposedly heard from an Indian princess in the American West: ‘‘It is not I who am singing; It is my people singing through me.’’∂∞ Noyes’s ingenious brand of domesticity, her celebration of manageable space, her artful reshaping of daily routines, assured audiences that a suburban culture was neither parochial nor time bound. Noyes successfully embodied the multiple and often contradictory values of suburban life via the memory of her mother. Three Petticoats received substantial public support not only for the values it presumed to disseminate but because, in the lore of the town, the Gausmann family’s impressive continuity in place was gen- eralized to the citizenry as a whole. Although in the early years of the century, a majority of Leonians were newcomers, increasingly, suburban communities experienced an analogous continuity with the Gausmanns. In spite of the steady presence of realtors, even after World War II, Leonians prided themselves on buying homes without realtors, that is, by neighborly word-of-mouth and without ‘‘For Sale’’ signs appearing on front lawns. Equally significant were the number of children not only returning to reside in Leonia but actually purchasing and refurbishing their parents’ homes. ‘‘Children tend to settle in the town,’’ one postwar observer has noted, ‘‘so that a typical block goes through a cycle. The people on the block appear for a number of years, they grow old, then children grow up and move away, the older people die off, and the children come back and move into the home or into other homes in town and refurbish them, bring them back up again to the new standards. It is still going on, I see it on our block here. Young people are moving in. My neighbor Phil Boggia . . . his roots are here. Robbins right up the street, the mayor’s wife, lives right next door to her parents. It does go on!’’∂≤ ‘‘There are a lot of us,’’ another Leonian remarked, ‘‘that are in the homes that our parents had.’’∂≥ Such succes- sions found considerable resonance in the cultural continuities of the Gausmann persona. During the Depression years the Dutch heritage had to compete not only with Revolutionary icons but with others as well. This historical awakening did not end with the promotion of a particular Dutch heritage. Through historical images from the old English Neighbor- hood suburban Leonians found the metaphors to insist on the con- Recovering Suburban Memory 259 tinuing endurance of cultural values that were not distinctively suburban. The advantage of the Dutch images for Leonia, in particular, was their distance from the partisan icons of its multicultural population. Dutchness could be adapted with ease to many different meanings and possibilities and yet provide some sense of legitimate, communal identity. Such remembered images had the additional benefit of linking one suburban community to broader historical and social movements at the very moment they seemed to celebrate a specific local and regional past.∂∂ This trajectory of community images from a country town to one insistent upon its Dutch and Revolutionary roots might well invite comments comparable to the criticism received by Channing Pollock for The House Beautiful: ‘‘sentimental’’ and ‘‘nostalgic.’’ In context, however, the historic images recognized that suburban life no longer merely reflected country values but also still appreciated low population density and natural greenery of older suburbs. The activated historical imagery implied no rejection of earlier icons but, rather, gathered them up in the process of shifting directions. Similarly, while his historical campaign necessitated a good deal of voluntary effort, Hixson’s initiative originated in Leonia’s official governing structure, the Leonia Planning Board. His political appointment gave him legal and coercive authority unlike that of the voluntary organizations that hitherto had directed the town’s routines. Nevertheless, Hixson’s historic focus drew on distinctive features of his community, its longevity, its accommodation of different ethnic and racial groups, and its ongoing tradition of voluntarism to socialize newcomers. His formal authority underlay his considerable voluntary outreach, well beyond the official duties of his board office, to engage the past and create a new and functional consensus. Within the voluntary tradition that ostensibly encouraged individual talent in a broad social order, formal organizations and new town images could seem to accommodate rather than contradict their past. If the internal and external changes were in retrospect more dramatic, then Hixson’s management of the town’s collective memory worked in a peculiarly traditional way to soften the hard edges of change. Suburbs and their cities grew farther apart during the twentieth century not in their practical routines of shopping, fashion, and social life but more in the way they came to view themselves and each 260 Suburban Landscapes other. By the post–World War II period the suburb and the city had become an established antagonistic convention, mutually opposed in ways that suburbanites at the turn of the century would not have recognized. The mass-produced suburbs of Levittowns, no less than the plight of the inner cities, in the second half of the twentieth century perpetrated this polarity of city and suburb to a point where their commonalities and interdependencies were regularly obscured. One of the principal casualties of this development was the devalua- tion of neighborhood dynamics upon which the modern metropolis and the twentieth-century suburb ultimately depend. Appendix

Appendix 263

Table A.1 Occupations of Household Heads in Leonia, N.J., 1880–1920 (in percentage)

aSkilled labor for 1880 included blacksmith, dentist, carpenter, bookkeeper, carriage builder, dyer, butcher, and telegraph clerk. For 1900 the category included many of the same occupations, especially carpenters. The 1900 group expanded, however, with jeweler, silk weaver, mason, electric lineman, florist, stenographer, pilot, lithographer, artist, bank teller, ferry wheelsman, and dressmaker. In 1920 many of these occupations added skills relevant to the motion picture industry and a nearby dye works. bThe managerial category in 1880 included coal and other merchants and railroad agents, while in 1900 there were added insurance agent, realtor, broker, boardinghouse keeper, poultry supplier, accountant, grocer, department store floorwalker, and editor. In 1910 managerial divided into two categories: one (18 percent of total householder heads) with superintendents, proprietors, merchants, and managers; the other (25 percent of total householder heads) with a range of subordinate bureaucratic roles, including clerk (shipping, bank, court, delivery, sales), agents, cashier, traveling salesman, teller, auditor, canvasser, examiner, and secretary. In 1920 many brokers (insurance, realty, stock) along with business examiners, appraisers, corporate secretaries and treasurers, foremen, and superintendents reflect the upper echelon (28 percent) of administrative stratification, while changes in the clerk, salesman, bookkeeper, office accountant, and cashier category (24 percent) established a lower end of the American administrative ladder. cThe professional category included only an engineer in 1880, while in 1900 there were minister, physician, engineer, school principal, and architect. In 1920 all of those occupations were represented, with the greater concentration centering in engineer and university teacher. All numbers are based on the manuscript records of the U.S. federal census for the requisite years. There were 48 heads of households in 1880, 179 in 1900, 338 in 1910, and 727 in 1920. dUnknown frequently represented two generic sorts of residence heads: widowed women who were renting space to boarders; and elderly who shared their household with renters or wage-earning family members. eThe 1920 federal census did not include the category ‘‘own income.’’ This figure represents ‘‘none’’ or ‘‘no occupation’’ in the Occupation column. In effect, it combined the ‘‘own income’’ and ‘‘unknown’’ categories of the 1910 federal census. 264 Appendix

Table A.2 Female Heads of Households in Leonia, N.J., 1880–1920 (in percentage)

Note: The majority of female household heads did not designate an occupation. If they did so, the occupation was normally boardinghouse keeper. A number of them simply registered ‘‘own income’’ in 1900 and 1910.

Table A.3 Home Ownership in Leonia, N.J., 1900–1920 (in percentage)

Note: Renters in 1910 did not include ‘‘boarders’’ but only household heads. Most of the renters resided on the most public roads of the town: Riley Avenue (now Hillside Avenue), Broad Avenue (both trolley routes), Grand Avenue, and Spring Street.

Table A.4 Household Heads’ Country of Origin, 1880–1920 (in percentage) Appendix 265

Table A.5 Household Heads’ Father’s Country of Origin, 1880–1920 (in percentage)

aOne Chinese bOne Chinese, one Japanese, one Australian, two Syrian, and one Armenian

Table A.6 Class Segregation in Four Neighborhoods by Type of Work, 1900–1920 (in percentage)

Note: The percentages at times do not add to 100 percent because information was unrecorded in the U.S. federal census. 266 Appendix

Table A.7 Renters and Home Owners in Four Neighborhoods, 1900–1920 (in percentage)

Note: The last two graphs suggest that in this period the geographical location of the household is a sharper index of social class values than is the economic relation to property.

Table A.8 Householders with Servants in Leonia, N.J., 1880–1920 (in percentage)

Table A.9 Average Age of Leonia’s Servant Class, 1880–1920 (in years) Appendix 267

Table A.10a Race and National Origins of Leonia’s Servant Class, 1880–1920 (in percentage)

Table A.10b Racial Breakdown of American-born Servants (in percentage)

Table A.11 Total Number of Leonia Residents

Note: Figures for the years 1905 and 1915 are from the New Jersey state census. 268 Appendix

Table A.12 Political Patterns of Leonia Voters, 1876–1972 It was heartening to see Bergen County reﬂect so accurately the nationwide sentiment of the people. —Bergen Evening Record editorial, November 5, 1952 Appendix 269

Table A.12 (continued ) 270 Appendix

Table A.12 (continued ) Appendix 271

Table A.12 (continued ) 272 Appendix

Table A.12 (continued )

Notes: The figures for the presidential election are official numbers derived from The People and a Nation, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994). The state, county, and town figures throughout and the Ridgefield/Leonia numbers up to 1924 are accurate to a point. For many years the state archival manuscripts dealt with New Jersey voting patterns according to their votes for presidential electors, who did not always receive equal votes even within the same party. The actual ‘‘presidential vote’’ was an average of votes for electors. Later state authorities designated a number to represent the ‘‘popular vote’’ for president. Many of the numbers here represent the figures given in [variously titled] Fitzgerald’s Legislative Manual, the State of New Jersey: [date] (Trenton: MacCrellish and Quigley, [date]), although, it should be noted, these numbers differ from the manuscript counts and sometimes even with numbers in the manual’s own pages. The manual often ignores votes outside the main parties. So these figures represent a ‘‘best-effort’’ composite from the printed and archival sources. Between 1896 and 1972 the State of New Jersey has endorsed a Democratic presidential candidate in 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, 1960, and 1964. In 1944 the voters split their votes for a Republican governor and in 1960 for a Republican U.S. senator (Case). In 1964 they extended their Democratic preferences to U.S. Senate (Williams) and in 1968–72, for Bergen County, to a Democratic congressman in spite of a staunch Republican voting tradition over the years. Appendix 273

Table A.12 Notes (continued ) 274 Appendix

Table A.12 Notes (continued ) Notes

Introduction

1. Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 16–23. 2. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983). See also the suggestive probe of images and ideology by Sam Bass Warner Jr., ‘‘The Management of Multiple Urban Images,’’ in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Derek Fraser and An- thony Sutcliffe (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 383–94. 3. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 12–13; see also D. W. Meinig, ‘‘Symbolic Land- scapes: Some Idealizations of American Communities,’’ in The Interpretation of Or- dinary Landscapes, ed. D. W. Meinig (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 164–92. 4. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). 5. Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). See also Bennett Burger, ‘‘The Myth of Suburbia,’’ Journal of Social Issues 17 (1961): 38–49. 6. Only lately have commentators begun to argue that the suburb, progressively less dependent on the city, has become a new social form, a ‘‘technoburb’’ as Robert Fishman has it. See Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987); see also Joel Garreau, Edge City (New York: Doubleday, 1988); and Peter O. Muller, ‘‘The Transformation of Bedroom Suburbia into the Outer City: An Overview of Metropolitan Structural Change since 1947,’’ in Suburbia Re-examined, ed. Barbara Kelly (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 39–44. 7. See, for example, Dena Kleiman, ‘‘A Dream Falls Flat: Fleeing Hoboken for the Suburbs,’’ New York Times, March 7, 1988, B1. The point can be made with selected essays in Kelly, Suburbia Re-Examined. 8. John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988). 9. For the ﬁrst convention, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 10. Carol O’Connor, ‘‘The Suburban Mosaic: Patterns of Land Use, Class and 276 Notes to Pages 3–8

Culture,’’ in American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review, ed. Howard Gillette and Zane Miller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), 243–53. 11. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); see also Kelly, Suburbia Re-examined. 12. Stuart M. Blumin, ‘‘The Center Cannot Hold: Historians and the Suburbs,’’ Journal of Policy History 2, no. 1 (1990): 118–29; see also John Logan, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp. chap. 2. 13. See also Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), chap. 8: ‘‘Escape to Suburbia’’; Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Boston: Athenaeum, 1962), 164. 14. See Robert Breugmann’s arresting analysis of older, urban conceptualizations in ‘‘The American City: Urban Aberration or Glimpse of the Future,’’ in Preparing for the Urban Future: Global Pressures and Local Forces, ed. Michael Cohen et al. (Wash- ington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996), 336–67. Two good examples of suburban studies that move beyond census aggregates to discover distinctive features are Jean-Paul Collin, ‘‘A Housing Model for Lower- and Middle-Class Wage Earners in a Montreal Suburb: Saint-Leonard, 1955–1967,’’ Jour- nal of Urban History 24, no. 4 (May 1998): 468–90; and Richard Harris and Matt Sendbuehler, ‘‘The Making of a Working Class Suburb in Hamilton’s East End, 1900– 1945,’’ Journal of Urban History 20, no. 4 (August 1994): 486–511. 15. Paul H. Mattingly, ‘‘The Suburban Canon over Time,’’ in Suburban Discipline, ed. Peter Lang and Tam Miller (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 38–51. 16. Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1989). One should also consult C. Wright Mills’s important study White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951). 17. A recent, spirited exchange within the suburban discourse found several supporters for the argument that suburban culture needed to be more prominent in any analysis of new ‘‘urban’’ formations. See William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, ‘‘Con- textualizing Suburbia,’’ American Quarterly 46, no. 1 (March 1994): 55–61. 18. Most major surveys of American art favor the ‘‘bohemian’’ characterization and overwork the radical or aberrant features of the dozen or so twentieth-century Ameri- can artists considered signiﬁcant. An important counterpoint to this argument can be found in a new set of studies in American advertising and consumerism, which have begun to approach American artists as image makers and shapers of middle-class taste. See particularly Michele Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); and R. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 19. These dynamics have been observed elsewhere, for example, in the New Deal agencies supporting a tradition of uplift and ‘‘American Scene’’ values. See, for example, Richard McKinzie, New Deal for Artists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Notes to Pages 10–20 277

Press, 1973); and, more recently, James Dennis, Renegade Regionalists (Madison: Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press, 1998). 20. See Alan Brinkley, ‘‘The New Deal and the Idea of the State,’’ and Ira Katz- nelson, ‘‘Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?’’ in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), for provocative arguments about the changes of the 1930s. Brinkley and Katznelson argue two features of the 1930s that might well make the decade more of a turning point than early or later designations. The new role of the federal government to act upon national initiatives found its analogy in one New Jersey suburb creating a mechanism it called the ‘‘Civic Conference.’’ Similarly, the national political argument against group self-interest reverberated in Leonians’ reconstruction of the locale’s ‘‘Dutch inheritance’’ and the public antipathy to ‘‘partisanship.’’ 21. Michael Birkner’s study of nearby Bergenfield, N.J., blue-collar and Republican, analyzes a distinctive party machine and political boss alternative that nevertheless also preserved the veneer of social harmony (and the ‘‘country’’ imagery) through these years. See Michael J. Birkner, A Country Place No More: The Transformation of Bergenfield, New Jersey, 1894–1994 (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994). 22. Margaret Marsh corroborated the point in her study, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 23. For a preliminary discussion of the problem, see Warner, ‘‘Management of Multiple Urban Images,’’ 383–94. 24. Abigail Thernstrom (‘‘The Overlooked Story,’’ New York Times, June 18, 1997) opens a range of issues in this interesting editorial, which among other things notes that black Americans have rushed to the suburbs at a faster pace than whites over the past quarter-century. Margaret Marsh makes a similar point about white residents rising in Washington, D.C., while 1980s middle-class ‘‘flight’’ to the suburbs is an African-American experience. ‘‘(Mis)Reading the Suburbs,’’ American Quarterly 46, no. 1 (March 1994): 45.

Chapter 1: Dutchness and the English Neighborhood

1. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 5. 2. Bergen County Panorama: American Guide Series (Hackensack, N.J.: n.p., 1941), 8. 3. Randall Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 4. Anna Noyes, ‘‘Leonia Looking Back,’’ East Bergen Express, February 19, 1943, 1. 5. Firth Haring Fabend, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660–1800 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991); and Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 6. Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany, 1630–1710: The Dutch and English Experi- ences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 293; Simon Schama, The Em- 278 Notes to Pages 21–27

barrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 6. 7. John Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 43ff.; Peter O. Wacker, Land and People: A Cultural Geography of Preindustrial New Jersey—Origins and Settlement Patterns (New Bruns- wick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975), chap. 4; Joseph Wood, The New England Village (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 8. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), esp. chap. 4, ‘‘Bounding the Land.’’ 9. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 74–75; Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu- tion Press, 1995). 10. Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 6. 11. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). 12. John Rainbolt, ‘‘The Absence of Towns in Seventeenth Century Virginia,’’ Journal of Southern History 35 (August 1969): 343–60; Carville Earle and Ronald Hoffman, ‘‘Staple Crops and Urban Development in the Eighteenth Century South,’’ Perspectives in American History 10 (1976): 7–78; see also Jacob M. Price, ‘‘Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Perspectives in American History 8 (1974): 123–86. 13. Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1978). 14. Stilgoe, Common Landscape, 82. 15. Adrian C. Leiby, The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley: The Jersey Dutch and the Neutral Ground, 1st ed. (1962; rpt., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980). 16. Wesley Vreeland, interview by Linda Cirino, Leonia, September 26, 1986, Leonia Library Archives. 17. Peter Christoph, ‘‘The Colonial Family: Kinship and Power,’’ in A Beautiful and Fruitful Place: Selected Rensselaerswijck Seminar Papers, ed. Nancy A. M. Zeller (Al- bany, N.Y.: New Netherland Project, 1991), 111–18. See, in the same collection, Donna Merwick, ‘‘The Rituals of handelstijd in Beverwijck,’’ 317–25, for an analysis of the nonpolitical orders of Dutch society. 18. Firth Haring Fabend, Dutch Family, 49. See also David Stephen Cohen, ‘‘How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherlands?’’ New York History 62 (January 1981): 43–60. 19. Robert Sweringa, ed., The Dutch in America: Immigration, Settlement and Cul- tural Change (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 1. 20. Fabend, Dutch Family, chap. 4; see also Roderick Blackburn, ‘‘Dutch Domestic Architecture in the Hudson Valley,’’ New Netherlands Studies: An Inventory of Cur- rent Research and Approaches, Bulletin KNOB 84, nos. 2–3 (June 1985): 151–64; Adrian C. Leiby, The Early Dutch and Swedish Settlers of New Jersey (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1964); Dell Upton, ed., America’s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups Notes to Pages 27–35 279 that Built America (Washington, D.C.: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1986), 48–54. 21. Stewart McHenry, ‘‘Eighteenth-Century Field Patterns as Vernacular Art,’’ in Common Places, ed. Dell Upton and John Vlach (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 107–23. 22. Fabend, Dutch Family, chap. 1, see esp. 130. Also David Stephen Cohen, The Dutch-American Farm (New York: New York University Press, 1992), esp. chap. 3; and Peter Wacker, Land and People (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975), 239–42. 23. Leiby, Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley, 9, 20–21. See also Fabend, Dutch Family, chaps. 7 and 9. 24. Fabend, Dutch Family, chap. 6. See also Dennis Ryan, ‘‘Landholding, Oppor- tunity and Mobility in Revolutionary New Jersey,’’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 36 (1979): 574–75; David Narrett, ‘‘From Mutual Will to Male Prerogative: The Dutch Family and Anglicization in Colonial New York,’’ De Halve Maen 65, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 1–4. 25. Fabend, Dutch Family, chap. 10. 26. McHenry, ‘‘Eighteenth-Century Field Patterns,’’ 107–23. 27. ‘‘Leonia of Long Ago—Leonia of the Future,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, September 25, 1930, 4.

Chapter 2: The Village as a Voluntary Organization, 1859–1894

1. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 2. Ibid., chap. 1. 3. Carol Karels, Leonia Legacies: Voices Then, Voices Now (Hackensack, N.J.: Tech Repro, 1994), 15–17. 4. Charles Lee drew special attention to himself by failing to move his New York forces with sufficient dispatch to support Washington’s defense of Fort Lee. In Decem- ber 1776, shortly after the fort fell to the British, Charles Lee was captured and held prisoner until the surrender of General John Burgoyne, under whom Lee had once served in Portugal. After an official inquiry was conducted into his conduct and reputed insubordination at the 1778 Battle of Monmouth, his military career ended under a cloud. In 1782 Lee died in obscurity in Philadelphia; see Putnam’s Home Encyclopedia (New York: George Putnam, 1852), 576; ‘‘How Leonia Got Its Name,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 4, 1938, 1; see also the treatment of Lee in Richard Rabinowitz, ‘‘Story Time, Exhibit Time,’’ Culturefront (Summer 1997): 57– 65, 72, 95. 5. Henry Binford, The First Suburbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 44. 6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Federal Census, MSS (1880), National Archives. 7. Michael J. Birkner, A Country Place No More: The Transformation of Bergenfield, New Jersey, 1894–1994 (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994). 8. Letter to the editor by Frederick West, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 24, 1933, 6. West explained that ‘‘Mr. Minnerly’’ ‘‘informs me that for ten years from 280 Notes to Pages 35–41

1901 he took about eight thousand dollars worth of Carp and Catfish per season’’ out of the waters of Overpeck Creek. Minnerly added also ‘‘the value of eels, white and yellow perch and some shad and herring caught by the populace in general. Twelve thousand dollars a year would be a conservative estimate of the food value taken from that creek.’’ 9. Carole Root Cole, ‘‘Map of 1840—Property Holdings along the English Neigh- borhood Road within Leonia’’ (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1980). Andrew D. Bogert, one of the several Bogert families in the English Neighborhood, formally resided in Englewood, the next town north of Leonia. In the 1900 U.S. Federal Census (Ward 3, Englewood City, N.J., no. 199) Bogert’s birthday appears as May 1864, making him only twenty-one years of age at the time of the ‘‘Leonia Park’’ project. Even in 1900 his occupation is given as ‘‘Carpenter/Builder.’’ 10. ‘‘Leonia of Long Ago—Leonia of the Future,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, September 25, 1930, 2. 11. See chapter 4 for an elaboration of Richards’s work and designs. 12. Ilonka Fertig, interview by author, Lancaster, Va., May 19, 1990. See Paul Baker, Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White (New York: Free Press, 1989). 13. Leonia Park: Property of Andrew D. Bogert (1885). This map and house blueprint were filed January 5, 1886, presumably in the Recording Office of Hackensack, N.J., the county seat for Bergen County. Thanks to David Boyd for a copy of this document. 14. Michael J. Doucet and John C. Weaver, ‘‘Material Culture and the North American Home: The Era of the Common Man,’’ Journal of American History (De- cember 1985): 560–87. See also Herbert Gottfried and Jan Jennings, American Ver- nacular Design, 1870–1940: An Illustrated Glossary (New York: Van Nostrand Rein- hold, 1985); Joel Schwartz and Daniel Prosser, eds., Cities of the Garden State: Essays in the Urban and Suburban History of New Jersey (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1977). 15. Clifford E. Clark, The American Family Home, 1800–1960 (Chapel Hill: Uni- versity of North Carolina Press, 1986), chap. 3. 16. Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 30. 17. Kenneth Jackson (Crabgrass Frontier [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], 130), notes that until 1916 national legislation prevented banks from making long-term loans on real estate. Only in the 1890s did some of these institutions issue a few short-term mortgages on residential property. The role of local savings and loan associations was thus crucial before as well as after federal laws changed in this area. See Oliver Zunz, ‘‘On the Fringe: Prosperous or Trapped?’’ Reviews in American History 13, no. 4 (December 1985): 563–69. 18. ‘‘Ex-Mayor R. J. G. Wood Celebrates His Eighty-Seventh Birthday,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, May 29, 1931, 1. See also ‘‘R. J. G. Wood Passes Away Quietly in Sleep,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 10, 1933, 2. 19. ‘‘Mrs. Anna Christie Stagg, Life-Long Resident, Dies,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, July 1, 1932, 1. See also ‘‘Sarah J Christie,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, June 23, 1933, 2, which noted that she had come to Leonia only eighteen years earlier with her husband, A. A. Christie (d. 1921), to participate in the Leonia Heights Land Com- pany activities, a profitable realty adventure of the 1920s; also ‘‘Edward Stagg, 78, Notes to Pages 41–48 281

Passes Away at Leonia Home,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, June 22, 1934, 2. Stagg was born in Englewood, N.J., on June 28, 1856, and spent his boyhood in Hackensack. In 1873 he entered the employ of Patterson Brothers of New York City and retired as company president in 1928. He married Anna Christie in 1884 and resided in Leonia ever after. Among other activities in the town he sold sections of the Christie holdings to the Leonia Heights Land Company. 20. Doris Faig, interview by author, Leonia, February 9, 1990. 21. Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 22. Sarah Burns, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 23. Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 24. Constance Perin, Everything in Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976). 25. Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), chap. 3. 26. Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944 (N.p., 1944), 8. See also Edward K. Spann, ‘‘Escape to Suburbia,’’ The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). There are no hard ﬁgures for 1890, since the manuscripts of the federal census in that year were destroyed by ﬁre. Before 1880 residents of Leonia are not demarcated in the census, and hence detailed comparisons are not possible. 27. John Pomfret (Colonial New Jersey: A History [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973], 199) notes that at the time of the Revolution one-twelfth of New Jersey’s population were black. 28. ‘‘Leonia of Long Ago—Leonia of the Future,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, September 25, 1930, 2. 29. See my earlier discussion. 30. See chapters 3 and 4 of the present study. 31. John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 9–10. 32. Ibid., intro. 33. The Dutch Reform mission of 1824 had no permanent pastor. 34. ‘‘Leonia of Long Ago—Leonia of the Future,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, September 25, 1930, 2. 35. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Federal Census (1880 and 1900). 36. John Wragge, interview, by author, Leonia, July 23 and August 13, 1986. Notes on these untaped interviews are in the Leonia Library Archives. Some details were derived from the 1900 federal census. 37. Frances Westervelt, A History of Bergen County, New Jersey, 1630–1923 (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1923), 372. See also Birkner, A Country Place No More. 38. Birkner, A Country Place No More. The most thorough treatment of this episode can be found in Kevin Wright, ‘‘Punkin Duster Finds the Woodchuck Borough: 282 Notes to Pages 49–53

A Centennial Review of Bergen County Borough Fever, 1894–95,’’ at the Bergen County Historical Society website: »http://www.carroll.com/bchs/part1.html…. 39. After 1896 Leonians did not simply match the county vote. Until the election of 1912 Leonia consistently voted 15 percent or more for Republican candidates than did the county, which in turn was more Republican than the state. 40. See Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944 (1944). John T. Cunningham, New Jersey: America’s Main Road (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 256. 41. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); see also Margaret Marsh, ‘‘From Separa- tion to Togetherness: The Social Construction of Domestic Space in American Sub- urbs, 1840–1915,’’ Journal of American History 76, no. 2 (September 1989): 506–27; Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Co- lumbia University Press, 1981), chap. 8: ‘‘Escape to Suburbia’’; and Oliver Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 152–53. 42. ‘‘Minutes of the Meetings of the Mayor and Council of the Borough of Leonia, NJ,’’ January 14, 1895, Leonia Municipal Archives. 43. ‘‘Minutes of Mayor and Council of Borough of Leonia,’’ April 22, 1898, Leonia Municipal Archives. 44. Michael Birkner’s study of nearby Bergenfield—A Country Place No More— fully documents that the railroad was not an instrument for populating suburbs. Other dynamics account for the varied social and cultural structure of such communities. Bergenfield notably concentrated on middle-income and even working-class residents. See also Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900– 1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 45. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 46. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, chap. 8. See also David Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982), pt. 4. 47. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 142–43. 48. Faig, interview, February 9, 1990. 49. Proceedings of the Leonia Literary League, Leonia Library Archives. See entry for January 19, 1891, which recounts the organization’s six-year history. 50. In a perceptive review of Sam Bass Warner’s Streetcar Suburbs Blake McKelvey correctly asked whether suburban civic organizations did not check the decline of social status often precipitated by continuing migration into suburbs. He also noted that the principal deficiency of Warner’s now classic study was the absence of such citizen efforts and of their civic organizations. See his review in the Journal of Ameri- can History 49 (December 1963): 717–18. 51. Fred Nankivel Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 641. 52. Ibid. The names regularly appearing in the minutes included those of longtime residents J. V. Moore, George M. Brinkerhoff, Cornelius Christie (whose mother was a Brinkerhoff); midcentury arrivals such as R. J. G. Wood and A. P. Hurd; late- Notes to Pages 53–60 283 nineteenth-century residents such as Edward Stagg and the merchants C. D. Schor and P. P. Cluss, as well as others whose presence was important at the turn of the century: Lorenzo Gismond, H. Ahrens, ‘‘Professor’’ J. H. Clark, and schoolteacher J. S. Bennett. Belle MacMichael was a frequent solo vocalist. 53. In the 1880 U.S. federal census there were three black householders in Leonia: Stephen Benson, a twenty-two-year-old native of New Jersey, a laborer who lived with his wife and niece; Edgar Ambleman, a thirty-nine-year-old New Yorker by birth who listed no occupation and lived with his wife, two teenage daughters, and godson; and Thomas Francis, a forty-three-year-old native of New Jersey, who listed his work as ‘‘Laborer’’ and lived with his wife, age twenty-three. 54. Paul H. Mattingly, ‘‘The Guarantees of Voluntary Organizations,’’ in The Class- less Profession: American Schoolmen in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1975). See also Don Doyle, ‘‘The Social Functions of Voluntary As- sociations in a Nineteenth-Century American Town,’’ Social Studies History 1 (1977): 333–55; Gregory Singleton, ‘‘Protestant Voluntary Organizations and the Shaping of Victorian America,’’ in Victorian America, ed. Daniel Walker Howe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 47–58. 55. Proceedings of the Leonia Literary Leagues; see minutes of January 19, 1891. 56. Letter of F. L. Olmstead to Edward Everett Hale, October 21, 1869, Olmstead Papers, Library of Congress, quoted in Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 128. See also Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 130–39; David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), esp. chap. 8.

Chapter 3: Village Landscapes

1. Fred Nankivel Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 1038. 2. Doris Faig, interview by author, Leonia, February 9, 1990. See ‘‘Leonia Long Ago,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, June 11, 1937, 16. 3. Michael Patrick Hearn, ‘‘Peter Newell (1862–1924),’’ in More Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Random House, 1990), xxvii, a reprint of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which New- ell illustrated in 1900. See also Who Was Who in America, vol. 1 (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1968), 893; and Joyce Kilmer, ‘‘Peter Newell Says Domesticity Helps Art- ists,’’ New York Times Magazine (September 17, 1916): 12–13. 4. Gardner, More Annotated Alice, xxvi. 5. Peter Newell, Topsys and Turvys (1893; rpt., Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1988); see also Topsys and Turvys, Number 2 (1894; rpt., Rutland Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1988). 6. Gardner, More Annotated Alice. 7. Ibid. 8. Peter Newell, The Hole Book (1908; rpt., Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1985). 284 Notes to Pages 61–71

9. Peter Newell, The Slant Book (1910; rpt., Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1967). 10. See Christopher P. Wilson, ‘‘The Rhetoric of Consumption: Mass-Market Mag- azines and the Demise of the Gentle Readers, 1880–1920,’’ in The Culture of Con- sumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed. Richard W. Fox and T. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 39–64. For all its insight this essay is preoccupied with the illusory character of magazine images without assessing their general plausibility or roots in actual experience. If they contained fictive dimensions, mass images were important historically not so much for their falsification of actual social arrangements but for their expression of values that many different groups could recognize and applaud. 11. Gardner, More Annotated Alice, xxvii. 12. Bergen County Panorama: American Guide Series (Hackensack, N.J.: n.p., 1941), 240; Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1968), 1:893; Mrs. Edward Fertig, interview by author, Lancaster, Va., May 19, 1990. 13. ‘‘McCormick, Well-Known Artist Is Dead at Age of 68,’’ North Jersey Life/ Leonia Life, October 15, 1943, 1; obituary, New York Herald Tribune, October 14, 1943; Who Was Who in American Art (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1962), 406. 14. Ada Chapman, Memoirs of Charles S. Chapman, NA, ed. Everett Fink (Du- mont, N.J.: Koval Press, 1964); Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1968), 4:167. 15. David R. Boyd, interview by author, Leonia, September 20, 1986, and February 10, 1989; Who Was Who in American Art (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1962), 107. Chapman’s own account of his North Woods experience as a ‘‘culler’’ appears in ‘‘The Culler,’’ Collier’s (November 1907). 16. Royal Cortissoz, Horatio Walker, and Howard Giles, The Book of Alexander Shilling (New York: Paisley Press, 1937). See also Francine Tyler, The First American Painter-Etchers (New York: Pratt Graphics Center, 1979). 17. William Gerdts, Art across America (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 2:299; see also Enos Comstock, ‘‘A Leonia Artist Traces the Borough’s Artistic Career,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, April 14, 1933; Gerdts, Painting and Sculpture in New Jersey (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1964). 18. Comstock, ‘‘Leonia Artist’’; Gerdts, Art across America, 1:259–60; National Cyclopedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White, 1962), 45:83–84. Of- ficially, Perrine lived in Ridgefield and later Fort Lee, N.J. He also participated in the now famous 1913 Armory Show in New York City. 19. Cortissoz et al., Book of Alexander Shilling. See also Wanda M. Corn, The Color of Mood: American Tonalism, 1880–1910 (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1972); Patricia Hills, The Painter’s America: Rural and Urban Life (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1974); and William Gerdts, Art across America, vol. 1: New England, New York, MidAtlantic (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990). 20. ‘‘John Vanderpoel,’’ Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1968), 1:1269; see also William Gerdts, American Impressionism (New York: Artabras, 1984), 246. 21. Comstock, ‘‘A Leonia Artist Traces His Borough’s Artistic Career’’; see also Notes to Pages 72–78 285

Who Was Who in America, 1:355; Gerdts, Art across America, 2:246–47. Eaton’s house was located at 141 Crescent Avenue. He should not be confused with Charles Warren Eaton (1857–1937), also a distinguished artist and his contemporary. 22. Enos Comstock, Leonia Life Semicentennial Edition (1944). This article about Leonia artists groups them in three distinct waves. In the ﬁrst wave Comstock, a member of the Leonia art colony himself, named Freeman Carter, Arthur Diehl, Charles Eaton, Kate Gausmann, Sol Kann, Peter Newell, Van Deering Perrine, Alex- ander Shilling, Ilona Rado West, and Wilhelmena Wyckoff. 23. ‘‘Who’s Who at the Leonia Art Exhibit,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, April 21, 1933, 3. See also Chris Pettys, Dictionary of Women Artists (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 582; La Revue moderne illustre des arts et de la vie (Paris), no. 12 (June 30, 1929). See also Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth Century Paris Salons (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1990). The French ateliers admitted women when the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not. 24. See Frances Weitzenhoffer, The Havemeyers: Impressionism Comes to America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), recounts the collecting patterns of Henry Os- borne Havemeyer, his wife, and family, powered by money from the Havemeyer sugar monopoly. The Webbs joined the Havemeyer family by marriage and began collecting artwork; see obituary of ‘‘J. Watson Webb,’’ New York Times, June 14, 2000, B14. 25. Mrs. Edward [Ilonka West] Fertig, author interview, Lancaster, Va., May 19, 1990. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. See also Chris Petteys, Dictionary of Women Artists (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 582; Les Artistes d’aujourd’hui, review of her Paris exhibition in 1929, July 1, 1929, 10. See also ‘‘Who’s Who at the Leonia Art Exhibit,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, April 21, 1933, 3, which notes that among her important portraits were those of Princess Tremanoff in Budapest; Mme Maurice Loevy, the celebrated astronomer; Miss Grace How; Stuart Chase and his sister Adelaide (as children) of Haverhill, Mass.; Mrs. William Webb of Salem, Mass.; Mrs. William Mitchell of New York City; Miss Julia Horne [Mrs. Lou Tellegren] of Leonia, N.J.; and the full-length standing portrait of Eugene Debs, then in the library of the Rand School of Social Work, New York City. 28. Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 68–71. 29. Ilonka West Fertig, interview by author, Lancaster, Va., May 19, 1990. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. Arpad Rado, Ilona West’s brother, created his own cultural resource for the town and the region with his musicales, centered on his Euterpe Quartet. This resource may well have been the attraction for musician/composer Ferde Grofé, a Leonia resident in the 1920s, who felt sufﬁciently connected to his townsmen that, even after he moved away, he communicated to his former neighbors the news of his son’s birth. In the process he documented the long reach of the Leonia cultural network. North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, July 17, 1930, 2. 32. See Jan Seidler Ramirez, ‘‘New Century Cityscapes or Painting the ‘New Me- 286 Notes to Pages 79–85

tropolis,’ ’’ Culturefront (Winter 1997–98): 132–43; see also Ramirez, Painting the Town: Cityscapes of New York (New Haven: Yale University Press and the Museum of the City of New York, 2000).

Chapter 4: The Trolley Produces a Country Town, 1894–1920

1. Betsy Stanton, ‘‘Recalling Early Leonia,’’ Bergen Record, May 13, 1987, D6. 2. Leonia was not alone in its use of this term, as Michael Birkner’s insightful study of Bergenfield, N.J., has shown. See A Country Place No More: The Transformation of Bergenfield, New Jersey, 1894–1994 (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994). 3. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); see also Margaret Washington, ‘‘Anthropological Approaches to History,’’ Encyclopedia of American Social History (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1993), 1:281–95. 4. Particularly before the movie industry relocated to California in 1921, major studios such as Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, William Fox, the Solax Company, and World Pictures used New Jersey for its outdoor scenes. The New Jersey industry often hired technicians and artists, such as George Overbury ‘‘Pop’’ Hart and Thomas Hart Benton, to design scenery for indoor shots. See Gregory Gilbert, George Overbury ‘‘Pop’’ Hart: His Life and Art (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 34; Federal Writers Project, Works Progress Administration, New Jersey: A Guide to Its Present and Past (New York: Hastings House, 1946), 164; Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 379. 5. Mrs. George Macalister, interview by May Marsh, Leonia, March 24, 1938. Notes in Leonia Public Library Archives. See also letter of Ilonka West Fertig to Eliza- beth Egan, July 12, 1970, Leonia Public Library Archives. See also Secor Chase, interview, by author, Leonia, August 14, 1986; Barbara Reynard Dey, interview, by author, Tenafly, N.J., May 1, 1987, Archives of the Salma- gundi Club, New York. The 1920 census has a number of Leonia residents employed in various capacities by the ‘‘moving picture’’ industry. 6. ‘‘Josiah Mott Allaire,’’ obituary, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, October 11, 1935, 5. Allaire was listed as sixty-nine years of age and a town resident for thirty-five years. He died in Englewood (N.J.) Hospital on October 8, 1935. In the 1920 federal census Allaire, a New Jersey native, is identified as an actor in the moving pictures, living with his uncle, the longtime Leonia grocer Phillip Cluss, on Central Avenue. Also see Wragge, interview by author, Leonia, July 23 and August 13, 1986. 7. William Shedd, interview by Kate Scooler, Leonia, July 21, 1986. 8. See Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900– 1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Harris also notes that for Toronto the absence of trolleys kept suburban housing costs low for working-class families. 9. Faig, interview, February 9, 1990. 10. Ibid. In actual fact the U.S. federal census for 1900 lists 47.4 percent of Leonia householders as renters. Only 15 percent of householders owned their homes free of mortgages. Notes to Pages 86–89 287

11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. These numbers indicate that the trolley introduced greater diversity rather than, as current scholars tend to argue, greater homogenization. Much depends on one’s assumptions about the middle class, which I take to be both expanding and stratifying. The trajectory of the ‘‘managerial’’ category does rise steadily but increasingly includes the greatest range—store clerk to company owner—of all the groupings. The professional class remains a distinct minority from 1880 to 1920. Skilled labor remains a decided presence throughout, peaking at 43 percent in 1900. Increasingly, as one moves into the interwar period, many ‘‘skilled laborers’’ will acquire middle-class accouterments by buying on the installment plan and drawing on multiple earners within their families. During the Junction stage of development the clear demarcations between manual and nonmanual workers resist any facile homogenizing results in this example of trolley suburbanization. My summary conclusion is that social class diversity endured throughout the period, while residents worked increasingly to mask the diversion, often successfully, with harmonious imagery like that of the ‘‘country town.’’ This cultivation of harmonizing images strikes me not as devious or coercive but, rather, expressed imaginative responses to social diversity. 14. Minutes of Leonia Mayor and Council, November 1, 1895; March 14, 1898, Leonia Borough Hall Archives. Cornelius Christie was educated at Harvard, where he may have been acquainted with Artemas Ward (1875–1946), whose father, also Artemas Ward (1848–1925), was an advertising executive with Ward and Gow and a Westchester realty entrepreneur. Eventually, Ward would join Christie as a principal figure in the town’s real estate development. In the several available manuscript censuses (1880, 1900, and 1910) Christie appears as a bachelor, living in the household of his younger brother, James, on Grand Avenue, presumably in the old Christie homestead. See ‘‘Ward and Gow Files,’’ Harvard University Archives, Baker Business School; also Fiftieth Annual Report of Harvard Class of 1899 (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1949), 836–38. 15. Minutes of the Leonia Mayor and Council Meetings, June 9, 1897; February 2, 1898. 16. Ibid. 17. Minutes of Leonia Mayor and Council, May 1, 1896; also February 2, 1898. The protesting citizens were N. T. Romaine and George Gausmann in 1896. In 1898 Romaine repeated his objection and was joined by farmer Arthur Gladwin, on whose pasture land the Marquis de Lafayette once bivouacked his troops. Even supporters of the trolley such as longtime residents R. J. G. Wood and George Mabie approved of the facility only with a number of specific restrictions. 18. In 1890, nationwide, the average income of a clerical worker was $848, and the average income of an industrial worker was $486. By taking in boarders and drawing on the wages of other family members, however, the family income of industrial workers rose into the level of the clerical worker. Commutation costs might well be covered in the difference between city and suburban house rentals. See Mary Beth Norton et al., A People and a Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 539. 288 Notes to Pages 91–98

19. Jesse Leslie, interview by author, 327 Broad Avenue, Leonia, October 22, 1986. 20. Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the Ameri- can City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 275–81. 21. In the seven Broad Avenue houses (nos. 455–99; see fig. 4.7), constructed between 1900 and 1905, the 1905 New Jersey state census listed the household heads’ occupations as shoe store clerk, iron contractor, manager of dry goods store, fire insurance salesman, insurance clerk, credit manager of dry goods store, and life insurance examiner. One was born in Germany, two in New Jersey, three in New York, and one in Massachusetts. Four of these householders were still residents in the 1920 federal census. 22. J. Shedd, interview, July 28, 1986. The other schools sending to Leonia High School in these years were Palisades Park, Ridgefield, Edgewater, Bogota, Teaneck, and Ridgefield Park. 23. Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944 (1944), 9; see also ‘‘Leonia Tercentenary,’’ Leonia Life, June 6, 1968, 20. 24. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 275 ff. See also note 13 in this chapter. 25. Wesley Vreeland, interview by Linda Cirino, Leonia, September 23, 1986. 26. U.S. federal census for 1900 and 1910. There were no black families in the 1910 federal census living on Spring Street. By 1920, however, thirteen black families (2 percent of household heads) resided in the town, concentrating in Schor Avenue and Spring Street residences in the vicinity of the old Village. See Andrew Weise, ‘‘Places of Our Own: Suburban Black Towns before 1960,’’ Journal of Urban History 19, no. 3 (May 1993): 30–54. 27. David Boyd, interview by author, Leonia, September 20, 1986. In 1910, according to the U.S. federal census of that year, the majority of fifteen householders on Spring Street were skilled laborers, white, and renters. In 1920 the street was not predominately black, but those who were there listed laborer, janitor, and chauffeur as their occupations. The majority were renters, though several were owners. 28. Michael Frisch, Town into Community: Springfield, Massachusetts and the Mean- ing of Community, 1840–1880 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), chap. 12. 29. Nationwide this stratified range in the ‘‘managerial’’ class increased seven- fold between 1870 and 1910, greater than any other occupational group. See James Henretta, W. Elliot Brownlee, David Brody, and Susan Ware, America’s History (Chi- cago: Dorsey Press, 1984), 2:563. 30. Interview with William W. Shedd, interview, Kate Scooler, July 21, 1986, Leonia, Leonia Library Archives. 31. See Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968). 32. Frances Westervelt, A History of Bergen County, New Jersey (New York: Lewis, 1923). 33. Patricia Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 26–29; Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790 Notes to Pages 98–102 289

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 30; see also Michael Kammen, Colonial New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975). 34. Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944 (1944), 29. The classis was the Dutch referent to the organization of pastors and elders governing a group of churches, an analogous form of a presbytery. 35. Ibid. 36. Later denominations—Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, and Jews—all followed a relatively similar pattern. Until the turn of the century their small numbers resulted in gatherings within individual homes. At some later point they brieﬂy rented storefronts or space in existing churches, until the interwar period. By that time virtually all denominations had their own facility and town presence. Carol Karels, Leonia Legacies: Voices Then, Voices Now (Hackensack, N.J.: Tech Repro, 1994), esp. 57–66. 37. ‘‘Leonia Mourns Dr. J. P. Taylor,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, December 28, 1934, 1. The obituary notes that the clergyman (1873–1934) held degrees from New York University (1896) and Union Theological Seminary (1911) and a doctorate in classics from New York University (1915). In 1906, after holding several Methodist posts, he shifted to Presbyterianism and came to Leonia in 1910, where he remained until his death. The article concludes that ‘‘he did not follow the ‘modernists,’ ’’ loved the Greek New Testament and ‘‘strongly opposed the repeal of the prohibition amendment.’’ In an exceptionally laudatory editorial in the same issue it was noted that Dr. Taylor’s long stewardship had raised the congregation to a membership of 422 with benevolent offerings of nearly three thousand dollars and congregational expenses over nine thousand dollars. ‘‘It thus appears that the membership and benevolent offerings have increased three-fold in the 25 years, the congregational expenses and the population of the borough nearly four-fold.’’ Editorial, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, December 28, 1934. 38. Faig, interview, February 9, 1990. 39. ‘‘Trinity Lutherans Will Renovate St. John’s Church,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, December 27, 1940, 1. 40. ‘‘Leonia Mourns Dr. J. P. Taylor,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, December 28, 1934, 1. 41. Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1968), 1:893. Newell’s papers can be found at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. 42. Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944. 43. Federal Writers Project of New Jersey, New Jersey (New York: Hastings House, 1946), 51, 438. Also Wragge, interviews. Many Leonians worked as carpenters and construction workers on the building of Camp Merritt. The cantonment processed over one million men before the war was over. The camp covered areas of present-day Dumont and Tenaﬂy, N.J. 44. J. Shedd, interview, July 28, 1986. 45. Helene T. Svihra, ‘‘Frances Bartlett Tyson (1874–1971),’’ Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990), 201–2; Carol Karels, The Leonia Line (Hackensack, N.J.: N.p., 1993), 149–52. 46. Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1975), 2:262. 290 Notes to Pages 102–107

47. Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944. 48. Margaret Marsh, ‘‘From Separation to Togetherness: The Social Construction of Domestic Space in American Suburbs, 1840–1915,’’ Journal of American History 76, no. 2 (September 1989): 506–27; see also Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘‘Woman’s Sphere’’ in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Carol Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, eds., Women of America: A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), esp. 139–49. 49. Mary Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 50. One New Jersey architect, Gustav Stickley, would declare that ‘‘a home without a hearth is like a body without a soul.’’ Cited in Phil Patton, ‘‘Houses That Have Their Roots in Books,’’ New York Times, February 25, 1993, C10. See also Clifford E. Clark Jr., The American Family Home (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 186–87. 51. Marsh, ‘‘From Separation to Togetherness’’; see also Gwendolyn Wright, Build- ing the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon, 1981), chaps. 6 and 9; Clark, American Family Home, chap. 5. 52. Marsh (‘‘From Separation to Togetherness’’) did not find home ownership to be a distinctive feature of the middle class. Leonia’s experience corroborates this interpretation, since renters made up nearly half the householders in 1900 and only declined to 36 percent by 1910. In 1920 there were still 30 percent of Leonia householders in the renter category. 53. See David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Indus- trializing America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981). 54. Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990). See also Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions (New York: Free Press, 1988), chap. 6. 55. Marsh, ‘‘From Separation to Togetherness,’’ 522. 56. Minutes of Leonia Mayor and Council, April 22, 1898, Borough of Leonia Municipal Archives. The chief marshal was paid forty dollars per month. 57. Doris Faig, interview by Linda Cirino, Leonia, July 29 and September 19, 1986. Original tapes in the Leonia Public Library Archives. 58. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 133. 59. John Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. 60. U.S. federal census for 1880, 1900, and 1910. Blacks who belonged to the early- twentieth-century migration were often thought to prefer suburbs over city in order to take advantage of large household plots for gardens. Their agricultural upbringing made the transition to suburbs smoother than a transition to city and industrial jobs. 61. Theodore de Bary, interview, New York City, July 24, 1997. Blacks appear regularly in photos of graduating classes, Girl Scouts, and other public groups. The exact relations between citizens of different races would only be clear, however, were memories of black citizens also available. Unfortunately, one long-term black family, which was most frequently identified as the authoritative source for this contribution, Notes to Pages 108–112 291 refused, on several different occasions, to be interviewed for this study. Without drawing inferences from nonexistent evidence, one should probably reserve judgment about the memories of racial harmony or the significance of an enduring black presence in suburbia. See also Carol Karels, Leonia Legacies, 63–64. At the time of the founding of Mt. Zion Baptist Church (1928) there were about fifteen black families in Leonia. 62. The 1885 Leonia Park plot plan and model design were generously supplied to me by David Boyd. 63. Palisadian (June 1908). See also June 1909 issue; and Secor Chace, interview by author, Leonia, August 14, 1986. 64. ‘‘Richards Dies, Was Leonia Builder,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, December 23, 1943, 2. 65. Letter of A. W. Hixson to editor, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, December 31, 1943, 4. 66. See May Marsh, ‘‘The History of Leonia’’ (ca. 1935), Leonia Public Library Archives. This document recorded the relevant transportation chronology that affected suburban commutation:

1. 6th Avenue (N.Y.) elevated train 1878 2. 125th Street ferry 1893 3. Englewood trolley 1896 4. Hackensack trolley 1898 5. Broadway subway 1904

The author correctly noted that there had been a ferry service between New York and the Fort Lee Landing since 1825. After the 6th Avenue elevated train connected the Manhattan business district to the Polo Grounds, however, ferry service on the Hud- son accelerated. The trolley, in an important sense, was predicated on this precedent transportation system. See Charles Cheape, Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). 67. Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1975), 1:41. 68. Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 228–34; see also Paul H. Mattingly, The Classless Profes- sion: American Schoolmen in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1975). 69. Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 124–25. 70. Marsh, ‘‘From Separation to Togetherness,’’ 527. 71. John Shedd, interview by author, Leonia, July 28, 1986. Original tape in the Leonia Library Archives. 72. John D. Dorst, The Written Suburb (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 73. See Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 102 and chap. 7. 292 Notes to Pages 113–116

Chapter 5: Country Landscapes, Bohemian City

1. Letter to Artist’s Parents, February 5, 1920, Papers of John Steuart Curry, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 2714. See also Lawrence Schmechebier, John Steuart Curry’s Pageant of America (New York: American Artists Group, 1943). There was at least a generation’s difference between Curry, born in 1897, and his predecessor in Leonia, Peter Newell, born in 1862. 2. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). See James Dennis, Renegade Regionalists (Madison: University of Wis- consin Press, 1998), esp. 244 ff. 3. William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. chap. 8; Michele Bogart, Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chap. 1; Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 16. Curry left Leonia about 1921, lived briefly in New York City after his marriage, then, for much of his most productive years, resided in another suburban town with an art colony, Westport, Conn. 4. The Leonia School of Illustration, organized by Harvey Dunn and Charles S. Chapman, began instruction in the summer of 1914 with thirty-four students and did not survive 1919 as a formal school of instruction. In these classes were a number of artists who later achieved national reputations, including Frank Street, Grant Rey- nard, Dean Cornwell, Henry C. Pitz, Clark Fay, Nancy Fay, Mead Schaeffer, and Arthur Fuller. Saul Tepper, Harvey Dunn: The Man, The Legend, The School of Painting (New York: Society of Illustrators, 1983), 1. Arthur Covey, Harry Wickey, Harry Ballinger, Hugh Belille, Charles Durant, Wil- liam Fisher, Dwight Franklin, Art Fuller, Albin Henning, Robert E. Johnston, Arthur Mitchell, J. Clinton Shepherd, Lee Townsend, and, of course, John Steuart Curry have also been associated with the school and its ongoing influence. 5. Letter of John Stuart Curry to his mother, Margaret Steuart Curry, Chicago, June 21, 1916, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 2714. 6. Letter from Curry to his mother, New York, February 2, 1920, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 2714. 7. Ibid. Curry lived and worked in Leonia from 1920 to sometime in mid- to late 1922. 8. Robert E. Johnston (1885–1933) was born in Canada and studied with Harvey Dunn. In addition to his magazine illustration he painted a well-known mural for the James Whitcomb Riley Hotel in Camden, N.J. For this work he received a money prize that enabled him to build his Leonia studio, where he worked for the rest of his life. J. Shedd, interview, July 28, 1986; Reynard Dey, interview, May 1, 1987; Archives of the Salamagundi Club, New York. Dean Cornwell (1892–1960), one of Dunn’s Leonia students, began as a well- known magazine illustrator and advertising designer (for such companies as Coca Cola, Squibb and Co., and Johnny Walker) but became one of American’s distinguished muralists. He broke into this format with his well-known Los Angeles Public Library mural in 1927 and continued through his career to produce vivid social Notes to Pages 116–117 293 landscapes that often left the art critics chagrined and the public delighted. Patricia Janis Broder, Dean Cornwell: Dean of Illustrators (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1978); Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reels N55, N83, and D229. 9. Clark Fay (1894–1956) and his wife, Nancy (1893–1930), had traveled east from Denver, Colo., to study with N. C. Wyeth and Harvey Dunn. They attended the first classes of the Leonia School of Illustration in 1914, where they thought they learned more of their craft than anywhere else. Clark illustrated for Saturday Evening Post and the Delineator, while Nancy worked as an artist for the Ladies’ Home Journal and Woman’s Home Companion through the 1920s. Walt and Roger Reed, The Illustra- tor in America, 1880–1980 (New York: Society of Illustrators, 1984), 122–23; Who Was Who in American Art, 197; May Wickey (formerly May Street), interview by author, Englewood, N.J., February 27, 1987; Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., reel N88. Frank Street (1893–1944), a native of Kansas City, Mo., studied at the Art Stu- dents League and with Harvey Dunn and Charles Chapman at the Leonia School of Illustration (1914–19). He worked in Leonia for the rest of his life, illustrating for many distinguished magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Jour- nal, Pictorial Review, American Legion Magazine, and Collier’s. Walt and Roger Reed, The Illustrator in America, 1880–1980 (New York: Society of Illustrators, 1984), 144; Saul Tepper, Harvey Dunn: The Man, the Legend, the School of Painting (retrospective exhibit) (New York: Society of Illustrators, 1983); Wickey, interview, February 27, 1987; Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., reel 1079. William Fisher, born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1890, studied at the Art Students League and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he exhibited, among many other places. He later resided in Teaneck, N.J., and opened his own William Fisher Art School in Kennebunk, Maine. Dorothy Bailey, ed., Who Was Who in American Art (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1962), 197; Peg Trapani, interview by author, Leonia, 1986; ‘‘Memories of Ilonka West Fertig and Thomas West,’’ Leonia Library Archives; Ar- chives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., reel N88. 10. See also Susan Meyer, America’s Great Illustrators (New York: Excaliber Books, 1978). 11. Letter of April 20, 1920, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 12. Letter of John Steuart Curry to his parents, New York, January 28, 1923. Curry wrote: ‘‘Well, I am married, happy and glad of it. . . . I was awfully afraid you would think I had eloped with a model or some female of the Greenwich Village type.’’ Curry’s last letter from Leonia was on July 10, 1922. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., reel 2714. 13. Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis Publishing Co., 1968), 1:1002. See also Henry C. Pitz, Howard Pyle: Writer, Illustrator, Founder of the Brandywine School (New York: Bramhall House, 1965); see also Patricia Hills, Turn-of-the Century Amer- ica: Paintings, Graphics and Photographs, 1890–1910 (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1977). See Joseph Stuart, ‘‘Harvey Dunn: Painter of the Pioneer Experience,’’ MS, Harvey Dunn Archives, South Dakota State Museum, Brookings, S.D. 294 Notes to Pages 117–122

14. Howard Pyle, ‘‘A Small School of Art,’’ Harper’s Weekly, July 17, 1897, 710–11. 15. In No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), R. Jackson Lears puts Pyle in an antimodernist mode that finds little contradiction in assimilating ‘‘premodern vitality to progressive optimism’’ (164). 16. Meyer, America’s Great Illustrators, 53. 17. Steve Shipp, American Art Colonies, 1850–1930: A Historical Guide to America’s Original Art Colonies and Their Artists (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996). 18. Meyer, America’s Greatest Illustrators, 40–63. See also James J. Best, ‘‘The Brandywine School and Magazine Illustration: Harper’s, Scribner’s and Century,’’ Journal of American Culture 3, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 128–44. 19. Sarah Burns, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 20. Henry Mills Alden, ‘‘A Tribute,’’ in Howard Pyle: A Record of His Illustrations and Writings, comp. Willard S. Morse and Gertrude Brinckle (Wilmington, Del.: Wilmington Society of Fine Arts, 1921). 21. Edgar Horvell, ‘‘Harvey Dunn with the American Expeditionary Force’s Art Program,’’ Smithsonian Journal of History 2, no. 4 (Winter 1967–68): 45–56. See also Andrew Wyeth, ‘‘N. C. Wyeth,’’ An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 83; May Wickey, interview by author, Englewood, N.J., February 27, 1987. 22. Robert F. Karolevitz, Where Your Heart Is: The Story of Harvey Dunn, Artist (Aberdeen, S.D.: North Plains Press, 1970), chap. 3. 23. Wickey, interview, February 27, 1987. Grant Reynard has made some handwrit- ten notes on the exhibition catalogue Paintings, Prints and Drawings from the Grant Reynard Collection, Montclair Art Museum, January 17–February 7, 1965, Montclair, N.J., which indicate he met Harry Wickey in Harvey Dunn’s Leonia class in 1914, ostensibly the first year the Leonia School of Illustration opened. 24. Karolevitz, Harvey Dunn, 46. See also Ilonka Fertig, interview by author, Lan- caster, Va., May 19, 1990; letter to author from Mrs. May Wickey, Englewood, N.J., March 26, 1988. The first class in 1914 purportedly numbered thirty-four. See Ernest Watson, ‘‘Harvey Dunn: Milestone in the Tradition of American Illustration,’’ Ameri- can Artist, 16. 25. Karolevitz, Harvey Dunn; see also Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1960), 3:243. See also Harvey Dunn: Son of the Middle Border, exhibition catalogue of the South Dakota Memorial Art Center, Brookings, S.D. (1984); Fertig, interview, May 19, 1990. 26. Karolevitz, Harvey Dunn, 37. 27. Ibid., 93. See also Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen Jr., N. C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations and Murals (New York: Bonanza Books, 1972), 127– 28, 141–43. 28. Horvell, ‘‘Harvey Dunn,’’ 45–56. Michele Bogart has argued that the strategic use of illustration during the war resulted in a new and powerful legitimation of illustration as art. This new respectability enabled some illustrators to reduce their ambivalence about illustration as art; it also enabled others, such as Dunn, to use their Notes to Pages 122–130 295 established skills of illustration in artwork for their own artistic priorities rather than for contract or public consumption. See Bogert, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art, 128. 29. Wickey, interview, February 27, 1987. 30. Joseph S. Czestochowski, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood: A Portrait of Rural America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981); William Slaughter, Westport Artists of the Past (Westport, Conn.: Westport Bicentennial Arts Committee, 1976). 31. Thomas Hart Benton, ‘‘John Curry,’’ University of Kansas Review (Winter 1946): 87–90. See also Erika Doss, ‘‘The Art of Cultural Politics: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism,’’ in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 195–220. 32. Harry Wickey, Thus Far (New York: American Artists Group, 1941); Harlan Knautz, Grant Reynard, NA: An American Painter (Berea, Ohio: Baldwin Wallace College, 1974); Thomas Craven, ed., A Treasury of American Prints (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939); ‘‘J. Clinton Shepherd,’’ National Cyclopedia of American Biogra- phy (Clifton, N.J.: James T. White, 1984), N-63: 278–79, Wickey, interview, February 27, 1987. (The Streets were actually born in Missouri but raised in Kansas.) 33. Dean Krakel, Mitch: A Personal Biography of Arthur Roy Mitchell, Western Artist (Trinidad, Colo.: Powder River Book Co., 1981), 99–101. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. A representative portion of Mitchell’s opus has been collected in the Arthur Mitchell Museum, Trinidad, Colo., which also contains work of his Leonia friends Frank Street and Grant Reynard as well as work of Harvey Dunn. Dunn’s work has been collected by his native state in the South Dakota Art Museum at Brookings, S.D. In that collection one can also find the artwork of Frank Street and Grant Reynard, among other Leonia artists. 34. Christopher P. Wilson, ‘‘The Rhetoric of Consumption: Mass-Market Maga- zines and the Demise of the Gentle Reader, 1880–1920,’’ in The Culture of Consump- tion: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed. Richard W. Fox and T. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 35. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham, chap. 8. 36. Burns, Pastoral Inventions. 37. See Ann F. Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990). 38. Undated letter fragment and James Denney, ‘‘Willa Cather Gave Him Some Advice,’’ both in Sunday World Herald, Magazine of the Midlands, September 19, 1982, in Grant Reynard Papers, Archives of the Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, Nebr. See also Grant Reynard, The Colors of My Life: Memoirs of a Nebraska Artist (Kearney, Nebr.: Kearney State College, 1986). 39. Wickey, interview, February 27, 1987. May Wickey had lived in Leonia since 1917, the year of her first marriage to Frank Street. She continued to live in their Studio-in-the-Barn until, some years later, she married Harry Wickey (1892–1968), whom they had known since the days of the Dunn-Chapman School of Illustration. 40. Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980); see also Laurence Veysey, ‘‘The Ferrer Colony and the Modern School,’’ The Communal Experience: 296 Notes to Pages 131–133

Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Cultures in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 77–177. 41. Knautz, Grant Reynard, 16–17; Barbara Reynard Dey, interview, May 1, 1987. 42. Harry Wickey, Thus Far: The Growth of an American Artist (New York: Ameri- can Artists Group, 1941), 51–53, 64–65. Wickey’s personal papers can be found in the Harry and Maria Wickey Collection, Syracuse University. See also Carl Zigrosser, A World of Art and Museums (Philadelphia: Art Alliance, 1975). For discussions of the rising importance of galleries and art dealers in the shaping of America’s art canon, see Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); and Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Arthur Sinclair Covey (1877–1960) was a Leonia resident who distinguished himself as a muralist and eventually was elected to the National Academy of Design. He studied and worked for three years (1913–15) with Sir Frank Brangwyn on the eight wall panels for the Panama-Paciﬁc Exposition in San Francisco; completed the historical panels for the Wichita, Kans., city library; and executed eighteen panels for the Lord and Taylor department store in New York City and seven for the Kohler (Wis- consin) Administration Building as well as panels for Norton Hall in Worcester, Mass., and for Filene’s of Boston. He won the commission for one of the panels for the George Washington Bicentennial Exhibition in the National Gallery in 1932 for Episodes in the Life of John Brown (1937) for the Torrington, Conn., post ofﬁce. See North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, February 12, 1932, 1. Also Karal Ann Marling, Wall-to- Wall America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 75. See also Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1960), 3:188. See also Christopher Finch, ‘‘American Regional Painting Comes of Age,’’ Architectural Digest (December 1991): 68–81. 43. The Mahonri Young and Wickey works are in a private collection. Dunn’s portrait is a part of the collection of South Dakota Memorial Art Center, Brookings, S.D.; Arthur Mitchell’s portrait of Harvey Dunn is a part of the collection at the Arthur Mitchell Memorial Museum, Trinidad, Colo. 44. PM illustrations, An Old New York Mayor Gets a Facial (September 2, 1945); and Dean Cornwall Works in the Clouds (December 9, 1945). 45. Wickey, interview, February 27, 1987. 46. See Archives of the Arthur Mitchell Memorial Museum, Trinidad, Colo. 47. One might also note that among the other artists who went from Leonia to Westport’s art colony, there were Clark and Nancy Fay, Art Fuller, John Held Jr., and Remington Schuyler. Technically, Held never lived in Leonia but was a frequent visitor there, often staying with his friend and fellow Utah native, Mahonri Young. Leonia provided the inspiration for his impressionistic watercolor Leonia, NJ (Spring 1918). See The Most of John Held, Jr., intro. Carl J. Weinhardt (Brattleboro, Vt.: Stephen Greene Press, 1972), 26. 48. Walt Reed, Harold Von Schmidt Draws and Paints the Old West (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1972), 36. Notes to Pages 133–137 297

49. Krakel, Mitch, intro. At times Leonia speciﬁcally compared itself with comparable artist towns such as Westport and Old Lyme (Conn.), Rye and Woodstock (N.Y.). See ‘‘Business Plus Art,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, October 16, 1930, 1. See also William H. Gerdts Jr., Painting and Sculpture in New Jersey (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1964); as well as his treatment of the proliferating summer colonies in American Impressionism (New York: Artabras, 1984), 129–37. His indispensable Art across America (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990) identiﬁes many of the art colonies nationwide. Gerdts does not, however, treat Leonia as an art colony, although he mentions several of its prominent members, most notably Paul Dougherty, Harvey Dunn, C. Harry Eaton, Van Dearing Perrine, and Alexander Shilling. See also Michael Jacobs, The Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America (Oxford: Phaidon, 1985); Constance E. Koppleman, ‘‘Nature in Art and Culture: The Tile Club Artists, 1870–1900’’ (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York–Stony Brook, 1985). 50. Martin Green (New York 1913 [New York: Scribners, 1988]) has argued that the Armory Show polarized modern and western art in the United States and made depictions of the Old West seem to be atavistic. In mass magazines and the new radio media these Western motifs were only at an early stage of great popularity. One might note that western motifs were also not absent from the 1913 Armory Show itself but have been obscured in the subsequent scholarly memory. 51. Kenneth Lynn, ‘‘The Rebels of Greenwich Village,’’ Perspectives in American History 8 (1974): 335–77. 52. William R. Taylor, ‘‘The Power of the Word: Greenwich Village and the Golden Fleece, 1913–1929’’ (address for Greenwich Village: Culture and Countercul- ture, sponsored by the New York Institute of the Humanities, October 18, 1990, New York University). See also Green, New York 1913. 53. Green, New York 1913, 188–89. See also Mahonri Sharp Young, The Eight: The Realist Revolt in American Painting (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1973). One should note that initial supporters of the Armory Show such as artist Jerome Myers felt totally compromised by the celebration of European art that followed the Armory Show. Cf. Green, New York 1913, 136, 186. 54. Bennard B. Perlman, Robert Henri: His Life and Art (New York: Dover Publica- tions, 1991). 55. One might well argue that the city viewed through a sympathetically urban lens projected these ‘‘suburban’’ values. See Grant Reynard’s extraordinary cityscapes during his tenure as illustrator for the adventuresome New York newspaper PM in the early 1940s. 56. Taylor, ‘‘Power of the Word.’’ 57. In an interview (June 19, 1989) in Tappan, N.Y., with Robert Fuller, son of one of the members of the Leonia artists’ group during the interwar years, he recalled: ‘‘This is what they thought of Modern Art. They’d get a big bucket, a big dishpan about this size, then they put water in it, then they put some kind of oil paint of all different colors—reds, greens, blues, blacks—then they’d take a sheet of paper that they’d worked out and they would stick it in this guck, then shake it out a couple of 298 Notes to Pages 137–143

times and bring it out and look at it and say ‘God, look at what I’ve got here. Isn’t that marvelous.’ That’s what they though of Modern Art. [Laughter] . . . It was. Then they’d do it again. Frank Street and Grant Reynard, I remember doing it in my father’s studio. I thought it was great too. That’s what they felt Modern Art was like.’’ 58. None of these artists attempted any particular theory of their work and, indeed, resisted formal conceptualization. Harvey Dunn, so central and influential to Leonia artists, explicitly rejected ‘‘art for art’s sake.’’ The meaning of a picture, he instructed his students, should be so patent that formal definitions and explanations should be unnecessary. Many of them repeated his own story of an elderly observer requesting a title of one of his works: ‘‘Madam, if you need a title to know what the picture is all about, I have failed.’’ Still, contemporary artists, such as Norman Rockwell, specifically saw Dunn’s overall ability to be one of translating ‘‘a commercial theme into more lofty concepts.’’ Karolevitz, Harvey Dunn, 177, 127.

Chapter 6: The Middle-Class Zone

1. ‘‘Community House’’ pamphlet, n.d., Leonia Library Archives; David Boyd, interview by author, Leonia, February 10, 1989. 2. Leonia Life, June 14, 1922. 3. Ibid., June 21, 1922, 5. 4. Ibid. 5. Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), 1:321. This average was computed for the period 1917–19. 6. ‘‘Community House Assured,’’ Leonia Life, June 14, 1922, 1. 7. Michael Birkner, A Country Place No More: The Transformation of Bergenfield, New Jersey (Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994). 8. Leonia Life, June 22, 1922, 5; ‘‘Community House, Winnetka, Illinois’’ (with photo), Leonia Life, November 15, 1922. See also Michael Ebner, Creating Chicago’s North Shore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 217–20, for additional discussion on Winnetka’s Community House. 9. Figures have been accumulated from the U.S. federal census records for 1920. One should note that the managerial category divided neatly into two distinct eche- lons. The first (28 percent) included brokers (insurance, realty, stock) along with business examiners, appraisers, corporate secretaries or treasurers, foremen and superintendents, while the second (24 percent), a generally lower administrative authority, identified clerks, salesmen, bookkeepers, office accountants, and cashiers. Unskilled labor remained at 7 percent, almost exactly its portion in 1910. 10. Haller (1885–1974) would serve on many local committees, such as the Leonia Planning Board, while researching for his studies of the seventeenth-century commonwealth. In 1938 he published his still classic study, The Rise of Puritanism (1938). See Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1976), 6:177; and Carol Karels, Leonia Legacies (Hackensack, N.J.: Tech Repro, 1994), 113–16. 11. Paul Monroe, ed., Cyclopedia of Education (1911; rpt., New York: Macmillan, 1968), 2:131, 4:469. See also Theodore F. Jones, New York University, 1832–1932 (New York: New York University Press, 1933), 163–64. Notes to Pages 143–148 299

12. Boyd, interview, September 20, 1986. The Athens image clearly inflated the actual case. In the 1905 state census (1,041 inhabitants) there were no clear ‘‘academics.’’ In the 1915 state census (2,132 citizens) there were twelve college and university professors. In the 1920 U.S. federal census (2,979 residents) there were now nineteen academics, compared with twenty-one who identified themselves as ‘‘artists.’’ 13. Archives of the Baker Business School, Harvard University, houses the records (1895–1919) of this company. 14. Leonia Heights Land Company brochure, n.d., Leonia Library Archives, Leonia. 15. Salina Johnson, interview by Kate Scooler, Leonia, September 12, 1986. 16. Mrs. Harry Moore, interview by the author, Leonia, August 8, 1986. 17. ‘‘Sarah Christie,’’ obituary, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, June 23, 1933, 2. The deceased, who lived at 116 Orchard Place, was the widow of A. A. Christie, who was connected to the Leonia Heights Land Company. 18. Letter of Charlotte B. Williams to the editor, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, April 2, 1937, 12. 19. Ilonka Fertig, interview by author, Lancaster, Va., May 19, 1990. In the 1920s Fertig, the daughter of artist Ilona Rado West, began a successful career in interior decorating in New York City. 20. Faig, interview, February 9, 1990. In these years Mrs. Faig was a homemaker and wife of a mason, who during the Depression became a member of the town’s public works crew and later chief of the Leonia Volunteer Fire Department. 21. David Boyd, interview by author, Leonia, September 20, 1986. His father, artist J. Rutherford Boyd, was the chairman of the Committee of 100. 22. Secor Chace, interview by author, Leonia, August 14, 1986. Chace, who offered this ‘‘time-clock’’ characterization, was a career policeman and, in retirement, a shop- keeper in Leonia. 23. Boyd, interview, September 20, 1986. 24. Peg Trapani, interview by L. Cirino, Leonia, 1986. Trapani was a housewife, singer, and sometime journalist. 25. See mention of Yalden in North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, January 30, 1930, 1; ‘‘Attack Fatal to Dr. Yalden,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, February 26, 1937, 1. British-born Yalden (1870–1937) had lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Mt. Holyoke College. He specialized in mathematical calculations for astronomical prediction. He was particularly influential in the plotting of eclipses, several of which he witnessed, photographed, and wrote about. He was a sailor and navigator and a designer of sundials. One of his best known is located at Woods Hole Observatory in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, executed in a sculptural collaboration with fellow Leonian and Whet- stone member J. Rutherford Boyd. During his years in Leonia (1917–37) Yalden was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society of London in 1930, while serving (according to the 1920 federal census) as superintendent of a trade school in New York City. See, for example, ‘‘Doings in Leonia,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 13, 1931, 2; and March 31, 1933, 2. See also ‘‘History of the Whetstone Club’’ by Arthur W. Hixson (December 1955), in author’s possession, courtesy of David Boyd. 26. Fertig, interview, May 19, 1990. Urey and Fermi were both residents of Leonia when they received the Nobel Prize for their researches. 300 Notes to Pages 148–154

27. Barbara Reynard Dey, interview by author, Tenafly, N.J., May 1, 1986. 28. May McNeer Ward (the author and artist’s widow), interview by author, Res- ton, Va., November 24, 1989. 29. ‘‘Community House Plans Come to an End,’’ Leonia Life, February 7, 1923, 1. 30. John Wragge, interview by author, Leonia, July 23, 1986. Wragge, son of a German immigrant, worked most of his life as a car mechanic, ultimately owning his own business in the old Village servicing the autos of his commuter clientele. 31. Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944 (1944); see also ‘‘John Pollock, Former Leonia Mayor Dies in New York City,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, August 3, 1945, 1. The actual purchase of the Wood homestead and the creation of Wood Park would formally occur after Pollock’s first two terms as mayor (1920–23). See Borough of Leonia Minute Book, December 23, 1925, for details of the lease between the town and Wood, for which $1,920 would be paid as rent for five years; the land would be called Wood Park and the town’s option to buy for $32,000 had to be exercised before December 1, 1930. By January 1, 1930, Pollock had again been elected mayor to preside over his earlier initiative. 32. The novel centralization of booking features such as Keith’s nevertheless continually accommodated the local dynamics of communities on a troop’s circuit. Pol- lock had to be sensitive to the novelty of this local/translocal booking work as he shaped his own managerial values. See Robert Snyder, ‘‘Vaudeville and the Transfor- mation of Popular Culture,’’ in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Russell Sage, 1991). 33. ‘‘Who’s Who in Bergen: John Pollock,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, August 7, 1931, 3. 34. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. 35. Henry Lankenau, interview by Kate Scooler, Leonia, December 2, 1986. 36. Michael McCarthy, ‘‘Corrupt or Contented? Philadelphia Stereotypes and Sub- urban Growth on the Main Line,’’ in Suburbia Re-examined, ed. Barbara Kelley (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 111–18. 37. B. R. Dey, interview, May 1, 1986. Mrs. Dey was the daughter of artist Grant Reynard, who lived in the Junction area of Leonia. 38. Jesse Leslie, interview, Leonia, October 22, 1986. 39. Mrs. Harry Moore, interview by author, Leonia, August 8, 1986. 40. See Reynolds Farley, ‘‘Suburban Persistence,’’ in North American Suburbs: Poli- tics, Diversity and Change, ed. John Kramer (Berkeley: Glendessary Press, 1972), 84. 41. Joseph Bevacqua (Planning Board member and chair, 1978–92), interview by author, Leonia, April 8, 1992. Bevacqua, a graduate of Fordham University, worked for much of his career for a New Jersey engineering firm. 42. M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), esp. chap. 7: ‘‘Zoning and the Single Family Home.’’ 43. Janet Hutchison, ‘‘Building for Babbitt: The State and the Suburban Home Ideal,’’ Journal of Policy History 9, no. 2 (1997): 184–210; Ellis Hawley, ‘‘Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of the ‘Associative State,’ ’’ Jour- nal of American History 61 (June 1974): 116–40. Notes to Pages 155–165 301

44. Bureau of the Census, Federal Census, MSS (1900 and 1920). 45. Boyd, interview, September 20, 1986. 46. Trapani, interview, 1986; Boyd, interview, February 10, 1989; Fertig, interview, May 19, 1990. 47. Boyd, interview, September 20, 1986. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. ‘‘Even in Leonia,’’ editorial, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, June 12, 1930, 4; ‘‘Norman Thomas Sees in Socialism Only Hope against Chaos-War,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, April 17, 1931, 1. 51. Mary Beth Norton et al., A People and a Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1986), 2: 538–40. 52. In 1989 Leonia contained 3,230 households and 8,365 residents. See »www .bergenrecord.com/yourtown/census/leonia.htm….

Chapter 7: The Political Culture of Suburban Professionals

1. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 174–77; see also Eric H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 2. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. Wragge, the son of immigrants from Bremen Germany, spent nearly his entire life in Leonia, ﬁrst as a carpenter’s apprentice, then as auto mechanic, and in later retirement years as a political activist. See also M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), chap 7. This John Boyd was no relation to the Boyd family of artists. 3. North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, July 25, 1941, 2. 4. Michael Ebner, Creating Chicago’s North Shore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); see also Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. 5. ‘‘Watch Out for Consolidators,’’ editorial, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, January 19, 1934, 2. 6. ‘‘Envision the Future, Combine Towns, Plan Your County, Says J. W. Binder,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, September 11, 1930, 1. J. W. Binder was the ‘‘inveterate hustler’’ for the George Washington Bridge and rode circuit throughout the county to stimulate thinking about future planning because of the bridge. 7. Ellen Skinner, ‘‘A Social History of Planning and Land Use: White Plains, New York, 1900–1972’’ (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1990), esp. chap. 3; see also Carol O’Connor, A Sort of Utopia: Scarsdale, 1891–1981 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983). See also the informative research paper by John Petito, ‘‘Covenants, Control and Community,’’ for the 1992 New York University (NYU) Public History Work- shop and available in Bobst Library Archives, NYU. 8. Ellen Skinner, ‘‘The War against the Housing of the Minority Poor: White Plains, New York,’’ in Contested Terrain: Power Politics and Participation in Suburbia, ed. Marc Silver and Martin Melkonnian (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 243–53. 9. Fertig, interview, May 19, 1990; see also De Bary (a Leonia native and later 302 Notes to Pages 165–169

Columbia University professor of history), interview, New York City, July 24, 1997. One memoir of the Spring Street community remembered a consciously supportive, mixed-race community. Carol Karels, ‘‘George Boyd Recalls . . . Leonia during the Depression,’’ Leonia Legacies: Voices Then, Voices Now (Hackensack, N.J.: Tech Repro, 1994), 141–43. 10. Leslie, interview, October 22, 1986. 11. Ivory and Doris Sully, interview by Kate Scooler, Leonia, September 13, 1986. 12. J. M. Van Valen, History of Bergen County, New Jersey (New York: New Jersey Publishing and Engraving Co., 1900), 566–74. 13. Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1975), 2:48. See also Donald A. Krueckeberg, ed., The American Planner: Biographies and Recollections (New York: Methuen, 1983); and Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 14. North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, March 7, 1929, 1. 15. Ibid., April 25, 1929, 1. 16. Ibid., May 2, 1929, 1. 17. ‘‘Open Letter to Harry Moore,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, May 16, 1929, 6. Moore’s fellow candidates were Christian Segard, Patrick Henry Davis, and Fred Clarke. Later the ‘‘opposition’’ was further detailed as the ‘‘builders,’’ a group that included ‘‘Messrs. W. J. Lockwood, [Lynn] Coover, [Osborne] Bowles, [Robert B.] Hansen [of Leonia Bank and Trust] and [John] Boyd, who was no relation to the artist Rutherford Boyd but was the son-in-law of builder William R. Richards [see North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, December 11, 1930, 2], one of the founders of the Leonia Bank and Trust. John Boyd was also the builder of the first apartment building in town (1927), which had actually precipitated the tightening of the zoning regulations. North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 28, 1929, 4. Later other individuals and realtors were specifically named members of this group: DeRuyter Van Orden, E. D. Paulin, A. A. Lincoln, H. D. Van Zandt, E. Schweppe, and J. Kaelin. ‘‘Broad Avenue Association Proceeds with Suit against Leonia Bor- ough,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, February 6, 1931, 1. 18. North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, May 9, 1929, 1. 19. Ibid. See also Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. Arthur Stone, a Leonia resident and vice president of the Erie Railroad, arranged for the railroad to donate the Station Parkway land to the town. Another town resident, a Democrat and landscape architect named Frederick C. Hoth, devised the plan for Station Park as a park. See ‘‘Leonia’s Outstanding Citizens Protest Attack on Pollock,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, October 30, 1931, 1. 20. ‘‘What Kind of Skyline Do We Want for Leonia?’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, May 16, 1929, 1. 21. ‘‘Democrats Also Have Closed Zone Candidates for Office,’’ North Jersey Life/ Leonia Life, May 23, 1929, 1. For mayor the candidates put forward Paul V. Hoyler and for councilmen R. S. Alexander, a Columbia University economist, who had served as councilman before and developed the arguments adopted by Pollock, Thurman Van Metre and Edward W. Bishop. Notes to Pages 169–174 303

22. ‘‘Entire Pollock Ticket Sweeps Election,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, June 20, 1929, 1. 23. ‘‘Pollock Ticket Sweeps Leonia after Peaceful Campaign,’’ North Jersey Life/ Leonia Life, November 7, 1929, 1. 24. Editorial, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, January 9, 1930, 4. 25. ‘‘A Complete Town,’’ editorial, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, September 25, 1930, 2. 26. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. 27. The Broad Avenue Association continued to criticize the zoning code. See ‘‘Broad Avenue Association Proceeds with Suit against Leonia Borough,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, February 6, 1931, 1. 28. John T. Cunningham, New Jersey: America’s Main Road (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 292–93. The three Democratic governors were Edward I. Edwards (Hudson County), George S. Silzer (Middlesex County), and A. Harry Moore, no relation to Leonia’s mayor with a similar name (Hudson County). 29. ‘‘Business plus Art,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, October 16, 1930, 4. 30. See chapter 9 of the present study: ‘‘The Modernization of Suburban Realism.’’ 31. ‘‘Who’s Who in Bergen: John Pollock,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, August 7, 1931, 3. 32. ‘‘Taking Zoning Problems Out of Politics,’’ editorial, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, April 10, 1931, 4. 33. After the controversial Republican split during the 1912 presidential election, Leonia and Bergen County politics paralleled each other for a time and split with Republican statewide and national voter proportions, increasingly inﬂuenced by the politics of big-city machinery. Town and county politics began to diverge during the Depression, however, due to dynamics that this chapter documents. See Stanley Worten et al., New Jersey: Past and Present (New York: Hayden Book Co., 1964), esp. 85–98. 34. M. P. Baumgartner, The Moral Order of a Suburb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and my essay ‘‘Excavating the Historical Suburb,’’ American Quarterly 41, no. 4 (December 1989): 689–94. 35. ‘‘Taking Zoning Problem Out of Politics,’’ 4. 36. ‘‘Dr. W. Haller Answers Statement of Osbourne Bowles,’’ North Jersey Life/ Leonia Life, November 13, 1931, 4. Haller’s wife was a town activist and a member of the Leonia Planning Board. William Haller was the distinguished scholar and author of The Rise of Puritanism (1938). 37. Skinner, ‘‘White Plains, New York, 1900–1972,’’ esp. chaps. 3, 4, and 5. Like Leonia, White Plains was unable to construct many apartments or commercial buildings either during the Depression or following the World War. But, unlike Leonia, in the boom of the 1950s the White Plains ofﬁce building, shopping plazas, and new housing became political devices for restraining or ousting lower-income groups. 38. ‘‘Planning Board Presents Survey of Leonia’s Present Development,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, October 16, 1931, 1. 39. ‘‘Joseph H. Foley May Become Councilman,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, January 1, 1932, 1. A council vacancy permitted Pollock to appoint Foley to the 304 Notes to Pages 174–177

council. Later he won election in his own right. Foley was a director of the National Bank of the Philippine Islands. George S. Mills was a longtime resident, having attended the Leonia Grammar School, Hackensack High School (before Leonia High School was built), and New York University. In addition to his service as councilman he served on the Town Planning Commission and the Leonia Board of Education. At the time of his second election as mayor, in 1933, Mills was vice president of the Commercial National Bank and Trust Company of New York City. North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, March 31, 1933, 3. 40. ‘‘Leonia Women to Raise Funds with Card Party at Boyd Home,’’ North Jersey Life/ Leonia Life, September 30, 1932, 1; see also Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944, 10. 41. Editorial, ‘‘Leonia Forms Central Relief Committee,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 13, 1931, 4. The unemployed rates reflected the varied economic status of adjacent suburbs. In 1930 Leonia reported 79 unemployed (under 10 percent of town household heads), while neighboring suburbs reported 17 for well-heeled Englewood and 178 for blue-collar Palisades Park. ‘‘9758 Jobless Census Shows,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, August 21, 1930. 42. ‘‘Relief Money Goes to the Needy,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, January 1, 1932, 1. 43. Faig, interview, September 1986; Ann Vreeland, interview by L. Cirino, Leo- nia, September 23, 1986. Both women considered themselves homemakers in spite of working outside the home. See also Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. 44. Faig, interview, September 1986. 45. Ibid. Eventually, the town established its own relief department supported by public funds. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. 46. Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944. See also New Jersey State Census, MSS, 1915 (microfilm, Elizabeth [N.J.] Public Library); and North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, June 7, 1940. 47. ‘‘129 Graduate from Leonia High School,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, June 17, 1932, 4. Although the first graduating class contained 17 students, the average commencement afterward produced 32, until the 1920s, when it rose to 71 students. A precipitous upturn occurred by the 1930s, however, with an average of 112 gradu- ates in the early years of the Depression. 48. ‘‘Leonia Board of Education Shows Plans for Enlarged System,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, May 6, 1931, 1. 49. ‘‘Leonia Voters Turn Down School Building Decisively,’’ North Jersey Life/ Leonia Life, June 26, 1931, 1. Out of the 933 citizens who cast their votes, 650 were against the bond, 283 for it. 50. ‘‘Who Will Build the High School?’’ editorial, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 13, 1931, 4. 51. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. 52. ‘‘Williams, Corker, Republicans Win Council Seats,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 9, 1934, 1. 53. ‘‘Democratic Policies on Palisades [Park] Democratic Griddle,’’ Bergen Record, September 29, 1934. See, in the same issue, ‘‘Pollock Offers 5-Part Program in Tenafly Talk.’’ Notes to Pages 177–185 305

54. Paul H. Mattingly, ‘‘Politics and Ideology in a Metropolitan Suburb,’’ in Con- tested Terrain: Power, Politics and Participation in Suburbia, ed. Marc Silver and Martin Melkonian (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), chap. 9. Leonia gave 68 percent of its votes (1,517) to Pollock and 28 percent to his opponent, Edward A. Kenney, the eventual victor in both the 73d and 74th Congresses (1934–38). In 1934 Kenney totaled 42,959 (52 percent) votes to Pollock’s 40,383 (48 percent). Bergen Evening Record, November 7, 1934. 55. ‘‘Defending the Indefensible,’’ editorial, Bergen Evening Record, October 11, 1934; ‘‘Part Allegiance Is a Costly Luxury,’’ editorial, Bergen Evening Record, October 19, 1934; ‘‘World Champion Double-Crossers,’’ editorial, Bergen Evening Record, Oc- tober 29, 1934. The targeted Bergen County boss was Ralph Chandless of Hasbrouck Heights, with whom the Bergen Evening Record associated the Republican slate that included Pollock. 56. North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, August 24, 1934, 1. 57. Ibid. 58. Steven J. Hoffman, ‘‘ ‘A Plan of Quality’: The Development of Mt. Lebanon [Pa.], a 1920s Automobile Suburb,’’ Journal of Urban History 18, no. 2 (February 1991): 141–81. 59. Bevacqua, interview, April 8, 1992.

Chapter 8: The Ideology of the Civic Conference

1. Liz Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 2. See Warren Sussman, ‘‘The Culture of the Thirties,’’ Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 150–83. 3. Steven Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 4. Wesley and Ann Vreeland, interview by L. Cirino, Leonia, September 23, 1986. 5. Fertig, interview, May 19, 1990. 6. C. B. Loomis, a Leonia resident, conducted the study and served as the organization’s executive secretary. Membership was open, and there was no fee to join. Several distinguished citizens became ofﬁcers in the association, and a systematic inventory of their neighbors’ various talents and social abilities began in December 1934, a preliminary to a project of planned activities. Loomis was a graduate of Oberlin College and Yale Divinity School. He had by 1934 twenty-two years’ experience in community work and program building, most recently working on a similar project in Meriden, Conn., for the National Council of YMCA and the American Adult Education Association. The president of the Leonia Community Association was Edward J. Allen, who was director of the Seth Low Junior College and president of the Brooklyn conference on Adult Education. The treasurer was the president of the Leonia Bank and Trust Company, Robert Hansen. ‘‘Leonia Community Association Will Study Interests,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 17, 1934; see also editorial in this issue; and 306 Notes to Pages 185–187

Joseph Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 7. ‘‘600 Signers Would Bar School to Community Association,’’ North Jersey Life/ Leonia Life, April 27, 1934, 1. 8. ‘‘Board of Education Closes School to Association,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, May 18, 1934, 1. 9. Editorial, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, May 18, 1934, 4. 10. ‘‘Lease Is Signed for Community House,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, Novem- ber 16, 1934, 1. The house was located near the center of town, at 244 Central Avenue. It was financed in part by the Loomis family renting the second floor, so that the first floor could be public space. The next project of the Leonia Community Association (LCA) was a series of lectures by notable Leonians: Ernest Yalden and Harold Urey on science, R. S. Alex- ander on economics, Rutherford Boyd and Howard McCormick on art, Herman Harrell Horne on ‘‘personality,’’ and, finally, Frank Olmstead on ‘‘Religion and Sci- ence.’’ Olmstead was a YMCA worker and religious leader who was frequently a target of the Leonia Citizens’ League. See North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, April 26, 1935, 1. In August 1935 the two leading spirits of the LCA, Samuel Everett and C. B. Loomis, resigned to take jobs out of state. Everett became assistant professor of education at the University of Illinois, Loomis became regional secretary in the South for the Resettlement Administration. Without the full commitment of an executive secretary, the organization fell apart. 11. Mattingly, ‘‘Politics and Ideology in a Metropolitan Suburb,’’ chap. 9; see also ‘‘Williams, Corker, Republicans Win Council Seats,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 9, 1934, 1. See also ‘‘Pollock Wins Home Town by Slim 2–1 Vote,’’ Bergen Evening Record, November 7, 1934. 12. ‘‘Harmony Elsewhere,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, January 4, 1935, 4. Local nonpartisanship combined with intense interest in national politics in other suburban towns. See the experience of the federally supported greenbelt suburbs of the 1930s in Joseph Arnold, The New Deal in the Suburbs (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 171. 13. ‘‘Norman Thomas Speaks in Leonia,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, January 11, 1935, 1. Thomas claimed that public health, old-age pensions, abolition of child labor, work-job insurance, and public works were all socialist initiatives. He welcomed the New Deal’s adoption of them but thought their applications were ‘‘palliatives’’ that did not address the deeper problems of the Depression. 14. ‘‘Bruce Bliven Tells of Recovery Efforts,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, Novem- ber 23, 1934, 1; ‘‘Leonia Women’s Club to Hear Mrs. Simkhovitch,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, March 15, 1935, 1; ‘‘Lays Stress on Community Spirit,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, March 29, 1935, 1. 15. See Linda Keller Brown and Patricia Vasilenko, ‘‘Time, Space and Subur- banites: The Social-Spatial Structure of Essex, Union and Morris Counties in the Twentieth Century,’’ Cities of the Garden State: Essays in the Urban and Suburban History of New Jersey, ed. in Joel Schwartz and Daniel Prosser (Dubuque, Iowa: Ken- dall/Hunt, 1977), 86–87. This interesting study demonstrated that in New Jersey’s Notes to Pages 188–193 307 largest city, Newark, the last stage of significant growth in the twentieth century occurred in the 1920s; then urban change entered a long period of stasis and decline. The authors also demonstrate convincingly that, for populous (nonurban) Essex, Union, and Morris Counties, the 1920s became the decade with the largest percentage of suburban population increase in New Jersey history and an expansion of a Democratic Party presence in the New Jersey suburbs. See J. Shedd, interview, July 28, 1986. 16. ‘‘Lays Stress on Community Spirit,’’ 1. 17. See Sussman, ‘‘Culture of the Thirties,’’ 174–75. See also Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938). 18. William Shedd, interview by Kate Scooler, Leonia, July 21, 1986. 19. Ibid. 20. See, for example, ‘‘Opponents of the New Deal,’’ editorial, Bergen Evening Record, September 26, 1934, editorial page. The newspaper enthusiastically endorsed Democratic governor A. Harry Moore, Democratic congressman (9th District) Ed- ward Kenney, and Republican U.S. senator Warren S. Barbour through the 1930s. See the continuing celebration of independent voter discrimination in the editorial for Bergen Evening Record, October 17, 1940. 21. J. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. Forstoff owned the Forstoff Weaving Com- pany and was an official with the First National Bank of Fort Lee (N.J.). John Wragge recalled that the deciding vote for the Civic Conference was cast by John Olson, later a staunch critic of the organization. After World War II Forest Park, Ohio, set up an analogous structure, the Civic Association, and Scarsdale, N.Y., in the interwar period created the umbrella organization the Town Club. See Zane Miller, Suburb: Neighborhood and Community in Forest Park, Ohio, 1935–76 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981); and Carol O’Connor, A Sort of Utopia: Scarsdale, 1891–1981 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), chap. 5. 22. J. Shedd, interview, July 28, 1986. 23. ‘‘John Pollock, Former Leonia Mayor Dies in New York City,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, August 3, 1945, 1. 24. Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944, 40; see also J. Shedd, interview, July 28, 1986. 25. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. 26. Johnson, interview, September 12, 1986; and Bevacqua, interview, April 8, 1992. 27. Johnson, interview, September 12, 1986. 28. ‘‘Men’s Neighborhood Announces New Officers—History of Club Compiled by New President [Ray Addison Sigsbee],’’ Leonia Life, September 5, 1923, 1. 29. Leonia Life, October 18, 1922, 1. Leonia’s effort consciously modeled itself on the Winnetka (Ill.) Community House, which for a time prompted discussion of such facilities in many communities nationwide. 30. ‘‘Primary Forecast,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, July 26, 1935, 16. 31. Johnson, interview, September 12, 1986; see also Carol Karels, Leonia Legacies (Hackensack, N.J.: Tech Repro, 1994), 149–51. 308 Notes to Pages 193–197

32. Mildred de Bary, ‘‘The Editor Speaks,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, April 14, 1944, 1. 33. Ibid. See also ‘‘Wilbur Osler, Once Mayor, Dies in Hospital,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, February 9, 1950, 1. The obituary notes that Osler served as mayor of Leonia in 1912–13. His own generational pattern illuminates his appreciation of the depoliticized character of the old suburban village. He was born in Philadelphia in 1863, and after his education there, he entered his uncle’s cordage business. In 1897 he came to New York City to open an office for the firm and immediately bought a home in Leonia for his family. He became active in many cultural, educational, and civic affairs, creating the first Shakespeare Club in the town. He extended this interest in drama by coaching many amateur town productions, helped found the Leonia Savings and Loan, and contributed to the building code deliberations. Before his tenure as mayor he served on the board of education and the borough council. 34. North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, June 7, 1940, 1. 35. North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, July 25, 1941, 2. 36. W. Shedd, interview, July 21, 1986. 37. ‘‘Three Mayoralty Candidates Seek Office in Local Primaries,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, September 13, 1935, 1; ‘‘Democrats Urge More Minority Representa- tion,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, October 18, 1935, 1. 38. ‘‘GOP Candidates Elected,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 8, 1935, 1. Peggy Rado was the daughter of founding editor Martha Rado. 39. ‘‘Town Goes Completely GOP for Seventh Straight Year,’’ North Jersey Life/ Leonia Life, November 6, 1936, 1. The editorial also noted that the last Democrat to take a seat on the Leonia council was R. S. Alexander, one of this year’s candidates. He was appointed in 1931 by Republican mayor Pollock to fill an unexpired term. 40. John Stencken, interview by author, Leonia, July 25, 1986. 41. Ibid. See also ‘‘Over 700 Attend Dedication of New School,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, February 5, 1953, 1; ‘‘Conference Candidates for Office,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, March 12, 1953, 1. 42. J. Shedd, interview, July 28, 1986. 43. W. Shedd, interview, July 21, 1986. 44. ‘‘Forstoff Picked for Mayor,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, August 6, 1943, 1; ‘‘Council Announces Mayor for Re-Election; Herterich and F. S. Smith for Council,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, March 6, 1945, 1; ‘‘Mayor, Polhemus and Kennedy Are Endorsed,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, March 13, 1947, 1. Political allegiances became strengthened in other ways as well. Former mayors and Councilmen George S. Mills and Wilbur Osler were related by marriage. East Bergen Express, March 5, 1943, 4. In 1944 Democratic councilman Galland’s son married then Republican mayor Forstoff’s daughter in St. John’s Roman Catholic Church. Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, January 28, 1944, 6. In 1951 one daughter of Council- man George Stanley wed the son of popular school board member John McGavack, and his other daughter wed the son of longtime member and president of the school board, Jesse Leslie, who also served as the borough attorney for many years. See ‘‘Miss Virginia Stanley Wed to Ensign John McGavack, Jr.,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, June 7, 1951, 1. Notes to Pages 197–199 309

45. The early presidents of the Civic Conference are listed here with their occupation and political afﬁliation:

Martin H. Jachens, 1939, engineer, Republican Frank S. James, 1940, Republican George S. Mills, 1941 (resigned), banker, Republican Victor K. LaMer, 1942, chemistry professor, Republican Edwin W. Patterson, 1943, Columbia law professor (sabbatical), Democrat Paul B. Williams, 1943, Republican L. Stanley Ford, 1944, attorney, Republican Dudley Allen, 1945, public service executive, Republican Ralph S. Alexander, 1946, Columbia, economics professor, Democrat Edwin W. Patterson, 1947, law professor, Democrat Edward S. Peterson, 1948, Republican Victor Ferrall, 1949, attorney, Republican Eugene Vann, 1950, insurance executive, Democrat H. E. A. Forstoff, 1951, manufacturing executive/banker, Republican Stephen Jurbala, 1952, attorney for Met Life, Republican Dudley Martin, 1953, New York Times journalist, Republican

46. ‘‘Little Life,’’ East Bergen Express, January 1, 1943, 1. One might note that the editor was Worthington Wells, who a few years earlier had been a delegate to the Civic Conference from the Leonia Republican Club. 47. Ibid. 48. Edward Fertig, letter to William Simmeral, president, Men’s Neighborhood Club, Leonia, in North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, January 1, 1943, 1. Fertig was the son- in-law of artist/socialist Ilona Rado West. 49. Ibid. 50. See, for example, ‘‘The Leonia Civic Conference,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, April 21, 1944, 4; ‘‘The Editor Speaks,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, June 9, 1944, 1; ‘‘The Editor Speaks,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, November 2, 1945, 4; February 18, 1948, 12; ‘‘Along Life’s Way,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, February 9, 1950, 1. For the Henry Wallace endorsement, see ‘‘The Editor Speaks,’’ North Jersey Life/ Leonia Life, February 2, 1945, 1. Mrs. de Bary died suddenly in May 1950. Her obituary noted that she was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1884; had worked on various newspapers; came to Leonia in 1924; and raised her ﬁve children there while working for the Bergen Evening Record. She was a member of the Leonia Women’s Club, the Leonia Co-Operative Association, and the First Church of Christ Scientist in En- glewood, N.J. In 1946 she changed the editorial column from ‘‘The Editor Speaks’’ to ‘‘Along Life’s Way.’’ Throughout the late 1940s she kept up a steady drum roll of endorsements for the United Nations and other Progressive issues, among which, in her mind, the Civic Conference ﬁt snugly. ‘‘Editor of Leonia Life Dies,’’ Leonia Life/ North Jersey Life, May 25, 1950, 1; T. de Bary, interview, July 24, 1997. 51. ‘‘Local Contest for First Time in Seven Years,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, March 31, 1944, 1; see also April 7, 1944, 1. 310 Notes to Pages 199–204

52. Ibid. 53. ‘‘Republican Candidates State Why They Oppose Conference Plan,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, April 14, 1944, 1. The two Republican candidates were F. Fred Hohenholt, a Jersey City native, a Leonia resident since 1933, and an engineer; and Walter C. Kiefer, a businessman. Hohenholt had already served one term as councilman with Civic Conference endorsement.‘‘Conference Picks Walden, Hohenholt,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, May 16, 1941, 1. 54. ‘‘Election Has Contest for Council,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, November 2, 1945, 1. The candidates in 1945 were Charles L Herterich, a New York banker, and Frank S. Smith, the Democrat and a New York telephone executive. 55. ‘‘Vann Traces the History of Civic Conference,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, November 2, 1950, 3; see also ‘‘Vann Explains Civic Conference and Its Stand,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, February 1, 1951, 1. 56. ‘‘Vann Cites Civic Conference Objections and Answers,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, November 9, 1950, 3. 57. ‘‘Vann Explains Choice of Conference Candidates,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, November 16, 1950, 3. 58. Stencken, interview, July 25, 1986. 59. ‘‘Civic Conference Review Candidate Endorsement,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, January 29, 1948, 1; ‘‘Election Is Triumph for McGavack,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, February 12, 1948, 1. 60. Donald and Barbara Dey, interview, by author, Tenafly, N.J., May 1, 1987; see also ‘‘Walsh Pleads Vet Needs Are Still Urgent,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, January 16, 1947, 1. Eventually, the apartments were built and represented the first low-cost housing in Leonia. ‘‘106 Family Apartment Is FHA Approved,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, September 1, 1949, 1. 61. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986; Chace, interview, August 14, 1986. 62. ‘‘Boyd Wins Appointment to Leonia Police Force,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, April 27, 1950, 1. George Boyd, the first black policeman, had been a graduate of Leonia High School (1944), an honors student, and had served as second lieutenant in the Army Air Force. He had also completed two years of study at City University in New York City. After a year’s service on the Leonia police force, Boyd went on to a distinguished career in the armed services. 63. Walsh Acts to Inform Bettors ‘No Soap,’ ’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, May 12, 1949, 1; ‘‘Mayor Demands That Prosecutor Offer Apology,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, June 1, 1950, 1. 64. ‘‘Crime Probe Stirs Garden State Blooms; Bergen at Top in Anti-Gambling Campaign,’’ Bergen Evening Record, April 6, 1951. The county paper constantly reported the denials of Republican Party leaders that critics and reformers had any substantive evidence of Republican corruption. Among many examples in these years, see ‘‘Cavinato Says Opponents Offer Only Double Talk,’’ Bergen Evening Record, April 6, 1951; or the paper’s editorial opinion, ‘‘Who’s Right and Who’s Wrong,’’ April 9, 1951. Nelson Stamler, deputy state attorney general, nevertheless was given occa- sional front-page coverage, especially for his assertion that ‘‘it’s inconceivable that Notes to Pages 204–205 311 local officials do not know that gambling exists.’’ ‘‘Indictments in High Places Com- ing, Stamler Indicates,’’ Bergen Evening Record, April 25, 1951. 65. ‘‘Dickerson Starts $525,000 Libel Suit in Campaign,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, April 5, 1951, 1; ‘‘Dickerson Files Million Dollar Suit for Libel,’’ Leonia Life/ North Jersey Life, March 20, 1952, 1. The Bergen County prosecutor was Walter Winnie, the same individual who earlier had demanded Walsh turn over the in- criminating evidence on the illicit gambling ring. Winnie was himself indicted for ‘‘misconduct’’ in 1951 on charges of failing to pursue evidence of a gambling network in the county. See also ‘‘Suit for a Million Filed by Dickerson,’’ Bergen Evening Record, March 18, 1952, 1. After eight months defending Dickerson against any charges of wrongdoing, the Bergen Evening Record begrudgingly conceded the need for an investigation. Cf. ‘‘Time to Blow the Whistle,’’ editorial, Bergen Evening Record, March 18, 1952, 26; with ‘‘Just a Suggestion,’’ editorial, Bergen Evening Record, November 15, 1952. The suit seems to have quietly died and was not mentioned in Dickerson’s later obituary. The Bergen Evening Record accorded his passing with the front-page respect due a once-prominent politician. ‘‘Dickerson Dies at 66’’ and ‘‘Party Mourns G.O.P. Leader,’’ Bergen Evening Record, August 22, 1966, 1. 66. ‘‘Joseph Walsh Was Councilman,’’ obituary, Bergen Evening Record, December 26, 1976, C24. See also ‘‘Leonia’s Walsh Cites Gambling Hits Leadership,’’ Bergen Evening Record, March 12, 1952, 1. The Bergen Evening Record made no connection between Meyner’s landslide victory and the previous two years of gambling investigations that implicated many local police chiefs and even Bergen County’s prosecutor plus its chief of detectives. See ‘‘As Good a Reason as Any,’’ editorial, Bergen Evening Record, November 4, 1953, which attributed Meyner’s landslide to Republican politicians’ indifference to ‘‘broken local fences.’’ 67. ‘‘Idea for Marine Park More than 25 Years Old,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, August 16, 1951, 1. 68. J. A. Walsh, letter to [William] Bowerman, in Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, March 2, 1950, 12. 69. ‘‘Leonia Council 5–1 in Support of Marine Park,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, June 29, 1950, 1; ‘‘Pros and Cons on Marine Park Are Expressed,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, July 6, 1950, 1; ‘‘Leonia Deeds Marine Park Land; Walsh Resigns as Com- missioner—Only Offered His Resignation as Police Commissioner,’’ Leonia Life/ North Jersey Life, July 13, 1950, 1; ‘‘Walsh Retains Local Attorney on Marine Park,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, July 27, 1950, 1. 70. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. Notes of this interview are in the Archives of the Leonia Public Library. See also ‘‘Mayor Allen Halts Bitter Discussion over Marine Park,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, June 28, 1951, 1; ‘‘Pass Zoning Law That Keeps Leonia Residential Town,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, January 17, 1951, 1. 71. ‘‘Conference Candidates Win by 300; Opposition Causes Heavy Voting,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, February 15, 1951, 1; ‘‘Citizen’s League Candidate As- sails ‘One-Party’ System,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, September 19, 1951, 1. 72. After Eisenhower’s 1952 election victory the Bergen Evening Record (November 312 Notes to Pages 205–207

5, 1952) editorialized that ‘‘it was heartening to see Bergen County reﬂect so accurately the nationwide sentiment of the people.’’ Its celebration of state, county, and local party cohesion marked a sharp change from its 1930s priorities of ‘‘political independence.’’ 73. ‘‘Leonia G.O.P. Boss Rebels against One Party System,’’ Bergen Evening Record, March 2, 1951, 2; ‘‘All GOP Fight before Voters: Allen, Walsh Top Race for Leonia Posts,’’ Bergen Evening Record, November 3, 1953, 13. 74. ‘‘Mr. Voorhis [minister of the Presbyterian church] Speaks on Concepts of Government,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, January 15, 1953, 1. 75. ‘‘Suggests Walsh for Mayor at Conference Meeting,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, March 12, 1953, 1. See also editorial ‘‘Along Life’s Way,’’ by Nan Shilling in the same issue. See ‘‘Walsh, Ford to Run for Leonia Borough Council,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, March 22, 1946, 1. Walsh was then described as ‘‘a native son of New Jersey, born in West New York.’’ He had been quite active in YMCA volunteer work and on other committees concerned with youth recreational and vocational programs. He had studied science and merchandising at Rutgers, Columbia, and the Newark School of Technology. At that time he worked as executive manager of the New York metropolitan branch of Rochester Germicide Company. 76. ‘‘Civic Conference Candidates Win in All Four Districts,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, November 5, 1953, 1. The actual votes were 1,925 for Dudley Allen and 1,403 for Joseph A. Walsh; ‘‘Civic Conference Ticket Seizes All Posts,’’ Bergen Eve- ning Record, November 4, 1953. In this election some vote splitting occurred, since Walsh ran well ahead of his ticket, as Allen ran behind his. Two years earlier Allen had won the mayoralty with 2,140 votes, about 10 percent more than his 1,953 total. 77. ‘‘Allen’s Victor by 522 Votes; Walsh Beaten,’’ Bergen Evening Record, November 4, 1953, 11. 78. W. Shedd, interview, July 21, 1986. The actual vote gave Payne, the anti–Civic Conference candidate, the largest vote (1,868), Peterson (1,824), Hayes (1,335), and Miller (1,347). ‘‘Civic Conference Elects One, Loses 2nd Candidate,’’ Bergen Evening Record, November 3, 1954, 24. 79. W. Shedd, interview, July 21, 1986. 80. Bevacqua, interview, April 8, 1992. Ford, who arrived in Leonia in 1964, campaigned against the Civic Conference and, after his election victory, served as Democratic mayor for four years (1972–75), working especially for senior housing and environmental space, among other new issues. 81. ‘‘Senator Urges Leonia GOP to Binds Wounds after November 8,’’ Bergen Evening Record, November 1, 1955, 20. 82. Dudley Allen, interview by L. Cirino, Leonia, July 16, 1986. Allen had come to New Jersey from Winthrop, Mass., to attend Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. Upon graduation he took a position with Public Service Electric and Gas Company of New Jersey, which was then centered in Newark. He moved to Leonia in 1942 and became a Newark commuter. Allen became active in the Players Guild, the Men’s Neighborhood Club, and the Leonia Presbyterian Church before receiving the Civic Conference’s call to run for council in 1948. The next year the conference, for which he had served as president in 1945–46, selected him as its mayoral candidate. Notes to Pages 209–216 313

83. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986; Stencken, interview, July 25, 1986; Allen, interview, July 16, 1986; de Bary, interview, July 24, 1997. The equation of brain power and civility continued well beyond the conference’s demise and even before then had been promulgated well beyond Leonia’s boundaries. Cf. ‘‘N.J. Town Proves Brains Can End Civic Woe,’’ Boston Globe, April 15, 1962, 6A. 84. Jon Teaford’s important study Postsuburbia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1997) conﬁrms the new role played by county governments in the last third of the twentieth century, especially in mediating the suburban tensions between local priorities and costly city services.

Chapter 9: The Modernization of Suburban Realism

1. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), chap. 9; see also Michele Bogart, Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. chap. 3. Modernization here connotes the complicated process of replacing a respect for tradition with an enthusiasm for novelty, and this chapter assumes modernization concerns not simply technical artifacts but also the cultural assumptions and focal issues of the process. 2. Lary May, ed., Rethinking America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. chaps. 1, 2, 9, and 10. 3. Bogart, Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art, esp. chap. 1: ‘‘The Problem of Status’’; Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. chap. 16: ‘‘Picto- rial Perils: The Rise of American Illustration.’’ 4. Mahonri M. Young Papers, Harold Lee Library, Brigham Young University, box 5, folder 38. 5. Mahonri S. Young (the artist’s son), ‘‘Mahonri M. Young,’’ Dedicatory Exhibit, April 1965: Brigham Young University, Franklin S. Harris Fine Arts Center (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1965); Mahonri M. Young Papers, Brigham Young Uni- versity, box 5, folder 63 (on Glackens); Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988); Carl Zigrosser, A World of Art and Museums (Philadelphia: Art Alliance, 1975), 31. Young also trained in the Academies Dela- cluse and Colarossi. 6. Mahonri S. Young, interview by author, Water Mill, N.Y., July 12, 1989. 7. Mahonri M. Young Papers, esp. box 6, folder 11. 8. Young, interview, July 12, 1989; Mahonri M. Young Papers, box 6, folder 11; see also Guy Pene DuBois, ‘‘Mahonri Young, Sculptor,’’ in Sculpture, Drawings and Paint- ings by Mahonri Young (New York: Sculptors’ Gallery, 1918). 9. The extensive collection of Mahonri Young’s work can be found at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The university’s ﬁne arts collection there dates Walpi in Sunlight as circa 1918, but Thomas Craven (ed., A Treasury of American Prints [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939]) insisted that the etching was done ‘‘over a long period of time—it was actually ten years in the making,’’ which would make the date later, about 1922 (pl. 98). 314 Notes to Pages 216–220

10. Similar values were embedded in an emergent tourist industry in the West, made possible by the railroads and architecturally designed hotels and resorts. See Ann Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820– 1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990). See also James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 11.Young, interview, July 12, 1989. See also Melissa Dabakis, ‘‘Formulating the Ideal American Worker: Public Responses to Constantin Meunier’s 1913–14 Exhibi- tion of Labor Imagery,’’ Public Historian 11, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 113–32. 12. Mahonri M. Young Papers, box 7, folder 17. Also Report of ‘‘This Is the Place’’ Monument Commission, Salt Lake City, Utah, July 24, 1947, Brigham Young Univer- sity Archives. His work can be found in the National Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Phillips Gallery in Washington, D.C., as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Academy of Design, the Cleveland (Ohio) Museum of Art, and the Newark (N.J.) Museum of Art, among others. 13. Young, interview, July 12, 1989. 14. Before he settled on the caricatured illustrations that would make him both rich and famous, Held experimented with several styles, including his pointillist Leonia, N.J., Spring 1918, undoubtedly a product of one of his visits to Young. Marc Connelly, foreword to The Most of John Held Jr. (Brattleboro, Vt.: Stephen Greene Press, 1972), 16. Held illustrated for many of the major magazines of the 1920s, endlessly reﬁning variations on his best-known depiction, ‘‘the ﬂapper.’’ See also ‘‘John Held Jr.,’’ Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1960), 3:389; Shelly Armitage, John Held: Illustrator of the Jazz Age (Syracuse: Syra- cuse University Press, 1987), 129, for a discussion of his painting Leonia, N.J., Spring 1918. Young used Held as a model for some of his boxing pictures and cultivated his student’s New York routines and artist/friends Robert Henri, Louis Boucher, and Ernest Haskell. 15. B. R. Dey, interview, May 1, 1986; May Wickey, interview by author, Engle- wood, N.J., February 27, 1987. 16. Cf. William Gerdts, Art across America (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990). 17. Young, interview, July 12, 1989. Young’s extraordinary celebration of skilled labor can be seen in his ‘‘worker’’ friezes on the West High School building in Salt Lake City. See also Thomas Ernest Toone, ‘‘Mahonri Young: His Life and Sculpture’’ (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1982). 18. Boyd, interview, February 10, 1989. 19. Mahonri Young Papers, box 5, folder 56. 20. Walt Reed (director of Illustration House [96 Spring St., New York]), interview by author, New York City, December 13, 1990. 21. The extent and variation of ‘‘realism’’ went beyond the United States’ version of it. See Linda Nochlin, Realism (New York: Viking Penguin, 1971). For a very perceptive discussion of the Abstract Expressionists’ later indebtedness to interwar traditions, see Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Notes to Pages 220–226 315

22. Boyd, interview, February 10, 1989. 23. Conversation with John McCurrahan, director of the Museum of Nebraska Art, July 9, 1991, Kearney, Neb. 24. Obituary, New York Times, February 14, 1951. 25. D. Boyd, interview, February 10, 1989. 26. Ibid. See also Douglas Dreishpoon, Science into Art: The Abstract Sculpture and Drawings of Rutherford Boyd (exhibit catalogue) (New York: Hirschl and Adler Gal- leries, 1983), 9–15; and Bogart, Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art, esp. chap. 3: ‘‘Art Directors and the Art of Commerce.’’ 27. Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1976), 6:440. Williams dabbled in many media, particularly well-known for his stained glass windows (at the University of Illinois and Johns Hopkins University), his windows and murals at Indiana State University, the post ofﬁce in New Castle, Delaware, and his porcelain enamel panel in the Cleveland Union Terminal. In 1897 he was born in Liverpool, England, and died in Gettysburg, Pa., Nov. 4, 1975. In Leonia Williams lived in the house on Crescent Avenue originally built by artist C. Harry Eaton and now owned by ceramicist Rachel Jones. He was eventually elected to the National Academy of Design. 28. Boyd, interview, February 10, 1989. 29. Boyd, interview, September 20, 1986. For a commentary on J. Scott Wil- liams and Clara Elsene Peck, see Walt and Roger Reed, The Illustrator in America, 1880–1980 (New York: Society of Illustrators, 1984), 77; see also National Cyclopedia of American Biography (Clifton, N.J.: James T. White and Co., 1980), 59:73; Archives of Salmagundi Club, New York City; Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institu- tion, Washington D.C. (see Papers of J. Rutherford Boyd). 30. See chapter 7, which discusses his seminal role in the development of Commu- nity House. 31. Trapani, interview, November 1986. 32. ‘‘Reception Tomorrow to Open Artists’ Exhibition’’ (front-page headline), Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, April 10, 1936, 1. 33. Boyd, interview, February 10, 1989; and Dreishpoon, Rutherford Boyd, 5, 9; see also feature article on Dynamic Symmetry in Life (cover photo of J. Rutherford Boyd), December 30, 1948. 34. Josef Albers, letter to J. Rutherford Boyd, Black Mountain College, N.C., January 25, 1943, in Boyd Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institu- tion, Washington, D.C. 35. Dreishpoon, Rutherford Boyd, 14–15. 36. In addition to Mahonri Young, sculptors in the Leonia artist colony included Joseph Andrews, Alex J. and John Ettl, Stephen Searles, Frederick Hammergren, and Gerhard Schmidt. 37. Several Leonia artists, including Dean Cornwell and Arthur Covey, became known especially for their murals via the inﬂuence of the renown British muralist Frank Brangwyn. For stained glass, see Alfred Hutty, in National Cyclopedia of American Biography 316 Notes to Pages 227–231

(New York: James T. White, 1963), 46:277–78; for cartoons, see George Mabie, Bob McGeeohan, Nate Collier, Ralph Fuller, and E. Ward Blaisdell. Robert Fuller (artist’s son), interview by author, Old Tappan, N.Y., June 19, 1989. For portraits, see, among many others, George Hausmann, North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, April 14, 1933, August 24, 1934, and February 26, 1953, 1. See also Karal Ann Marling, Wall-to-Wall America: A Cultural History of Post-Ofﬁce Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); and Marlene Park and Gerald Markowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Ofﬁce and Public Art in the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). 38. Alice Meeker, interview by Linda Cirino, Leonia, 1986; Boyd, interview, Febru- ary 10, 1989; National Cyclopedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White and Co., 1953), 38:585–86; reels D114 and N113, Archives of American Art, Smith- sonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; author’s correspondence with artist’s daughter, Judith Boudah (July 14, 1992, Dec 6, 1992, August 18, 1993), which includes an interview with her mother, artist Ruth Moore, February 18, 1993, Charlotte, Vt. 39. B. R. Dey, interview, May 1, 1987; North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, September 12, 1929, 4; ‘‘Bentz Awarded Prize on Coast,’’ Bergen Record, May 14, 1940; obituary, New York Herald Tribune, August 1, 1950. 40. Fuller, interview, June 19, 1989. 41. Boyd, interview, February 10, 1989. 42. See the article on one of these shows at Boyd’s studio in North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, December 19, 1930, 2. A subsequent issue (January 9, 1931) noted that this informal show attracted 350 people in the four days it lasted. 43. ‘‘Learning from Masters,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 4, 1938, 1. May Wickey, earlier Street’s wife, has recalled Frank Street’s admiration for the skills of one of these amateurs, Mrs. Harold Urey, whose husband won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of heavy water during his Leonia years. 44. Henry and Constance Lankenau, interview by Kate Scooler, Leonia, December 2, 1986. 45. Richard D. McKinzie, New Deal for Artists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 106; Bruce Bustard, A New Deal for the Arts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). 46. Who Was Who in America (Chicago: Marquis and Co., 1985), 8:414. Lynd Ward’s papers can be found in the Lauinger Library Archives, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Ward lived in New Jersey suburbs most of his life: Palisade, N.J. (1929–43), Leonia (1943–58), and Cresskill, N.J. (1958–82). He died of Alzheimer’s disease in Reston, Va., on June 28,1985. 47. M. M. Ward, interview, November 24, 1989; see also ‘‘Creative Artists,’’ Leonia Life/North Jersey Life, November 6, 1947, 6. 48. See Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, rev. ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), esp. chap. 22; and Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Notes to Pages 231–240 317

49. Lynd Ward, Storyteller without Words: The Wood Engravings of Lynd Ward (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1974), 10–14. M. M. Ward, interview, November 24, 1989. See also Who Was Who in America, 8:414. 50. Ibid., 20. 51. Ibid.; M. M. Ward, interview, November 24, 1989. 52. Ward, Storyteller without Words, 79. 53. Ibid., 125–26. His wife and author, May McNeer, considered Ward not a realist but a ‘‘romantic with a social conscience.’’ He came by his social conscience honestly, since his father was Rev. Harry Frederick Ward, professor of Christian Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary and one of the founders and general secretary of the American Civil Liberties Union. M. M. Ward, interview, November 24, 1989. 54. M. M. Ward, interview, November 24, 1989. See also National Academy of Design: A Century and a Half of American Art (New York: National Academy of Design, 1975), 238. Ward was president of the Society of American Graphic Artists from 1953 to 1959. 55. M. M. Ward, interview, November 24, 1989. The Biggest Bear (1952), written and illustrated by Lynd Ward, won the prestigious Caldecott award for 1953. Subur- ban pride and support for Ward’s artistry can be found in the embrace of the county- wide newspaper, the Bergen Evening Record, November 2, 1960. 56. Cf. Michael Ebner, Creating Chicago’s North Shore: A Suburban History (Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Ebner makes abundantly clear in most of the eight suburbs discussed that their origins continued to shape the communities’ development. Evanston’s commitment to temperance, Winnetka’s to education, Kenil- worth to a controlled Walter Scott fantasy, had ongoing implications for each suburb which distinguished it from its neighbors.

Chapter 10: Recovering Suburban Memory

1. Lankenau, interview, December 2, 1986. Lankenau worked much of his life for a New York City advertising agency, to which he commuted from Leonia. 2. Robert Garland, ‘‘Sentiment Laden Drama Finds Divided Audience,’’ New York World Telegram, March 13, 1931. 3. J. Brooks Atkinson, ‘‘In Praise of the Good,’’ New York Times, March 13, 1931. See also Gilbert Gabriel, ‘‘The Heart Invincible,’’ New York American, March 13, 1931; John Mason Brown, ‘‘The Play,’’ New York Evening Post, March 13, 1931; Arthur Ruhl, ‘‘Mary Phillips and James Bell Play a Suburban Couple in a Sentimental Drama,’’ New York Tribune, March 13, 1931. 4. ‘‘On Leonia and Mayor,’’ Newark Sunday Call, October 3, 1931. 5. Channing Pollock, ‘‘The House Beautiful,’’ MS, Crosby Gaige Collection of the New York Library of Performing Arts Archives, Lincoln Center. (The play opened on March 12, 1931.) Many thanks to New York University librarian and Leonia Public Library consultant Gail Malmgreen for drawing the play to my attention. 6. Ibid. 7. A ten-thousand-dollar home in 1930 deﬁned the most expensive category of 318 Notes to Pages 241–246

American home, a category that ﬁt only 17 percent of existing residential dwellings in that year. See Carol O’Connor, A Sort of Utopia (Albany: Suny Press, 1983), 97 ff. In Leonia there is no evidence that the zoning board ever levied such a stipulation about minimum house costs in these years. 8. Crosby Gaige, Footlights and Highlights (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948), 233–34. 9. Channing Pollock, Harvest of My Years (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). 10. Pollock, ‘‘House Beautiful.’’ 11. Ibid. 12. John Dorst, The Written Suburb: An American Site, an Ethnographic Dilemma (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 13. ‘‘Old Days in Leonia,’’ Leonia Life, May 24, 1922, 2. Several articles like this example drew on the writing of Robert Hill Greene, at the time a Leonia resident and president of the Men’s Neighborhood Club. Greene’s own published work appeared in 1920 in the Eighteenth Report of the Bergen County (N.J.) Historical Society. 14. Michael Frisch, ‘‘The Memory of History,’’ A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); David Thelan, ‘‘Memory and American History,’’ Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (March 1989): 1117–29. 15. ‘‘English Neighborhood Road,’’ New Jersey Life/Leonia Life, July 4, 1941, 8. 16. On November 27, 1927, the Leonia Planning Board was authorized by the mayor and council to implement the zoning ordinance of 1921 and successive amend- ing ordinances. Leonia Semi-Centennial, 1894–1944. Among the papers of the Leonia Planning Board, passed on to successive chairmen, was Planning and Problems of Town, City and Region: Papers and Discussions at the Twentieth National Conference on City Planning (Philadelphia: William F. Fell Co., 1928). The text likely accompanied the Leonia consultation of city planner Edward Bassett, who was conference president at the 1928 meeting and whose presidential address led the volume. One of the few paragraphs in the text, probably highlighted by Hixson, included: ‘‘Plan for individual character. Every city, county or region has something of its very own, of life, subtle character, individuality. This is most precious. Its preservation and enhancement is the prime duty of every planner’’ (38). 17. ‘‘English Neighborhood Road,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, July 4, 1941, 8. In 1945 Hixson succeeded in having Central Avenue become Fort Lee Road but failed ultimately to convert Grand Avenue into the English Neighborhood Road. 18. Actually, there seems to be some question whether Berry lived in the area. In ‘‘Leonia Grew on Hunting Ground’’ (Bergen Evening Record, April 15, 1968) Berry appears primarily as a land speculator who resided in present-day Jersey City, raised a large family, and conducted his operations from well south of the English Neigh- borhood. In 1669 he did receive a large land grant that included the northern part of Leonia. In Leonia’s 1944 history his association with the area seems to have been more important than any interpretation of what his association actually meant to colonial history or subsequent events. Although Berry’s name did not appear on a street, his name and historical place appeared on one of Hixson’s historic town signs. Notes to Pages 246–254 319

19. John Mason Brown, ‘‘The Play,’’ New York Evening Post, March 13, 1931. These uses of history were not restricted to Leonia but developed nationwide in the resurrec- tion of colonial housing styles as well as in powerful models of historical preservation such as Williamsburg, Va. See Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996). 20. Ultimately, resistant Leonians acquiesced to New Deal programs. Three major Depression-era projects would put Leonians to work and gave the town needed public facilities: the concrete high school grandstand, the high school extension, and the first town assessment for tax purposes. J. Wragge, interview, July 23, 1986. 21. Allen, interview, July 16, 1986. 22. Emma Walsh, interview by S. D. Mattingly, Leonia, June 19, 1986. Mrs. Walsh was a homemaker (with four children) until her husband’s retirement, when she became a secretary in New York City; Stencken, interview, July 25, 1986. Stencken was a professional architect and former mayor of Leonia. 23. See ‘‘Hixson Named Chemical Head at Columbia,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, July 5, 1940, 1. Hixson was born in Mifflinburg, Pa., in 1880. 24. North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, July 25, 1941, 2. 25. North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, November 6, 1931, 1. The advertisement—‘‘Good Cooking Preferred Now as Then’’—filled half the advertisement with a woodcut depicting a couple in Dutch costume with the caption: ‘‘Typical Early Dutch Settlers in Leonia.’’ 26. ‘‘Men’s Club Enjoy Historical Stories,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, October 13, 1933, 3. 27. ‘‘Women Revive Club’s Historical Background,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, January 26, 1934, 2. 28. ‘‘Leonia Pageant Enacted by Club,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, September 29, 1933, 1; ‘‘Historic Pageant Presented by Juniors,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, No- vember 10, 1933, 6. 29. ‘‘Historic Pageant Presented by Juniors,’’ North Jersey Life/Leonia Life, Novem- ber 10, 1933, 2. The pageant had originally appeared in September of the same year and was repeated on several subsequent occasions. The Legend of Leonia was composed by Leonia resident Lela Blanpied, a recent graduate of New Jersey College for Women and shortly to marry into the Bogart family, whose New Jersey roots reached to the seventeenth century. 30. David Glassberg, ‘‘History and the Public: Legacies of the Progressive Era,’’ Journal of American History 73, no. 4 (March 1987): 957–80. 31. David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 120. 32. Anna Noyes, Three Petticoats (N.p., 1955), 35, 128. 33. Herbert Kraft, The Lenape: Archaeology, History and Ethnography (Newark, N.J.: New Jersey Historical Society, 1986), 129. 34. Kraft, Lenape, chap. 8. See also, by the same author, ‘‘Sarah Kiersted,’’ Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990), 26–27. 35. Kraft, Lenape, chap. 8. 320 Notes to Pages 254–259

36. Karal Ann Marling, Wall-to-Wall America: A Cultural History of Post-Ofﬁce Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 37. Adrian Leiby, The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley: The Jersey Dutch and the Neutral Ground, 1775–1783 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 66–72. 38. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriot- ism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 39. In addition to Howard McCormick’s murals, artists Enos Comstock, Charles Chapman, Grant Reynard, Nate Collier, Ralph Fuller, Robert A. Cameron, and H. R. Van Zandt contributed to the 1944 history. 40. Noyes, Three Petticoats, 61. 41. Ibid. 42. Warren and Doris Feirer, interview by Kate Scooler, Leonia, October 22, 1986. 43. Trapani, interview, November 1986. This core of multigenerational residents offset the mobility that characterized so many suburbs. The absence of such a core undermined the essential cohesiveness of newer suburbs such as Greenbelt, Md., during the New Deal years. See Joseph Arnold, The New Deal in the Suburbs (Co- lumbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 184–85. 44. Thelan, ‘‘Memory and American History.’’ Index

Academie Colarossi, 211 Armory Show (1913), 135, 213, Academie Julian, 65, 66, 70, 211, 212, 297nn.50 & 53 235n.23 Art colony, 57, 68, 120–21, 133–37; Ahrens, H., 283n.52 and bohemianism, 8, 64, 113–14, Albers, Josef, 225, 315n.34 124, 134–37, 212; and its genera- Alda, Alan, 148 tional stages, 8, 292n.4; before profes- Alexander, Ralph S., 147, 169, 302n.21, sionalization, 8, 64–65, 120–21, 306n.10, 308n.39, 309n. 45 136–37; exemplifying suburban Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 58– dynamics, 7, 72, 78, 95, 127, 211; as 60 suburban resource, 7, 8, 71, 72, 78, Allaire, Josiah Mott, 47, 50, 80, 286n.6 122, 133–37, 156, 170, 223–26, 234– Allen, Dudley, 202, 206, 207–8, 35 309n.45, 312nn.76 & 82, 313n.83, Art Students League, 57, 66, 73, 115, 318n.21 120, 212, 221, 229, 293n.9 Allen, Edward J., 305n.6 Arthur Mitchell Museum, 295n.33, All Saints’ Episcopal Church. See Epis- 296n.43 copalians, role of Ashcan School, 135–37, 212 Ambleman, Edgar, 283n.53 American Legion, 98, 102, 168, 174, Baker, Alfred Zantzinger, 65–66 185, 190, 198 Baker, Paul R., 280n.12 American Legion Monthly, 122, 293n.9 Ballinger, Harry, 76, 292n.4 American Regionalists, 123 Baptists, role of, 289n.36, 291n.6 American Revolution, as remembered Barbour, Warren S., 307n.20 event, 254–55 Bassett, Edward M., 66–68, 318n.16 Anakajans, 251–54; portrait of, 252 Beeching, David, 41, 83 Anastasia, Anthony, 204 Belille, Hugh, 292n.4 Andrews, Joseph, 315n.36 Bellows, George, 130, 131 Anshutz, Thomas, 220 Bennett, J. S., 283n.52 Architecture: Dutch, 26–27, 73–74, Benson, Stephen, 283n.53 108, 222, 239, 243; Leonia Junction, Benton, Thomas Hart, 123, 225, 232, 91, 97, 103–4; Leonia Park, 36–38, 286n.4 107–8 Bentz, John, 133, 228 322 Index

Bergen County, N.J., 48, 49, 69, 72, 82, 284n.15, 288n.27, 291n.62, 298n.1, 106, 143, 163, 181, 183, 203, 268–74 299nn.12, 21, 23 & 25, 301nn.45 & Bergen County Museum of Science and 47–49, 314nn.18–22, 315nn.28, 29 Art, 193 & 33, 316nn.38 & 41; portrait of, 230 Bergen County Traction Company, 82, Boyd, George, 302n.9, 310n.62 88 Boyd, Harriet, 220, 223, 229 Bergen Evening Record, 141, 177, 189, Boyd, J. Rutherford, 138, 142, 156, 185, 198, 274, 305n.55, 307n.20, 309n.50, 220–29, 299nn.21–25, 302n.17, 310n.64, 311nn.65 & 66 306n.10, 315n.33, 316n.42; portrait Bernhardt, Sarah, 150 of, 229 Berry, John, 246, 248, 318n.18 Boyd, John, 162, 302n.17 Bevacqua, Joseph, 300n.41, 305n.59, Bragwyn, Frank, 296n.42, 315n.37 307n.26, 312n.80 Breugmann, Robert, 276n.14 Bierstadt, Albert, 125 Brinkerhoff, George M., 282n.2 Binder, J. W., 301n.6 Brinkley, Alan, 277n.20 Binford, Henry, 33 Broad Avenue Association, 303n.27 Birkner, Michael J., 277n.21, 279n.7, Brown, Linda Keller, 306n.15 282n.38, 286n.2, 298n.7 Bunyan, John, 242 Bishop, Edward W., 303n.21 Burgoyne, Gen. John, 279n.4 Black Mountain College, 225 Black suburbanites, role of, 87, 94, Cameron, Robert A., 245, 320n.39 106–7, 153, 155, 166, 177, 202, 248, Camp Merritt, 101, 289n.43 283n.53, 288n.26, 290nn.60 & Capers, Anna, 166 61 Carnegie Corporation of New York, 184 Blaisdell, E. Ward, 315n.37 Carter, Freeman, 285n.22 Blanpied, Lena, 319n.29 Cather, Willa, 127–29 Blassﬁeld, George, 47 Century, 65, 116 Bliven, Bruce, 187 Chandless, Ralph, 305n.55 Blumin, Stuart, 276nn.12 & 16 Chaplin, Charlie, 80 Bodnar, John, 320n.38 Chapman, Charles S., 14–18, 28, 30– Bogart, Michele, 276n.18, 292n.3, 31, 40, 66–67, 68, 120, 123, 134, 138, 294n.28, 313nn.1 & 3, 315n.26 139, 142, 227, 228, 284n.15, 292n.4, Bogert, Andrew D., 35, 37, 38, 86, 107, 320n.39 280nn.9 & 13 Chase, William Merritt, 66, 120, 228 Bogert, Paul, 196 Chase, Secor, 286n.5, 291n.63, 299n.22 Bogota, N. J., 146 Cheape, Charles, 291n.66 Boggia, Phil, 258 Chicago Art Institute, 69, 70, 115, 120, Bohemianism, 276n.18 130, 225 Bonomi, Patricia, 98 Chicago Art League, 69 Boucher, Louis, 314n.16 Chin, Sam, 47 Boudah, Judith, 316n.38 Christie, A. A., 299n.17 Bougereau, William, 73 Christie, Anna, 41 Bowles, Osborne, 302n.17 Christie, Cornelius, 35, 37, 41, 49, 88, Boyd, David R., 145–46, 157, 219– 91, 282n.52, 287n.14 20, 222, 224, 228, 230, 280n.13, Christie, David, 15, 35 Index 323

Christie, James, 34, 287n.14 Country town, iconography of, 79–112, Christie, Sarah, 280n.19, 299n.17 113–14, 155, 161, 169, 183, 237, Church, Frederick, 125 277n.21, 287n.13 Cicetti, Fred, 84, 208, 230 Covey, Arthur S., 130, 131, 132, Cirino, Linda, 278n.16, 288n.25, 292n.4, 296n.42, 315n.37 290n.57, 299n.24, 304n.43, 305n.4, Cowan, John, 47 312n.82, 316n.38 Cox, Kenyon, 228 Civic Conference. See Leonia Civic Crabgrass Frontier, 3 Conference Crane, Bruce, 70 Civic Culture, 101, 140–42, 184, 187, Crane, Diana, 296n.42 190–209, 214, 236–37, 282n.50 Craven, Thomas, 295n.32 Civil War Drill Hall, 15, 18 Cunningham, John T., 303n.28 Clark, Clifford, 280n.15 Currier and Ives, 42, 119 Clark, J. H., 283n.52 Curry, John Steuart, 76, 113–17, 118, Clark, William Appleton, 66 122–23, 124, 129, 132, 133, 292nn.1, Clarke, Fred, 302n.17 3, 4 & 7, 293n.12 Classis, 19, 98, 289n.34 Curtis Publishing Company, 221 Clayton, Leonard, 132 Cluss, Phillip P., 34, 44, 45, 283, Daumier, Honore, 131, 211–12, 213, 286n.6 217, 220, 231, 235 Cohen, Liz, 305n.1 Davis, Patrick Henry, 302n.17 Cole, Carole Root, 280n.9; 1840 De Bary, Mildred, 158, 198–99, 309n.50 Leonia map, 29 De Bary, Theodore, 290n.61, 302n.9, Collier, Nate, 316n.37, 320n.39 313n.83 Colliers, 293n.9 Debs, Eugene V., 73–75, 183, 273, Collins, Raphael, 73 285n.27 Columbia Teachers College, 185, 231 Delineator, 220, 293n.9 Columbia University, 143, 147, 247 Democratic party, role of, 6, 11, 158, Community formation, 19–24; in 169, 181, 185–86, 188–89, 269–74, Chesapeake tradition, 22–23, 24; in 307nn.15 & 20, 308n.39 Dutch tradition, 19–21; in New Dewey, Charles Melville, 70 England tradition, 21–22, 24 Dey, Barbara Reynard, 152, 286n.5, Community House, 138 292n.8, 296n.41, 300nn.27 & 37, Community House: in Leonia, N.J., 310n.60, 314n.15, 316n.39 138–42, 146, 148, 149, 156, 157, 159, Dey, Donald, 202, 310n.60 186, 188, 192, 195, 306n.10, 315n.30; Dickerson, John J., 204, 311n.65 in Winnetka, Ill., 141–42, 307n.29 Diehl, Arthur, 285n.22 Comstock, Enos, 229, 284n.22, 320n.39 Domesticity: and 19th-century ‘‘separate Consumerism, 178–79, 210–11 sphere,’’ 103–4, 110–11; and 20th- Cooper Union Forum, 142, 229 century ‘‘companionate marriage,’’ Coover, Lynn, 302n.17 103–4 Cornwell, Dean, 76, 116, 133, 292nn.4 Dougherty, Paul, 297n.49 & 8, 315n.37 Dreishpoon, Douglas, 315nn.26 & 35 Cosmopolitan, 116 Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Country Sketch Club, 69, 70, 120 Industry, 117 324 Index

Dunn, Harvey, 76, 114–18, 120–23, Faig, Doris, 41–42, 79, 83–87, 94, 99, 125–27, 129–30, 132, 134, 213–14, 145, 175, 281n.20, 283n.2, 286n.9, 217, 218, 228, 292n.4, 293n.9, 289n.38, 290n.57, 299n.20, 304n.43 294nn.23 & 28, 296n.43, 297n.49, Faig, Harriet, 175 298n.58; and Army Expeditionary Faig, Sam, 175 Force, 121–22 Farming class, role of, 39, 42, 80, 95, Durant, Charles, 76, 292n.14 109 Dutchness, 14–31: in Manhattan, 19, Fay, Clark, 116, 292n.4, 293n.9, 26; in New Jersey, 9, 11, 19–21, 25– 296n.47 26, 32, 87, 112 Fay, Nancy, 292n.4, 293n.9, 296n.47 Dutch Reformed Church: in Leonia, 15, Feirer, Doris, 320n.42 18, 40, 97–98, 281n.33; in Ridgeﬁeld, Feirer, Warren, 320n.42 19 Ferdon, Henry, 46, 47, 93 Dynamic Symmetry, 224, 315n.33 Fermi, Enrico, 148, 300n.260 Ferrall, Victor, 309n.45 Eakins, Thomas, 220 Ferrara’s Grocery, 152 East Bergen Express, 197 Ferrer School, 130 Eaton, Charles Harry, 70–71, 285n.21, Fertig, Edward, 198, 309n.48 297n.49, 315n.27 Fertig, Ilonka, 280n.12, 285nn.25 & 29, Ebner, Michael, 163, 298n.8, 317n.56 286n.5, 299n.19, 302n.9, 306n.26 Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 65, 75 Fight on Lexington Common, The, 119 Edwards, Edward (artist), 224 Fink, Lois Marie, 285n.23 Edwards, Edward I. (New Jersey gover- First National Bank of Leonia, 109 nor), 303n.28 Fisher, William, 76, 116, 292n.4, 293n.9 Egan, Elizabeth, 286n.5 Fishman, Robert, 275n.6 Englewood, N.J., 90, 280n.9, 286n.6, Flagg, James Montgomery, 117 304n.41, 309n.50 Flatbush, N.Y., 167 English Neighborhood, 14–31, 40, 43, Foley, Joseph, 174, 185, 195, 304n.39 45, 69, 72, 73, 87, 88, 93, 100, 112, Ford, L. Stanley, 309n.45 145, 156, 157, 166, 235, 243, 244, Ford, Thomas E., 312n.80 246, 249, 251, 257, 258, 318n.18; Forstoff, Harry E. A., 189, 202, 307n.21, 1944 map, 16–18; revolutionary map 308n.44, 309n.45 (1776–77), 20; road, 18, 40 Fort Lee, N.J., 14, 33, 65, 80, 291n.66 Episcopalians, role of, 97, 98, 100, 102 Fort Lee–Hackensack Turnpike, 18, 32, Erie Lackawanna Railroad, 88, 149 41, 50, 106 Ethnicity, and community formation, Fox, Richard W., 284n.10, 295n.34 26, 44, 50–51, 63–64, 72, 87, 96, 106, Francis, Thomas, 283n.53 138, 153, 236–37, 264–65, 267 Frank Street’s Studio-in-the-Barn, 130, Ettl, Alex, 315n.36 131 Ettl, John, 315n.36 Franklin, Dwight, 292n.4 Everett, Samuel, 306n.10 Fraser, Stephen, 277, 305n.3 Everybody’s, 116 Friars Club (New York City), 171 Frisch, Michael, 95, 288n.28, 318n.14 Fabend, Firth, 277n.5, 278n.18, Fuller, Alexa, 147 279nn.22, 24 & 25 Fuller, Arthur, 292n.4, 296n.47 Index 325

Fuller, Ralph, 147, 228, 315n.37, Hackensack Valley, 18, 32, 51 316n.40 Hague, Frank, 177 Fuller, Robert, 297n.57, 315n.37, Haller, William, 142, 158, 173, 298n.10, 316n.40 303n.36 Hambidge, Jay, 224 Gaige, Crosby, 318n.8 Hammergren, Frederick, 228, 315n.360 Galland, Joseph, 196, 308n.44 Hansen, Robert B., 302n.17, 306n.6 Gans, Herbert, 275n.5 Harper Bros., 64, 117 Gausmann, George, 287n.17 Harper’s Monthly, 59, 118 Gausmann, Kate, 285n.22 Harper’s Weekly, 65, 118 Gausmann, Margeret Van Brunt Moore, Harris, Neil, 292n.3, 313n.3 256–57, 258 Harris, Richard, 276n.14, 281n.23, Gender as a suburban factor, 12, 103–5, 282n.44, 286n.6 126, 174–75, 264 Hart, George Overbury ‘‘Pop,’’ 286n.4 George Washington Bridge, suburban Hartman, William, 92 inﬂuence of, 9, 142–43, 163–64, 167, Hartmann, Sadakichi, 130 176, 301n.6 Harwood, J. T., 212 Gerdts, William, 284nn.17–21, Haskell, Ernest, 314n.16 297n.49, 314n.16 Hausmann, George, 177, 315n.37 Gerstle, Gary, 277n.20, 305n.3 Havemeyer, Henry Osborne, 285n.24 Gibson, Charles Dana, 117 Hayes, Bill, 206, 312n.78 Gilbert and Sullivan, 150 Held, John, Jr., 217, 296n.47, 314n.14 Gismond, Emmanuel, 34 Helstoski, Henry, 273 Gismond, Lorenzo, 50, 283n.52 Henning, Albin, 292n.4 Glackens, William, 213, 214, 215 Henri, Robert, 130, 135, 136, 212, 215, Gladwin, Arthur, 287n.17 314n.14 Glassberg, David, 319nn.30 & 31 Herbert, Victor, 242 Glendennon Newell American Legion Herterich, Charles L., 310n.54 Post, 102 Hills, Patricia, 293n.13 Goddard, Pliny, 148, 234 Hines, Docery, 107 God’s Man, 231, 233, 234 Hixson, Arthur W., 148, 173, 245–51, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, 286n.4 259, 299n.25, 317n.56, 318nn.16– Golen, John, 150 18, 319n.23 Good Housekeeping, 105, 116 Hoffman, Stephen, 178 Grand Central Gallery, 125 Hohenholt, N. Fred, 310n.53 Green, Frank, 69 Hole Book, The, 60–61, 62, 63 Green, Martin, 297n.50 Holy Spirit Lutheran Church. See Greene, Robert Hill, 318n.13 Lutherans, role of Greenwich House, 187, 188 Homeownership, 12, 82, 96, 104, 158– Greenwich Village, 113–14, 135–37, 212 59, 264 Grey, Zane, 117 Home and School Association. See Grofé, Ferde, 285n.31 Leonia Home and School Association Hoover, Herbert, 141, 154, 166, 181 Hackensack, N.J., 30, 48, 89, 90, 91 Horne, Herman Harrell, 102, 148, Hackensack Meadows, 71, 156 306n.10 326 Index

Hoth, Frederick C., 302n.19 Karolevitz, Robert N., 294nn.24–26, House Beautiful (magazine), 105 298n.58 House Beautiful, The (drama), 238–44, Katz, Michael B., 281n.25 259 Katznelson, Ira, 277n.20 Hoyler, Paul V., 169 Kefauver, Estes, 203 Hudson from Heine Cook’s, 132, 214– Kelly, Barbara M., 275n.6, 276n.11 15 Kenilworth, Ill., 317n.56 Hudson River ferry, 9, 40, 82, 89, 90, Kennedy, John J., 197 291n.66 Kenney, Edward A., 305n.54, Hurd, Alfred Paul, 41, 83, 283 307n.20 Hurd, Mrs. M. E., 99 Kett, Joseph N., 291n.68, 306n.6 Hutty, Alfred, 315n.27 Kiefer, Walter C., 310n.53 Kiersted, Sarah, 251, 254 Illustration, 211–20, 294n.28 Kilmer, Joyce, 283n.3 Illustrators, for mass magazines, 211, Kiphut, Lisa, 47 237, 297n.50 Knautz, Harlan, 295n.32, 296n.41 Immigrants: inﬂux of German, 171, 264, Knickerbocker Hotel, 18 265; presence of in suburbia, 184, 264, Kraft, Herbert, 319nn.34 & 35 265 Krakel, Dean, 295n.33, 296n.49 In the North Woods, 68 Krebs, Hendrick J., 120 Krebs, Tulla, 120 Jabberwock, 59–60 Krebs Pigment and Chemical Company, Jachens, Martin H., 309n.45 120 Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, 2, 15, Krueckeberg, Donald A., 302n.13 275n.3, 277n.1 Jackson, Kenneth: important conceptu- Ladies Home Journal, 105, 221, 222, alization, 3, 276, 280n.17, 282nn.41 293n.9 & 46; urban bias, 3–4 LaMer, Victor K., 309n.45 Jacobs, Michael, 297n.40 Landon, Alf, 195 James, Frank, 309n.45 Landscapes: as cultural constructs, 1–2; Jewel Brothers, 53 interpreted by John Brinckerhoff Jewish suburbanites, 194, 239, 244, Jackson, 2, 15; not synonymous with 289n.36 ideology, 2 Johnson, Salina, 299n.15, 307nn.26– Lankenau, Constance, 316n.44 27, 308n.31 Lankenau, Henry, 229, 300n.35, Johnston, Robert E., 116, 292nn.4 & 8 316n.44, 317n.1 John Wicker Art School, 130 Law, Richard, 202 Jones, Rachel, 315n.27 Leach, William, 276n.18 Judge, 65 Lears, R. Jackson, 276n.18, 284n.10, Jurbala, Stephen, 309n.45 294n.15, 295n.34, 313n.1 Lee, Charles, 33, 279n.4 Kaelin, J., 302n.17 Lee, Henry, 33, 257 Kann, Sol, 285n.22 Legend of Leonia, The, 249–51 Karels, Carol, 279n.3, 289nn.36 & 45, Lehman’s General Store at Leonia Junc- 291n.61, 298n.9, 302n.9, 308n.31 tion, 91, 127, 128 Index 327

Leiby, Adrian, 278nn.15 & 20, 279n.23, Leonia Lyceum, 10, 47, 52–55, 57, 58, 320n.37 97, 98, 99, 147, 149 Lenepes, 251–54, 256 Leonia Methodist Church. See Method- Leonia, N.J.: Chapman map of, 14–18, ists, role of 30–31, 33, 40, 43; Cole map of, 29; Leonia Park, 35, 39, 46, 96, 102, 107–8, John Held painting, 296n.47; naming 155, 159 of, 33 Leonia Planning Board, 10, 162–63, Leonia Art Exhibit, 223–24 166, 179, 248, 259, 298n.10, Leonia Board of Education, 174, 184, 300n.41, 318n.16 190, 198, 202, 304n.39, 308n.33 Leonia Players’ Guild, 98, 147, 190, 196, Leonia Board of Trade, 173 222, 312n.82 Leonia Borough Council, 97, 308n.33 Leonia Public Library, 92, 101 Leonia Borough Hall, 149, 154, 156, 196 Leonia Railroad Station, 48, 302n.19 Leonia Boy Scouts, 100, 190, 193 Leonia Recreation Commission, 190 Leonia Broad Avenue Grammar School, Leonia Republican Club. See Republi- 73–75, 102, 149, 185, 196, 223, 251 can party, role of Leonia Building and Loan Association, Leonia Savings and Loan Association, 109 308n.33 Leonia Citizens’ League, 185, 187, Leonia School of Illustration, 114, 120– 306n.10 27, 130, 213, 292n.4, 293n.9, Leonia Civic Conference, 11, 189–209, 294n.23, 295n.39 236–37, 247, 273, 277n.20, 307n.21, Leonia Semi-Centennial, 245–46, 251, 255 309nn.45 & 50, 310n.53, 312nn.80 Leonia Taxpayers Association, 205 & 82 Leonia Town Center, 150–53, 156 Leonia Community Association, 184– Leonia Village, 32–56, 79–83, 93, 151, 87, 305n.6, 306n.10 155–56, 159 Leonia Cooperative Association, Leonia Volunteer Fire Department, 106, 309n.50 149, 299n.20 Leonia Democratic Club, 189. See also Leonia Women’s Club. See Women’s Democratic party, role of Club of Leonia Leonia Girl Scouts, 193, 290n.61 Leslie, Jesse, 152, 165–66, 288n.19, Leonia Heights Land Company, 138, 300n.38, 302n.10, 308n.44 143, 144, 150, 155, 280n.19 Levittown, Pa., 164 Leonia High School, 92, 149, 175–76, Life, 65 183, 304n.47, 310n.62 Lincoln, A. A., 302n.17 Leonia Home and School Association, Little House, 193 168, 174, 190, 198 Lockwood, W. J., 302n.17 Leonia Junction, 89–95, 154–56, 159, Logan, John, 276n.12 287n.13, 288n.21 Loomis, C. B., 305n.6, 306n.10 Leonia Junior Women’s Club, 190, 248, Low, Thomas, 193 249–50 Lutherans, role of, 99–100, 289n.36 Leonia Life, 157, 163–64, 168, 169–70, Lydecker, Garrett, 19 172, 192, 223 Leonia Literary League, 10, 52–55, 96, Mabie, George, 287n.17, 315n.37 147, 184, 282n.49 Mabie, James, 34 328 Index

Malmgreen, Gail, 317n.5 national aspiration, 103–5, 111, 161– Managerial class, role of, 38, 110, 142, 62, 178–79, 210–11; probematic idea, 156, 263, 287n.13, 288n.29, 298n.9, 5, 111, 159–60, 178–79 300n.32 Miller, Edward R., 196, 203, 206, Marine Biological Laboratory, 225 312n.78 Marling, Karen Ann, 296n.42, 316n.37 Miller, Zane, 307n.21 Marsh, Margaret, 102–3, 277, 282n.41, Mills, C. Wright, 276n.16 290n.52 Mills, George, 107 Marsh, May, 286n.5, 291n.66 Mills, George S. (Leonia mayor), 174, Martin, Dudley, 309n.45 184, 304n.39, 308n.44, 309n.45 Masereel, Frans, 231 Mills, Margery, 107 Mattingly, Paul H., 276n.15, 283n.54, Mitchell, Arthur, 123, 132, 133, 292n.4, 291n.68, 305n.54, 306n.11 295n.33, 296n.43 Mattingly, Stephen D., 319n.22 Mix, Tom, 80 May, Lary, 313n.2 Montclair Art Museum, 294n.23 McClure’s, 220 Montgomery, Robert, 204 McCormick, Howard, 66, 69, 130, 213, Moore, A. Harry (New Jersey governor), 214, 219, 228, 251, 255, 306n.10, 303n.28, 307n.20 320n.39 Moore, Harry (Leonia mayor), 152, McCurrahan, John, 315n.23 165–67, 244, 302n.17 McDowell, Edward, 242 Moore, Mrs. Harry, 299n.10, 300n.39 McDowell colony, 127–28 Moore, J. V., 282n.52 McGavack, John, 308n.44 Moore, Ruth, 227, 316n.38 McGeeohan, Bob, 315n.37 Moore, Thomas, 25 McKelvey, Blake, 282n.50 Moore, William, 34, 47, 82 McKim, Mead and White, 73 Moore’s Hardware, 82, 93 McKinzie, Richard D., 276, 316n.45 Moretti, Willie, 204 McLaurin, Lewis, 107 Morrow, Dwight, 58 MacMichael, Belle, 257, 283n.52 Motor Magazine, 225 McNeer, May, 232 Movie industry, 65–66; and Fort Lee, Meeker, Alice, 316n.38 N.J., 286n.4 Men’s Neighborhood Club, 10, 57, 99, Mt. Zion Baptist Church, 107 102, 146, 168, 173, 189, 190, 192, Muller, Peter O., 275n.6 196, 198, 248, 312n.82, 318n.13 Murphy, J. Francis, 69, 70 Merchant class, role of, 46, 47 Museum of Natural History (New York Merwick, Donna, 277n.6, 278n.17 City), 213, 215 Methodists, role of, 97, 99–100, Myers, Jerome, 297n.53 289n.37 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 67, 123 Nankivel, Fred, 53, 58, 65, 69 Meunier, Constantin, 217 National Academy of Design, 65, 67, Meyer, Susan, 293n.10, 294n.18 135, 232, 296n.42, 315n.27 Meyner, Robert B., 204, 311n.66 National Housewives League, 100 Middle class, role of, 95; cliche, 1; his- New Deal, 174–77, 180–82, 184, 186, torical notion, 3–4, 97; as internally 187, 188, 246, 306n.10, 319n.20 stratiﬁed, 4–5, 96, 110, 159, 287n.13; Newell, Peter, 52–53, 57–66, 69, 72, 73, Index 329

76, 100, 102, 114, 214, 218, 285n.22, Peterson, Edward S., 206, 309n.45, 291n.1; compared with Sir John Ten- 312n.78 niel, 58–59 Petito, John, 301n.7 New Republic, 187 Pickford, Mary, 80 New York City, 51, 57, 64, 68, 69, 71, Pitz, Henry C., 292n.4 76, 82, 83, 89, 96, 114, 123, 125, 135– PM, 132, 296n.44, 297n.55 37, 141, 153, 161, 166, 188, 218, 222 Polcari, Stephen, 314n.21 New York University, 102, 143, 147, Politics: electoral, 11, 164, 303n.33, 148, 225, 289n.37, 301n.7 268–74; as shaping suburban inﬂu- Nochlin, Linda, 314n.21 ence, 11, 141, 149, 158–60, 169–79, Nonpartisanship, 5, 6, 169, 183, 186 182, 210–11, 236–37 Northern Valley Railroad of New Jersey, Pollock, Channing, 150, 171, 238, 241, 32, 51 243, 245, 246, 250, 259 Noyes, Anna Bogart Gausmann, 256, Pollock, John, 149–53, 154, 168–79, 258 184, 186, 188, 189, 190, 195, 238– Nuckel, Otto, 231 39, 243, 244, 300n.31, 303n.21, 305nn.54 & 55, 308n.39 Oaky Doaks, 228 Pomfret, John, 281n.27 O’Connor, Carol, 275n.10, 301n.7, Pond, Richard C., 100, 248 307n.21, 318n.7 Population patterns, 93, 99, 109– Olmstead, Frank, 306n.10 10, 138, 161, 163, 175, 194, 247, Olmsted, Frederick Law, 55, 283n.56 267 Olson, John, 307n.21 Powell, George, 193–94 Oral history, 6, 7, 11 Prairie Is My Garden, The, 126 Oratam, 246, 251–54 Presbyterian Church of Leonia, 101, Osler, Wilbur, 193, 196, 308nn.33 & 44 196, 312n.82 Overpeck Creek, 18, 30, 32, 35, 40, 88, Presbyterians, role of, 97, 99, 101, 102, 199, 204, 252, 280n.8 289n.15 Professional class, role of, 9, 38, 161–62, Palisades Park, N.J., 146, 176, 304n.41 171–72, 211, 263 Palisadian, 83 Prosser, Daniel, 307n.15 Palliser, George, 37 Puck, 65 Parabola, 225 Pyle, Howard, 70, 117–21, 129–30, 133, Parabolas Descending, 226 134, 221, 294n.15 Parker, Dorothy, 241, 242 Patterson, Edwin W., 309n.45 Race as a suburban factor, 12, 106–7, Paulin, E. D., 142, 145, 150, 185, 112, 153, 267, 281 302n.17 Radford, Gail, 302n.13 Payne, George, 206, 312n.78 Rado, Arpad, 76, 142, 285n.31 Peck, Clara Elsine, 222 Rado, Ilona, 73–74, 114, 120, 157, 184, Penﬁeld, Dr. Thornton B., 100 285nn.22 & 27, 299n.19, 309n.48; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Self-Portrait, 77 220 Rado, Martha, 157, 184, 185, 198, 240, Perrine, Van Dearing, 69, 284n.18, 244 285n.22, 297n.49 Rado, Peggy, 195, 308n.38 330 Index

Railroad, suburban inﬂuence of, 8, 9, Saturday Evening Post, 115, 116, 120, 33–35, 40, 42, 43, 45–46, 50–51, 55– 127, 293n.9 56, 88, 110, 282n.44 Savage, Robin Ward, 233 Ramirez, Jan Seidler, 285n.32 Scarsdale, N.Y., 64, 307n.21 Realtors, role of, 88, 92, 169, 172, Schaeffer, Mead, 292n.4 302n.17 Schmechebier, Lawrence, 292n.1 Redbook, 127 Schmidt, Gerhard, 315n.36 Reed, Walt, 293n.9, 296n.48, 314n.20 School of Industrial Arts (Trenton, Regional Plan of New York City, 7, 166, N.J.), 130 170, 176, 184, 204 Schor, Cornelius, 15, 34, 50, 283n.52 Remington, Frederic, 66–67, 125 Schor, George, 34 Renters, 12, 39, 43, 96, 104, 154, 178, Schuyler, David, 283n.56 264, 266, 287n.18 Schuyler, Remington, 296n.47 Republican party: comparisons: —with Schwartz, Joel, 307n.15 county patterns, 183, 199, 203–5, Schweppe, E., 302n.17 282n.39; —with national patterns, Scooler, Kate, 286n.7, 288n.30, 299n.15, 203; —with state patterns, 203–4, 300n.35, 302n.11, 307n.18, 316n.44, 282n.39; local dynamics, 6, 149, 158, 320n.42 165, 169–79, 184, 185; role of, 57, Scribner’s, 65 268–74, 303n.33 Searles, Stephen, 315n.36 Reynard, Grant, 123, 127–30, 131, Segard, Christian, 302n.17 132, 147, 148, 218, 292n.4, 294n.23, Servant class, role of, 87, 104, 266, 267 295n.33, 297n.55, 298n.57, 300n.31, Shahn, Ben, 225, 232 320n.39 Sharpe, William, 276n.17 Reynard, Gwen, 147 Shaw, George Bernard, 150 Richards, William P., 35, 39, 107–9, Shedd, John, 288n.22, 291n.71, 142, 149, 302n.17 307n.22, 308n.42 Ridgeﬁeld, N.J., 10, 18, 19, 48, 49, 51, Shedd, William, 81, 195, 196, 286n.7, 268 288n.30, 307n.18, 308n.43, 312nn.78 Robinson, Theodore, 70 & 79 Rockwell, Norman, 117, 298n.58 Shepherd, J. Clinton, 76, 116, 123, Rodin, Auguste, 217 292n.4 Romaine, N. T., 15, 287n.17 Sheppell, Robert W., 37 Roman Catholic suburbanites, 92, 98, Shilling, Alexander, 69–70, 285n.22, 99–100, 174, 289n.36, 308n.44 297n.49 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 181, 195 Sigsbee, Ray Addison, 307n.28 Roosevelt, Theodore, 183, 273 Silzer, George S., 303n.28 Rother, Maria, 131 Simkhovitch, Mary, 187–88, 189 Russell Sage Foundation, 141, 166, 184, Skilled labor, role of, 10, 38, 42, 71–72, 204 109, 174, 263, 287n.13 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 69, 76 Slant Book, The, 61–62 Smith, Frank S., 195, 197, 310n.54 Salmagundi Club (New York City), 66, Smith, Nelson, 176 70, 120, 213 Snyder, Robert W., 300n.32 Salt Lake Tribune, 212 Social class division, role of, 8, 37, 39, Index 331

42, 63–64, 72, 96, 109–10, 112, 154– national experience, 7, 13, 111–12, 55, 161, 177–78, 180–81, 265, 135–37, 159–60, 210–11, 255; politi- 287n.13 cal culture of, 4–6, 9, 159–60, 207–9; Socialist presence, 6, 73–75, 157–58, popular interpretation of, 1, 4; racial 183, 187 presence in, 12; and scholarly dis- Socialization, 192 course, 1–4, 49, 103–5; and social Société des Artistes Français, 65, 73 class stratiﬁcation, 8; and social wel- Society of American Graphic Artists, fare, 188, 304n.41; and staged inter- 232, 317n.54 actions with city, 4, 7, 10–12, 111 Solex Company, 286n.4 Suburban architecture. See Architecture South Dakota Memorial Art Center, Suburban housing, 37–38, 39, 103–5, 296n.43 202, 210 St. John’s Roman Catholic Church, 92 Suburban icons, 5, 7, 10, 111, 113–14, St. Nicholas, 65, 220 140, 210–11, 243, 255, 258–59, Staatliche Akademie fuer Graphische 284n.10; artists’ colony, 113–14, Kunst, 231 133–37, 144; ‘‘Athens of New Jersey,’’ Stagg, Anna Christie, 41, 280n.19 143; country town, 9, 10, 79–112, Stagg, Edward, 41, 86, 281n.19, 155, 161, 169, 183, 277n.21, 283n.52 287n.13; middle class suburb, 111; Stallion and Mare, 124 neighborhood, 24–25, 175, 188; resi- Stamler, Nelson, 310n.64 dential community, 145, 155–56, Stanley, George, 308n.44 159–60, 177 Stencken, John, 196, 308n.40, 310n.58, Suburban population: and escape from 313n.83, 319n.22 the city, 11–13, 49, 106, 235; and Stickley, Gustav, 290n.90 immigrants, 44 (see also Ethnicity and Stilgoe, John, 24, 45 community formation); and multi- Stone, Albert J., 302n.19 ethnic residents, 44, 63–64, 72, 87, Storm King Art Center, 132 153; and social class mixes, 63–64, Street, Frank, 116, 123, 130, 131, 133, 72, 287n.13 147, 228, 292n.4, 293n.9, 295nn.32, Success, 220 33 & 39, 298n.57, 316n.43 Sully, Doris, 302n.11 Strennert, Arthur, 92 Sully, Dr. Ivory, 302n.11 Stuyvesant, Peter, 251, 252 Sussman, Warren, 305n.7 Suburb: as borderland, 2, 45; compatible with city life, 4, 11, 52, 55, 111, 259– Taft, William Howard, 183, 273 60; and the Depression, 125, 161–62, Taos Artists’ Group, 133 173–78, 180–82, 193, 236–37, 247; Taylor, Dr. John Prentice, 99, 100, differentiated from city, 1–2, 11, 113– 289n.37 14, 135–37, 159–60, 164, 237–38, Taylor, William R., 292n.3, 297n.52 259–60; distinctive problem of com- Teaford, Jon, 313n.84 munity formation, 1, 5; as engine of ‘‘Technoburb,’’ 275n.6 socialization, 4, 105, 125; and ethnic Tenaﬂy, N.J., 91, 122 diversity, 12, 50–51, 105, 112, 138, Tenniel, Sir John, 58–59 236–37; as locus of 20th-century Tepper, Saul, 292n.4 American community life, 2, 13; in Thelan, David, 318n.14, 320n.4 332 Index

Thomas, Norman, 158, 184, 187, Wacker, Peter O., 278n.7, 279n.22 306n.13 Wainhouse, David, 148 Three Petticoats, 257–58 Walker, Horatio, 70 Thus Far, 295n.32, 296n.42 Wallace, Henry, 198, 309n.50 Toone, Thomas Ernest, 314n.17 Wallock, Leonard, 276n.17 Topsys and Turveys, 58 Walpi in Sunlight, 215–16 Townsend, Lee, 123, 292n.4 Walsh, Emma, 319n.22 Trapani, Peg, 146–47, 224, 293n.9, Walsh, Joseph A., 202–6, 311n.65, 299n.24, 301n.46, 315n.31, 312nn.75 & 76 320n.43 Ward, Artemus, 143, 287n.14 Trees in Moonlight, 134 Ward, Rev. Harry N., 317n.53 Trolley, suburban inﬂuence of, 8, 9, 10, Ward, Lynd, 148, 230–34, 316n.46 82–83, 87–91, 95, 109–10, 155, 194, Ward, May McNeer, 300n.28, 287n.13, 291n.66 316nn.47, 51 & 53–55 Tyson, Dr. Frances, 102 Ward, Nanda, 233 Warner, Sam Bass, 275n.2, 276n.13, Unskilled labor, role of, 38, 42, 44 282n.50 Urey, Harold, 148, 300n.26, 306n.10 Washington, George, 14, 28, 33 Urey, Mrs. Harold, 316n.43 Washington’s Retreat from Fort Lee (Mc- Cormick), 251, 253 Vanderpoel, John, 69, 70 Washington’s Retreat from Fort Lee Van Metre, Thurman, 303n.21 (Young), 100, 101, 217 Van Orden, DeRuyter, 302n.17 Water oils, 67 Van Zandt, H. D., 302n.17, 320n.39 Wealth of Nations, The, 109 Vann, Eugene, 196, 197, 201–2, 205, Webb, Anna, 73–76, 285n.24 309n.45 Weir, J. Alden, 214 Vann, Mrs. Eugene, 188 Weiss, Marc, 302n.13 Vasilenko, Patricia, 306n.15 Weitzenhoffer, Frances, 285n.24 Vaudeville circuit: B. N. Keith’s, 150, Wells, Worthington, 309n.46 300n.32; Orpheum/RKO, 150 West, Frederick, 73–76, 148, 279n.8 Voluntary organizations, and suburban West, Ilona. See Rado, Ilona structure, 6, 10, 52–55, 96, 105–6, Westport, Ct., art colony, 122, 133, 112, 136–37, 140, 153, 159–62, 292n.3, 296nn.47 & 49 174, 179, 181, 190–209, 210–11, Whetstone Club, 148 282n.50 Whirling Diamonds, 227 Von Schmidt, Harold, 133 White, Stanford, 37 Vote-splitting, 158, 164, 189, 273–74, White Plains, N.Y., 164, 165, 173, 307n.20 303n.37 Voting patterns, 268–74 Wickey, Harry, 123, 124, 130–33, 134, Vreeland, Ann, 304n.43, 305n.4 218, 292n.4, 294n.23, 295n.39, Vreeland, Dereck, 25 296n.42 Vreeland, Michael, 15, 35 Wickey, May, 120, 130, 132, 147, Vreeland, Richard, 34 293n.9, 294nn.21, 23 & 24, Vreeland, Wesley, 183, 277, 288n.25, 295nn.29 & 39, 296n.45, 314n.15, 305n.4 316n.43 Index 333

Williams, Harrison, 273 300n.30, 301n.2, 302n.19, 303n.26, Williams, J. Scott, 156, 185, 222, 304nn.43 & 45, 307nn.21 & 25, 315n.27 310n.61, 311n.70, 313n.83, 319n.20 Williams, Keith, 226–27 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 104 Williams, Paul B., 309n.45 Wright, Gwendolyn, 290n.51 Williams, Raymond, 275n.9 Wright, Kevin, 282n.38 Wilson, Christopher, 284n.10 Wyckoff, Wilhelmina, 285n.22 Wilson, Woodrow, 183, 273 Wyeth, N. C., 120, 121, 293n.9 Wind and Rain, 127, 129 Winnie, Walter, 311n.65 Yalden, J. Ernest, 148, 225, 299n.25, Women’s Club of Leonia, 10, 100–101, 306n.10 102, 146, 173, 188, 190, 196, 223, 248 Young, Brigham, 212, 217 Wood, Grant, 123 Young, Mahonri M., 100, 101, 211–20, Wood, Ogden, 70 229, 296n.47, 313nn.4, 5 & 7–9, Wood, Robert J. G., 34, 40, 41, 141, 314nn.12 & 17, 315n.36 283n.52 Young, Mahonri S., 216, 313nn.5, 6, 8, Wood Park, 84, 150, 151, 168 11, 13 & 17 Working class suburbanites, role of, 89, Youth Museum of Leonia, 193 94, 95, 287n.18 Works Progress Administration, 176, Zigrosser, Carl, 132 246 Zoning Law (1921), 152, 154–60, 162– World Pictures, 286n.4 63, 166 Wragge, John G., 131, 203, 281n.36, Zukin, Sharon, 275n.1 286n.6, 289n.43, 290n.59, 295n.33, Zurier, Rebecca, 316n.45

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