Building Suburban Power
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BUILDING SUBURBAN POWER by Paige Glotzer A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland February, 2016 © 2016 Paige Glotzer All Rights Reserved Abstract "Building Suburban Power" examines how suburban developers constructed a discriminatory housing market between the 1890s and the 1960s. It uses corporate records to offer a granular look at the everyday practices of firms in order to link their daily, seemingly mundane decisions, to the changing global circulation of people and capital at the turn of the century on one hand and the emergence of federal housing policy in the 1930s and 40s on the other. Between these two time periods, suburban developers turned their informal communication channels into a powerful real estate professional organization that they helmed to standardize a suburban housing market. Through these long-running attempts to become "professionals," a small group of suburban developers parlayed their early beliefs about desirable communities into legitimized "common sense." The dissertation follows the money, ideas, and practices of one firm, the Roland Park Company of Baltimore, Maryland, which its peer companies often held up as a model of suburban development operations in the United States. Utilizing a network- oriented approach, it often enters and leaves the Roland Park Company offices in Baltimore to encompass a widening set of actors that ultimately codified enduring principles about property. These principles still in part configure uneven political, economic, and culture power in the United States. Readers: N.D.B Connolly, Mary Ryan, Angus Burgin, Graham Mooney, David Freund ii Acknowledgments It really took a village. I have been incredibly fortunate to receive the guidance and patience of numerous historians. First and foremost, my advisors Mary Ryan and N.D.B. Connolly believed in me from day one. Much to their credit, I have remained excited about my project and about devoting my life to the historical profession. Over the years, Nathan equipped me with the tools to be a better scholar. I consider his seminar on racial literacy, in particular, to be the most important class I have ever taken. Little did I know when I met Mary that she would shape my entire career in that first meeting with the tiny question “do you want an extra job?” When I said yes, she told me to go speak to a Special Collections librarian about processing the Roland Park Company Records. That job gave me my first year paper, which became my dissertation, and will soon be my first book. Angus Burgin adopted me as his unofficial advisee based on my poorly-proofread first year paper and has remained a kind and encouraging mentor, always ready to give feedback and interrogate my argument to the point where I surrender in exhaustion. His critiques, along with his enviable ability to remember secondary literature, made my work better. Ronald Walters and Judith Walkowitz guided my interests in cultural history. I am grateful to have received early training and continued support from both of them. Louis Galambos also gave me some tough love with very thorough line edits and impressed on me the importance of knowing business history. iii Graham Mooney and David Freund both graciously commented on the project long before they joined my committee and dedicated their time to reading the dissertation. Like any historian, I could not conduct research without the tireless work of archivists and librarians. I am indebted to everyone at the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries Special Collections Department. The now-retired Cynthia Requardt helped acquire the Roland Park Company Records from Cornell University and hired me to process them. James Stimpert, Amy Kimball, and Kelly Spring helped me access the records and do my job. Heidi Herr was simply the best boss a person could ask for, and I am not just saying that because of the pastries from Woodlea Bakery. Jordon Steele taught me how to process the Roland Park Company Records and developed a vision for making the collection accessible to the public. Partially through his efforts, the library brought in the irreplaceable Valerie Addonizio who actually did most of the work processing, organizing, and cracking the code of the Roland Park Company. Chella Vaidyanathan served as liaison to the History Department and always answered questions about research and teaching resources. All of the Special Collections staff have been generous and continue to make research the pleasure it should be. In addition to the folks at Special Collections, thank you to Frederik Heller and Russell Carlson at the National Association of Realtors® Library and Archives; Edward C. Papenfuse, Rob Schoeberlein, Saul, and Amy at the Baltimore City Archives; and everyone at the Cornell University Rare and Manuscript Library, The Enoch Pratt Maryland Room, the Maryland Historical Society, and the Legislative Reference Library. iv Members of the DC-Area African American Studies Works-In-Progress Seminar, the Johns Hopkins Gender Seminar, and the Charm School of Baltimore Historians workshopped my chapters and provided stimulating environments for scholars working across disciplines, time periods, and places. The History of Capitalism Bootcamp, headed by fearless camp counselor Louis Hyman, has built an exciting and robust network of scholars with whom I continue to collaborate. In the History Department’s Twentieth Century Seminar, I found my scholarly community. I am eternally grateful to my co-founders and brilliant colleagues Amira Rose Davis and Rebecca Stoil, who are intellectual forces of nature and wonderful people to boot. As I sat down to write these acknowledgments, Amira reminded me that she stayed at my house as a prospective student exactly five years ago to the day. It made for an especially bittersweet moment as we prepare to move on to other places, facing the prospect of producing work and carving out institutional niches without each other for the first time in our short careers. It will be impossible for anyone to fill their shoes. Fellow Twentieth Century Seminar members and good friends Jessica Levy, Mo Speller, and Morgan Shahan laughed, cried, and edited my work through the best and worst of times. Honorary seminar member Jessica Keene was always ready to either have fun watching a Golden Girls episode or stay up all night helping me to meet a deadline. They all made Hopkins manageable and memorable. Thank you to my best friend Aleks Shagalov, whom I have known for exactly half my life and with whom I have amassed countless inside jokes, made up words, silly moments, and late-night phone conversations. He has always been and always will be an ally and source of strength. v Looking back on my time in Baltimore, I cannot imagine what it would be like without Roger Maioli. Roger knows me better than I know myself. When writing became overwhelming, he washed my dishes and folded my clothes so they didn’t go neglected. He has attended every major presentation I have given and he is quick to brag about my accomplishments. And, much to his credit, he has found joy in living with my menagerie, Johnson, Boswell, Remy, and Azul. Here’s to future adventures as Doctor and Doctor. Finally, I owe it all to my mother and father, Michele and Harvey, who always told me I could achieve anything in life. They patiently let their pretentious child quiz them on presidents and they showed up to school events with huge smiles. Over the years they scrimped and sacrificed for me, moving between neighborhoods and states to ensure I got the best education they could provide. Mom and dad, I turned out pretty ok. Thank you. vi Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 - International Investment and Local Places 18 Chapter 2 - Nuts and Bolts 47 Chapter 3 - Pipelines and Power 82 Chapter 4 - Formulas and Standards 122 Chapter 5 - Neighborhood Protection and Common Sense 168 Conclusion 205 Figures 213 Bibliography 233 Curriculum Vitae 241 vii Introduction One fall day in 1893 Edward Bouton, the president of Baltimore's first suburban development company, had a question for his lawyers. Could his company, The Roland Park Company, legally insert a clause into its deeds to exclude African Americans from its developments? The attorneys replied with unequivocal “no,” calling the question "an embarrassment."1 Bouton initially heeded their advice. However, in 1913, with the opening of his subdivision targeting even more affluent buyers, he went ahead and inserted a racial exclusion clause into the company's deeds.2 Forty years after Bouton's initial inquiry, suburban developers helped the federal government turn housing segregation into sweeping federal policy during the New Deal and Second World War. Racially restricted suburbs, nearly nonexistent before the 1890s, had by the 1930s become a widespread strategy for developers and policymakers to protect a given piece of real estate’s property value.3 Developers like Bouton turned local experiments with discrimination into national housing policy. Suburban segregation—and indeed planned suburbs in general—were anything but a given when Bouton first queried about racial segregation in 1893. But beginning in that decade, a new wave of large-scale developers began to draw on transnational capital. While money from abroad did not replace local investment—the new firms used both—wealth harvested from human bondage and imperial extraction 1 George Whitlock and Samuel D. Schmucker to Bouton, 5 October, 1893, Roland Park Company Records Box 2 Folder 7 MS 504, Special Collections, Sheridan Libraries, Baltimore, MD. 2 Guilford Deeds and Agreements RPC Box 274. 3 Robert Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870 - 1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 46. 1 served as an important catalyst for founding America’s first large-scale emergence of planned suburbs.