Week of 3/24/2016

Homelessness isn't just a problem in our era. As we shall see, this was a concern of our authors, as well. They were humanitarians and advocates for many different causes, and performed their advocacy in books of fact and fiction. I Probably the most famous of Harriet Beecher Stowe's work was Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, which she wrote in 1852. Catherine E. Beecher wrote advocating abolitionism, educational improvements, and theology such as Common Sense Applied to Religion, or the People and the Bible. (In the 19th century, "vicious" meant immoral, not necessarily brutal or dangerous.

There are many residences in our large cities where women claiming to be Christ's followers live in almost solitary grandeur till the warm season, and then shut them up to spend their time at watering-places or country resorts. The property invested in such city establishments, and the income required to keep them up, would secure "Christian homes " to many suffering, neglected, homeless children of Christ, who are living in impure air, with all the debasing influences found in city tenement-houses. Meantime, the owners of this wealth are suffering in mind and body for want of some grand and noble object in life. If such could not personally live in such an establishment as is here described, by self-denying arrangements and combination with others they could provide and superintend one.

The Authors have a different idea in their minds when they use the word "neighborhood". Their image isn't quite that of a small city like Bristol or an area in a metropolis like Chicago or New York. They're thinking of many small farming communities near the east coast and elsewhere, Lowell or Lawrence, Massachusetts, for example, where many of the young children especially young women have left their homes to get work in the mills. The ideas in the chapter reflect the dreams and visions of both sisters. Women could actually return home and open buildings combining house, schoolhouse, and church in one structure, used twenty-four hours a day. I think the idea is rather brilliant myself. What do you think?

The aim is to illustrate one mode of commencing a Christian neighborhood that is so economical and practical that two or three ladies, with very moderate means, could carry it out very moderate means, could carry it out. A small church, a school- house, and a comfortable family dwelling may all be united in one building, and for a very moderate sum, as will be illustrated by the following example

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The ground plan,... includes one large room twenty-five feet wide and thirty-five feet long, having a bow window at one end, and a kitchen at the other end. The bow-window has folding-doors, closed during the week, and within is the pulpit for Sunday service. The large room may be divided either by a movable screen or by sliding doors with a large closet on either side. The doors make a more perfect separation ; but the screen affords more room for storing family conveniences, and also secures more perfect ventilation for the whole large room by the exhaust-flue.

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Two good-sized chambers are over the large lower story,... Large closets are each side of these chambers, where are slatted openings to admit pure air ; and under these openings are registers placed to enable pure air to pass through the floor into the large, room below. Thus a perfect

mode of ventilation is secured for a large number.

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Two ladies residing in this building can make an illustration of the highest kind of "Christian family," by adopting two orphans, keeping in training one or two servants to send out for the benefit of other families, and also pro- viding for an invalid or aged member of Christ's neglected ones. Here also they could employ boys and girls in various kinds of floriculture, horticulture, bee-raising, and other out-door employments, by which an income could be received and young men and women trained to industry and thrift, so as to earn an independent livelihood.

Welcome Back from Spring Break

I apologize for missing class with you on Friday before Spring Break. As I told you, I was going to the funeral of William H. (Bill) Rizzini my favorite RWU President and a friend for over 40 years. We'll finish off the readings we would have discussed that Friday and then return to Crabgrass Frontier for just a bit, before moving on yet again to our third book of the semester, Home, a Short History of an Idea

Chapter 7.

Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. The most important think to understand is that it was a combination of factors which made suburbia affordable for middle class persons. We’ve already seen that cheaper transportation opened opportunities unavailable before. If one thinks about the slow and laborious process of making houses prior to the invention of the 2x4 and the machine-made nail, one realizes that there was no way to house large numbers of people in individual houses on individual plots of land without technological innovation intervening.

Chapter 8.

Here, the important thing to recognize is that there are multiple ways to measure size of communities. Perhaps the one we think of most often is population, which we can determine by simple count. But area is another measure... the number of square units (miles, kilometers, etc.) included in the political unit in question. A third is density of population (population divided by area). Be aware that it is the second which is being explained in this chapter. The process is annexation. The reasons for it and the reasons against it are the subject of this chapter. The last paragraph is rather ominous:

Resistance to annexation is symptomatic of the view that metropolitan problems are unsolvable and that the only sensible solution is isolation. Elite suburbs are communities encapsulated from the crises of urban capitalism, yet able to benefit and enjoy the system’s largesse.

We'll be seeing that some of the "flight to the suburbs" is just that: flight. What were people fleeing from?

Below left is a Google Street View of one of the formerly separate suburban towns annexed by Chicago, Hyde Park. Prowl around and see what you see. On the right is a neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago called Ravenswood. Can you locate the "L" (Elevated Train Line) and the nearest station. This is not far from where I spent my undergraduate days. Some called it Swedeville back then. Not so much now. Also use Google Maps to locate some of the other communities mentioned. We'll discuss them a bit as we think about diversity of income and race.

In the early twentieth century it was possible to buy an entire house, choosing from a catalog like the two Sears, Roebuck one's pictured above, and have it delivered to your lot where a carpenter and perhaps an electrician and plumber could assemble it for you. The earlier catalogue is to the left, above. Both contain information on the process and designs available. There is at least one Sears House in Bristol, though I'm not certain it appears in the catalog. Click on the catalogs to go dream shopping. Find something interesting and put the URL in your resource folder.

You could also buy everything you need to decorate your house either from Sears, Roebuck and Company or from Mongomery Ward, its chief rival. Clothes, as well, not to mention supplies for the farm. Even in the early 20th century we were not very urbanized in America. To Shop a bit Click here. Again, if you find something interesting, post the URL in your resource folder.

Chapter 9:

So far we’ve seen that there are different physical configurations for suburbs, depending on the technology prevalent when they were formed. Railroad suburbs string out along the main lines of the railroad companies themselves, rather like beads on a string. Streetcar suburbs develop first along the lines of the streets, chiefly the principal streets connecting outlying towns with city centers. Because trolleys are capable of starting and stopping frequently, density is pretty uniform along the route, save at intersections between trolley lines.

Here, the task is to understand how suburbs created in response to the automobile are different from those which are created in response to the streetcar. We’ll return to this again later, when we look at the development of the interstate highway system, and at the time in our history when two or more cars, rather than one or less, became common for all but the working poor.

The driving force behind the

creation of the automobile suburb was, of course, the

automobile. Not just any automobile..."horseless carriages" had been around for more than ten years when mass production techniques introduced by Henry Ford allowed to sell automobiles at prices which ordinary Americans could afford.

The video shows many aspects of the Henry Ford assembly line. Imagine working under such conditions. The Model T was in production for 19 years, unlike today's cars, some of which come out with "new" models on a half-year cycle. The total number produced during that time period was over 15,000,000. Now, a good year in the automobile industry produces about that many.,

Chapter 11:

We know that many people resent government assistance to the poor, and “Welfare Queen” is a political stereotype which has often appeared in American politics since about 1980. Government policy operating on behalf of the middle to upper classes is less often thought of or discussed in the public arena. We’ll see the impact of government policies which influence who can own a home, why home ownership is considered a desirable public good, and why it might not be unfair to call this particular set of government policies “white collar welfare”.

Chapter 12:

We’ve already seen how technology, combined with differences in the economics of different systems of transportation, began to segregate Americans by economic class from the earliest days of the modern suburb. This chapter will show how attempts to “do something for the poor” actually enhanced that separation. Zoning restrictions forbidding multiple family dwellings isolated many suburbs from housing “projects,” which were modeled as stripped down apartment buildings. Remember some of the scenes from Suburbs, Arcadia for Everyone, to see alternative ways to provide adequate housing for the working poor. One doesn’t have to warehouse people in hi-rises to provide decent housing for poor people.

Chapter 10:

We have renewed our familiarity with the "ups and downs" of the housing market in the years since 2008. The years between World War I and World War II were a roller coaster, economically speaking. First the "Roaring Twenties" and second "The Great Depression". The house in which I live was built in 1928, the year before Black Tuesday and the Stock Market Crash of 1929. What happened when the bubble burst? This chapter will give you some ideas about that.

The question used to whether the high price of oil and diminishing resources of petroleum might make the cost of operating the family car so expensive that the suburb as we know it may lose its dominance as the ideal environment for living and raising families. Now there are other concerns like climate change. The current low cost of petroleum products won't last forever, however.

Levittown, made possible by the Automobile. Note, However, that the garage is not a universal feature yet. Nowadays, we incorporate garages into the house, turning the family car into another member of the household.

Chapter 12 suggests that public policies which encouraged suburbs, whether mortgage subsidies and tax policy or the building of improved highway systems and interstates was not without social cost. Think, for example about the racial or ethnic makeup of the high school you attended. How would it have been different in the age before the automobile suburb?

There should be no major problems with the sections of Jackson assigned for this class. We're all intuitively aware that the automobile revolutionized the house. It also revolutionized and continues to revolutionize the infrastructure.