In this exemplary study of the Bulldozer, Francesca Russello Ammon asked how the US came to embrace and implement widespread destruction as a means to achieving progress between 1945 and the mid-1970s, with demolitions reaching their zenith in the name of urban renewal in the 1960s.
Though the army formally established the Corps of Engineers in 1802, it was only during World War II that Naval Construction Battalions (Seabees) members utilized heavy equipment for the large-scale land-clearance practices required by the hundreds of new bases that were being built across the world. From 1942 through the end of the war, 85 percent of Caterpillar's production went to the government. The author showed how the implementation and representation of clearance elevated both the bulldozer and the men operating it into powerful American heroes.
Navy Seabees operating a Caterpillar, June 1945, The Life Photo Archive, photographs by J. R. Eyerman
When these men and methods came home after the war, "the domestic landscape became their new enemy, and profit - rather than victory - was the new goal".
Clearance of nature and large-scale earthmoving made way for new suburban development, while demolition of existing city buildings implemented state-sponsored slum-clearance programs and urban renewal. Though "on the ground demolition proved slow, dirty, difficult, and environmentally and socially damaging", it was initially accepted as progress. But the physical and social devastation upon the land turned the Bulldozer, once a symbol of progress, into a symbol of destruction. This transformation began in the 1960s, and it was complete by the mid-1970s.
The author presented three case studies - namely the suburban land clearance in Orange County, California; the urban renewal demolition in New Haven, Connecticut; and the postwar highway boom - to show the physical capability of large-scale destruction and to introduce the opposition that soon followed.
"Although no clear moment marks the demise of the culture of clearance, America's withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 marks a suitable endpoint. [...] Just as the earthmoving Seabees helped glamorize the bulldozer in the 1940s, military clearance in Vietnam helped tarnish it a few decades later. [...] The environmental damages were brutal, ranging from erosion to the long-term depletion of vegetation and wildlife".
