From the Pacific War to Urban Clearance, a Short History of the US Bulldozers

A CONVERSATION WITH FRANCESCA RUSSELLO AMMON

This conversation with Francesca Russello Ammon was originally recorded in May 2018 for The Funambulist podcast. We have decided to revisit it for the purpose of this issue, in collaboration with Francesca herself. The dialogue is built around her book, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (2016), which retraces the political history of the bulldozer by the United States during World War II (used in the Pacific War) and immediately following it in the massive clearance and engineering of the US settler colony, in particular in its cities.

LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: The first part of your book addresses the use of the bulldozer by the US military during World War II, in particular, during the Pacific War – a name whose irony seems to be lost on many people… In it, you’re describing this section of the US Navy called the “Seabees” (United States Naval Construction Battalions), who have been extensively using the bulldozer. Would you mind telling us more about them?

FRANCESCA RUSSELLO AMMON: Sure. The US army has the Corps of Engineers, which has existed for a while. But during World War II, the Navy created its own comparable branch: the Seabees. During the war, there was this realization that a group would be necessary to both build and fight. So, they specifically tried to bring in engineers, construction workers, and people with skills in operating heavy equipment, building bases, building airfields, highways in the Pacific especially, and they sometimes imported older, more experienced men into the military than they would have otherwise been doing. Those men joined the Seabees. Over time, they essentially tapped the supply of people who could readily staff this. So the new men who joined those battalions were trained when they became Seabees. This kind of army of construction men contributed to the war effort, but then also, when the war was over, came home and found new construction opportunities at home, in both construction and destruction, having trained in those things during the war.

LL: If we stay in the World War II era, you’re describing the bulldozer used as an actual weapon on the front, but also articulate perspectives on the racialized and settler colonial politics pertaining to the construction of the ALCAN Highway to connect Alaska and the rest of the United States.

FRA: One of the highways where bulldozers and other construction equipment were used to construct during the war was the ALCAN Highway, which was up in Canada. By the time it was finished, the war was over; but the process of building this trained a lot of men in this work – men who became active in the highway department in the post war period in the United States. But you’re referring to the actual labor of it. The way that jobs were generally parsed out in the military was that white men in the army got a lot of the heavy equipment training and African American men, more often than not, did the more manual, laborious work. Thus, when the war ended, the skills that those groups had were different, and those translated into the kinds of jobs that those two groups had in the post war period too. There was this ceremonial moment of the meeting of bulldozers at the finishing point of the ALCAN Highway, which actually was an African American operator and a white operator. That was not representative of how this work actually occurred. The racial dynamics of this are an interesting part of the story, both about who gets trained in this labor and gets the salary and benefits of that and about who gets displaced by bulldozing, which is often disproportionately racialized people, African Americans in particular.

LL: And in this case, probably also Indigenous people.

FRA: Oh absolutely, and in the Pacific, that was very true as well. spatial injustices at work there were perhaps the most obvious. I argue in the book that this was somewhat of a training ground for normalizing displacement. Who were those subjected to it going to be? Those who had the least power over landownership and were the least well equipped to fight back. They were the victims for the supposedly greater good that precipitated displacement. Those who were going to suffer the negative effects were very often racialized people. So when we speak about the bulldozer, its impact lay not only in its objective technical capacities, but also in the ways that it was subjectively and unevenly deployed to displace people. The machine has no inherent politics, but its application very often does.

LL: One thing that I learned from your book is that William Levitt, the founder of Levittown, in Long Island was a Seabee himself. We had talked about Levittown in our second issue – back in 2015! – with Olivia Ahn, as the site where domesticity produces the post-war gender paradigm – after that many women had been in the workforce during World War II and needed evidently to be sent back to the realms of the home. It is quite striking to observe the interconnection of these histories together.

FRA: Yes, there was a really strong gender dimension to the application of the bulldozer, particularly during the war, with this symbolic construction of another version of the “All-American cowboy.” It also applies to stories that get told about it, such that people who oppose some of this destruction lean on gendered metaphors whereby the land becomes a feminized landscape that’s being plundered and raped by this machinery.

Both proponents and activists use gender as a way of trying to understand what more is going on, besides the physical movement of dirt and displacement of people.

Why do we celebrate these powerful movements of machines and men? What is at stake for us here?

In an interview, Bill Levitt talks about how World War II was really a virtual training ground, where he talked at night with some of his colleagues – fellow Seabees – about how they could automate this process more. How could they make it faster and more efficient? And then that was what he came home to do after the war. Levitt, the company, built war housing during the war too. So, in Virginia, they actually did incubate this idea of mass-produced housing that then became the norm in the post war period. War provided the opportunities for experimentation and the urgency for doing things rapidly, such that after the war those same processes were applied in non-war conditions, but still building upon that expertise.

LL: Your book mobilizes a lot the construction of highways in the United States. Something that has always hit me in this history is the 1949 conspiracy by General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, and Phillips Petroleum that bought the streetcars of 25 US cities to dismantle them to individualize the means of transportation. The effect of this conspiracy was later on, capitalized by the federal government, and in particular the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 signed by Dwight Eisenhower, which associates this capitalist predatory industry with Cold War militarization of the infrastructure. And bulldozers, obviously, are a fundamental part of it.

FRA: Yes, the original map for the Interstate Highway System originates out of World War I, when there was a need to have these truck convoys traverse the country, which took a long time and eventually planted the seed for regarding it as an actual military necessity to have a better highway network. If you look at what was realized as the interstate highway map and the original plan, General Pershing’s map, they’re very much the same. So that’s one point of origin. But then Eisenhower himself, having served in World War II and seen the Autobahns in Europe and actually having been involved in World War I in some of those highway convoys, further nurtured the idea. So, I think the fact that Eisenhower was the one to sign the act is not coincidental. He saw, personally, the value of this, while being wrapped up in all that Cold War rhetoric too, of being able to empty out the cities quickly and be prepared for any sort of Cold War conflict.

We don’t typically think about it as a defense system in practicality today, but it was interstate commerce and military defense that were both driving these things.

And what was the capability to build it? Well, it came out of that construction prowess, and the equipment that could do it, that was highly trained and honed during the war and able to execute this massive infrastructure project.

LL: The infrastructural development I just mentioned was happening at a continental scale; but your book looks carefully at the urban scale as well. Perhaps we can first talk about Orange County and then New Haven, which are two very specific examples you’re looking at in the book?

FRA: It is a national story, which is why I use this term “Culture of Clearance” as characterizing development in the post-war period around the US. I touched down on a couple places that are really examples of putting this into practice: Orange County is my example for suburban development. Take a look at the rapid rate at which farmland was turned into space for housing and all the trees that were torn down and the mountain sides that were leveled in order to create large, empty, flat expanses for development of sameness. This isn’t the first time that land has been appropriated and cleared, of course. We could also go back to European colonization and westward expansion, which displaced people and leveled natural environments. But the post war period is also somewhat distinct in the character of its land clearance. If you’re building tract housing, the buildings are all the same. The building pads are all the same. They have to be all the same. The landscapes that you’re building upon get cleared down and leveled to do this – including the development of highways to service those areas. It’s all intertwined. It is a large-scale clearance of everything that’s stood in the way to build large-scale projects.

At the same time, you have cities being cleared by bulldozers and leveled for urban renewal construction. There are two very different built forms in the end. But the fundamental underlying premise is that we need to clear away, level, and create a large space for new construction. So what’s going on there is comparable in certain ways: cities are tearing down the older infrastructure, buildings, industry, these sorts of things, and creating space for high rises. And the amount of destruction that’s going on is what ties them together. So we generally think about the post war period as this moment of rapid growth in construction. It’s really an era of rapid destruction to enable that. That was the first necessary step for the so-called progress of modernization.

LL: You’re mentioning high rises, but also highways, again, that are segregating entire cities, racially segregating them. And, I’m thinking, in particular, of Baltimore or Detroit, even here in Philadelphia, there’s probably a lot to be said about that. Can you maybe tell us more about it?

FRA: Sure, yes. What’s notable about these projects is not just their large scale, but where they’re located. Highways and urban renewal very often targeted high-value land close to the center that was occupied by less powerful populations. You mentioned Philadelphia. The Vine Street Expressway goes through Chinatown, for example. And that’s not an uncommon story if you look at the Chinatowns of cities all over North America. One of my colleagues, Domenic Vitiello, works exactly on this and this similarity that we see.

Highways, urban renewal, and other big development projects, such as stadiums, have routinely targeted Chinatowns, effectively colonizing the land that these communities once called home.

The history of African Americans being displaced is one we know even better. In New Orleans, for example, lots of neighborhoods have experienced this, such that while urban renewal cleared out whole neighborhoods, highways could do that too, and they could also cut off whole neighborhoods, cut off access to services and the waterfront. So highways are really dividing too. On the one hand, they’re upgrading the infrastructure; on the other hand, they’re displacing populations that are not viewed as the ones that cities are trying to attract. They’re trying to attract suburban families, suburban businesses. And how do we clear space for them? Well, we take it away from these populations that are less able to resist that.

LL: I feel that the bulldozer represents this moment of explicit violence in that process. We look at highways and some of us don’t necessarily see them as an embodiment of structural racist violence, but the bulldozer materializes that in its clearance. Your book also shows how the bulldozer needs to come with an entire sort of benevolent and modernizing imaginary to counter this spectacle of violence. As an example, I’m thinking about the sort of PR operations that the Mayor of New Haven does in Life magazine.

FRA: New Haven is an interesting case. It received more federal dollars per capita than any other city for urban renewal. So while it wasn’t the biggest city, it was implementing urban renewal more seriously than any other place in the U.S.. Richard “Dick” C. Lee was the mayor, and when Life photographers came to the city, he specifically wanted to be photographed knocking down a building because that was a sign of progress. He was the “city clean-up champion,” as they wrote in the piece. So it’s not just about bulldozers, but also about wrecking machines and lots of different pieces of equipment that were tearing down. He was quite happy to be photographed doing this. This was a positive thing. But this changed over time as people started to see some of the damaging consequences of the demolition. Thus clearance work started disappearing from view in depictions of the highway, and the focus shifted instead to the finished product. We were no longer looking at that moment of destruction because that’s the messy part.

If we can get to the modern output, the before and after, that covers over what happens in the middle. How do we get there? Who gets this place? What happens to the environment in the middle? This book is very much about that middle piece between the before and the after. What is the process? How do we endorse certain decisions? What’s at stake when we do that? And so I’m also interested in photographs, in general, that are about the before and after. The stereotypical emphasis on before and after views during this period skips over an important piece in how we get from A to B. I aim to recover that missing piece.

And how do you know about this process? When I started the project, I did not know where the archives were going to be, what would tell me about demolition; and wrecking companies don’t generally leave so many paper archives, or related government records, which would be useful in this regard. But actually, the photographs that were taken of sites undergoing demolition tell us a lot, for example, about how long this process took. You know, the kind of process by which, instead of tearing down all the buildings in a block, it takes a while to relocate people who are living in this or that building; the whole process stretches out in time. And what does it mean for the people who are still living alongside it? What must they and their homes endure during that long period of construction work? So photographs have been a great resource in this project, and I was really glad that the press allowed me to include so many in the book.

LL: We are reaching the conclusion of both your book and this conversation by evoking the various acts of resistance against bulldozers, and depictions of the bulldozer as an instrument of violence, of state violence, in particular. You talk about how the murder of Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer finds some echoes in a past with a priest laying down in front of a bulldozer in the 1970s in the US.

FRA: This second incident took place in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1964. There, a white Presbyterian minister named Bruce Klunder lay down in protest in front of a bulldozer on a construction project, and the equipment operator accidentally ran over him. By contrast, the accidental versus intentional nature of the killing of Rachel Corrie is less clear. In both cases, however, nonviolent protesters died by blows from the machine. So protesting the bulldozer can be physically dangerous. I also include a photograph in the book showing Black protesters standing in front of a bulldozer in the Fillmore neighborhood of San Francisco. They were protesting the urban renewal of the area that was their home. With their faces staring down the open shovel, the physical danger is immediately apparent. So, physically standing up to the bulldozer is a familiar trope. We saw this also with Indigenous people in the Great Plains protesting the Dakota Access pipeline standing in front of the bulldozer in Standing Rock. Symbolically, this has always been an important move. But in the case of the incident that you’re talking about in Ohio, the machine actually killed the man that was lying there in his silent protest. These machines are dangerous to stand in front of, as the murder of Rachel Corrie shows as well. So, it’s not just about symbolism. We also saw this in World War II. To go back to the beginning, there were stories of Japanese snipers who were literally wiped off the battlefield by the blade of a bulldozer. So the violence is not just metaphorical or social. It is physical. The application of the machine is physically violent, and these particular incidents highlight that to us. ■