Following World War II, the built environment in the United States expanded at an unprecedented rate and scale. For each construction project, powerful machinery assisted in “creative destruction”—demolishing buildings, removing vegetation, and leveling terrain. In her astute and insightful book, Bulldozer, Francesca Russello Ammon traces the coevolution of advancements in earthmoving equipment and the process of land clearing, which together enabled the pervasive physical transformations associated with urban redevelopment, suburbanization, and interstate highways.

Effective opposition to the devastation entwined with the remaking of America's postwar landscapes took time to coalesce, Ammon argues, thanks to the “culture of clearance,” a widely embraced ideology that took root during World War II. By glorifying the battlefield exploits of earthmoving equipment, various journalists, filmmakers, novelists, and advertisers had offered positive representations of bulldozers and land clearance and had reinforced these images with descriptions of how such machinery aided in the reconstruction of Europe by removing the rubble of ravaged cities. In addition to linking moral and material progress to demolition and land clearing, the war helped in training heavy equipment operators and mechanics, who then found employment in the peacetime construction workforce.

Marshaling evidence gleaned from government and corporate archives, news reports, advertising, film, and literature, Ammon examines the wartime role of earthmoving equipment manufacturers: how they used the insatiable military demand for their machines to accelerate technical improvements and expand their manufacturing capabilities; how wartime advertising campaigns highlighted the firms’ patriotism alongside the quality and utility of their products; and how the construction industry nurtured wartime partnerships with the government in order to encourage postwar policies subsidizing building demolition and land clearance, such as the GI Bill of 1944, the Housing Act of 1949, the 1954 Internal Revenue Code, and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.

Suburbanization quickly became a national phenomenon, one that involved enormous land-clearing efforts. In her telling investigation of that process, Ammon focuses on Southern California, which converted tens of thousands of acres of prime farmland into highways and subdivisions. Developers eventually looked beyond flatlands to the more readily available hillsides, and the resulting large-scale movement of earth to build roads and carve out level construction sites pushed sprawl into increasingly remote and vulnerable locations. As the interface of wildlands and settlements increased, so did the threat and social costs of wildfires. And with that increase came another—albeit ironic—role for bulldozers: fighting fires and creating firebreaks.

Nowhere was the unbuilding of America's architectural past more prevalent than in the tsunami of federally financed urban renewal projects, where bulldozers helped lay waste to some 2,500 neighborhoods in nearly a thousand cities between the late 1940s and mid-1970s. This wholesale demolition produced acute social pain and disruptions. Ammon provides a detailed case study of New Haven, Connecticut, which vigorously pursued urban renewal, knocking down over three thousand structures during a two-decade span and sanctioning the elimination of roughly 17 percent of its dwelling units during the 1960s alone.

Postwar highway construction, most specifically the interstate highways—those forty-six thousand miles of limited access expressways that crisscrossed the nation—also involved massive land clearing and widespread social displacements in both urban and rural settings. Cities and suburbs, farms and fields, forests and mountains were all severed by the high-speed motorways. The engineers’ propensity for straight highway alignments may have shortened routes and saved property acquisition costs, but in mountainous terrain it dramatically increased the need for earthmoving.

Ammon's final section, “Bulldozers of the Mind,” provides a highly original exploration of children's books, toys, and artwork that happily depicted earthmoving machines and their constructive contributions through demolition. Her close reading of children's literature produces a persuasive argument for how “the authors of postwar bulldozer books offered multiple reasons for embracing the destruction of the natural and built environment” (p. 249). Turning to land art (or “earthworks”), she describes how artists have appropriated the bulldozer to create art, essentially using “bulldozers as paintbrushes” (p. 251). This type of environmental art typically represented a backlash to demolition and land clearance. “As earthworks makers blurred the line between art and life,” Ammon explains, “they invited viewers to see the landscape in a new light. . . . In an era in which the tyranny of the blank slate threatened to wipe out distinctive landscapes and impose flat sameness instead, earthworks artists argued for the value of place” (p. 256).

The earthworks artists foreshadowed a shift in public attitudes—one that initially tended to applaud the bulldozer and its demolition and land-clearing work but, influenced by concerns about environmental protection and historic preservation, gradually came to see it as a symbol of loss. By the 1970s, the culture of clearance was falling out of favor. “In the course of a few decades,” Ammon concludes, “the machines of demolition and clearance were remade in the popular imagination. Their image changed from celebrated, patriotic icons to maligned symbols of destruction. Just as the ideology, technology, policy, and practice of large-scale destruction had created the culture of clearance, so did the gradual undoing of each of these pillars signal its decline” (p. 297).

Business historians interested in how their field meaningfully intersects with scholarship in environmental, urban, technological, and cultural history could hardly ask for a better example than the cautionary tales in Bulldozer.