Friday, December 4th 2-4pm
Brian McCabe - Homeownership
and the Enactment of Citizenship
in Early Twentieth Century America
Over the last century, homeownership rates have climbed steadily in the United States. Motivated, in part, by the belief that civic benefits accrue to homeowners, federal policymakers have helped push these rates upwards through a vast array of tax expenditures subsidizing homeownership. But while political leaders oftentimes refer to citizenship benefits of homeownership, the historical origins of this association remain unclear. Why are homeowners thought to be better citizens than non–owners? When did homeownership emerge as an act of citizenship in the United States?
How has this association been reinforced over the course of the twentieth century? This essay attempts to unravel the historical linkage between homeownership and normative beliefs about American citizenship. It contextualizes the discussion in the rhetoric of nineteenth–century housing reformers who linked the American home with particular notions of morality and family life. In showing the distinctive place of the American home in the nation’s history, the chapter then argues that homeownership only emerged central to conceptualizations of the American home in the late– nineteenth and early–twentieth century. The sustained period of post–Civil War industrialization and urbanization drew countless rural Americans and new immigrants into American cities. Reformers and political leaders believed that homeownership would help quell the restlessness and disorder of urban life. At the same time, growing threats to the democratic, capitalist order from abroad led both political and business leaders to imagine homeownership as an antidote to radicalism. Under the twin threats of urbanization at home and radicalism abroad, political leaders began to extol the virtues of homeownership as the bedrock of civic responsibility, national engagement and American patriotism.
The arguments in this chapter rely largely on two major housing movements – the Own Your Own Home campaign and the Better Homes in America movement — to illustrate how the twin threats of radicalism abroad and urbanization at home turned the American home into a place for the enactment of citizenship and patriotism. Variously sponsored by private organizations, civic groups and government leaders, these campaigns capitalized on important ideas and rhetoric linking homeownership to citizenship, patriotism and nationalism. Building off of reform efforts from the nineteenth century, the campaigns reached beyond simply the design and architecture of the home. The tenure status of the American homes began to play a critical political function in American ideology.