I

In 1930, in his book Individualism Old and New, the American philosopher John Dewey remarked that he “knew of no recent event so politically interesting as President Hoover’s calling of industrial conferences after the stock-market crash of 1929.”Footnote ¹ These meetings, which Herbert Hoover organized in the early, disorienting years of the Great Depression, when unemployment was soaring and evictions, foreclosures, and bankruptcies stalked the land, brought government officials together with businessmen, bankers, and corporation executives from a range of private industries in an effort to jump-start the stalled economy. They hoped to stimulate private consumption, buck up moribund industry, and increase indirect government support for business, all without the direct federal intervention in the economy that Hoover’s successor Franklin Delano Roosevelt would eventually unleash with his New Deal. Getting people together to talk may have seemed overly cautious in the face of economic and social cataclysm, but Dewey, a reformer, theorist of democracy, and long-time advocate for the use of public power to shape economic life, recognized that this was a meaningful step for a country shaped by a deep tradition of commitment to the autonomy of the private market. He saw two possible legacies for these conferences.

The first was failure. They were, he said, an example of the “national habit” of “locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen.” That seems right. Too little too late to offset the downturn, the conferences were a kind of reluctant opening act for the very thing that Hoover hoped to avoid: the New Deal’s explicit government intervention in the economy. But I am interested in these meetings, and particularly the president’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, held in 1931, for the second legacy Dewey prophesied: the “dimly and ambiguously possible” glimmer they gave of an alternative organization of US social and economic life. The conferences, Dewey thought, suggested a new imaginative model for public management of the economy. “A hopeful soul,” he wrote, might see in them “planned coordination of industrial development” and the “introduction of social responsibility into our business system to such an extent that the doom of an exclusively pecuniary-profit industry would follow.” The result could be “public control of industry and finance for the sake of social values.”Footnote ²

The conferences never had that effect, of course. But the New Deal that Hoover feared and later opposed would take some ideas from his conferences and supercharge them with federal power, thereby laying the groundwork for government guidance—if not “control”—of “industry and finance.” Many historians have understood the Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership as a precursor to New Deal housing policy. The conference laid out how the government could help to organize and subsidize the workings of the private real-estate industry and its already decades-long interest in promoting the male-breadwinner-led, single-family house for white Americans, making this gendered and racialized ideal the national standard for metropolitan growth, economic development, and social structure.Footnote ³ And many have assumed—or argued—that this unequal compact was secured through an appeal to the form of individualized subjectivity particular to American ideals. Hoover and other boosters, we are given to understand, mobilized long-standing ideals of “possessive individualism”—and their spatial instantiation in the single-family house—to fix homeownership at the heart of US political culture and political economy.Footnote ⁴

What has not been appreciated, however, is how the form of homeownership that Hoover championed coalesced out of a long era of crisis in American political culture and political economy. Bringing our attention back to the years between the 1870s and the 1930s, we can see that what Dewey called “social values” slowly unsettled US political culture and posed a challenge to the nation’s individualist bedrock. Understanding this incomplete transformation and its impact on the evolution of homeownership requires consideration of another figure: the influential economist Richard T. Ely.Footnote ⁵ Less renowned than Dewey or Hoover, Ely’s work was pivotal to the era of institutionalized homeownership. He was an iconoclastic economist who simultaneously undermined laissez-faire individualism and embraced evolutionary theories of industrial development, racial difference, and eugenics in the late nineteenth century. Ely also elaborated the idea of “social property”—a vision that supplied the intellectual armature for the field of real-estate economics and, by extension, the real-estate industry in the early twentieth century. His work helped the new middle-class real-estate agent develop a language of scientific practice, professional standardization, and social hierarchy necessary for his (he was always a man in this era) role in what Ely would have described as an “interdependent” capitalist service economy: distributing, regulating, and ordering the sale of commodified land and shoring up the vision of middle-class social distinction associated with the single-family house in an expanding metropolis.Footnote ⁶ Ultimately, Ely’s advocacy of government support for single-family homeownership paved the way for Hoover’s 1931 conference and New Deal housing policy.

This article brings together—for the first time—consideration of Ely’s critiques of laissez-faire, his interest in “interdependence,” and his idea of “social property” with his thinking about hierarchy and his innovations in real estate. The goal is to show how his “social” revision of individual property rights set the terms for an uneasy rapprochement between state power and individual autonomy in the housing market, while also legitimating the exclusionary “social shape of shelter” at the heart of the institutionalization of homeownership.Footnote ⁷

Looking closely at Ely’s work will show how, in the US in these years, a culture of ownership was “socialized.” Housing was not, of course, taken out of the market or nationalized by the state or walled off from the system of capitalist profit seeking, but a new and powerful ownership regime was indelibly shaped by the sense that an older political culture wedded to individualist ideals was unable to account for the new interdependencies of modern industrial reality. Ownership was retrofitted to serve “social values”—in Dewey’s terms—that went beyond the interests of individual striving.

Of course, all ownership is ultimately “social,” albeit in a slightly different, but related, sense. It is licensed by public regulatory or legal structures resulting from social and political processes and the relations of power that shape those processes. This will be true at many moments in global history. It’s a conceptual observation about the inevitable shape of property as an institutional arrangement. But in the United States—a nation shaped around a capitalist market in land, where a political culture based in private property ownership influenced its founding Constitution and individualism was an oft-observed popular ideology—a precise transformation in the form of socially produced ownership took historical shape in the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. In 1880 homeownership was a widespread disposition, a sensibility, a common but individual pursuit. By 1940 it was a form of collective yet unequal common sense about the standards around which life should be ordered, citizenship practiced, and legal, regulatory, and political-economic frameworks erected. What is needed is an intellectual and cultural history of the way this happened, the way the single-family home moved from an ideal to an institutionalized norm.

I offer that history here. Hoover’s housing conferences and the New Deal institutionalized homeownership by mobilizing a vision of property as a social and relational system rather than a pure product of possessive individualism. Richard Ely supplied the most influential and representative account of that vision. But even at a time when thinkers, policymakers, and other actors saw the social as the vital arena of modern life, this new system would allow homeowners to experience—and exert—their property rights in the guise of an individualism that had otherwise been modified by conditions of mutuality and interdependence. Ultimately, I will argue, the promise of the social was channeled and contained by Ely’s parallel investment in what I call managed hierarchy—a combination of class division, racial exclusion, and gendered domesticity—which short-circuited the democratic mutuality that the socialization of laissez-faire capitalism and individualism might have promised. The result was a socialized institution of ownership that disguised itself as a product of individual striving and obscured the hierarchies it produced in a rhetoric of autonomous possession. This made it, no doubt, one of the most powerful and widespread exclusionary products of the “gendered racial capitalism”—as Sarah Haley calls it—that shaped the era of modernity.Footnote ⁸

This article proceeds in four further stages. First, it sets the world of Dewey, Hoover, and Ely in larger historical and historiographic context, bringing more depth to the arguments introduced above. Next it reveals exactly how Richard Ely mobilized the energies unleashed by the era of the “social self” to create both a critique of laissez-faire economics and a vision of real estate based in both “social property” and managed hierarchy. Then it dives into the record of Hoover’s 1931 housing conference to show how Ely’s vision became the basis for the ideas that would shape federal policy. Finally, it returns to Dewey to conclude, and to note the paradoxical ironies of a land and ownership system made social by way of appeal to exclusion and legitimated through the continuing appeal of a mythic yet persistent individualism.

II

To understand this longer history—and Ely’s role in it—we must first pull back from the precipice of the Great Depression, when Dewey made his initial notes on Hoover’s conferences. The philosopher’s hopes about the coming socialization of American life stemmed from ongoing, slow-roiling changes in the structures of subjectivity at the heart of American political culture and political economy—changes that had, as we shall see in more detail below, two linked strands. First, cultural and intellectual historians have suggested that industrialization, the corporation, and the consumption economy came together to license the emergence of a new model of selfhood. The new social scientists of the day announced the arrival of a “social self,” and saw it as a challenge to the older forms of possessive selfhood germane to the laissez-faire liberalism of the mid-nineteenth century. The concept of social selfhood never became the dominant model for US subjectivity, but its emergence signals the ways in which new forms of social organization, financial networks, corporate order, transnational connection, urban life, and the rise of a salaried middle class revealed novel forces of interdependence, mutuality, and coercion at work in US society. These forces placed pressure on the older notions of individualism that had shaped visions of smallholder or proprietary ownership as the basis for political independence, and for middle-class Progressive Era reformers they warranted state and municipal intervention in the economy and urban environment for the good of both individuals and the social body.Footnote ⁹

Second, at the same time, many social scientists and popular writers—like Ely—also argued that the new interdependence did not suggest any flattening of hierarchy or inequality in that social body. In fact, they argued, the new conditions required cold recognition of evolving hierarchies and inequalities, all products of forces of social evolution and racial development that had to be managed and directed by experts in innovative arts and sciences of social control. As many historians have shown, the rise of urbanization and imperialism in these years saw an upsurge in stage theories of civilizational development and in the various forms of scientific racism and population control that influenced the urban reform movements of the day.Footnote ¹⁰ The result was that two impulses jostled with one another for primacy. On the one hand, in the new, disorienting setting of a complex industrial and international society, many argued, people should not have to go it alone. On the other, some would be ill-prepared for participation in a highly evolved and complex order. The state that was needed to regulate the dangers inherent in urban industrial life had also to be called upon to preserve orderly social relations, oversee supposedly dangerous populations, and protect the “social organism” from contamination by those seen as unfit for self-government and civic participation. And so the new middle-class social-science-influenced reform danced, in the words of historian Florian Urban, between “care” and “control.”Footnote ¹¹

What can we learn about the origins of housing market policy when we look at the deep interrelations between these two tendencies? Historians interested in the social self, or interdependence, or state intervention in the market, have long noted the influence of “social control” in this middle-class worldview, but we have yet to fully understand the way ideas of hierarchy combined with Dewey’s “social values” to shape the complex interrelation of ideas, movements, and policies that went into making the publicly backed market for single-family homes. Those interested in how Progressive “social control” meant racism have wielded this story in two ways, depending on their political perspective: either to reveal the long-standing power of race to shape US liberalism, or, conversely, to argue that the Progressive interest in social control of peoples reveals the corruption of attempts to assert more public control over markets.Footnote ¹² Meanwhile, urban historians have shown how real estate and race have long been entwined, and how Ely and others who founded the practice of modern real estate did so with preserving hierarchy in mind.Footnote ¹³ However, none of these accounts give us the full picture, because they have yet to reveal how the unequal and discriminatory homeownership system was a by-product of the “age of the social” that Ely also championed.

The transformations that Ely helped spur were not his alone, of course. He was part of a generation of thinkers, writers, intellectuals, and policymakers formed by the great dilemmas that shaped the political culture of the United States between the 1880s and the 1930s. This was an era when landed independence for white men—the ideal of political virtue and autonomous individualism lionized at the nation’s origins—found itself on unsure terrain. Perhaps this is surprising: in some ways the ground had never been more fruitfully prepared for visions of individual ownership. In the wake of slave emancipation, which had ended the racialized system of persons as property, proponents of a bourgeois utopia celebrated the unfettered reign of freely chosen individual “contract” as the basis for a laissez-faire economy and all social relations across classes. The settler nation’s extirpation of Native Americans from their lands lodged individual possession of property at the heart of national life, finally enclosing the West, and clearing away alternative forms of relationship to land and property. On the other hand, women, workers, and the formerly enslaved demanded rights, equality, and a fairer share of the distribution of property once held by white men only.

Meanwhile, industrialization, the spread of wage labor, and the emergence of widespread housing tenancy in growing cities undermined the older, closely held ideals of independence and proprietorship. The financialization of the economy produced newer forms of property—rental housing as investment and stock ownership, for instance—and novel financial instruments—like the mortgage-backed security—that rested on interdependent social relations or introduced abstraction and mediation into the once direct and seemingly organic realm of landed property. Corporations gradually displaced independent proprietors as drivers of growth; consumers began to unseat producers as the focus of public economic policy. All these transformations spurred new visions of social selfhood to equal the emerging conditions of material and psychological interdependence. Guardians of the older order—elites and those of a traditional bent amongst the new middle classes predominantly, but also male, largely white workers committed to ideals of individual and patriarchal ownership—worried that their power to determine the parameters of citizenship might be ebbing away. In this crucible, homeownership took on new urgency as an echo or a remnant of the old property regime and the old possessive individualism.Footnote ¹⁴

This is the overarching context in which the kind of homeownership that Ely championed was institutionalized. Long imagined as an icon of American individualism, it was forced to register the tremors that new structures of economic organization, visions of social selfhood, and imaginings of social property sent through older ideologies of self-possession. And yet, I will show, just as the new, institutionalized model for homeownership was created by these visions of sociality—visions animated by ideals of both mutuality and hierarchy—it could still appear to stand for supposedly transhistorical ideals of autonomy and independence. That it did so allowed the hierarchies of this institutional complex to appear natural and inevitable, and so win the right to manage women, incorporate workers and immigrants, and attempt to exclude African Americans and others seen to be outside both the shifting borders of whiteness and the new regime of social property. The new institutions of ownership—the house, the housing market, the neighborhood—gave material shape to one of the most persuasive forms of ideological common sense in the history of US political culture. A complex co-articulation of relationality, hierarchy, and persistent belief in autonomous individual striving, this compact did much to determine the unequal development of the nation’s political economy and its social, economic, and metropolitan geography.

III

Richard T. Ely was one of the most influential economists of his generation. A cofounder of the American Economic Association in 1885, and one of many “ethical” or “institutional” economists who questioned the classical ideology of laissez-faire market fundamentalism, Ely was also, in the latter part of his career (between the 1910s and 1930s) an innovator in the economics of land and real estate. His work with the Institute for Research in Land Economics—he founded the organization in 1920—did much to inspire the economic theory and research that would inform Hoover’s 1931 housing conference.Footnote ¹⁵ Ely was both author of a foundational, widely read radical article that looked to drop laissez-faire in the dustbin of history—“The Past and Present of Political Economy” from 1883—and by 1931 a key member of the Committee on Business and Housing at Hoover’s conference. His career took him from supplying the economic armature for the renovations to individualism launched by Dewey and other Progressive or social-democratic thinkers to advocating for a sound national policy to support the institution most associated with the primacy of the individual male breadwinner ideal: homeownership.

How can this be? Few have asked this question in any detail, settling for the familiar idea that Ely got more conservative as he got older. This may be so: his biographer and his own autobiography suggest that he retreated from the absolute support for public ownership of municipal utilities that he advocated in the 1880s and 1890s, backed away from his passionate advocacy for labor unions, and forswore all of his early enthusiasm for a genteel form of Protestant socialism. Resistance to his early radicalism did have its effects: as economics professionalized in the last two decades of the century, Ely’s interest in a practical or “ethical” economics became more controversial, embroiling him in a series of fights with peers and University of Wisconsin administrators. In 1894, he survived an attempt to censure him for his support for labor politics, but the experience seems to have chastened him, and he retreated from overt politics and began his migration towards the economics of land and property.Footnote ¹⁶

However, the ideas that I trace here were present all along—during and after his radical period. His views on property (and managed hierarchy, as we will see) formed during the time he hoped to overthrow laissez-faire. Looking closely at the relationship between his writings advocating for a newly socialized economics beginning in the 1880s and his work on real estate and land several decades later suggests that they share what he called a “social theory of property.”Footnote ¹⁷ Throughout his career he pursued a vision of liberty as a “social product.”Footnote ¹⁸ In a complex urban, industrial age, he argued, liberty and individual freedom required the positive protection of the state rather than simply negative restrictions warding off threats to autonomy. This conviction underwrote his arguments for state oversight of the economy and his approach to homeownership: both required planning and regulation to deliver social, not merely individual, goods.

Ely was a leader of a generation of economic thinkers who built off the critiques of individualism launched by John Dewey and other social-democratic philosophers in Europe and the US in the nineteenth century. Dewey, inspired by the power that Darwinian evolution gave to the environment in shaping individual organisms, joined his mentor G. Stanley Hall and his contemporary William James in looking to forge an equivalent vision of human subjectivity and psychology—one that took the social conditions of industrial society into account in understanding the possibilities for human agency and relationality. In 1888 Dewey had called the “nonsocial individual” a mere “abstraction,” and over the years—between the 1870s and the 1930s—he sought to imagine a new kind of socialized selfhood, in which individual and society were “organic to each other.”Footnote ¹⁹ In Individualism Old and New he argued that, in a “corporate age,” it was “associations” that defined “the opportunities, choices and the actions of individuals.”Footnote ²⁰

Dewey’s interest in the power of a new “social corporateness” was hardly unique. Other sociologists and philosophers—James, George Herbert Mead, Charles Cooley—attempted to describe a new “social self” that would recognize the fundamental embeddedness of the self in society. They too felt that new conditions troubled the power of what Dewey’s biographer Robert Westbrook calls “the negative liberty of laissez-faire capitalism and the possessive individualism of the entrepreneur.”Footnote ²¹ The rise of the corporation, urbanism, and the complex new industrial order had spurred interest in a new terrain of inquiry and action: the “social.” Individuals, these thinkers argued, were linked in emerging webs of national and international connection. Impersonal markets; transportation systems; corporations and factories; specialized roles in the production, distribution, and consumption of goods: all increased dependence on others and revealed how individual activity was made possible by the conditions and forces reshaping modern capitalism. The old sovereign self rooted in landed independence and possessive individualism was giving way, Dewey and his ilk felt, to a mode of selfhood born from the relational powers of exchange, service, and expression that the connective world of interdependent modernity made possible. The “social self” would be the form of expressive subjectivity germane to the new corporate and urban order.Footnote ²²

Dewey hoped that the rise of the “social self” might underwrite a new ethic of participatory community in the ruins of individualism. It might give Americans a chance to refound their lost “cooperative commonwealth”—a new social order in which each person would find fulfillment and self-realization in an equitable industrial democracy. Others had less emancipatory visions. They hoped to create forms of scientific expertise and state power to harness the forces of interdependence and manage, direct, and channel modernity in service of the new social selfhood. They hoped, in other words, to institutionalize these forces.Footnote ²³

This was Richard Ely’s goal. From the philosophy of the social self, Ely and others like him built a social science. Their endeavors, Ely wrote, gave “special prominence to the social factor … in man’s nature.” Placing themselves in “opposition to individualism,” they stressed the way that the revolutions of the late nineteenth century had revealed interconnection to be the chief fact of modern life.Footnote ²⁴ “Pure individualism,” Ely declared, had become a “scientific absurdity.”Footnote ²⁵ Industrial development had created complexity, multiplication of roles, and specialization. From there developed webs of mutual reliance on other specializations. “The whole world,” Ely said, “becomes a vast network, in which each serves all and all serve each.”Footnote ²⁶ The result was that individuals “form more truly than ever before a social and industrial organism whose numberless parts are in infinite variety of manner interdependent. Infinite interrelations! Infinite interdependences!”Footnote ²⁷ Charting a course between state socialism and the “anarchy” that unchecked liberalism promised, Ely and his peers argued that “social solidarity” was the necessary and inevitable product of the times.Footnote ²⁸

This new reality required a revision of the old doctrine of laissez-faire anchored in individual liberty and based solely on the right to contract. The liberty that was once seen to sit “apart from organized society, and to which a man has an inalienable individual right,” Ely declared, had now to be reconceptualized as a positive good: the “outcome of life in organized society.” No longer the negative right of classical liberalism, freedom was a positive “social product.” By these lights the state, “which stands for organized society,” had become “the organ of liberty.”Footnote ²⁹ Ely and his students and peers helped to advance Progressive Era efforts to regulate the municipal and national capitalist economy. Alongside this move to use the state to protect citizens from the excesses of capitalism, however, ran another project: using public power to organize, channel, and promote those elements of private industry that Ely and others deemed socially beneficial. Trained experts like Ely and his reform-minded peers would be needed in both endeavors: the regulation of the private economy and the realization of the efficiency and abundance that the corporate organization of that private economy promised.Footnote ³⁰ Nowhere would that be more true than in the institutionalization of the real-estate industry.

At first glance, Ely’s contributions to land economics and real estate appear more prosaic than his attempts to rewrite the fundamental laws of classical economics. Between the 1910s and 1930s he argued for the basic importance of research into the state of rural and urban land use and for the production of the facts and figures that would help support, standardize, and regulate land development. He often stressed the pragmatic nature of his goals, saying that he merely wished to discover and promote new efficiencies in real estate and land use. But the impact of his and his colleagues’ work was profound: nothing less than the creation and promotion of the “land systems” that would drive and institutionalize the real-estate industry and financial markets in land.Footnote ³¹ He would find common cause with newly professionalizing real-estate brokers—especially those who had formed the influential National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) in 1908—in promoting the rational distribution of land and the stabilization of land values, which they all associated with stable communities. The liberal disbursement of land, only lightly regulated by a weak state, he felt, had led to chaos and the boom-and-bust cycles of modern capitalism.

These efforts took shape alongside a global revolution in urban real estate. Across the Western and colonized worlds in the late nineteenth century, governments and property owners looked both to create a functioning and liquid financial market in urban land and to control and harness that market for economic growth and value extraction. Faced with falling profits from industrial development and continuing cycles of boom and bust, capitalists turned to land and housing as sources of value, developing new financial instruments to carve capital out of development. Experts like Ely saw an opportunity to channel these forces through new regimes of property rights, and they worked to come to grips with what historian Alexia Yates calls the “double life of real estate in market societies”—its capacity to both mobilize, displace, and uproot—to make land into a fungible commodity—and its appeal to the ideals of settlement, home, and stability.Footnote ³²

Ely’s “land systems” promised to square the circle of these two tendencies. In cooperation with NAREB and other industry groups, Ely’s Institute for Research in Land Economics (which received funding from NAREB) worked to give the practices of the private real-estate industry academic legitimation. By the end of the 1920s he and his colleagues had codified a series of real-estate innovations that would eventually expand the market for home finance. They created “scientific” principles for standardizing real-estate valuation and appraisal; promoted the expansion of the long-term, low-interest, fully amortized mortgage loan pioneered by savings and loan banks; and backed the powers of zoning ordinances and other land-use restrictions favored by city planners and the real-estate industry. Ely’s work was so influential that a version of his institute’s motto—“Under all, the land”—served as the opening line of one of the most influential documents in the history of US real estate: NAREB’s 1924 inaugural code of ethics. The code pledged all of its broker members to a solemn duty to protect the social resource of land, the wide distribution of which would secure “free institutions and our civilization.” But it also promised to keep US neighborhoods segregated by “race and nationality” in order not to undermine property values.Footnote ³³

These paired impulses—the social and the hierarchical—shaped NAREB’s efforts and the larger eventual institutionalization of homeownership. And both had their roots in Ely’s work. His ideas about ownership built off his earlier insistence on “liberty as a social product,” resting on a similar assertion of what he called a “social theory of property.” As early as 1891 he argued that private property had “two sides, the social and the individual.” The social dimensions of private ownership were little recognized, but he insisted that there was no “absolute right of private property.” It was “not instituted for sake of the individual, but for the sake of the society as a whole.”Footnote ³⁴ Ely’s vision of property stressed what the legal historian Gregory Alexander has called “property as propriety”—a conception that has always coexisted and competed in the United States with the more familiar, and more often dominant, idea of “property as commodity.”Footnote ³⁵ The civic republican ideals of the early nation, for instance, promoted property as propriety, valuing the social interests of “virtue” and the stability it was said to promote. They existed in tension with the more purely liberal vision of property as commodity, in which ownership stood for freedom of private contract, negative political liberty, and a possessive individualism to be guarded against the incursions of the state or the majority. In the nineteenth century, the power of laissez-faire had tended to suppress this “propriety” tradition, but Ely and his fellow travelers revived its interest in defining property as an instrument of social order as much as autonomous liberty. Property did not stem from nature, they believed, or inhere in individual control over matter. “The essence of property,” Ely wrote, “is in the relations among men arising out of their relations to things.”Footnote ³⁶ Private property—even in land, the key ingredient in American conceptions of freedom and the building block of the real-estate industry—was, Ely wrote at the turn of the century, a “social institution and a social trust.”Footnote ³⁷

But what kinds of obligation did this social trust place on private property? About this Ely tended towards a kind of Panglossian assurance. He cited the Constitutional right of “police power” over property—which allowed for various forms of public regulation of land use—and at the extreme he backed the use of eminent domain with fair compensation for public use. For all his interest in socializing ownership, Ely was reluctant to endorse nationalization of land, the single tax on land advocated by the radical reformer Henry George, or even any substantial increase in public ownership of land. Just as he thought conditions of social interdependence must inevitably produce more social equality, he tended to believe that because private property was socially produced and legitimated—because Americans had chosen a system in which private property dominated—it should be seen as a social good. Property, he believed, did not serve merely individual freedom. It served society, which in turn would protect private property. Private property, he would argue, should be organized and regulated—taxed appropriately for social use, shaped and controlled by zoning, public planning, and other kinds of institutional measures—not to delimit its power, but in ways that would broaden access to ownership for those materially excluded from it and enhance private property’s central role as a bulwark against the chaos unleashed by industrialization and modernity.Footnote ³⁸

Like many of his peers in the emerging social sciences, Ely paired enthusiasm for the new relations of interdependence with passion for the expert administration and management of the newly socialized world. Social progress, Ely wrote, meant increased altruism and fellow feeling, but it also meant increased “social determination” and “social control.” If this meant increased oversight of the market by the state or municipality to offset the “inequality of conditions” lying back of liberal freedom of contract, it also meant increased management of people.Footnote ³⁹

Like other social scientists and reformers of the age, Ely believed that industrial society was the product of a long process of evolution. Unlike Darwin, however, for whom natural selection involved random and contingent adaptation to the environment, Ely joined other popularizers of evolutionary models in looking for progress, and for mechanisms by which societies advanced up the ladder of civilization. He believed that the current industrial stage was the highest yet—a story told by many in these years as one of racial progress up from savagery—but it was also fragile and always at risk of “degeneration.” The “savages” within—the poor, the disabled, vagrants, immigrants, racial outcasts—threatened Anglo-Saxon manhood and womanhood and their idealized domestic family life.Footnote ⁴⁰ Processes of natural selection unfolded in time, but industrial society required concerted procedures for “social selection”—as Ely called it—to separate the fit from the unfit and preserve progress.Footnote ⁴¹ If “inequalities of condition” warranted public intervention, he argued, natural inequalities amongst people were nonetheless inevitable and would emerge in competition. An interdependent industrial order placed increased demands on its members for “complex brain operations,” self-control, and harmonious interaction. Those who proved unfit—those “degenerates” left on “the rubbish heap of humanity,” whether “tramps,” “paupers,” repeat criminals, the “feeble-minded,” or others hobbled by their inferior “heredity”—had to be both cared for and controlled. Some could be trained for the new world, but others had to be weeded out of society—through institutional confinement, “custodial care,” or eugenic control of reproduction.Footnote ⁴² This was the darker side of Ely’s critique of individualism. By the early twentieth century, he and other evolution-minded reformers had shifted from seeing people as products of their environment to viewing them as primarily bearers of gene stocks, caretakers for the genetic resources of society in need of careful supervision and management. The “unfit,” Ely wrote, “should be prevented from a continuation of their kind.”Footnote ⁴³

The result was a nativist and white-supremacist politics of “race improvement.” “Baser foreign elements”—the Chinese primarily, in Ely’s early writings, penned during the onset of the exclusion era—might have to be kept out; race “amalgamation” had to be controlled. To do otherwise would be to “give evil free course,” and let laissez-faire win the day. All these restrictions were necessary, Ely thought, to preserve the mutuality that interdependence fostered. Without them, industrial liberty and “modern economic freedom” would fall into jeopardy. “Remove mutuality,” he wrote, “and dependence may degenerate into bondage.”Footnote ⁴⁴

How did this particular vision of social interrelation and hierarchical management influence Ely’s thinking on land and real estate? In his Elements of Land Economics he wrote that when “certain racial and national groups,” or “lower standard groups,” were allowed to buy land in an area where an “upper standard group” predominated, “land values drop and the institutional life of the area is broken up.” He applauded state laws outlawing land purchases by “Orientals” and approved of the many forms of private racial restriction practiced by the real-estate industry—seeing in them a means to shape and control the “social” nature of property.Footnote ⁴⁵

He also favored protecting the visions of home, domesticity, and homeownership elaborated by the emerging middle class. He evaluated both public and private property ownership, and approved the former for conserving scarce resources, but noted the idea that private property in land had often been seen as a “bulwark of political liberty.”Footnote ⁴⁶ And while he insisted that he did not explicitly hold a brief for private ownership, he did advocate for homeownership per se as a public good, stressing “the social importance of home ownership as a basis of good citizenship.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In the 1920s his institute’s research supported the development of model communities like Radburn in New Jersey (where he lived for a time) and Sunnyside in Queens, New York City, both built by the City Housing Corporation, a limited-profit company that built garden communities designed to bring homeownership into the reach of lower-middle-class Americans. As for “tenancy,” he hoped it would not become “dominant.” He worried it did not give citizens a full stake in their interdependent society. He allowed that it could be a step towards homeownership, but it was perhaps most useful in population management. The rental market primarily served “those who in their own interest and in the interest of society should be tenants under wise direction rather than owners.”Footnote ⁴⁸

For all his interest in a social theory of property, Ely often resorted to privatized virtues as his measures of hierarchical value. Like many middle-class urban reformers, he viewed cities of working-class tenants as both an object of concern and a challenge to the order necessary to direct the interdependent industrial world further upward on its evolutionary path. “The slums of cities,” for instance, needed a domestic recasting. Disappearing under the ministrations of urban reform, they would be replaced by “wholesome dwellings” characterized by “that old and beneficent institution—The Home.”Footnote ⁴⁹ And in his 1902 book The Coming City he imagined the entire public world of the city privatized through its reshaping as a “well-ordered household.”Footnote ⁵⁰ It was this structure of feeling—socialized property serving as a “bulwark” for a positive conception of industrial liberty supporting a hierarchical race, class, and gender order—that would inform the social shape of shelter brought into being by the institutionalization of homeownership.

IV

If Dewey hoped for a radical, if nebulous, socialization of US life, and Ely looked to master the new social selves of modernity through expert-led social control, then Herbert Hoover championed the idea of private enterprise as a source of social good. Famously leery of government intervention in the economy, Hoover nonetheless caught some of the socializing impulses that so moved Dewey and Ely. In his 1922 book American Individualism, he echoed the two thinkers, arguing that individualism was now based on more than “contracts, property, and political equality.” It had “long since abandoned the laissez-faire of the 18th century” and now featured “a greater and broader sense of service and responsibility to others.”Footnote ⁵¹ The old “pioneer individualism” had become “progressive individualism,” and its energies were now engaged upon the “continents of human welfare.”Footnote ⁵² He specifically hailed the rise of the corporation, welcoming its eclipse of the “arbitrary individual ownership” of firms. “The directors and managers of large concerns,” he declared, “themselves employees of these great groups of individual stockholders,” have come to “reflect a spirit of community responsibility.”Footnote ⁵³

Hoover envisioned a simultaneous preservation and transformation of possessive individualism if it was to survive the age of incorporation. Individualism must persist, but in a new context:

Hoover believed that private property was not a “fetish” in the US.Footnote ⁵⁵ But his vision blunted the edge of Dewey’s critique of individualism, and in his embrace of voluntarism explicitly brought out the strain of privatism that Ely had implicitly advocated. The right to property remained at the heart of Hoover’s new individualism, tempered only by voluntaristic acts of service, and mobilized as an ethos in which autonomy could be found in what might be called “expressive individualism,” or a right to self-realization through “leadership” and manipulation of the administrative and bureaucratic structures of modern organizational life.Footnote ⁵⁶

A self-described “unashamed individualist,” Hoover pitched the book as a kind of rearguard defense of older ideals in new times. He hoped to retrofit possessive individualism to ward off the revolutionary ideologies coursing through Europe in the wake of the Great War, while also, like Dewey or Ely, registering ongoing transformations in the scope and possibilities of individualism during a corporate age. But he believed that these transformations resulted, in the end, not from shifts in the political, social, and economic context in which individualism sat, but from voluntaristic efforts to create a “better, brighter, broader individualism—an individualism that carries increasing responsibility and service to our fellows.”Footnote ⁵⁷ If Dewey looked for an emerging “social corporateness,” and Ely a “social theory of property,” then Hoover’s reformed individualism lay at the heart of what he called “cooperative associationalism.”Footnote ⁵⁸ This was a new kind of expressive individualism retrofitted to replace the old possessive individualism, and it was well suited to fuel his efforts to promote homeownership.

Hoover was probably the most effective booster for homeownership in US history. As both Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s and later president, he fulfilled in policy what Ely advocated for in his popular writings and his economic research. Hoover’s efforts to build a political culture of homeownership through the organization, standardization, and spread of the private home-building industry prefigured New Deal support for white, middle-class, breadwinner homeownership, lacking only Franklin Roosevelt’s willingness to put the considerable weight of the federal purse behind efforts to create a government-backed mortgage market. Hoover’s 1931 housing conference was itself the culmination of years of house and home boosterism undertaken by a host of civil-society and commercial groups dating back to before World War I—many of which Hoover had encouraged as Secretary of Commerce and Ely had advised as head of the Institute for Research in Land Economics.Footnote ⁵⁹

Looking closely at the conference proceedings, we will see that the social shape of shelter it institutionalized dovetailed Hoover’s reconstituted individualism with Ely’s social vision of homeownership as a bulwark of hierarchical mutuality. It’s important, however, to recognize that these visions picked up on avid interest in homeownership by regular Americans, an interest that some were able to capitalize on better than others. Working-class people in late nineteenth-century American cities, for instance, had pursued homeownership as a hedge against the insecurities of a volatile capitalist economy and the ebbing power of landed independence. They embraced the respectability, dignity, and autonomy said to inhere in ownership, but houses also boosted working-class incomes in ways that preserved vestiges of the old productive economy. They housed boarders, hosted small businesses and vegetable gardens, and served as leverage for small loans from neighborhood lending networks. Meanwhile, middle-class attraction to homeownership took on a slightly different tenor: the “home” became an investment in real-estate profits and a source of gender, family, and class respectability in a genteel neighborhood separated from the industrial districts of cities. An ideal of privacy and health tied to visions of “property as propriety,” homeownership spread as a vision of social order and a defensible asset for white wage and salaried workers alike, imbued with social and property value that needed protecting from threats posed by immigrants or nonwhites.Footnote ⁶⁰

It was these ideals that Ely had long hoped to promote. And it was these ideals the various home and real-estate boosters of the early twentieth century—like those in NAREB—arose to support and, eventually, to institutionalize. These widespread interests, however, faced considerable challenges in the early years of the century. Housing construction had boomed in the late nineteenth century, driven by relatively low construction costs, the spread of streetcars and trolleys, the slowly increasing rationalization of the construction industry, and the global turn toward real estate as an arena for capital investment. Much building of homes, however, remained a piecemeal affair, as most houses were still erected by individual builders working lot by lot. The mortgage products offered by local savings and loan associations were targeted at people of moderate means, but they tended to be relatively short-term loans of five or six years and stability was not easy to come by.Footnote ⁶¹ Some of the bigger builders offered installment plans and longer-term mortgages, but homeownership, as popular as it was, largely required wealth or inordinate commitment to thrift and savings.Footnote ⁶²

Housing starts continued their upward trajectory after the turn of the century, but construction costs spiked as well. Institutional lenders—commercial banks and life insurance companies—gradually began to enter the residential lending market, but they tended to offer short-term loans with payments on interest only and balloon payments on the principal at the end of the term. (By the 1920s, savings and loans, Ely’s institute observed, could offer eleven or twelve years with payments on both interest and principal.)Footnote ⁶³ Meanwhile, the construction industry slowly consolidated, leading to an increasing focus on the top end of the market. A short experiment with government-built worker housing during World War I suggested that the traditional abhorrence of federal intervention in housing in US political culture might not be immune to revision if the private industry could not build for all. The 1920s saw the biggest housing boom yet, but the lion’s share of the activity reflected the shape of the new corporate contour of the building and lending industry: great flourishes of building on the middle-class suburban fringes of cities, inflated by the spread of the automobile, and a corresponding boom in apartment buildings for the well-to-do in urban downtowns and residential neighborhoods. Some more modest building did occur—this was the age of the bungalow in many American cities—but manual laborers were mostly left out of the boom, while skilled workers saw the price of housing rise compared to relatively stagnant wages. African Americans of any class, arriving in cities in great numbers in these years, found themselves confined to the old tenement belts close to downtown.Footnote ⁶⁴

Ely and his allies in the real-estate industry looked at these developments with growing alarm. They had achieved increased standardization in building and home finance but continued to worry that homeownership was not reaching enough people. Committed, of course, to the market provision of shelter, and leery about the specter of government intervention, they began in the 1920s to increase their efforts. Ely and his institute worked to publicize and spread a range of innovations in housing finance—particularly the long-term, amortized mortgage—as well as standardized practices in subdivision development and real-estate appraisal. Meanwhile, real-estate interests teamed up with Hoover at Commerce to sponsor a series of public-relations campaigns with names like “Better Homes in America” that reached many thousands of Americans with an idealized vision of the single-family house in a spacious yard both as “home” and as the purchase central to bolstering the growth model of an emerging consumer capitalism.Footnote ⁶⁵

The 1929 stock market crash and the early years of the Depression pushed the housing market into crisis and gave an added sense of urgency to these efforts. Hoover and Ely, like many other Progressives and like the New Dealers to come, now saw the housing problem as central to the whole economy. As the center of domestic life, the house was the purchase around which so many other commodities and financial instruments revolved. Roosevelt would say it best a few years later, but the sentiment was theirs, too: housing was “the wheel within the wheel to move the whole economic engine” and jump-start the national economy.Footnote ⁶⁶ This conviction hardly guaranteed a uniform view of what was to be done, however. On the left, labor officials and housing reformers hoped to fulfill their long-standing ambitions to, as Elizabeth Blackmar puts it, enlarge the “social limits on private property rights” by calling for public housing programs influenced by European models for mass social housing. The only way to offset that threat, Ely, Hoover, and the real-estate industry realized, was to restart, reinvigorate, and spread the cultural ideal that they had advertised in the 1920s: a “moral economy,” as Jeffrey Hornstein calls it, in which Ely’s vision of independence through managed sociality took shape as the detached single-family home and its gendered ideals of public–private division defended from outsiders.Footnote ⁶⁷

That vision reached a head in Hoover’s 1931 conference, where both threads of this vision got a full hearing. On the one hand, it was not hard to find in the proceedings the idea of “home” figured as the font of independence. And yet the proceedings also revealed how homeownership itself was being retrofitted to meet the age of the corporation and the social self. Conference-goers revealed how it was being accommodated to those terms by embracing the kind of managed hierarchical mutuality favored by Richard Ely and other idealists of property as propriety.

It was Hoover himself who famously sounded the most redolent notes of the pro-homeownership refrain while introducing the conference. “That our people should live in their own homes is a sentiment deep in the heart of our race and of American life,” he intoned. “To own one’s home is physical expression of individualism, of enterprise, of independence, and of the freedom of spirit.” They don’t “sing songs about a pile of rent receipts.” The “immortal ballads,” he continued, were “not written about tenements or apartments … They are the expressions of racial longing which find outlet in the living poetry and songs of our people. They were written about an individual abode, alive with the tender associations of childhood, the family life at the fireside, the free out-of-doors, the independence, the security, and the pride in possession of the family’s own home—the very seat of its being.”Footnote ⁶⁸

At the same time, many conference-goers were worried that these ideals had not yet produced results. One committee report warned of “very startling trend … away from the private house to the larger multiple dwelling.”Footnote ⁶⁹ This threatened “passing of the house”—as they called it—was a product of the volatility in the housing market during the 1920s and the lack of affordable mortgage financing, but they worried that it endangered “American institutions” of free enterprise.Footnote ⁷⁰ As such it required organized action. The house, the traditional expression of individualism, had to be made a thoroughly social affair if it was to win the day over collectivist competition.

Hoover’s Secretary of Commerce, Robert Lamont, a strident backer of the real-estate industry, was so disturbed by the crisis in housing, particularly amongst African Americans, that he was moved to abandon traditional individualism. The crisis, he remarked—echoing ideas Ely had championed for decades—had been caused by “shortcomings of our individualistic theory of housing, and the failure which grows out of expecting each person in our highly complex industrial civilization to provide his own housing as best he may.” Ultimately, he argued, it was impossible to produce “acceptable housing by isolated individual effort.”Footnote ⁷¹ The housing the conference envisioned may have appeared to enshrine the old spirit of possessive individualism, but bringing it to life, he said, would require “dependence on all the economic, social, and political forces of the community.” What Hoover’s conference edged towards and FDR’s New Deal would realize—government support for the mortgage market—would require collective effort. “In fact,” he continued, the conference had established “housing as a major test of modern man’s capacity to work cooperatively towards the distant goal of the common good instead of the immediate goal of the apparent individual good.”Footnote ⁷²

In order to fulfill this vision, conference attendees argued that the housing industry had to imitate the standardized methods used to finance, design, and build factories, office buildings, and skyscrapers. The needed science of housing was, as Hoover put it, one part in the “vast problems of city and industrial management.”Footnote ⁷³ Ultimately, securing ideologically individualist ends would require his “cooperative associational” means. The conference recommended the creation of a federal mortgage discount bank, realized several months later as the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which would help create a network of banks with a common pool of money to help underwrite longer-term amortized lending. And eventually, of course, the single-family house would be standardized and industrialized, expanded across the country by mass production and, much to Hoover’s chagrin, boosted by greater direct government support for its financing during the New Deal.Footnote ⁷⁴

But what did this situation demand of the individual homeowner? How did it imagine the individual at the heart of this cooperative association? In fact, no small amount of the conference proceedings was dedicated to regulations and codes of the kind needed to manage, proscribe, and delimit a homeowner’s rights. For instance, the conference’s Home Ownership and Leasing Committee reported that “a profound change in what home ownership means has taken place in the minds of the American public.” Echoing Ely’s social theory of property, they declared “unlimited freedom in the use of a lot” outmoded. That freedom “does not give the owner so great enjoyment of his rights as when he surrenders certain privileges in return for protection through similar surrenders by his neighbors.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Like Ely, the committee backed the various protections that had been innovated over the previous several decades by the real-estate industry and municipal governments—zoning, deed restrictions, building codes, and subdivision regulations. These “tools of exclusion,” as the historians Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese call them, could serve simultaneously as protections for property values—safeguards against invasive and incompatible forms of land use, restrictions on who could be one’s neighbors—and the implements of mutuality by ensuring that homeowners respected the social fabric of the community that enabled their individual ownership.Footnote ⁷⁶ Homeowners enjoyed their individualism as part of Ely’s “land systems,” and they had a stake in asserting themselves to preserve that order—but as a kind of defensive individualism that was organized and structured to preserve the privilege of managed autonomy and hierarchical mutuality.

Of course, the currency of that mutuality remained, at base, a compact with a socialized individualism expressed in the language of property values and the forms of social exclusion that would come to mark single-family breadwinner suburban life. The committee did not shy away from making this abundantly clear:

V

John Dewey understood what he was up against. In Individualism Old and New he noted that the decade just gone by—the 1920s—had featured “the most sentimental glorification of the sacredness of the home.” And in what certainly reads like a pointed slight aimed Hoover’s way he acidly remarked that at a time when the pressure “to get ahead in a competitive pecuniary race” was soaring, official accounts of American social life were “bursting with desire to ‘serve’ others.”Footnote ⁷⁸

In the end, however, it was those two sentiments—the home and a voluntarist ideology of sociality—that dovetailed to create a new social shape for shelter. Both Dewey and Hoover offered visions of selfhood that sought to modify individualism for a corporate, industrial, and metropolitan era, a time in which, as Richard Ely argued, new forces of interdependence had eroded the power of the old possessive individualism. Dewey claimed that “social corporateness” would arrive with the “economic revision” that he believed must accompany a corporate political economy. Hoover’s “cooperative association,” on the other hand, was a product of an ideological faith in the virtue of interdependent market relations, enlightened leadership, and American “national genius.”

In the end, homeownership was, like so much else in American life in those years, organized. The “land system” of codes, regulations, mortgage instruments, and zoning restrictions favored by Ely’s theory of social property became the cornerstone of what historian Marina Moskowitz calls a “standard of living,” not a fully socialized form of ownership.Footnote ⁷⁹ During the early New Deal, labor and housing reform groups proposed extensive initiatives for social housing. But the limited “public housing” that they won with the 1937 Wagner Public Housing Act paled in comparison with the 1934 Housing Act, which supercharged the recommendations imagined for the private market by Ely and Hoover’s 1931 conference through the creation of the Federal Housing Administration. This “two-tiered” system of housing provision—as historian Gail Radford calls it—had led, by the postwar era, to the institutionalization of a split reality. On the one hand, there was a visible but parsimonious public housing program stigmatized in the public’s eyes by its poor and increasingly racialized residents. But on the other hand, a standardized system of tax, insurance, and regulatory supports for a new private market in long-term amortized mortgages on single-family homes appeared to be a natural, and thus invisible, part of the “free market.”Footnote ⁸⁰

FHA programs also notoriously institutionalized the forms of exclusion imagined by Ely and practiced by the private real-estate industry. The FHA, working with guidelines and practices developed by two influential Ely students—Ernest Fisher and Frederick Babcock—standardized real-estate appraisal practices and extended insurance to mortgage lenders according to a system of neighborhood risk ratings (and other practices) designed to jump-start the economy and stabilize the housing market.Footnote ⁸¹ For three decades or more real-estate professionals had seen concentrations or combinations of “national” and racial groups—Southern and Eastern European immigrants or their recent descendants; blacks and Jews; Mexican Americans and Asian Americans—as linked to other signs of physical or social deterioration in working-class neighborhoods and counted them as “scientific” evidence of dangerous erosion in property values.Footnote ⁸² Now the federal government adopted and standardized these practices. Inspired by Ely, and led by his students, the FHA institutionalized these appraisal techniques, using them to guide where government insurance should or should not be extended for mortgage lending. The result was an invisible system of discrimination legitimated by the seemingly innocent power of scientific data analysis.Footnote ⁸³ If public policy had once looked to protect the mythic independent American from the vagaries of the market, historian Daniel Platt argues, it now worked to shield the market from “high-risk” borrowers. By “steering capital away from people and places most exposed to the turns of fortune,” Platt shows, the FHA made housing debt the central normative instrument of an interdependent political economy based on unequal access to consumption.Footnote ⁸⁴

Ultimately, the FHA homeownership system enshrined the vision of managed hierarchy that Ely conceived to protect his ideals of “social property.” It licensed a form of mutuality or interdependence based in a socialized individualism that preserved, perpetuated, and legitimized class and racial inequality and patriarchal gender divisions. This was a kind of social organization, but one geared to realizing a version of Ely’s conceptions of hierarchical mutuality. The New Deal’s homeownership system appeared to be a natural product of the market, David Freund has argued, when it was actually a product of a public–private compact that created the racially divided metropolis of the postwar era—the chief instrument in perpetuating and solidifying the great racialized wealth divide produced by American capitalism. Ultimately, race and other forms of hierarchy shaped the market—and in so doing camouflaged themselves. The racialized sociality of real estate happened just out of sight, submerging itself in the naturalized workings of the property market, subsisting on perceptual assumptions of proper spatial social relations and hierarchies that structured thought, feeling, and practice, leaving overt pronouncement of discrimination redundant or unnecessary.Footnote ⁸⁵

Equally important, and even more crucial for this system’s longevity, was the way it could continue to be garbed in a rhetoric of individual self-possession. As a kind of quasi-socialized individualism, this regime underpinned a collective, institutionalized interest in property values that appeared to be anchored only in individual striving and capacity. The property value system relied, in turn, on protection from the incursion of those whose supposed incapacity for such autonomy threatened to erode the supposedly autonomous possession of that social and property value.

This complex formation suggests how homeownership became such a widely shared and closely held institution in the United States. Emergent as a mode of living since the nineteenth century, in the first three decades of the twentieth homeownership flourished as an affective, practical, and political solution to a prolonged era of crisis in American culture and social life, becoming a dominant structure of feeling around which US political culture and urbanism have since revolved. Lodging itself at the heart of the nation’s metropolitan geography—in the form of suburban growth—it also shaped the political culture of the New Deal, marking both its intellectual formation and its long-term political fortunes.

We know well how the New Deal welfare state was based on the idea that the individual freedoms once associated with classical liberalism could only be safeguarded by public investment in the general social welfare. We should also recognize the way in which the “other” New Deal’s attempts to bolster private industry (in housing, at least) stemmed from a powerful lineage of interest in the “social” renovation of individualism and liberty.Footnote ⁸⁶ Both of these tendencies were shaped by the recurrent power of racial, class, and gender hierarchies, and both can be traced to ideas championed and spearheaded by Richard T. Ely. And so we are left with another New Deal paradox. Its ruptures with past political culture—the reformation of individualism and the relative “socialization” of housing through government intervention in the market—arise out of recurrent continuity: an investment in Ely’s managed hierarchy.Footnote ⁸⁷ Both crosscutting currents return us to familiar ground—the long history of New Deal practice in Progressive Era thought—and to a deeper understanding of Ely’s influence over that history. His influence also suggests how the New Deal was divided from the start, with the persistent individualism of US political culture not so much banished as incorporated by the new social shape of homeownership, leaving that complex investment in the single-family home as a built-in liability that would foreshadow—even subsidize—the forces that would undo the New Deal welfare state in the long run.