Daniel Immerwahr reviews Joshua Specht’s Property Values, a history of American land ownership, and lands on a simple explanation for why the country looks the way it does: it keeps swinging between two crude geometries, the continental grid and the winding suburban curve, and both were imposed fast, and for property transfer rather than for living well.

Specht’s sharpest claim is that Native dispossession belongs beside slavery as a founding sin. Immerwahr agrees — and adds that dispossession mattered not only for what it took, but for the mind-set it licensed: territory as empty space, a chalkboard to be wiped clean.

  • Circleville, Ohio (1810) was laid out in concentric arcs around an Indigenous earthwork; a “Circleville Squaring Company” later razed the mounds, straightened the lots, and paved the roads over a Native burial site.
  • Jefferson’s grid was drawn for land nobody had surveyed. Surveyors started in Ohio on September 30, 1785, in lands held by Lenapes, Miamis, Odawas, and Shawnees. It eventually covered two-thirds of the contiguous United States.
  • 52 land-grant universities were funded with more than 10 million acres taken from nearly 250 Native polities. Wars produced land; land funded wars. Lincoln collected two Iowa parcels for under three months of Black Hawk War service and never visited them.
  • The Homestead Act gave away squares totalling an area the size of Pakistan — state socialism inside the bootstrap myth.
  • Lewis Mumford on land parcelled into “abstract units for buying and selling”; John Wesley Powell warned the square grid would ruin the semi-arid West by ignoring drainage basins. Stegner said he was using bear language in a bull market. Then the Dust Bowl arrived and dust rained on the White House.
  • The 1930s flipped the dream from homestead to homeowner: zero-down loans, mortgage guarantees, highways, insured developers. By 1960, more Americans lived in suburban single-family homes than in cities or the countryside.
  • Suburbs were as artificial as the grid. Levittown: 17,447 houses in four years, one every sixteen minutes, on failed potato farmland. Developers levelled an area the size of Rhode Island every year in the 1950s.
  • The exclusion was built into the form. Racial covenants, cross burnings in Levittown, Pennsylvania in 1957, and Albert Pope’s point in Ladders: cul-de-sacs have so few intersections that a place can be gated. Fewer crossings means more cars, and worse walking.
  • Density falls, conservatism rises. Lily Geismer’s Don’t Blame Us traces the market-forward liberalism of the Clinton years to the suburbanization of the Democratic Party — people who fought for integration and against war while refusing collective spending.

The political lesson is uncomfortable in both directions. Government built the grid, and government built the suburbs; one looked like a handout to settlers and the other looked like individual choice, and both were policy.

Immerwahr’s closing question is the good one. Why did such simplistic ideas hold sway for so long? Because on a stolen continent the land seemed unmarked by history — so settler ideas could run rampant over it, bulldozing yesterday to clear space for tomorrow.