For American machinery manufacturers and operators, places like Guam were essentially test runs for the frenzy of construction that would begin at home when everyone returned. Following the war’s conclusion, the U.S. got drunk on bulldozers: Many of its major cities, despite never once being attacked, began to take on a bizarre resemblance to the area-bombed ruins of Europe and Asia as large swathes of natural landscape and farmland were leveled in preparation for a new dawn of infrastructure and suburbia. During the late 1950s in California, an orange tree was bulldozed on average every 55 seconds.
Of course, it wasn’t just bulldozers used for this nationwide transformation — wrecking balls and cranes did just as much work — but this particular machine became the symbolic metaphor of the era. “Mother Earth is going to have her face lifted!” read one earthmoving equipment advertisement in 1944, complete with an illustration of a feminized planet rolled on its side and looking to the ground as a man drives a bulldozer over her face.
In New York, Robert Moses famously oversaw the clearance of vast tracts of land for public and private development. In his famous book “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air,” philosopher Marshall Berman captured his own conflicted feelings as a New Yorker during this period. He was awestruck by what was taking place around him. “To oppose his [Moses’s] bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams, stadia, cultural centers, was — or so it seemed — to oppose history, progress, modernity itself. And few people, especially in New York, were prepared to do that,” he wrote.
But his perspective changed in 1953 when the bulldozers arrived at his door to begin work on a new expressway. “At first we couldn’t believe it; it seemed to come from another world,” he wrote. “They surely couldn’t mean what the stories seemed to say: that the road would be blasted directly through a dozen solid, settled, densely populated neighborhoods like our own; that something like 60,000 working- and lower-middle-class people, mostly Jews, but with many Italians, Irish and Blacks thrown in, would be thrown out of their homes.” And yet it was so. Berman remembered visiting the construction sites after the evictions, sometimes to weep for what was being destroyed, sometimes to “marvel” at how quickly his “ordinary nice neighborhood” was being transformed into “sublime, spectacular ruins.”
The image of a person weeping for the devastation wrought by the bulldozer while still maintaining awe at its capabilities remains to this day a poignant summation of the seemingly irreconcilable paradox of this machine, both destroyer and creator, and the disorienting speed of erasure it has enabled. Around the world, these scenes are as common today as they were during the demolition of Berman’s Bronx.