Should you ask why we love Greendale,
Find it fun to work and play here,
We all answer, all tell you . . .


It's awakening to bird-song
In the rosy dawn of springtime!
Watching frisky squirrels cavorting!
Romping space for pets and children,
Far from city's threatening traffic!
It's group picnics at grounds southward,
And the suppers cooked o'er charcoal
In one corner of our gardens;
Baby's playpen in the sunshine,
Knowing well that naught can harm him!

Summary Paper Two is due

To this point, we have examined the shifting state of the individual within various rhetorics of the ideal community. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it becomes clear that neither church nor state can construct a perfected social order. Perhaps, the job should be left to masters of commerce and captains of industry. The ideal public life becomes a product to be planned, packaged, and purchased - and placed within what Michel Foucault labels a heterotopia. However, as corporations and trusts gird the nation with railroads and sell their ideologies with worlds fairs and planned communities, some critics fear the corporate dynamo � the "big generator" � that grows within the American garden of Eden. Fearing that our communities have become too mechanized, too planned, they call for a romantic rhetoric of arcadia � a mythical green space, a modern compromise with the forces of discipline. To examine these metaphors more closely, we discuss the works of Leo Marx, Robert Ivie, and Roger Aden.

Readings: Garreau, Christensen, and Howard

Notes: Joel Garreau's Machine and Garden

Notes: Carol Christensen's Levittown chapter

Notes: Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-Morrow

Off-campus webpages

Rhoda Amon, The Birth of Garden City

The American Studies Group at UVA, Henry Adams: The Dynamo and the Virgin

Cornell University College of Architecture, Art & Planning, Links: Garden Cities to Green Cities

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Celestial Railroad

Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow - maintained by Cornell University

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