The Buttons They Handed to Schoolchildren

On a passage from The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

After the 1917 Russian Revolution, federal officials concluded that the way to defeat communism in the United States was to make as many white Americans as possible into homeowners, on the explicit theory that those who owned property would be invested in the capitalist system.

RICHARD ROTHSTEIN

I have been reading Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, and a passage I came to this week sharpened something I already knew in a way that has not left me alone since.¹ I knew, generally, that single-family homeownership in the United States is a state-engineered arrangement rather than a market outcome. I knew the FHA redlined Black neighborhoods, that the GI Bill funneled federal mortgage subsidies to white veterans and excluded Black ones, that the postwar suburb was a public-private project organized around the production of a white propertied class. That much is commonly in the literature.

What Rothstein gives in this passage is the prehistory of the policy, the ideological ground that the FHA and the GI Bill would later operationalize at scale, and it is more direct than I had understood. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, federal officials concluded that the way to defeat communism in the United States was to make as many white Americans as possible into homeowners, on the explicit theory that those who owned property would be invested in the capitalist system. The Department of Labor launched an Own-Your-Own-Home campaign that same year. It handed out buttons that read “We Own Our Own Home” to schoolchildren. It printed two million posters for factories and other workplaces. It distributed pamphlets describing it as a “patriotic duty” to cease renting and to build a single-family home. The contradiction is worth pausing on. Capitalism sells itself as the system of individual freedom, but its foundation in the United States was laid through state-mandated social duty, evangelized at scale to a population whose patriotism was conditional on its compliance. The advertisements throughout the country featured white couples and white families exclusively.

Reading this, I had to stop and sit with what it actually means. The American Dream, the entire ideological infrastructure of property as freedom and renting as failure, was called into being within three years of the Bolshevik seizure of power, as a counter-revolutionary measure, directly evangelized to children. Children actually wore buttons. The political project of producing a propertied subject who would experience their interests as aligned with capital was not the cumulative effect of a thousand small decisions. It was a deliberate state campaign with posters and pamphlets, executed by named officials in named years.

I have been writing about how capitalist culture conditions bodies in Southern California, about how the freeway is in every nervous system and the fortress home is a posture the body assumes. The Rothstein passage names one of the documented mechanisms by which that conditioning was installed. It did not appear from nowhere. It was put there, on purpose, by a state apparatus that understood exactly what it was doing. The schoolchildren who wore those buttons became the parents who bought the suburban homes that became the neighborhoods whose property values their grandchildren now defend at zoning meetings without knowing why.

The recognition does not by itself change anything. It is also not nothing. The thing about a historical project that has been successful enough to become invisible is that naming it returns it to the category of contingent choice. The buttons came from somewhere. The buttons can stop being made.

1. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017).