The War Against the Trees (Historical Context)

Historical Context

When World War II ended in 1945, some ten million American soldiers were discharged from the armed forces. To shelter them, housing developments were built outside the city. Though suburbs existed in America before the fifties, they were nothing like those to come. The most infamous and influential plan for suburbia was Levittown, located on Long Island, New York. On July 3, 1950, William J. Levitt appeared on the cover of Time magazine in front of a row of identical boxlike houses on freshly bulldozed land. The caption read: “House Builder Levitt. For Sale: A New Way of Life.” First on Long Island, then near Philadelphia, and in New Jersey, Levitt helped model the suburbia of the 1950s. In October 1947, the first Levit-town home was purchased, just one of many mass-produced, affordable, look-alike houses characterizing 1950s suburbia. These developments helped foment middle-class migration to the suburbs and the need for more and larger high-speed roads to handle high-powered cars. Not only were houses nearly identical, but lots as well, with a tree planted every twenty-eight feet (two-and-a-half trees per home). In the beginning, Levitt included a free television set and a washing machine as incentives to buy. Homeowners could not build fences, lawns had to be mowed at least once a week, and laundry could be hung on rotary racks only, not on lines, and never on weekends. Despite such restrictions, 1.4 million housing units were built in 1950. The rate continued throughout the decade, an average of three thousand acres of farmland bulldozed per day for tract housing. By 1952, Long Island’s Levittown population was ten thousand, and Pennsylvania’s Levittown could accommodate seventeen thousand families.

“The War Against the Trees,” while commonly appearing in modern poetry anthologies, is nearly absent from criticism. It seems that only Selden Rodman finds the poem worthy of comment, asking Kunitz in an interview whether “The War Against the Trees” wasn’t “a primer of ecology.” Rodman’s observation is not surprising given the interview took place in 1971, not long after the sanctioning of environmentalism with the first Earth Day in April 1970. More remarkable, however, is that “The War Against the Trees” (1958) was published well before what by some accounts was the inspiration for America’s modern environmental movement — the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962.

Although critics have ignored “The War Against the Trees,” they have not ignored Selected Poems, the volume in which it appears. In 1958, poet and critic David Wagoner wrote that the eighty-five poems in Selected Poems “exhibit a simultaneously delightful and frightening mind. Its ways are intricate, surprising, and clear; but they occasionally lead so deep or so far forward that the reader performing Pound’s ‘dance along the intellect’ discovers himself in a country where he is his own most dangerous enemy, where he is forced to choose sides at the bottom of his own mind.” In the case of “The War Against the Trees,” that choice might refer to the tough one between nature and development. Nine years later, Jean H. Hagstrum remarked that “the latest poems (which include “The War Against the Trees”) make the old metaphysical boldness even bolder and intensify the already unparaphrasable imagistic intensity. At the same time, the long colloquial line of 1944 has now become a marvel of flexible strength. Suffusing these familiar effects is a golden romanticism ” Had Hagstrum specifically addressed the case of “The War Against the Trees,” she might have supplied one more adjective to describe that “golden romanticism”: A frustrated golden romanticism. Robert Weisburg picks up the issue of Kunitz’s romanticism in his “Stanley Kunitz: The Stubborn Middle Way”: “Kunitz, in fact, is a devout Romantic in his adherence to the natural world as his model for human experience, though he has successfully transformed nature from Wordsworthian harmony and sublimity to the modern disfigurement he must deal with, especially by dealing more with man’s body than with earth’s body.” This is less true of “The War Against the Trees,” where the human heart is too small to save the “earth’s body” from desertification, disfigurement, and death. But Weisburg is certainly correct, in terms of “The War Against the Trees,” when he writes that harmony between humans and nature is non-existent. Not just non-existent, but as fallen as if Adam and Eve had themselves driven the bulldozers.

Compare & Contrast

• 1958:The Affluent Society, by Harvard economics professor John Kenneth Galbraith, decries the overemphasis on consumer goods in the U.S. economy and the use of advertising to create artificial demand for such goods. More of the nation’s wealth should be allocated to the public, says Galbraith.
  1999:The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need by Juliet Schor shows how keeping up with the Joneses has evolved from keeping pace with one’s neighbors and those in a similar social strata, to keeping up with coworkers who earn five times one’s own salary, or television characters with a lifestyle unattainable for the average person.
• 1958: “The torrent of foreign oil robs Texas of her oil market” and costs the state $1 million per day, says the chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission which controls production in the state. The Commission reduces Texas oil wells to eight producing days per month.
  2000: Truckers march on Washington demanding that the federal government lower oil prices. With American pressure, the organization of oil producing nations, OPEC, agrees to step up oil production in order to lower prices.
• 1958: The median U.S. family income is $5,087, up from $3,187 in 1948 (half of all families have incomes below the median, half above), but prices have climbed along with incomes.
  Today: The median family income adjusted for inflation is $42,000.