4

STANDARDS

In 1929, Roland Park Company Sales Manager Guy T. O. Hollyday gave the following advice to members of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) in an article published in the National Real Estate Journal: “To keep out people who have not learned to live decently [we have] a sales policy against certain nationalities, such as the poorer south Europeans whose presence in the district would depreciate values.”¹ Hollyday echoed the policies espoused by his boss, Roland Park Company president Edward Bouton, that race, religion, and nationality affected property values. Hollyday’s article reflected an existing culture within the company, one that viewed the Roland Park Company as the industry leader and trendsetter. The Roland Park Company knew, in Hollyday’s words, how to “create and maintain a market.”²

In order to understand the rise of NAREB and the Roland Park Company’s place in it, it is crucial to look at the interplay between industry-wide conversations about real estate and local practices of individual firms. This multidirectional exchange enabled the Roland Park Company to make the leap from constructing Baltimore’s suburban real estate market to helping to forge a national one. Though NAREB was founded in 1908, it was in the 1920s that it achieved a robust organizational capacity amid a nationwide real estate boom. Whereas previously developers informally disseminated forms, advice, and plans, NAREB opened new communication channels to make information available to any member of the association. NAREB, in essence, made it possible for members to easily have large nationwide conversations about important issues such as valuing property.

Suburban developers like those in the Roland Park Company filled the association’s leadership ranks from the outset. As a result, they played a disproportionate role in shaping NAREB’s platform. During NAREB’s formative years, suburban developers spearheaded a drive to transform the image of those in the real estate business from scam artists to reputable professionals. They worked to standardize practices and introduce a code of ethics that its members would be duty-bound to follow. If members adhered to the rules and paid their dues, they could call themselves Realtors with a capital R, a name NAREB trademarked. But the association’s dissemination of textbooks and training courses did not prevent individual members from continuing to shape the industry. In a departure from some theories of professionalization, NAREB’s central office regularly distributed materials based on its members’ advice and experiences.³ Ultimately, though, through the mechanisms of professionalization, NAREB encouraged members to emulate suburban developers.⁴

Members of NAREB tended to have little in common during the organization’s first decade aside from the fact they were white men involved in real estate. NAREB initially banned African Americans from membership and rarely admitted women before the Second World War.⁵ NAREB members came from different parts of the country and had disparate interests ranging from selling farm property to managing cooperative apartments in large cities. Developing shared ways of seeing people and property together became a crucial facet of Realtor identity. Scott Kurishige writes, “Developers and realtors sought to control not only the trade in bricks and mortar but also the trade in images of race, neighborhood, and community.”⁶ This was the case with public promotions by NAREB, such as early collaborations with the U.S. Department of Labor for the Own Your Own Home campaign.⁷ It was also the case with regard to advertising by individual firms. Often overlooked, but just as critical to real estate, was the circulation of images that were not intended for the public. Seeing people and property together, for example, occurred in the literal sense as NAREB members came together to travel, organize tours, and fraternize. Whether discussing business, driving through cities, or singing songs together, Realtors used NAREB to rehearse ideas about people and real estate. Through this process they reinforced their standing as white, as men, and as real estate experts. This enabled them to develop a shared way of seeing that inflected the development of professional practice.

In terms of documents not intended for public view, none illustrate the daily practices of segregation better than the Roland Park Company’s exclusion files. The company created a cache of office records to keep track of rejected buyers. Whereas the company used the public document of the restrictive covenant to bar African Americans, it vetted others whom salesmen initially thought were qualified to live in a Roland Park neighborhood. The exclusion files most clearly illustrate the Roland Park Company’s inconsistencies and ambiguities that put it at odds with national conversations on standardizing real estate practices. The company used exclusion files when it came to excluding any homebuyers other than African Americans. In the files, salesmen documented how they investigated potential buyers and debated with supervisors the potential merits of candidates before rejecting them. The company began to use exclusion files after moving the investigative apparatus of employee credit checks in-house after the opening of Guilford. Their use greatly expanded in the 1920s when the company opened its third subdivision, Homeland. Of the fifty-six exclusion files that have survived in the company records, all but three were created after 1920.⁸

The exclusion files cast light on the constant interplay between local understandings about racial hierarchy, national conversations, and federal laws.⁹ Natalia Molina argues that scholars often “miss how regionally constructed notions of race developed, circulated, and gradually percolated to the national level.”¹⁰ The exclusion files fill in a missing piece about the relationship between local and national segregation efforts, because Realtors’ positions often depended on where they lived and how they understood racial hierarchies to be constituted in their localities. These ideas filtered up to the national level through Realtor participation in NAREB. As a result, national institution building both depended on and stood in tension with local practices of exclusion.

The give-and-take between local real estate firms and the national association shaped how questions of racial hierarchy and housing exclusion played out.¹¹ Despite NAREB’s top-down attempts to codify directives about exclusion, suburban developers never reached a consensus on what exclusion looked like on the ground. This remained the case even as developers became NAREB leaders with a disproportionately large platform within NAREB to work their views into real estate standards.

FORGING A NATIONAL INSTITUTION

In the early twentieth century, the popular perception was that real estate developers were scam artists. Colorful descriptors such as “fly-by-nighters,” “land butchers,” “sharks,” and “curbstoners” appeared in magazines and literature. These depictions lumped together developers with real estate brokers and just about anyone who conducted business related to real estate. With no barriers to entry and the promise of a living to be made, especially in rapidly growing cities, the numbers of brokers soared. Established developers and brokers needed to prove their trustworthiness to suspicious new customers, who doubted whether they could perform their jobs competently and in good faith. Over time, they began forming local real estate boards that charged membership fees and set rules about how to conduct business, with the intent of distinguishing themselves as a class of reputable real estate firms. The Baltimore board, founded in 1858, was the nation’s oldest.¹²

In 1908 nineteen local boards met in Chicago to form NAREB. They aimed to scale up the gatekeeping and reputation building of local boards into a national enterprise. Doing so would also enable them to better exchange information and, in their words, exert a “combined influence upon matters affecting real estate interests.”¹³ Accordingly, the leaders of local boards quickly assumed top positions in the national association.¹⁴ The group elected as its first president a developer from Detroit to lead in “the assumption of social responsibility by real estate men for good city planning and good community structure.”¹⁵ Large-scale suburban developers became leaders of NAREB, giving themselves strong voices in shaping the nascent association. This meant that planned suburbs and the practices of these developers stood the greatest chance of representing the best work in North American residential real estate.

The association’s first president called for “real estate men” to be “classified among the so-called professions,” citing contemporary organizations such as the American Bankers Association, though law, engineering, and medicine also were frequently evoked.¹⁶ NAREB leadership laid out a professionalization project that encompassed four main objectives: create barriers to entry, establish norms and standards, generate and disseminate a body of knowledge, and fashion members as experts. Early efforts to create barriers to entry intersected with what would become another central facet of NAREB: influencing local, state, and national policy. NAREB combined these goals by sending members to their state legislatures to campaign for real estate licensing laws, thus restricting who could legally conduct business.¹⁷

To begin cultivating an image as experts, NAREB coined and trademarked the name “Realtor,” which only members could legally use. Members sought to brand themselves and spread the term so as to “institutionalize the Realtor” with the general public, investors, and other businessmen. It was their hope that “people come to realize that this term [Realtor] distinguishes an entire class of men.”¹⁸ Unlike curbstoners, Realtors were to be seen as possessing “high ideals, business capacity, civic loyalty, national patriotism and broad all round manhood” by virtue of their NAREB membership.¹⁹

To adopt standards, a NAREB members approved a code of ethics in 1913. Its formal title, “Ethics of the Real Estate Profession,” linked it to the Realtor professionalization drive.²⁰ Such codes of ethics typified professionalization at the turn of the century.²¹ The NAREB code laid out “duties to clients” concerning fair prices and transparency, such as inspecting a property before agreeing to sell it, and “duties to other brokers” about fair competition among NAREB members.²² The code’s provisions were generated through discussions about the issues that most concerned members.

To form a body of knowledge, NAREB began publication of the National Real Estate Journal, which subsequently covered issues from all over the United States and Canada, reprinted speeches from events, and contained editorials written by Realtors. Its writers treated developers of planned suburbs like celebrities, presenting them as experts among experts. One article, for instance, praised the developers of Bay City, Michigan, by saying they “were almost in a class with Nichols, Bouton, Ninde, Thompson and other subdividers.”²³ Such was the respect for this small group, including Edward Bouton, that the writer referred to them only by their last names, expecting members to know them automatically. All of them—Bouton; J. C. Nichols of Kansas City, Missouri; Lee Ninde of Fort Wayne, Indiana; and King Thompson of Columbus, Ohio—developed large planned tracts of upscale single-family homes. All used racially restrictive covenants. Nichols, Bouton, and Ninde all chaired NAREB committees and, when not chairing, served on them. Nichols and Bouton in particular had become friends through sharing information about their businesses and meeting at city planning conferences.²⁴

In addition to playing active roles at NAREB, suburban developers also participated in other nascent organizations. Historians have noted Bouton’s role in generating interest in city planning among Realtors, which led to their participation in the National Conference of City Planning (NCCP), an organization founded a year after NAREB and composed of planners and housing reformers. As developers increasingly participated in the NCCP, the organization shifted to focus on how municipal planning could benefit planned suburbs.²⁵ In turn, urban planning also guided the course of NAREB. The association formed a city planning committee due to developer interest in NCCP activity.

During their first decade of activity, neither NAREB nor the NCCP replaced the informal networks through which developers disseminated practices. To meet these needs, a group of suburban developers formed a separate and more informally organized group called the Developers of High-Class Residential Property in 1917. The Developers of High-Class Residential Property was comprised of Bouton, Nichols, Ninde, Thompson, and a handful of others who specialized in planned suburbs around the United States. In many ways, the group functioned as a transition between the informal networks of earlier decades and the institutionalized communication channels of NAREB that would be more fully realized in the 1920s. NAREB brought these members together as most were also part of the association’s City Planning Committee.²⁶ Many of the members, however, knew each other from prior interactions. In addition to Bouton and Nichols, Bouton and John Demarest of New York had been former business partners during Bouton’s brief stint as general manager of the Sage Foundation’s planned suburb, Forest Hills Gardens.

Rather than frame their goal as a project of standardization, which was championed in NAREB, the Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property aimed to provide a source of knowledge as members shared their experiences through annual candid conversations and mailed questionnaires. Significantly, none of the group’s members were in direct competition. Conversations covered a wide range of daily problems and business procedures. One year’s meeting included over two dozen topics, including restrictive covenants and labor practices, which had long been central concerns of the Roland Park Company.

The topic of restrictions attracted Indianapolis developer Emerson Chaille to the group. Chaille hoped the annual meeting would help him decide how to use restrictive covenants and set house prices since, as he pointed out, the developers at the meeting had also begun using restrictions they had adapted from others. The matter was urgent for Chaille. He had already invested in land several miles from the city center and he did not have local models to look at because nothing like “the highest grade subdivision” had “ever been thought of in Indianapolis.”²⁷

On the subject of restrictions and house prices, attendees took turns saying whether they included minimum cost restrictions in their deeds. Minimum cost restrictions served as both a barrier to entry for buyers and a measure of quality control on the house a resident would commission. All attendees except one did, though they clarified that it was not a uniform figure per subdivision but varied depending on the block. King Thompson of Columbus, Ohio, believed that a minimum cost should be inserted into restrictions as a signal to the public about the nature of the subdivision. Demarest concurred that “restrictions are unquestionably one of your best-selling assets, if they are properly presented.” A discussion ensued about how to determine the base price, especially in light of soaring building costs nationwide. The one developer who had not included the restriction expressed particular concern over deciding on a figure because he was determined to adopt a minimum cost restriction on a future development. Bouton suggested he could avoid the matter completely and adopt the method the Roland Park Company used for Guilford, where it included in restrictive covenants the right to approve all house plans.²⁸

Bouton then raised the question of whether residents attempted to violate the restriction and build homes for less. Nichols recounted several incidents. Two others claimed it happened only in the parts of their subdivisions where homes were the cheapest. Here, Bouton reiterated that the Roland Park Company avoided such incidents because it exercised approval over all plans. In actuality, the Roland Park Company staff noted several cases in which owners might have violated the restrictions along the eastern edge of Guilford, precisely the location of Guilford’s cheapest homes.²⁹

At the 1919 conference developers voiced concerns over the future of domestic labor in their suburbs. This became a question about racial hierarchy. Everyone agreed that it had become increasingly difficult over the 1910s for residents to find servants.³⁰ Thompson wanted advice on improving servant conditions that would make it easier to live in his subdivision’s large houses. Some members of the conference responded that they had begun to simplify house layouts and stock houses with more conveniences to require less housework overall.³¹ Others tried to create better ventilated attics and basements, the likely quarters for live-in servants, to make accommodations more attractive to potential employees. Nichols, Demarest, and Chaille were exploring the possibility of bringing movie theaters near their developments because cheap leisure activities could make working in the area more enticing. Thompson was considering ways to shorten the hours his residents might need servants. The root of “the servant problem,” as he saw it, was that residents treated their servants “like slaves.” Improved hours might even entice “white girls” into service, he reasoned, by reducing “the stigma attached to it” due to the fact that the majority of live-in servants were black women. At the very least, he concluded, they would be more likely to take up day labor, though probably not live-in labor.³²

Hugh Prather responded that he already had a ready source of black domestic labor that was meeting the needs of his company’s Dallas suburb, Highland Park. Before his team laid out Highland Park, it first subdivided seven and a half acres of land to sell to twenty-five black families to form what Prather called a “servants’ addition.” Named Booker T. Washington Addition, the servant residences were separated from Highland Park proper by a “high railroad embankment” and surrounded by tracks.³³ The land, he added, “never could have been used for any other purpose.” Prather called the families “a pretty good class” because residents owned property and built a church. Prather’s company constructed a small school. Nichols interrupted to ask if Booker T. Washington Addition had only houses, a church, and a school. Prather replied that nothing else was necessary. “It makes them satisfied there in Highland Park to have some place to go at night and visit,” he said. “They have some place to go and walk up and down the railroad tracks and streets, as Negroes like to do.”³⁴ Prather did not mention that Highland Park’s reputation as a sundown town meant that black residents were unlikely to move about at night safely.³⁵ Prather used his example of Booker T. Washington Addition to illustrate why he, unlike his colleagues, did not need to take measures to better labor conditions in order to retain a workforce.³⁶

Bouton agreed that “establishing a community which will furnish servants is something which might be done by all of us.” He did not bring up Cross Keys, which predated Roland Park by decades. Rather, he discussed his idea to “establish a Polish community”—Christian Poles, he clarified, because he “understood they were very cleanly and made good servants.” His perception of Poles as clean stood in contrast to how the company treated the black residents of Cross Keys, and their land itself, as health threats. Bouton went so far as to make inquiries about the possibility, but “ran up against the immigration laws.” He turned to Prather and suggested he could “probably do that” instead of relying on the black residents of Booker T. Washington Addition. Prather replied, “We could.”³⁷

A NATIONAL FORUM ON LOCAL BUSINESS

Bouton’s experience with immigration laws as an obstacle to his plan to recruit Polish labor was indicative of the times. Immigration policy became a contentious issue among Realtors in the late 1910s and early 1920s, as Congress considered a slate of comprehensive immigration bills that had the potential to severely restrict or ban immigrants based on national origin. NAREB provided a centralized forum for debate. Anti-immigration Realtors framed their opposition in two ways, namely through labor issues and race science such as eugenics, both of which found an audience through popular books. Realtors who spoke at meetings and published pieces in the National Real Estate Journal often began their remarks by introducing themselves as employers. As employers, they could play a role in preventing immigrants from driving down the “good living wage” commanded by “American artisans.”³⁸ Eugenicists believed that the most biologically and intellectually superior people hailed from the Protestant countries of northwest Europe. Many voiced concerns that the growth of other populations endangered white civilization. In order to preserve their own survival, they called for action to ensure the continued domination of Protestants from northwest Europe over other races. One anti-immigration Realtor, who declared his home state of California to be on the brink of Japanese “invasion,” implored fellow Realtors to help “to save our land to the white race, to preserve our social and economic standards, to exclude an alien race whose God is not our God, whose standards are not ours, who is debarred from American citizenship.” Calling the Japanese aliens, he warned that if more immigrants arrived, they would tip the balance of social and economic power in the state.³⁹ Another said that “different races should be kept apart.”⁴⁰ This last statement, made by a Jewish Realtor and son of a Mississippi sugar planter, applied to native-born Americans and immigrants alike.⁴¹

Pro-immigration Realtors also framed their views in terms of labor. Some of the association’s most outspoken members in favor of open immigration came from agricultural areas and wanted to attract immigrants to remedy farm labor shortages. Rural Realtors from Michigan, Idaho, Montana, Minnesota, and South Dakota wrote pro-immigration pieces in the National Real Estate Journal.⁴² Michigan Realtors viewed immigration as necessary for rural settlement. Even so, the pro-immigrant Realtors, like the anti-immigrant Realtors, considered only immigrants from northwest Europe to be desirable, following the eugenics hierarchy that prized “Nordic stock” as physically and intellectually superior.

Tensions between the two camps boiled over at the 1923 NAREB midwinter meeting when delegates interrupted a Michigan Realtor advocating for lax immigration controls and forced him from the stage. The National Real Estate Journal recapped the incident with the headline “Oppose Further Immigration.”⁴³ Subsequently, a Chicago Realtor called on colleagues to compromise. Both sides, he reasoned, had “extremists of belief and resultant propaganda.”⁴⁴ Still, Realtors continued to have open disagreements.

In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act ushered in federal comprehensive immigration laws in the United States.⁴⁵ It instituted a quota system that supplemented or strengthened existing legislation already targeting people of Asian descent. Its net effect permitted a continuation of European immigrants from northwest Europe, while severely limiting or outright banning immigration from most other parts of the world. The act carved out a large exception for the Western Hemisphere after lengthy congressional debates about Mexico and Mexican labor.

One of the long-term impacts of the Johnson-Reed Act was the federal construction of a white race whose ancestry provided the basis for their admission to the United States. In the short term, however, the quota system’s unequal treatment of European groups continued to reflect widespread notions of which differences were questionable or suspect.⁴⁶

Suburban developers remained largely quiet during NAREB immigration debates, but questions of racial hierarchy continued to inform their candid conversations at the Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property. These meetings discouraged any alternate views, as one developer after another broadly agreed about the merits of exclusion, and simultaneously provided a venue for working out the specific mechanics of how to discriminate.⁴⁷ For example, each year conference members voted on whether to sell to Jews (generally a resounding no) and then discussed their rationales. In 1919 Nichols met with disapproval when he said that his company had relaxed its policy on Jewish exclusion since the end of the First World War. He asked other attendees, “Can’t anyone have a few kind words to say on my behalf?” to which Bouton responded, “I think it is a perfectly ghastly mistake.”⁴⁸

John Demarest feared losing control over his development if he began to sell to Jews. Whereas Nichols believed he and his salesmen could vet clients and make exceptions for certain Jews, and Prather occasionally sold to Jews, Demarest said, “When you open the door, it is gone.”⁴⁹ Demarest articulated the idea that undesirable groups irreversibly lowered property values; the reputation of Forest Hills Gardens would be ruined. Moreover, developers believed they would lose the ability to strongly control their investment if they began to make exceptions. Bouton warned that residents would “stampede” from their homes if Jews moved in.⁵⁰ And who else but other Jews, or people Bouton considered even lower on the racial hierarchy, would want to fill the newly vacant homes?

Jews occupied a distinct place in these early theories of white flight. Demarest and Bouton espoused an ecological theory of succession in which Jews would rapidly drive out Christians, who would never return.⁵¹ Thompson recognized how he was the beneficiary of people moving away from Jewish buyers. “I am profiting by them going into the East End section and crowding those people out,” he added, “so I am getting the benefit of that.”⁵² At the same time, the position of Jews at the end of the 1910s was ambiguous; they were sometimes viewed as a racial other and at other times as white enough to be dangerous infiltrators. Jewish affluence in places such as Kansas City, New York, Dallas, and Baltimore, in particular, created a consistent contradiction for members of the Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property, which never saw the need to vote on other groups such as blacks, who were already banned by restrictive covenant.

The members of the Developers of High-Class Residential Property tackled a broader question: Who should maintain the social order in and around the properties they developed? For Demarest, the answer was himself. Demarest told of how he once had a homeowner who insisted on selling his house to a Jew. Demarest threatened the homeowner by saying he would have a neighbor rent his house to an African American in retaliation, even violating the racially restrictive covenants of Forest Hills Gardens to do so. To Demarest, the social order tracked closely with what he considered the hierarchical relationship between people and property. He did not comment on whether the threat worked, but in his mind, no one could lower a property’s value more than a black renter.

Unlike Demarest, others in the group joined Bouton to advocate for solutions based on ideas of white popular sovereignty. Bouton proposed that in order to be democratic, the developers poll residents about whether to make exceptions for certain people. He also insisted that the real test of whether Jews should be allowed would follow if a developer polled residents and got approval. The belief at Roland Park was that if a Jew moved in, on the very next day all the property around it might depreciate by as much as “thirty-three and a third percent,” a figure no one explained.⁵³ The lone dissenting voice was Prather, who would not allow residents to vote because he, like Demarest, wanted to control each case. He also assumed that Highland Park residents would vote against their own interests to permit affluent Jews.⁵⁴

Prather chimed in that if he had tried what Demarest did down in Dallas, the next morning “he would be hanging from a flag pole somewhere.”⁵⁵ It is unclear whether Prather meant himself, the black tenant, or the landlord would be lynched, but either way, violence was guaranteed. Despite disagreement, the conversation centered on presumptions about how racial hierarchy informed the social order in their cities. As they characterized it, this hierarchy not only would make or break the long-term prospects of their business, but also carried risks of violence for anyone perceived to be transgressing it.

Assumptions such as Prather’s indicate developers were aware that the actions of residents could, indeed, be a double-edged sword. The Roland Park Company vice president, who also attended the conference, informed the group that right before he left Baltimore there had been an issue where a resident had sold her property to someone who turned out to be Jewish. She wanted the company’s advice on how to stop the sale, which he gave. The resident also shared the news with her neighbors, “three or four” of whom informed the vice president that if she could not stop the sale “they were going to wait on [the buyer] as a vigilance committee and tell him how strong they felt about it.” These residents of a Roland Park Company development (it is unclear which) felt it acceptable and urgent enough to discuss exclusion frankly with the company, which had a history of both facilitating resident action in Cross Keys and setting the tone for racialized labor relationships. By telling the company, however, the residents were also ensuring that the Roland Park Company followed through on maintaining the exclusion it had long promised and which residents had come to consider as necessary.⁵⁶

ORIGINS OF THE EXCLUSION FILES: CREDIT REPORTS AND THE FEMALE INVESTIGATOR

One issue that was not discussed by members of the Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property was how the Roland Park Company’s own salesmen factored into the exclusion/inclusion process through the daily tracking of potential sales, a crucial part of company operations in which employees exercised discretion based on locally informed assumptions. The Roland Park Company’s chief mechanism of documenting sales was actually an elaboration of an earlier vetting process adopted by the company: credit reports on its employees. In 1907 the Roland Park Company sought the services of the Union Credit Company, but it was not interested in credit checks per se. Rather, the company wanted to use the investigative services to determine the “general character,” “habits and honesty,” and “ability” of its staff.⁵⁷

Initially, the company also used Union Credit to vet a handful of prospective buyers, with emphasis placed on investigating their finances and “extraction.”⁵⁸ After Guilford opened, however, the company sought to establish its own in-house investigative arm to vet future customers. Bouton sent identical letters to two people, asking if they knew anyone suitable for “a little special work of investigation.” One recipient was Roland Park resident, Johns Hopkins University provost, and former director of the Baltimore Country Club, Joseph Ames. The other was Lilian Welsh, a physician, instructor, and administrator at the Women’s College of Baltimore. In the letter, Bouton explained that all prospective buyers had to submit references to the company. The investigator would contact the references. The duties of the investigator job, which would consist “almost entirely of interviews,” meant the employee should meet certain criteria, including being a woman. Namely, Bouton sought “a woman, not too young, of good address, education, and above all, good judgment.” Bouton also preferred that the woman be local, because it was part-time employment and he did not want the “responsibility” of ensuring she had other things to do.⁵⁹ For unknown reasons, the Roland Park Company dropped its attempt to hire an investigator shortly thereafter.

Bouton may have gotten the idea of hiring a woman from his brief stint working with Demarest, who employed a woman to follow up on the references of prospective purchasers. At the Conference for Developers of High-Class Residential Property, Demarest shared his thoughts on how the “female investigator” formed part of a good sales strategy. The woman, he said, “stimulates interest in the man whom she may go see as the reference or prospective purchaser.” If a client knows the developer vetted all residents of a community, then he would “get a certain protection for his investment, a certain protection for his family.” A professional and “conscientious” woman would impress those men with the tenor and nature of her investigations. Demarest called his female investigator “a walking advertisement” who generated new business when she interacted with a prospective buyer’s coworkers or acquaintances “in a businesslike way.” Even if the target of her investigation ultimately proved unsuitable, his coworker would know he was going to fulfill his duty as husband and father if he bought a house with that developer.⁶⁰ Even though Bouton did not hire an investigator, having one became another potential practice to be circulated among his network of suburban developers.

After Bouton shelved the idea of the female investigator for Roland Park, the company continued to seek out ways to establish an investigative system. Subsequently, the company created a new card system for tracking interactions between salesmen and consumers. This marked the first time the company kept the sales card of someone it decided not to sell to. Salesmen would follow leads of interested buyers who possessed the means to purchase a home. They wrote down brief summaries of their interactions with the client and added commentary. When they learned information that led them or their supervisors to terminate the sales process, the card was stamped “Exclusion File” and kept in a collection in the office.

An early card from 1916 detailed the interactions of Frank Carozza, a Baltimore-based general contractor from Govans. On July 1, Carozza inquired about lot prices in Guilford. He told the salesman he wanted to see the lots on his own, without a salesman, but would get in touch if he liked what he saw. Four days later, the sales manager made a follow-up phone call to Carozza at his office. Carozza was too busy to talk, but salesman George Simmons noted that “he has the appearance of being an intelligent rather high type of Italian.”

For the next month, Simmons recorded whenever Carozza visited the company to talk about which lots to purchase. Then, on September 5, a different salesman recorded the following on Carozza’s sales card: “Happened to see the children of Mr. Carozza’s family in Govans on Monday and I really think they would be undesirable residents for Guilford; their dress and looks are very much of the Italian type and I am satisfied that neighbors would object to them.”⁶¹ The Carozza family did not notice the salesman on the street at the time. A week later, the company rejected Carozza’s plans to buy lots and build houses in Guilford.

That marked the end of Carozza’s transaction, but Simmons recorded one final interaction on the exclusion file a month later. This time he saw Carozza on the street. Carozza approached him. According to Simmons, Carozza “seemed to be wrought up about something.… Someone had told him the reason his plans were turned down was because he was Italian.” Here, Simmons lied in response, telling him “I had been away and was not up to the situation but would find out about it and let him know.” There was no follow-up noted. Company staff stamped “Exclusion File” on Carozza’s card and retained it separate from other sales records.⁶² Carozza’s exclusion file became one more piece of a growing system of investigating, surveilling, and recording who could and could not buy property. The company focused its investigations on people like Carozza who may have passed as desirable white persons but ultimately proved to be not white enough.

Realtors often treated religion, national origin, and race as interchangeable for the purposes of establishing a racial hierarchy. According to historian Thomas Guglielmo, Americans were likely to classify Italians as a race in the 1910s and 1920s, rendering their place of birth less important than their overall ancestry. However, Italians were still considered white enough to be treated as potential homebuyers.⁶³ In this sense, the Roland Park Company conforms with what historians of race and immigration have detailed with regard to how individuals could be white for certain purposes and not others. This includes instances in which people tried to be recognized as white in order to secure access to full citizenship or took measures to avoid being classed as nonwhite or, in particular, black. In doing so, they recognized that access to the rights and privileges of citizenship was tied to a hierarchy of race.⁶⁴ The permutations and exceptions were many and they often varied by region, year, and circumstance, but the common thread running through such complexities was that different groups were defined and defined themselves in relation to others beyond a simple black/white binary when it came to buying and selling property.

THE HEYDAY OF THE EXCLUSION FILES

The Roland Park Company continued to grow its business operations in 1924 with a third subdivision north of Guilford called Homeland. The expansion of the company’s business appears to have paved the way for the further implementation of the exclusion files, which joined physical boundaries and restrictive covenants in the company’s growing toolbox of exclusionary instruments.

With the expansion of the exclusion files, salesmen discretion became both more nuanced and, at times, more ambiguous. Despite the heavy attention paid to ancestry, it was never the sole criteria for exclusion of whites. Rather, the exclusion files paint a more complicated picture of how developers excluded people on a daily basis, revealing how salesmen employed a flexible calculus to work out ambiguities on a case-by-case basis. Few exclusion files were more ambiguous than that of “Mrs. Mildred Wonneman.” Ostensibly, the Roland Park Company salesman deemed her and her husband unacceptable homebuyers because they were both hairdressers. However, other details on the card that could have also been factors included the fact that Wonneman’s business was located on Greenmount Avenue. The card also noted that she was “also known as Mrs. Bracket.”⁶⁵ A combination of local geography, gender norms, and occupation contributed to her exclusion.

As these examples indicate, appearance and social networks played an important role in shaping company decisions. Both were the deciding factors in the sale of a house to George Boas and his wife, Simone Brangier Boas, in 1926. Five years earlier, Boas, born to Jewish parents, had accepted an invitation to join the Johns Hopkins University faculty.⁶⁶ Sales manager Guy T. O. Hollyday remained reluctant about the sale because the company had “a very strict rule against selling to Jews.”⁶⁷ Rather than rejecting the sale outright, however, Hollyday wrote to long-time resident of Roland Park, former Baltimore Country Club board member, and Hopkins provost Joseph Ames. He asked Ames’s opinion “as a resident and one personally acquainted with Dr. Boas” to help him determine whether he should make “an exception” to company policy.⁶⁸ Ames replied the same day with a glowing recommendation: “He and his wife are both delightful people.… The fact that he is a Jew has no bearing on the case. His associations are strictly among people whom you and I know.”⁶⁹ Hollyday also reported that Boas did not “worship at any synagogue and has no Jewish religious associations being an Agnostic.”⁷⁰ In this case, an exception was made for Boas because Ames judged him to have no Jewish acquaintances.

FIGURE 4.1  A Roland Park Company exclusion file about a prospective buyer in Homeland. The salesman believed the buyer might be Jewish, investigated him, and stopped the sale.

(Courtesy of the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries)

Just as one’s network could insulate a potential homebuyer from the company’s process of exclusion, as was the case with Boas, so could it expose potential homebuyers. The non-Jewish Diehls, for example, were excluded because “of Jewish influence.”71 Meanwhile, a salesman apologized to his superiors for reaching out to someone who turned out to be Jewish. “This person was on our mailing list, but was removed,” he explained. “He is a Jew, but his wife is a gentile and they have gentile friends.”⁷²

Salesmen used the combination of networks and appearances to seek exceptions to general company practice. Boas and Brangier Boas would not be visibly Jewish in their dress, the company they kept, or in their daily lives. Hollyday, on Ames’s word, would be able to control any risk Boas’s Jewishness might present. In other cases company salesmen, as a general practice, did not sell to people with Italian surnames. Salesman John Mowbray judged Pietro Pipetone favorably, however, after visiting his place of employment and his home, phoning a reference who called him a “high class Italian,” talking to an employee of the Italian consulate personally acquainted with Pipetone, and meeting Pipetone and his teenage son. The appearance of Pipetone and his teenage son, noted the salesman, impressed him.⁷³ However, Mowbray disqualified the family of M. T. Cavacos even though they were “neat and respectable” and had “a great deal of money” because when he met them he concluded they were “unquestionably Greeks.”⁷⁴

In addition to expanding the exclusion files, the opening of Homeland also afforded Bouton the opportunity to finally hire the “female investigator” he had sought a decade earlier. Edith McHenry fit Bouton’s criteria; she was “not too young, of good address” and of good education.⁷⁵ McHenry was born into one of Baltimore’s elite families, a descendant of a Revolutionary War general and Confederate soldiers. She split her early years between Baltimore and Boston, with summers in Europe. As a teenager, she became an avid golfer, including at Roland Park’s Baltimore Country Club. She also was one of Baltimore City’s first women to obtain a driver’s license. By the time she joined the company, she was thirty-two, unmarried, and living alone in an apartment at the fashionable Geneva within walking distance of Guilford.⁷⁶

McHenry joined the male sales staff in vetting prospective homebuyers. She was not a NAREB member, nor was she a saleswoman. Rather, the Roland Park Company employed McHenry as supervisor of personnel, an emerging and usually feminized sphere of the corporate workforce.⁷⁷ In this role, McHenry often stepped in to assist on exclusion file candidates in ways that reflected the gendered expectations of her job. Such was the case with her work on the exclusion file of Assistant City Solicitor William Laukaitis. His post was a major one in the Baltimore City government and came after the Roland Park Company began to take municipal funds for its infrastructure. Nevertheless, the company was still willing to deny city employees access to its developments if they did not meet its terms. The salesman conducted a cursory investigation that included phoning people “to get Mr. Laukaitis’s religion” and found he was not Jewish. Though he felt Laukaitis was “on the doubtless list in regard to respectability,” the salesman asked McHenry “to call on his wife to see what she thinks of them.” McHenry recorded the results of her home inspection on Laukaitis’s exclusion file: “I do not think that Mr. Laukaitis or any of his tribe are desirable as residents of the District. They are foreign and not too hot! The men appear very nice but the women and their living quarters are something! Drop.” Even though the domestic habits of the Laukatises were, as McHenry noted, unlikely to be visible to neighbors, the unconventional gender roles she observed, combined with a perceived foreignness of the “wrong” type, doomed the Laukaitis family’s efforts to live in a Roland Park Company suburb.⁷⁸ The Laukaitises were born in the United States—he was born in Baltimore. They were of Lithuanian descent, and their address at 851 Hollins Street put them in the heart of Baltimore’s Lithuanian community—facts the salesman did not acknowledge.

In making her assessment of the Laukaitises, McHenry echoed the assessment of other real estate professionals who determined that what happened inside a home was just as important as outward appearances when deciding who was included and excluded. As one Realtor put it in the National Real Estate Journal, “Citizenship has its basis in the home, and citizenship is what we want to impress on the foreigner. Our home life has made our country the greatest in the world.”⁷⁹ Drawing on the authority granted her as a woman, McHenry judged the Laukaitises’ home life as a marker that they were foreigners unable to assimilate to good, American standards. Her decision fit squarely into the NAREB immigration debate, even though Laukaitis and his wife were both American-born. Those who took the position that immigrants could assimilate looked to the home as a basis for proving the merit of the immigrant. McHenry did not detail what she found off-putting about the Laukaitis home, but she emphasized their “foreignness” and, by calling them “a tribe,” paired foreignness with otherness and backwardness.⁸⁰

In terms of the daily practices of exclusion, Realtors’ understandings of local racial hierarchies mattered. Roland Park Company salesmen were prepared to be vigilant but flexible about European groups. They were, however, caught off guard by Bacon and Idella Chow.⁸¹ Due to the proliferation of alien land laws during the 1920s in other states, Maryland afforded more opportunities for the Chows to own property than elsewhere. Bacon F. Chow was born in China, attended college and graduate school in the United States, and received a PhD from Harvard. He married the American-born Idella Tong, who accompanied him when he took a university position in China before moving back to the United States so he could take up another position.

The salesman M. Rodgers noted that the Chows were “Chinese” and then wrote about a day of typical home visits in which he took them to several houses across the company’s developments.⁸² Rodgers also penciled in a notation next to the typed notes that the Chows were “good buyers,” because they were willing to spend $18,000. In addition to that, Chow was a biochemist about to begin work with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Hygiene. Being new to Baltimore, however, they were unlikely to have the type of well-established social network through Johns Hopkins that had benefited Boas and Brangier Boas.

Two days after remarking on how the Chows were good leads, Rodgers consulted with a sales manager who “advised no further contact” because of “racial considerations.” Idella Chow called the office two months later to say they were still looking, and the same salesman once again consulted a sales manager. Though he had been told to add the Chows to the exclusion files, Rodgers thought it was worth reopening the subject. The sales manager did not tell Rodgers to drop the file a second time. Instead, he went to the president of Guilford’s neighborhood association to get a resident’s opinion about selling to Chinese buyers. The president consulted with other members of the association and replied that “he, personally, would have no objection,” but others residents were opposed to “a sale to such a person.” Only then did Rodgers move the Chows’ card to the exclusion files. The Chows instead moved to Lauraville in Northeast Baltimore near Morgan Park.⁸³ The discretion the company used with the Chows and the ambiguity of their position in Baltimore’s racial hierarchy stood in tension with NAREB’s emphasis on standardization.

MOVING TOWARD STANDARDIZATION

The daily, inconsistent practices of local real estate companies stood at odds with the vision proponents of real estate professionalization wanted to project to the public. NAREB wanted its membership to be considered experts by the general public. To do this, it had to establish what expert knowledge consisted of and to what extent it could be standardized. Nichols became one of the most ardent supporters of making Realtors into experts through a social scientific approach. “Realology,” he argued, “should be as much an established science as geology and zoology.”⁸⁴

By 1923, fifteen years after the organization’s founding, NAREB had grown to over thirty-seven thousand members.⁸⁵ It had clear communication channels and various institutionalized apparatuses for disseminating information. That same year, NAREB formed a national educational committee, after isolated efforts by local boards to create course offerings.⁸⁶ The formation of the committee was in many ways in tune with the original promise of the organization as a source for disseminating best practices. From this drive came the Standard Course of Real Estate, developed, in part, by economist Richard Ely, whom NAREB named education director. Ely aimed to construct a course specifically to standardize real estate practice, provide uniform training, and professionalize real estate by giving it a curriculum developed through a rigorous scientific process. NAREB subsequently disseminated the curriculum to local boards and, shortly thereafter, to universities.⁸⁷

Ely’s participation in the drafting of the Standard Course lent ideas about real estate development a technocratic authority, though developers had already been putting them into practice. It did not hurt that Ely, like leading suburban developers, believed that the most valuable property was in socially restricted and aesthetically homogenous planned communities. NAREB’s selection of Ely, the founder of the American Economic Association, evinces Realtor interest in modeling NAREB after existing professional organizations. Moreover, a partnership with the academic Ely and his Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities provided NAREB with a major source of credentialed knowledge. Ely’s institute offered a model for how to package information such as digestible lectures, books, and articles, and sell its educational material.⁸⁸

The introduction of the Standard Course did not replace other educational material NAREB printed and sold as textbooks. These textbooks were often composed of reprinted Realtor speeches. The Realtors who authored these pieces used their own local practices to offer nationally disseminated advice on subjects such as racially restrictive covenants.⁸⁹ An edition from 1923 encouraged readers to “give this subject of restrictions our very best thought” by linking it to a Realtor’s “duty to properly anticipate the probable future, as well as the present, use of the specific piece of land.” Restrictive covenants, and the long-term scale of decision making that informed their proliferation, had previously been the domain of developers of large-tract, planned suburbs such as Roland Park. Now, NAREB reconfigured what had been a key logic of planned suburbs as the obligation of all Realtors, regardless of the kind of real estate business they conducted. NAREB justified the inclusion of restrictive covenants in the textbook by evoking widespread concerns about black migration and European immigration, noting “each succeeding year brings with it a constant increase in population.”⁹⁰

Textbooks also served the function of settling legal questions about exclusion. The same textbook that linked restrictions to Realtor duty included a section titled “Court Approves ‘Colored Person Clause,’ ” in which the author included a copy of his company’s restrictive covenants. Despite the growth in restrictions in the 1920s, Realtors repeatedly raised concerns about what they perceived to be a legal gray area thanks to conflicting local and state court rulings. Textbooks reprinted portions of meetings where the NAREB legal counsel assured Realtors that covenants were permissible.⁹¹ This reference was in line with other NAREB publications, which periodically published articles on legal developments that facilitated Realtors’ adopting restrictions and understanding their context. Realtors received some of these publications, such as the National Real Estate Journal, as part of their membership. Realtors purchased others, including the textbooks, with money that funded NAREB operations, including the reprinting of discussions endorsing housing segregation as an example of best practices nationwide. Even as its national apparatus became more robust in the 1920s, real estate professionalization continued to function as a multidirectional process in which members transmitted ideas that filtered up to the national association, which institutionalized them through various means and later repackaged and consolidated them, then filtered them back down to be adopted by other developers.⁹²

By 1923, many in the association believed that NAREB had grown large enough to necessitate divisions. These were organized by Realtor specialities such as brokerage, farmland, and industrial property. Developers were gathered under a new division, Homebuilders and Subdividers, which chose as its symbol a single-family house surrounded by trees. The house would have fit in comfortably at Roland Park. The Homebuilders and Subdividers group also created its own structures. Developers contributed material from which the director, himself a developer, disseminated selections as examples of best practices for subdivision selling. By the following year, members had contributed enough samples to form a national library.⁹³ The Roland Park Company contributed copies of the Roland Park Company’s Magazine. NAREB published an image of it alongside magazines from two members of the Developers of High-Class Residential Property as “attractive and interesting” examples Realtors could consider.⁹⁴ Developers throughout North America could request copies under the assumption that any of the materials were association-approved.

On one hand, the institutional structures such as the library made development more egalitarian: not only could companies big and small have a major resource to shape their development and sales strategies, but small firms could gain visibility by making their materials widely available to peers. On the other hand, the rise of NAREB made it easier for developers to emulate the practices of their most well-known peers. NAREB leaders had the ability to select for inclusion, categorize, and group submitted advertisements, potentially discarding those that did not meet with approval. In turn, the library shaped how developers would then locate and engage with the content.

In addition to its library, the Homebuilders and Subdividers Division also published in its Idea Services bulletin a booklet from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company of New York called “Functions of the Sales Manager,” which recommended that sales managers keep “prospect cards” containing information on prospective clients and the results of an attempted sale. Prospect cards were similar in form and purpose to the Roland Park Company’s exclusion files, a tool the company had adopted from credit reporting companies. With the bulletin, NAREB endorsed adapting strategies from actuarial science to suburban development. By the mid-1920s, the national circulation of prospect cards among different professions created a demand for data-intensive files. Prospect cards served the twin purposes of improving office organization and facilitating exclusion.

Beginning around the same time, the Roland Park Company began to use a standard form for its exclusion files. Prior to the mid-1920s, the categories of information had differed from card to card. Each of the later, more standardized cards contained a form number and the year the form was bulk printed. This shift in card production indicated a growth in the market for such cards, which coincided with an increase in the dense links different professionalizing groups developers shared with each other. Companies that already practiced exclusion used such developments to refine their daily methods.⁹⁵ As Realtors adopted them, more of them gave talks about their file organization and the equipment they used.⁹⁶

In concert with its growth during the 1920s, NAREB revised its code of ethics to codify the relationship between race and property value. The revised code’s Article 34 prevented a Realtor from “introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.”⁹⁷ Realtors deliberately worded the article broadly, giving wide-ranging discretionary powers to individual Realtors. Thus, Realtors became duty-bound to “exercise their social responsibility” by considering how people affected the surrounding area.

FIGURE 4.2  An advertisement for a prospect files cabinet. The description reads, “Typical visible filing equipment for prospect files. Such equipment is easy to install and use and reveals facts quickly.”

(Used with permission of the National Association of REALTORS® Library & Archives)

Members based the code, in part, on their understandings of how notable developers became successful. Whatever division members belonged to, they had likely been exposed to such ideas by NAREB leadership, which consisted of developers such as Nichols, who conducted sustained and vocal campaigns within the organization in support of standardizing real estate around developer practices. Realtors that followed the code of ethics thus used their powers to enhance local property values by fostering residential segregation.

ANNUAL CONVENTIONS

No event was more important for forging a Realtor identity than the annual convention, which NAREB’s historian called “the central real estate school of the times quite as much as it was a forum and a means of collective action.”98 It was here that Realtors practiced ways of seeing people and property together. They did this by depicting what historian Philip Deloria calls their “broad cultural expectations” of people unlike themselves, resulting in an “act of domination” through which they could emphasize their own place at the forefront of American progress.

At conventions, Realtors had the option of attending a business session where they could, for example, hear about the benefits of restrictive covenants, before joining colleagues in another room where they sang songs from an official booklet containing selections such as “When Greek Meets Greek,” which lampooned various European groups, or “Massa’s in de Cold Cold Ground.” Sung in dialect, the latter included lines such as “Mas-sa made de darkies love him / Cayse he was so kind.”⁹⁹ During the 1928 convention organizers treated delegates to “a real genuine ‘treat of thrills’ ” that included a blackface quartet, a watermelon-eating contest, and spirituals.¹⁰⁰ Following the 1922 convention in San Francisco, the National Real Estate Journal published comical drawings of its attendees. They included a cartoon of a Realtor dressed as a Native American “doing an Indian dance,” with a dialog bubble containing broken English.¹⁰¹

These actions sat beside the image of Realtors as good citizens at the forefront of progress. In 1925, the Detroit Board, tasked with organizing the annual NAREB convention, published an issue of the Detroit Realtor that featured cover art of a dignified white man in classical garb holding a car, surrounded by scenes celebrating Realtors’ positive impact on Detroit. Rendered in expensive color ink, the art included a white family in front of a red and white suburban house with a large front yard; bustling, clean, contented white industrial workers; and the Detroit skyline, complete with belching black smokestacks. Though hardly representative of Detroit’s housing, labor, and demography, the cover conveyed the industrious hard work and uplifting values of Realtors who embraced progress—or in this case, a car—to turn Detroit into a thriving metropolis. In this and their patriotic songs during the convention, Detroit Realtors demonstrated their good citizenship, constructed with racialized and gendered imagery, that reflected both their ideas about themselves and their aspirational values.

FIGURE 4.3  The official poster for leisure program of 1928 annual convention of the National Association of Real Estate Boards featured extensive use of racist tropes, including blackface and one direct allusion to slavery with “the hottest Charleston team in captivity.”

(Used with permission of the National Association of REALTORS® Library & Archives)

In May 1931, Baltimore hosted a NAREB convention. In many ways, it contained the typical slate of events that had proved successful in past years. Every NAREB member across North America received a promotional pamphlet advertising the convention’s leisure activities, including regional and local tours put together by Hollyday as chair of the Sightseeing Committee. It promised a “general sightseeing trip around Baltimore” that included stops in Roland Park and “a real chummy trip around the Baltimore Harbor.”102 In selecting the sights for the tour, Hollyday crafted an image of the ideal Baltimore as white. Organizers did not shy away from depicting the class diversity of the city—factories and affluent suburbs were depicted side by side in the convention material and on itineraries, as they had been on the cover of the Detroit Realtor—but the tours also carefully avoided any predominantly black areas. The regional tour had a heavy emphasis on Civil War sights. A picture of the monument of confederate general Robert E. Lee graced the pamphlet Baltimore organizers sent out to participants. Next to the picture of the Lee statue, organizers highlighted Roland Park a second time. In an inset called “Homes,” the Real Estate Board of Baltimore held up the Roland Park Company suburbs as the very symbol of Baltimore’s progress on the national stage. “Although retaining the charm of old architecture,” it read, “the note of Baltimore is distinctly modern. To the north is the Roland Park–Guilford–Homeland development, considered the most distinguished in America.”¹⁰³ After a day of convention activities, attendees were treated to a lawn party and concert with the theme “Night in Dixie Land.” The program promised entertainment from “a number of darkies from ‘Way Down Sou’ in the Land ob Cotton.’ ” The following day, convention goers had the option of visiting two former plantations before stopping at Edward Bouton’s house in Roland Park.¹⁰⁴

FIGURE 4.4  The cover of the Detroit Realtor.

(Used with permission of the National Association of REALTORS® Library & Archives)

Realtor I. Norwood Griscom captured the link between national professionalization and local Realtor activity in an impassioned convention speech. Beginning with the oft-repeated narrative of how NAREB elevated real estate practice into a profession, he reminded his audience that “several years ago, the job of selling Real Estate was considered more or less a joke,” but “the real estate man of today is a builder due to the high ideals that have been placed before him by this great Association.” These lofty principles obligated Realtors to “be conversant with the values and every fact pertaining to the growth and development of his city or community.” Griscom tied the Realtor duty to be ethical to his duty to “the race that borne you on its mighty current from eternity to now,” exhorting the Realtors in the room to embrace all the duties that came with being a professional. “Get this into your head,” he exclaimed, “You are the men higher up! If you will be but this, from this minute you will grow and gather power.” “You,” he repeated, “you Realtors, are the men higher up!”105 NAREB’s Idea Services reprinted and mailed the speech to all members of the Homebuilders and Subdividers Division.

CONCLUSION

During the organization’s first two decades, members of NAREB institutionalized the practices of suburban developers like the Roland Park Company by tethering those practices to its professionalization effort. As such, the project of professionalizing real estate involved debates about race and immigration, which provided Realtors with a standard way of seeing people and fraternizing. Taken together, these actions resulted in the emergence of a real estate industry that embraced exclusion from local boards all the way to the association’s national offices.

In the 1929 article where Hollyday advised fellow NAREB members “to keep out people who have not learned to live decently” in order to “create and maintain a market,” he articulated a notion of property value based on racial hierarchy. Without exclusion, developers assumed, white residents would resort to violence, or at least mass exodus, to preserve the benefits of their status. The particular images of violence they summoned—lynching and vigilantism, mob rule and policing neighborhood borders—were deployed against many people. But mob violence disproportionately affected African Americans, who as one historian noted, posed a “categorical threat to sound development,” as far as white Realtors were concerned.¹⁰⁶

Through NAREB, developers institutionalized and sold these assumptions as expert knowledge. On the ground, though, exclusion proved a murkier business. Notwithstanding a set of clear guidelines outlined in NAREB and other professional materials, salesmen continued to work out the details of exclusion based on fungible lines shaped by local contexts. Nevertheless, these contexts informed national conversations as a handful of suburban developers became NAREB leaders whose work set an example of what excellence looked like.

The stock market crash later that year plunged the country into the Great Depression. Real estate would be among the hardest hit areas of a devastated economy. Thanks to their professionalization efforts, NAREB members would be able to continue to characterize themselves as experts. When the federal government began to consider sweeping policies to salvage the housing sector, Realtors, and especially suburban developers, were poised to step in.