1 Hornstein, Jeffrey M., A Nation of Realtors®: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

2 Silber, Nina, “Reunion and Reconciliation, Reviewed and Reconsidered,” Journal of American History 103 (June 2016): 61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Deloria, Philip J., “American Master Narratives and the Problems of Indian Citizenship in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (Jan. 2015): 3–12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. William Cronon cites examples of racialized progress and declension narratives dating to the seventeenth century. Cronon, William, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 5–6 Google Scholar.

4 The National Negro Business League was one of the most important Progressive Era Black business organizations in the United States. Though there is a dearth of scholarship on the specific involvement of real estate brokers at the national level, a broker did head the New York chapter. It was not a monolithic organization and its politics, as well as those of its founder, Booker T. Washington, could be polarizing to members. McGruder, Kevin, Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 161–5Google Scholar; Walker, Juliet E. K. and Garrett-Scott, Shennette, “Introduction—African American Business History: Studies in Race, Capitalism, and Power,” Journal of African American History 101 (Fall 2016): 395–406 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Piper, W. Brian, “‘To Develop Our Business’: Addison Scurlock, Photography, and the National Negro Business League,” Journal of African American History 101 (Fall 2016): 436–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The League had a real estate auxiliary that was likely inactive. Walker, Juliet E. K., The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York: Twayne, 1998), 185 Google Scholar. On the participation of Black women in business organizations during the late nineteenth century, see Shennette Garrett-Scott, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance before the New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 41–72, 170. For examples of brokers using history in the National Negro Business League, see Proceedings of the National Negro Business League, Its First Meeting Held in Boston, Massachusetts, August 23 and 24, 1900 (Boston: J. R. Hamm, 1901), 27–29, 35–36.

5 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 22–30 Google Scholar. I distinguish between constructing a historical narrative as telling stories about the past and theorizing historical change as discussing the mechanisms for change over time. I am indebted to scholars and of race for differentiating while also seeing them as interlinked processes. For example, Tavia Nyong’o characterizes race as “a theory of history—an explanation of why things happened” and C. Riley Snorton writes “race is a history of theory” that “then becomes a way of thinking history doubly, or of thinking about the history of historicity.” Nyong’o, Tavia, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 11 Google Scholar; Snorton, C. Riley, Black on Both Side: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 8Google Scholar.

6 Glotzer, Paige, How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 15–45 Google Scholar; Kim, Jessica, Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 31–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 United Realty 1, no. 1 (1908): 18, National Association of REALTORS® Library and Archives, Chicago; Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar. On city growth and professionalization, see Teaford, Jon C., The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1984), 132–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Glotzer, How the Suburbs Were Segregated, 115–82; Hornstein, Nation of Realtors; Weiss, Marc A., The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Helper, Rose, Racial Policies and Practices of Real Estate Brokers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

9 Davies, Janet Pearl, Real Estate in American History (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1958), 43 Google Scholar.

10 Davies, Real Estate in American History, 42–50; Lands, LeeAnn Bishop, “‘Speculators Attention!’: Workers and Rental Housing Development in Atlanta, 1880 to 1910,” Journal of Urban History 28 (July 2002): 551–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Hornstein, Nation of Realtors, 15.

12 Fogelson, Robert M., The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 137–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Teaford, Jon C., City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 62 Google Scholar; Freund, Colored Property, 46–48.

13 Janet Pearl Davies, “Real Estate Achievements in the United States” Vol. 1, Ch. 2, 2, National Association of REALTORS® Library and Archives, Chicago.

14 Exchanges founded in the 1880s included Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Denver, Little Rock, Minneapolis, Norfolk, Omaha, Toledo, and San Diego. Davies, “Real Estate Achievements,” Vol. 1 Ch. 2, 5; Davies, Real Estate in American History, 39–42.

15 U.S. Census Bureau, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, vol. 1, Number of Inhabitants (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942), 70.

16 Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 20; Weiss, Rise of the Community Builders, 5, 21; Birmingham Association of Realtors, “Our Story,” www.birminghamrealtors.com/who-we-are/about-us (accessed July 13, 2022).

17 “Real Estate Exchange,” Evening News (Birmingham, Alabama), Aug. 14, 1889.

18 “Consolidation,” Evening News (Birmingham, Alabama), Sept. 13, 1889.

19 Paula Young Lee, “The Temperance Temple and Architectural Representation in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago,” Gender & History 17 (Nov. 2005): 793–825.

20 “Real Estate Exchange,” Evening News (Birmingham, Alabama), Aug. 14, 1889; “A Good Scheme,” Birmingham News Oct. 26, 1889.

21 “Col. Wright’s Death Mourned,” Pensacola News Journal, Mar. 19, 1915; “Second Day,” Daily News (Birmingham, Alabama), Mar. 31, 1891.

22 “National Exchange,” Birmingham News, Feb. 26, 1891.

23 “It Is a Go,” Birmingham News, Feb. 6, 1891.

24 “Men of Realty,” Daily News (Birmingham, Alabama), Mar. 30, 1891.

25 Daily News (Birmingham, Alabama), Mar. 30, 1891; Kramer, Elsa F., “Recasting the Tribe of Ishmael: The Role of Indianapolis’s Nineteenth-Century Poor in Twentieth-Century Eugenics,” Indiana Magazine of History 104 (Mar. 2008): 38–43 Google Scholar.

26 Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988), 187–8Google Scholar.

27 “It Is a Go,” Birmingham News, Feb. 6, 1891; “National Exchange,” Birmingham News, Feb. 26, 1891.

28 “Men of Realty,” Daily News (Birmingham, Alabama), Mar. 30, 1891.

29 Davies, “Real Estate Achievement,” Vol. 1, Ch. 2, Part 2, 8.

30 “Second Day,” Birmingham Daily News, Mar. 31, 1891; Davies, “Real Estate Achievement,” Vol. 1, Ch. 2, Part 2, 8.

31 “Men of Realty,” Daily News (Birmingham, Alabama), Mar. 30, 1891.

32 “Men of Realty,” Daily News (Birmingham, Alabama), Mar. 30, 1891.

33 “Real Estate Congress,” Milwaukee Journal, Jan. 16, 1892; Davies, Real Estate in American History, 45.

34 “Mr. Bartholf Is Secretary,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Oct. 2, 1891; “Mrs. Chapman’s Gift,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Oct. 7, 1891; “Call Board Sale,” Milwaukee Journal, Nov. 3, 1891; For average wages information, see Orum, Anthony M., City-Building in America (1995; London: Routledge, 2018), 57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 “The Real Estate Congress,” Milwaukee Journal, Feb. 1, 1892.

36 “Real Estate Congress,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Jan. 21, 1892.

37 “Plans of Real Estate Men,” Milwaukee Journal, Feb. 3, 1892; “The Real Estate Excursion,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Feb. 4, 1892; “To Boom Buffalo at Nashville,” Buffalo Courier, Feb. 10, 1892.

38 “Real Estate Men Off,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Feb. 16, 1892.

39 “Milton Commencement,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, June 30, 1881; “Farm and Dairy,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Jan. 22, 1884; Clinton Babbitt, “Agricultural Meeting,” Wisconsin State Register, Jan. 26, 1884; “The Legislature,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Jan. 20, 1885; “The Legislature,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Feb. 5, 1885; “The Legislature,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Feb. 7, 1885; “The Legislature,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Feb. 20, 1885; “About the State,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Sept. 24, 1885; Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Nov. 23, 1885; “Multiple News Items,” Milwaukee Journal, Feb. 24, 1886; “A Day in the City,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Mar. 8, 1886; “State News in Brief,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Oct. 31, 1887; “A Day in the City,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Mar. 13, 1888; “Republican Meetings,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Oct. 17, 1888; “Agree on a Secretary,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Sept. 30, 1891.

40 Proceedings of the National Real Estate Association First Annual Meeting, 1892, 26 National Association of REALTORS® Library and Archives, Chicago (hereafter First Annual Meeting); Clinton Babbitt, “Agricultural Meeting,” Wisconsin State Register, Jan. 26, 1884; “Hon. J.C. Bartholf as Speaker,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Jan. 6, 1887; “Will Run to Win,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Sept. 28, 1888; “True Catholicism,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Mar. 16, 1891.

41 First Annual Meeting, 26.

42 “Captain M.B. Pilcher Goes to Reward,” Tennessean (Nashville, Tennessee), Dec. 31, 1908; First Annual Meeting, 31–32.

43 First Annual Meeting, 27.

44 Topping, Simon, Northern Ireland, the United States, and the Second World War (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 169 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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46 First Annual Meeting, 27.

47 Hunter, Tera W., To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 127 Google Scholar; Gaston, Paul M., The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (1970; Montgomery, AL: New South Books, 2011)Google Scholar.

48 Destin Jenkins makes this argument drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s formulation of “the propaganda of history.” Jenkins, Destin, “Ghosts of the Past: Debt, the New South, and the Propaganda of History,” in Histories of Racial Capitalism, ed. Jenkins, Destin and Leroy, Justin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 188 Google Scholar.

49 Cook, “‘Not Buried Yet,’” 341–2.

50 On the link between sectional reconciliation and the national rise of Jim Crow, see Prince, K. Stephen, Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 246 Google Scholar.

51 “Sales of Real Estate,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Mar. 6, 1892.

52 First Annual Meeting, 28–9.

53 Painter, Nell Irvin, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 188 Google Scholar; Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 189–207 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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55 Cronon, William, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 31 Google Scholar.

56 First Annual Meeting, 28–39.

57 First Annual Meeting, 132, Smyers was introduced as A. M. Smyers but only R. C. Smyers appears in the member rolls. “Made It Permanent,” Daily Inter Ocean, Feb. 19, 1892.

58 Molina, Natalia, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 39 Google Scholar; Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 25–26; Lazarus, Mark L. III “An Historical Analysis of Alien Land Law: Washington Territory and State: 1853–1889,” University of Puget Sound Law Review 12 (Winter 1989): 198–246 Google Scholar; Aoki, Keith, “No Right to Own?: The Early Twentieth-Century ‘Alien Land Laws’ as a Prelude to Internment,” Boston College Third World Law Journal 19 (Fall 1998): 37–39Google Scholar.

59 First Annual Meeting, 32–33.

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61 Glotzer, How the Suburbs Were Segregated, 15–45.

62 First Annual Meeting, 126–27.

63 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 302.

64 First Annual Meeting, 105.

65 This intent of the law became increasingly explicit in the first decades of the twentieth century. Shah, Nayan, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 10, 119–21Google Scholar.

66 First Annual Meeting, 127–29.

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68 First Annual Meeting, 127.

69 Kaplan, Amy, “Black and Blue on San Juan Hill,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Kaplan, Amy and Pease, Donald E. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 219–36Google Scholar; Oldfield, John, “Remembering the Maine: The United States, 1898, and Sectional Reconciliation,” in The Crisis of 1898: Colonial Redistribution and Nationalist Mobilization, ed. Smith, Angel and Davila-Cox, Emma (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 45–64 Google Scholar; and Silber, Nina, Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 159–96Google Scholar.

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72 “Made It Permanent,” Daily Inter Ocean, Feb. 19, 1892; First Annual Meeting, 67–68.

73 First Annual Meeting, 157, 184.

74 “The Real Estate Exchange,” Buffalo Sunday Morning News, Mar. 20, 1892; “Banquet to President Weil,” Buffalo Courier, May 8, 1892; “Personal Paragraphs,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Mar. 3, 1892.

75 “Real Estate News,” Buffalo Commercial, May 7, 1892.

76 A committee on alien land laws was likely formed in Nashville but no activity took place and it was omitted from the minutes. In Buffalo the committee was tasked with preparing a report and reading it at a future meeting along the same lines as other committees. “A Real Estate Conference,” New York Times, June 29, 1893; Report of the Second Congress of the National Real Estate Association Held at Buffalo, New York, October 4, 5, and 6, 1892 (Buffalo: Courier Company, 1893), 27, 201, National Association of REALTORS® Library and Archives, Chicago (hereafter Second Congress).

77 Davies, “Real Estate Achievements,” Vol. 1, Ch. 2, Part 2, 29–30.

78 Davies, “Real Estate Achievements,” Vol. 1, Ch. 2, Part 2, 16.

79 “An Official Circular,” Buffalo Commercial, July 13, 1892; “All Eyes on Buffalo,” Buffalo Commercial, Sept. 20, 1892; “For the Real Estate Congress,” Buffalo Evening News, Sept. 27, 1892.

80 “Two Speakers,” Buffalo Courier, Oct. 4, 1892. On Depew being known as a booster and famous orator, see “A New York Display,” Buffalo Evening News, Oct. 1, 1892 and “Some Professional People,” Buffalo Evening News, Oct. 6, 1892.

81 “Golden Words,” Buffalo Evening News, Oct. 6, 1892.

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84 Second Congress, 142.

85 Glotzer, How the Suburbs Were Segregated, 59; Dawson, Virginia, “Protection from Undesirable Neighbors: The Use of Deed Restrictions in Shaker Heights, Ohio,” Journal of Planning History 18 (May 2019): 116–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Second Congress, 53, 142, 155. Also, see Ingersoll’s remarks on violent white supremacists compared to the “best of the colored race” in Proceedings of the Civil Rights Mass-Meeting Held at Lincoln Hall, October 22, 1883 (New York: C.P. Farrell, 1883), 17.

87 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 106–09. Closely aligned activities of this period included slumming and ethnographic tourism.

88 Second Congress, 137–38; Jacoby, Great Agnostic, 24, 104.

89 Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 109; Alexander, Nathan G., “Unclasping the Eagle’s Talons: Mark Twain, American Freethought, and the Responses to Imperialism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17 (Oct. 2018): 533, 536CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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93 Second Congress, 149.

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95 Alexander, “Unclasping the Eagle’s Talons,” 536. Jacobson notes the “Anglo-Saxon cultural mission” of the many of the authors of parables of progress, but Ingersoll would likely break from these views and stand opposed to the notion of an inherent Anglo-Saxon superiority. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 109.

96 James B. Jones, Jr., “Arthur St. Clair Colyar,” www.tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/arthur-st-clair-colyar (accessed July 24, 2022).

97 “Bright Bob,” Buffalo Enquirer, Oct. 6, 1892.

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104 Hornstein, Nation of Realtors, 29.

105 “National Association of Real Estate Exchanges,” United Realty 1, no. 1 (1908): 8; Davies, “Real Estate Achievement,” Vol. 1, Ch. 2, Part 2, 30–31.

106 Hornstein, Nation of Realtors, 35.

107 Freund, Colored Property, 15; Hornstein, Nation of Realtors, 107; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and in Equality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 46; Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 34–35; Glotzer, How the Suburbs Were Segregated, 144.