Realtors Interpret History: The Intellectual Origins of Early National Real Estate Organizing

Abstract

In 1891, when U.S. realtors attempted to establish their first national professional organization, the National Real Estate Association (NREA), they turned to history to provide a shared intellectual foundation to justify collective organization. Though the NREA was only in operation for a short period, the ways its members invoked history illuminate how key assumptions about race, property, and citizenship became central to a nascent national real estate industry, predating the more well-known real estate professionalization projects of the twentieth century. History united members from different regions with little in common who were skeptical of the need to form a national institution. They used history in three ways to sustain the organization: repeating narratives, theorizing historical change, and constructing historical subjects. They infused each of these with an imperial worldview fashioned from competing lines of thought in circulation at the time. Among these were sectional reconciliation, manifest destiny, and narratives of civilizational progress. Through their actions, they embedded white supremacist Gilded Age and Progressive Era formulations of history into real estate via the new institution.

This article provides a new look at the role of history in the development of the American real estate profession during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. As scholars have shown, the turn-of-the-century real estate profession, if it can be called that, existed as a series of local interests operating within segregated real estate exchanges in cities and towns across the nation. Real estate brokers, in the tradition of nineteenth-century boosters, were more attuned to local or regional business matters than national ones. Terms commonly used today such as “realtor” did not yet exist nor did a standardized body of knowledge or single idea of professional identity. In 1891, when a group of southerners and midwesterners formed the country’s first nationwide real estate association, the National Real Estate Association (NREA), they found little to unite members. They turned to U.S. history to help convince skeptics and build a shared intellectual foundation. History thus played a vital role in mobilizing them around a common agenda and the potential to become powerful actors on the national stage.

Of the different understandings of history available to them, NREA members charted an imperialist trajectory framed as evolutionary and progressive. This trajectory incorporated and made sense of the subjugation of Native peoples in the U.S. West, the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South, and American overseas ambitions. NREA members placed themselves within this sweep of history by claiming shared kinship with the Anglo-Saxons of the distant past to debate the political, legal, and social components of American citizenship. Yet their understanding of history was also shaped by their ambiguity about the relationship between real estate and class that complicates scholarship on the fundamentally middle-class nature of the real estate profession. ¹

The intellectual landscape of the NREA sheds new light on realtors’ “imaginative side.” ² Nina Silber calls for an increased focus on such work in regard to one historical narrative that members used—the history of post-Civil War sectional reconciliation. In addition to sectional reconciliation, the NREA relied on manifest destiny and stories of the stadial progress of peoples. All three had different, sometimes conflicting, variants in circulation. Nevertheless, realtors found common ground at NREA meetings, as when proponents and opponents of social Darwinism constructed compatible racial narratives of the stages of civilizational progress.

NREA interpretations of history were hardly original or novel in the 1890s—they broadly fall under what Philip Deloria calls the “master narratives of American history” in circulation at the time. ³ Though beyond the scope of this article, NREA members were not even the only real estate businesspeople to draw on U.S. history to organize nationally. Black real estate operators found outlets outside segregated local real estate exchanges such as the National Negro Business League, whereby they joined men and—unlike in the NREA—women from a variety of business endeavors. They too drew on narratives of U.S. history to further their goals as businesspeople but also to rally audiences around certain types of racial uplift. ⁴

As Michel-Rolph Trouillot has cautioned, however, the power of history lies in its production. It is thus necessary to examine the specific historical narratives NREA members shared, the theories of historical change they promulgated, and the ways they constructed historical subjects in order to reveal the specific contours and consequences of their undertaking. ⁵ White real estate brokers, including NREA members, are well-documented agents in the rise of Jim Crow and imperialism that same decade. ⁶ Ultimately, the interpretation of history at each NREA meeting shaped the ideas that members carried back to their towns and cities and forward in time to different institutions.

A different real estate institution has occupied a central space in histories of real estate, and for good reason. In 1908, white, predominantly male real estate agents founded the National Association of Real Estate Exchanges. The name was quickly changed to the National Association of Real Estate Boards and, later, to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). From the outset, they recognized that they lived in “an age of organization,” as one put it at an early meeting. From there, realtors followed a familiar path toward professionalization. ⁷ Since its founding, it has substantially influenced the geography, politics, laws, and socioeconomic conditions of American property ownership. Scholars therefore look to NAR to understand such important topics as claims to citizenship, the history of municipal governance, and the history of segregation. ⁸ However, the national project undertaken by NAR actually began with the NREA, which, though short lived, would be cited by founding members of NAR as a milestone in changing what realtors thought was possible. ⁹ NREA thus fills in a missing component of the history of real estate that early NAR members themselves considered to be an important part of their history.

Though occasionally discussed on its own terms rather than as a brief rehearsal for NAR, little has been written on its operations. ¹⁰ Yet NREA members had a different understanding of professionalization than those that followed. Whereas NAR leaders emphasized standardizing best practices, including those that codified segregation, best practices seldom figured in NREA discussions, where heterogeneity in business practices was the norm. While members of NAR assumed a national organization to be possible, NREA members had to justify the very concept of shared national real estate interests. These differences point to how examining the intellectual landscape of real estate through the NREA can bridge the different approaches historians use to study real estate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the former, local and regional case studies of boosterism and urban growth predominate, though often in dialog with the outsized role U.S. expansion played in the cultural and political imagination. Historians of the twentieth century, by contrast, contend with the rise of a national housing apparatus, especially in regard to discriminatory federal housing policy. Even in locally scaled studies, they must often account for the importance of the national or even international components of politics, business, and financing. On one hand, the NREA is an outgrowth of fragmented nineteenth-century practices, while on the other it complicates the periodization and institutional context used to account for national role realtors played in housing segregation.

Origins

The real estate exchange of Birmingham, Alabama, hosted the first meeting of the NREA on March 30, 1891. Exchanges—also sometimes called boards—were being founded in every corner of the United States. These were institutions as well as physical spaces modeled after stock exchanges. Each set its own membership rules and comprised primarily of white men. Nonmembers continued to conduct real estate business but lacked the centralized resources, networks, and physical space of an exchange. ¹¹

The two-year-old Birmingham exchange reflected a mix of national real estate trends, regional patterns, and local conditions necessary to understand the NREA. Nationally, cities were growing in size and population, caused, in part, by the expansion of transportation networks as well as an immigration boom. ¹² Overall, the percentage of Americans living in urban areas had increased each decade since 1840, with a jump from 28.2 percent in 1880 to 35.1 percent in 1890. ¹³ Real estate agents nationwide grew increasingly concerned with intercity competition during the decade. In this regard, real estate exchanges shared overlapping goals with older business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce as well as established organs of urban boosterism such as the press and municipal government. Though in local competition with one another, exchange members shared an interest in shaping the economic fortunes of their city lest they lose business opportunities to other places. As a result of these factors, the number of exchanges ballooned. Even older exchanges reorganized or reconstituted in the late 1880s and early 1890s to better meet the needs of real estate agents. ¹⁴

Birmingham was a typical site for a real estate exchange. Founded in 1871 at a proposed railroad junction, it rapidly developed into a regional industrial center due to nearby iron and coal deposits. The furnaces and railroads attracted jobs, while the young city’s selection as county seat facilitated a concentration of political power and resources. Between 1870 and 1890, its population swelled from under 3,000 to 26,000. ¹⁵ As in other cities, the real estate development that drove and was driven by growth also spurred concerns that competition from an unsavory class of agents could undermine the real estate business. Brokers avoided being seen with clients along the street known as Real Estate Row lest a competitor lure them away. Meanwhile Real Estate Row gained a reputation for both legitimate and illegitimate or “fly-by-night” brokers who left unsuspecting clients with worthless property. ¹⁶

Both the spatial concentration of real estate transactions indicated by Real Estate Row and consternation about the conduct of business provided the direct impetus for real estate agents to vote in favor of forming the Birmingham Real Estate Exchange in August 1889. The founding members cited the need to prevent the undercutting of prices and to create a space, the physical exchange, for members to conduct business. ¹⁷ Observers in the press noted the prevailing tendencies toward creating business organizations and their proximity to one another downtown. Why stop with directing all real estate business into an exchange, one noted, when Birmingham had so many “various business associations” it “tired one to count”? The newspaper called for them to be combined into one building—a “temple of commerce and home industries, worthy of Birmingham and her hustlers.” ¹⁸ Such a call was part of a national trend at the beginning of the Progressive Era that has been more documented in larger cities like Chicago, namely that of reworking the architectural idiom of capitalism by combining it with that of a civic or moral purpose. ¹⁹ Not only would the building allow for more efficient operation of business organizations and add to the emerging skyline of Birmingham, but it would showcase the possibilities of the boosters inside to lift the city’s economic fortunes through their work.

The Birmingham Real Estate Exchange prioritized its booster mission from the start. On the day of its founding, organizers remarked that “such an exchange exists in every city of importance in the country, and Birmingham is not to be left in the race.” One of its first orders of business entailed planning to bring “Northern and Western capitalists” to the area to tour local industry. ²⁰ Not only did members accord exchanges with a city’s national reputation, but the manner in which they acted as boosters suited local history and regional conditions. Birmingham was no stranger to attracting northern and western capital specifically as an iron-rich industrial town and as a rising population center of the New South.

Being so typical of real estate exchanges in timing, goals, and operation, and so centered on local and regional growth, why then would members of the Birmingham Real Estate Exchange break from familiar patterns to host a national meeting? Members credited the idea to Thomas T. Wright, a Nashville industrialist with business interests in newspapers, railroads, and real estate. Wright took an interest in attracting capital and tourism to the South. He promoted conventions, expositions, and one-time events such as a large naval display in Tampa, Florida. ²¹ The Nashville exchange, formed less than a year before the meeting became another early supporter of a national association.

Beginning in January 1891, the secretary of the Birmingham Real Estate Exchange sent out 500 invitations to all organized real estate exchanges as well as mayors throughout the country where no organized real estate exchange existed, asking for one delegate from each place to attend. The press published the responses that poured in voicing support and encouragement. ²² Newspapers also called on readers and businesspeople to support the meeting and trust the recommendations that came from the “progressive but conservative” body of attendees. ²³

Among these published letters of support was one from Wright, who did not attend the inaugural meeting of the association he was publicly credited with originating. In it, he singled out real estate dealers as “the great modern factors for the development of our country” and called on them to band together “to exchange ideas and formulate plans for their mutual interest.” Chief among those plans needed to be how to house the working classes in purpose-designed homes with the latest conveniences. Such housing would replace the “wretched hovels that degrade, animalize, and turn [the workingman] to an Ishmaelite”—an unredeemable social outcast prone to crime, vice, and degeneracy. ²⁴

Wright’s reasoning hints at what constituted a “progressive but conservative” perspective on real estate agents, and one that applied a particular historical worldview to his present day. The allusion to Ishmaelites was part of an emerging rhetoric squaring social Darwinism with Christian explanations of the behavior of the poor, especially that of immigrants and certain races. ²⁵ Improving housing conditions for the poor was hardly a new issue for newspaper readers; the national exposés of Jacob Riis had just published the previous year. Likewise, businessmen had already been conspicuously engaging in housing philanthropy that yielded some return on investment, such as limited dividend developments on both sides of the Atlantic. ²⁶ Therefore, instead of referring to mere business acumen and prudence or to bolstering initiatives yielding civic benefits, Wright made it possible to frame the association’s creation as having far-ranging, even civilizational stakes. Wright expanded the scope of how to justify a national project beyond local or regional shared interests and, in the process, addressed the question of why local real estate agents should care about working with distant counterparts to build a national platform.

Wright’s absence was only the first sign that attendance would prove disappointing. The Birmingham exchange anticipated a large turnout would arrive by rail from every region. ²⁷ Yet by the end of the first day, the only registered attendees were southerners representing Jonesville and Decatur, Alabama; Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee; and Savannah, Georgia. ²⁸ As a result, organizers moved sessions from the grand Birmingham opera house to a room at the real estate exchange. ²⁹ More joined the second day, bringing the final registration to thirty-one people from fourteen cities or towns across five states. Three delegations from Connecticut and Ohio lent the only credence to the newly formed association’s national aspirations. Otherwise, all other attendees were southern. ³⁰

Nevertheless, the meeting wavered between making a case for national importance and promoting regional pride or local booster efforts. The opening remarks by the Birmingham city attorney “dwelt on unity of the two sections and the grand and glorious destiny of our country,” tying the association to a larger national project of sectional reconciliation from the outset. ³¹ Meanwhile, the president of the Nashville Real Estate Exchange proclaimed that Birmingham was poised to become the greatest city in the South, possibly, even greater than his own Nashville, which undoubtedly held the title. Attendees sported dark red badges with gold letters designed to make them a visible presence as they ventured into the streets of Birmingham, affirming the city’s place of prominence as host to national real estate interests. ³² The speeches marked the first time the national association was explicitly positioned within a narrative of U.S. history. Intended for a national representative audience, the remarks on the association’s role in sectional reconciliation still suited a meeting with primarily southern attendees who expected to share the floor with northern and western counterparts. The promotion of the South and of Birmingham remained palatable and familiar as it was the same type of boosterism that underwrote the recent founding of the real estate exchanges.

Despite the low attendance, organizers decided there could be sustained interest in a national project. Before the meeting’s end attendees elected officers, some of whom were not present, and formed a plan to lobby real estate boards around the country in advance of the next year’s meeting in Nashville.

The Rise of the NREA

The Nashville meeting marked the first successful effort from real estate agents to convene a nationally representative gathering. Their second was held on February 17–19, 1892, when 600 delegates from twenty-one states and Canada met in the Tennessee State Capitol. Unlike the previous year, the large venue matched the actual rather than the anticipated attendance. The NREA credited the improved turnout to robust yearlong promotional efforts. The association’s executive committee mailed letters signed by the governor of Tennessee to real estate exchanges explaining the aims of the Nashville meeting and requesting each elect delegates to attend. They also stated that a committee member would soon be traveling to the city to meet with local exchange members. Exchanges finalized arrangements via telegraph and announced the dates to its members through the local press. ³³

One of the first exchanges outside the South that energetically welcomed an NREA committee member was Milwaukee’s. The Milwaukee Real Estate Board was created in mid-1891, after the Birmingham meeting. The exchange reflected city growth, spurred by immigration and industrialization. Local newspapers frequently reported on the growth of membership and the ever-increasing volume of sales channeled through the board. The board quickly became well organized and well funded; it established six standing committees, including a public service committee that split its efforts between attracting industry to Milwaukee and discussing municipal infrastructure legislation. It also paid an elected secretary $100 per month, a figure higher than the earnings of much of Milwaukee’s labor force. ³⁴ Shortly after the meeting, members of the board met the NREA secretary in Chicago to work out the logistics of Milwaukee’s attendance in Nashville. ³⁵

Milwaukee ostensibly supported the NREA mission, which the association’s secretary described as the creation of a “uniform system” for property transactions across the country to replace the current inefficient highly variable patchwork. ³⁶ Members, however, viewed the meeting as an opportunity to bolster interest in Milwaukee, especially from southerners. It was not the only exchange to see it that way. Both Milwaukee and the Buffalo Real Estate Exchange arranged for special Pullman cars festooned inside and out with banners displaying the exchanges’ names. Both printed souvenirs, pamphlets, buttons, maps, and posters for distribution. Each rented a hotel suite to adorn with photos of the city’s buildings. ³⁷ Attendance even became competitive. The Milwaukee exchange boasted to the press that no city would outnumber theirs, and in the event that St. Louis did, it was only due to its proximity to Nashville. ³⁸ There were few signs prior to the start of events that real estate exchanges saw fellow attendees as potential collaborators for a national association rather than rival boosters competing for opportunities.

At the meeting speakers adopted a self-conscious view toward making history. Secretary of the Milwaukee Real Estate Board J. C. Bartholf took to the podium as the first member of a real estate exchange to give an address, following a host of local politicians and leaders, including the governor of Tennessee and the secretary of the local Commercial Club, all of whom added further to the sense of prestige surrounding the proceedings. Bartholf’s position in the lineup was fitting. In addition to being a real estate broker and newspaper owner, Bartholf had served a term as a Republican Wisconsin assemblyman, where he championed free public education and women’s suffrage. He was also a chronic joiner of civic and professional groups with ample time logged at conventions. Above all, he prided himself on his oratory. From his school days he was a frequent public speaker. By 1892, he had racked up a considerable list of speaking engagements around Wisconsin, ranging from appearances at the University of Wisconsin’s Farmers’ Institutes to a meeting of the Northwestern Tobacco Growers’ and Dealers’ Association. ³⁹

Bartholf began by congratulating the organizers, who had “earned the honor and distinction of being epoch makers in what may be termed the real estate history of the United States.” ⁴⁰ Bartholf’s self-conscious appeal to history—and national history at that—proved especially important as the first prominent face of the association from outside the South. Like in Birmingham, the organizers of the Nashville meeting struggled to attract representatives from some of the largest real estate exchanges, including those in New York and Baltimore. Bartholf admitted that Northerners like him assumed any real estate organizing would originate with them. That he was there thanks to the southerners of Birmingham and Nashville defied the stereotype that the North was more “enterprising and more awake” to the benefits of business organization. ⁴¹ Coming together from all regions was cause for celebration and proof the national project could work despite the conspicuous absence of larger exchanges.

Such circumstances inspired urgency in organizers’ appeals for national reconciliation in the face of post-Civil-War sectionalism. Nashville Real Estate Exchange President M. B. Pilcher, who had pithily linked Birmingham and Nashville as the greatest cities in the South at the previous meeting, took his humor in a different direction at the more well-attended meeting in his hometown. The former Confederate captain began the meeting with a Civil War joke. To welcome attendees, Pilcher remarked, “About thirty years ago some of us gave some of you a pretty warm welcome down here. Now we want to make it red hot. We want every one of you to go away from here feeling that we are brethren in this great work.” ⁴² It met with laughter and applause from attendees.

Like Pilcher, Milwaukeean Bartholf drew attention to and then papered over sectional divisions to frame the NREA within this national narrative. Bartholf recast the Mason–Dixon line as the work of two subdividers instead of two surveyors. He appealed to those present in Nashville to act as a unified group to help heal old wounds caused by the Civil War. The subdividers, he noted, may have created the famous line of demarcation between North and South, but it was “a line, thank heaven, which is now only a reminiscence of an unfortunate and unhappy past.” ⁴³ Real estate agents of the present could move beyond the errors of those from the past. As proof of that sectional reconciliation, the NREA would celebrate every region and serve national interests.

The NREA’s reliance on sectional reconciliation for smoothing a path for a national organization was not a foregone conclusion despite its popularity. Caroline Janney argues that reconciliation was never the predominant memory of the war among its participants. Recent scholarship on the topic focuses on fraught and contested relationships between northerners and southerners, especially for the generation that lived through the war. The discursive possibility of framing the NREA through sectional reconciliation, however, did exist. Wright had founded the Scotch-Irish Society of America, which “consciously sought post-Civil-War reconciliation between North and South, noting that the Scotch-Irish fought for both Union and Confederacy.” ⁴⁴ Moreover, the ages, experiences, and memories of NREA members varied considerably, from veterans on both sides to members who were children during the conflict or born after the war’s end. Nevertheless, this recent scholarship complicates but by no means displaces an established line of argument by historians such as Nina Silber and David Blight that the commitment to sectional reconciliation in the decades after the Civil War “intensified the nation’s embrace of white supremacy and patriarchy, while pushing the country further away from even a tentative commitment to racial equality.” ⁴⁵

Bartholf indeed embraced the racist roots of sectional reconciliation by choosing to highlight the work of avowed white supremacist Henry Grady as a more recent example of Americans undoing the work of Mason and Dixon. At first, Grady might seem like a curious choice as the most famous booster of the South. Bartholf, however, linked regional interests with national unity just as his board had balanced its commitment to a national association with using it as an opportunity to boost Milwaukee. The recent passing of Grady, said Bartholf, was mourned by “loyal citizens of the entire Union.” For Bartholf, Grady’s accomplishments extolling the “marvelous miracle of commercial, industrial, and intellectual development of the imperial New South” benefited the entire country. ⁴⁶ Drawing on Grady thus afforded attendees a space to acknowledge regional difference and reconcile boosterism with national goals.

Known as the father of the New South movement, Grady promised a newly modern region in which northern capital and a pliant southern labor force would drive American prosperity. Predicated on urban industrial development, union busting, tenant farming, and racial violence, the New South became a powerful discourse that helped reconfigure the political economy of the South and bolster development at the end of the nineteenth century. New South businessmen heavily relied on racist historical narratives. ⁴⁷ Significantly, the New South became a potent image of progress and promise of economic opportunity for real estate agents as well as the driving force behind the growth that gave rise to southern real estate exchanges such as Birmingham and Nashville. ⁴⁸

That Bartholf chose to deracialize Grady’s specific brand of New South boosterism to make a case for a national association was an egregious, though apropos, concession given the timing of the meeting. White Democrats and Republicans, including prominent politicians from western states, viewed the national atmosphere as particularly conducive to sectional reconciliation in the early 1890s with the defeat of a federal election bill that was the last Republican effort to protect Black voting rights in the South. ⁴⁹ As scholars such as Robert Fogelson have shown, the rise of Jim Crow in those very years was driven by the coupling of this changing political economy with the rise in segregated real estate. From the start of widespread introduction of racially restrictive covenants in subdivisions to new techniques of violent dispossession against Black property owners in rural and urban settings, a new geography was taking shape in all regions, not just the South. ⁵⁰

Beyond speeches, NREA members self-consciously lent material form to their interpretations of history. One example was when the Chattanooga Real Estate Exchange presented Milwaukee with a gavel that was made of wood from the battlefield of Lookout Mountain and contained an embedded rifle bullet. ⁵¹ NREA members punctuated the connection between their work and sectional reconciliation and in doing so linked ideas of race, fraternization, and the work of buying and selling real estate.

Prominent as it may have been, the Civil War was not the only historical event to make an appearance at the Nashville NREA meeting. Manifest destiny also featured heavily. It was again Bartholf, at the beginning of the lineup of scheduled speakers, who set the tone with a description of when “the all-conquering white man invaded [Columbia’s] borders, in mute eloquence more eloquent than words could ever be, said to him: ‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you; seek and ye shall find.’” Subsequently, he continued, enterprising men went forth and put the riches of the land to productive use as they spread out over mountains, forest, and valleys. Real estate agents, in Bartholf’s telling, were central to this history as members of the “vanguard of America’s grand army of progress.” With a commitment to a restored Union, “they have gone forward as one people in a career of peaceful conquest unrivaled in the annals of time.” Looking ahead, Bartholf saw an “ever brightening career of triumphal conquest that lies out before the American people. And in that forward movement no other class will take a more active nor honorable part than the real estate men of the land.” ⁵² Bartholf echoed generations of thought on manifest destiny as a racial destiny, whereby, as Nell Irvin Painter has summarized, “Entire races are consigned to extinction in the interest of Nature’s greater good.” ⁵³ Such sentiment, especially in regard to land acquisition, was often depicted in the form of a white woman beckoning Americans west in the spirit of progress. ⁵⁴ According to William Cronon, such views of the frontier and of settlement would have “closely matched nineteenth-century notions of social evolution” at whose end lay large industrial cities. ⁵⁵ Bartholf’s assessment of real estate business was similar to Wright centering real estate men in the development of the United States, but with a more explicit historical narrative that equated what Wright termed “the great modern factors for the development of our country” with manifest destiny.

To envision themselves as driving manifest destiny, members of the NREA were to embody the muscular masculinity of native Tennessean Andrew Jackson. In the 1890s, Jackson’s heroic reputation was tied closely to U.S. territorial expansion and the qualities Bartholf named—manhood, integrity, courage, and heart—associated with his military career as much as his presidency. The trials and tribulations of the last several decades notwithstanding, Bartholf encouraged those in the audience to see this history of conquest and military victory as signs of their nation’s promising future. ⁵⁶ In this way, history provided members with a model as well as a sense of mission and consequence.

Once attendees began discussing the agenda of the NREA, speakers made their case through history. The most oft-mentioned reason for organizing a national association was to create uniform laws on matters related to real estate, such as title transfer. Among the myriad of presentations and discussions was a block of time devoted to alien land laws, which attendees thought impeded easy and efficient property transfers.

It was this context in which estate broker R. C. Smyers took to the podium in Nashville and began to talk about the “old blood purity laws” implemented in colonial Virginia under James I. At a gathering replete with discussion of pressing real estate topics, Smyers digressed into seventeenth-century history to impress on his peers the importance of history for contemporary real estate agents. Thanks to those early laws, the United States now had alien land laws that restricted property ownership based on nationality or “blood.” That was a problem, he concluded, that could only be resolved by their collective efforts through the country’s first national real estate association. ⁵⁷

Alien land laws defined the rights of those without citizenship at the state and territorial levels. Though related in their exclusionary aims, alien land laws and blood purity laws are usually treated as distinct from each other in scholarship. In the past, blood purity laws were used to construct racial categories, such as through the infamous one-drop rule, which asserted that any person with even one ancestor of Black ancestry—one drop of Black blood—was considered Black. By contrast, scholars contextualize alien land laws within the history of anti-Asian policy that bridge the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment. Historian Natalia Molina connects such laws with the history of violence against Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos in the United States, while others identify their role in collapsing all Asians into the mold of perpetual foreignness. ⁵⁸

Despite a lengthy presentation on alien land laws at the meeting, the question of Chinese ownership received only a passing mention at the NREA, in reference to Nevada’s alien land law. This may have reflected the relatively limited Western presence at the meeting. The association’s president, secretary, and treasurer hailed from Nashville, Milwaukee, and Buffalo, while no one from west of the Great Plains served on committees. The only leadership roles went to four vice presidents from Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Butte, Montana. However, since each state with attendees automatically got a vice president, the position meant little in terms of influence or participation. Whereas some states had over twenty members in attendance—Wisconsin had fifty and Buffalo, New York, alone had twenty-five—the entire state of California had two members, the vice president and a delegate from Los Angeles. Nevada had none. ⁵⁹ Anti-Chinese animus was by no means limited to the West, but regional representation likely contributed to both the framing and reception of the NREA platform. ⁶⁰

Instead, they chose to link inefficient or ineffective laws to an unbroken history of British property rights that first arrived with the English settlers in what became the thirteen colonies. This unbroken history linking alien land laws to Britain subsequently served as the basis for NREA calls for legislative reform aimed at keeping European capital flowing to the United States. The motivation here was likely a more generalized concern with attracting and retaining a flow of capital investment, in real estate as in extractive industries and other U.S. industrial concerns at the time. Everyone from financiers to brokers to developers used European capital from farm mortgages to early racially segregated suburbs. In short, European investment in American land and financial institutions fueled the economic boom that made real estate a profitable business in 1892. ⁶¹

NREA members, looking to history, claimed that while Europe had given the United States property law, not to mention a host of literary, artistic, and scientific traditions, the United States in return had opened opportunities for Europeans to gain material wealth through property ownership and settlement. More recently, however, a problem had emerged as a result of alien land laws. By way of examples from the past century, Smyers argued that well known and influential Americans had been able to travel to Europe to continue partaking of European education and culture. Europeans, on the other hand, had been stopped from carrying material wealth back to Europe. The result was a disruption of the “great intimacy and extensive kinship” that linked Americans and “the great nations of Europe.” This was a grave injustice to Europeans. ⁶²

In articulating what exactly had gone awry with regard to alien land laws, some resorted to an Anglo-Saxon past to make a case for American exceptionalism. By the 1890s, ideologies of Anglo-Saxonism with pliable cultural and linguistic components, backed by racial science, made it both fashionable and anodyne among many native-born white Protestants to interchangeably consider American history and heritage as English. Defenders included many native-born whites regardless of their own lineage. ⁶³ According to an NREA member from Angola, Indiana, the United States retained “relics of the past” that “germinated on these shores from seed imported from Europe” even though America “lopped off a great many European shams when she set up for herself,” such as laws of entail that restricted how property could be inherited. ⁶⁴ Though he equated American heritage with European origins and celebrated this lineage, he also bemoaned the parts of that lineage that impeded the unfettered transfer of property among people of Anglo-Saxon descent.

This impediment extended to white women as well. In step with an increasingly prominent strand of discourse centered on protecting white woman that informed anti-Asian, anti-immigrant, and anti-Black rhetoric, NREA members identified white American women as the key victims of alien land laws. Though white women could be penalized under the terms of the law, historian Nayan Shah describes both alien land and miscegenation laws as a form of regulation of interracial intimacy “that produced state-sponsored family forms and circumscribed participation in the economy.” However, especially in the West, these laws targeted relationships involving East Asian and South Asian men. ⁶⁵ Instead, NREA members drew attention to the obstacles that these laws created with regard to inheritance for white women married to European men. Under the laws, property rights followed the citizenship status of a husband or father. Thus, they exclaimed, when a husband with the legal status of alien died, neither the American widow nor their children could inherit or easily dispose of the property. Here, the United States had created a draconian version of property rights that differed from “the civilized and Christian nations the world over.” ⁶⁶ Tellingly, laws of coverture were never brought up, even though they had historically disadvantaged women regardless of the race or citizenship status of her husband. Unlike the strain of American exceptionalism that informed the forward-thinking elimination of entail, here Americans were uniquely—and unacceptably—trailing behind world leaders like Britain.

By the end of the meeting, the realtors in attendance had reached a consensus: Alien land laws needed to be repealed or, at the very least, made subject to a uniform federal law enabled Europeans to own land on terms equal to those of U.S. citizens of European descent. ⁶⁷ In their narration, the United States was an inheritor of a European tradition of property rights. Yet, over time, Europeans had become the biggest victims of American property laws that stymied the flow of capital. The NREA saw it as its duty to work toward reforming these laws and restore the fair exchange of material wealth between the United States and what they called “civilized nations.” ⁶⁸

Their consensus was rooted in a particular narrative of U.S. history as one of white inheritance. The driving force of change in NREA interpretations had been white settlement and the transformation of land into legally recognized property, a form of entitlement bestowed upon them by virtue of the civilizing forces inherent to their whiteness. Thus the responsibility of ensuring efficient, fair, and continued growth fell to them.

Moreover, it was this theme—white inheritance—that proved the unifying thread bringing together the various historical narratives present at the conference. It is necessary to contextualize NREA members’ financial imperatives—be they facilitating European investment or retaining northern capital, within shifting understandings of citizenship and the American polity. Historians have recently begun to connect sectional reconciliation, transnational investment, and Anglo-Saxon identity prior to the often-cited pivot point of the Spanish-American War. ⁶⁹ Alys Beaverton concludes in a study of U.S. press coverage that in the 1880s “a powerful force behind Americans’ growing interest in continental commercial aggrandizement was widespread anxiety over the fragility of the post-Civil-War U.S. republic.” ⁷⁰ The protection of white womanhood and the construction of white American masculinity likewise threaded through disparate discourses and policies ranging from Chinese exclusion to a resurgent lost cause narrative. Proponents of immigration restrictions, racial segregation, and American expansion found common ground in theorizing U.S. history as one of white inheritance. ⁷¹

Coming from speakers from Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, it was clear to those in attendance that a shared interpretation of history had emerged that bridged regional difference. It provided a common intellectual foundation upon which NREA members could begin to meet their goal of influencing legislation.

The Heyday of the NREA

The NREA voted for Buffalo to sponsor the next national meeting, to be held in October 1892. It was a contentious process, with delegations jockeying for support for hosting duties. At one point a member from Velasco, Texas, put forward his city on the basis that he was one of the few representatives present from the Trans-Mississippi West. His campaign faltered when a midwesterner interrupted to ask if he was the only resident of Velasco. The location was settled, however, when Milwaukee and Buffalo made a deal wherein the former received support to have its officers elected and the latter would host. ⁷² The deal marked a move away from the South as being the most prominent and visible driving force of the NREA, though it remained a steady presence.

With the meeting a mere seven months away, the continued success of the NREA required being able to fund a well-attended event lest Nashville seem like a fluke. As of that spring, the association had $650 in its coffers but estimated the convention would cost at least $1,500. Though at least one officer raised the possibility of obtaining a loan, the NREA bet its financial viability on increasing its dues-paying membership. It projected in March that it would have at least $2,500 on hand by the start of the meeting. The Buffalo exchange was also expected to assume certain costs. ⁷³

The ensuing promotion of the meeting combined the practical need to raise funds with historical justification of a national project. NREA members toured the country in the intervening months encouraging the formation of local real estate boards and membership in the national association. They figured that members of newly organized exchanges would opt wholesale to join the NREA. ⁷⁴ In addition to touring, the NREA sent out a circular to exchanges that adopted the viewpoint of a “historian of the future” looking back on the nineteenth century who concluded that of all the forces that contributed to “the matchless record of human achievement that mankind has made along the highway of human advancement,” the “most potent” was organization. ⁷⁵ It is unclear to what extent the membership drive shored up NREA finances, but the local arrangements committee nevertheless began planning a lavish affair set in one of Buffalo’s largest venues.

The tone of the October meeting with regard to race and history differed despite similarities to the previous agenda. The NREA continued to state a main goal of making land transactions more efficient and again scheduled presentations on these topics. It also formed three special committees to continue working toward this aim after the end of the meeting. All three were devoted to familiar iterations of these topics. One, on “alien ownership of land,” was composed of members from Illinois, Minnesota, and Tennessee. The others focused on “uniformity of legal blanks” and “formulating a uniform system,” respectively. ⁷⁶ Separately from this work, the chairman of the association’s resolutions committee called for all standing alien land laws to be abolished lest they cause issues with future titles. The concept of alien land laws, however, was ultimately sound. According to him, “no true American would regret the adoption of a different alien law—a law which should bar from our shores those alien to our purpose.” ⁷⁷ This stance left room for the association to adapt to changing discourses around citizenship, including at the subnational scale.

Two factors, however, were different. First, large exchanges attended. The Real Estate Exchange of the City of New York attended thanks to being persuaded that the NREA “was not organized for the purpose of booming any particular state, East or West, but that it is strictly national in character.” ⁷⁸ A New Yorker gave an address about the Real Estate Exchange of the City of New York, the only speech whose topic was a specific exchange. With the support of large exchanges, speeches thus focused less on trying to justify the existence of a national association. Secondly, buoyed by expectation that attendance would far surpass that of previous meetings, the NREA sought fewer speakers for Buffalo than for Nashville, but this smaller group was selected to imbue the event with the status it deserved. Organizers seemed confident that they could cover the expenses necessary to secure them.

The headlining speakers had little experience in the real estate business. Henry George was a popular though controversial radical economist, theorist, and reformer who addressed the audience on the subject for which he was best known—his single tax proposal on the value of land, which he had proposed in his landmark Progress and Poverty in 1879. Robert Ingersoll was one of the preeminent American orators of the late nineteenth century whose speech reflected his views as a strident freethinker. Ingersoll was actually a late replacement for Chauncey Depew, a well-known lawyer, railroad executive, and politician. Ingersoll and Depew were frequently compared to one another in the New York area as being two of the most noted orators of the day. The latter was also a property investor and namesake of the newly incorporated village of Depew, near Buffalo. Fittingly, the address he had been scheduled to give had been entitled “Rapid Transit and Suburban Real Estate,” a topic that made sense for the audience. ⁷⁹ However, Ingersoll delivered an address entitled “Progress,” a topic that broadly fit the NREA, which had positioned real estate agents and their national efforts at the forefront of positive change. Whereas Depew would have doubled as a talented speaker and a Buffalo booster, the lineup of George and Ingersoll created the impression that the NREA could mount what the Buffalo Courier, under the headline “Two Speakers,” promised to be a “feast of reason” by two “original and powerful thinkers” whose works were known “in all civilized lands.” ⁸⁰ With Ingersoll’s fee of $500 for the last-minute remarks (George’s fee was undisclosed), the NREA was willing to spend a sizeable chunk of its reserves to derive status from speakers whose views were well known. ⁸¹

George spoke first on the single tax, which was levied on the value of land rather than that of improvements. He illustrated its principles with a historical framing: “When only red men were here the land had no value; when the first settlers came it had no value; but houses were built, factories were erected, and you had streets made. As public improvements are put in, land, and land only, increases in value.” The single tax would instead redistribute the “value which the growth of the community creates” to all members of the community. For George, an important function of the single tax was to discourage the resource hoarding that accompanied land speculation. Like Nashville’s Thomas T. Wright, George shared a deep concern that poverty and inequality caused social maladjustment and idleness in cities, which could be mitigated by increasing working-class access to homeownership. ⁸² These conclusions had previously prompted Ingersoll to support George’s unsuccessful mayoral candidacy in New York, despite differences of opinion on the relationship between capital and labor. ⁸³

Like George, Ingersoll used history to comment on land value, taxation, and community, though for a very different purpose: to assert that white supremacy lowered land value. He told of land that had been worth “fifty to one hundred dollars an acre” until “some of the citizens called themselves Regulators and White Caps, and the land there to-day isn’t worth five dollars an acre.” Following an applause break, he concluded, “Why? Because a man does not want to live with hyenas and jackals and tigers,” to more applause. ⁸⁴ White supremacist groups such as Regulators and White Caps, along with the Ku Klux Klan, emerged after the Civil War to violently dispossess African Americans of property.

The former Radical Republican emphasized the criminal, immoral acts of extralegal land seizure to flip assumptions about race and property value in which white supremacists caused the devaluation of Black-owned land. Ingersoll positioned anti-Black violence as a step backward for civilization in a larger evolutionary story of progress in history, saying, “every advance made by the human race increases the value of the soil; every great man that sheds his glory in the world adds to the value of this world.” White supremacist neighbors, in Ingersoll’s narration, impoverished humankind with the analogous impact of decreasing land values. Ingersoll subverted the increasingly common trope of the “undesirable neighbor” that real estate developers had begun to deploy as a catch-all term for the poor, immigrants, Jews, and African Americans to promote emerging forms of housing segregation. For Ingersoll, the undesirable neighbor who devalued property was also poor, but, as he put it, “not poor in money, I mean ignorant, abominable.” ⁸⁵

What was remarkable about Ingersoll’s explicit formulation on race and property value was not simply that he held this belief or even that he voiced it on record at what was likely the largest gathering of real estate agents in U.S. history but that he earned applause and approbation for doing so. ⁸⁶ His formulation of race and property value proved difficult to find among white real estate brokers. On the contrary, developers were beginning to experiment in the 1890s with exclusionary tactics underpinned by the assertion that African American occupancy lowered property values. Ingersoll’s comment is a striking moment of an alternative, historically grounded narrative of race and property value during the rise of Jim Crow. It ultimately proved to be an exceptional moment in the history of white realtor professionalization.

Ingersoll’s remaining remarks on progress resembled a more typical interpretation of history at the turn of the century that Matthew Frye Jacobson calls “parables of progress,” comprised of evolutionary tales that demonstrated both temporal and psychological distances between the world’s peoples to “offer a running commentary on precisely the historical processes that … were drawing Americans across the globe in search of markets and millions of foreign laborers to the United States in search of work.” ⁸⁷ Though he rejected social Darwinism, Ingersoll readily promoted a whiggish theory of history in which peoples advanced unequally. Ingersoll established his historical interpretations as a progress parable when he characterized history as a “progression; from savagery to civilization, not from perfection to savagery.” ⁸⁸ He then proceeded to use it in one of the typical manners that Jacobson describes: condemning the harsh conditions of American progress while lauding evolutionary ideas of progress on the whole.

Science, technology, and secularism formed the basis by which Ingersoll, a proponent of all three, placed the world’s peoples on the line of advancement. In this regard, Ingersoll, a supporter of U.S. imperialism until shortly before his death, constructed a historical narrative that also exemplified the typical parable narrative feature Jacobson describes as “harnessing a cast of thousands in an imperial fashion to a self-absorbed comment on the United States itself.” ⁸⁹ Comparing Americans to Mexicans, he stated that Americans made advancements in science so that, unlike Mexicans, they no longer believed in the supernatural properties of lightning but experimented with its properties. Americans, and their European ancestors, were not like the Chinese, who invented typing technology, but had no ideas for how to use it and thus languished until the technology had been refined. American settlers were ambitious as opposed to Native Americans, whom he consigned to the past as leading primitive lives without knowing success or failure. Possessing ambition was the reason man “gets civilized.” ⁹⁰ Ingersoll’s message was clear: unlike Mexicans, Chinese, or Native Americans, the white men in the room were civilized. They wanted something.

Ingersoll was confident that looking at the past highlighted the advancements that had brought those in the room to the current moment. With progress, however, came a new host of social ills visible in the conditions of the urban poor. To emphasize this, he called it preferable to “take a girl twelve years of age, kill her, roast her, eat her, than to compel her to make a living for sixty or seventy years with the needle, living in a tenement, starving from day to day.” ⁹¹ The laboring child in the tenement was especially heartbreaking since people of the past were “less sensitive to pain” than more advanced peoples of the present, a trope long leveled against African Americans and Native Americans, including by contemporaries Ingersoll would have ardently opposed, though it was more seldom used against European immigrants who were crowding into tenements in New York where Ingersoll lived. The laboring child was a victim of progress but still a modern subject whom the NREA could help.

Ingersoll outlined steps the NREA could take to “destroy the cruelty and heartlessness of the present time.” ⁹² Echoing other speakers at the ongoing and previous NREA meetings, Ingersoll encouraged realtors to unite in their efforts to lobby for legislative reform. Unlike previous speeches where property law remained cumbersome or inefficient due to its purported British origins, as with title transfer, or deprived people of their inheritance, such as with alien land laws, he made the case that laws with their origins in Britain needed reform solely because they were cruel. For Ingersoll, American property laws, based as they were on British laws, were so cruel that they would “disgrace Central Africa to-day.” ⁹³ Paul Kramer notes the many competing racial logics in circulation at the time, inflected by U.S. geopolitical projects, including those that focused to varying degrees on the civilizing aspects of whiteness and citizenship. ⁹⁴ Though Ingersoll was a noted defender of racial equality, he also endorsed U.S. civilizing missions in Hawaii, the Caribbean, and, later, the Philippines. ⁹⁵ Progress, to extrapolate Ingersoll’s thinking, would coincide with a move away from primitivism to modernity. Though he aimed his barb at Britain, as real estate agents did in the discussion at Nashville that blamed Britain for outdated laws, to compare the United States to Central Africa, clearly still a stronghold of backwardness in his analogy, could serve to shock the audience into action.

It is likely that NREA members disagreed with portions of the speakers’ remarks. The politics of some of the real estate exchange members who presented differed considerably. A speaker from Nashville was a case in point. He was a former enslaver and member of the Confederate Congress as well as a New South promoter who supported the use of convict leasing to replace free miners. ⁹⁶ Though both George and Ingersoll refrained from directly mentioning political parties at the meeting, Ingersoll, an outspoken Republican, gave an interview to a Buffalo newspaper during the gathering in which he quoted and agreed with George’s take that the Democratic Party kept people poor. ⁹⁷ Moreover, the NREA never endorsed their views even if it paid for and benefitted from their reputations as famous men with well-known political views who drew and held crowds of people with diverse viewpoints. ⁹⁸

There was still much, however, to instill a sense of purpose and commitment to the national agenda. Ingersoll and George wanted real estate agents to increase homeownership. Specifically, Ingersoll, like George, proposed the NREA work toward reforming tax law. Like George, another speaker from New York had also discussed the need to use legislative influence to tamp down unchecked land speculation. ⁹⁹ Ingersoll and George also declared that it was both a business imperative and a moral imperative to ensure property ownership would continue to be a pillar of democratic governance and community riches. A perfected and just form of property ownership, codified with uniform and fair laws, would enable the United States to continue to hold its position at the forefront of civilization. To the extent that NREA members had reached a consensus over two years, they were united on the front that land constituted a basis for societal wealth and relations. Buffalo reinforced that the NREA was part of a world-historical moment in which members could guide political change.

The End of the NREA and Rise of NAR

No discernible change occurred. The NREA had pinned its survival to a continual increase in membership. Its future seemed bright at Buffalo. Attendance nearly doubled from 825 to 1,500 attendees. However, only 493 were dues-paying members. ¹⁰⁰ The very land speculation brought up at the meeting—fueled by European capital no less—plunged the country into depression in 1893. Real estate firms went out of business. Exchanges folded. The association cancelled a planned convention in St. Paul.

Despite the cancellation, the NREA organized one last program at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Beginning in Nashville, members had planned to hold an NREA meeting at the event and had established a committee for that purpose. The NREA looked to the fair to advance the three goals: increase interest in a national association, advance real estate interests with the general public, and court European capital to bolster American real estate. To these ends, the committee envisioned “a sort of symposium of information relative to the real estate interests and values governing lands.” ¹⁰¹

The NREA realized these goals by assembling a lineup of speakers from different regions to address the public on topics NREA members had discussed at previous meetings. They included Charles C. Bonney, a former Illinois Supreme Court judge active in the American Bar Association, who spoke on “land tenure … among the Aryan races.” Bonney fixed Aryan peoples as possessing a transhistorical love of the homestead as “inviolable.” However, his remarks that that “[h]omes of moderate value should be free from taxation” and that “conveyances [should be] simple, [and] easily executed … so that property, when not bequeathed by will, would descend to those to whom of right it belonged” were in keeping with the NREA’s insistence on the timely topic of alien land law reform and Henry George’s views on taxation. Another speaker, “urg[ed] the necessity of providing homes for the working classes.” ¹⁰² Though its organizational capacity was likely declining as the depression rendered it insolvent, the content NREA chose to present to the world linked racial hierarchy, access to homeownership, and taxation. The Columbian Exposition was one of the decade’s most well-attended events worldwide. In its last gasp as a group, the NREA used the biggest platform a business association could have achieved to grapple with the class politics of property and the racial boundaries of citizenship.

The association dissolved shortly thereafter. A decade and a half passed before real estate agents formed another dedicated national association. During that time, the intellectual landscape of the real estate business shifted in response to local, regional, and national changes. The NREA endorsement of stadial models of peoples coincided with the ascendancy of race science at the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, the Chicago World’s Fair was a fitting setting for its final programming. The fair’s centerpiece, the Court of Honor in the White City, provided a showcase for American science, industry, and commerce using an architectural idiom that signaled American imperial ambitions. Its Midway Plaisance provided thrills and pleasure palaces, filled with what organizers intended to be the exotic sites and displays from peoples the world over. Attendees advanced through civilizations along the midway to reach the apex of mankind in the Court of Honor with occasional romantic gestures to an imagined past such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show just outside the gates. The exposition itself was structured like an evolutionary progress parable.

As the 1890s continued, the phenomenon Thomas Hanchett calls sorting was increasingly interpolated with the rise of race science and this potent grand narrative of history. The scale of cities transformed from walking-scaled cores that mixed uses, classes, and races to become larger and more spatially segregated. Historians have identified interrelated factors that caused sorting, from emboldened white supremacists to the increase in segregated planned suburbs. Likewise, the hardening of Jim Crow, codified nationally with Plessy v. Ferguson, and political realignment, as well as continued immigration and industrialization, gave rise to experiments in discriminatory city planning. ¹⁰³ The Great Migration intensified and accelerated segregation. As real estate exchanges reconstituted in the first decade of the twentieth century, they did so in this context. In 1908, members of these new boards joined with surviving ones to found the National Association of Real Estate Exchanges, a name quickly changed to reflect the more popular terminology of the times: the the National Association of Real Estate Boards (later the National Association of Realtors, or NAR).

Though NAR began fifteen years after the demise of the NREA, its continuities and differences illuminate the influence of the latter. Its unit of organization remained the real estate board, a local institution that continued to be segregated by race and gender. ¹⁰⁴ NAR completed the shift to the midwestern leadership begun at the NREA. Chicago assumed the role of Birmingham and Nashville and the permanent staff—a feature the NREA never established—was headquartered in the Windy City. It did, however, have more members from the West than the NREA. At least three early NAR presidents were former NREA members. They included NAR’s first president, W. W. Hannan a Detroit developer who readily credited the NREA as the primary forerunner of NAR, framing it as fully a part of NAR’s origin story. ¹⁰⁵

NAR put forward a narrative of progress that would not have been out of place in NREA. According to Jeffrey Hornstein, by 1910, “The real estate men developed a vision of themselves as part of a larger cohort of men and women whose cooperative work in balancing various interests would redeem American civilization and mitigate the harsh impact of rapid industrialization and haphazard urban development.” ¹⁰⁶ Yet NAR drafted these narratives to serve a goal NREA had not prioritized: the creation of professional identity. Importantly, the move toward professionalization came from the rising cachet of large developers who were becoming prominent through their creation of segregated suburbs. This emphasis on a single, standard articulation of what it meant to be a real estate agent, or realtor, as NAR branded its members, far surpassed the NREA impetus to pool energies to create uniform legislation. That identity from the outset was connected with endorsements of discriminatory practices, from advocacy for restrictive covenants in the inaugural NAR presidential address to a code of ethics that prohibited members from harming a neighborhood by being party to racial integration. ¹⁰⁷

Conclusion

The founding of the NREA marked an important step toward the consolidation of white real estate interests during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Running sharply through the organization was the practice of interpreting U.S. history. An examination of these interpretations illuminates the intellectual origins of the real estate industry. With history, the NREA drew from certain broadly available narratives and dispensed with others to articulate a commitment to racial hierarchy along with ambiguous class and gender politics. These were inflected by profound anxieties about the relationship between property and citizenship at the end of the nineteenth century.

As an institution, the NREA proved a significant milestone for real estate practitioners to formulate these ideas as the basis for a national project, but they did not require the continuation of the NREA to remain salient. After the demise of the NREA they lived on as local practices and informal conversation. Additionally, the biographies of NREA members also point to the likelihood that realtors carried such ideas over into other domains through practicing law or entering politics, participating in civic and fraternal organizations, and becoming involved in interrelated business endeavors. When white realtors founded the NAR in 1908, they maintained a notion of historical importance to impart on their work as protectors and engineers of national progress, at both the forefront of history and the top of a racial hierarchy. NAR was the product of a different moment than the NREA, but its continuities of personnel, the incorporation of NREA into the NAR lineage, and its similarities of framing point to the formative role of the NREA for NAR’s operations.

Nevertheless, by expanding the periodization and focusing on the intellectual origins of the real estate industry, it becomes clear that NAR cannot be the starting point for a national history of realtor power. Though NAR itself can be decentered, the case of the NREA shows that real estate institutions remain key for understanding that power and the specific racial logics behind how realtors wielded it.