in California, Dundee proudly proclaimed that it had been built “one house at a time.” Prairie-style architecture featuring big porches and hipped roofs rose alongside Colonial, Georgian, Craftsman, Tudor, and Italian Renaissance-style homes. Covenants brought some uniformity to the look and feel of the community, however. The homes had twenty-five-foot setbacks to allow for tree-shaded front lawns. Garages were located at the rear of the lots. Alleys provided service access for trash collection and ice and grocery deliveries. Large municipal parks maintained a sense of nature in the neighborhood and served as community gathering places for picnics, concerts, and church revivals.72
The house that Will and Florence chose, at 5106 California, was a two-story bungalow with a portico front porch and a dormer window that commanded a view of the street.73 Only a narrow driveway separated the home from the neighbors’. It was more house and a finer neighborhood than many families could afford, but the ranks of home owners in Omaha were growing.
Streetcars, low-priced land, and an adequate supply of mortgage credit helped make Omaha a city of home owners by 1920. As a building boom increased the number of dwellings in Omaha by 70 percent between 1900 and 1920, the percentage of owner-occupied residences rose from 27.7 to 47.2.74 Only a handful of other midwestern cities had higher rates.
Home owners in Omaha depended on a variety of formal and informal sources for mortgage capital. Many people borrowed from family members or local merchants. The more affluent turned to commercial banks and mortgage brokers who loaned from their available pools of deposits or acted as agents of large eastern life insurance companies looking for investment opportunities. For the salaried and wage-earning classes, however, the greatest source of mortgage capital was the building and loan, a cooperative institution whose members pooled their savings and invested these funds in mortgages on one another's homes.
As the president of a fire insurance company, Will Ahmanson kept in close contact with the mortgage lenders in Omaha. They were an important source of business and information. Insurance risks and credit risks were often interrelated, and the more Will knew about the trustworthiness of a potential customer, the more he could measure the potential insurance risk.
Attending chamber of commerce meetings as a teenager with his father, Howard Ahmanson met many of these leaders of Omaha's financial sector. From his father he understood that Omaha's high rate of home ownership reflected a well-functioning commercial system, and he aspired to become a part of this system.
SEEKING A PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION IN BUSINESS
Howard already had a sense of himself as a business professional by 1923. He had learned from his father and from his apprenticeship in the offices of National American after school and during the summers. Graduating from Omaha's Central High School on the eve of his seventeenth birthday, he wanted to go east to Yale for college. But his father was not in good health, and Howard was uneasy about the idea of going so far away. Instead, he enrolled at the University of Nebraska to study business.75
Business administration was a relatively new academic discipline, and the University of Nebraska was quite proud of its school. As a “Bizad” major, Ahmanson joined the University Commercial Club. He flirted with journalism and worked on the Cornhusker yearbook.76 But he was already a student of entrepreneurship.
He and his friends frequented a short-order restaurant called the White Spot, where crowds of college students and town folk lined up to buy hamburgers. Ahmanson admired the owner's success, especially after he opened six or seven additional White Spot restaurants around town. But Ahmanson also noticed that shortly after the owner added steaks, lobster, and other fancy dishes to the menu, he went broke. “Had he stuck with his original idea of making the best hamburger in town,” Ahmanson would later point out, “he'd probably have been quite successful.”77
A PROGRESSIVE BUSINESS CULTURE
Howard began his college career during a critical transition in the history of business-government relations in the United States. Through the end of the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth, myriad industries in the American economy became increasingly concentrated as entrepreneurs took advantage of the growing national transportation system to increase the scope and scale of manufacturing and to ship products throughout the country.78 This economic integration fed the growth of cities, as factories swelled with workers fresh off the farm or the boat from Europe. A loose coalition of social reformers and business leaders known as Progressives sought to rationalize government's management of the infrastructure of society and the economy.79 In cities like Omaha, Progressives campaigned to end machine politics and put decision making in the hands of nonpartisan “experts” and committees. At the national level, a series of Republican administrations focused on cooperation with big business rather than regulation.
Among the leaders of this Republican movement, none was more important than the Iowa-born Herbert Hoover. A mining engineer and successful businessman by World War I, he earned worldwide respect and admiration when he oversaw an international effort to provide food to Belgium's starving people during World War I. Appointed U.S. secretary of commerce in 1921, he made his philosophy clear: “The Department of Commerce should be in the widest sense a department of service to the commerce and industry of the country. It is not a department for the regulation of trade and industry. In order to do service to great advantage, I wish to establish a wider and better organized co-operation with the trades and commercial associations.”80
Hoover transformed his agency in an effort to establish a new model for the ways in which government could support private efforts to strengthen the economy and society.81 He created bureaus to deal with new industries, including aeronautics and radio. He restructured the Bureau of the Census to aid business by publishing more data. He expanded the government's role as convener and coordinator, urging business leaders to join trade associations to address public policy issues in a coordinated manner. “We are passing from a period of extreme individualistic action,” he said in 1924, “into a period of associational activities.”82 Hoover envisioned a system in which public policy would be made by experts, technicians, and professionals deeply immersed in their subjects, who would collaborate voluntarily for the greater good of society, leaving traditional patronage politics to the history books. Under this framework, the federal government would become more “elaborate and permissive,” serving as “a clearinghouse for business compromise” and widening the dialogue among communities of interest.83
As a business student at the state university in 1925, Howard was exposed to the ideology of Hoover-style Progressivism. He read Warren G. Harding's Our Common Country: Mutual Good Will in America, noting the late president's call for a better understanding between business and government. Ranked in the top ten in his class, Ahmanson seemed destined to become one of Hoover's professional managers, but the greatest loss of his life would lead to an entirely different future.84
A PERSONAL CRISIS
Will Ahmanson suffered from goiter, an enlargement of the thyroid. In many patients, the condition created a swelling in the throat that made it hard to talk or swallow. Sometimes it was associated with an increased heart rate or an irregular heartbeat and muscle weakness. Researchers suspected that goiter resulted from an iodine deficiency. In the 1920s, however, popular culture blamed a variety of factors ranging from the stresses of modern life to jazz music.85 In regions far from the ocean like the Great Lakes, the Missouri River valley, and the upper Midwest, the malady was so common that these areas were called “goiter belts.”
Will's health had already affected the lives of both of his children. Hayden had proposed to Aimee on the eve of his graduation from law school. They had planned to marry in the spring of 1924, but Will was so often bedridden that they postponed the ceremony. Instead of launching
