How boosterism built America

A version of this article originally appeared in Quartz’s Obsession newsletter. Sign up here to share our Obsessions in your inbox.

First comes the story, then comes… who knows!

Greenland is green. Duluth is the center of the world. The future is just one economic development deal away, while the brochures practically print themselves.

This kind of aggressive marketing has a name: boosterism. And as Erik the Red’s Greenland example suggests, it’s a centuries-old practice that works by overselling a place before the promise is, strictly speaking, true. If you hype it, they will come. That’s the hope, anyway.

Boosters don’t describe real things so much as what they hope will become real things, often presenting growth as inevitable and betting on optimism as a viable economic strategy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, boosterism has played a major role in American history, and is carefully studied by actual historians — even as it makes them uncomfortable. The harsh truth is, boosterism sometimes works. It helped sell Americans on railroads; Chicago, as the “White City”; and it moved more than a few acres of Florida swampland, too.

Which brings us to the hidden costs. Boosterism tends to minimize risk, bulldoze public consent, and obscure who bears the downside or gets displaced. That’s why it’s newly relevant today, as AI barons search out their next “inevitable” hub. For more on that, scroll down below — I swear I’m not overselling it.

By the digits

2: The number of buildings constructed for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair that are still standing today, if you count a ticket booth as a building. The fair is considered an example of boosterism on a vast scale — and a successful example to boot, helping establish Chicago as a major city even if most of the Fair structures are long gone.

27 million: The Number of people who visited the Chicago World’s Fair during its six-month run, representing about half the population of the U.S. at that time.

300: Lots in Tampa Bay that booster D.P. Davis sold in a single three-hour period in 1924, during the height of the Florida “land” boom. All 300 lots were literally underwater, as in beneath Tampa Bay.

Hundreds of thousands: Promotional brochures distributed annually by the LA Chamber of Commerce in the 1920s.

1.1 million: Increase in the population of LA between 1900 (about 100,000) and 1930 (1.2 million), following the distribution of all those brochures.

Same hype, different day

The boosterism playbook hasn't changed much since the 1920s Florida “land” boom saw your grandad grabbing up his own cozy little piece of Tampa Bay. What’s changed is the product.

The boosters of our own era aren’t talking up the Everglades or even Cheyenne, Wyoming. They’re selling new emerging markets, crypto utopias, and of course, the vast AI buildout. They promise automation will create more jobs than it destroys and that data centers and their ilk will revitalize struggling regions. The language may be new — more “disruption,” less “manifest destiny” — but the underlying logic is identical. Believe hard enough, move fast enough, and reality will surely catch up to the pitch.

Consider all the cities that have, in recent decades, competed to become the next Silicon Valley, with officials offering tax breaks, infrastructure upgrades, and regulatory “flexibility” to lure marquee tech names. Sometimes it works: Austin, for instance, has genuinely boomed. But just as often the jobs go to transplants, housing costs skyrocket, and locals get priced out of the prosperity they were promised.

Even more recently, dozens of data centers have popped up across the U.S. AI boosters insist we’re on the verge of solving climate change, curing disease (maybe even death), and unlocking limitless productivity — if only we prevent all regulation and trust that the benefits will most definitely trickle down. Skeptics who point out grid problems, job losses, or the increasing concentration of power and capital get dismissed as Luddites standing in the way of economic development.

Thus the booster hype machine runs on — downplaying risks, hyping possible rewards, and insisting that this time it’s different.

Quotable

“In America today we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than in any other land at any other time. The poorhouse has vanished from among us.”

—Herbert Hoover in his 1928 presidential acceptance speech, which some historians see as an example of boosterism on a national scale. Incidentally, Hoover gave this speech just months before the 1929 stock market crash, and the Great Depression that followed it.

Brief History

1787-1790: The Scioto land scheme markets Ohio as America’s inevitable future, selling lots to European buyers, even though boosters don’t yet own the land. Settlers arrive to find that promises don’t reflect reality or even actual legal claims, in what’s often taken to be a key early example of boosterism in the nascent U.S.

1862: The Homestead Act advances westward settlement by granting vast amounts of land to white settlers, much of it taken from Indigenous people either through coercion or broken treaties. Booster rhetoric promises opportunity, and the promise comes true, for some. To this day, a portion of the comparative wealth of white households can be traced to the Act.

1922: Sinclair Lewis satirizes boosterism in his landmark novel Babbitt. Eight years later, Lewis wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.

2017-2018: Hundreds of American cities compete to win Amazon $AMZN’s second corporate headquarters, offering tax breaks, workforce development, you name it. Arlington, Virginia wins out.

January, 2026: Officials in modern-day Scioto County, Ohio, publicly confirm that Google $GOOGL is the company behind a proposed $1 billion, 500,000-square-foot data center project. The announcement comes after county commissioners approved “a giant tax abatement.”

Fun fact

In the late 1800s, town boosters sometimes paid newspapers hundreds of miles away to run glowing “articles” about places the reporters had never visited. These pieces spoke of sunny, health-giving climates, endless economic opportunity, and booming populations — even if the towns being advertised barely existed. In a few cases, settlers arrived to find little more than a train depot.

Watch this

Boosterism finds its way into a now-classic musical, with striking newsboy Christian Bale singing about dreams of a better life, inspired by a Santa Fe brochure, circa 1899.