Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960

By Richard Harris

A unique study of how the American Dream came to be—and came to be constantly updated and renovated: ”A pleasure to read.”—American Historical Review

Each year, North Americans spend as much money fixing up their homes as they do buying new ones. This obsession with improving our dwellings has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry that includes countless books, magazines, cable shows, and home improvement stores.
 
Building a Market charts the rise of the home improvement industry in the United States and Canada from the end of World War I into the late 1950s. Drawing on the insights of business, social, and urban historians, and making use of a wide range of documentary sources, Richard Harris shows how the middle-class preference for home ownership first emerged in the 1920s—and how manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government combined to establish the massive home improvement market and a pervasive culture of Do-It-Yourself.
 
Deeply insightful, Building a Market is the carefully crafted history of the emergence and evolution of a home improvement revolution that changed not just American culture but the American landscape as well.
“An important topic that deserves to be widely read by scholars of business history, urban history, and social history.”—Journal of American History

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226317687

Richard Harris

Richard Harris, ICC's former board chair is an investment manager, business TV commentator, expert witness, radio presenter and columnist that has supported David's work from its earliest days.

Book preview

Richard Harris is professor in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences at McMaster University in Canada. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a 2005 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The publication of this book was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12     1  2  3  4  5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31766-3 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-31766-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31768-7 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harris, Richard, 1952–

Building a market : the rise of the home improvement industry, 1914–1960 / Richard Harris.

pages ; cm. — (Historical studies of urban America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31766-3 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-31766-8 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Construction industry—United States—History—20th century. 2. Building materials industry—United States—History—20th century. 3. Dwellings—Remodeling—United States—History—20th century. 4. Dwellings—United States—Maintenance and repair—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Historical studies of urban America.

HD9715.U62H37 2012

338.4′769024—dc23

2012005110

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Building a Market

The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960

RICHARD HARRIS

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

HISTORICAL STUDIES OF URBAN AMERICA

Edited by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, James R. Grossman, and Becky M. Nicolaides

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CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Preface

ONE / Introduction

PART I: ORIGINS

TWO / The Foundation of Home Ownership

THREE / An Industry Unready to Improve

FOUR / The Realm of the Retailer

FIVE / The Birth of the Home Improvement Store

PART II: CRISIS, 1927–1945

SIX / A Perfect Storm for the Building Industry

SEVEN / Manufacturers Save the Retailer

EIGHT / The State Makes Credit

PART III: RESOLUTION, 1945–1960

NINE / Mr. and Mrs. Builder

TEN / Help for the Amateur

ELEVEN / The Improvement Business Coalesces

TWELVE / A Zelig of the American Cultural Economy

Notes

Index

ABBREVIATIONS

PREFACE

There is an incessant give and take between historical and theoretical analysis . . . though for the investigation of individual questions it may be necessary to sail for a time on one tack only.

—Joseph Schumpeter, 1951

Any fool can write a book but it takes a man to dovetail a door.

—Charles Lummis

Charles Lummis may be right: having botched a couple of dovetailing jobs, I’d have to say for me the writing comes easier. But I can report that, in at least one respect, the two types of tasks call for the same method: improvisation. A literal observer, observing the course of my research over the past two decades, might describe it as one thing just led to the next. Certainly, the process did not unfold to an original plan, in the manner that grant agency committees prefer. In my defense, and with the benefit of hindsight, I could claim to have followed the example of Michel Foucault and many lesser lights among known historical scholars: I tracked the genealogy of a social practice, home improvement, that we now take for granted. This entailed plodding, step-by-step, back to a time when things were different from the way they are now. True enough. But both accounts would be generous. Originally, I planned a book about the boom in owner-building that occurred across North America in the decade after 1945. I still believe that this is an interesting and overlooked subject but, early on, I learned that it was part of a broader, longer-term, and more continuously significant trend: the rise of home improvement. It was only when the unraveling and explanation of this trend became my goal that I fumblingly adopted a strategy as logical as that of allowing one clue to lead to the next. It was not just the method that I improvised, then, but the purpose. Just so, faced with a broken door, the home improver may conclude that the best solution is to remove a wall.

As the purpose changed, the scope grew. My original interest had been in the men and women who jointly made decisions about whether and how to build, and in the nature of their needs and aspirations. To the extent that decisions about improvement must always be made by the home owner, this focus has remained. But household decisions have always depended on the availability of the goods and services that are usually provided by local building suppliers and lenders. As I tracked back in time, it became clear that this business environment changed steadily in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, in part through the actions of manufacturers and federal agencies. To make sense of these changes, and for long stretches of time, I followed clues wherever I could find them: in the homes and personal records of amateur builders; in newspapers, consumer magazines, and business trade journals; and then in the records of government agencies, manufacturers, and retailers of building supplies. When the diverse economic and political, as well as cultural, dimensions of the history began to emerge, it became necessary to situate home improvement in wider terms, as part of changing gender norms; the rise of affluence, consumerism, and consumer credit; the evolution of retailing and marketing; and the state’s growing role in structuring modern markets. And so, as the scope of the project widened, I had to acquire new conceptual tools and skills, often on the fly. And so, as Schumpeter says, I found it useful to shift back and forth between a mountain of material and some new (to me) theoretical ideas. But in the end I tried to tell a story, in part because I like stories and in part because I became convinced that there is an interesting story to be told.

One aspect of this study has remained constant, probably because I cannot help it. As a Canadian, I am constantly struck by the many similarities, and intriguing differences, between consumer and housing markets here and in the United States. The most obvious difference is the lower salience of race in Canada; another is the persistence of different practices with respect to debt. But if my inclination to compare has personal roots, it has a broader payoff. It is arguably impossible to make any judgment without implying some point of comparison. By making this object more explicit, it becomes easier to define differences, as well as to identify causes. Using occasional references to the experiences of Canada and Australia, I have tried to clarify the nature of the American story of home improvement while also suggesting its wider significance.

None of this would have been possible without the financial support of a series of agencies. It was a Fulbright Fellowship that first took me to the University of Maryland and the Library of Congress, where I discovered the materials that planted seeds for the project. Later, a Visiting Fellowship at the Australian National University, and research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Hagley Museum and Library, made it possible to build a comparative frame a reference. Eventually, it was a Guggenheim Fellowship that gave me the time to pull everything together, while a publication subvention from the Graham Foundation has supported what turned out to be quite a long manuscript. To the donors and taxpayers who have supported these agencies—wittingly or unwittingly—I give thanks.

Also anonymous are the readers, both of the book manuscript and of the articles, previously published and listed elsewhere, that describe some of the territory covered here. The editors of two journals, Philip Scranton and Walter Friedman, not only passed on comments but added thoughtful observations of their own. Valuable feedback was also provided by participants at meetings of the Urban History Association, the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, and the American Historical Association; by audiences at seminars at the Universities of Birmingham, Harvard (Joint Center for Housing Studies), Leicester (Centre for Urban Studies), Maryland, Toronto, and University College London, as well as the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, and the Australian National University; and by members of the H-Urban list, who have provided a community of kindred spirits for two decades. Special thanks are due to Wendy Plotkin, for so long the moving force behind H-Urban; to Pat Troy, Tony Dingle, and Alastair Greig, for being such excellent hosts Down Under; and to Alex von Hoffman and Kermit Baker, for giving me the opportunity to participate in a real-life industry meeting. Others, who can and should be named, have provided important feedback at various stages of the research, and on the manuscript. These include Reggie Blaszczyk, Greg Brooks, Michael Buzzelli, Lizabeth Cohen, John Dargavel, Richard Dennis, David Freund, Ryan George, Aman Gill, Graham Holland, Mike Mercier, Gail Radford, Mark Rose, Mary Sies, Mark Swenarton, Carol Town, Alex von Hoffman, and Carolyn Whitzman. Special thanks are due to Robert Lewis—friend, colleague, sounding board, and now partner in crime. Aman Gill, Sarah Hardy, Matt Kerns, and Tricia Shulist were able assistants.

At my university especially, librarians are an endangered species. I would like to make a point of acknowledging the able and indispensable assistance I have received from archivists and librarians at the U.S. National Archives, the Library and Archives of Canada, the National Library of Australia, the CSIRO Library (Canberra), the Archives of Ontario, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University, the Hagley Museum and Library, the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History at Duke University, Peoria Public Library, and the Library of Congress. Many, perhaps, were just doing their job, but this meant doing it well, and I would like to thank four people for being especially supportive: Susan Decker at Edward Hines Lumber, Kathryn Hodson at the University of Iowa Libraries, Aloha South at the U.S. National Archives, and above all Cathy Moulder at McMaster, who made her map library a home. Staff at the Veterans Land Administration in Charlottetown, the Peoria Journal-Transcript, and the Hamilton Spectator, and Paul Wahlfeld of Wahlfeld Lumber, Peoria, helped however they could. I would very much like to thank those owner-builders in Peoria, Illinois, Canberra, and Hamilton, Ontario—and not just those whose experiences are mentioned here—for their hospitality and enthusiasm in letting me into their worlds. And above all I thank Carol, Alex, and Peter, who have lived with this project for as long as I have.

ONE

Introduction

Contrary to popular belief, houses don’t stand still. They either march forward or they slip back.

—Julius Gregory, House and Garden, 1934

Today, home improvement is ubiquitous, but its history remains inscrutable. If you own your home, you may relish the challenges of fixing that leaky faucet, redecorating the living room, or subdividing the basement to accommodate a home office. Alternatively, if you are like me, you may view these jobs as chores, best evaded with that all-purpose tool, the telephone. Either way, you cannot long escape the need for repairs and maintenance, or easily resist the temptation of making alterations and additions. On that premise a whole industry depends: eager lenders; the manufacturers of tools, appliances, and materials; a retail sector that includes the second-largest big-box chain in the United States; and a range of media—including consumer magazines, TV shows, and now websites and blogs—that instruct, entertain, and feed our desires. How could it be otherwise? And yet, not so long ago, it was. Our collective commitment to home improvement dates back decades, not centuries. So does the industry that sustains that commitment. In fact, it is possible to be very precise. It was in 1952 that do-it-yourself (DIY) emerged as a distinctive market, and by 1954 it was a recognized fad. Within two years, there was an identifiable home improvement industry to service not only amateurs but those who preferred to use the yellow pages.¹ How did this suddenly happen? Oddly, nobody has thought to ask.

It turns out that the rise of the home improvement industry didn’t happen overnight. It took decades, and involved a wide range of cultural and economic forces. Indeed, I argue that this story is in many ways that of America in the twentieth century. It involves rising affluence and growing consumer debt, together with the emergence of home ownership as the American (not to mention the Canadian and the Australian) middle-class dream. It couples the partial domestication of men with an equally incomplete emancipation of women. Decade by decade, it was shaped by major events: Progressive-era trust-busting in the 1900s; the rise of the automobile in the prosperous 1920s; the crisis of the Depression, leading to the rise of New Deal intervention in the markets for housing and credit; and World War II, with its aftermath of housing shortages and can-do optimism. War and peace, boom and bust, class and gender, dreams and realities, state and society, culture and economy—all figure prominently in the story.

One of the reasons that the story is so complex is that it blurs some of basic social categories that we like to take for granted but which turn out to be overly neat. These include the distinctions we make between production and consumption, and the roles still deemed to be appropriate, separately, for men and women. Home improvement has some obviously productive aspects, but it is the property-owning consumer who gets the ball rolling, who shops for materials, and who often tackles the job himself. In fact, as far as we can tell, do-it-yourself has accounted for roughly half of all the improvement work done by home owners in the postwar decades. The producer and consumer, then, are often one and the same, with neither being very effectively counted in economic statistics.² More importantly, this combination presents a conundrum to building suppliers and lenders. To whom, and how, should they market their goods and services? Meanwhile, contractors must insert themselves into the mix as best they can.

Confusing the picture further, home improvement sits uneasily at an intersection of gender roles. The building industry has long been a male preserve, and when home owners take over their tasks it still seems natural to speak of the home handyman. But to this day, it is women who care most about the home and who do most of the shopping. Today, when families do work on their home, it is not always clear who will take on the tasks. The same was true when amateur repairs and alterations were first becoming common. Would men do everything? Would women invade the lumberyard, shopping for the ideas, materials, and tools that their husbands would use? Would they tackle improvement jobs themselves, as extensions of housework? The answers were uncertain and varied, but they mattered, not only for family life but for retailers and manufacturers. Already discombobulated by the rise of the amateur, companies had to think about marketing to women, who had particular expectations about product design, showroom cleanliness, and staff demeanor. Lying at the shifting intersection of culture and economy, then, the rise of the home improvement industry makes for a richly intriguing story.

Improvement’s Appeal

Its hybrid ambivalence is part of improvement’s intellectual appeal. Take the average renovation project—a remodeled kitchen, a refinished attic, or a redecorated living room. Typically, it brings together tradesmen and amateurs, working sequentially or side-by-side in a way that in other contexts is rare. It may see women tackling tasks that even today are considered nontraditional. A basic challenge in constructing the history of the home improvement industry is that of figuring out who—men and women, amateurs and professionals—did what; how the division of labor was negotiated; when and why it changed. The shifting balance mattered for those involved, and also for their supplier, the retailer of tools, matériel, advice and, commonly, credit. To this day, men and women shop differently: the handywoman, accustomed to stores with a more feminine counter culture,’ is inclined to browse, ask dumb" questions, reflect, and, only then, buy; her mate, diffident about shopping and perhaps no less ignorant of construction, is keener to barrel ahead. And amateurs have different needs than the professional, almost invariably male, who is indifferent to well-lit displays, who knows what he wants, and mostly wants to cut a deal. Worse, from the retailer’s point of view, some types of customers are less familiar than others, though this does depend on where you are. In a small town, the building retailer might know most of his customers, but in a city or suburban store the consumer is anonymous. How can retailers satisfy such diverse customers, and especially those pesky women? This vexing and multifaceted conundrum, vital to the retailer, is no less central to any understanding of the home improvement market.³

The conundrum of satisfying diverse customers is not the retailer’s alone: he—almost all building supply retailers have been men—is the indispensable middleman in a two-way exchange of views that is typically managed by the producer.⁴ In one direction this exchange involves advertising and salesmanship directed at the consumer; in the other, it involves discovering which products are selling and which are not, the unavoidable knowledge about consumer preferences that companies may supplement with longer-range market research. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, this guided exchange of information came to be thought of as the domain and purpose of marketing. Instead of the huckster’s efforts to get the consumer to buy what you have, the marketer aims to have what the consumer wants; the product became a consequence of marketing, not vice versa. It puts the retailer in the middle of a two-way relationship between producer and consumer.⁵ This relationship is rarely more complicated than in the home improvement industry. Any sensible manufacturer markets to particular buyers, and even in a well-defined consumer market such as apparel this is rarely a straightforward task. With a new product, or in a changeable market, there is the challenge of predicting and imagining exactly what the consumer might want.⁶ There are questions about the best ways to sell: whether, and how, to brand your product; how much, and where, to advertise; and which retailers to enlist, how best to use them, and so forth. A whole other set of marketing strategies are needed when manufacturers sell to other producers: advertising may need to focus on trade journals while the more limited number of well-informed buyers may be handled personally by agents and specialized dealerships.⁷ Unusually, manufacturers as well as retailers in the home improvement field have to think about both types of buyer, the amateur and the professional, and so must mix and vary their marketing methods to an exceptional degree.

The messy complexity of home improvement is intriguing, and also significant. Some scholars have suggested that research on marketing is an important way to understand the interplay of production and consumption, which describes and arguably guides the trajectory of modern consumer society.⁸ They have pointed out that this interplay happens in different ways. It depends on the scale and nature of the production system employed by the manufacturer, ranging from speculative mass production to the fashioning of batch or customized products; it depends just as much on the character and needs of the buyer, whether an anonymous consumer or a personal customer and client.⁹ Over the past century, writers and the media have given a great deal of attention to the mass producer—Ford in the automobile industry, McDonald’s in fast food, and, on a smaller but still impressive scale, the Levitt brothers in house building—and to their relationship with the mass consumer. But many industries contain companies and consumers who relate in other ways, and in this regard no industry contains more significant complexity than residential construction and its partner, home improvement. As its suppliers, building manufacturers and retailers struggle to make sense of a level of complexity than can become bewildering and inscrutable in periods of rapid change. The task of making sense of that fluid complexity, and of the struggles of its major players, is a significant challenge. The story of how home improvement became a business offers us an intriguing window on more than half a century of economic and cultural change, a point to which I return in the concluding chapter.

Contexts and Connections

Consumers and the mass media pay plenty of attention to home improvement, but, at least in their professional capacity, historians and other scholars have ignored it, and to an absurd degree. Reported figures are inadequate, because it is difficult to give proper weight to do-it-yourself activity or to track the informal, under-the-table arrangements that loom large in the commercial segment of the field, but it appears that about as much money is spent on the repair, maintenance, modernization, remodeling, and rehabilitation of existing dwellings as on the construction of new. Indeed, survey data suggest that, in every quarter of the year, something beyond mere repairs is done to about a third of all dwellings, more in higher-income households.¹⁰ Industry insiders know about this. Currently, they track and discuss short-term fluctuations at semiannual meetings organized by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. But neither the national media nor historical scholars pay much attention. Following the onset of the financial recession in 2008, media reported monthly data on sales, prices, mortgages, and housing starts, as experts looked for signs of a bottoming out or market upturn. Evidence on improvements has received little attention. Such neglect is typical. When popular interest in historic preservation and rehabilitation began to gather momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, it passed under the media’s radar. As Stewart Brand puts it, we don’t seem to be very interested in how buildings learn.¹¹

Researchers and historical scholars have paid little attention to the way dwellings are changed once they have been put in place. Economists rarely consider improvements when they model housing demand, while social scientists and historians have neglected what families do to, as opposed to within, their homes.¹² We have been told how women, especially, have carried the burden of housework, and how in working-class families they often brought paid work into the home. But how much work did different classes of people do on their own homes, and how have men and women divided up the tasks? We have no idea. Historians of technology have properly emphasized the importance of considering the mundane as well as the spectacular, and the everyday actor-networks within which innovations occur and spread. In particular, Ruth Cowan has suggested that a consumer’s-eye view offers valuable insights into the way technologies diffuse. In that spirit, several writers have told us interesting things about the evolution and significance of technologies that have made housework easier and lighter. But they have ignored the methods of building and rebuilding, although these have usually required technologies simple enough for any amateur to use. Cowan’s own history of American technology, for example, ignores the subject.¹³

Historians of consumption have followed suit. Of course, they have written about the various goods, from clothing to furniture and appliances, that are purchased and then stored in houses, and about the individual and collective significance of these possessions. Grant McCracken has commented, a little ingeniously, that when our culture is insinuated into our physical landscape, our housing, and its furnishing, the premises of our existence are also the premises of our existence. But few have considered the significance of houses as consumer items: about the significance for the buyer of architectural style, for example, or of different building materials.¹⁴ Then, too, it has become normal to speak of the ways in which purchasers even of mass-production goods use them to find, create, and change their meaning, thereby communicating and sharing identity. As Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood argued, influentially, the essential function of consumption is its capacity to make sense. This line of argument has been fruitfully explored by historians. In an early and influential example, Lizabeth Cohen showed how immigrants and workers in Chicago put their own stamp on standard goods. The implication is that consumers are active not only as buyers but also as users. Speaking generally, as John Fiske puts it, every act of consumption is an act of cultural production, for consumption is always the production of meaning.¹⁵ Maybe so. But for all the talk about the cultural work that consumers do, not much has been said about the physical labor they perform on what is after all the most expensive purchase of all. Occasionally, there are surprising denials. For example, in her subtle and otherwise well-informed survey of the field of consumer history, Susan Strasser comments that do-it-yourself is just a hobby because literally consumers, we do not sew clothes or build houses. More typically, there is silence. Major recent surveys of consumer culture ignore the making and meaning of the dwelling.¹⁶ Historians of consumption have followed their cue and ignored the subject.

Students of American business have done no better. Those guided by Alfred Chandler have concentrated on corporations that experienced a managerial revolution, but not including manufacturers of building supplies such as American Radiator, United States Gypsum, or Johns-Manville. Less surprisingly, they have passed over the building trade, with its myriad producers, back-of-the-envelope calculations, muddled and malleable subcontracting, and general air of disorder. These are characteristics doubly true of the renovation business. Indeed, convinced of the merits of bureaucratically organized large-scale production, generations of observers have happily damned the building industry for its inefficiency.¹⁷ Since this was an economic arena where branding, advertising, and market research were slow to gain a foothold, marketing texts and histories have not noticed it. Paul Cherington’s The Consumer Looks at Advertising (1928) is typical. Cherington was research director at J. Walter Thompson, the country’s leading advertising agency. In The Consumer, he surveyed how advertising had improved many industries and how it might be applied to others. Housing did not get a mention.¹⁸ More surprisingly, building has been ignored by those who have written about the other side of industrialization, including industries that involved subcontracting networks that served niche markets, or single clients.¹⁹ The neglect of local building suppliers is especially unfortunate. It has been argued that the history of retailing in general, with the exception of department stores, is a poor cousin.²⁰ Main street retailers are mentioned in surveys of small business, but have been accorded little significance even by those who recognize the importance of marketing.²¹ And nobody noticed the hardware store or the lumber dealer. The latter, especially, was a curiosity: a retailer who could not be found on main street; who sold to producers and almost entirely to men; who made deliveries after other businesses had given up on the practice; and among whom chain forms of organization had begun in the late 1800s, later going into decline at just the moment when this type of business began to gain momentum for other lines (figure 1).²² Much more than hardware stores, lumber dealers mattered, and they figure prominently in the present story: they were by far the main source of materials, advice, and credit to the small builder and the amateur alike. In 1918, however, they were embedded firmly in the lumber trade, and in order to play a major role in the consumer market for home improvement they would have to disentangle their loyalties and linkages. For that reason, the first part of this book pays close attention to the lumber trade, and the retailer’s slow process of disentanglement.

Most curiously of all, home improvement has been ignored by historians of housing and urban development. The improvement of dwellings rarely has a dramatic impact on the urban scene. Modernization jobs and renovations are often carried out unobtrusively so as not to attract attention from the property assessor doing a windshield survey; owners may forget to take out building permits for the same reason.²³ Even a major rear extension that changes the dwelling’s footprint may be invisible from the street. But neighbors know, and pedestrians can see which houses and neighborhoods are well-maintained. Yards alone offer clues. Neighboring property owners respond, emulating improvement or choosing neglect: a survey in the 1970s suggested that neighborhood quality was one of the three factors that property owners took into account when deciding whether to improve.²⁴ The collective consequences for neighborhood change is clear enough. But in the studies of residential change in the first half of the twentieth century, home improvement barely figures as a footnote.²⁵ The same is true in the fields of housing, and housing policy. Given its economic significance, repairs and renovations should account for about half of what historians have had to say about housing. The actual proportion cannot be expressed without use of a decimal point. Marc Weiss’s survey of the real estate field, dated but exhaustive, makes no mention of it. Before and since, there have been book-length historical accounts of house building but only one that pays attention to improvement—Barbara Kelly’s report on how the first occupants of a postwar Levitt-built suburb adapted their homes.²⁶ Not even speculation has been offered as to its long-term evolution. Even stranger, claims have often been made about the bias of federal housing policy since the 1930s in favor of new suburbs, and to the disadvantage of older city neighborhoods.²⁷ This overlooks the fact that substantial support was offered to home improvement from 1934 onwards, and that seven years later a careful study found that the FHA actually favored new homes built in cities over their suburban counterparts. It also ignores the fact that contemporaries believed that the 1954 Housing Act marked a historic turn in that direction.²⁸ In the end it did not, but there is room for a real debate about the suburban bias of federal policy in this period, a debate that has not yet properly begun.

1. The local building retailer. The rise of home improvement depended upon local retailers, especially lumber dealers. Among retailers, the latter were unusual in selling to producers (builders), as well as to consumers. Source: Here’s a Better Way to Build (Washington, D.C.: National Retail Lumber Dealers Association, 1947).

Only two writers have had something general to say about the history of improvement. Both have focused on the do-it-yourself half of the picture.²⁹ Steven Gelber has considered DIY in relation to the history of crafts, hobbies, and masculinity. Complementing this, in the catalog for an exhibition at the National Building Museum, Carolyn Goldstein has shown how DIY depended on the development of new technologies. Both offer interesting and perceptive accounts. But neither connects do-it-yourself to the larger project of home improvement, and hence to the urban housing market. And so they are mostly silent about lumber dealers, finance, federal loan insurance, and the cyclical pressures on the housing stock that accompanied shifts in the wider economy.

Similar to urban and housing historians, Gelber and Goldstein both overlook the sea change in the attitudes of the middle class towards home ownership that occurred in the 1920s. It is hard to overstate the importance of this development. Previously, workers and immigrants had tried very hard to acquire property, but white-collar workers and professionals were largely indifferent to home ownership. By the late 1920s, for the first time, it was possible to speak with qualification of home ownership as a social norm, the American dream.³⁰ This mattered because home owners are more interested in home improvement than landlords (or tenants), and much more likely to consider doing the work with their own hands.³¹ And like just almost everyone, Gelber and Goldstein neglect the radical form that DIY sometimes took: owner-building.³² In rural areas and small towns, many homes had always been erected by owners for their own use. Periodically, the same was true in larger urban centers, with a mini-boom in the late 1930s and a much larger surge after 1945. The changes in gender roles and building technology that Goldstein and Gelber speak about did matter. But so did the wider practice of amateur building, the emergence of federal policy in this field, the changing business strategy of lumber dealers, new marketing efforts by manufacturers, and the irregular cycles of boom and bust.

Weighing and interweaving each of these elements, this book’s story of the home improvement industry aims to contribute to five areas of historical inquiry. For the history of technology, it draws attention to a major field of practical, everyday activity. This saw continuous rather than dramatic technological change, and a constant renegotiation of the line between professional and amateur. For consumer history, it illuminates a major category of shopping and expenditure, one that required buyers to construct meaning, in a very concrete way. For business history, it underlines how significant the building industry has always been, showing how important retailers were for the marketing strategies of manufacturers, while reassessing the role of the New Deal state in that connection. For the history of housing and urban development, it clarifies just how much remains unresolved once a dwelling has been built. Subsequent decisions about whether and how to repair or rebuild have all sorts of implications for home, neighborhood, and urban change. They also have implications for families: for their ability to make do or to improve their standard of living, and for the way in which men and women negotiate their changing family roles. And so, the story of home improvement extends our understanding of the history of the modern family, showing that there was a whole arena of domestic life where gender roles were changing steadily from the 1920s onwards.

Part of the messiness of home improvement, then, is that it connects with so many intellectual concerns. To make order out of this confusion we need to consider what conceptual tools are available to characterize and explain the emergence of markets in general, and the home improvement market in particular.

Tools

To understand the rise of the home improvement industry, the concept of the market is essential. The social practices that gelled in the mid-1950s, even those that involved amateurs, depended upon trade: there were buyers and sellers. Since most materials and tools were distributed through local retailers, these were key agents, along with manufacturers and consumers. There were also adjunct markets for credit and building services, that is, construction labor and project management. They were adjunct because not always required: many consumers paid cash and chose to do their own work. Then again, most retailers offered buyers some form of flexible credit, so that specialized lenders came into play only for the larger projects. The following account, then, pays continuous attention to consumers, retailers, and manufacturers, and considers lenders and contractors when appropriate. But there was another player: the state. The question is never whether the state is, or should be, involved in a market, but rather how: markets cannot exist without the enforcement of contracts, while governments routinely do other things too.³³ Fiscal policy commonly affects some commodities differently than others. In the United States, until the 1930s, more than two-fifths of the total revenues of all levels of government came from the property tax, which discouraged expenditure on housing. After passage of the Sherman Act (1890), governments also regulated competition. House building and improvement were never a direct target, but they were affected by prosecutions of the so-called Lumber Trust. And in the 1930s, the introduction of federal loan insurance shaped the markets for mortgages, and then consumer loans.³⁴ Clearly, this story must consider the ever-present, and occasionally game-changing, federal state.

If markets are political, they are also fundamentally social. Lately, scholars have argued that markets involve the transaction of meanings and cultural practices as well as property rights in goods and services.³⁵ The recent financial crisis has shown, in particular, that they depend on trust. Kenneth Lipartito has observed that business history should consider how the ideas and strategies expressed by firms find their ways into the minds of consuming agents, and thereby create the environment of ‘demand’ that supposedly disciplines economic activity.³⁶ This is the company’s equivalent of a nation’s soft power. The argument may be reversed: historians of consumption should consider how consumer preferences make their way into the mind of the CEO and the salesman, shaping the marketing strategy that guides production. The interplay of supply and demand, then, is cultural as well as economic. It is not just the quickening of commerce that defines a home improvement market, but a shared understanding that such trade has a distinctive meaning, and that all agents should orient their thinking and actions accordingly. Men might think of themselves as handymen; retailers might offer services to them as such, while manufacturers market accordingly. The process is public, and in the twentieth century the mass media always played a role. They helped habituate agents to one another, guiding them to perform in predictable ways that helped define the market as a social and cultural, as well as an economic, field of action.³⁷

Markets are anonymous and personal at the same time. The anonymous aspect is obvious in a mobile urban society where goods are mass-produced, branded, widely advertised, and distributed nationally. It has come to be seen as the market’s defining quality. Speaking about consumption in Europe and North America in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Victoria de Grazia has referred to American notions about the essential facelessness of markets. James Carrier has discussed the implications for the retailer: dependence on an impersonal passing trade that expects branded goods at fixed prices and for whom the provision of store credit is problematic. These aspects of markets were an important and growing aspect of urban life. Susan Strasser has spoken of the increasingly anonymous character of the consumer from the late nineteenth century, in contrast to the familiar customer. This happened as stores grew larger, while advertising and media became more important. But although it was growing, anonymity was not a defining quality of markets. It was most apparent in the larger downtown stores in the largest metropolitan areas, the sorts of enterprises and places that have attracted the most attention from social, business, and urban historians. It was least apparent in smaller cities and towns, and for specialized retailers such as the building supplier whose staff often knew the customer. Any home improver, and especially amateurs, needs frequent advice and services that call for personal attention. Various attempts were made to challenge local ties, notably by the manufacturers of kit houses after 1905. These affected local retailers, but did not become the norm. Indeed, the eventual emergence of a home improvement market after 1945 was preceded by a resurgence in personalized services. The anonymity of the market is a question, not a given.³⁸

What changes a market, or indeed creates it? Obvious possibilities include new technologies, coupled with the initiatives of entrepreneurs who market them. Economists and economic historians have downplayed the significance of the entrepreneur. Following Joseph Schumpeter, however, business historians have given him—and sometimes her—more weight.³⁹ Certainly, in the twentieth century the appearance of whole industries, from autos to personal computers, must be interpreted partly in terms of technological innovation and of the actions of specific individuals and companies. As Richard Tedlow has put it, The customer disposes. But the company proposes. On the face of it, the relevance of this line of argument to home improvement seems limited. Despite the hopes of policy makers and the efforts of entrepreneurs who experimented with the prefabrication of housing units, most building technologies were not revolutionized in the twentieth century. Instead, incremental changes made basic tasks easier. This was a sort of deskilling, as skills were transferred from people to materials and tools, making amateur improvement easier. Arguably, as some threshold or tipping point was crossed, a self-conscious do-it-yourself market emerged.⁴⁰

If truly creative individuals and companies were not required, there was still a role for adaptive responses. These are the sorts of management decisions that, as Henry Mintzberg describes, involve the ability to detect emerging patterns and help them to take shape. They fall on a sort of continuum, ranging from the deliberate to the emergent, where companies are not acting strategically. Entrepreneurs may not even feel that they have a real choice: they change because competitors or customers compel them to do so. Firms of all sizes do this. In the 1920s, and against the instincts of its founder, Ford began to offer financing to its customers because the success of GM’s Acceptance Corporation in boosting sales left it no alternative. Such adaptive responses are more common in smaller companies and competitive markets. Family-run retailers, especially, squeezed between powerful manufacturers and sovereign consumers, may feel pushed in this direction. For that reason, as Davies has suggested, they exemplify models drawn from evolutionary theory: change usually happens in small increments, punctuated by exogenous events that alter its direction irrevocably; even with only small changes, if enough retailers adapt then their actions may accumulate significantly. At any rate, along with creative entrepreneurship, the possible significance of modest adaptations must be considered.⁴¹

Of course, there are more critical intellectual traditions that doubt the ability of business to shape the consumer’s options. There are those who point to the ability of large companies to dominate particular markets, and in particular their power to set prices. In the United States, antitrust legislation has been one response, although deployed inconsistently and often to attack the weak. In the early twentieth century, most prosecutions under the Sherman Act were brought against horizontal combinations of small companies in competitive industries, not the big trusts.⁴² Lumber retailers and manufacturers were targeted on several occasions, and so market collusion and its opponents must be part of the present story. At a deeper level many critics, especially those drawing on the Marxist tradition, have argued that the system within which all businesses and consumers operate contains forces that push in a consistent direction. The logic of capital is growth, requiring the geographical expansion of markets and their penetration into more spheres of social life. For this line of argument, the initial emergence of the home improvement market presents a conundrum. As a new market it might seem to illustrate the point. But so much of it relied on do-it-yourself, which may remove or keep paid labor from the building scene. The net effect is unclear and invites study.

Set against this dark view of capital’s logic, as well as the more benign interpretations about the significance of business innovation, are the varied arguments of those who have emphasized the significance of the consumer.⁴³ As noted earlier, consumers shape the meaning of particular goods and services. This matters most when it affects which products, or classes of goods, they choose to buy. Economists emphasize, or simply assume the existence of, this form of consumer sovereignty. In effect, they reverse Ted-low’s formula: the company may propose, but in the end it is the consumer who disposes. Some historians have argued that this argument carries much truth. Regina Blaszczyk, for example, has suggested that it is changes in consumer taste that have shaped the industries for home furnishings and decoration since the eighteenth century.⁴⁴ The power of the consumer is most obvious, but also most limited, in determining the relative fate of one brand within an established industry, but it can also affect whole industries. The obvious examples are positive: the widening interest in home ownership during the 1920s, or the way that the rise of the automobile was driven by people’s enthusiasm for a technology that offered new freedom of movement. But since consumer incomes are finite, there is always at least one industry that loses ground. As families spent more on automobiles, they cut back on other items, not just bicycles and public transit but housing too.⁴⁵ In fact, it was during the 1920s that this type of effect first came to be appreciated. People began to speak of the new competition, a conscious rivalry between industries for the consumer’s dollar.⁴⁶ It was associated with the maturation of brand advertising, the emergence of scientific salesmanship, and the first big surge in installment credit.⁴⁷ The significance of this new competition was recognized by everyone associated with the building industry, and it must be part of the story of home improvement.

Over long periods, as living standards change we might expect consumer priorities to shift. Various writers have tried to distinguish between necessities and luxuries or, more subtly, to identify a hierarchy of human needs. Such arguments have problems but contain a grain of truth.⁴⁸ Many people assume, and a number of people have argued, that as societies become more affluent, their preoccupations change. Ronald Inglehart has marshaled evidence to suggest that people attach growing importance to self-expression. This can take many forms, from music and travel to extreme sports, but do-it-yourself is a prime example. For most of the twentieth century, the real incomes of most Americans were rising, and in the middle decades of the twentieth century disparities narrowed. However we define it, the middle class grew. As more people found their basic needs satisfied they could begin to think about home improvement as a hobby. Whether they chose to do so depended on many things, including the expected economic, social, and psychic rewards.⁴⁹ Regardless, the long-term effects of rising incomes on consumer behavior is another line of argument to be considered.

But incomes do not rise steadily, a fact that was never more obvious than during the 1930s, when spending again focused on basic needs.⁵⁰ The sheer magnitude of the Depression means we must be alert to its possible impact on the rise of home improvement. Coming on top of the new competition of the 1920s, it was the buyers’ market of the 1930s that led to a general surge of interest in marketing and market research, coupled with the continued rise of installment credit.⁵¹ For the first time these were underpinned by federal initiatives that compiled market and demographic data as never before. New data were collected about housing, culminating in 1940 in the first housing census. And of course the state’s role in the economy, and its impact on markets, grew enormously as Roosevelt’s administration worked to rescue the system.⁵² As is well-known, the New Deal reshaped the mortgage market by offering insurance for long-term, high-ratio amortizing instruments, and introduced subdivision guidelines to help promote the growth of large builders and land developers. Meanwhile, a building slump raised the profile of all types of repair, conversion, and remodeling. It was impossible that the Depression would not have mattered, and indeed I argue that this crisis was in some ways transformative. For that reason the following narrative divides as naturally as a three-act play: set-up, crisis, and resolution.

Of course nobody planned things that way. Businesses, consumers, and the federal government all did their bit to raise the standard of living. To the extent that they succeeded, each may be said to have helped create the conditions for the growth of home improvement. But very few predicted the Depression, and nobody schemed to bring it on. The Depression is only one example, albeit the greatest, of the ways in which unintended consequences can shape the course of events. Historians routinely distinguish between the stated goals of government policy and the actual effects, for these are almost invariably different. They find it more difficult to explore the same gap between intention and effect when it comes to businesses and consumers. The goals of businesses are usually not made public, and those of consumers are often inscrutable, if only because they are so varied. But although the size and even the nature of unintended consequences is often unclear, we cannot ignore them. They are often the most important influences of all.

Methods and Materials

One of the great advantages of concentrating on just one industry or market is that it becomes possible to follow the continuing interplay between producers, consumers, retailers, and the state, as these are played out in different sorts of urban places, through good times and bad. A number of writers have argued that this is important: that instead of trying to make thin generalizations about manufacturing, consumers, retailing, advertising, or marketing we need more thick descriptions, substantial histories surrounding the emergence of given markets and forms of conducting business. In particular, following the work of Gary Gereffi, interesting work has been done on the commodity chains that link producers, distributors, and consumers, the best of which is attentive not only to the circulation of goods but also of information. The significance of the latter is that it underlines the fact that cultural as well economic considerations are involved.⁵³ Fair enough, and the present study is intended to provide an extended example of exactly this way of thinking. But there is a potential downside. One the advantages of surveying, for example, the whole marketing field is that differences can become apparent. Even though such surveys may not be couched as examples of comparative research, that is what they are, even if only implicitly. The great strength of any type of comparative research is that it sets particular cases in context and encourages us to consider and test explanations. At first glance it may seem that the Depression transformed marketing in one industry, but if