New "Better Homes" Sunday Section Joins Automotive Section in 1924

Back in 1924 the morning paper started a Sunday section titled "Better Homes." It promoted home ownership and advertised real estate and real estate firms, construction trades, home appliances, and home furniture and decoration.

An automobile section had already been going for a few years. The ad placements for the car trade had been considerable and it was clearly an important revenue stream.

To see the two sections developed and published in close proximity really underscores the connection of land use and transportation in the new autoism.

February 24th, 1924

February 24th, 1924

On February 24th of 1924 the "Better Homes section" started. (The page below from the May "homes week" reproduces the graphic more clearly on a single page.)

May 11th, 1924

The week before February 24th, on February 17th the paper ran a "Home Builders Page." Probably this was too narrow and it was revised to "Better Homes" the next week.

February 17th, 1924

There was, in fact, a national campaign, and the "Better Homes" sections should be associated with that. In May they promoted "Better Homes Week."

May 11th, 1924

Through these theme weeks and other promotions, the campaign targeted women and "homemakers" as decision-makers and influencers over domestic space.

March 16th, 1924

"Is your kitchen the correct working size" a column asked?

May 29th, 1924

There is even a recent biography of the organizer, Marie Mattingly Meloney. She sounds like an interesting figure! At the time she was the editor of The Delineator, a women's magazine centered on sewing patterns.

American Queenmaker

Herbert Hoover also had a prominent role in the campaign. A post at a National Archives blog centered on Hoover says about Meloney, "After the war, she worked with Hoover’s campaigns for Better Homes for America and the American Child Health Association." As I read the history right now, this has it backwards: Seeing its usefulness, Commerce Secretary Hoover latched onto and promoted Meloney's "Better Homes in America" campaign. Then he was convenient to have as a figurehead. Meloney did the work, and Hoover may have taken more than a fair share of the credit.

"The Home as an Investment"

In 1922 he'd contributed a note, "The Home as an Investment," to a pamphlet Meloney organized and largely wrote on a plan for demonstration weeks around the country. The themes Hoover hits are interesting and relevant today and we may come back to it and unpack them more.

ONE can always safely judge of the character of a nation by its homes. For it is mainly through the hope of enjoying the ownership of a home that the latent energy of any citizenry is called forth. This universal yearning for better homes and the larger security, independence and freedom that they imply, was the aspiration that carried our pioneers westward. Since the preemption acts passed early in the last century, the United States, in its land laws, has recognized and put a premium upon this great incentive. It has stimulated the building of rural homes through the wide distribution of land under the Homestead Acts and by the distribution of credit through the Farm Loan Banks. Indeed, this desire for home ownership has, without question, stimulated more people to purposeful saving than any other factor. Saving, in the abstract, is, of course, a perfunctory process as compared with purposeful saving for a home, the possession of which may change the very physical, mental, and moral fibre of one’s own children.

Now, in the main because of the diversion of our economic strength from permanent construction to manufacturing of consumable commodities during and after the war, we are short about a million homes. In cities such a shortage implies the challenge of congestion. It means that in practically every American city of more than 200,000, from 20 to 30 per cent, of the population is adversely affected, and that thousands of families are forced into unsanitary and dangerous quarters. This condition, in turn, means a large increase in rents, a throw-back in human efficiency and that unrest which inevitably results from inhibition of the primal instinct in us all for home ownership. It makes for nomads and vagrants. In rural areas it means aggravation and increase of farm tenantry on one hand, an increase of landlordism on the other hand, and general disturbance to the prosperity and contentment of rural life.

There is no incentive to thrift like the ownership of property. The man who owns his own home has a happy sense of security. He will invest his hard earned savings to improve the house he owns. He will develop it and defend it. No man ever worked for, or fought for a boarding-house.

At least here in Salem, 1924 is the first year the group and movement had gained real traction. Our favorite semi-Salemite appears a few times.

May 4th, 1924

May 10th, 1924

December 28th, 1924

The economic stimulus of consumerism associated with home ownership attracted Hoover's interest. The economic "readjustment" period after World War I was still settling, and Hoover saw possibility.

One take on "readjustment," July 26th, 1921

There's a real secondary literature on housing and on economic policy and conditions between World War I and the Great Depression. But it's large and the best sources aren't always convenient to cite online.

One discussion is in George A. Gonzalez' book, Energy and Empire: The Politics of Nuclear and Solar Power in the United States. (It's nice to be able to locate our petro-suburban pattern a little in a climate-adjacent analysis!)

Prompt to consumer spending

He writes:

In addition to enhancing the economic value of land on the urban periphery, automobile-centered urban sprawl expanded the market for automobiles as well as created demand for appliances and furniture to fill the relatively large homes built on the urban outskirts. During the 1920s, the federal government began to promote urban sprawl as a way to stimulate the economy.

Interestingly, historians of roads and traffic do not seem to have remarked on "Better Homes in America," and I couldn't find anything by Peter Norton on it. Maybe there's more and we'll come back to this.

Novels are another data point.

In White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel, Catherine Jurca discusses the familiar cultural critique of suburbs as soul-sucking.

Suburbanism

A certain scope of negation was implied and intended. It wasn't just fussy intellectuals who noticed.

December 9th, 1923

At the end of 1923, just two months before the first "Better Homes" page, in a column on the future of the automobile industry, Walter Chrysler said:

The motor car is a revolutionary influence. For example, it is responsible largely for the disintegration of urban residential life and the development of suburban life. Think of what a creator of economic wealth the automobile has been in making possible suburban development. Think of the extent to which salesman have been able to increase trade through the use of automobiles.

He also hits the economic stimulus theme Hoover identifies. 

via Wikipedia

Finally, it is interesting to note that in 1924 another women's magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, landed on the name we know it by today.

December 7th, 1924

Salem adopted its first zoning code in 1926 and this "Better Homes" publicity in 1924 is an important antecedent. A note in the Better Homes section from December of 1924 says directly, "Salem is now taking preliminary steps toward zoning in the future."

We'll come back to this as there are many strands to see if we can develop in more detail. At present 1924 seems like a real moment in the history of our autoism and its intimate connection with land use.

• Previous notes on the history of zoning here in the 1920s.