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.