TWELVE

A Zelig of the American Cultural Economy

In the movie Zelig, Woody Allen tells a fanciful story about a social non entity who, strangely unnoticed, was present at key events in the twentieth century. In the realm of fact as opposed to fiction, home improvement played an important but similarly unobtrusive role in several developments. In the long run, it could not have flourished without the collective prosperity that brought more people into the middle class, broadly defined. Most property owners had always tried to maintain their homes in decent repair, but now they could afford to steadily improve them, whether through modernization, alterations, or additions. As the ranks of the middle classes expanded, their desire to own their own homes also grew. This mattered because, for all sorts of reasons, home owners are more interested than landlords or tenants in home improvement. The shift in outlook involved much more than a matter of money. In turn-of-the-century cities, most professionals could have afforded to own, but many chose not to. After World War I, to a degree that is not widely appreciated, tastes changed. By the 1940s, owning one’s home was not just the goal of immigrants and workers; it had become the American dream. On this foundation, and as domestic prosperity resumed, the level of urban home ownership jumped to unprecedented heights, and a home improvement industry emerged. And this in turn contributed in no small way to a rise in the standard of living.

In the housing business, as more generally, higher standards were made possible by the expansion of consumer finance. Even those who did their own repairs and alterations often found it necessary to borrow. For several decades, most had to rely on short-term credit from retailers, which limited how many were able to take on improvement projects and how large those projects could be. Starting in the late 1920s, some lenders and manufacturers began to offer their customers easier terms, but in this field as in others, it was the federal government that changed the rules of the game in the 1930s. Federal legislation not only helped families to buy homes but also to modernize and enlarge them. Soon, owners could roll improvement finance into first mortgages. In the process, commercial banks were drawn into the new business of consumer loans. It turns out, then, that the rise of home improvement leveraged a general expansion of consumer debt. Little did we know.

The rise of home improvement also played a key, but overlooked, role in one of the major cultural shifts of the twentieth century: the domestication of men and the associated emancipation of women. Neither change was completed by 1960, nor even today; they may never be. But both were perceptibly bound up with housing developments from the early 1900s. The key change was the emergence of the newly favorable view of home ownership. By the 1920s, it was acceptable for men to show an interest in home maintenance; during the 1930s it became necessary; by the early 1950s it was expected. Changes in the domestic role of women were more subtle, but they contradict our stereotype of the 1950s. As early as the 1920s, women were buying paint, wallpaper, and floor coverings, and many did their own home decoration. After 1945, tens of millions invaded lumberyards, worked on their own building sites, and tackled major renovation jobs. They measured, sawed, hammered, glued, and probably cussed too. As they built and improved homes together, husbands and wives had to negotiate new domestic divisions of labor, and so new cultural expectations emerged. At first, the handywoman was news, but by the mid-1950s she was an accepted part of the domestic and business scene. If the 1950s saw most women back in the home, this did not simply involve a turning back of the clock. By then, home improvement guaranteed that, on the domestic front, times were already a-changing.

These cultural and economic changes were the outcome of what Americans think of as their perennially pragmatic can-do spirit. Women took on “men’s work” because they had to, and on that basis were praised. The media treated all amateurs in this way, even those who stole jobs from professionals. New circumstances called for new measures. The same outlook informed and shaped the building industry, though it did meet with resistance. As consumers began to patronize lumber dealers, the trade press soon told retailers to diversify, thereby cutting some of their established ties with the lumber trade. In time, most retailers got the message. They were encouraged to do so by the manufacturers of other building materials, as well as of tools, who did not care overmuch whether their goods were sold to professionals or amateurs, as long as they were sold. Indeed, recognizing new opportunities, manufacturers got into marketing. Instead of trying to sell what they produced, they learned to produce what diverse, and increasingly fickle, consumers seemed to want. In the business world, even more than in the home, tradition counted for little. And in both arenas, nothing advertised America’s can-do spirit better than the DIY fad and improvement boom.

Apart from expressing broadly American trends, the rise of home improvement was given a boost by three periods that themselves were formative of the national experience. The 1910s and 1920s were the era when the automobile became an American icon, building a major industry, and soon reshaping whole metropolitan areas. Obviously, families began to spend more on cars; less obviously, they spent less on housing. This caused consternation in the building industry and, by the late 1920s, was pushing suppliers to think about new ways of creating business. Home modernization seemed to be the solution, and indeed by the early 1930s came to be seen as the industry’s salvation. In a backhanded way, then, the automobile gave a boost to the improvement trend.

The Depression not only raised the profile of home modernization and repairs but also goaded the federal government into action. Federal policy makers soon came to agree with building suppliers that pumping money into home upgrading was the best way of reviving the building industry, and hence the wider economy. Historians of housing policy have emphasized the extent to which, from 1934, federal policy makers promoted new home building by offering to insure the long-term amortizing mortgage. In fact, it was Depression-era home improvement that kick started not only the revolution in consumer finance but also the permanent involvement of the federal government in the market for home finance. Once again, improvement participated in a crucial historical moment. And so it was after 1945.

It was the Second World War, particularly its domestic aftermath, that finally made home improvement an everyday presence. The housing shortage compelled many to build or complete their own homes. Unwittingly, they demonstrated just what amateurs could accomplish. Publishers and suppliers got the message and began to publish manuals and to market new products that made handiwork easier. As young families grew, and as prosperity enabled millions to enlarge the modest homes that they had originally built or bought, a do-it-yourself boom helped to propel home improvement into the zeitgeist. Coupled with popular resourcefulness and rising prosperity, then, it was the postwar housing shortage that finally tipped the balance.

One major issue—race—has not been broached in this story, and it is important to consider why. For most of the twentieth century, the racialization of housing markets in the United States has been profound. Its most obvious expression has been segregation, and the difficulties that African-Americans have typically faced in moving to the suburbs. Most of those who lived in urban areas were tenants, and managed on low incomes, so their opportunities to make home alterations were limited. But as Andrew Wiese has shown, some did find their way into the suburbs, perhaps disproportionately by building their own homes.¹ Many house-proud city-dwellers must have invested their money and labor in repairs and improvements. Such families were part of the historical growth of home improvement, and deserve a place in the story that I have told here. Unfortunately, the sources on which I relied, notably the trade press, leading newspapers, and mass-market magazines, say effectively nothing about whether, and how, African-Americans improved their homes. They are silent about whether, and how, specific building suppliers served that specific market; how manufacturers and then banks handled improvement loan requests from African-Americans; and whether FHA offices discriminated in this field, as they did in the mortgage market for new homes. To document this experience it would be necessary to explore the experience of specific families and businesses in particular neighborhoods. Such research lay beyond my resources and remit. I can only express the hope that, by showing how important home improvement was in so many ways, this book encourages others to fill one of the more important gaps that it has left.

It would be easy to think of improvement as a peculiarly American story. Certainly, the same story could not be written about Britain, or indeed most Western European countries. Until at least the 1960s, apart from any other consideration, standards of living and levels of home ownership there were much lower. But similar circumstances did exist, and similar developments did occur, in Canada and Australia. In most respects, the parallels are very close. Home improvement emerged slowly until the 1950s, and then in a rush. One difference was the unique willingness of one Canadian federal agency to tap, and support, the energies of the amateur. This illustrated a more cautious approach to the promotion of credit, one that, generalized, has served Canadians well in the recent financial crisis. Another difference was the long reluctance of Australian timber merchants to change their ways in order to meet the needs of the new consumer. Their continuing allegiance to the timber trade did not prevent the postwar boom in owner-building and do-it-yourself Down Under, though for a few years it surely hampered them. The emergence of home improvement by 1960, then, is not a uniquely American story, although in that country it did take an especially wholehearted commercial form.

Culture and Economy

The emergence of home improvement also illustrates some important truths about markets. One of the most important of these is that they are shaped not only, as many have supposed, by consumers, industry, and the state, but also by the media.

It would of course be possible to place the consumer at the center of this story. As they responded to new circumstances, millions of men and women in families drove change. In the 1920s the white-collar middle class stopped debating whether home ownership made sense and concluded that it was necessary to family life. On this foundation they built a popular interest in home improvement and amateur handiwork. At the same time, as they began to spend more money on cars and less on houses they compelled suppliers to respond by diversifying their lines and sprucing up their yards. Through Depression and war, men and women repaired and converted dwellings. After 1945 they took matters into their own hands by building and fixing. How could home owners, as agents, not be a large part of the story?

But manufacturers were always vital. From 1905, entrepreneurs founded companies that built kit houses. They were not responding to demand: until kits were produced, nobody asked for them, but, once offered, they proved popular. Arguably, they contributed to the widening interest in owner-occupation after World War I by making it more affordable. Unquestionably, they gave a wake-up call to the retailer and gave birth to the idea, if not at first the reality, of the local all-purpose home building and improvement store. Manufacturers such as Masonite and Black and Decker developed new materials and tools that made improvement cheaper, and more amenable to the amateur. Others, such as American Radiator and Johns-Manville offered the first finance for home modernization, and pushed retailers to promote this business. Manufacturers not only made the products that improvers needed, they nurtured the idea and created the wider circumstances that helped make it real. They were hardly less important than the consumer.

By comparison, it may seem that retailers are the poor cousins of the story. In the 1920s, even sympathetic insiders criticized them for being stick-in-the-muds. During the 1930s, manufacturers, notably Johns-Manville, worked hard to change their thinking and upgrade their skills, but criticisms persisted into the early postwar years. But even when they dragged their heels, retailers were indispensable. Their ability to meet the competition of kit companies and, after 1945, of so-called prefabricators, shows that they were resilient. They were crucial in providing goods and services to the amateur, playing an unobtrusive but essential role in the reemergence of owner-building after 1945 and the subsequent do-it-yourself boom. By then, many retailers had caught up with, and overtaken, the trend. Running evening classes, and sometimes on-site help, they were no longer agents of the manufacturer, or servants of the consumer, but had become players in their own right.

And the state was crucial. It always mattered unobtrusively, guaranteeing contracts and so forth. In addition, and more dramatically, it changed history. In 1913, the Supreme Court landed a death blow to the lumber dealers’ efforts to sabotage the kit business. This, as much as the kits themselves, compelled dealers to consider the more constructive option of serving the consumer. Then, in 1934, the National Housing Act took the manufacturers’ idea of financing improvements and backed it with the resources and legitimacy that only the state could provide. Marketed vigorously, Title I of the NHA shaped consumer decisions and the building industry alike, not to mention the commercial banks. Without those two specific interventions of the federal state, a home improvement and do-it-yourself boom would surely have happened, but later and on a more limited scale.

The least obvious players in the making of the improvement market were the mass media, which during the period in question meant the publishers of newspapers, magazines, and manuals, and to a lesser extent the radio. All, of course, carried advertising, but this was not their only significance. From the late 1910s, manuals and magazine articles offered information and advice that, in a modest way, gave extra momentum to the improvement trend. The pace picked up after 1945: there were more manuals and articles. By the early 1950s these reached, and contributed to the making of, a tipping point. Relative to their expenditures on housing as a whole, households invested about twice as much in improvements during the prosperous 1950s as they had in the prosperous 1920s. Perhaps this alone was enough to bring the improvement trade into the foreground, but newspapers suggest otherwise. Do-it-yourself had been waxing and waning for decades, and after 1945 grew steadily for some years, but it was made a media event rather suddenly in 1953–54. Its naming as a fad in newspapers and magazines acknowledged the real cultural and economic significance that it had already acquired, but such coverage also enlarged that significance. Men and women who had previously tackled a domestic project now saw themselves as part of a trend. This may have validated what they were doing; it surely helped to make it into a social expectation, while giving suppliers the message that here was a coherent market. Within two years, do-it-yourself had helped to make the wider improvement trend into a recognized force, not just in the media and in the minds of Americans, but for those in the industry that made it possible. In an established line of business, the importance of the media may sometimes be limited. But the experience of home improvement in the mid-1950s suggests that mass media are critical to the formation of a new market.

One reason why it is so difficult to assess which agency played the greatest overall role in the story is that the balance shifted. Kit manufacturers and the state, in the form of the Supreme Court, were critical at the beginning; consumers drove change in the 1920s; manufacturers of building materials and then the federal government took the initiative from the late 1920s and through the Depression; the media, and then consumers again, played a larger role after 1945. By the 1950s, retailers were also beginning to shape events, although by then the rapidity of change makes it impossible, and perhaps meaningless, to assign causality. Once the market had been established, it functioned as a self-propelling entity in which all agents played a part.

This shifting interplay between households, industry, media, and the state in the rise of home improvement serves to underline the most basic fact about markets: in a modern capitalist society, and perhaps in any society, culture and the economy are so interpenetrated that they cannot be separated. New consumer preferences for cars, owner-occupied homes, and home modernization entailed new patterns of expenditure that reshaped a building industry that included manufacturers, retailers, contractors, and lenders. They also entailed new cultural assumptions about how families should live, how various domestic tasks should be divided between men and women, and about the very meaning of masculinity and femininity in America. Such assumptions were enacted privately, but also produced and reproduced publicly. And, of course, these cultural assumptions were in turn shaped by industry and state initiatives in the “political economy.” To speak of the home improvement “industry” apart from the cultural assumptions that enabled it would be absurd.

What’s in a Market?

This study also illustrates just how complex and unstable markets are. One of the great merits of considering the whole product chain, from manufacturer through retailer and lender to the consumer’s home, and then back through market researcher and buyer behavior, is that it enables us see how influence flows in both directions. Watching the historical formation of a market underlines just how contingent, incomplete, and impermanent that process can be.

The great mistake would be to see the market as unitary, or established once and for all. There were those who made this mistake as early as 1955. In that year, Bob Jones, executive vice-president of the Middle Atlantic Lumbermen’s Association, devised a wake-up call for his members. He employed Jean Schloss, a retail consultant with ten years’ experience at Gimbel’s in Philadelphia and six years as a teacher at Drexel Institute, to conduct a field survey of a sample of members. Incognito, posing as a housewife who needed advice on a kitchen remodeling job, she visited twenty-eight lumber dealers in towns and suburbs across Pennsylvania. When her road trip was over, Jones brought her to speak to the group at the association’s annual convention. He told her to “really lay it on the line” and, without naming names, she did. As a woman, Schloss typified the modern home improver and yet, as she declared, “You don’t want me . . . I am just a necessary evil.” Elaborating, she conceded that “in practically every case I was handled politely,” but, she went on “I can think of [only] one of the 28 yards or stores visited in which I was treated with any enthusiasm at all.” (At this point the transcriber parenthetically reports “laughter,” probably nervous.) Over the next hour or so, she described the dealers’ various inadequacies: poor lighting, dusty displays, and so forth. Only the rare retailer offered DIY classes. On no point was she more eloquent, or critical, than the indifferent quality of sales staff. “I went there because I needed advice from you. You didn’t give it to me. You couldn’t be bothered with me.” Salesmen, she claimed, were even ineffective at selling their stock. “If I insisted on buying I could have it, but no one tried to sell me anything.”²

It would be easy to conclude from Schloss’s presentation that building retailers were no further advanced in meeting the needs of the amateur home improver than they had been thirty years earlier, but that was not so. Jones and Schloss had a specific and singular notion of the market that dealers were now supposed to be serving. He had asked her to make a case, and she had done so, but they had chosen their sample carefully. Most of the businesses Schloss visited were small-town yards rather than newer suburban stores. Her background gave her expectations that, when applied to building retailers, were unusual. She deplored the fact that staff were casual, reporting that in only five stores were they turned out in “well tailored, well-laundered linen jackets.” Most clerks lacked ties or hats, or had rolled up their sleeves. Would this really have bothered most customers, even women? And her insistence that salesmen introduce themselves to each customer may also have been unreasonable. Many might have preferred to browse, think, and then ask. Indeed, by then self-service was becoming possible. As the manager at Von Tobel’s in Las Vegas explained, a paint customer might need immediate help the first time she went shopping, but not necessarily the second or third. Since 1952, Wickes had been doing a thriving cash-and-carry business that treated customers in a very rough-and-ready way. In other words, the average retailer was much better-equipped to serve consumers than Schloss implied. But most important of all, and increasingly, there was no such thing as the average building supplier. Schloss had conceded the point at the beginning of her talk. She found “great discrepancies” that, on closer study, resolved themselves into “two groups—the lumber yard and the people who were really retailing.” She implied that the former were heading the way of the dodo, and that a pure consumer business was the way of the future. She was wrong. Plenty of yards thrived by serving contractors, because no single method of building or renovating became ubiquitous.³

Only those dealers who wanted to participate in one version of the new improvement market needed to listen to Schloss’s advice. In truth, by the latter half of the 1950s there were plenty who had already heeded it, especially those suburban stores that she ignored. But even they did not all have to do exactly the same things: customers’ preferences and needs varied by region and place, as they had always done. In towns and smaller cities, the personal touch was often expected. And so in Charlotte, North Carolina, the salesman at H&S Lumber, Hall Gillham, assiduously followed up his larger sales for improvement jobs with site visits. He did this for contractors as well as consumers. Many other small stores offered a “house doctor” service that included house calls. Others thrived by going large and impersonal. In the Washington, D.C., area the prime example was Hechinger. It had opened its first branch operation in 1941 and then expanded steadily through the 1950s, opening showroom-style stores in Alexandria (1954), in Rockville (1957), and on Wisconsin Avenue (1958). By 1960, their newest suburban operation was based in the Prince Georges Plaza Shopping Center. It was everything that Schloss would have approved of. Hechinger’s grabbed the consumer, devoting 2 percent of its annual sales to advertising. The new store opened Saturdays as well as three evenings a week. It carried 14,000 items in fifteen departments in a bright, 28,180-square-foot space. Lumber accounted for only 35 percent by value of its sales; two-thirds of its customers paid cash, and other sales were financed under the FHA’s Title I program.⁴

Home centers like Hechingers offered a model of the future that has become widespread, even dominant, but not ubiquitous. Small stores offering personal service worked better in some markets and for some purposes, then as now. A final example illustrates the point. The arrival of Home Depot had had a devastating effect on lumber stores in east-end Toronto, Ontario, by the mid-1990s, but Danforth Lumber survived. It did so in part by catering to contractors—who constituted half of its business—and also by offering excellent personal service. On closer examination, even the big-box behemoth has been less than monolithic. Home Depot has set itself apart by taking warehouse operations to a logical conclusion by incorporating all on-site storage space into its retail operation and by eliminating almost all distribution centers. It began by targeting customers, but as Chris Roush, its biographer, has noted, at various times and in some markets the company has experimented with serving contractors. In some places it got into trouble for attracting day laborers; in 2004, contractors accounted for 30 percent of its Canadian sales. Trying to differentiate itself Rona, a Canadian big-box competitor, has tried to make a niche as the quintessential consumer store, experimenting with various retail formats, ranging from huge to small, and pursuing the female consumer. Plus ça change! Another competitor, Home Hardware, has survived as a dealer-owned cooperative that supported smaller operations such as Danforth Lumber. Today, each jostles for position and weighs its options (contractor/ consumer; men/ women; volume/ service), just as retailers did in the 1950s, or indeed the 1920s.

Looking for the business model, it is easy to oversimplify this fluid complexity. Just as William Levitt monopolized attention in the 1950s as the wave-of-the-future suburban builder, so for a time the suburban big-box home improvement store might seem to be the end point in the evolution of home improvement retailing. It turned out that Levitt was not the future of his industry: complete vertical integration made sense only at a particular place and time, and his company eventually went bankrupt. Home Depot’s big box is not the acme and apotheosis of its business either. We should not read the history of home improvement as if it were.⁵

The same cautionary comments apply to consumers. When the do-it-yourself craze swept the continent in the mid-1950s, the media made it seem that everyone was jumping on board. But tenants had only limited incentives and opportunities to improve their homes, and plenty of home owners chose not to. Neither husband nor wife in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1958), a novel recently made into a popular movie, showed the faintest interest in home remodeling. To be sure, for several decades, amateur improvement did gain momentum. The baby boom created pressure to extend and improve homes. The postwar rise in home ownership leveled off, but retailers and manufacturers were primed to sell improvement to millions of new suburban property owners, and they helped grow the market. But inevitably, some of the early excitement faded. In 1960, a by-then-rare article about owner-building in House Beautiful treated this option as perfectly reasonable, weighing pros and cons, but by comparison with the breathless tone of popular accounts a decade earlier, it was measured, passionless.⁶ And then, in 1963, a manual was published for those home improvers who specifically did not wish to do their own work. For a time it had seemed that everyone—or at least every married male—was expected to be handy. Then, the social pressures had dropped a notch. Being handy was recognized as what it had always been, an option, albeit one that had now become very common.

Do-it-yourself has remained common, and has helped drive a continuing growth in the home improvement business down to the present. But here, as with the growth of Home Depot and in the level of home ownership, we should be careful about simple extrapolations. Recently, we have learned the hard way that not everyone can, or should be encouraged to, become a home owner. As levels of home ownership in America have dipped, the opportunities and incentives for do-it-yourself have waned too. And indeed a growing proportion of households are redefining the meaning of urban home ownership to exclude, or at least limit, the amount of handiwork that may be required. As I write this, an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail reports on a local survey that found that 67 percent of potential buyers want a home that is “move-in ready.” A real estate agent is quoted as saying that “men especially do not want a house where they will immediately need to do a lot of work.” Research suggests that male professionals may be willing to take on some domestic chores, including cooking, but that they would prefer to hire others, including male immigrants, to do gardening and home repairs. The most effective way of minimizing improvement jobs is to buy into a condominium development, and it is surely no coincidence that many cities, including Toronto, have recently seen a condo boom.⁷ This reflects high land prices in some inner-city housing markets, but it also suits the needs of young, or retired, couples and singles who have no interest in knocking out walls or refinishing the attic. So, even more obviously, do the low-rise common-interest developments that have spread in recent decades. The do-it-yourself boom of the early postwar decades may be no more than an extended segue into a home improvement market that is dominated by contractors, tradesmen, and other professionals.

Regardless of who does the work, the improvement of dwellings will remain a major element in the housing market, and indeed of the wider cultural economy. Currently, because so much energy is required to heat, or cool, the average North American home, retrofitting and upgrading is an important part of our efforts to limit carbon emissions and global warming. As such, it brings into play some of our deepest cultural assumptions: about economic growth, the environment, and indeed our place on earth. It now engages an array of novel technologies and industries; it has become the object of new federal programs and regulations; and, once again, it is in the media’s gaze. It is difficult to foresee a time when the home improvement market will fade into unimportance. In that sense, its emergence by the 1950s was a once-and-for-all event. But if that is true, this book has only told the beginning of the story.