Introduction xvii
clothing lines and entertainment intended to be appealing solely to that
group. While political power did not result from these intense marketing
campaigns that encompassed music to breakfast cereals, childhood became
an important aspect of consuming life.
Disenfranchised groups, such as homosexual men whose very identity
was illegal in many states throughout the 20th century, developed consumer
markets that, because there was money to be made, exerted pressure on
marketers for recognition. Bars and social gathering places, hotels and re-
sorts, and products targeting gay male consumers were not simply hedonis-
tic or about gaining market advantage; in the context of a homophobic
society, gay consumerism was a political and cultural tool that provided a
visible identity for a group that legally and socially was intentionally ren-
dered invisible.
The American middle class was a group defined by the U.S. Census
Bureau as being in the middle of the income and wealth brackets, but the
middle class also represented the ideal consumer for manufacturers and
marketers to focus their attentions toward. The objects of 20th-century
everyday life explored in this book—from electric razors to automobiles,
from brassieres to ashtrays—were invented, produced, and sold with a
middle-class consumer in mind. To be middle class was to be, by popular
conception, white, educated, and working in a white-collar career that did
not require hands-on physical work. By income, being middle class could
mean anyone making the median income—a factory worker, an African
American lawyer, a Latino farmer—but the idealized image of a middle-
class American was racially defined as white and further restricted to high
school or college education and the newer forms of labor in offices at desks.
Especially after the Great Depression in the 1930s and then again in the
post–World War II 1950s, the federal government targeted enormous
amounts of taxpayer money toward encouraging a white middle class
through subsidized home loan programs; investing in city, state, and na-
tional infrastructure; and after the 1940s subsidizing higher education at a
time when college students were largely white.
In the earliest years of the 20th century, a new measure of prosperity was
invented: standard of living. Progressive reformers determined the barest
essentials of modern life, from goods to services, that ensured health and
decent living and then measured shortcomings as a way to argue for the
need for progressive remedies. Did a worker’s wages allow for the basic
needs of life to be met? By the 1920s the basic standard of living was more
about living up to an ideal status of middle-class life, and that included not
only enough food and access to medical services but also nonnecessity
goods ranging from indoor plumbing to motorized refrigerator boxes.
The standard of living undeniably improved for most Americans during
the 20th century. Even when most measures were tied to the purchase of
