The Birth of a Consumer Democracy

This chapter surveys housing and suburbanization, autos, and television as three vital engines that drove economic expansion and mass consumerism. It opens with a discussion of Chester Bowles, wartime head of the OPA, and his emphasis on housing and homebuilding as a key to future prosperity. Technological innovation, the productivity of American industry, and the prosperity that followed brought all the former privileges of the wealthy classes within reach of the rapidly expanding American middle class. These factors help explain why so many Americans look back with nostalgia on the postwar decades as “Happy Days.”