Better Living: Toward a Cultural History of a Business Slogan

This article traces the migration of the slogan "better living" from its inception in 1935 as an attempt to clean up the corporate image of Du Pont, through its dissemination into the building trades and architecture during and after World War II, and finally into urban planning in the postwar decades. These fields borrowed the phrase back and forth in their promotional literature in order to serve their own, often clashing agendas—one strand of the larger contest between the forces of free enterprise and those of centralized planning and reform. The essay aims to bring together aspects of business, architecture, and planning in order to explore the fertile cultural milieu these different fields shared in the middle decades of the twentieth century.