Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home

In Technology as Freedom, Ronald Tobey presents an arresting and provocative thesis about the means by which a plethora of electrical appliances became the norm in the American home. The conventional wisdom about this process has located the key transition in the 1920s and has emphasized the role of advertising and of consumption choices by individuals. Drawing on a massive amount of data, Tobey argues that the conventional wisdom is wrong both about the timing and about the dynamics of the process.

The crucial datum is the fact that only a minority of American homes in 1930 possessed a full panoply of electrical appliances. Rather, a large percentage of the homes wired for electricity had only lights and possibly an iron. Radio began to offer itself as an attractive purchase in the late 1920s, but the wider use of appliances was restricted by their relatively high cost and the relatively high cost of the power itself. In short, the market was not aimed at everyman/woman.

An industrialist, Henry Ford, conceived of the potential for a mass market in automobiles and designed the Model T accordingly, but Tobey contends that it was a politician, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his allies who had the imagination to dream of cozy homes replete with laborsaving appliances, and all available on a mass scale. During the 1930s the Federal Housing Administration, established by the National Housing Act of 1934, encouraged home ownership. Since owners rather than renters invested much more freely in appliances, American homes began to be recognizably modern.

The Tennessee Valley Authority played an especially consequential role, according to Tobey, because it reduced the cost of power for those served by the system, thus increasing the attractiveness of electrical appliances and showing utilities throughout the country the way to the future. “The resistance of utilities in the 1920s to marketing electric heating to the mass market crumbled in the face of evidence from the TVA that even the poorest household would buy electric ranges . . .” (p. 123).

There are many things to praise about this book. The suggested connection between the political process and the domestic environment is sharply drawn and convincing. The author’s willingness to reject received opinion is refreshing. Moreover, the amount of data he has amassed about patterns of appliance ownership and use is most impressive. This is a book that builds bridges between the history of domesticity, the history of technology, and scholarship on the New Deal—a highly praiseworthy achievement. Nonetheless, there are grounds for criticism.

In the first place, the analysis would be greatly strengthened by more attention to gender as a factor. Tobey tells us that in the 1920s people spent money on cars rather than on laborsaving devices for the home. When they began to buy electrical equipment for the home in the late 1920s, a radio was often the breakthrough purchase. One cannot help but wonder which household member was making these decisions; they seem to reflect the interests of husbands rather than wives. Then in the 1930s the purchases began to reflect female priorities. Why? Was this pattern related in some obscure way to the well-established fact that women played a much greater role in FDR’s administration than in any preceding one?

In the second place, the author weaves back and forth between data gathered for the country as a whole and those gathered for the city of Riverside, where he teaches at a branch of the University of California. Sometimes this strategy creates abrupt disjunctions in the analysis. Had he given his readers more information about Riverside and its surrounding southern California context—California was an especially turbulent place in the 1930s—the chapters might have cohered more smoothly.

This said, Tobey has written an important book, one that suggests new and fresh ways of looking at the American home.