Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960 by Richard Harris (review)

In the mid-1950s, “do-it-yourself” home improvement caught the attention of the mass media in the United States. Featured on the cover of Time magazine in the summer of 1954 as the “new billion dollar hobby,” the popular demand for amateur home improvement tools, materials, and instruction manuals was cast as big news. Richard Harris argues in Building a Market that the home improvement industry did not appear suddenly in the decade after World War II, however. Rather, he demonstrates convincingly that it developed over the course of several decades and was shaped by many factors, including: the growth of the middle class and the rise in homeownership in the interwar period; the expansion of consumer finance; the increased role of the state in the 1930s; the manufacture and advertising of new materials and tools; and the expansion of attention of the mass media. The book draws on a rich array of sources to untangle the complex array of historical forces that shaped this market over the course of the first half of the twentieth century.

Harris’s analysis emphasizes the significance of market demand, which he credits with pressuring innovations in manufacturing, marketing, and retailing. An important chapter explores the emergence of homeownership as a middle-class value, synthesizing the work of several historians of housing, architecture, and domestic life. By identifying a notable cultural shift after World War I and demonstrating how broad this change was, Harris offers a valuable contribution to the history of American housing and domestic life.

Homeowners, and potential homeowners, drove the creation of this market to a large degree. Depression-era and postwar shortages of housing and the materials and skilled labor required for construction spurred many young couples to build their own homes. In a case study of Peoria, Illinois, where two-thirds of the houses built between 1933 and 1939 were constructed by amateurs (p. 219), Harris uses original oral history interviews to examine the skills and perspectives of these individuals. Amateur builders comprised about one-third of all American homeowners by 1949. They paved the way, the author argues, for a larger population of suburban homeowners to undertake smaller-scale home improvement projects.

Some manufacturers of new materials embraced advertising as a way to cultivate this new clientele. However, resistance from lumber dealers and retailers was substantial. Lumber manufacturing was slow to become standardized. Shopping for lumber remained confusing for most consumers until the late 1910s, when house-building kits from Sears, Aladdin, and other companies encouraged lumbermen to adopt new types of retail spaces and methods during the next decade. Harris devotes considerable attention to the lumber industry, both manufacturing and retailing, and its transformation in response to changing market demand. The three chapters dedicated to this story are dense, but reward patient readers who seek to understand the untidy origins of the modern home improvement store.

Building a Market is certainly a work of business history. Still, historians of technology stand to learn a lot from this book. Scholars interested in the built environment will discover diverse techniques, materials, and tools of construction—and their continuities and changes—embedded in the stories of how they were bought and sold. Social and cultural historians of technology will learn much from the shifting relationships among consumers, retailers, producers, and authors of how-to literature, which are at the heart of Harris’s analysis. Investigators seeking to understand users of technologies in historical context will appreciate the insights into do-it-yourself consumers that are revealed by the examination of the complexities of this marketplace.

Harris’s introduction reads much like a grant proposal, exaggerating the originality of the questions he poses. Fortunately, his thorough study provides the most satisfying set of answers to date to questions that he and other scholars have raised. And in synthesizing a voluminous amount of trade literature and charting the historical development of a...