Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America (review)

Moskowitz mixes material-culture studies and traditional historical methods to explore the origins and meanings of the phrase "standard of living." Observing that "standard" refers both to standardization and to various measures of "the good life," Moskowitz argues that this was a fluid new concept in the early twentieth century. Distinct from such economic measures as wages or the cost of living, the standard of living was a qualitative rather than quantitative gauge. "It is at once personal, applied to an individual or household, and collective, shared by groupings as large as a class or a nation" (3). Progressive-era discussion of an American standard of living occupied social scientists, artists, producers and providers of goods and services, politicians, urban planners and boosters, and middle-class consumers presumably anxious to demonstrate their status by using the correct fork or living in the right kind of house.

Four chapters present case studies in which consumerism, the market-driven need for standardized products, middle-class cultural competencies, and national changes in living patterns intersected between 1900 and 1932. The case studies involve silverplate flatware, bathroom fixtures, mail-order homes, and zoning plans. A conclusion—more like a fifth chapter—brings together period texts such as Robert Staughton Lynd's Middletown (New York, 1930) and Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt (New York, 1922) to suggest the ways in which social scientists and artists, for different audiences, reflected and carried forward the work of delineating, critiquing, and exposing American middle-class mores.

Some of this ground has been explored before. Bushman's work on early nineteenth-century manners comes to mind. Mail order and other forms of prefabricated homes have fascinated historians of vernacular architecture, and household plumbing has been a favorite topic from Catharine Beecher's day to our own.¹ What Moskowitz adds to this discussion is sensitivity to the ways in which businesses consciously used complex cultural signs to sell products, and the pervasiveness and flexibility of the notion of a standard way of life as expressed in things.

Moskowitz shows that manufacturers of such seemingly mundane items as silverplate flatware, bathroom fixtures, and houses all rallied around the notion of standardization to sell a weird variety of concepts. For example, products came in standard forms—so many forks to a set or so many rooms to a house—whereas choices in patterning or room arrangements allowed consumers to express individuality. The notion that individuality could be contained and expressed in a standard form is only one of the paradoxes that Moskowitz explores.

Although she discusses the motivations of consumers throughout, the book is stronger on the producer side, largely because of the types of sources that Moskowitz uses—objects, magazines, corporate records, and literature. But the discussions among producers about their goals, and their adjustments to the market, make a compelling argument for the complexity and pervasiveness of a shared fascination with a standard of living.