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  • Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960 by Richard Harris
  • Bryan D. Palmer (bio)
Richard Harris. Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960. University of Chicago Press. xii, 432. US$45.00

The French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared in 1840 that “property is theft.” Perhaps, but in the age of domicile beautification, soaring real estate prices, and recurring renovation – all driving a “do-it-yourselfism” that constitutes equity, promotes self-exploitation, and, in some cases, measures gendered worth – property on the small scale of home ownership can also be oppression.

How did the home improvement industry come into being? This is the question that animates Richard Harris’s impressively researched, carefully argued, and wide-ranging analysis of the rise of “do-it-yourself” (DIY) from the First World War into the 1960s. Focusing on the United States, but with asides to Canada and Australia (far more to the former than the latter), Harris has written a book that is simultaneously about business and consumers, labour and capital, class and culture.

There are those who argue that DIY happened “seemingly overnight.” Harris comments wryly that if you look at certain sources it is easy to suggest, focusing on consumer magazines and the business press, that the DIY fad exploded onto the scene in the United States in 1952; or, if you probe the mass media, it is possible to date the birth of DIY as precisely as the second half of 1953. But as Harris establishes, in the trade press servicing the lumberyards or in the practices of countless ordinary folk – first blue-collar workers, often from immigrant backgrounds, and, later, more ostensibly middle-class types – the necessity of home improvements and reliance on one’s own labour to maintain, expand, and even construct the family residence was long-standing. It reached back to the 1920s, according to Harris, although it is surprising that he does not gesture toward even earlier examples of home improvement in the nineteenth century. DIY certainly gathered momentum throughout the Depression years and into the 1940s and 1950s. If the media christened the trend, helping to consolidate the home improvement market and merchandising the phenomenon in particular ways, it only “discovered” what had been evolving over decades.

In telling this story, Harris necessarily weaves into the DIY fabric a fascinating history of change that is orchestrated by class, consumers, credit, and capitalism. Lest anyone think this is a history of masculineonly [End Page 575] endeavours, Harris provides fascinating glimpses of how gender factored into domestic labour that was as much about modernizing the kitchen as it was about preparing meals within it. He addresses the extent to which women worked in the home improvement workshops, just as he explores how they felt and were perceived when “shopping” in the outlets that sold two-by-fours, wallpaper, and stucco, commercial venues that shifted gears and undertook many a makeover themselves.

There are insights and surprises galore in this book. Precisely because our homes are commodities as much as they are reflections of our lives, they remind us of both individuality and collective containment. They are also expressions of need and markers of social place, in which resilience in the face of capitalist constraints or ostentatious display growing out of privilege and power can emerge. What is perhaps most interesting in Harris’s study, focused as it is on those who were forced to do for themselves or who wanted to engage in their own improvements – categories that pretty much exclude those occupying the truly elite rungs of the social hierarchy – is the accent on the poor and the ways they charted the beginnings of what would become a home-improvement industry. The workers and immigrants who pioneered building by owners, or the Appalachian migrants who lived in basement units in Macomb County, Michigan, working for Chrysler by day and building their homes from the bottom up by night and on weekends, were not only the exploited labour of the Fordist regime of accumulation. They were also new sources of profit for the oldest of mercantile endeavours, the staple trade of the timber barons, which...

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