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BOOK REVIEWS could be shipped anywhere in the United States and installed in days. Operating out of a repurposed war industry plant outside of Columbus, Ohio, the company attempted for the first time to rationalize and industrialize fully a traditionally unresponsive and disorganized housing sector by bringing continuous production techniques and economies of scale to bear on the industry that capitalism forgot" ( 5). A capitalintensive new business that borrowed forty million dollars from the government to get running,Lustron produced only · about twentvfive hundred homes before it succumbed to financial difficulties and increasing political opposition. Although Knerr's narration of this story is compelling enough,he also quite effectively and succinctly contextualizes the Lustron experiment within larger American architectural, technological, social , economic, and political trends. Knerr argues that Lustron is a valuable case study illustrating not only an original approach to American housing that took advant· age of a brief window of opportunitv during which public and private interests intersected immedi·ately after World War II,but also the complexities of joint public/ private social improvement ventures and the limits of governmental entrepreneurship . Lustron ultimately failed, Knerr maintains, bec·ause " it exceeded the acceptable limits of government sponsorship during the immediate postwar era by extending the businessgovernment partiici ship to serve a peacetime social need, a goal the American public ultim·ately failed to support" ( 12). Knerr largely succeeds in establishing his case by persuasively using a wide variety of primary sources including government documents, promotional materials, trade publications, and Lustron company 1 files. His extremely effective use of source materi·als, however, subtly undermines at least part of his interpretation. Did the public really fail to support Lustron? Knerr' s welldocumented account of the fervid enthusiasm hundreds of thousands of Americans displayed for the company's products when they clamored for information or toured model homesas well as the near absolute devotion of surveved Llistron ownersseems to indicate otherwise . Similarlv,Knerr's adroit use of government documents to demonstrate the politically and ideologically motivated opposition to Lustron by the new Republican Congress bent on blunting Truman administration initiatives convincingly places primary culpability for Lustron' s death in the C·apitol. 1[ hus, this part of Knerr' s thesis seems to conflate public with politie ,11 will when the two might more profitably be disentangled. This small quibble aside, Suburban Steel remains a wellwritten volume that is an insightful addition to several literatures, including the histories of US. architecture, business and industry,and public poljcy. Kevin Kern The Universitv of Akron Curt Dalton. Dayton. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing,2006. 128pp. ISBN 073854079x ( paper), $ 19.99. Dayton is the latest region·al addition to Arcadia Publishing's Postcard History Seria . The use of historical postcard images is not new,but this is the first publication of a collection on this scale for Dayton, Ohio. ' Ihe author,Chris Dalton,is the Visual Resources Manager for Dayton History , the local historical society,and this new postcard collection concentrates on commercial and institutional buildings. Over two hundred postcard images,selected from the Dayton Metro Library and SPRING 2007 81 ...

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