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

Before 1930, the domestic market for electrical appliances was segmented, but New Deal policies and programs created a true mass market, reshaping the electrical and housing markets and guiding them toward mandated social goals. The New Deal identified electrical refrigeration as a key technology to reform domestic labor, raise family health, and build family assets. New Deal incentives led to nearly fifty percent of Title I National Housing Act loans being used to buy electric refrigerators in the 1930s. New Deal policies ultimately created the mass commodity culture of home-owning families that typified the conservative 1950s. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996. Technology as Freedom tells how the New Deal brought electrical modernization to the mass of American households and how that dramatic change helped to reshape American home life. Contrary to the claims of a generation of historians that the nation's private free-market economy and the demands of society's lower orders produced domestic electrification, Ronald Tobey argues that this modernization of the American home was the direct culmination of Franklin Roosevelt's progressive views and was, indeed, part of his New Deal strategy to protect Americans from the harshest effects of the free-market economy.