ABSTRACT
The years between the start of the Great Depression in 1929 and the end of World War II in 1945 were ones of profound economic contraction and great material hardship for most Americans. The explosion of the American suburbs of vivid collective memory at the end of World War II resulted from a confluence of cultural and demographic factors: systemic housing shortages, massive new household formations (and an incipient baby boom) as GIs returned from war, implementation of the Interstate Highway System, affordable automobiles, the standardization of construction technologies, vertical integration of housing production systems, and the democratization of credit, among other things. After years of hardship, America's rapidly expanding middle class wanted material evidence of their peacetime prosperity: a house, a car, and all of the things that go along with the house and the car, such as appliances, furniture, lawn mowers, etc. Importantly, the commodity culture this widespread growth embodied was neither new nor specifically suburban; a similar expansion of consumer activity occurred immediately after the Civil War, materialized by the emergence of the department store in the urban core. Likewise, economist Thorstein Veblen introduced the concept of conspicuous consumption in relation to an urban upper class at the turn of the twentieth century. 1 However, many observers argued post-war American suburbia manifested commodity culture at an extraordinary scale. 2
