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

By Ronald C. Tobey

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520323742

Ronald C. Tobey

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Technology as Freedom

Technology as Freedom

The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home

Ronald C. Tobey

University of California Press

Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press London, England

Copyright © 1996 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tobey, Ronald C.

Technology as freedom: the New Deal and the electrical modernization of the American home / Ronald C. Tobey.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-20421-2 (cloth: alk. paper)

i. Electrification—United States—History—20th century. 2. Electrification—Social aspects—United States. 3. Rural electrification—United States— History—20th century. 4. Rural electrification— Social aspects—United States. 5. New Deal, 1933-1939. I. Title.

HD9685.U5T63 1996

333-79'3²'097309043—dc20 96-23123

CIP

Printed in the United States of America 123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 @

To my family, Elisabeth, Amy, and David, who, in bearing with me through this project, modernized me continually

Contents

Contents

Plates

Illustrations

Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Appendix

Chapter 1 The Limits of Private Electrical Modernization, 1919-1929 The Perspective of Enterprise

The Consumer’s Perspective

Appliance Sales and Household

Dwelling Fitness for Electrical

Appendix

Chapter 2 The Reform Tradition

The Reformers’ Charge

The Public Power Movement

Enter, Franklin Roosevelt

Chapter 3 Homes or Industry?

Ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego

Homes Before Electrical

Public Electricity for Homes

Electricity for Industrialization

Defining Quality of Life

Appendix

Chapter 4 The New Deal in Electrical Modernization Public Enframing

The Housing Crisis Cometh

Home Ownership for a Settled Place of Abode

The New Deal in Housing

The New Deal in Electrical Modernization

TVA’s Lessons about Electrical Mass Consumerism

Chapter 5 The New Deal Saves the Home, 1933-1949 Local Property in Crisis

State-sponsored Consumerism in the Home

The Electrical Standard for Housing

Labor Housing

Defense Housing

Postwar Housing

A Dry Storm

Appendix

Chapter 6 Political Paths to Electrical Modernization

The Leap to Modernization

The Radio Jump

The Refrigerator Jump

Wartime and Postwar Prosperity

Strategies for Economic Security

Conclusion

Appendix

Chapter 7 The Culmination of the New Deal in Electrical Modernization, 1945-1960 History’s Armillary Sphere

The Storm Breaks

The Culmination of the New Deal

The Invisibility of the Revolution

Notes

Index

Plates

1. Electrical Dream Kitchen. 2

2. Competition for Electrical Refrigerators. 25

3. Substandard Urban Housing. 34

4. The 1920s: The Homes of the Elite Shone Brightly

from Their Hilltops. 70

5. President Roosevelt Speaks of Hope Through Electrical

Technology in Tupelo, Mississippi, November 18, 1934. 96

6. Treadle Machine: The Unelectrified Life in the Rural South. 97

7. Jumps in Electrical Consumption—The Radio. 160

8. Jumps in Electrical Consumption—The Refrigerator. 163

9. The Promise of the New Deal for the Nation’s Minority

Families—Electrically Modern Public Housing. 204

10. The Promise of the New Deal for the Nation’s Minority

Families—Electrically Modern Private Homes. 207

Illustrations

i. i. Dwellings Ineligible for Electrical Modernization, 1920-1954 38

1.2. Heavy Electrical Appliances Annual Sales, 1919-1965 38

1.3. Small Electrical Appliances Annual Sales, 1919-1965 39

1.4. Comparative Growth Rates, 1922-1940 39

3.1. Riverside, California Neighborhoods, 1921-1950 86

5.1. General Johnson Says 148

5.2. Supporting Our President in His National Recovery Program 149

5.3. We Deem It an Honor 150

5.4. Frigidaire Prices Are Still Down [NRA Code] 151

5.5. Trade In Your Old Refrigerator [NRA Code] 152

5.6. Loans to Repair and Modernize Your Property [NHA Title I] 153

5.7. The United States Government Provides the Opportunity

[NHA Title I] 154

5.8. Free Information on the Federal Home Modernization Plan

[NHA Title I] 155

6. i. Annual Monthly Mean, Household Electricity Consumption,

1921-1950 184

6.2. Riverside Consumption Levels, 1921-1950 184

6.3. Electrical Consumption, Individual Dwellings, Riverside,

1921-1950 185

a. 3506 Strong St., Expansion District 185 b. 4162 Rubidoux Avenue, Wood Streets District 185

c. 4706 Victoria Avenue, South East Side 186

6.4. Neighborhood Average Residential Monthly Electrical

Consumption, 1921-1950 187

a. Mile Square 187

b. Old East Side 187

c. South East Side 188

d. North East Side 188

e. Expansion 189

f. Country Club 189

g. Arlington 190

h. Tract 190

i. Groves 191

j. Wood Streets 191

k. Casa Blanca 192

6.5. Average Monthly Electrical Consumption, Owners and

Renters, 1921-1950 192

6.6. Cumulative Proportion Persisting, Country Club + Casa

Blanca vs. Mile Square 193

Tables

Li. Appliance Saturation Comparisons, 1922-1960 7

i. i. Electrical Technology Classes of Urban and Rural Housing 35

i.2. National Price Drops for Eleven Appliances, 1926-1939 37

1.3. Trends of Annual Normalized Sales, 1921-1964 37

3.1. Qualitative Grouping of Riverside Occupations, 1921-1950 87

3.2. Home Tenure Characteristics of Riverside’s Neighborhoods, 1921-1950 88

3.3. Occupational Characteristics of Riverside Neighborhoods, 1921-1950 88

3.4. Riverside Neighborhoods, Light Groupings, 1921-1923 89

3.5. Social Characteristics of Riverside Neighborhoods, 1921-1950 90

3.6. Appliance Inventory of Electrified Residences, Riverside, 1922 91

6. i. Consumption Floors for Standards of Electrical Living, 1921-1950 178

6.2. Radio Adoption by Neighborhood Class, Riverside, 1926-1950 178

6.3. Radio Adoption by Occupation, Owners and Renters, Riverside, 1926-1945 179

6.4. Refrigerator Adoption by Neighborhood Class, Riverside, 1921-1950 180

6.5. Refrigerator Adoption by Occupation, Owners and Renters, Riverside, 1926-1950 180

6.6. Residential Survival Time by Neighborhoods, Riverside, 1921-1950 181

6.7. Residential Survival Time by Consumption Floors, Riverside, 1921-1950 181

6.8. Residential Survival Time by Occupational Groups, Riverside, 1921-1950 182

6.9. Residential Tenure by Tenure Status, Occupation, and Neighborhood 182

Acknowledgments

For my understanding of the history of Riverside, California, on which several chapters of this work build, I am indebted to Tom Patterson—for his book, A Colony for California, cited throughout this work, and for his careful reading of chapters 3 and 5 in manuscript. I am indebted to Marguerite Duncan-Abrams for a similarly careful reading of chapter 3 and for her research for a master’s thesis on the history of Riverside’s planning commission. Other local historians to whom I am indebted personally or whose publications aided me are Marion Mitchell- Wilson, Harry Lawton, Allen Mawhinney, and William Myers.

A number of my university colleagues gave me valuable assistance. I am grateful to Eric Monkkonen for his careful reading of a longer version of this work and for his suggestions for revision. My debt to his theory of American urban history, America Becomes Urban, is apparent through this book. I appreciate the patient and generous readings of earlier versions of this work by anonymous readers, whose suggestions helped me to revise. John Phillips read chapters 2 and 4 and made numerous (and helpful) complaints about my quoting of politicians. I appreciate Sarah Stage’s supportive reading of my treatment of the rational housekeeping movement. David Warren, as dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of California, Riverside, provided years of support, as well as a vote of confidence in me and my students, for preservation and organization of the Riverside City utility records used in this research. Tom Thompson and Richard Turner have my gratitude for the hundreds of hours they sweated in a surplus university trailer physically organizing the utility records and drawing the record sample. My greatest intellectual debt is to my coauthor of chapter 6, Charles Wetherell. He has been my constant companion and critic for this project. He supervised and conducted nearly ten years of quantitative analysis on the Riverside utility readings and city directories—a truly formidable effort for which his coauthorship is inadequate acknowledgment. He produced brilliant analyses of data and methodological innovations that only a few historians can appreciate. I trust that he gained some satisfaction from their accomplishment, however invisible they are in the narrative of this book.

Over the years, my graduate students have contributed to my understanding of southern California’s history through their theses and our many consultations over them. I am pleased to acknowledge what I have learned from Gabriele Carey, William Myers, and Barbara Milkovich about Orange County; Jay Brigham, Donn Headley, Joe Libby, Shola Lynch, Robert Phelps, and Trudy Selleck about Los Angeles; Ric Dias about Kaiser Steel in Fontana; Anthea Hartig, H. Vincent Moses, and Lee August Simpson about the history of citrus; C. Victor Herbin, Jr., about Riverside’s African-American community; Joyce Carter Vickery about Riverside’s Mexican and New Mexican pioneers; Elizabeth Leonard and Mark Rawitsch about Riverside’s Japanese-American community; and Hongwei Hwang about Riverside’s East Side.

My search for illustrative photographs accumulated a long list of debts among institutions around the country, in part because I made an e-mail request for assistance on H-Local, an internet discussion list. I thank especially H. Vincent Moses, Riverside Municipal Museum, Riverside, California; Steve Thomas and Edward Earle, UCR/Califomia Museum of Photography, Riverside, California; Betty Cagle, Lee County Library, Tupelo, Mississippi; Mark Renovitch, Franklin Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York; Carolyn Cole, Librarian, Los Angeles Central Public Library; Don Veasey, Birmingham Public Library, Birmingham, Alabama; and Greg Koos, McLean County Historical Society, Bloomington, Illinois. I happily acknowledge the H-Net assistance of Richard Jensen, Tracy Smith, and Robert Schweitzer. At the end of this long project, I was encouraged and aided by the director of the University of California Press’s Los Angeles office, Stanley Holwitz, and by my editors, Elizabeth Knoll, Michelle Nordon, and Sheila Berg, in reducing the length of the book manuscript and preparing it for publication.

I am pleased to acknowledge thirteen years of support for voluminous copying, microfilming, research assistants’ salaries, and miscellaneous tasks of computer analysis by the Academic Senate Research Committee of the University of California, Riverside. I am also grateful to the Academic Computing Center and the dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of California, Riverside, for posting funds to Wetherell and my bottomless computing account in the Laboratory for Historical Research in the Department of History. Grant no. SES-8708094, 1987-1989, from the National Science Foundation awarded to Charles Wetherell and me as co-principal investigators supported the initial, crucial organization of data and analysis of utility readings on which we built chapters 3 and 6.

Introduction

Did Electrical Modernization Cause a Social Revolution in the American Home in the 1920s?

In 1925 Samuel Dodsworth, captain of American industry, fantasized a $1,700 house trailer hitched to his car and bound for the wilderness. He dreamed of a very masterwork of caravans: a tiny kitchen with electric stove, electric refrigerator; a tiny toilet with showerbath; a living-room which should become a bedroom by night—a living-room with a radio, a real writing desk; and on one side of the caravan, or at the back, a folding verandah. He could see his caravanners dining on the verandah in a forest fifty miles from any house. A generation later, Americans lived Dodsworth’s dream. They owned conveniences that had once been the luxuries of the rich. Some families caravanned through the American space in silver streamlined trailers. Most households caravanned in place, enjoying nature within the screened protection of suburban patios. Americans side-saddled their domestic environment of electric appliances and electronic pleasures everywhere. In 1959, Richard Nixon held up the American standard of electrical living against Nikita Khrushchev in their famous kitchen debate over the relative merits of market and command economies. Standing in front of a Moscow exhibit of an American kitchen filled with electric appliances, the vice president drew out the meaning of the exhibition for the first secretary and premier. Nixon decided that this was as good a place as any to answer the charges that had been made in the Soviet press, that only ‘the rich’ in the United States could afford such a house as this. Capitalism offered competing products at prices cheap enough for everyone. Competition created freedom. To us, diversity, the right to choose, the fact that we have a thousand different builders, that’s the spice of life. Thus Nixon fittingly concluded the decade of the 1950s. The affluent life won the cold war.¹ (See pl. 1.)

Plate i. Electrical Dream Kitchen. ([Photographer unknown.] L.A. Residences— Interiors—Dodge House. Student decorating cake/household training/Dodge House. Security Pacific National Bank Photograph Collection. Los Angeles Public Library.)

Scholars agree on the timing, scope, and thoroughness of electricity’s transformation of the American home. Electrification for illumination began in cities in the 1880S, displacing kerosene and gas lighting. By the early 1920s, private companies had electrified half of urban America’s homes. Modernization brought power tools, heating and cooling appliances, and fuller electrical lighting, making possible renovation of domestic work processes and improving the environmental quality of the home. During the 1920s the basic economic and social processes of modernization were put in place and a substantial percentage of homes were modernized. By 1959, nearly all American households— rural and urban—had been transformed. Scholars also agree on the nature of electrical modernization as a social process. Electrical modernization occurred through private marketplace consumption for all but a few rural and farm Americans. Households chose to acquire electrical goods and services in free markets of competing products offered to them by private American corporations, just as they selected clothes in department stores, cars at dealers’ lots, vegetables in grocery stores, and dreams from movies. A feminist historian claims with a hint of exasperation, All those women actively chose. A historian who examined residential electrification in Chicago argues that for the most part, consumers used a rational process to decide which products to buy. A comparison of product successes and failures illustrates how city dwellers exercised discretion in making choices from the cornucopia of electrical devices. In brief, scholars explain residential electrical modernization as part of the same phenomenon of consumerism that has typified Western mass production economies since the late nineteenth century.²

The thesis that electrical modernization occurred through consumer choice in the private marketplace has two consequences as an explanation of everyday technology. First, it denies that domestic electrical modernization significantly involved collective, public decisions. Historians of electrical technology shunt aside as irrelevant the progressive reform tradition that drew issues of distribution of services by public utilities, electrification, and electrical modernization into its debate over social democracy. They interpret municipal politics of utility regulation as just another venue for struggle within the commercial-civic elite, rather than as a tradition of debate over values between different classes. Since organized politics is the primary American institution for collective, public decision making, the consumerism thesis amounts to a wholesale rejection of the historical role and relevance of political debate to the shaping of American domesticity. We reveal the enormity of this claim when we contemplate the wide range and complexity of political institutions in the United States, including local government and the politics of utility franchises and land use planning, state government and the politics of regulation, and the national government and national mass electoral parties.³

Second, the consumerism thesis implicates the rationality with which consumers choose. By denying that consumers choose collectively in a public arena of debate, the idea of consumer rationality is ambiguous. Scholars explain consumer purchase decisions either as private choice reflecting endogenous values or as utilitarian calculation. Absent a public competition of values, value choice may not be choice at all, but value-driven behavior. Choices prescribed by cultures of gender, class, or race can carry such compulsion for individuals as to deprive them of free selection. Behavior can be sociologically functional by reinforcing group identification or by invigorating social positioning, without involving rational deliberation by the consumer. Calculating choice among competing products, as described by microeconomics, is not unambiguously rational. We presume people buy goods and services because they have needs, but modern consumers buy more than they need. In the microeconomic framework, in which households try to maximize their marginal utilities, overconsumption is essentially irrational behavior. Consumers’ behavior does not become rational simply because they comparison shop and choose among competing products. (That madmen are methodical and choose among courses of action does not mean they are not mad.) Scholars explain installing electric labor-saving machines in the kitchen basically like buying clothes. We buy the dishwasher, then in a fit of overconsumption we buy an electric knife, can opener, blender, and shredder. A parade of other electric gadgets follows—cocktail mixer, mayonnaise whip, bread maker, knife sharpener. We store most devices at the inconvenient rear of a lower cabinet and use them infrequently, more labor being required to drag them out, set them up, and clean them than they save in food preparation. Still, people never seem to have enough such gadgets for their kitchen, or clothes, or furniture in their house. All commodities become subject to fashion. We consume seemingly irrationally without regard to need and discard goods without regard to remaining usefulness. In the end, supposedly rational, utilitarian behavior paradoxically begets irrational behavior.⁴

The paradox of consumerism reinforces the persuasion that organized politics has been irrelevant to social history. Historians of everyday technology do not deny that political struggles occurred over issues related to consumption, such as the prices of water, gas, and electricity and pure food and drug acts, but they do not see a direct connection between political tradition, political debates, social policy, and household behavior. They describe choice as private, not public; as individually calculating, not collectively rational. For them, choice does not largely take place in public, involve efforts to persuade organized groups to take positions, use a public vocabulary, make arguments open to challenge by others, or endeavor to prescribe social policy for institutions capable of affecting many people.⁵

The consumerism thesis implies that an expanding, conservative capitalism, largely unrestrained by governmental regulation or unfocused by legislatively mandated social policy, deserves credit for domestic electrical modernization. The consumerism thesis thereby denies that the New Deal significantly changed— assuredly it did not revolutionize—American domesticity. Bracketing the New Deal out of the history of modernization means that private industry substantially accomplished domestic electrical modernization in the 1920s, before the New Deal, or created in the decade of the 1920s the pattern of its fulfillment in the economic boom after World War II. Electrical modernization owed no debt to the American reform tradition. According to this conservative interpretation, the New Deal only extended the technological blessings of electricity to socially marginal groups who, for special historical reasons, had not participated in the uplifting forces of the free market. These groups included African-Americans, the urban poor, and farmers. The New Deal did not, therefore, alter the essence of the nation. Private enterprise corporations, driven by the market, shaped the economy. The national government assisted corporations by coordinating market administration, but did not direct the economy toward social goals.⁶

Historians are certain that the adoption of appliances brought significant social change in some homes in the 1920s. They are less sure about the nature of the change. Few scholars think that use of appliances liberated women from home labor as advertisements promised. Historians of women tend to believe that it degraded the upper- or middle-class woman by proletarianizing her: she did servants’ work in the home, or made housework into factory production. Labor-saving devices made her labor in the home longer and harder, not easier. If such changes occurred, they would indeed have been revolutionary, because they would shatter the prevailing Victorian rationale of the home and the role of the mother and wife in it.⁷

Did domestic electrical appliances, which consumers bought in a private market uninfluenced by governmental social policy, cause a social revolution in values and behavior in the 1920s? Evidence does not allow us to see either widespread adoption of domestic electric appliances in the 1920s or significant social change due to their adoption. Statistics of adoption of electric refrigerators, ranges, vacuum cleaners, clothes washers, flatirons, and heating pads during the decade demonstrate that private industry put appliances into only a small number of homes. Capitalism drastically skewed the distribution of income, housing quality, and general quality of life in the 1920s. Private sector promotion of appliances did not challenge the highly unequal distribution of wealth. In April 1929, at the end of eight years of expansive prosperity, the majority of electrified homes (81 percent) owned the electric flatiron. Since many of the nation’s homes were not electrified, only 60 percent possessed an electric flatiron. Electrified households made the vacuum cleaner the second most widely adopted appliance, but only 39 percent of them possessed one, and only 29 percent of all homes, electrified and not electrified, possessed one. Only 27 percent of electrified homes, 20 percent of all homes, possessed the third most widely adopted device, the clothes washer. The low rates of electric appliance adoption at the end of the 1920s boom mean that less than one in four of all homes owned more than two electric appliances. In every city, in only a few neighborhoods … residents spoke confidently about shaping an environment with the aid of air conditioning, electric lights, and heat. In most other sections of their cities, however, residents continued to watch the price of coal and pass information from one generation to the next about starting a cranking coal stove on chilly mornings. The wondrous commercial vision of domestic electrical technology, a world in which machines and not persons labored, simply could not have been true for the overwhelming majority of American households. Dods worth’s dream was only a fantasy. (See table I.i.)⁸

To deny that a social revolution in the household occurred in the 1920s does not deny that some households adopted appliances, or that some players in the marketplace wanted a revolution to occur, or that popular advertisers puffed mightily to precipitate social change, or that many individuals pined for personal transformation through technology. Undoubtedly, as historians have shown, some manufacturers tried to change household work habits. Many individuals hoped, in an enduringly American way, that electric technology would radically transform their lives. As so often happens in the real world, however, a huge gap separated promise and reality.

We may suspect that a social experience narrowly limited to high-income homes in the 1920s would have a socially conservative meaning, not a progressive meaning. Rather than viewing electricity as a transformative force, these favored Americans might well have employed appliances conservatively to distinguish their class status and to protect and extend their disproportionate share of the nation’s social wealth. Social and labor historians have found, looking at the labor role of women in the home, that introduction of electrical technologies reinforced conservative values. For these households, adoption of a full service of electrical devices would not have constituted modernization. Electrical labor-saving appliances in the 1920s culminated a century-long embourgeois- ment of the home; they did not initiate an era of democratic electrical modernization. Conservative domestic values had great capacity to socialize the new electrical technology, as they were doing in the 1920s and 1930s with the telephone, without significant disruption to domestic habit.⁹

The structural bias in the U.S. economy in the 1920s argues against the thesis that 1920s prosperity planted the seeds of mass electrical modernization after 1945, when boom years returned. Mass electrical modernization after 1945 grew, rather, out of New Deal goals and programs, especially housing programs. New Deal policies sought social modernization of households through electrical modernization of their homes, not status conservation for the well-to-do. Advocates of the rational housekeeping movement early in the century called for social modernization of their homes and used electrical technology for this purpose. They conceived of appliances in the framework of household budgets, so as to transform the technology from simple labor-saving devices into assets that helped families navigate the new industrial economy. Progressive politicians adopted the rational housekeeping project. They proposed to use governmental power to sponsor it for the vast majority of the nation’s households unable to buy appliances in the 1920s. Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of the home culminated the Progressive reform tradition.

The appropriate historical context for understanding the electrical modernization of American homes is the political history of the nation’s housing. The history of the material quality of the nation’s dwellings involves the gradual obsolescence of shelter technology as new technologies offered more efficient services than old. It involves racial and class segregation of housing, which affected the housing stock realistically available to different races and economic classes. It involves local and national governmental policies regarding quality of housing. Regional policy debates in southern California and the political and economic history of housing in Riverside, California, typified the coming of electrical modernization to towns and cities around the nation. The New Deal sought a housing revolution—to raise substandard American residences up to minimal standards of physical shelter, to distribute the blessings of electrical modernization to the four-fifths of the nation’s households that did not benefit from the domestic electrical affluence of the 1920s, and to modernize the social and moral qualities of the families in those homes. The New Deal sought to make the owner- occupied, electrically modern dwelling a major asset for lifelong security for all families, protecting them from the ragged winds of capitalism’s uncertain wage labor market. As a national revolution of social modernization, electrical modernization resulted directly from the New Deal’s transformation of the nation’s homes.

Appendix

Table Li. Appliance Saturation Comparisons, 1922-1960

NOTE: Saturation is the number of appliances in stock per one hundred households. Saturation is not applicable as a measure of adoption for range at risk, because I used range adoption to define the extent of modernized dwellings before 1945. At risk refers to the class of dwellings that could technologically have served the appliance. A dwelling without electricity is not at risk to use electrical appliances and a dwelling with only light circuits is not at risk to use heavy power appliances. I estimated saturation at the end of April to coincide with the decennial census. Floor model vacuum cleaners only; not including hand-held models. Radio saturation estimates refer to year-end, rather than midyear.

SOURCES: I estimated the adoption of household electrical appliances from a model of adoption, rather than generalizing from empirical marketing surveys of adoption. I made this choice for methodological reasons. Constructing a model gives me complete knowledge of the methods involved in estimating adoption, so I know how much confidence to place in my estimates. Also, with a time series model, I can test my projections against the few trustworthy surveys, especially the Bureau of the Census’s 1940 survey of household refrigerators. I derived annual sales of appliances from Electrical World (established in 1906) and Electrical Merchandising (established in 1916), trade journals published by the McGraw Company. The Bureau of the Census also used their data in Statistical Abstracts (1963) and Historical Statistics of the United States (1976). I obtained annual estimates of the number of households from Patience Lauriat and Paul C. Glick, Estimates of the Number of Households in the United States, 1900-1958, Current Population Reports, Population Characteristics, ser. p.20, no. 92 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1959). I measured depreciation (i.e., removal of appliances from the stock of appliances in households) empirically by determining the rate of straight line depreciation that would best predict national censuses of appliance stock, such as the U.S. Census’s 1940 query on possession of refrigerators. Depreciation estimates are summarized in the table below.

Hence, saturation is derived:

Cumulative sales = Year 1 sales + Year 2 sales … + Year x sales [-exports]

Stock = Cumulative sales — Depreciation

Saturation = Stock/Households

OTHER EMPIRICAL SURVEYS: Reports of private marketing studies do not sufficiently describe their methods for me to make confident generalizations on them. Also, nearly all surveys were of special markets, such as a particular city, or the electrified households in an operating utility’s service area. Finally, although some marketing surveys asked respondents for income, none looked at housing conditions, which I identify in chapter 1 as a key factor in appliance adoption or housing tenure status of the resident (whether owner or renter), which I discuss as another key factor in chapter 6.1 examined the following marketing surveys: Edison Illuminating Companies Survey, 1921-1923, of Selected Wired Residences in Eight Northeastern Cities, reported in Electrical World 82 (October 1923): 708-710; New York Edison Appliance Survey, 1925, Manhattan and Bronx Households, reported in Survey of Appliance and Lighting Load, Electrical World 86 (August 22, 1925): 375; Chicago Residential Appliance Ownership, 1926 and 1929, reported in (for 1926) Harold L. Platt, The Electric City, table 29, Household Electrical Appliances in Use in Chicago in 1926, p. 24, and (for 1929) George H. Jones (identified as Power Engineer of the Commonwealth Edison Company of Chicago), Better Load Factor, Electrical World 95 (June 28,1930): table, Appliances Used in 5,000 Homes in Chicago, p. 1339; Pittsburgh Appliance Ownership, 1931, reported in table 14, Consumption by Pittsburgh Families in Three Income Groups, 1931, Recent Social Trends in the United States, Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, foreword by Herbert Hoover (New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 2:896; National Summary, Real Property Inventory Urban Places, 1934-1936, and Real Property Inventory Sixty-four Cities, 1934, reported in tables E, L, N, in Peyton Stapp, Urban Housing: A Summary of Real Property Inventories Conducted as Work Projects, 1934-1936, Works Progress Administration, Division of Social Research (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938), 17 f.; Percentage of Urban Households Making Installment Purchases of Electric Appliances, 1935, reported in Expenditures for Electrical Appliances by Workers in 42 Cities, prepared by the Bureau’s Cost of Living Division, Faith M. Williams, chief, Monthly Labor Review 46 (February 1938): table 2, p. 450 if.; Pittsburgh Domestic Appliance Ownership Survey, 1944, reported in Tom F. Blackbum, Survey Reveals Pittsburgh Appliances Possibilities, Electrical Merchandising 72 (December 1944): table, Percent of Families Owning Each Major Appliance, p. 20.

I provide a full account of the sales, stock, and depreciation models and analysis of the empirical surveys in Ronald C. Tobey, "Statistical Supplement to Technology as Freedom" (unpublished ms., 1995).

Chapter 1

The Limits of Private Electrical Modernization, 1919-1929

The Perspective of Enterprise

In the 1920s, American electrical utilities completed the final stage of their development. The commercial central station industry had evolved from small, local distribution systems at the turn of the century to regional transmission monopolies by World War I. Holding companies then consolidated regional utilities in the decade before the Great Depression. By 1929, five holding companies controlled 80 percent of the electrical generating capacity of the nation. Electrical operating utilities grew dramatically during the 1920s. The amount of electricity generated by central station utilities rose 228 percent, from 39,519 million kilowatts in 1920 to 90,076 million kilowatts in 1930. Revenues from sales of this electricity grew by 244 percent, from $882 million in 1920 to $2,155 million in 1930. Since the vast majority of ultimate consumers of electricity were households and since domestic consumption of electricity returned a significant percentage of utilities’ revenue, observers assumed that utilities as an industry eagerly mass marketed home appliances during the decade to increase domestic consumption of electricity. This was not the case.¹

Most utilities lacked enthusiasm for the domestic market, because their bottom line showed little profit from it. The industry in fact subsidized much household service—because governments required them to do so. As late as 1930, eight million households, or 40 percent of the nation’s private utility domestic customers, did not consume enough electricity to be profitable. The utilities subsidized this service by maintaining higher flat rates to relatively high value domestic users.²

The utilities naturally wished to invest their capital in the most profitable projects. In the 1920s, the sale of electricity to industry using electric power motors brought the greatest profit. Between 1923 and 1929, the percentage of total electricity distributed in the United States taken by manufacturers rose from 48.2 to 52.9 percent. Central station electrification of industry brought high returns in two ways. First, many industrial plants and large stores had their own electrical generators and distribution systems. Utilities needed only to convince their management that they could buy central station energy more cheaply than they could generate their own power. The utility then could feed electricity to the industrial plant’s electricity system, in some cases requiring installation of couplers to transform AC to DC current. The utilities’ industrial campaign met remarkable success. After 1923 the aggregate power generated in the United States by isolated industrial power plants declined. The second reason for the high profit from industrial sales came from the geographical concentration of industrial plant energy consumption. Industrial motors used large amounts of electricity when measured by standard criteria, such as metered connections per mile of distribution line. Other factors also affected the relative profitability of the industrial and the domestic sectors of the business. For instance, domestic consumption’s higher ratio of distribution mileage to meters meant greater losses of electricity from distribution lines. More meters brought higher overhead costs for service and management. An analysis conducted in 1923 of residential service in the Middle West revealed that the carrying cost of homes averaged $2 to $2.50 a month, at a time when the average revenue from homes was less than that.³

In 1929, domestic customers constituted 82.7 percent of users of central station energy but returned only 29.4 percent of total revenues. Large and small industries, by contrast, constituted 17.3 percent of customers and returned 55.5 percent of total revenues. The 1920s saw tremendous growth in household electrification, but the percentage of total customers comprised by households in 1929 changed little from 1922. Managers of the electric utilities understood their profit situation. As the utilities pulled out of the postwar depression (1920-1921), they looked to industrial electrification and electrical modernization of capital equipment for the profits they needed to attract financing for the increased generating capacity they intended to install. In an editorial of January 1923, Electrical World, the major management journal of the industry, pointed to the fact that only one-third of machine horsepower in industry came from electricity. The editors recommended conversion of the remaining two-thirds of industrial horsepower as the outstanding opportunity for the utilities. Projections of future electrical loads pointed to greater increases in industrial power loads than domestic lighting loads. In a set of ten-year projections made in 1924, industrial power clearly ranked as the planning priority, though predicted increases in domestic power sales warranted notice.⁴

An array of problems blocked increased sale of electricity to homes for the utilities. In the early 1920s, utility marketing analysts portrayed American homes as two distinct markets. Home illumination comprised one market for electricity; the other market called for full electrical service. Under public regulation to extend service broadly, utilities had to make capital investment to electrify new houses and to retrofit nonelectrified housing stock with wiring for illumination. Utilities thought households might install one or at most a few small electric appliances on house light lines. Managers drew back, however, from investing in electrifying dwellings for heavy appliances, because heavier appliances required heavier wiring and different neighborhood transformers, with no assurance that the investment would produce significantly greater consumption of electricity. Most utility managers simply did not believe, through the 1920s, that the home heavy appliance market would be sufficiently profitable for them to divert massive capital to it. A marketing study of 584 residential customers conducted by the Philadelphia Electric Company in 1926 demonstrated that the average light customer worked within a rigid budget for electrical service. Though households might be willing to buy appliances up to their budget limits, they resisted raising the level of budgeted expenditures for electrical service. Electrical demand was not elastic: It would appear that considerable resistance exists to an increase in the annual expenditure even in the face of continual educational effort as to the advantages and economic benefits of a more liberal use of electric service. On the basis of analysis of federal income tax data and utility marketing, another analyst concluded flatly, The actual demand for electric service will always be a function of the amount of the family budget that can be spent for these domestic requirements.⁵

As a result of the segmentation of the residential market, most utilities refused to build electrical load in the illumination sector that represented four- fifths of their customers. They focused their marketing efforts, instead, on increasing consumption by the few upper-income households who could pay for full electric service. This class represented a large market, no doubt, but not a mass market. A report by Electrical World in 1927 testified to this widespread strategy. An industry analyst surveyed 376 large utilities serving an aggregate population of 54,500,000 persons. The analysis demonstrated—in his opinion— that only 28 percent of the utilities promoted full domestic service, that is, appliances as well as lights, across all their markets. They ignored lower-income households earning $2,000 to $3,000 a year. A review of 1928 revenues from fifty-seven operating utilities led Electrical World to conclude that only 10 to 20 percent of these utilities customers were prospects for complete electric service at indicated competitive rates. The experience of the few utilities that did attempt to market full service indicated that average customers responded to lowered appliance prices and electric rates with increased demand; nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of utilities did not lower prices, refusing to believe that those households had sufficient income to make them worth the investment. Throughout the 1920s, the industry press was filled with self-confirming studies that middle- and lower-income households were not good markets for increased electricity consumption.⁶

For all the claims utilities made in the 1920s of marketing prowess and of the necessity for encouraging diversity of electric demand (for purposes of load management), the evidence in their own trade literature testifies that they had little understanding of domestic consumers and marketing. They pigeonholed households in a few large-scale categories. They expressed little appreciation for the individuality of consumer tastes and buying habits. They had little concrete information about how households actually worked inside the home or made buying decisions. Most utilities lacked appreciation for the research on rural, farm, and urban households by women social scientists of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1920s and for the whole range of household management literature by housekeeping reformers. Their ignorance of the home market was not unusual. Telephone companies, for instance, could not initially imagine that households might want to use phones simply for social conversation. As the study by C. F. Lacombe revealed in 1927, most utilities had little understanding of the competitive, mass consumer marketplace.⁷

Some of the utilities’ difficulty in assessing the residential market developed because they had no standard accounting methods to analyze the domestic rate structure. They could not determine how to charge the home user of appliances to make a profit. A survey in 1923 of thirty-five midwestem utilities revealed that in small operating utilities, with less than a thousand domestic customers, the utility managers had almost a total lack of knowledge of what it costs to carry a residential consumer. The domestic rate posed an economic conundrum not solved by the utilities until the early 1930s. On the one hand, the cheap, flat rate enabled the utilities to fulfill their political mandate for universal electrification. On the other hand, the flat rate discouraged consumption of electricity. How did this situation arise? Samuel Insull’s Chicago Edison system established the pattern of charging domestic customers by a cheap, flat rate in the 1890s. Insull adopted a two-tier rate that he thought would permit massive residential consumption, though this consumption did not develop as he expected. Ordinary household customers had a flat illumination rate. Large consumers had a second, lower, rate for consumption above a base amount. The two-tier billing structure reflected the utilities’ segmented domestic market conception. Shortly before World War I, state regulatory commissions enshrined the flat rate as democratic social policy and thereby threw onto the utilities the burden of justifying a departure from this historic practice. Such justification proved extremely difficult. Not until the early 1930s did the utility industry agree on accounting procedures to determine profit and loss in delivering electrical service to the individual customer.⁸

Theoretically, the flat rate represented the average charge to the individual customer needed to cover capital and operating expenses, proportional to the aggregate ratio of capital and operating expenses for domestic customers as a whole. Being an average charge, domestic customers who consumed high amounts of electricity subsidized domestic customers who consumed low amounts. An analogous situation characterized the telephone industry before 1894. Bell systems charged users a universal flat rate. Only when telephone companies switched to per-message rates could average monthly charges drop sufficiently to make telephones attractive for homes, which used them less than did businesses. Before World War I, the electrical industry could tolerate the economics of the flat rate. Since sales to industry and electric railroads earned most of the utilities’ profit, the loss due to subsidization was not great. It certainly did not seem worth the effort to put every domestic customer on a profit basis. During normal growth, the addition of profitable customers balanced the addition of subsidized customers. Subsidized customers had little reason to object. Profitable customers did not use enough kilowatt-hours of electricity monthly to make carrying a subsidized customer burdensome. Across the country, in the 1920s, the domestic flat rate ranged between nine cents and seven cents per kilowatt-hour (kwh). In 1922, a study by the Idaho Power Company demonstrated that to make a profit the company would have to charge 10.5 cents/kwh