How did Americans’ opinion of their government sink so low? Sixty years ago, nearly 8 in 10 Americans said they trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time. But for an administration that campaigned on making America “great again,” there is remarkably little curiosity about what version of government, exactly, elicited such widespread acclaim.
The reason is fairly obvious — it was nothing like what they are building now.
The ideal kitchen sink, for a working kitchen of any reasonable size, has two basins. On the right, it’s a shallow five inches, a comfortable depth for washing dishes. On the left, it’s deeper — eight inches, perfect for rinsing down fresh fruits and vegetables. A wire drying rack is sized to fit the deeper basin; a cupboard behind the faucets secrets away soaps and sponges.
You’re unlikely to find this sink design in most modern houses. But it is the fruit of decades of diligent government research conducted primarily by a little-known agency known as the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics. From 1923 to 1962, the bureau deployed mass public surveys, built experimental houses and conducted research into hundreds of consumer products from textiles to meats to kitchen sinks, all to deduce scientifically the best possible way to live a middle-class life in midcentury America. The resulting techniques, materials and designs still prompt misty-eyed nostalgia from TikTok traditionalists and bitter 21st-century consumers alike. In the last century, perhaps no other government agency has had such a profound impact on daily life — and yet today, it has been almost completely forgotten.
In many ways, the whole discipline of home economics started from ideological convictions very similar to those held by Musk and his allies: The historian and author Carolyn Goldstein identified “a belief in scientific and technological progress” and a sense of “the superiority of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.” In the 19th century, home economics taught best practices for cooking, gardening, sewing and other technical housekeeping skills. As Goldstein told me in an interview, it was “a time when we believed that everything, all of our social problems, had an engineering solution to them.”
At the turn of the century, the American government was actively engaged in building up the country’s rural heartland. While cities industrialized, rural America risked being left behind, and the backbone of 19th-century American identity — the family farmer, the frontiersman, the homesteader — was gradually fading away. “People were leaving their farms,” Goldstein said. “And by contrast, the farm, the farmers and the farm families that stayed looked downtrodden, overworked, inefficient.”