In the early 1920s, the United States government confronted a housing crisis. During the First World War, the government had rerouted domestic spending on housing units to military spending. At the same time, a growing urban population, comprised increasingly of rural transplants and international immigrants, put a squeeze on the existing housing system. The Great Migration of the 1910s, in which thousands of Black Americans left the South for the North, had also increased the northern population and heightened racial tensions around housing. By 1923, a Los Angeles Times article, quoting Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, reported the housing shortage at one million units.
The government, under the guidance of President Warren G. Harding, knew that the country needed a quick fix to its housing woes. But in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a deep distrust of communism meant that cooperative and state-run housing projects were off the table. Officials looked to the private sector for a solution, and found a willing and able partner in a new social enterprise: Better Homes in America.
Better Homes in America (BHA) was formed in 1922, a partnership between the Harding administration (Herbert Hoover in particular) and Marie Meloney, the editor-in-chief of the women’s magazine The Delineator. The campaign encouraged home ownership as a financial, social, and patriotic undertaking, with homemaking and consumerism at its core. BHA presented itself as a traditionalizing force for good, one that would help stabilize the country and raise up the next generation of patriotic citizens.
The housewife in particular was called upon for service. In her magazine, Meloney extolled the virtues of homemaking as an act of civic duty, and, in the extreme, a bulwark against communism. “There is not another activity or industry comparable, in numbers employed, in value of effort or importance of production, with this one of the home. But America has left it to shift for itself, to get on any old way,” she wrote in October 1922. “The housewife and her problems have been forgotten. It is time that she be remembered. For what matter it if a nation be great in industry, in commerce, in politics, if she be not also great in her homes?”
To spread their message, BHA leaders established local chapters, and provided the chapters with information to disseminate to members and the public. In October 1922, they launched Better Homes Week, which included a campaign for local chapters to build their own “better” model homes in a BHA-approved style; national contests for the best model home; and the erection of a National Better Home in Washington, D.C. The National Better Home was designed in the style of a seventeenth-century home on Long Island, with a nostalgic eye turned toward a bygone era of wholesome family togetherness, but in a way that was achievable for a largely white middle-class. According to the urban historian Dolores Hayden, by 1930, the national BHA claimed that there were more than 7,000 local committees in operation.
