Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940

Kyvig concentrates on how most Americans (which means primarily members of the middle and lower-middle classes who lived in small cities and towns) went about their everyday lives in a period when the country was being transformed by a national economy and a consumer culture. This is a rich and wide-ranging subject that Sinclair Lewis and John O'Hara dissected in their best novels; that was the focal point for Orson Welles in one of the greatest movies ever made, his adaptation of Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, and for Robert and Helen Lynd in their masterpieces of sociology, Middletown and Middletown in Transition; and that I've been obsessed with for years. So I came to this book expecting nothing new. But in examining the impact of cars, electricity, radio, and the movies on daily life, and in exploring changes in fashion, buying habits, family relations, and religious practices, Kyvig regularly comes up with illuminating details (as late as 1937 more Americans were born at home than in the hospital) and new ways of thinking about familiar subjects (by considering, say, the effect of the development of the school bus on the quality and character of rural education). He previously wrote a masterly account of the repeal of Prohibition, and his treatment here of every aspect of that policy is especially strong (he shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, the Eighteenth Amendment was effective -- outside major cities; he estimates that alcohol consumption dropped by more than 60 percent from 1920 to 1933). This is an unusually satisfying book.

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