The Modernize Main Street campaign created during the Depression years
represented a significant effort to revitalize the central business dis-
tricts of American communities [#note1]_. 

Promoted through trade journals and design competitions, the 
idea of updating commercial buildings with modern materials and streamlined 
design was therefore, one way of renewing citizen’s interest in
consumption [#note2]_.

Prior to the 1920s, most American citizens tended to “make do” and reuse
material goods instead of purchasing new items each year [#note4]_. 

Advertising strategies to convince people to buy products that were not
absolute necessities for daily life (or were absolutely needed at the time)
soon became the focus of marketing executives [#note5]_. 

Popular magazines with mass distribution like *Ladies’ Home Journal* and *The
Saturday Evening Post* dis- played suggestive advertisements instilling a
desire for consumable products.  Marketing ideas based on planned obsolescence
and repackaged goods encour- aged a development of this “modern” consumer
culture [#note6]_.

An increased cultural emphasis on consumption as a capitalist value challenged
Puritan morals which began to decline by the end of the 1920s [#note7]_.


1938 [*]_. $112,457,506 

1939 [*]_. $112,457,506 

.. Year Amount 
.. 1933 $33,000,000 
.. 1934 $37,861,600 
.. 1935 $69,036,398 
.. 1936 $97,310,000 
.. 1937 $124,536,283 
.. 1939 $126,159,914 
.. 1940 $130,101,332 
.. 1941 $133,987,740 


.. [*] There was a recession in 1938 which dampened spending on modernizing. 
 The 1938 figure, however, was still above the spending of 1936. 

.. [*] second ere was a recession in 1938 which dampened spending on modernizing. 
 The 1938 figure, however, was still above the spending of 1936. 

.. class:: endnotes
.. rubric:: Endnotes


.. [#note1] Esperdy, Gabrielle. “Modernizing Main Street: Everyday Architecture and 
 the New Deal.” Dissertation. (The City University of New York, 1999). Ann 
 Arbor, Michigan: UMI, 2000, 327. 
 
 para NOTE

.. [#note2] Gebhard, David. *Art Deco in America*. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 
  1996), 14. 


.. [#note4] Horowitz, Daniel. *The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Towards the 
  Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940*. Baltimore: John Hopkins University 
  Press, 1985, 114. 

.. [#note5] Filene, Edward A. *The Next Steps in Retailing*. (New York: Harper and 
 Brothers, Inc., 1937): 2 

.. [#note6]  Ewan, Stuart. *All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary 
 Culture*. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1988, 47. 

.. [#note7] Horowitz, Daniel. *The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Towards the Con- 
 sumer Society in America, 1875-1940*, 134-135.