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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.
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