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Borrowing to Buy is No Disgrace: The Social Marketing of Mortgages in 1920s America

Tue, August 19, 8:30 to 10:10am, TBA

Abstract

Most scholars date federal efforts to encourage mortgages to the New Deal. This study provides new historical insight into the development of housing finance by analyzing the activities of the Better Homes in America (BHA), a massive, quasi-private public relations operation in collaboration with federal drives to promote home ownership during the 1920s. Using primary evidence from archival collections at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, we document the emergence of a federally coordinated housing field under the leadership of Herbert Hoover during his tenure as Secretary of Commerce. Our analysis reveals a time when the public still needed convincing that mortgages were both realistic and prudent. Campaign leaders provided education on the virtues of owning, while also framing the mortgage as a savings device that would promote thrift by directing family earnings away from “wasteful” consumer spending toward the joint investment/consumption endeavor of homeownership. Our findings also show the significance of gender for the development of mortgage markets. Women were assigned a special role in campaigns that empowered them as financial stewards but also reinforced their true place as in the home. Although the BHA failed along with Hoover’s presidency during the Depression, the BHA put amortized mortgages on the nation’s mental map of what a mortgage could and should be. In so doing, it helped to establish a cultural template for interpreting and legitimizing mortgages that would survive the Great Depression.

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