Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture [Paperback]

Andrew Hurley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 2002

The years immediately following the Second World War witnessed a dramatic transformation of America's working-class suburbs, driven by an unprecedented post-war prosperity and a burgeoning consumer culture. Chrome and neon were the new currency in this newly vital consumer culture, and no post-war consumer products trafficked more heavily in this currency than diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks. Through these three distinctively American institutions, Andrew Hurley examines the struggle of Americans with modest means to attain the good life after two long decades of depression and war.He tells this story of the humble origins, explosive growth, and gradual, sad decline of the diner, bowling alley, and trailer park in expert fashion. This is cultural and social history that knows how to entertain.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Much as Stephanie Coontz did in her influential The Way We Never Were (LJ 9/1/92), Hurley (history, Univ. of Missouri; Environmental Inequalities, Common Fields) holds up a new lens to class, race, gender, and the economy in the postwar era. The accessible topics and interesting prose support strong arguments concerning how marketing these institutions to newly affluent blue-collar workers shaped images of ideal middle-class suburban families in ways that excluded people of color. Unfortunately, the four chapters do not hold together particularly well. The separate chapters on diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks are more detailed than necessary, while the concluding chapter covers new economic territory without weaving in the strands of earlier chapters. Recommended for academic and public library collections in American studies, economic/business history, and sociology. Paula R. Dempsey, DePaul Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"It has a quirky charm." -- --Wall Street Journal

"Well-documented, tightly reasoned and balanced." -- --San Francisco Chronicle

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (February 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465031870
• ISBN-13: 978-0465031870
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #436,028 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Social history along the highway, April 9, 2002

By 

saskatoonguy (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture (Paperback)

This is essentially a book of social history, although it brings together the disciplines of economic history, gender studies, architecture, and popular culture. Hurley discusses how diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks reflected the social values of the 1950s and 1960s. The chapters on the three building types go into excruciating detail; for example, every nuance of diner design and operation is discussed and scrutinized for meaning. The book would have been improved if the author had covered more building types in the same number of pages.

Hurley's overriding theme is laudable: On the outskirts of most towns, there is a region that constituted that community's "commercial strip" during the 1950s and 1960s, before America discovered fast food, shopping malls, and big-box stores. Most of us drive through these past-their-prime commercial strips every day, seeing nothing but obsolete buildings. Hurley points out that these obsolete commercial strips are the equivalent of archeological sites, speaking volumes about how family values have evolved during the past half-century.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars working class dreams in the consumer paradise, May 16, 2003

By 

Scott Grau "avid reader" (Iowa City, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture (Paperback)

Hurley offers an insightful, thought-provoking, and at times disturbing picture of three emblematic popular institutions of post-war America. While all came out of working class roots and emerged as popular features in the wider popular culture of the 1950s, each industry found different ways to negotiate its relationship with its working class roots and its aspiration for access to a wider mass market. Hurley shows how working class Americans, emerging from the economic trauma of poverty and the Great Depression, sought through consumer culture to redefine themselves as middle class, even as middle class Americans often created new kinds of fashion snobbery as a way of redefining the new aspiring working class/middle class as crass or vulgar.

Hurley explores the emergence of the new mass market that emergence with relative working class affluence after the Second World War, while properly noting the limitations of that affluence. He also explores how this new mass consumer market, shaped by advertising constructs of domesticity and family togetherness, both limited, and even excluded women and minorities (especially African-Americans, who continued to be the target of the most vigorous economic discrimination and exclusion) through the 1960s and 1970s, even as the mass market ideal was crumbling under new challenges generated during the 1960s that sprang from many of the impulses unleased by American consumerism itself.

This is a fascinating and indeed entertaining work. Yoy can learn a lot about the social and cultural history of diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks, but beyond that, you can get a valuable insight into some of the larger forces that have shaped who we are as Americans, both for better and for worse.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, Easy Read., October 2, 2008

By 

M. Hancock - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture (Hardcover)

I urge anyone to check this fascinating, brief snapshot of 20th century American culture. I've loaned this book to several friends, and they all loved it as well.

I actually bought mine used for a couple of bucks. Well worth it.