During the early months of 1919, the term “Reconstruction,” of concern to few but historians and the friends and foes of D.W. Griffith in the years immediately preceding the Great War, was again on the lips of Americans. Alabama State Federation of Labor President, William L. Harrison, noted that “Since the signing of the Armistice, and the cessation of hostilities, the questions of reconstruction and re-adjustment are being diligently studied by the people generally.” Out of the war, he argued, came “new and progressive ideas on reconstruction.” He was right. As the war ended, dozens of books and articles bearing titles like Reconstructing America, Democracy and Reconstruction, and Social Reconstruction joined a new journal called Reconstruction: A Herald of the New Time. This literature celebrated the role that a strong federal government had played in helping workers secure the right to join unions during the war, and it laid out hopeful plans for what the government might do to solve the “labor question” after the war. Such ideas helped convince Harrison's counterpart, Florida State Federation of Labor President John H. Mackey, that the postwar era would bring “a silver ray which carries with it wondrous tidings for the uplift of the masses.”

In his 1922 novel Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis introduced his main character, George Follansbee Babbitt, a realtor and member of the local planning board, by describing Babbitt's suburban residence. Paraphrasing contemporary house-plan publications, Lewis characterized the Dutch Colonial dwelling as at once “competent and glossy.” Babbitt's yard, “was perfection … his bathroom … porcelain and glazed tile and metal sleek as silver … and his bedroom … right out of Cheerful Modern Homes for Medium Incomes.” Indeed, his house “had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences.”

During the past two decades, sociologists, political scientists, and historians have been increasingly interested in the development of modern states and their administrative structures. By focusing on specific policies and government agencies, these scholars have provided various frameworks for understanding the growth of the American state in the twentieth century, especially during the New Deal and the 1940s. One issue that has received scant attention, though, is housing policies. Public housing, federally insured home mortgages, and tax policies that privileged home owners were significant state interventions that profoundly affected economic relationships and the formation of social policy. Housing policies therefore need to be seen as part of larger economic and political developments.

It has become an article of faith that political history has fallen on hard times in recent years. “[T]he status of the political historian within the profession,” William E. Leuchtenburg observed in his 1986 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians (OAH) has “sunk to somewhere between that of a faith healer and a chiropractor.” Hugh Davis Graham, in an insightful analysis of policy history, reached a similar conclusion. “The ranks of traditional political history are depleted,” he wrote in 1993, “their assumptions and methods discredited along with the Great White Men whose careers they chronicled.”