Privileging the private home: a case of persuasive storytelling in early twentieth-century professional discourses

The private, detached single-family house has long been a dominant feature in the cities, towns, and suburbs of the United States to a much greater extent than in most other Western nations. To this very day, the private home is considered a constitutive element of the “American Dream.” This paper seeks to uncover some of the mechanisms through which this house acquired commanding presence in the American imagination and, consequently, in American metropolitan space. Specifically, the paper turns to professional discourses from the early 1900s. The paper argues that city-building experts from that time period – architects, housing reformers, and urban planners – collectively envisioned the detached single-family house as having a privileged claim to the American city and converted this vision into a persuasive story. Through their storytelling, the experts helped craft a number of government strategies that defended the dominant position of the single-family dwelling in the American city through the remainder of the twentieth century.