From Submarines to Suburbs — 2006 ·

Selling a Better America, 1939–1959

“Cynthia Henthorn presents the most thorough and systematic examination of wartime commercial advertising that I have encountered to date, and she does so with careful attention to issues of gender, race, and class.”

Katherine Jellison — author of Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913–1963

“Henthorn’s well-written and extensively illustrated book about ’American commercial propaganda’ from 1939-1959 fills an important gap in the emerging historical narrative.... Drawing on a wealth of sources, including an impressive number of institutional advertisements, Henthorn explores how corporations promoted a strong consumer ethos during the war and beyond.”

The Historian

“Readers will appreciate the numerous illustrations as well as Henthorn’s deft analysis of advertising copy and imagery. A skillful synthesis that yields new insights, From Submarines to Suburbs is a valuable contribution to both business and cultural history.”

Business History Review

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During World War II, U.S. businesses devised marketing strategies that encouraged consumers to believe their country’s wartime experience would launch a better America. Advertisements and promotional articles celebrated the immense industrial output that corporations achieved during the war. These commercial messages positioned wartime technologies and corporate expertise as the means to streamline America and invent a socially hygienic future free from poverty, slums, drudgery, filth, and—for some businessmen—the New Deal administration.

From Submarines to Suburbs surveys the development, strategy, and effect of these campaigns over a span of twenty pivotal years. Cynthia Lee Henthorn takes a close look at how prefabricated suburban houses, high-tech kitchens, and miracle products developed from war-related industries were promoted as the hygienic solutions for establishing this better America, one led by the captains of free enterprise.

As Henthorn demonstrates, wartime advertising and marketing strategies tying consumer prosperity to war were easily adapted in the Cold War era, when a symbiotic relationship between military standing and standards of living intensified in a culture dependent on defense spending. Were the efforts to engineer a better America successful? Using documentary evidence in the form of numerous advertisements, From Submarines to Suburbs stands as a significant contribution to understanding how today’s “better” America evolved.

Cynthia Lee Henthorn has taught design history, with an emphasis on advertising and marketing trends, at art and design colleges in New York City. In her current role as a developmental editor of online courseware, she creates interactive, Web-based textbooks and assessment tools for the higher education market.