An American Experience
The modest, handsome Dutch Colonial Revival featured in the December 18, 1926 issue of the Saturday Evening Post epitomized the ideal American home of the 1920s. A classic combination of materials and design: a Colonial Revival home represented taste, family, wealth and history, without ostentation. While this structure may currently resemble hundreds of other middle-class Dutch Colonial homes of the period, this particular house is a special reminder of life in pre-World War II America.
Westwood Hills architect, Elizabeth Eans (Rivard), designed the Miss Abbie Abshire house in Fairway, Kansas in 1926. Miss Evans worked for the Kansas City, Missouri, contracting firm of R.L. Falkenburg. Her practice with the firm began in 1923, shortly after their graduation from the University of Kansas School of Architecture. Evans quickly established a reputation for designing superior quality cottage-style homes for families of modest means. The Abshire home continued to accurately reinforce her reputation of designing intelligently scaled, well planned homes with attention to detail.
The Creo-Dipt Company featured this house in a full-page, watercolor advertisement on page 46 of the December Post. The Falkenburg Company clad and roofed the Abshire house with Creo-Dipt brand, treated red cedar, wood shingles. Creo-Dipt shingles were touted as low maintenance, energy saving, versatile, and, above all, attractive. Available in a rainbow of color tints, Creo-Dipt shingles could be used on roofs or for wall cladding applications. It was implied that this brand was a premium building material, sought after by the modern families of good taste and means.
A feature in a Saturday Evening Post advertisement was not coincidental. All of the advertisers in the magazine were meticulously chosen. The editors wanted to present a very specific, idealized vision of not only American life, but also of American consumer goods. The selection of feature stories, art, reviews, and profiles were equally as deliberate. A carefully marketed magazine could find clever ways to manipulate its reading audience’s taste. The entire Post package was ingenious; a meticulously planned, edited, and arranged marketing tool designed to influence the American middle-class. The publishers wanted to present an aesthetic inspiring values, humility and a strong work ethic. According to historian Jan Cohn, this idea was rooted in the specific values of “hard work, fair play, personal responsibility, individual initiative, and common sense.” The message was effective and far-reaching. Saturday Evening Post had a circulation of more than two million readers in 1924. The Post represented what middle-American society was, or, at least, wanted to be between 1920-1940. As a result, companies scrambled for the opportunity to advertise their products on their pages.
The Abshire house perfectly represented the aspirations and values of middle-class Americans of the 1920s as idealized by the Saturday Evening Post. Cohn best summarized the spirit behind the magazine, which accounted for its staggering popularity: “To read the Post was to become American…and to participate in the American experience.”
--ALBUM vol. 11, no. 4 (fall 1998)