Buy Now, Pay Later

450 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE been to further push out the boundaries of the history-of-planning held itself by incorporating planning by the private sector into his discussion. Schultz has made great strides in expanding the scope of the held, but he could have gone much farther. Although its primary contribution is to urban history, the book belongs on the shelf that holds the history of technology and culture as well. It is all about the optimistic ideas 19th-century Americans had about modern technology and how to use it to improve public welfare. The chapters on hctional utopianism illuminate how 19th-century Americans imagined that new technologies might be used to improve the human condition. The later chapters on sanitarianism and municipal engineering discuss the wide range of technological solu­ tions reformers sought to apply to the city problems of their times. They also provide an excellent sense of the faith reformers then had that modern technology would indeed help them resolve urban problems. Christine M. Rosen Dr. Rosen teaches in the School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s. By Martha L. Olney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Pp. xvii + 424; tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $45.00. The challenge of interpreting the American 1920s continues to inspire historians. In Buy Now, Pay Later, Martha Olney has addressed this challenge by turning common assumptions about economic behavior into questions that deserve careful attention. Her compila­ tions and analyses of massive amounts of data will make this book a helpful resource to other historians, and her interpretations of several important issues will further debate on the business and economics of this watershed decade. Olney first asks whether increased expenditures on durable goods in the 1920s simply reflected overall growth in consumer spending or whether there were deeper changes in purchasing patterns. She demonstrates that spending patterns did indeed change significantly, as various categories of goods and services absorbed different pro­ portions of household budgets after World War I than before. These changes are of particular interest to historians of technology because the categories of durables for which demand rose the most were automobiles, household appliances, phonographs, and radios, while spending on traditional durables, such as furnishings and china, remained relatively stable. In order to purchase major durable goods, households of the 1920s reduced their spending on other goods and services, but “convention­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 451 ally defined personal saving” declined much more, and debt rose dramatically (p. 56). However, Olney reinterprets households’ pur­ chasing of major durable goods, even with debt, as a form of savings because they thereby acquire an asset that will provide a future stream of services. While interesting, this concept violates ordinary intuition. Even now, few people consider their automobiles or audio equipment as part of their households’ “savings portfolio” (p. 54), and, at best, consumer debt might be considered reverse savings. Olney also challenges the “received wisdom” that some types of credit were “created to market cars and other durable goods” (p. 4). She argues that automobile manufacturers’ needs both to keep production rates constant across seasons and to control franchised dealers motivated the initial establishment of finance companies. The largest finance companies were “factory-tied,” set up to enable dealers to buy inventory even during seasons when consumer purchases were low (p. 128). Although Olney believes that these moved into con­ sumer financing as an “afterthought” (p. 5), her evidence on this expansion from inventory loans to purchasing dealers’ retail install­ ment contracts is sketchy. Retailers had long been involved in provid­ ing consumer credit, and they had often sold consumers’ notes to banks and credit agents. Olney reviews such practices but minimizes their influence on the development of consumer credit after 1910. Olney expands her analysis of the 1920s to explore why people changed their attitudes toward debt and came to desire the new goods available to them. She examines advertising’s roles, but her discus­ sions depend on secondary literature and an ill-advised survey of advertisements in Ladies’ Home Journal. For instance, she concludes that advertising was not used

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