Better Living: Toward a Cultural History of a Business Slogan

This article traces the migration of the slogan "better living"from its inception in 1935 as an attempt to clean up the corporateimage of Du Pont, through its dissemination into the buildingtrades and architecture during and after World War II, and finallyinto urban planning in the postwar decades. These fields borrowedthe phrase back and forth in their promotional literature inorder to serve their own, often clashing agendas—one strandof the larger contest between the forces of free enterpriseand those of centralized planning and reform. The essay aimsto bring together aspects of business, architecture, and planningin order to explore the fertile cultural milieu these differentfields shared in the middle decades of the twentieth century.