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Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on May 25, 2007
Enterprise and Society 2007 8(2):413-420; doi:10.1093/es/khm029
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Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference.

David A. Hanks and Anne Hoy. American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow

Christina Cogdell. Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s

Glenn Porter

Director Emeritus, Hagley Museum and Library

David A. Hanks and Anne Hoy. American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow. Paris: Flammarion, 2005. 312 pp. ISBN 2-0803-0499-2, $75.00

Christina Cogdell. Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. xvii + 328 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3824-9, $42.50

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Beginning in the latter part of the 1920s, the look of objects in the human-made world within the United States began to change. Many things that had previously been vertical, angular, rectilinear, complex, and bristling with protuberances became horizontal, rounded or parabolic, simple and smooth, with hidden hardware and machinery. This was the phenomenon known as streamlining. Vehicles of transport led the way—airplanes, automobiles, ocean liners, dirigibles, and especially the locomotives that "toppled the skyscraper as the master metaphor of the era," as David A. Hanks and Anne Hoy comment in American Streamlined Design (p. 170). Soon, streamlining moved beyond its original rationale as a means of facilitating the passage of vehicles through air or water to a broad design style, highly popular in the consumer economy of the United States, but less so elsewhere. As Hanks and Hoy analyze and illustrate with more than 350 beautiful photographs and drawings, . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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