“These austere lifestyles were accompanied by an ideal of equality. In the first half of the twentieth century, most Americans liked to see themselves as members of a more or less uniform middle class. ‘The rich man smokes the same sort of cigarettes as the poor man, shaves with the same sort of razor, uses the same sort of telephone, vacuum cleaner, radio and TV set,’ Harper’s Magazine wrote with satisfaction in 1947. With this ideal came a sense of proportion; you didn’t always need to.”
