Better Homes in America

This was the Better Homes Movement, which was initiated in the pages of the Butterick Publishing Company's household magazine, The Delineator,[1] under the editorship of Marie Mattingly Meloney.

In 1923, another department publication promoted ethnic and racial homogeneity by urging potential home buyers to consider the "general type of people living in the neighborhood" before making a purchase.

Vice-President Calvin Coolidge served as honorary chairman of the Advisory Council of Better Homes in America, and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was president of its board of directors.

To commemorate the Better Homes Movement, a replica of Payne’s colonial home in Long Island, New York, was built on the White House lawn in Washington, D.C. More than a million people visited the Payne House, and newspapers across America promoted other small Colonial Revival cottages like it.

Because of the patriotic and national sentiment of these years so soon after World War I, many of the model homes exhibited various Colonial Revival architectural elements.