Author Description

Technology as Freedom tells how the New Deal brought electrical modernization to the mass of American households and how that dramatic change helped to reshape American home life. Contrary to the claims of a generation of historians that the nation's private free-market economy and the demands of society's lower orders produced domestic electrification, Ronald Tobey argues that this modernization of the American home was the direct culmination of Franklin Roosevelt's progressive views and was, indeed, part of his New Deal strategy to protect Americans from the harshest effects of the free-market economy.