Barbara Berglund

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Barbara Berglund | Western Living Sunset Style in the 1920s and 1930s: The Middlebrow, the Civilized, and the Modern | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.2 | The History Cooperative

Western Living Sunset Style in the 1920s and 1930s: The Middlebrow, the Civilized, and the Modern

In the 1920s and 1930s, Sunset Magazine created images of the West and westerners that exerted considerable social power. By imbuing depictions of the civilized and the modern with prescriptions about social order, this middlebrow lifestyle magazine offered the white middle-class components for fashioning a collective identity that reinforced their regional dominance.

En los años veinte y treinta, Sunset Magazine creó imagines del Oeste y su gente que llegaron a tener un poder social importante. Por llenar sus descripciones de lo civilizado y lo moderno con recetas sobre el orden social, esta revista de la clase media ofreció a sus lectores blancos los componentes para construir una identidad colectiva que fortaleció su dominio regional.

DURING THE 1920S AND 1930S, Sunset Magazine emerged as a regionally significant middlebrow journal. Its experts—engaged in the middlebrow mission of educating its readership in good taste in literature, art, design, and architecture—exported trends from the preserve of high culture and fitted them to a broadened audience and new domestic spaces. More often than not, acquiring good taste in the terms laid down by Sunset meant being able to deftly maneuver through the modern world of consumer goods to purchase the right books, hue of paint, curtains, dining-room set, or home. Much more was at stake, however, than simply the selection of the correct rug that coordinated with the correct sofa in a way that properly brought together a harmony of line, form, color, and texture in both interior and exterior design. In Sunset, the middlebrow mission also mobilized the interrelated discourses of civilization and modernity and the particular configurations of race, class, gender, and social order that those terms implied. Through their didactic efforts, Sunset's editors and experts contributed to the development of ideas about what constituted civilized, modern western living and who constituted a civilized, modern westerner. At a time of accelerated white migration to the Pacific Slope and Southwest, Sunset produced a vision of western living that simultaneously defined whites' place in the region and offered components that could be used to fashion a collective identity for white, middle-class westerners that was both distinctively western but also recognizably within the American mainstream. Reading Sunset magazines from the 1920s and 1930s facilitates an exploration of middlebrow culture on the familiar terrain of literature as well as the less well-traveled terrain of the domestic space of the modern home. It reveals a compelling story of how visions of social order and aesthetic sensibility constructed and reinforced one another in the early-twentieth-century American West.

The first three decades following World War I saw the proliferation of an unprecedented range of activities directed toward making various forms of high culture available to a broader audience. The Book-of-the-Month Club, university extension programs, radio programs that aired literary criticism, affordable collections of "Great Books" and encyclopedias, the production of outlines that broke complex works into easily digestible bites of knowledge, and book review sections in newspapers all came into being during this time. Correspondence courses, night schools, women's study clubs, the lecture circuit, and public libraries were reinvigorated by a new interest in what was initially given the innocuous and generally positive label of "voluntary education." Books like The Meaning of a Liberal Education—published in 1927 and reviewed in Sunset's pages—probed and praised this "growing interest of the people in education as a gospel of self-improvement and social salvation."¹

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