The Great Escape : WHEEL ESTATE: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes, <i> By Allan D. Wallis (Oxford University Press: $24.95; 288 pp., illustrated)</i>
The year was 1921. A party of outdoorsmen, brought on a weekend camping trip by President Warren G. (Scoutmaster) Harding, were gathered around an ingenious and elaborate chuck wagon which had been towed here behind an automobile. “The smoke from a cooking fire curled gently toward a clear sky as people talked and laughed above the echoes of wood being chopped. The man cutting wood, in striped shirt and bow tie, was Henry Ford. Thomas Alva Edison recorded the event on his motion picture camera, as Harvey Firestone looked on, offering directorial suggestions.”
These, then, were the first RVers: Early Winnebago Man. Who would have guessed that, given such illustrious and even stylish beginnings, the movement toward portable houses would have ended up in such low regard as it is today.
What a wonderfully American idea it was, a declaration of independence, to be able to gas up the old homestead and take off--to say, “If I don’t like these neighbors I’ll just move my house someplace else.” Now, however, the valiant travel trailer, incarnated as the mobile home and the factory-built house, has lost its wheels altogether in a Faustian bid for social respectability. Still, it has grown up to be the poor, dowdy stepsister of the American landscape, habitually overlooked in the debate over unaffordable housing.
“Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes” tells this saga with as much passion as can be wrung from an academic history of aluminum habitations. Allan D. Wallis, a professor of environmental design, declares his allegiance at the outset: “The mobile home may well be the single most significant and unique housing innovation in twentieth-century America.” Then, just as quickly, he concedes the central irony: “No other innovation . . . has been more widely adopted nor, simultaneously, more broadly vilified.”
The early days of auto-camping sound almost heroic. In 1919, aviation pioneer Glenn Curtis built what he called a motor bungalow, the Aerostar, which had a cockpit and a telephone to the car ahead. Charles Lindbergh, after his famous flight, could be seen pulling around a custom-made trailer fashioned after the European Gypsy wagon. By employing machine-age technology, man could return to nature without getting his pants dirty unless he wanted to. It was a big adventure, and it felt like freedom.
Throughout the 1920s, people who worked on the road--salesmen, evangelists, farmhands--caught on to the idea that they could live full-time in trailers. Some models cleverly folded out or popped up for extra space at night, and yet on the outside most of them retained that streamlined look which identified them with fast trains, planes and automobiles. The industrial age was on the move.
The trailer-camp life attracted a strain of people who wanted to be free from mortgages, from landlords, from being dictated to. The frontier spirit was alive and well, with curtains in the windows. In 1936, economist Roger W. Babson, who’d made a name for himself by foretelling the stock-market crash, received another vision. “I am going to make an astonishing prediction,” he wrote. “Within 20 years, more than half of the population of the United States will be living in automobile trailers.”
In the ‘40s the travel trailer became the “house trailer,” and sometimes didn’t move for years at a time. After the war, millions of veterans lived in trailers with their families while they went to school or worked in the boom-time factories. An editorial in Trailer Travel magazine boasted of the new Mobile Man: “Like the pioneer, he, too, is hardy and self-sufficient--he can live and thrive wherever he goes . . . He solves the manpower problems and housing shortages of the nation. He is independent, entirely democratic.”
Nevertheless, when those veterans could afford it, they moved into “real” houses. And so it has proven out since that time: Something there is in the homeowner’s heart that cannot love a mobile home. No matter how monstrous and house-like they have become, factory-built living quarters have ended up appealing to only two segments of the population. Mobile homes that can still actually move, called recreational vehicles, have been more or less preempted as long-term shelter by retired middle-class white married couples, who quietly carry on the pioneer spirit. Mobile homes that are, in fact, immobile are occupied by the marginally poor. These communities are looked down upon by other Little Pigs (those of us who built our houses out of stone) as lowering property values and harboring low-lifes.
Professor Wallis cites testimony to the contrary. It is even suggested that mobile-home parks, with their cozy proximity and common sense of plight, are the last genuine communities left in America. Time after time the mobile home has been vindicated, Wallis argues, as the only realistic alternative to overpriced conventional housing. It is adaptable, transformable, disposable. It would satisfy many of the elderly who will be needing somewhere to live in the future. It could accommodate some of the homeless.
However, since 1973, when mobile homes made up 37% of the nation’s houses being built, the proportion has diminished by half. Again, Wallis sees irony. As factory-built houses have come to look more like site-built homes, they have tended to lose their only remaining advantage. By giving up their wheels and trailer hitches they’ve gained more acceptance, and yet they’ve also fallen prey to government housing standards, which have added to their already mounting costs. So, while these domiciles are still considered unfashionable, neither are they such bargains any more.
As a seasonal resident myself of a modest parcel of wheel estate, it is my opinion that the future of this movement lies in returning to its footloose beginnings and re-imagining its style.
As communications technology continues to free more people from the need for a fixed workplace, the electronic cottage-to-go could be a dynamic alternative in the ‘90s for those who like to travel. My own winter come-along, scarcely 14 feet long (my wife calls it our California home), has a solar panel on the roof which powers, among other things, a laptop and a printer. With the addition of a mobile phone, a modem, a portable fax and a satellite dish, a human being can now, for the first time, live in blissful remove from the daily struggle while-- Look, Ma, no wires!-- staying in instant touch with the power pulses of the world. A mortal can be in two places at once--lying in a hammock right here while manipulating his destiny out there. We used to hear about the possibilities of projecting and multiplying ourselves through “psychic travel.” Turns out, it can all be done with a properly outfitted RV.
But for this to happen will require a revolution in RV taste. Trailer and motor-home manufacturers are missing out on the whole demographic ballgame by not designing some of their models for a younger, hipper audience. Who says that a home on wheels has to be white and shiny and blinding to the eyes? Who says that inside it has to look like a showroom out of a 1956 Montgomery Ward catalogue? What’s wrong with Santa Fe Southwestern? A return to Streamline Moderne?
I’m waiting for a revival of the travel-trailer classics--those little wheeled blimps from the ‘40s and ‘50s with real birch paneling inside. You could get hold of one of those and restore it like a classic car: Do over the booths in overstuffed deco, the louvered windows in leaded glass. I know about a tiny community of these trailers out near Palm Springs, each with its own fenced yard and waiting for that loving touch. Sometimes my wife and I have this fantasy about opening a gorgeous campground out along the beach with vintage trailers for rent by the night.
Picture red-velvet curtains. Candlelight and crystal. Some old Fletcher Henderson on the CD.
How much would people pay for an experience like that?
