House proud: how the real estate industry got respectable.

• Author: Risen, Clay

A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth Century American Middle Class By Jeffrey M. Hornstein Duke University Press; $22.95

In 1922, Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt, his classic satire of the emerging American mass middle class. Readers remember its title character, George Babbitt, for his comfortable angst, his paradoxical mixture of class pride and implacable spiritual unease, and his sense of accomplishment tossed with a constant concern for status. But many readers may not recall Babbitt's chosen career: He is a realtor. And though some aspects of the book have not worn well--today's reader, well-versed in the ironies of American middle-class life, will likely find its depiction of Babbitt and his socioeconomic environs wooden and unconvincing--Lewis could not have chosen a better career to embody 1920s middle-class anxiety. Realty was just then emerging as a middle-class profession, and, like Babbitt, it was nervously obsessed with positioning itself as a socially respectable pursuit grounded in empirical research, a profession akin to law or medicine. "Makes me tired the way these doctors and profs and preachers put on the lugs about being 'professional men,'" Babbitt says. "A good realtor has to have more knowledge and finesse than any of 'em."

Looking back, we can see that Babbitt and his colleagues needn't have worried--realty rode the American middle class to dominance in the decades before and after World War II, becoming one of the most lucrative sectors of the U.S. economy within a few decades. At the same time, its rise came just as the federal government was taking on new powers and responsibilities between the wars, and it was one of the first industries to realize the importance of maintaining a robust Washington office--a presence that allowed realtors to shape the modern housing market. "Organized real estate brokers structured the rules of the real estate market to create a demand for their services, positioning themselves as the principal purveyors of what came to be the quintessential symbol of middle-class status," writes Jeffrey Hornstein in his survey of realty in the 20th century, A Nation of Realtors[R].

But the parallel history of realty and the middle class does not mean that the interests of the two have always intersected. Indeed, as the industry's status anxieties subsided and its profit motive, a central but previously suppressed driving force, came to the fore after World War II, those interests began to diverge. Realty took a...