Beware of Trailerites

Trailer Show at the headquarters of the Automobile Club of Southern California, c. 1936.  The many-portholed Good Ship Lollipop in the foreground is an Airfloat, the menacing trailer to the left is an Airstream.

In this Age of McMansions it's hard to believe that our government once feared trailerites---people who take to the travel trailer life---but that's exactly what happened in 1937.  Although trailers were not a new phenomenon, they suddenly burst forth onto our pop culture that year---featured in anything from radio shows to movies---from novels to social commentary.  Trailer manufacturing had grown exponentially since 1935, and suddenly it seemed everyone was considering selling everything and hitting the road---or for the first time owning their 'home' outright, albeit one clad in leatherette that had be waxed regularly.  Surveys were taken and it was concluded that there was a potential that half of the United States would be living in trailers by 1950.  The degradation of our social mores was duly trotted out, but the real concern was the bottom dropping out on the property tax base.

A much used trailer, possibly a small and once elegant Kauneel of Kauneel & Son, Bay City Michigan.

The likely ignition for the explosive interest in trailers was the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935.  Now empty-nesters of modest means had an income to augment the sale or renting out of their home---enough to winter in Florida or the desert Southwest and summer at some sylvan retreat.  Itinerant workers had long been trailerites, and that only increased as the economy recovered enough to offer sporadic good employment around the country.  By the end of the decade even some transitory farm workers had scraped together enough money for a used trailer, and the term 'trailer trash' was firmly  placed in the popular lexicon.

"Mr And Mrs H.F. Trumpbour live in a travel trailer." 1941

Despite the often heard sales pitch of a modern three room apartment on wheels! trailer life in the 1930s was generally short of one modern ideal: a bathroom.  Only the most luxurious trailers had bathing facilities, and if equipped with a toilet is was likely to be a chemical john---in need of being taken out as regularly as the garbage.  Communal showers and laundry tubs made the trailering life best suited for the relaxed and gregarious.  Heating and cooking was by oil, refrigeration was usually by ice or occasionally household current or kerosene.  'Bottled gas' (propane) didn't become a common trailer utility until after World War II.  The upside was a certain doll-house-like convenience, low heating costs and often beautifully paneled interiors---not to mention that all-important mobility.  New job prospects in far away places?  Hate your neighbors?  Move.

Trailer courts and motor courts often joined forces in the late 1930s

By the late 1930s, gracefully banked pavement coast to coast and four lane boulevards between some cities eased the tension new trailerites had over dragging their homes around with them.  Places to park for the night or the month were popping up everywhere---anything from resorts to kitsch to local eyesores.  A lag in popular interest was momentary, for once Europe fell into war and America was called on to supply the Allies, trailers became important housing for suddenly burgeoning industry.  The demand increased dramatically after Pearl Harbor when trailer manufacturing became a critical war industry as the government tried to ease a now-acute housing shortage that continued to plague America throughout the 1940s.  Trailers, for better or for worse, were now a permanent part of America's social and physical landscape.