Page 172 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

164 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

demolishing old and dilapidated buildings, but also constructing new liv-
ing quarters for the teeming urban masses (Swenarton, 1981).
But what started out as a public health initiative to stem the tide of com-
municable diseases arising from unsanitary and crowded living conditions
among the poor expanded to include other classes of citizens. In England,
framers of the Housing Act of 1914 took the extraordinary position that
the state has the “duty of seeing that a relative standard of comfort and
convenience is secured in the housing of the working class” (Swenarton,
1981, p. 45). This required the formation of a public utility society (at
Rosyth) where the state would contribute nine-tenths of the cost of con-
struction. State planners believed that the cost outlay would be repaid by
rental agreements with government employees because much of the new
housing was connected with the construction of a new naval facility.
If a new housing policy could be implemented to accommodate the
working class in urban centers—not just the poor, as previously config-
ured—why couldn’t it also be extended to rural areas? This part of the plan
would not be realized until after World War I, when massive numbers of
servicemen returned home from the war. As opposed to the 25,000 new
homes planned for in the 1914 law, the postwar ambition was for the state
to construct some 500,000 new homes. The project undertaken by the
British government after World War I, to build “homes fit for heroes”
(Swenarton 1981), was basically an act of pacification in the face of the
potential for massive unrest caused by labor strikes and large numbers of
demobilized soldiers out on the streets with no prospects for work, hous-
ing, or other amenities of modern living. British government officials per-
ceived that this potential situation could take Britain down the same path
as the alarming conditions that led to the overthrow of governments in
Russia and Germany (Swenarton, 1981).

What Do Social Marketers Believe?

In general, the writings of social marketers reflect a left-leaning intellectual
position that champions secular humanism and the role of government in
driving desired social changes. This is not alarming on its face, because
indeed many of the social sciences that have emerged since the 19th cen-
tury have tended to attract like-minded individuals who share common
notions about what is wrong with the world and what needs to be done to
fix it. During the Progressive Era, for example, the founder of American
sociology, Lester F. Ward, believed that as the queen of the sciences (fol-
lowing Comte’s formulation), sociology’s greatest contribution as an ap-
plied science would be the development of attractive legislation. Ward