Heya! I have an earlier answer to a similar question that might interest you:
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The American consumer is a curious, contrary, and above all cheap creature, and the success of wall-to-wall carpeting in the second half of the twentieth century is one of the greatest testimonies to that.
The story must begin in the late 19th century, with the decline of full-floor covering. That's right--from the later 18th century, tacked-down carpet had grown more and more popular for warmth and aesthetics. Mind you, we're not talking about actual "Oriental carpet", but rather the cheap substitutes that had originally covered up expensive carpet in high-foot-traffic areas. This would be tacked to a wooden floor in strips across the room sewn together; or, with the advent of the broad-loom at the end of the century, maybe tacked to a wooden band around the edges of even a stone floor.
Charles Locke Eastlake was having none of this.
Eastlake was an architect and furniture visionary from England whose book/essay collection Hints on Household Taste spearheaded a new wave of interior decoration described as "simple, real, strong, and honest"--more austere, angled, and much less ornamented than what he considered overwrought Victorian styles. Mary Jean Smith Madigan points out that American acolytes of Eastlake tried mightily to dissociate themselves from his name even as they basically copied his aesthetic (probably because he was so well known that there was already a backlash against him!--just, not his ideas). This was particularly true of his most influential American plagiarist heir, New York Times and book author Clarence Chatham Cook.
One of Cook's most important propagated principles, which he drew wholeheartedly from Eastlake, was that carpeting should absolutely not be wall-to-wall. The straight lines and square shapes created by area rugs and the visual effect of the "clean" space fit perfectly into the Eastlake aesthetic. Furthermore, with the ideal of hygiene and cleanliness that became so central to good solid middle class identity in the Progressive era, Eastlake, Cook, and his other disciples heavily sold the advantage of throw rugs to be taken outside and beaten clean.
We have taken this apparent tangent mostly because I like words, but also because it is crucial to understand that while Eastlake style, "Homestyle Design," Aestheticism, whatever you want to call it, drastically reduced the consumer premium on wall-to-wall soft floor covering, preference was ultimately preference rather than totality. Carpet retained an air of luxury, class, and abundance. Right after the deprivation years of World War I and World War II, the carpet industry in America reached its pre-1950s highs of almost 90 million square yards sold (1923 and 1948)--before falling significantly in subsequent years. In 1951, 73 million square yards of carpet were sold--in 1955, only two percent of American master bedrooms were carpeted--the carpet industry left the 1940s seriously worried for its fate.
One place that was not worried about its economic fate at that time, on the other hand, was Dalton, Georgia. Although "factories and manufacturing" and "U.S. South" are not typically joint phrases, Dalton had made itself the exception with the cultivated evolution of its cotton mills into the tufted textile manufacturing industry. The in-home workshops of Catherine Evans Whitener and her friends, producing "chenille" bedspreads with some carpets on the side, caught the attention of northern investor-industrialists. They came south, where labor costs were lower, and basically turned Dalton into the tufted textile town. Earlier efforts at making machines to produced tufted textiles rather than hand-sewing were perfected. The northerners also brought the use of synthetic fibers as well, newly available after the war, to replace the traditional cotton and wool of the bedspreads and carpets as a cost-saving feature. ("Every woman wants a wool carpet, but Acrilan ihas the same qualities and is cheaper," ran the Monsanto ads).
In 1951, the tufted textile industry's presence in the carpet industry was tiny--"carpet industry" was synonymous with "woven carpets." But the price differential was significant enough that by 1954, the American carpet industry's leaders were worried in a big way about the new competition, especially with the still-small consumer demand for carpet.
So they decided to embark on a full-court press campaign to make Americans demand carpet:
As the largest company in the industry, we feel it is our duty to sell the concept of carpet--the generic of carpet
asserted Mohasco's Herbert Jay, vowing to "[sell] consumers on the concept of carpet per se." And so the American Carpet Institute and its member companies waged a war in advertising and in government. By 1958, carpet was the #1 most-advertised household item, ahead even of television sets.
"Home Means More With Carpet On the Floor" ran the ads' tagline. And it was not just empty words. The carpet industry lobbied the U.S. government hard to have the price of carpet included in the overall cost of the house when calculating mortgage values and rates. This made a carpeted house a more attractive financial investment.
Other lines of advertisement promoted the benefits of carpet for the postwar family: "quiet, beauty, and warmth." They stressed the freedom of choice--color! pattern!--even amidst the general trend in homogenization of household options. Carpet became a place to pretend to express individuality, argues Philip Scranton. (I am putting it less charitably than Scranton, but you get the idea).
But here's the thing: American consumers are contrary, cheap, and have the attention span of a peanut.
The woven carpet industry's massive ad campaign succeeded all right--by 1963, nearly 300 million square yards of carpet were sold in the US (recall: 73mil in 1951). But American consumers gave not a single care whether it was woven or tufted, wool or synthetic. They wanted what looked good, what was popular, and what was cost-effective. That meant tufted textile, which accounted for 250 million of those yards.
There are certainly other factors that enabled wall-to-wall carpeting to become popular: a rise in per capita income directly correlated to an increase in carpet purchases; the wider availability and marketing as desirable of vacuum cleaners supplied the means for servant-less women to keep them clean.
But we must not confuse enabling factors with causation. In the late 1950s, a massive advertising campaign for an upscale product with lingering associations of luxury attempted to save its industry from being replaced by a new, cheaper, technology-driven variant--only to sell the American public on the upstart instead, and on an utterly unprecedented scale.
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