Lizabeth Cohen connects a number of elements to illustrate what she understands to be America’s postwar obsession with mass consumption. By examining government documents, sociological surveys, marketing research, and historical monographs, Cohen shows how the Progressive and New Deal eras’ emphasis on consumerism as the cornerstone of citizenship changed in post-World War II America. Cohen ties together federal policy, business cycles, reform movements, marketing strategies, and the local history of northern New Jersey to chart the rise of mass consumerism in American society. In the end, Cohen presents a history of mass consumerism’s effects on race, gender, class, and politics.
Put simply, Cohen’s overreaching thesis is that the way we buy shapes the way we understand ourselves as citizens. As Cohen maintains, “I am convinced that Americans after World War II saw their nation as the model for the world of a society committed to mass consumption…consumption did not only deliver wonderful things for purchase…It also dictated the most central dimensions of postwar society.” Consumerism, Cohen contends, influences public life as much as it responds to private needs. For Cohen, American values, attitudes, and behaviors are attached to consumerism; moreover, she argues that public policy and mass consumption mutually reinforce each other. Ultimately, Cohen suggests that communal identities spring from modes of consumption, and not modes of production.
To detail what she describes as America’s infatuation with mass consumption, Cohen creates a few – and at times overly confusing – categories for consumer patterns. The first– “citizen consumers” – involves a patriotic ideal that one should consume with the general good at heart. Moreover, with this category, price controls and other market regulations are favored as a means for protecting consumers and preserving equity. The second– “purchaser consumer” – sees consumerism as the pursuit of self-interest or private gain. These two categories epitomize the consumer trends of the New Deal and World War II eras. A third category– “purchaser as citizen” – surfaced in postwar America. Here, the over indulgence of personal material wants is rationalized as a contribution to the nation. The fourth category– “consumer/citizen/taxpayer/voter” –emerged during the last two decades. With this last category, self-interested citizens perceive government policies like any other market transaction as they judge policies on how well they serve them personally.[1]
Cohen starts her analysis amid the economic turmoil of the Great Depression. During this time, she argues, the language and notion of citizens as consumers took hold just as a person’s ability to consume was challenged. Most of all, the New Deal ordained the Progressive era discovery of consumerism as a social force by framing the Depression as a problem of under consumption. As a result, citizen consumers and purchaser consumers came to the forefront of American society. Consumer citizens sought representation in the government, and they fought for new legislation and regulation to protect consumers. Also, Cohen argues, the New Deal’s emphasis on consumers offered women and African Americans new paths to political power as a number of grassroots consumer movements, often led by women or African Americans, looked to purchasing power as a foundation for securing social ends such as equality and solidarity. [2]
World War II intensified the consumer trends created during the New Deal era. For consumer citizens, wartime programs, such as the Office of Price Administration (OPA), encouraged Americans to consume responsibly for the general good. On the purchaser consumer side, some consumers stockpiled rationed goods or bought them on the black market. In addition women gained new political authority during WWII since they were traditionally perceived as the power behind purchasing. As Cohen states, “good citizenship and good consumerism were promoted as inseparable and women gained special stewardship over both.”[3] The connection between citizenship and consumerism also assisted African Americans as Cohen explains, “the goal was as much to claim equal citizenship as to consume material goods or services.”[4] Finally, American soldiers fighting overseas increasingly adopted a vision that placed consumerism as the key to the good life and their ultimate reward for service.
After WWII, the consumer citizenship ideal faded. One cause was the disbanding of the OPA in 1946, which marked the end of price controls. Most of all, a wide range of economic interests ranging from anti-New Deal big businessmen to moderate liberal capitalists, championed the notion that mass consumption was central to the transition from wartime to peacetime.[5] This emphasis on growing the economy through over consumption, rather than responsible consumption and assuring the fair distribution of wealth, was the foundation for purchasers as citizens and the “Consumers’ Republic.” This Republic, Cohen contends, “promised the socially progressive end of economic equality without requiring politically progressive means of redistributing existing wealth.”[6] Cohen continues her analysis by insisting that the Cold War glorified the post-war ethos, as political leaders increasingly connected Americans’ free choice as consumers to political freedom. [7]
With the rise of the Consumers’ Republic came a number of changes. Women, for instance, lost their hold on purchasing power. As Cohen explains, “The gendering of the ‘consumer’ shifted from women to couples, and at times to men alone. The female citizen consumer evolved into the male purchaser as citizen who, with the help of state policies, also dominated as head of the household, breadwinner, home-owner, and chief taxpayer.”[8] The GI Bill, the adoption of joint tax return, and the increasing unavailability of credit for women supported this change in gender norms.[9] Post-war mass consumption also reinforced racial inequality with the segregation of home purchasing and home financing.[10] Finally, the rise of the Consumers’ Republic also shaped class relations. As Cohen explains, mass consumption marked the end of a distinct working-class labor movement, as purchasing power and attaining middle-class status became the new goals of working-class Americans.[11] Ultimately, in Cohen’s view, the ascendancy of the Consumers’ Republic influenced our understanding of gender, class, and race.
For Cohen, the self-interested aspect of purchasers as citizens was intensified by several developments. Suburbs, for instance, contributed to the creation of a social landscape where Americans shared less common physical space and public culture.[12] Malls and shopping centers, she argues, sought to exclude unwanted urban elements, such as vagrants, the poor, and racial minorities. The most significant contribution was market segmentation, which was the principle of appealing to a specific slice of the population rather than the people as a whole. This tactic strengthened the boundaries between social groups, creating a more fragmented America. Mass consumption, she concludes, created a society with people imprisoned in their own niches that were separated along race, class, and gender lines.[13]
Despite the rise of the over indulgent and self-interested purchaser as citizens, the ideal of responsible consumerism did experience a renewal, which grew out of the unfulfilled promises of the Consumers’ Republic. To explain this rebirth, Cohen first looks to the civil rights strategies of African Americans. Cohen points out that struggles took place “over delineating seating on buses and in theaters, access to stores and parks, and boundaries between black and white neighborhoods…” Ultimately, Cohen links the fight for equal rights to an insistence on obtaining an equal opportunity to buy things.[14]
Growing out of the civil rights movement, a “Third Wave of Consumerism” emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s. In this wave, public interest research groups, and consumer protection offices came to the forefront of American society. This development pushed legislators to seek regulations that established standards to reverse environmental damage and prohibit unsafe products. Yet, as Cohen asserts, participants in this consumer movement were largely mobilized by their expectations as participants in the Consumers’ Republic, and not because they wanted to radically change the system. Even though pieces of the Consumers’ Republic, and its associated consumer movement, collapsed when the nation went into severe economic decline in the mid-1970s, the notion that consumer happiness was central to the well-being of America remained intact.[15]
In recent decades, Cohen explains, the Consumers’ Republic has transformed into the “Consumerization of the Republic.” The New Deal and the WWII era set up a template that placed consumerism as a fundamental connection between the government and its citizen. Yet, self-interested over-indulgent consumers increasingly replaced the communal spirit of the 1930s and 1940s citizen consumers. Now, Cohen contends, a self-interested consumer mentality determines government policies, as citizens judge public services and tax assessments – like other purchased goods – on the personal benefits they might provide for individuals.[16]
Like other historians, Cohen sheds important light on the connections between consumerism, culture, and identity.[17] Her discussion on the civil rights movement is particularly insightful, as she underscores the ways in which the history of consumerism can illuminate the contours of political struggles. Still, her work is not without problems. The first is methodological. Her categorizations of consumer patterns are overly confusing and, at times, they seem somewhat artificial. While she tries to demonstrate how these categories are distinct, it seems that some of the groups might share more similarities than she would like to concede.[18] The second problem deals with her periodization. While Cohen places the foundation for mass consumerism primarily in the 1930s, other historians, such as Roland Marchand, have placed the rise of consumerism in the 1920s.[19] Finally, her reliance on consumption as a fundamental component of identity overlooks the ways in which the process of production also contributes to self-definition. These problems aside, Cohen presents an important analysis on the evolution of American consumerism and its affects on race, gender, class, and politics.
-Rebecca DeWolf, Ph.D.
[1] Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 8-9.
[2] As Cohen writes, “the New Deal’s sudden attention to consumers as a voice of the public interest offered otherwise underrepresented groups an opportunity to become another ‘countervailing power’ worthy of official recognition…women made up much of the leadership and rank and file of the consumer movement in the 1930s…Black residents recognized over the course of the thirties the benefits of politicizing African American consumers on a mass scale.” Cohen, 32-33, 42.
[3] Cohen, 83.
[4] Ibid., 100.
[5] Ibid., 114.
[6] Ibid., 129.
[7] Ibid., 126.
[8] Ibid., 147.
[9] Television also contributed to the change in gender norms as Cohen writes, “authoritative male voice-overs taught incompetent house-wives the merits of everything from kitchen floorwax to headache medication…” Cohen, 150.
[10] Cohen explains that “As a majority of white Americans invested most of their life savings in a home by 1960 fear of racial mixing moved beyond a simple white discomfort with sharing neighborhoods and public institutions. The presence of black neighbors threatened to depress property values and hence to jeopardize people’s basic economic security, or so homeowners’ were convinced.” Cohen, 213.
[11] Cohen, 152.
[12] Ibid., 254-255.
[13] Ibid., 288, 331.
[14] Ibid., 185.
[15]Ibid., 14-15.
[16] Ibid., 391.
[17] For instance see Richard Bushman’s The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (First Vintage Books, 1992); William Leach’s Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (First Vintage Books, 1993); and T.J. Jackson Lears’ Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (Basic Books, 1994).
[18] In particular, the differences between purchaser consumer and purchaser as citizen seem slight and do not necessarily warrant two separate categories.
[19] Roland Marchand’s Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (University of California Press, 1986); T.H. Breen traces the influence of consumerism to the eighteenth century arguing it constituted a central part in the American Revolution in his work, The Market Place Revolution: How Consumer Politics shaped American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2004).