| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Charles F. McGovern. Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xv, 536. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95.
"Good things are worth waiting for" is an unfashionable adage among those who insist on their right to consume what they want when they want it. Nonetheless, Charles F. McGovern's long-awaited book rewards our patience as scholars with its exemplary study of how we lost our patience as a polity of consumers.	1
As the American mass market expanded, clusters of professionals competed to influence how the nation's publics and policy makers thought about purchasing and using goods and services. Advertising agents and other advocates for business, grouped here under the umbrella term "advertisers," sought to turn their marketing goals into the nation's goals. Their adversaries, "consumerists," were mostly technocrats and bureaucrats who objected to the rising influence of corporations and their advertisements; they argued on behalf of consumers for regulation and objective information, sometimes applying ideas from Thorstein Veblen and social scientists of like mind.	2
McGovern's protagonists presented themselves to the public, to policy makers, and to peers as experts who knew best how consumers should spend and how citizens should vote. Over time, these partisans conflated the two roles, imbuing immense political significance to the phrase "voting with dollars."	. . .

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