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Book Review
| A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. By Lizabeth Cohen. (New York: Knopf, 2003. 567 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-375-40750-2.)
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| "READ
THIS AD. OR, DON'T. An exercise in freedom."
So begins the message of a recent fullpage New York Times
advertisement (July 15, 2003) sponsored by the Ad Council to remind
readers of the core freedom standing at the center of what Lizabeth
Cohen calls the consumers' republic. The Ad Council's lines could
have easily served Cohen as an ironic epigraph for her richly detailed,
carefully argued, and altogether sobering history of the postwar
politics of mass consumption. Drawing on a wide and deep archive
of government sources, sociological surveys, marketing research,
and historical monographs, Cohen shows how the Progressive and New
Deal ideal of the citizen consumer has devolved over time into the
contemporary reality of the "consumerized" citizen for whom the
state appears as a second-rate delivery system of goods and services.
Buy them. Or, don't. |
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A Consumers' Republic is not the story of an abstracted or archetypal consumer, however. Instead, Cohen challenges the conventional picture of postwar prosperity by showing just how diverse mass consumption became after 1945 and, at the same time, how invidious and inequitable that diversity turned out to be at the grass roots—at the level, that is, of the lush suburban lawn and the weed-choked urban lot. Here, as Cohen patiently retraces the increasingly balkanized map of postwar suburbia, one sees how the same historical imagination that so brilliantly illuminated the social geography of working-class consumption in interwar Chicago in her Making a New Deal (1990) has delivered an even more ambitious, if considerably darker, panorama when turned upon the postwar United States. |
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Throughout A Consumers' Republic, Cohen tacks deftly between the national scene—federal policy, aggressive lobbies, reform movements, business cycles—and the local history of northern New Jersey, the setting of her own suburban childhood. This semi-autobiographical strategy enables her to chart the broad evolution of a new "birthright"—a national "landscape of consumption" (p. 7)—without losing sight of the micro-environments (the malls, zoning boards, schools) that, in economic terms, bounded consumers' rationality or overlooking the boundaries that those decisions in turn enforced. |
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If there is a decisive historical moment to Cohen's story, it comes at the end of World War II, when the labor and consumers' movements lost the battle to retain price controls. That defeat, she argues, coupled with postwar reconversion legislation, sealed the fate of the Progressive and New Deal model of consumer citizenship—a political, redistributive, and at times sacrificial ideal that thousands of women had put into action under the civic auspices of the wartime Office of Price Administration. The white, middle-class, breadwinner bias of the G.I. Bill, the Veterans' Preference Act, and new tax law converted the hypothetical female consumer from a potential activist into a homebound Keynesian functionary. At the same time, federal and state policy makers, abetted by banks, realtors, unions, and the construction industry, settled both white- and blue-collar workers into an intricately stratified patchwork of suburban neighborhoods where credit profiles operated like electric fences, red-lining and zoning both classes off from one another and from an increasingly ghettoized black population. |
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