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  • State of the Field:The Politics of Consumption
  • Meg Jacobs (bio)

More than half a century ago, historian Richard Hofstadter pointed to a fundamental transformation in American history, what he called "a major shift in the American economy and American life from an absorbing concern with production to an equal concern with consumption as a sphere of life." He located this shift in the late nineteenth century, when, as he put it, the United States, which was born in the country, moved to the city. In this period, he wrote, "the urban consumer first stepped forward as a serious and self-conscious factor in American social politics." According to Hofstadter, a "consumer consciousness" had emerged to reshape American politics. Why, then, did it take historians decades to pursue this insight and offer well-documented accounts of the rise of the consumer in American politics not only in the Progressive Era but also in other periods of American history? 1

American intellectuals, including Hofstadter and his contemporaries, have long tended to see consumerism in a negative light. Living suburban lifestyles, with the rate of home and automobile ownership going up rapidly, Americans in the postwar years became obsessed with material abundance, or so intellectuals believed. For Hofstadter and his peers, consumerism debased cultural sensibilities and dampened political activism. Part of the consensus school of historians in the 1950s and 1960s, Hofstadter saw a commitment to private property and free enterprise as defining the American political tradition. These beliefs established the boundaries of political debate.

That commitment to the market explained the tepid nature of political reform in the twentieth century. If, perhaps, consumers had advocated for political reform in the Progressive Era, by mid-century they lost their sharp edge—if indeed their brand of social politics, as Hofstadter called them, ever had one. Writing in the early 1950s, he remarked of this group: "Today the white-collar class is more apathetic and more self-indulgent; it hopes chiefly for security, leisure, and comfort and for the enjoyment of the pleasures of mass entertainment." In other words, Americans sat on their couches in their air-conditioned living rooms, watching television and tuning out the larger issues of the day. The famous liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith captured that critique when he discussed the paradox of public poverty amid [End Page 561] private affluence. Hofstadter's generation and the New Left generation that followed saw consumerism as dulling political conflict, and therefore tended to ignore it as a subject of study. 2

A newer historiography on the history of consumerism suggests the opposite. The struggle over control and access to the consumer economy, according to this literature, has been one of the most contentious issues in the twentieth century. Scholars have now written enough that we can reflect on what a vibrant, robust consumer politics looks like. And we can begin to map out a chronology and analysis of the role of consumerism in modern American politics. This essay offers an overview of the historiography on consumerism, then explores the literature on the politics of consumption, and concludes by suggesting questions for future research.

From Suffocation to Liberation: A Look Back at the Literature

In his 1954 classic work, People of Plenty, historian David Potter saw economic abundance as the essence of American national character. Influenced by contemporary psychologists and sociologists, Potter told the story of how advertising "indoctrinates values in the individual and his role as the consumer." He cited the statistics of how many washing machines and other new appliances Americans owned, but his was not a happy portrait. Potter agreed with contemporaries such as David Riesman and Vance Packard that abundance, rather than leading to fulfillment, triggered "psychological tension," as individuals strove in vain to demonstrate their social standing through material possessions. According to Potter, this status seeking resulted in a population who "often feels stress and insecurity." He summarized that "everything would seem to lead to the conclusion that abundance has exacted a heavy psychological penalty for the physical gains which it has conferred." 3

This mid-century view of consumerism as a stultifying political force had roots in an artisan, producer ideology, which historians now see as...

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