A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (review)

Cohen has produced a sweeping synthesis of postwar American society that puts the role of mass consumption at the center. In a series of essay-like chapters, A Consumer's Republic argues that the decades following World War II witnessed a fundamental transformation, as American economics, politics, and society revolved around the pursuit of private prosperity and the expansion of consumption. This shift entailed a wholesale change in how Americans understood themselves as citizens in a republic. In the New Deal and World War II, millions of American consumers had seen their rights as individual consumers as essential to the promotion of the "general good." No longer was that the case in the postwar period when a new consensus held that Americans' only obligation of citizenship was to increase their own consumption in order to underwrite national prosperity.

Cohen divides her narrative into four parts. Part I, "Origins of the Postwar Consumers' Republic," examines the 1930s and 1940s, a time when, according to Cohen, a notion of "citizen consumer" existed, pushed at the grassroots mainly by women and African-Americans, who embraced a consumer identity as a way to promote a safer and more equitable market. Beginning in Part II, "The Birth of a Consumers' Republic," Cohen documents how the citizen consumer's "nemesis," the "purchaser as citizen," rose to prominence as the basis of what she calls the Consumers' Republic. Americans began to fulfill their citizenship duties by embracing mass consumption as the route to economic equality and political freedom. In spite of its inclusive rhetoric, Cohen shows how policies that helped to underwrite the Consumers' Republic, such as the gi Bill and the tax code, benefited white middle-class males while discriminating against other groups, particularly African-Americans. Yet, she contends, the contradiction between the promise of the Consumers' Republic and its reality helped to fuel the civil rights movement. But just as blacks won increasing access to public accommodations, such as downtown stores, movie theaters, and restaurants, these sites of consumption were becoming overshadowed by the increasingly segmented and privatized new commercial centers of suburban America.

In part III, "The Landscape of Mass Consumption," Cohen documents how suburban America became stratified along racial and income lines, with particular attention to New Jersey as a case study. For Cohen, the suburban shopping malls hastened the decline of a more community-oriented style of consumption that had existed in urban downtowns. In Part IV, "The Political Culture of Mass Consumption," Cohen concludes by showing how marketing trends and national politics reinforced and amplified the postwar trends of segmentation; advertisers and politicians started to target narrowly defined social groups.

Cohen shows in close detail the exclusions and limitations of postwar America by bringing together much research and literature from the civil rights and women's movements and from consumer culture. That Cohen places the Cold War in the background marks an important shift in the historiography. Yet in many ways Cohen's narrative reaffirms a traditional consensus about the postwar period. Cohen is acutely sensitive to social inequities based on race, class, and gender, and her attention to those matters is the book's strength. She largely views the postwar period, however, as defined by a broad consensus among business, labor, and policymakers. This relative inattention to political struggles is perhaps the book's weakness; the book does not provide a clear sense of why one construction of citizenship replaced another and how exactly those shifts related to protracted debates about American political economy. Nonetheless, Consumer's Republic will become essential reading for students of postwar American history.