Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (review)

Ever since the publication of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), economists and other social scientists have studied the importance of consumption to the economy of the United States. There are numerous studies of patterns of consumption, but, Jacobson argues, the role of children has been seriously neglected. The children Jacobson studies were not just miniature shoppers; they were "cultural icons" who helped to establish the legitimacy of consumption in American society (p. 2).

Early in the twentieth century the understanding of childhood as a social ideal underwent a major transformation. Children lost their value as laborers and economic actors and gained instead an emotional value as detailed in Viviana Zelizer's Pricing the Priceless Child (New York, 1985). Children, in the public imagination at least, ceased being producers and became consumers instead. This transformation resulted from the interplay of children, parents, child experts, media outlets, advertising experts, and businesspeople. Jacobson's project is to discuss these interactions in detail, showing how and when a national children's market emerged.

The principal means of appealing to youthful consumers in the early twentieth century was through juvenile magazines. There were several with national circulations: St. Nicholas, American Boy, American Girl, Open Road for Boys, Youth's Companion, and Boys' Life. The magazines argued that they could connect manufacturers with youthful buyers, and the trade press, especially Printer's Ink, gradually came to agree. Magazines remained important through the first half of the twentieth century, but by the 1930s radio programs specifically for children began to supplant printed appeals. And of course in the late twentieth century television, in turn, supplanted radio.

Jacobson makes her case primarily by citing editorials in the advertising trade press and by including numerous illustrative advertisements that both used and appealed to children. Advertisers used images of children to attract both adult and child consumers, but they also appealed directly to children's own interests. One of the juvenile magazines, American Boy, placed ads in advertising trade magazines touting its ability to attract boy consumers and thereby to influence family decisions in the purchase of major items. Boys, the magazine argued, had more influence in family decisions than advertisers realized because families had become more democratic.

The means by which advertisers sought to influence children evolved from simple ads in juvenile magazines to fairly sophisticated appeals to children's interests on radio programs. These appeals included radio-based clubs that children could join by submitting proofs of purchase of the advertised goods. Clubs offered the chance to join an exclusive group with the possibility that youthful members might actually make a difference in society. Various decoding devices, secret greetings, and badges of membership rounded out the paraphernalia of the clubs. At first children joined these clubs in large numbers, but they often became disillusioned when no meaningful action followed joining or when it became clear that secret messages were little more than commercials in disguise.

One exception to the prevailing rule of deception on the part of children's clubs was Whatsit, a miniature newspaper for and by children. Whatsit was associated with a radio program, The Land of the Whatsit, which chronicled the adventures of two juvenile reporters. The newspaper routinely mocked adult pretensions and offered prizes for a variety of contests. Unlike similar contests, however, Whatsit offered cash prizes that proved far more popular than merchandise. Children had learned from unhappy experience that many merchandise prizes could be shoddy or cheap. By the time of Whatsit in the late 1930s, children had become sophisticated consumers who were wise to the ways of manipulation in advertising and games aimed at them.

A brief summary cannot do justice to Raising Consumers. The range of topics discussed, the depth of the scholarship, and the persuasiveness of Jacobson's arguments make this a pathbreaking work. A revised dissertation, Jacobson's...