A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, and: Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency (review)

Together, these books, very different in scope and focus, provide an overview of important aspects of the development of consumer society in the twentieth-century United States. Selling Mrs. Consumer is a partially successful biography of an obscure but significant figure, Christine Frederick (1883-1970), who deserves to be better known. A Consumer's Republic is a major work that will transform not only how we understand consumer society in modern America, but how we understand modern America, in particular the period from 1945 to 1970.

Cohen's book is marked by diligent, highly original, wide-ranging research and a powerful, if sometimes problematic, analytical framework. Most historians of consumer society have focused on popular culture to the exclusion of politics. If A Consumer's Republic occasionally suffers because it largely ignores popular culture, it more than makes up for this flaw by demonstrating the rich possibilities for using consumption as a framework for interpreting and analyzing the political economy of modern America.

Cohen's forcefully argued and extremely well documented thesis is relatively easily summarized: in the postwar years the encouragement of mass consumption became a political project of a powerful cross-section of American elites in politics and business. (The book focuses more on the producers of consumer society than its consumers.) These advocates of a "consumers' republic," a group that remains frustratingly sketchy because it is not clearly defined or delimited, determined that a particular kind of privatized consumption was good for individual citizens and necessary for the nation's economy. Although Cohen acknowledges the many benefits that the "consumers' republic" brought to ordinary Americans, her book punctures some of the myths promulgated by the consumer republic's celebrants. The main drawbacks she highlights are the unequal distribution of riches it produced, especially among those on the outside looking in, particularly African Americans and those in the white working class. The key problems with the consumer's republic, which Cohen highlights repeatedly in a variety of contexts, are segmentation, privatization, and gender and racial inequalities.

Several sections of the book are superb in their force, clarity, and marshaling of evidence. The analyses of the "GI Bill of Rights," suburbanization, and shopping malls are ingenious, fair minded, and powerful. In each case, Cohen shows how these seemingly universal developments were carried out in exclusionist ways. The GI Bill, she demonstrates, helped white veterans more than it did black ones, and men more than it did women; the system of mortgages and home construction helped white middle-class families achieve the suburban dream, but kept that dream out of the reach of most African American and working-class citizens. One of the most telling—and shocking— of the many useful statistics that Cohen employs is that the prototypical suburb Levittown, New York, with 70,000 residents in 1953, was the largest city in the country in which no blacks resided. Cohen's treatment of shopping malls as sites of privatized, commercialized, and feminized public spaces is a model of its kind, powerfully, and concretely supporting her thesis about the limitations of the consumers' republic. Through an analysis of a number of "free speech" cases in New Jersey shopping centers, Cohen shows the ways in which the developers' claims that these were the new "main streets" were disingenuous; developers and store owners retained private security forces and even resorted to arresting citizens engaged in political activities on mall property.

Although Cohen's book is primarily a macro-level analysis of the development of a consumerist political economy, she has...