Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America by Joanna Cohen (review)

Joanna Cohen’s Luxurious Citizens is a smart and elegant study of the creation of the American consumer-citizen in the years between the nation’s founding and the end of the Civil War. Over these decades, the prosperous patriot-consumer, whose prudent nonessential purchases helped fund the new nation, gave way to a more profligate middle-class consumer, who demanded unfettered access to goods at good prices as a right of citizenship. Early elites like Abigail Adams might have demanded abstention for the good of the country, invoking the patriot-citizen. Massachusetts farmers refused to exchange their foreign-made corduroy cloth for uncomfortable American leather. By 1865, the pleasure of corduroy had won out over civic virtues of self-restraint.

Cohen describes her book as a “cultural history of economic ideas,” especially the ideas of lawmakers, manufacturers, vendors, advertisers, and a wide range of pundits and journalists. In her chapters, she follows heated debates over early national commercial policy, consumer abstinence and indulgence before and during the War of 1812, the dangers and enticements of public auctions, the tariff, the proliferation of enticing advertisements, and the role of consumers during the Civil War. Throughout, she pays close attention to both what was said and how it was said. Cohen describes the increasing importance of gender and, to a lesser extent, race in creating the consumer-citizen, and she details the often subtle differences between Northern and Southern images of citizenship. Her discussion of the tariff debates in particular is excellent. Cohen shows that as protectionists and free traders argued over whether there should even be a protective tariff, they were also always wrestling with the larger question of what consuming those goods, taxed or not, might mean for the nation. By the end of the Civil War, the “liberty to consume” cheap and cheerful goods formed the basis of American democracy, as it does today (2).

Cohen is clearly troubled that “indulging in the world of goods” has replaced a more rigorous civic engagement as a “positive civic good,” and her introduction and epilogue lay out the precariousness of making consumption the basis of citizenship. And yet, as Cohen shows, consumption offered a great deal to nineteenth-century Americans. The commercial explosion of the 1830s encouraged merchants and advertisers to work overtime luring consumers to buy, but it also gave ever more men and women access to material luxuries, improving daily life. Though readers rarely see the consumers themselves in this book (it is, after all, about imagining consumers), when they do appear, they often suggest the potentials of consumption as well as its limitations. A white man’s violent attack on an African American woman wearing an expensive chinchilla hat is an example of the fragility of claiming consumer-citizenship (the expensive hat did not protect its wearer or make her that man’s equal), but it is also an example of the power (and, one hopes, pleasure) that owning that hat had, if only briefly. Cohen’s emphasis on the weakness of the consumer-citizen would no doubt dismay the early twentieth-century working women of New York and Chicago. They insisted that fancy hats held political promise as well as sensory pleasure. But this excellent book reminds us that these women had to forge the connection between hats and politics themselves; this possibility was beyond the imagination of earlier Americans.