No Remedy Against This Consumption

Lizabeth Cohen. A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. 568 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

If once historians of the United States shied from sweeping narratives, those days have gone. Scholars of the modern era swim now in a sea of syntheses, each as ambitious as the others to put its particular "-ism" at the center of scholarly discourse—and classroom lectures—for decades hence. Historians who fret that their baby boomer colleagues nurse neither the passion nor the eccentricity to produce great works may rest easier on considering the various efforts to offer a wholesale account for the century just past—though in fairness to critics these works have met with less than enthusiastic receptions. In the last few years syntheses based on exceptionalism and coercive nationalism have failed to sweep all contenders away, so now Lizabeth Cohen offers consumerism. Her Consumers' Republic is surely the best bet yet for an all-in synthesis of modern American history (at least, on the home front) and it makes good and creative use of a rich literature. Moreover, packaged as it is in a book featuring the zippy typographical flourishes of a 1950s advertisement, this tale of consumer dissatisfaction feels, as a latter-day Woodrow Wilson might say, like watching history on television. And—he would surely add—it is all so terribly true. ¹

As Alan Brinkley argues in The End of Reform, the New Dealers' adoption of Keynesian-style economics led to a linguistic revolution in politics. Consumption replaced production at the center of economic thought, and "[a]s the concept of the 'consumer' gained resonance in American politics, it became the basis of an almost universal political language." ² Everyone's duty could be defined, every policy could be framed, in terms of what it did for consumers and their ability to consume. Cohen divides this all-absorptive political term into two categories. First she finds dutiful "citizen consumers," born of Depression and war, "who reoriented their personal consumption to serve the general good." But citizen consumers had conceptual twins in "purchaser consumers, who pursued private gain." The Keynesian crucible melted the two into "the purchaser as citizen who simultaneously fulfilled personal desire and civic obligation by consuming" (p. 119).

Beginning in the critical era of the late 1940s and early 1950s, policymakers and economists defined the purchaser-as-citizen as he—or rather more often than not she—who by buying kept in motion the mighty engines of the American economy. Hoping to avoid another Great Depression, the men who ran the economy wanted Americans to spend their savings—and when savings were spent, to keep consuming on credit. By the 1950s, consumerism was not only going to prevent another Depression, it was going to win the Cold War. As President Eisenhower observed, the ability of an American workingman to "own his own comfortable home and a car" was the yardstick by which to measure the defeat of Marxism (p. 125).

But before long, marketers noticed that the American workingman hardly mattered as a maker of consumer tastes—it was his wife they wanted to watch. By indulging her desires—desires methodically encouraged by advertising men, desires to buy make-ups and dresses, to buy cling-wraps and Tupperware, to buy appliances and shoes—she kept profit margins dancing like sugarplums in the gray heads of flannel-suited middle-management. She had only to stoop—and rummage through her purse—to conquer. By the time the marketing surveyors had taken her measure, Purchaser Citizen had become the feminine equivalent and faithful helpmeet to that comfortable homunculus, Economic Man: his hundreds of millions of Rational Decisions guided the Invisible Hand of capital allocation and production, while her matching hundreds of millions of Indulged Desires (however guided by the Visible Hand of marketing and retail) gave supply-side decisions their vindicating consummation in the credit-eased transactions of modern commerce.

Thus...