Over the past decade Lizabeth Cohen has been at the forefront of a new type of American history: consumer's history. In this fast growing field historians look at the development of consumption and consumers, both as an ideal and as a reality, and as a new source of identity. There were reasons to be wary of this trend. Were economic realities and questions of power going to be ignored in a celebration of growing affluence? Was the integrity of culture to be ignored in a vindication of mass consumption?
Now that Lizabeth Cohen's new book has been published we can see that those reasons were misguided. This is a thoroughly documented book that is unusually scrupulous in the attention that it pays to problems of class, gender and race. Cohen starts in the thirties, looking at consumer movements and boycotts, and at two differing ideas of the consumer. One is the "citizen consumer," who is the hero of the book, the consumer who protects his (and very often her) rights and does not placidly accept what businesses deign to give them. The other, more prominent, consumer is the Consumer as Purchaser, the Keynesian consumer who stimulates the economy by his purchases. We then go to the war, and see how the government sought to limit price increases with the help of citizen cooperation. We learn about the many female volunteers, while we also learn that African-Americans, who most needed it, got the least help and the least employment with the OPA. Then we go to the postwar world where, despite popular support, Congress abolishes the OPA. Meanwhile the new consensus, the GI Bill, and the boom of suburbia promise a brave new world of abundance for all, or almost all.
Although women unions and minorities have used consumption and consumer's rights movement to express their grievances, one of Cohen's major themes is how the consumer's republic failed to break down the hierarchies of society and indeed reinforced them. Race was the most obvious failure. Although it has been told before, it is still shocking to learn that black soldiers in the Second World War were excluded from stores and restaurants that German Prisoners of War could freely enter. Cohen also reminds us that shabby treatment of Afro-American soldiers was not merely confined to the South, but to the whole country, including in the West where they were previously non-existent. This takes us to New Jersey, Cohen's native state. Although it had public accommodation laws dating back to the 19th century, storeowners often excluded black customers. Indeed, during the Depression both the Salvation Army and the Red Cross would refuse to help African-Americans in some places. In what is the tour de force of the book Cohen, based on massive amounts of evidence, discusses the struggles in New Jersey for successful civil rights legislation, and the racial segregation and outright exclusionism of the suburbs (encouraged by consumer prejudice, business practice and federal guidelines). We learn about New Jersey's selfish politics of localism, how school funding is based on inequitable local taxation, and of the difficult fights to ensure adequate funding for all.
Especially helpful is Cohen's description of the limited effect of the GI Bill. Most of its students would have gone to university anyway. The poor found that its educational benefits wouldn't be of much help to those who hadn't graduated from high school or who were looking for vocational education. Women and African-Americans faced further hurdles in trying to invoke the GI Bill. They faced outright discrimination, blacks couldn't easily enter the traditional veteran's leagues, and one popular one they did enter was red-baited to death. Both groups had second-rate status in the army, and African-Americans were given much more dishonourable discharges for criticizing their mistreatment. Women, for their part, had trouble getting credit cards, and when working women applied with their husbands for a Veteran's Administration Loan, the wife would have to promise she was either infertile or would get an abortion if she became pregnant. Women also had to step aside for returning veterans so that their proportion in one city university fell from 20% in 1940 to 14% in 1947. Meanwhile, the working class did not vanish in a wash of affluence. They kept their identity, which was enforced by a certain class segregation in suburbia.
Cohen also looks at the growth of shopping malls. She discusses how they were isolated from minority populations (one inner-city youth was killed in 1995 crossing a seven-lane highway because the mall were she worked did not allow buses to stop there). She also points out how they work to limit free speech and distort resources. She then goes to look at the rise of market segmentation in the fifties and sixties and how advertisers and businessmen concentrated their efforts at specific groups. She then discusses the rise and fall of the consumer's movement, as Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson and others inspired a great rush of pro-consumer legislation and greater regulatory effort in the sixties. But the consumer's movement had weaknesses as a truly enthusiastic mass movement, while attempts to institutionalize a consumer's voice in government were defeated in the seventies. There are some weaknesses in this book. As a discussion of advertising, it is less stimulating than Jackson Lears' "Fables of Abundance." More could be said about the pernicious effects of advertising for children, including the insane Reagan administration decision to allow the replacement of educational programming with program-length advertisements for toys. And there is not much about the culture of consumption, a problem that has vexed intellectuals from Veblen to Adorno. But as an account of how consumerism moved decisively from working for the common good to what is good for me is best for all, Cohen's work has no rivals.
