Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumers’ Republic is a history of mass consumption in postwar American society. Consumerism is usually treated as the antithesis of politics, with individual purchasing supplanting the struggle for the common good. But Cohen shows how during an era of Fordist prosperity and Keynesian ideals, consumerism and citizenship were woven together in complex and contradictory ways. She argues, “Increasingly over this century, the economic behavior of consumption has become entwined with the rights and obligations of citizenship. More and more in the postwar era, Americans merged their aspirations for an adequate material provision and legitimate place in the polity.” Her books shows how the “citizen-consumer” changed form across the 20th century. During the Great Depression, two types of citizen-consumers appeared: “citizen consumers” and “purchaser consumers.” Citizen consumers acted politically to prod the “government to protect the rights, safety, and fair treatment of individual consumers in the private marketplace.” Citizen consumers were most evident in the efforts to make the various New Deal programs include a “permanent representation of the consumer point of view in government, most fully through the creation of a federal consumer agency to complement those already devoted to commerce, agriculture, and labor.” In contrast to citizen consumers, “purchaser consumers were viewed as contributing to the larger society more by exercising purchasing power than through asserting themselves politically.” For purchaser consumers, it “was the buying power of consumers in the aggregate, not the protection of individual consumers in the marketplace, that . . . would bring the United States out of depression and ensure its survival as a democratic nation.” The citizen consumer ideal appeared early in the New Deal, though its success was limited, whereas the purchaser consumer ideal gained strength as Keynesianism moved to the forefront of New Deal strategies. The recognition of consumers as an important group in American society was slow, largely because of the longstanding emphasis on producers. Although the New Deal is mostly remembered as focusing on organizing labor and getting people back to work, “Less often mentioned but equally noteworthy was a growing recognition by those in and out of government of the importance of considering the consumer interest in reconstructing a viable economy and polity. By the end of the depression decade, invoking ‘the consumer’ would become an acceptable way of promoting the public good.” As the New Deal was worked out, consumers began to be seen as an important “countervailing power” to the growing size of government, and attention to the desires of consumers was believed to be one way of keeping economic reforms true to the “basic tenets of capitalism.” Because many New Deal programs focused on white, male workers, “For social groups not otherwise well represented, in particular women and African Americans, identification as consumers offered a new opportunity to make claims on those wielding public and private power in American society.” Women dominated consumer activism in the 1930s, generating a broad grassroots movement and many new women-led organizations. “Although historians have paid more heed to the emergence of new male-dominated labor unions representing producers than to the rise of women’s organizations committed to improving the lives of consumers during the 1930s, the depression inspired tens of thousands of American women to join together not only to protect their families from a declining standard of living and other forms of exploitation in the marketplace, but also to safeguard society more broadly.” African Americans, who were hit especially hard by the depression and largely ignored in mainstream political circles, also organized around consumerism to demand fairer hiring practices at stores (through “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boycotts) and to support black-owned businesses (the separate “black economy” created by segregation was turned into an ideal). By “mobilizing as consumers, African Americans participated in a broader political culture of dissent where ‘the consumer’ became viewed as a legitimate and effective agent of protest, particularly for women and blacks who were marginalized from the mainstream of politics and the labor movement.” Keynesianism took hold in the government around 1936-37, so the ideal of the purchaser consumer became more predominant at that time: “With the Keynesian revolution . . . consumers were becoming responsible for higher productivity and full employment, whereas a decade earlier that role had uncontestedly belonged to producers.” Keynesianism was also linked to American ideals of equality: “Within the United States . . . Keynesianism was thought to encourage greater economic egalitarianism because dynamic consumer demand depended on a wide distribution of purchasing power. Concentration of wealth in a few hands, in contrast, led to excessive saving and only minimal spending.” In order for the purchaser consumer ideal to save the economy, it needed to take a truly mass form. The outbreak of World War II exacerbated the tensions between the citizen consumer and purchaser consumer ideals. Although mass consumption was still held up as an economic necessity, it had to be subordinated to wartime restrictions and rationing. People across the nation learned during the war “that one of the chief ways to support the war on the home front was as responsible consumers. . . . Suddenly tasks that had been viewed as private and domestic were brought into the civic arena and granted new political importance.” Women, who had already gained political power as consumers during the Great Depression, gained even more political authority as they oversaw much of this domestic regulation of consumption. But “The survival of prosperity amid sacrifice more than anything else kept the purchaser consumer alternative alive. Even when observant of salvaging, rationing, and other market regulations, Americans managed to live better during the war than they had during the Great Depression.” Consumers were urged not so much to condemn consumption as to postpone it, to save and wait for the era of “postwar material prosperity.” At the war’s end, there was some support for the continuation of price controls, which in many ways protected the rights of consumers, but of course free market ideologies won out and the government gave its support to “a mass consumption-driven economy.” Cohen claims, “Out of the wartime conflict between citizen consumers, who reoriented their personal consumption to serve the general good, and purchaser consumers, who pursued private gain regardless of it, emerged a new postwar ideal of the purchaser as citizen who simultaneously fulfilled personal desire and civic obligation by consuming.” At the center of postwar mass consumption was the housing construction boom, which carried with it the demand for the goods needed to fill each house. As wartime savings were exhausted, “the explosion of consumer credit and borrowing kept the postwar mass consumption economy afloat.” Mass consumption was integrated into Cold War ideology as proof that American society was more equal and free than the Soviet’s. “Faith in a mass consumption postwar economy . . . stood for an elaborate, integrated ideal of economic abundance and democratic political freedom, both equitably distributed, that became almost a national civil religion from the late 1940s to the 1970s.” Cohen labels this postwar period the Consumers’ Republic. “The Consumers’ Republic had many appeals, not the least of which was the substantial prosperity it fostered, but perhaps most attractive was the way it promised the socially progressive end of economic equality without requiring politically progressive means of redistributing existing wealth.” As consumers became central to the economy, consumer activism became marginalized: “emphasis on the power of total consumer spending” left little room for concerns with specific consumer issues. “The increasing prosperity of the postwar era, moreover, made it hard for consumer organizers to transcend the mainstream discourse celebrating consumer purchasing power and to politicize consumers, who no longer felt as vulnerable as they once had to burdensome shortages, spiking prices, and inadequate product grading and labeling. Rather, larger economic concerns like inflation, consumer credit, and housing scarcity were the compelling issues of the day.” Much of the political power women had gained as consumer activists was lost during the period. Discriminatory aspects of the GI Bill and consumer credit further marginalized women from maintaining power as consumers, despite the control women generally held over daily domestic consumption. African Americans were also hurt by the way that the GI Bill and other government programs were operated through more local and private institutions that were widely discriminatory. But “the firm connection that the Consumers’ Republic established between citizenship and consumption presented African Americans with new opportunities for fighting the discrimination in public places that had so angered them during wartime.” Cohen even argues that many of the key conflicts of the Civil Rights movement involved gaining equal access to sites of consumption. “Not only was blacks’ politicization as consumers during wartime a critical prerequisite to their civil rights achievements soon thereafter, but the convergence of their ever louder protests with widely held expectations for the postwar Consumers’ Republic made progress in the realm of public accommodations more substantial than in other spheres of civil rights. While discrimination would continue to prevail in jobs, housing, schools, and political representation far into the postwar era, a far-reaching commitment to expanding the ranks of purchasers as citizens made the struggle for equal treatment in the realm of public accommodations more successful.” “By demanding the opening up of what was already expected to be a free and ‘mass’ consumption marketplace, as the Consumers’ Republic promised, black and white civil rights reformers achieved more than when they invoked blacks’ social entitlement to attend any school or live in any community, asserted their economic right to hold any job, or made a moral bid for entry into worlds clearly circumscribed as private.” Yet Cohen notes that this struggle severely limited the Civil Rights movement, foreclosing more radical approaches and reinforcing the capitalist status quo. These limits became especially apparent with the “white flight” to the suburbs, where consumer choice became the grounds for new forms of racial segregation. As suburbia developed, it quickly lent itself to class differentiation as new neighborhoods were designed and marketed to different groups. Suburban developers and communities used zoning restrictions (such as restrictions on the minimum size of lots and houses ) and a number of other quasi-legal tools to enforce racial segregation. Mass consumption of suburban housing eventually transformed into self-interested localism. “Suburbs designed to deliver the promises of the Consumers’ Republic to a wide range of postwar Americans ended up creating many local republics varying in socioeconomic makeup and in the privileges they bestowed upon their citizens.” As whites fled the cities with their money, mortgage lenders redlined urban black neighborhoods, financially condemning them to decay. These black neighborhood were also devastated by the rise of the suburban shopping center, which supplanted the city center as the site of consumption for most suburban consumers. As is well known, shopping centers replaced the urban center’s public space with privatized space that could be used to exclude non-consumer activities and undesirable individuals (i.e., the poor and racial minorities). But Cohen shows there were struggles over the shopping center as a “community” center, and, at least on local levels, First Amendment rights have been successfully used at times to affirm the right to free speech and to political activism in the mall. At the start of the Consumers’ Republic, consumption was conceived of as “mass consumption.” Although manufacturers sometimes made distinctions between different “price classes” of consumers, more often one product was though to be fit for all. But by the end of the first decade of the postwar era, the idea of “market segmentation” began to be popularized. The explosion of market research on the psychology of consumers helped dismantle “the fiction of a unified mass market.” “Ironically, despite concern among cultural critics of the fifties that the standardization inherent in mass consumption was breeding social conformity and homogeneity, the Madison Avenue that they reviled was moving by the end of the decade in the opposite direction: toward acknowledgement, even reifying, social differences through an embrace of market segmentation.” Cohen does not portray market segmentation as a top-down form of manipulation, and she notes how the emergence of identity politics contributed to demands on the consumer side for more market differentiation. Ethnic groups, youth, and even children soon became the target of specific marketing, and even the elderly became active in demanding attention as consumers when a group called the “Gray Panthers” (yes, that is a reference to the Black Panthers) started praising the purchasing power of senior citizens. Reinforcing the effects of suburbanization, market segmentation further fragmented American society and pushed consumer citizens away from any concern with the public good. During the 1960s and 1970s, a third-wave of consumerism arrived through the passing of numerous “federal laws and regulations to protect consumers.” Market segmentation may have added to the consumer dissatisfaction behind these laws. When products were aimed at the masses, some lack of fit was to be expected. But when products were oriented to specific market niches, consumers had higher expectations and therefore more potential for discontent. The consumer movement of the 1960s and 1970s differed from older ones because there had been a shift “from a notion of a common consumer interest to multiple consumer interests.” Such fragmentation of the social was not especially problematic as long as the economy was strong, but the lack of a common interest became evident when the economic crisis of the 1970s hit. Cohen argues that the economic crisis demolished “the underpinnings of the Consumers’ Republic.” Mass consumption no longer seemed a viable route to “economic and social incorporation.” Neoliberal deregulation eliminated most of the achievements and protections of the consumer movement, and it did so often by claiming that such deregulation served consumer interests. Privatization of government functions was also framed as making them more responsive to consumer demands. “When, after decades of postwar prosperity, economic crisis hit in the 1970s, the inequalities that had lurked barely beneath the surface rose as a specter to haunt the rest of the century. Letting private markets reign, without adequate attention to questions of income or resource distribution or without sufficient monitoring of how well the nation’s avowed values were being fulfilled, diminished the Consumers’ Republic’s otherwise substantial achievements.” Cohen concludes by arguing that “it is unrealistic to assume we can reverse a century-long trend of entwined citizenship and consumership,” and she suggests that we encourage the “revival” of the better parts of our citizen-consumer “legacy.”
Friday, February 19, 2010
Lizabeth Cohen: A Consumers' Republic (2003)
Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumers’ Republic is a history of mass consumption in postwar American society. Consumerism is usually treated as the antithesis of politics, with individual purchasing supplanting the struggle for the common good. But Cohen shows how during an era of Fordist prosperity and Keynesian ideals, consumerism and citizenship were woven together in complex and contradictory ways. She argues, “Increasingly over this century, the economic behavior of consumption has become entwined with the rights and obligations of citizenship. More and more in the postwar era, Americans merged their aspirations for an adequate material provision and legitimate place in the polity.” Her books shows how the “citizen-consumer” changed form across the 20th century. During the Great Depression, two types of citizen-consumers appeared: “citizen consumers” and “purchaser consumers.” Citizen consumers acted politically to prod the “government to protect the rights, safety, and fair treatment of individual consumers in the private marketplace.” Citizen consumers were most evident in the efforts to make the various New Deal programs include a “permanent representation of the consumer point of view in government, most fully through the creation of a federal consumer agency to complement those already devoted to commerce, agriculture, and labor.” In contrast to citizen consumers, “purchaser consumers were viewed as contributing to the larger society more by exercising purchasing power than through asserting themselves politically.” For purchaser consumers, it “was the buying power of consumers in the aggregate, not the protection of individual consumers in the marketplace, that . . . would bring the United States out of depression and ensure its survival as a democratic nation.” The citizen consumer ideal appeared early in the New Deal, though its success was limited, whereas the purchaser consumer ideal gained strength as Keynesianism moved to the forefront of New Deal strategies. The recognition of consumers as an important group in American society was slow, largely because of the longstanding emphasis on producers. Although the New Deal is mostly remembered as focusing on organizing labor and getting people back to work, “Less often mentioned but equally noteworthy was a growing recognition by those in and out of government of the importance of considering the consumer interest in reconstructing a viable economy and polity. By the end of the depression decade, invoking ‘the consumer’ would become an acceptable way of promoting the public good.” As the New Deal was worked out, consumers began to be seen as an important “countervailing power” to the growing size of government, and attention to the desires of consumers was believed to be one way of keeping economic reforms true to the “basic tenets of capitalism.” Because many New Deal programs focused on white, male workers, “For social groups not otherwise well represented, in particular women and African Americans, identification as consumers offered a new opportunity to make claims on those wielding public and private power in American society.” Women dominated consumer activism in the 1930s, generating a broad grassroots movement and many new women-led organizations. “Although historians have paid more heed to the emergence of new male-dominated labor unions representing producers than to the rise of women’s organizations committed to improving the lives of consumers during the 1930s, the depression inspired tens of thousands of American women to join together not only to protect their families from a declining standard of living and other forms of exploitation in the marketplace, but also to safeguard society more broadly.” African Americans, who were hit especially hard by the depression and largely ignored in mainstream political circles, also organized around consumerism to demand fairer hiring practices at stores (through “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boycotts) and to support black-owned businesses (the separate “black economy” created by segregation was turned into an ideal). By “mobilizing as consumers, African Americans participated in a broader political culture of dissent where ‘the consumer’ became viewed as a legitimate and effective agent of protest, particularly for women and blacks who were marginalized from the mainstream of politics and the labor movement.” Keynesianism took hold in the government around 1936-37, so the ideal of the purchaser consumer became more predominant at that time: “With the Keynesian revolution . . . consumers were becoming responsible for higher productivity and full employment, whereas a decade earlier that role had uncontestedly belonged to producers.” Keynesianism was also linked to American ideals of equality: “Within the United States . . . Keynesianism was thought to encourage greater economic egalitarianism because dynamic consumer demand depended on a wide distribution of purchasing power. Concentration of wealth in a few hands, in contrast, led to excessive saving and only minimal spending.” In order for the purchaser consumer ideal to save the economy, it needed to take a truly mass form. The outbreak of World War II exacerbated the tensions between the citizen consumer and purchaser consumer ideals. Although mass consumption was still held up as an economic necessity, it had to be subordinated to wartime restrictions and rationing. People across the nation learned during the war “that one of the chief ways to support the war on the home front was as responsible consumers. . . . Suddenly tasks that had been viewed as private and domestic were brought into the civic arena and granted new political importance.” Women, who had already gained political power as consumers during the Great Depression, gained even more political authority as they oversaw much of this domestic regulation of consumption. But “The survival of prosperity amid sacrifice more than anything else kept the purchaser consumer alternative alive. Even when observant of salvaging, rationing, and other market regulations, Americans managed to live better during the war than they had during the Great Depression.” Consumers were urged not so much to condemn consumption as to postpone it, to save and wait for the era of “postwar material prosperity.” At the war’s end, there was some support for the continuation of price controls, which in many ways protected the rights of consumers, but of course free market ideologies won out and the government gave its support to “a mass consumption-driven economy.” Cohen claims, “Out of the wartime conflict between citizen consumers, who reoriented their personal consumption to serve the general good, and purchaser consumers, who pursued private gain regardless of it, emerged a new postwar ideal of the purchaser as citizen who simultaneously fulfilled personal desire and civic obligation by consuming.” At the center of postwar mass consumption was the housing construction boom, which carried with it the demand for the goods needed to fill each house. As wartime savings were exhausted, “the explosion of consumer credit and borrowing kept the postwar mass consumption economy afloat.” Mass consumption was integrated into Cold War ideology as proof that American society was more equal and free than the Soviet’s. “Faith in a mass consumption postwar economy . . . stood for an elaborate, integrated ideal of economic abundance and democratic political freedom, both equitably distributed, that became almost a national civil religion from the late 1940s to the 1970s.” Cohen labels this postwar period the Consumers’ Republic. “The Consumers’ Republic had many appeals, not the least of which was the substantial prosperity it fostered, but perhaps most attractive was the way it promised the socially progressive end of economic equality without requiring politically progressive means of redistributing existing wealth.” As consumers became central to the economy, consumer activism became marginalized: “emphasis on the power of total consumer spending” left little room for concerns with specific consumer issues. “The increasing prosperity of the postwar era, moreover, made it hard for consumer organizers to transcend the mainstream discourse celebrating consumer purchasing power and to politicize consumers, who no longer felt as vulnerable as they once had to burdensome shortages, spiking prices, and inadequate product grading and labeling. Rather, larger economic concerns like inflation, consumer credit, and housing scarcity were the compelling issues of the day.” Much of the political power women had gained as consumer activists was lost during the period. Discriminatory aspects of the GI Bill and consumer credit further marginalized women from maintaining power as consumers, despite the control women generally held over daily domestic consumption. African Americans were also hurt by the way that the GI Bill and other government programs were operated through more local and private institutions that were widely discriminatory. But “the firm connection that the Consumers’ Republic established between citizenship and consumption presented African Americans with new opportunities for fighting the discrimination in public places that had so angered them during wartime.” Cohen even argues that many of the key conflicts of the Civil Rights movement involved gaining equal access to sites of consumption. “Not only was blacks’ politicization as consumers during wartime a critical prerequisite to their civil rights achievements soon thereafter, but the convergence of their ever louder protests with widely held expectations for the postwar Consumers’ Republic made progress in the realm of public accommodations more substantial than in other spheres of civil rights. While discrimination would continue to prevail in jobs, housing, schools, and political representation far into the postwar era, a far-reaching commitment to expanding the ranks of purchasers as citizens made the struggle for equal treatment in the realm of public accommodations more successful.” “By demanding the opening up of what was already expected to be a free and ‘mass’ consumption marketplace, as the Consumers’ Republic promised, black and white civil rights reformers achieved more than when they invoked blacks’ social entitlement to attend any school or live in any community, asserted their economic right to hold any job, or made a moral bid for entry into worlds clearly circumscribed as private.” Yet Cohen notes that this struggle severely limited the Civil Rights movement, foreclosing more radical approaches and reinforcing the capitalist status quo. These limits became especially apparent with the “white flight” to the suburbs, where consumer choice became the grounds for new forms of racial segregation. As suburbia developed, it quickly lent itself to class differentiation as new neighborhoods were designed and marketed to different groups. Suburban developers and communities used zoning restrictions (such as restrictions on the minimum size of lots and houses ) and a number of other quasi-legal tools to enforce racial segregation. Mass consumption of suburban housing eventually transformed into self-interested localism. “Suburbs designed to deliver the promises of the Consumers’ Republic to a wide range of postwar Americans ended up creating many local republics varying in socioeconomic makeup and in the privileges they bestowed upon their citizens.” As whites fled the cities with their money, mortgage lenders redlined urban black neighborhoods, financially condemning them to decay. These black neighborhood were also devastated by the rise of the suburban shopping center, which supplanted the city center as the site of consumption for most suburban consumers. As is well known, shopping centers replaced the urban center’s public space with privatized space that could be used to exclude non-consumer activities and undesirable individuals (i.e., the poor and racial minorities). But Cohen shows there were struggles over the shopping center as a “community” center, and, at least on local levels, First Amendment rights have been successfully used at times to affirm the right to free speech and to political activism in the mall. At the start of the Consumers’ Republic, consumption was conceived of as “mass consumption.” Although manufacturers sometimes made distinctions between different “price classes” of consumers, more often one product was though to be fit for all. But by the end of the first decade of the postwar era, the idea of “market segmentation” began to be popularized. The explosion of market research on the psychology of consumers helped dismantle “the fiction of a unified mass market.” “Ironically, despite concern among cultural critics of the fifties that the standardization inherent in mass consumption was breeding social conformity and homogeneity, the Madison Avenue that they reviled was moving by the end of the decade in the opposite direction: toward acknowledgement, even reifying, social differences through an embrace of market segmentation.” Cohen does not portray market segmentation as a top-down form of manipulation, and she notes how the emergence of identity politics contributed to demands on the consumer side for more market differentiation. Ethnic groups, youth, and even children soon became the target of specific marketing, and even the elderly became active in demanding attention as consumers when a group called the “Gray Panthers” (yes, that is a reference to the Black Panthers) started praising the purchasing power of senior citizens. Reinforcing the effects of suburbanization, market segmentation further fragmented American society and pushed consumer citizens away from any concern with the public good. During the 1960s and 1970s, a third-wave of consumerism arrived through the passing of numerous “federal laws and regulations to protect consumers.” Market segmentation may have added to the consumer dissatisfaction behind these laws. When products were aimed at the masses, some lack of fit was to be expected. But when products were oriented to specific market niches, consumers had higher expectations and therefore more potential for discontent. The consumer movement of the 1960s and 1970s differed from older ones because there had been a shift “from a notion of a common consumer interest to multiple consumer interests.” Such fragmentation of the social was not especially problematic as long as the economy was strong, but the lack of a common interest became evident when the economic crisis of the 1970s hit. Cohen argues that the economic crisis demolished “the underpinnings of the Consumers’ Republic.” Mass consumption no longer seemed a viable route to “economic and social incorporation.” Neoliberal deregulation eliminated most of the achievements and protections of the consumer movement, and it did so often by claiming that such deregulation served consumer interests. Privatization of government functions was also framed as making them more responsive to consumer demands. “When, after decades of postwar prosperity, economic crisis hit in the 1970s, the inequalities that had lurked barely beneath the surface rose as a specter to haunt the rest of the century. Letting private markets reign, without adequate attention to questions of income or resource distribution or without sufficient monitoring of how well the nation’s avowed values were being fulfilled, diminished the Consumers’ Republic’s otherwise substantial achievements.” Cohen concludes by arguing that “it is unrealistic to assume we can reverse a century-long trend of entwined citizenship and consumership,” and she suggests that we encourage the “revival” of the better parts of our citizen-consumer “legacy.”
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