On a Consumers' Republic

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I found this book to be much more difficult to read than Cohen’s first book, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. I’m not sure if I fully understand Cohen’s argument, but this is what my major take-away is.

During the New Deal and World War II, many American citizens sought to consume specific goods for the sake of the nation. The idea here was not to consume everything—frugality was necessary, and that which was consumed must benefit the larger nation. To be a good citizen, the interests of the nation had to be put first, with luxuries and personal desires remaining subordinate to the United States (as an aggregate). These are an “ideal type” that Cohen calls citizen consumers

However, at the same time, another ideal type emerged—that of the purchasing consumer. The purchasing consumer liked to acquire goods and pay for services for their own sake, offering a level of luxury not earlier seen. However, the problem with this is that purchasing anything had the possibility (and probability) of undermining limited consumption during the Second World War [pic related].

However, in the post-war years, the results of a sort of Hegelian dialectic emerge. The citizen consumer (the thesis) was synthesized with the purchasing consumer (the antithesis) to produce the purchaser as citizen. The purchaser as citizen is an ideal type that represents the perspective that ALL consumption actually benefits the national interest, no matter what it is. In the wake of Depression and War, economic recovery was critical (although much of the engine was already spurred by the defense industry), and the best way to recover was by consuming, consuming, consuming. Consumption of goods requires people to produce those goods, thereby creating jobs and strengthening the American economy. This worked well because, with the backdrop of devastation of years of warfare, there was nowhere else on Earth that could economically compete with the United States. The vast majority of goods were produced domestically, thereby strengthening the American economy further.

The unity of consumption and civic duty created a world where consumer activism, consumer rights, and consumption itself became representative of American values. In the process, Americans restructured their residential communities, commercial centers, and ostensibly empowered oppressed groups like African Americans and women (I’m less convinced by this last argument). Further strengthening the hold of consumption in the United States, new industries were forged in marketing and advertising to promote consumption, which was largely successful.

The story ends with the collapse of the American economy in the early 1970s, which delegitimized the act of consumption as a civic duty. Consumption continued and the association of consumer well-being with American prosperity continued, but consumption and “civic duty” became separated.

I know I just used the word “consumption” and its derivatives a lot, but it’s the best way to describe what’s happening here. Cohen is largely convincing, but the logic of the book was, at times, a bit confusing to me. Nevertheless, it’s worth reading to make sense of the seeming idolization of consumerism in the United States.